ROLL OVER TOLSTOY: SIX STUPENDOUS LOST RUSSIAN LITERARY CLASSICS.

You have already laboured your way through the hit parade of Gold and Silver age Russian greats: War and Punishment, Masters and Sons and The Bronze Orchard and so on. Brought to you by august frock-coated gentlemen, these tomes have been worth the effort. Like a trip to a cathedral or a Schoenberg concerto, however, they are respected more than enjoyed.

Quick resume.

The kingpin, Alexander Pushkin produced material that is youthful, cheeky, and experimental and was decent enough in his politics to boot. As national poets go, you could hardly ask for more.

Tolstoy, the second in the roll call is associated with a thundery King Lear persona which wears a bit thin in our age. It remains an inescapable fact , however, that Anna Karenina (1878)anticipated a great deal of the Twentieth Century novel in the pages of that one book.

The commonplace framing of Russians as being incomprehensible and crazed derives a lot from attempts to read and make sense of the byzantine novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Do read Crime and Punishment (1866), but feel free to leave the others to theologians and pyschoanalysts, say I.

Ivan Turgenev though is a reliable teller of human interest stories with an economy of expression all too rare in Russian letters. There is little by him that I have not read with some unforced interest.

An alternative list.

These are writers of both novels and short stories who published in a forty year period from the time of Tsar Alexander the Second to that of Stalin.

Some of them boast a global reputation but their work has been eclipsed by their most celebrated works; others are known far better in Russia than in the West. What is most crucial, however, is that they all can be found in translated form in paperbacks, or be it some of them only having been republished in recent times.

Moloch is a short story/novelette from Alexander Kuprin which appears in a collection of his writings named after his best known work, The Garnet Bracelet. Kuprin, who lived up to 1938, constitiutes a missing link between the writers of the Silver Age and those that flourished in early Soviet times. Viewed as an exponent of realism, his prose is in fact quite far-ranging

The short story/ novelette `Moloch`appears in this collection published in English by the Russian publishing house Karo books in St Petersburg.

A thirty-something engineer who has devoted much of his working life to overseeing the running of a provincial steel plant, feels alienated from his life and work on account of his sensitive nature. Addicted to morphine supplied by his only friend, a doctor,he has designs on an eligible young woman living in a nearby household. Then the arrival of his ebullient boss onto the scene throws all his dreams into question….

Kuprin’s prose is strenuous in its descriptiveness and from this banal beginning he sculpts something almost apocalyptic and which encompasses in its vision capitalist industrialisation, male hierarchies, and our capacity for self-deception. (The intensity of it reminds me a little of Nathaniel West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust.) Written in 1896, Moloch still speaks loud and clear to us in our time.

Far lighter fare, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Peskov’s The Golden Calf has been brought to life again in English translation just this year by Karo books in St Petersburg. Should you persist in the misapprehension that Russian fiction is all shadow and agony then try this satirical romp.

As we follow anti-hero Ostip Bender on his quest to become a millionaire in the Soviet system, we are treated to a panoramic tour through the Russia of the early thirties and it is one which raises eyebroows in its colourfulness.

The prose brims with zest and serves up a droll observation on every page. (I can even detect their influence on much more recent and edgier writers such as Garros- Evdokimov). There is such a parade of satirised character studies here that everyone who reads this novel has their own favourite one.

Still from a 1968 screen adaptation of `The Golden Calf``[Twitter]

Mikhail Bulgakov sealed his reputation with the puzzling Master and Margarita (1940) – although I tend to think his real masterpiece is The White Guard (1925). For enjoyment however, turn to The Fatal Eggs. This came to see print that same year despite being perceived, for reasons not so clear to the contemporary reader, as a swipe at the incumbent Bolshevik regime.

In the near future – 1928- a crotchety Muscovite zoologist. Persikov, discovers by accident a mysterious ray. This ray seems to have the effect of accelerating the growth any organisms it is directed at. The Soviet powers-that-be are soon eager to co-opt the professor’s new technology. Chickens are in short supply that year owing to chicken plague and something must be done to boost their production. An administrative cock-up, however, results in chicken eggs being swopped by those of snakes and lizards and it is these that receive the dose of the Red Ray. Moscow thereafter becomes encircled by an unstoppable contingent of super-sized reptiles….

This Frankenstinian science fiction yarn all gets Bulgakov’s detached and sardonic treatment. Like some kind of Prosfessor Branestawm-meets-Jurasssic Park, this is a story I can read again and again.

Still from a 1995 Russian screen adaptation of `The Fatal Eggs.[`Vilingstone.net]

His name synonymous with the Superfluous Man novel Oblomov (1859) Aleexander Goncharov had earlier published The Same Old Story (1847).

The narrative concerns an attempt by a dreamy and idealistic young man from the country to embark on a career as a poet in Saint Petrsburg. There he is mentored by his nemesis in the form of a wordly-wise and rather more matter-of-fact uncle. From this situation many poignant verbal clashes result and these form the main part of this comic novel with its drawn out dialogues which are both funny and profound.

The theme of country life versus the cynicism of town life takes on a symbolic stature which makes the inevitable corruption of the protaginist seem like a universal outcome: this is the Same Old Story.

So here we get a bit of a potshot at Romanticism written at a time when Romanticism was in the ascendancy and the would-be villain in the form of the uncle seems to become more likeable as the tale proceeds.

Ivan Goncharev [1812 -1891] [900igr.net]

Nikolai Leskov is known in Russia for the melodramatic crime tale The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk (1865) but also, in the last year of his life, brought out A Winter’s Tale, and critics tend to say that this novella was an expression of his near total disenchantment with Russian society. If so, his disenchantment sparkled.

The central situation is the interaction between a series of characters in an upper-class country estate in an unamed part of Russia in the late Nineteeenth Century. We have two aging female sophisticates and their spunky daughter and a rascal of a retired colonel among others informing the dialogues – for it is talk for the most part.

The sparse writing makes it all resemble the script of a drawing room drama. Moral and sociopolitical ideas are hurled about with great abandon which makes for a stimulating read which still feels fresh.

Leonid Andreev has been called `the Russian Poe` on account of some of his short stories, many of which could be labelled `weird fiction`.

The Abyss, from 1902 and republished in an eponymous collection in 2018 falls into this category. It seems to have unnerved Tolstoy a bit who is quoted on the dust jacket as being ` not scared` by it.

A love struck young couple make their way home through a twilit forest. There they come up against a groupof ne’erdo wells who subject them to an ordeal. This ordeal will test the very core of their humanity….

I am put in mind of early Ian McEwan. At any rate,if you like his brand of `mundane chiller`, with its metaphysical foray into darkness, then this is for you.

Anrd reev’s `The Abyss` appear in a collection of his writings published by Alma books in 2018 – with a great cover design by Will Dady.

You have no need to don a hairshirt to read these fictions. You might also be struck by how they lay waste to assumptions about Russian life while really engaging with our own time.

*****************************************************

Sources:

Andreev, Leonid The Abyss and other Stories (Surrey: Alma Books Ltd. 2018)

Bulgakov, Mikhail The Fatal Eggs (Surry: Alma Classics, 2018)

Goncharov, Ivan The Same Old Story (Surrey: Alma Classics, 2015)

Ilf, Ilya and Petrov Evgeny The Golden Calf (St Petersburg: Karo books, 2021)

Kuprin, Alexander The Garnet Bracelet (Saint Petersburg, Karo Books 2019)

Leskov, Nikolai The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and other stories (London: Penguin Books, 1987).

