Putin, Lenin and Idioms

The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia's Power Cult

Anna Arutunyan (Skyscraper, $18.50)

There could not be a more appropriate book to read at this moment. Published almost coincident with the Ukraine crisis, Arutunyan's book offers a powerful portrait of the economic, political and psychological forces that undergird the modern Russian state.

The title is a bit misleading, however, because this is not a book about Putin, per se. It is instead about how Putin could happen, about what it is in the Russian polity, in Russian history and economics, that would lead a country recently freed from the shackles of Communism, beginning its unsteady lurch toward democracy, to revert to its well-worn, authoritarian-feudal past.

Arutunyan, a journalist, approaches the issue from a sociological perspective, seeking to explain Russia by conveying illustrative stories about the various “layers” of society. She approaches Russia's current situation not as a problem that needs to be fixed, but one that needs to be understood. Through a mixture of first-person journalism, relevant political science and economic research, she shows why nothing gets done without the tsar's intervention, why Tsar Vladimir is as much the siloviki's prisoner as they are his, why Russians so avidly support Putin, why such a centralized, authoritarian Moscow is so weak in the regions, why corruption is immutable and the law is powerless, and why any successor to Putin will of necessity be a lot like Putin, and be brought to power by the Kremlin itself.

Russia, Arutunyan shows, is a society that remains intensely feudalistic and atomized, far from the collectivist society others have mythologized. And she finds many fascinating parallels in history to explain modern predicaments –not the least significant of which is the medieval practice of kormlenie –where boyars “fed themselves” off the property and resources bestowed upon them by the state.

In Russia, the ruled see those in power as a force that has “an unwritten, God-given right to exploit them in exchange for bringing order to their lives.” Those in power, meanwhile, have a paternalistic, possessive view of the “feminine” society over which they rule. This paternalism, this authoritarianism, Arutunyan argues, is the result of a deplorable lack of trust among Russians, of their weak sense of civil society. And as long as that is the case, the only unifying force in a country that is in fact very fractious, diverse and individualistic, will be the cult of a Good Tsar. And probably a carefully cultivated image of an outside world filled with malicious enemies. – PR

Lenin Lives Next Door

Jennifer Eremeeva (Small Batch Books, )

“You can't make this stuff up, but it lends itself to embellishment.”

Thus does Eremeeva explain to a friend what her book, this book, will be about. An unabashed, hilarious, gutsy work of creative nonfiction, Lenin Lives Next Door is the triple-distilled product of two decades of Eremeeva's life in Russia.

In the best tradition of expat fiction, the book is filled with deliciously eccentric characters that we know are pseudo-anonymized, but who are also just too bizarre to be entirely made up (with a name like Dragana Galveston, you know it has to be good). Indeed, the pseudonyms are plethoric: even her husband is simply HRH (mostly for Handsome Russian Husband, but the first H occasionally gets other meanings). And all this, like Russian literature's ruse of the “town called N—” makes us feel that her fictions are closer to truth.

A warning: don't pick up this book if you are looking for a romantic paean to the Russian dusha. Instead, this is about how a young woman, cast Russia-ward by her romantic enthrallment with Nicholas and Alexandra, traveled the country, lived as a native, raised a Russo-American family, and turned into a hard-boiled realist (perhaps even a borderline cynic), yet never lost the germ of her original romanticism. Perhaps.

Eremeeva is a fine storyteller (full disclosure, she has previously contributed to RL), and her tales of expat hi-life, cross-cultural confrontations, and run-ins with history make for enjoyable (and often salty and non-PC) reading. If you want to know what it's like to live in Russia for two decades without actually doing it, this is where I'd start. – PR

Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms, Revised Edition

Sophia Lubensky (Yale, $75)

There are hundreds of works marketed to English speakers working with Russian, but a huge proportion are, quite frankly, careless recastings of past references compiled with little thought for the needs of the end user. The “Lubensky,” as Russian into English translators fondly call it, is an exception.

For years, the book was out of print, and translators and other serious students of Russian were forced to pay hundreds of dollars for used copies of this indispensable reference. Thank goodness for the revised edition! Not only has it made this work available again for a two-figure sum, but it is better than ever, with hundreds of new entries, bringing the number of idioms covered close to 14,000. Furthermore, Lubensky judiciously mines the vast corpus of English translations of Russian literature (the revised edition adds to the mix such contemporaries as Akunin, Sorokin, and Ulitskaya) for bilingual usage examples – multiple ones for each idiom to cover the full range of meanings and contexts (some examples are invented).

The dictionary is also of value to anyone wishing to speak correct, idiomatic Russian, as it provides information on the forms in which each idiom is commonly used (such as word order, tense, negation), as well as its register and other characterizations (colloquial, rude, ironic, disapproving, etc.). The thoughtfulness with which the idioms have been organized, labeled, indexed, translated, and contextualized through examples makes Lubensky's Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms a lexicographic gem. –NF

Noted in Brief

Gaito Gazdanov, a brilliant Russian author exiled to Paris in the 1920s, is ripe for re-discovery. A beautifully lyrical writer with a gift for psychological storytelling, he was acclaimed by Gorky, fought in the French resistance, and worked countless professions before being discovered by emigre literary circles.

This spring, two short novels by Gazdanov are being released by two different publishers, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (Pushkin Press) and An Evening with Claire (The Overlook Press). Wolf is a psycho thriller in which a man who shot another in the war reads an account of the killing from the dead man's point of view, setting in motion a gripping tale of redemption. Claire, Gazdanov's first novel, is about the nostalgia of living in emigration (as was much Russian literature written in Paris at the time), but also about the Russia's collision with revolution, about first love, coming of age, and how the hopes and dreams of the early twentieth century turned sour. – PR