WHAT A BLAST! A review of Tatyana Tolstaya’s `THE SLYNX`.

Tolsstaya’s sole novel is a science-fantasy farce about the destruction of Russia – and it has divided opinion since publication.

-Who is Pushkin? From around here?
-A genius. He died long ago.
-He ate something bad? (p-123)
Russia has had much to say in the way of anti-utopias, having more or less written the rulebook on them. The post-apocalyptic story – this sister subgenre, however – far less so. Where has there been a Russian or Soviet novel that can stand alongside Walter Miller Junior’s A Canticle for Leibowitz from the America of 1959?

This impasse came to be challenged in 1987 as the Soviet edifice began to wobble, when Ludmilla Petrushevskaya penned The New Robinson Crusoe: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century.
Published in Novy Mir, this short story explores the life of a family in an unspecified post-disaster scenario. Then it would be 15 years later when Dmitry Glukhovsky launched the Metro cycle – his account of the survivors of a nuclear war who have decamped to the Moscow subway – which has become a global pop culture phenomenon.

Sandwiched between these two portents however, came Russia’s true post-apocalyptic classic. Tatiana Nikitichna Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy’s grandaughter, had become known for her short stories commenting on the perestrioka period. The Slynx (Kys) constituted something of a departure for her. Begun in 1986 and toiled over for 14 years whilst in Russia, Europe, Britain and America, this novel came to claim the Triumph prize in 2001 (a prize which had been set up a decade earlier to recognise outstanding contributions to Russian culture). It became the book to be seen with in the Russia of 2002.

THE SLYNX (KYS)is both a literary novel and a bestseller in Russia.[Pinterest].

Not all critics were convinced however. Dmitry Bykov was one of the naysayers, comparing the novel to a poor man's The Snail on the Slope ( referencing a novel by the Sturgatsky brothers).

It would be three years later when the late Jamey Gambrell would transmute into English the awkward colloquial Russianess of Tostaya’s prose as a New York Review book.

Clownland.
Tolstaya’s fantasia opens some two centuries hence, after an event spoken of as as the Blast (some sort of nuclear accident). This has laid waste to Moscow and nature, of sorts, has reclaimed the space. A new community of survivors has built a new town there -called Fyodor Kuzmichsk.
The townspeople are mutated in different ways (referred to as Consequences) and this fact creates the gross out texture of the proceedings.

Otherwise they are in a new Dark Ages: not religious, yet full of superstitious dread. Free-thinking, which is to say any kind of intellectual curiosity, is dicouraged with self-censorship.

Having only just invented the wheel, they assume the earth to be flat, have no mirrors and cannot make or sustain fire. They subsist in a feudal society regulated by the fearsome Saniturions who sledge their way round the town, wearing red hoods, on the look out for dissidence. The mainstay of the economy is mice – from which they make their food and clothing. Printed books from pre-Blast times – Oldenprint – are spurned as they are thought to give off radiation. The leader, however, transcribes poetry from the past and passes it off as his own work.

It is a topsy-turvy landscape in which rabbits dwell in trees and chickens can fly. The main beasts of burden are theDegenerators – unfortunate human-like (and articulate) four legged chimeras. The eponymous Slynx, meanwhile, (the Russian word – kys– suggests a jumble of different animals) is an invisible entity lying in wait in the surrounding forests and much feared bt Benedikt, the narrator.

One audacious twist appears in this not so unfamiliar freakshow. It is that there are some people – Oldeners – who have not only survived the Blast but have done so with a much prolonged lifespan. As refugees from the pre-apocalypse world, many try to restore a sense of cultural continuity by, for example, putting up signposts around with the name of old Moscow streets on them. For the reader, they provide a much needed foothold in things.

Benedikt, our cheery simpleton host, talks us through the do’s and don’ts of his milieu and through the unpredictable plot. He will marry above his station, gain a love of reading after being introduced to a stash of Oldenprint books and be lured into becoming an insurgent….

The dreamlike close of the novel is as puzzling as it is disappointing. Another enigma is the very title of the novel. What are we to read into the fact that this bogeyman has been highlighted in this way?

New take on an old genre.
Science fiction aficiocandoes will be reminded of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980) and Engine Summer by John Crowley (1979).
There is more of a light touch to Tolstaya’s approach though. Indeed, some high comedy arises from the hero’s rustic ignorance. Here the Oldener, Nikita, hints at how to produce fire:
Nikita Ivanich said: -Think friction, young man. friction. Try it. I'd be happy to but I'm too old. I can't` Benedikt said:–Oh, come on now, Nikita Ivanich. You talk about how old you are, but there you go being bawdy again. (p-128).

We also have the Comedy of Revulsion – as Benedikt details people’s Consequences and unappetising eating habits in a gleeful manner.
However, it is Tolstaya’s embrace of folkloric elements which distinguishes it from other post-apocalyptic novels. Those expecting Naturalism are instead obliged to take the story on a more metaphorical level.

Gambrell deserves credit for conveying the linguistic oddness of the novel with its corrupted syntax (feelosophy deportmunt store and so on).The chapter headings are old Russian alphabet letters and words that begin with these. (Like Clockwork Orange, The Slynx could function as a primer on the Russian language – as well as Russian poetry, much of which is dispersed throughpout the novel).

Informed by Chernobyl, The Slynx does contain a cautionary aspect to it as well as a Ray Bradbury-like concern with cultural amnesia (which may well be a reflection on it having been written in early post-Soviet times). Printed books seem to safeguard against this. As Benedikt proclaims:
You, book! You are the only one who won't deceive, won't insult, won't abandon....(p-204).

Some other sequences draw parallels with our own times, and by no means only in Russia. Following their coup d’etat Benedikt and his father-in-law discuss freedom of ass ocean. After deciding that no more than three can gather Benedikt raises a point:
And what if there are six people in a family? Or seven?
Father-in law spat:...let them fill in a form and get permission (p-278).

Glukhovsky and Tolstaya are not often mentioned in the same breath but I did feel a real sense of kinship between the Metro series and The Slynx. Tolstaya’s novel could almost co-exist in the same universe as Glukhovsky’s, by offering the story of those who survived in overland Moscow.

Tolsyaya: the one time Bright Young Thing of Gorbachev’s Russia.

All quotations are from: Tolstaya Tatyana The Slynx (New York: New York Review Books, 2003). Translated by Jamey Gambrell.

The lead image:infourok.ru

LOVE PANGS IN A GLASS FORTRESS: `WE` BY YEVGENY ZAMYATIN RECONSIDERED.

Ahead of the forthcoming film, I take a fresh look at this seminal science fiction anti-utopia – and the new relevance it has since gained.

I am a man and not a number.

Yet, my life is overuled by passcodes, passport numbers and national insurance numbers. I have sold my privacy to vast tech empires who decide what I want through algorithms. With me I carry a device which allows all my movements to be monitored…And whilst .I am not obliged to wear a uniform, I choose to dress in more or less the same way as everyone else….

This year marks the century after Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s novel WE was completed. No coincidence is it that the cultural event of this year is to be the big screen adaptation of this challenging fantasia. The timing, in terms of world events could not have been more auspicious.

WE was written when Zamyatin, a ship architect by trade living in St Petersburg, was 37. It received its first main publication in English in New York however in 1924 – the same year that Kafka’s The Trial also came out.

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 – 1937) [Goodreads.com]

My own introduction to the book came back in the Eighties when I was discussing Nineteen Eighty Four with a doped up undergraduate. He informed me that Orwell had, like, stolen all his ideas from some Russian geezer.

This half-truth forms most people’s first brush with WE. If they then go on to read the novel itself they do so only to make comparisons with Orwell’s classic – or perhaps with Huxley’s Brave New World.

Orwells’s debt to Zamyatin is a matter of record: Orwell reviewed the novel in Tribune (4th January, 1946). Huxley has never acknowledged the same influence, but Orwell (in that piece) felt it existed.

In any case, whilst it is by no means true to call WE `the first dystopian novel` it is, for sure, one that laid down the blueprint for many which came to follow. (My version, the Vintage imprint, is introduced by Will Self. This well-read bibliophile admits to not having read the novel before he did so to review it, and he read it on the Hebridean island where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four).

Zamyatin penned much else in different genres. If he is only known for WE then this is because is is this work that prompted the just installed Bolshevik apparatchiks to enusure that it never saw print in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin’s response – to get it printed on foreign soil -set the trend for many dissident scribes that followed him.

Better late than never: A Russian imprint of WE [goodreads.com]

It is time to excavate this novel from all of its associations with better known writings and also from its political backstory and try and encounter it afresh.

Everything is awesome.

We are in the far future. The One State, presided over by the ever watchful Great Benefactor, is the only collection of humans to have survived the Two Hundred Year’s War which has shattered urban society. They now live protected from individual freedom in a city composed of glass buildings. Around this is a `Green Wall` which quarantines them from the savagery of the natural world. Their daily activities are circumscribed by a Taylorist style `Table of Hours`. They have been assigned numbers instead of names and all wear a uniform.

`WE` established the archetype of the quintessential industrial-technocratic anti-utopia.[pinterest.com]

A spaceship engineer called D-503 keeps a journal and it is these first person present tense reflections that make up this novel. He is helping to build the Integral – a spaccraft that has the purpose of exporting the values of this society to other worlds. The narrator is foursquare behind this:

`Indeed is there a place where happiness is wiser, more cloudless than this miracle world?…nothing is happier than digits living according to the well-constructed, eternal laws of the multiplication table` (p-59).

However he comes to obsess over an unusual young woman (serial dating is encouraged by a voucher system which would put Tinder to shame). It turns out that she is an opponent of the regime. His attraction to her has distinct sadomasochistic overtones:

`And suddenly she burst out laughing. I could see this laughter with my eyes: the ringing, sever, stubbornly supple (like a whip), crooked line of this laughter`. (p-27)

D503’s inner struggle between his conventional loyalty to the One State and primal lust for this woman – I-330- drives the narrative to its tragic foregone conclusion.

The premise, then has since become so embedded that you will have encountered it in popular film culture in such films as Metropolis (1927), Sleeper (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demolition Man (1993) and Equilibrium (2002), to name but a few.

Russian S.F from the Twenties.

WE comprises a novel that belongs to the Nineteen Twenties just as surely as, say, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It is drenched with all the concerns of that decade: new machineries, female emancipation, modernism and a sense of despair at the future of humanity.

Also WE is far more of a generic science-fiction story than Orwell’s much more down-to-earth and more topical extraction of it.

It also must not be forgotten that is a part of Russian literature. It contains echoes of Dostoevsky here and there, as well as references to Pushkin. The polished style partakes of the avant garde ferment which enriched Russia at that time. (In fact, it is this latter aspect of the novel – its difficult prose – which has done much to discourage people from giving WE more attention).

More than an anti-Soviet diatribe.

It seems simplistic to view this Twenty Sixth Century world as being a comment on the Soviet Union. Yes, some aspects of `Stalinism` were anticipated with accuracy by Zamyatin: the use of Secret Police as spies (`The Guardians`) and The Day of One Vote, for example. Much else is more about technocracy than State Socialism, however.

Like Bulgakov, Zamyatin was labouring under the long shadow cast by H.G.Wells, with his antiseptic messianism. The society of One State, a kind of Rationalist Utilitarian one, resembles Gene Roddenberry’s Vulcans as much as anything:

`Take two trays of a weighing scale: you put a grain on one, and on the other put a ton. On one side the `I` and on the other is the `we`, the One state…Assuming that `I` has the same `rights` compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a grain can counterbalance a tone` (p-102).

Then against the psychology of this totalitarianism Zamyatin juxtaposes a primitive sexual infatuation – in its way just as deranged.

New resonances.

I have read WE about four times during the last decade, and in different translations. Clarence Brown (1993) then Mira Ginsburg(1983) and now the London based American Natasha Randall ((2006) Her variant seems to work best for me, although I would be hard pressed to explain why.

Getting past the Expressionist style of narration we find a novel that delivers a science fictional kick. There is a death ray that turns people to liquid, a Bell Jar used as a torture device,diaphanous listening gadgets lining the streets, robot tutors and a space craft that gets given a test flight.

On top of all that the world of WE has never seemes less implausible. Post-Covid, Zoom and so on have become all pervasive – with the result that we all indeed live in glass compartments, in effect, and the police have been granted unpresedented powers to direct people’s private lives.

Anticipations.

So I really hope that Hamlet Dulyan’s cinema adaptation will be more on the edgy side than precious. That is to say that it should not treat the tale as some sort of signed and sealed `period piece`, still less some kind of retrospective on the Soviet years.

I hope that the director has not been too `highbrow` has remembered that WE functions above all as a science-fiction yarn. Furthermore he needs to have brought out the eroticism of it all,

We shall see.

All translations are from: Zamyatin, Yevgeny WE. Translated by Natasha Randall. (London: Vintage, 2007).

The lead image is from: atomsand archetypes.wordpress.com

THE LEAGUE OF JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS: MAX FREI’S `THE STRANGER’S WOES` – BOOK TWO OF `THE LABYRINTHS OF ECHO` REVIEWED.

This distinctive alternate world makes Romanticism Great again.

When I chanced on the paperback of THE STRANGERS WOES (BOOK TWO OF THE LABYRINTHS OF ECHO) I knew that this was something which I had to devote some column inches to. Even so my pulse was not quickened: this brand of unadulterated fantasy involving magicians and their spells ranks alongside War and Historical Romance as amongst my least liked genre.

Eye opener.
Cracking it open on the metro home, I experienced moutning surprise. Here was a novel altogether different from the Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch tribute that I had been expecting. In fact, it is even poles apart from the hard-boiled nature of much Russian popular fiction.

A winner.
A multi-million seller in Russian speaking countries, the Max Frie series comprises some twenty-four books now, with but four of them out in English courtesy of the London based publishers Gollancz.
Critics tend to pigeonhole the series as being Urban fantasy but I find this label a tad misleading. For me they belong to the Magical Land subgenre, albeit laced with the detective genre and with a lot of humour poured into the mix.

Max Frei is both the protagonist of the stories and the author of them. It is the pen name of Svetlana Martynchuk, a 54 year old Odessa born Ukranian who has spent some time in Moscow and has since settled in Villinus.Her artist partner Igor Steopin developed the premise of the series and has collaborated with her on some of the writing.

The Labyrinths of Echo cycle came into being in 1996, lasting until 2003. Then Martynchuk breathed new life into the much loved franchise in 2014 with an update on it known as Dreams of Echo.

The series is of huge popularity in the Russian speaking world. [apriltime.ru]

English speeaking monolinguals, though, have only been able to buy these books for the last eleven years. The translators, from an American agency called Gannon & Moore, have also rendered the rather more weighty works of Ludmilla Ulitskaya into English. Polly Gannon boasts a doctorate in Russian literature from Cornell University and Ast. A. Moore, the assistant editor, comes from a more technical background.

What makes this series worth looking at, even if you are no devotee of Fantasy, is how it shows what kind of appetite exists among the Russsian book reading public.

Loser redeemed.
Frei, an Everyman Hero if ever there was one, begins as a twenty-something nobody who likes food, drink and the odd cigarette – in our world, that is. However, when he dreams his way into the alternate world of the City of Echo he becomes both respected and feared as a part of the elite Secret Investigative Force. (As exposition is kept to the minimum, I recommend that you start this series from Book One. I have had to piece together backstory as I was going along).

You see…a long tiime ago there had been a cataclysmic conflict between waring magic orders. This had depleted the very World’s Heart and had almost lead to the destruction of the world itself. So now the use of magic has been forbidden. The City of Echo resides at the world’s Heart and here a Secret Police force is at work to ensure there is no recurrence of the dark days of the past….

The long-lived inhabitants of the low-tech world use luminous mushrooms as indoor lighting, have giant domestic cats, use several baths as a part of their morning routine, frequent numerous taverns and can contact each other via Silent Speech, a type of telepathy.

Max Frei, under the tutelage of the avuncular Sir Juffin Hully, the director of the Secret Police and alonsgside such colleagues as Lonli-Loki and the glamorous Lady Melamori, learns about his own latent magical abilities. These he is able to use in the just fight against those using magic for the wrong villainous reasons. He becomes Sir Max.

Within the pages of Book Two Sir Max will hunt down a criminal returned from the dead in the outlands of the city, become an ambassador to a distant tribe of desert people, and deal with an apparent zombie attack .

Dialogue heavy.
It is its style and not the not-so-original plot which makes this book so noteworthy though. Book Two contains three big chapters which are divided into sections and is 412 pages in length. Much of what transpires is dialogue in the form of merry banter between colleagues. The most elementary rule of commercial fiction – to boil everything down and keep the pace going – is broken. Here is a more or less random quotation:

Max, the lives of all the policemen of Echo are in your hands.
Smiling Melifaro made himself comfortable atop my desk, knocking the self-scribing tablets on the floor and an empty cup in my lap. Melifaro didn’t even blink. Instead, he hung over me, wringing his hands theatrically and demanding attention.
Ever since Boboota ran out of those funny smelling sticks you gave him, his temper is even worse than it used to be.
Impossible, I said in a calm voice. It can;t get any worse than it was. Nature's resources are not limitless. The boys simply forgot what their boss used to be like before he stuffed himself on King Banjee. Now he's completely recovered, that's all.
So you don't hae any more of those smoking sticks? said Melifaro. Poor Apurra.
No I don't have any at the moment, but I can fetch some more. No problem. Who's Apurra?
Right, you haven't met him yet. Lieutenant Apurra Blookey. He's been with the police since Shixola died. As smart as the late Shixola, and almost as nice. You'll like him. Oh, and there's a new dame in the city police, Lady Kekk Tuotli....
(From page 137)

It feels spirited and affectionate with an exuberance that becomes infectious even as you flag a bit with ploughing through pages and pages of this stuff. You can appreciate the humorous tone even if it does not leave you teary eyed with laughter.

Some have made comparisons with Harry Potter insofar as this seems like a classic wish fulfilment saga, others with the more sophisticated Jasper Fforde and other critics even with Oscar Wilde. For myself I was reminded a bit of some of J. P Donleavy at times. None of these capture the uniqueness of Martynchuk’s writing though.
Grumble sheet.

Online commentators have carped at the quality of the translation. I am in no position to comment much on this but I did notice some lame Americanisms.

We meet the phrase Stop making fun of me a few times. A more real-world approximation of this would be Gimme a break will ya or, if you want to be more British Stop taking the piss. Likewise the exclamation gosh is uttered in many situations – sometimes in extremis !

Just as common is the complaint that the Max Frei protagonist is nothing but a Mary (or Marty) Sue type of character. That is to say he functions as a flawless over-idealised projection of the authors. Whilst this may be so, Sir Max gets portrayed as a man full of gratitude for the wonderful world he resides in and this fact makes him forgiving and unassuming. Such a hero is difficult to dislike, even if he is a phoney.

An example of the copious amounts of fan art that the Max Frei series has generated [403 Forbidden Illustration]

Modern romance.
This is 100 carat escapist pulp fiction which can appeal to both adults and teenagers alike. The charm of it is the unfashionable romanticism at work behind it all. Is there a message in it too though?
It is difficult to ignore the trademark of the series – which is its eat-drink-and-be-merry hedonistic ethos. Right now this feels like a cheeky slap in the face to the lights-out-by-ten shibboleth which is all around us.

Romance isn’t dead in the world of Echo – more fan art [inpinterest.com]

Frei, Max THE STRANGER’S WOES: THE LABYRINTHS OF ECHO:BOOK TWO (London:Gollancz, 2011) Translated by Polly Gannon and Ast. A. Moore.
(All quotations are from this text.)

Main image: tr.pinterst.com

SLACKER ON A SUBURBAN TRAIN: VENEDIKT YEROFEEV’S `MOSCOW STATIONS` REVIEWED.

Is this seedy and honest samizdat novel an expose of a wasted life or a comic masterpiece? Stephen Mulrine;s first rate translation helps us to decide.

You know it's weird, nobody in Russia knows how Pushkin died, but everyone knows how to distill varnish

One of the huge bugbears of social life in the towns and cities of Russia is the Sociable Drunk. Get together with a few acquaintances in a public area, maybe speak a little English and – kazam! -up pops the Sociable Drunk. He – it is most often a he – fastens onto you like a lamprey. He wants to shake your hand, to practise his Englsh and is brimming with theories and observations which he just has to tell you all about.
Well, the Sociable Drunk has his very own novel: Moscow Stations by Venedikt Yerofeev.

This novel began life in 1969 as a photocopied document which was passsed from hand to hand in the cities of Russia. It would be twenty years later that this cult product would receive official blessing – of sorts -by getting printed as a serial in a journal called Sobriety and Culture. Then it gatecrashed the Anglophone world after being transmuted into the English tongue by the talented Glaswegian translator Stephen Mulrine (whose death, at 82 in January of this year, is another loss to Russian-Western cultural exchange, to add to that of Jamey Gambrell). He adapted sections of the writing into a one man play (more of which later) and then translated it all for Faber & Faber in 1997.

The Faber & Faber Mdern Classics Edition. [Smart Shopper.ru]

Venedikt Yerofeev is not to be confused with Viktor Yerofeev! In fact, they are poles apart. Viktor Yerofeev is a modernist and a critic who writes with great coherence about social and cultural matters.Our Venedikt, however, is more a sort of Vodka soaked Dylan Thomas of Russian lower class urban life.

Born in 1938, he originated from the provincial far north, excelled at school, undertook some teacher training in Vladimir and then seems to have spent most of his days travelling from town to town doing odd jobs whilst in the grip of alchoholism.

Venedikt Yerofeev: Portrait of the Artist as a Drunken Young Man [Pinterest]

Like all too many men would do of subsequent generations, he died way too young at 51. His satirical drama Walpurgis Night was published after his death but his name remains synonymous with Moscow Stations.
This he dashed off in a few months whilst working as a layer of cables. He wrote with friends in mind (one of them would later recall seeing him chuckling over his first draft in a disused railway station).
The main interest a reader might have in this work now is in seeing whether it resonates with modern Russian life or whether it can be consigned to the shelf markedPeriod Piece from the Time of Stagnation.

Diary of a Heavy Drinker.
Moscow Stations comprises of a day in the life of young Venya (no doubt the author in a very thin disguise). His world consists of wandering through central Moscow as he downs Kuban vodka or Zubrovka or any other strong spirits or wine that he can afford and, to this end, he knows all about brand names and liquid volumes.

We discover him engaged on a Friday night ritual of boarding a train at Kursk station. He is destined for Petrushki, a high rise suburban district some 124 kilometeres East of Moscow, in a trip that would take around two and a half hours. (We are not talking Trans-Siberian express here!) His new girlfriend awaits him there as does his son, both of whom, in his inebriated state, he idolises.

This banal premise allows us to be privy to the protagonists internal monolgue as -in chapters named after the train station stops – he gets thrown out of a cafe for demanding non-available sherry, hooks up for some rambling intellectual banter with fellow Career Drinkers in the train carriage, has his baggage stolen, engages with hallucinatory dreams involving military glories and then wakes up returning to Moscow having passed out on the train overnight (that, at least is what we surmise has happened: it is not the sort of novel which lays things out for the reader). Needless to say, following all his musings over the pitiable details of his sordid life, he fails to disembark at Petushki.

Plain-speaking hobo.
The voice is book-learned and streetwise in the Henry Miller manner and the novel functions as a free-form romp. The first person past rense confessional, much of it a kind of stream-of-consciousness, ends up spiralling into chaos and ambiguity and with the execution of the narrator by shadowy assailants.

I was reminded of the peripatetic anti-hero of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger . In contrast, though, Venya’s issue is not one of material need, he belongs to a society of near full employment after all, it is how to score his next liquid fix and then to stave off the after-effects in the meantime:
...you should have seen me, holding my eyes shut tight for ages, trying to keep down the nausea, effing and blinding.... One minute the glass I'd drunk lay smoking somehwere between my belly and my gut, next minute it was shooting up and falling back down again (p-13).
(His warts and all expose of drinking’s downsides fails to mention the horrific absence of toilets on these suburban trains, however!)

The strenuousness of Mulrine’s rendition of Venya’s vernacular is nothing short of awe inspiring. He has reallyh brought to life for the English language reader something rooted in colloquial Russian:
So to hell with you! You can leave all that extragalactic astronomy to the Yanks, and the psychiatry to the Germans. Let all those Spanish bastards go watch their corridas, let those African shits build their Aswam dam, go ahead, the wind'll blow it down anyway, let Italy choke on its idiotic bel canto, what the hell! (P-44)
Moscow Stations does feel quite fresh for something with a 1969 vintage. In fact I can recognise possible tributes to it in later Russian novels: the intimate misfit’s voice in Arslan Khasavov’s Sense, for example or the madcap army games which Venya dreams up finding an equivalent in Dmitry Bykov’s Living Souls.
Yerofeev is sometimes dignified with the term dissident, but, from this novel alone, this label does not seem appropriate.Venya protests nothing – not the Brezhnev doctrine, or the growing tensions between Russia and China, nor the use of pschiatric institutions as political weapons. He even advocates pusillanimity which some might argue has since become the national vice. So does the novel have anything else to announce to today’s reader?

Unintended cautionary tale?
Some critics have imagined there to be a core religious significance to this work on account of the references to the Lord and to angels and matters spiritual in the text. However, these Christian name-checks are handled with the same kind of offhand facetiousness that every other intellectual subject is in this book.

Others just frame the novel as a good comic one. Indeed, there is a lot of playfulness in evidence throughout. The infamous recipes for cocktails, however – which itemise such ingredients as brake fluid and sock deoderant -would be easier to laugh with if they did not have a basis in fact. (A female acquaintance of Yerofeev’s recalls having to hide perfume bottles whenever he paid a visit). The best joke, for me appears right at the novel’s outset. Venya admits that he has never seen the Kremlin. Then: For instance. Yesterday - yessterday I didn't see it again (p-1) Much of the rest of the humour is a drunk’s humour – far funnier to the teller than to the listener.

The novel highlights the squalid horridness oif a life devoted to drink. Unlike J.P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, for example, Yerofeev does not seek to glamourise such a life with shows of macho swagger. Thus I can see how this novel made its way into a journal like Sobriety and Culture, which was devoted to public health, and taken as a warning against drink abuse.

Redeemed by a staging.
The narrator of Moscow Stations, whilst full of wisdom beyond his thirty or so years, is one I find hard to get on with. Yes, he is gentle and betrays affection for his loved ones and erudite and vivacious; he is also supercilious and proud and full of self-pity, just as a raving dipsomaniac would be.

The dramatic monologue that Mulrine extracted from this novel was put on at the Traverse theatre in Edingburgh with Tom Courtenay (Billy Liar) in the role in 1994, to some acclaim, and then it toured.

Born in the same year as Yerofeev and bearing a physical resemblance to him, Courtenay was 57 when he performed this role – a more fitting age for the protaginist somehow. Indeed Venya is something like what Billy Liar’s Billy Fisher might have ended up as, if he had taken to the bottle in a big way. I have not seen the play, but I have an instinctive feeling that this format would have more impact that the novel itself.

YEROFEEV, VENEDIKT MOSCOW STATIONS (LONDON: FABER & FABER, 1997, 2016). All quotations are from this text.

Lead image: Yandex.ru

LOOKING FORWARD TO THE PAST? VLADIMIR SOROKIN’S `DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK`.

When Russia’s foremost iconoclast came over all committed, the results still resonate even more 14 years later.

Liberals differ from the lowly worm only in their mesmerising, witch brewed speechifying. Like venom and reeking pus, they spew it all about, poisoning God's very world, defiling its holy purity and simplicity, befouling it as far as the very bluest horizon of the heavenly vault with the reptilian drool of their mockery, jeers, derision, contempt,double-dealing, disbelief,distrust, envy, spite and shamelessness.

Welcome to the World According to Andrei Danilovich Komiaga – and there’s plenty more where that came from in DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK by the sixty-five year old Vladimir Georgevich Sorokin. This writer and artist has been baiting hidebound traditionalists with his installations, stories and novels for forty odd years now.

His work offers a challenging double-whammy of weird fiction and post-modernism making this Moscow dweller a bete noir of both Soviet and post-Soviet establishments. He has only just escaped from prosecution for obscenity, and that is despite being in receipt of prestigious awards such as the Maxim Gorky and Andrei Bely prizes.

Try reading, for example Four Stout Hearts (from Glas New Writing: Soviet Grotesque, 1991). This just defies description in the transgressiveness of its content.

One of sorokin’s installations on show at The Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

Nevertheless, in writing such material, Sorokin himself maintained that he exemplified an Art for Art's Sake approach. All that was to change, though, when the author reached fifty and published DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK in 2006.

In this short novel, Sorokin keeps his scatological and obscurist tendencies (whilst still present) in abeyance and the tale is both coherent and entertaining. It functions as a cautionary black comedy about the Holy Triumvirate of autocratic state, orthodox religion and narrow nationalism.

The novel was unveiled to the Anglophone world courtesy of the discerning American translator Jamey Gambrell. It is with much sadness that I need to report that this contributor to East-West cultural understanding passed away earlier this year, way too young, at the age of 65.

Fly on the wall.
The reader is privy to a busy Day in the Life of an Oprichnik (the name refers to a resurrected member of the secret police from Ivan the Terrible’s reign) and in Komiaga we are treated to a great villain-as-narrator creation to trival that of Partrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The year is unclear – the book jacket says 2028 -but, anyway, this is the near future and Imperial Russia is back with a vengeance. A Czar sits in the Kremlin, which has been painted white to expunge the red troubles. There are public floggings in the squares of Moscow and the nation is encircled by a wall. The elite brotherhood of the Oprichnik are out and about to keep all this running smoothly.

Komiaga, driven by a mawkish sentimentalism, puts his heart and soul into a defence of His Majesty, who in turn represents the Motherland. We follow his career of executions, rapes, shady dealings and consultations on cultural censorship in a plotless sequence of events. The commentary hurtles along and is decked out with bawdy songs and poetry, and patriotic hymns.

Like all Monarchical societies, this one thrives on Pomp and Circumstance, which Sorokin itemises. For example, The Mercedov that Komiaga drives has to be decorated on the front with a real dog’s head, a new one being chosen each morning. (Sorokin has always been interested in ritual. Here, however, it makes complete sense in terms of realism).

There are some of Sorokin’s trademark surreal touches too. Komiaga purchases an aquarium containing gold sterlets. It turns out that these can enter people’s bloodstreams and create shared hallucinations. He and his comrades indulge this, creating a phantasmagoric diversion in the story.

Likewise, this future world introduces some science-fictional creations, such as the transparents, virtual computer generated assistants which can interact with humans with their encyclopedic knowledge.

The Future Now.
DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK takes existing trends to their conclusion: Putin has extended his rule to a potential date of 2034 and the bishop Patriarch Kirill has a major influence on affairs of state.

In the story, the sole kickback to the jackbooted new order comes from independent radio stations which indulge in obscure intellectualism. These carry so little punch that our narrator enjoys listening to these to pass the time inbetween his state duties.

A reader of dystopias may well be reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – with its protagonist who is a henchman of the repressive government -or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) – with its narrator who relishes in gang violence and uses his own argot to do so.

Character study.
Sorokin explores the psychology that lies behind this kind of society. He demonstrates how state sanctioned brutality is so often borne along by weepy romanticism.

Hypocrisy also plays a key role in this world and drives a lot of the (subtle) humour of the novel. For example, Komiaga implores his majesty to legalise certain drugs for the sole use of the Oprichniks so that they may buy them without hassle. His Majesty refuses this request on the grounds that everyone must be equal under the law – even though the Czar knows full well that his men are indugling in these drugs anyway!

This page turner is a hit, a palpable hit. It can take its place on the shelves alongside Zamyatin’s We and Voinovich’s Moscow 2042.

R.I.P Jamey Gambrell, 1954 – 2020. [amazon.com]

DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK by Vladimir Sorokin (translated by Jamey Gambrell) is out in Penguin Books/Random House, London, UK 2011.

Lead image: frommixcloud.com

THE EXCESS FIVE GO ASTRAY IN RUSSIA.

A Fresh look at the Superfluous Men of Nineteenth Century Fiction – and what they can tell us today.

`Nature clearly did not intend on me putting in an appearance, and as a result has always treated me as an unexpected and uninvited guest` (The Diary of a Superfluous Man, p-10).

Plough through any of the writings of the Golden Age of Russian literature and, within its pages, you will bump into a recurring archetype. This consists of a man in his twenties or thirties, highborn (but often in reduced circumstances), influenced by European cultures, unlucky in love and in general at odds with the social mores around him.
Meet the Superfluous Man. Sometimes translated as the Excess man, this term was propelled into Russian conversation of the mid- to late Nineteenth century by Ivan Turgenev in his The Diary of a Superfluous Man from 1850.
The label, then slapped fictional characters from earlier in that century, might be seen as a Russified cousin of the Byronic hero that existed in European culture at that time. On the other hand, the Russian one is less of a personality type and more of a sociological study – and literary trope.
The Bradford born translator of The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Michael Pursglove, traces the type as far back as 1831 with the play by Alexander Griboyedov called Wit from Woe which features a acerbic idealist called Chatsky.
In any case, it was in 1859 that the influential critic Dobrolyubov nailed the Superfluous Man to the mast by listing them in an article called What is Oblomovism? (This being an allusion to Oblomov – the lethargic landowner in Goncharev’s 1859 novel of the same name).

I set myself the task of re-acquainting myself with five translated paperbacks which feature Superfluous Men. I aimed to cut through the barbed wire of literary criticism which surrounds these works and emerge with their still palpitating hearts…

Tragic lovers.
Exhibit A constitute the doomed romancers. Let us beging at the beginning. A novella, first published in censored form when Turgenev was 32, The Diary of a Superfluous Man takes the form of the memoirs of a young man in the throes of an unspecified sickness. Written in the first person and spiced with autobiographical references, the events occur in and around Oryol, Turgenev;s own birthplace (some 368 kilometeres south-west of Moscow).
Chulkaturin is a respectable but socialy awkward civil servant who finds himself drawn to a young girl residing in the estate of a wealthy family that he visits.
It is not long, however, before the girl’s head is turned by the sudden arrival on the scene of the charismatic and high-ranking Prince N.
The battle for her affections can only be setttled, Chulkaturin comes to believe, by the inevitable duel.
The duel goes ahead and leaves Prince N. with a small wound. It also leaves him with a moral victory and the ability to appear magnanimous in defeat, whereas Chulkaturin gets cast in the role of a petty, spiteful man on the eyes of Oryol high society.
Chulkaturin rages against the hostile and insurmountable obstacle between him and his feelings and thoughts(P-10).
What happens next is that Prince N. lets the object of his affections down, however, upsetting her a great deal. Even so, Chulkaturin seems unable to profit from this turn of events. Another man, a colourless minor character up to this point, offers his sympathy to the young lady and wins her hand in marriage. The protagonist’s role in the whole affair has been that of an uneeded and discarded extra.
Ferocious in its intropection, this deathbed confession offers a very desolate picture. Indeed, the novella could be a caricature of all one might expect Russian literature to be like.

Ralph Fiennes as Onegin in a decent film adaptation of `Eugene Onegin` from 1999 [de.fanpop.com]

Eugene Onegin could not be more different. Penned by Alexander Pushkin a decade earlier, this first saw print in serialised form between 1825 and 1832.
Most Western people’s knowledge of it comes about, I suspect, via Tchiakovsky’s weighty opera adaptation of it from 1879. In Russia, meanwhile, it is a set text in state schools and the kids are expected to learn sections of it by rote.

Having read some bits and pieces of Pushkin’s before and being unmoved by them, I put Pushkin in a box marked Doesn't tranlate so well.
It was during a winter holiday trip to St Petersburg that I chanced on Eugene Onegin, left by a traveller at a hostel. I scanned the opening lines where Onegin makes cheeky remarks about the slowness of the death of his uncle and I was hooked. Meeting up with the actual Eugene Onegin is like expecting to drink a cup of bitter espresso coffee and finding, instead, that is is cocoa – with a marshmallow in it.

The tale, told in sing-song verse, catalogues in episodes, the life and times of a St Petersburg fop. (This might well be a self-projection of Pushkin himself, but the narrator is supposed to be a friend of Onegin’s and one with different views and habits).
Still in his twenties, Onegin inherits his uncle’s country estate and transforms into a country gent but is nagged by ennui throughout:
His passion soon abated/ Hateful the world became and His malady whose cause I mean/It now to investigate is time/Was nothing more than British spleen/Transported to a Russian clime (p-27-28)
In short, is Byron’s Childe Harold in Russified form. Indeed Vissarion Belinsky, the Russian critic, dubbed the poem an encyclopedia of Russian life
Throughout this frothy romp – in which Onegin will alienate his lover Natasha, slay his bosom pal in a hasty duel, have a change of heart about Natasha and fail to win her back – there is something for everyone: romantic transcendence, bawdy archness, jocular japes, Gothic terrors and brooding reflections and all within the commonplace environs of St Petersburg, Moscow and rural Russia, but described with vividness.

The Wandering Prophets.
I call Exhibit B the wandering prophets, not because they too do not have failed love affairs too, but because these excess men are peripatetic and given to soliloquising.

Scene from a Russian TV adaptation of `A Hero Of Our Time` [filmprov,ru]

The provocative phrase A Hero of Our Time forms the title of the poet Mikhail Lermontov’s sole novel. The protagonist, Grigory Aleksandrovich Pechorin, is another Byronic typepar excellence.Cynical, self-interested and consumed by boredom, he has few virtues, except for an ability to philosophise:

Passions are nothing more than ideas at the first stage of their development. They belong to the heart's youth, and he is foolish who thinks they will stir him all his life(p-182)
Other observations have quite a contemporary ring to them:

I saw that fame nor happiness depended on it [learning] in the slightest, for the happiest people were the most ignorant and fame was a matter of luck, to achieve which you only had to be clever (p-61).

The narrative is episodic, with much of it being related via Pechorin’s own journal in racy prose. What is more, unlike the previous two novels the setting is exotic. The events occur in the misty peaks of the Ossetian mountains, and Lermontov squeezes every ounce of romance from this.

We follow Pechorin as he claims a young Ossetian girl as his own, thus coming into conflict with the elders of her community, stumbles across a bizarre smuggling exercixe on the coast, is almost drowned by a femme fatale and witnesses a Russian roulette challenge. What stops all this from being just a tale of derring-do is the character study at the core of it.
The novel attempts to place Pechorin alongside a whole generation who came of age in the 1840s. An older acquaintance of his, when asked about Pechorin, responds: there were many who speak the same way, and that most likely some are speaking the truth (p-163).

Turgenev’s Rudin (1857) functions as a more developed revisiting of his earlier novella. Of all these novels, in fact, this is the one with the most sophisticated plot.
We are back in country estate territory. Rudin is introduced to it by dint of being the messenger who has to apologise to the hosts for the non-arrival of a long awaited guest.
Thus he is a stand-in, but however, his smooth intelligence soon charms the wealthy socialite who owns the house and her circle of acquaintances, so he becomes a long term resident there and shares the story with a witty misanthrope and a conventional landowner type, with whom he is compared and contrasted.
In true Superfluous Man style, he embarks on an affair with the young daughter of the Lady of The House. When she discovers this, she expels him.
Rudin is revealed to be a victim of his own eloquence: his love for the girl was all theatrical talk. However, those around him now characterise him as a chancer and a sponger, which is less true.
Rudin tries to explain himself by letter to his disappointed young lover (My fate is a strange one, almost a comic one. I give myself comnpletely, heartily, fully - and yet I am unable to give myself p113). She is unimpressed by this.
When Rudin goes off back to his wandering life, one of his opponents has a change of heart and says this of the man He posseses enthusiasm and...this is the most precious quality in our time (p-125).
Later on, we meet Rudin again. Now he has become an insurrectionist in the 1848 June uprising in France. Here he meets his end – as a hero, of sorts.

The Malcontent.
Chekhov’s short story The Duel, from 1891, is separated from the others by some decades.This fact is reflected in the self-conscious portrayal of the material. The Superfluous Man here calls himself such and makes reference to some of the works mentioned here.
We are back in an exotic locale: this time it is the Black sea off the coast of Southern Russia.
Layevsky, however longs to return to what he sees as the civilised North, feeling that his relationship with a beautiful but flighty young woman is stifling him. He attempts to borrow the money to do so from a good-hearted doctor friend but it opposed by an earnest zoologist influenced by Darwinist notions. This latter, Von Koren, has this to say about Layevsky:
I told him off, asked him why he drank so much...his sole reply to all my questions was to smile bitterly and say I'm a superfluous man...or he'll spin a whole yarn about Onegin, Pechorin, Byron's Cain, Bazarov, calling them our fathers in spirit and flesh (p-268).

This enmity to what he sees as a self-justifying weakling leads to yet another duel. This one, however, turns out to be a seriocomic travesty and there are no victors (and is later followed by a kind of reconciliation).
Chekhov’s character – Exhinbit C-the malcontent -is the least likeable one in this parade but he is well served by the author. There is a reason why Chekhov is revered as a master storyteller and here you do see why.

Echoes down the century.

Danila Kozlovsky as Max in the film`Dyxless` from 2012[timeout.ru]

When you strip away th historical paraphenalia, you feel struck by the freshness of these novels, and their ongoing relevance.
The Superfluous Maan never really left us: he just went global and more downmarket. Ernest Hemingway was known to be a devotee of Turgenev’s. In The Sun Also Rises (1926) we meet a post First World War Superfluous Man in the form of Jake who is impotent as a result of that war.
Nor has contemporary Russia abandoned the Superfluous Man. What about the redundant advertising compywriter turned mass killer in Headcrusher (2002) or the messianic adolescent in Sense (2012)?
In film, Max in Dyxless (2012) owes something to Onegin, albeit one projected onto the Moscow playboy milieu of the early noughties.
In this age of the redundant male perhaps we are all a bit Superfluous these days!
For myself, I just want to shout out a loud spasiba balshoye to these eminent Men of Letters for putting these relatable misfits onto a marble dias for us all to see.
Every dog has his day!

Sources:
Chekhov, Anton The Steppe and other Stories, 1887 -1891 (Penguin Group, London, 2001) Translated by Ronald Wilks
Lermontov, Mikhail A Hero of Our Time (Karo, St Petersburg, 2017) Translated by Martin Parker.
Turgenev, Ivan The Diary of a Superfluous Man and other novellas (Alma Classics, Surrey, UK: 2019) Translator: Michael Pursglove.
Turgenev, Ivan Rudin (Alma Classics, Surrey, UK :2012) Translator: Dora O’Brien.
Pushkin, Aleksander Eugene Onegin (Karo, St Petersburg,2017) Translator: Henry Spalding.

Lukyanenko’s Last Hurrah: The novel THE SIXTH WATCH.

Is this a farewell to the Watch Saga?

Invoke the name of Sergei Lukyanenko and the following picture may well pop into your mind: An uber-Russian-Muscovite who catapulted to fame through a string of hard edged and scary fantasy novels commencing with The Nightwatch.

Think again. The real Lukyanenko hails from Karatau in South Kazakhstan. He only arrived in Moscow, at the age of 28, in 1996. By that time he had already published quite a few novels in the space opera genre and which were influenced by the American writer Robert Heinlen.

As for `hard-edged` and so on, his prose is distinguished by its philosophical humour, occasional sentimentality and its promotion of the need for compromise in a world where there are no absolute truths. Packaging aside, he is not a horror writer as such. The gist is somewhere between the decided grimness of Dmitry Glukhovsky and the light touch of Boris Akunin – in fact more the latter.

I first encountered his books over a decade ago. They were huge in Russia and easy to find in translation and I read them as a duty, despite not being all that keen on mythical magic-based fiction. The main tning that I got from them was an introduction to life on the Moscow of today.

Urban fantasy pioneer.

This time I reached for The Sixth Watch in preparation for the lockdown to come. Also I felt that it would be interesting to find out how the creator brings his iconic series to a close.

Lukyanenko likes to think of hinself as a successor to the Strugatsky brothers and his first novel, Knights of the Forty Islands (1990) was a science fiction one, (and remains untranslated).

The Nightwatch (1998) was the tale that would vanish off the shelves, however. It introduced the world to the Others – supernatural beings such as vampires and magicians, werewolves and prophets who walk amongst us in human guise and are locked into a Cold War style detente between the forces of Light and Darkness. This is mediated by the nether world known as the Twilight (which the film version translates, rather better, into The Gloom).

It was a fellow Kazakh and director Timur Bekmambetov who was the first to recognise the cinematic qualities of this world and so in 2004 a bit of Russian cultural history was made. The film version of Nightwatch entered cinemas and was followed two yeats later with Daywatch. These represent a soft power breakthrough for Russia, with few critics having a bad word to say about them.

Scene from `Nightwatch (2004) [Slashfilm.com]`

Thr films also functioned as starmakers with Anton Khabensky, Anna Slyu, Sergei Trofimov and the band Gorod 312 all making their names here.

Lukyanenko has been credited, via his brand of urban fantasy, with taking fantasy to a wider age group and, indeed, many a `paranormal romance` potboiler, starting with Stephanie Myer’s Twilight series, owes something to him.

The portly dreamweaver has thus become something of an ambassador of Russia, much as Henning Mankell is for Sweden.

Some commentators have taken to badmouthing him for his `chauvinism`, in particular in connection with his stance on the Ukraine issue. This, however, despite being expressed in a theatrical way, is not so different from the mainstream one throughout much of Russia.

Anton returns.

Anton Gorodetsky, the Higher Light Magician remains our narrator and protagonist in The Sixth Watch. He seems happy in his marriage and has a daughter who is an Enchantress. He continues to work as a Nightwatch agent. It is in this role that he finds himself hunting down an errant vampiress on the loose on the streets of Moscow. This creature, furthermore, seems to be waging some sort of vendetta against Gorodetsky, but turns out, in fact, to be warning him. There is an oncoming apocalypse, he learns.

Cover from the Russian version of `The Sixth Watch or Shyestoi Dozor` [ozon.ru]

The plot, after the manner of the whole series, soon starts to resemble the serpentine digressions of an espionage thriller as an ancient Demon-God called The Two in One returns to reassert its dominion.To forestall the destruction of all life on Earth, even the Others, Gorodetsky has to gather together a convocation of of the heads of all the vampires, witches,prophets, shapeshifters and magicians. This then is the Sixth Watch: a sort of Seven Samurai -like defence league.

I stifled yawns through some of the portentous details about rituals and incantations and so on and so lost the thread at times. The fresh and vivid rendering of being at a witches rally and a vampire conference brought a smile to my face though.

Lukyanenko’s wining trick is to merge his world of paranormal events with quotidian domesticity.

As Gorodetsky prepares an omelette for his spunky fifteen year old daughter, who is also a prime target for the dark forces at play, he reminds her that putting too much salt in it would be bad for her health.

Lukyanenko also offers a nice line in ironic humour as shown in the following exchange with a doctor called Ivan:

`I once met a man who mixed petals into his tea, said Ivan, pouring the strong brew before diluting it with hot water.`It was disgusting muck. And what is more tose petals were slowly poisoning him`

`So how did it all end?` I asked.

`He died`, the healer said shrugging. `Knocked down by a car. `

What gives Lukyanenko’s writng its idiosyncratic flavour are the jaundiced observations on the urban life of today which always make you sit up even if they appear curmudgeonly. There is, too, the refreshing fact that in this novel we get a hero who is not a detached brainbox nor an alcoholic divorcee, but a family man.

The fairytle like climax put me in mind of Nikolai Gogol’s Viy (1835) and made any tedium I had thus far tolerated seem worth it. Also it did seem to make any further resurrection of the series well-nigh impossible.

Andrew Bromfied, that busy and ubuiquitous Yorkshireman who also brought the mini-classic Headcrusher to an Anglophone readership, seems to have engaged with Lukyanenko’s intentions quite well here. One or two moments of wooden dialogue aside, you would be unaware that you are reading a translation most of the time.

Mixed reception.

How are the Western fanboys and girls taking the shutters coming down on their cherished series?

Not so well.

On Youtube Polyanna’s Bookclub opines: `You can’t just end it like that – there’s got to be something next!` Over in Goodreads an Esteban Siravegna is more forthright:

`It feels as if Lukyanenko got fed up with the saga and decided to end it for once and for all, or that he needed the money`.

Man at a crossroads.

But Lukyanenko, as his folksy website makes clear, has other frogs legs and spider’s webs on the boil. He has made a foray into alternate world fantasy with Rough Draft (Chernovik) which was filmed, to muted reviews, in 2018. He is also a fixture on the video games in industry.However, if he were to conjure up a new Watch novel a few moons hence, I would not be so surprised. Seven is a magical number, after all.

The Sixth Watch' is published by Arrow Books, London (2016)

The main image is from twitter.com

VOT ETA DA!

Seven Significant Signposts of 2019.

In terms of publishing, it was cheering to see that Karo Publishers in St Petersburg have made ALEXANDER BELYAEV’S THE AMPHIBIAN available to the Anglophone world – a work of speculative fiction that speaks anew to our own age of biological engineering. Let us hope that this marks a new trend of reprinting works in English that are not just the routine Golden and Silver Age standard
In music, the band to watch out for next year must be SUNWALTER. They have spent much of 2019 working hard on tours of Eastern Europe making their distinctive brand of melodic science fiction themed pomp rock known to the world. I wish them the break they deserve. Meanwhile, IC3PEAK have become figureheads of youthful opposition with their innovative Witch House sound. Long may they keep this up! That the Russian Rock scene proper is not altogether extinct is evidenced by PILOT who still stage raucous but thoughtful alt rock commentaries on the 21st century to crowds of loyal follwers.
Cinema. Out of nowhere came the gem LOST ISLAND (Potteryanni Ostrov) – a dreamlike curio that, behind its apparent whimsy, had a point to make about Russian isolationism. In more mainstream releases, the thriller BREAKAWAY (OTRYV) demonstrated that Russia can produce a tense and effective edge-of-the seat affair to rival anything that comes from Hollywood. Then this was also the year in which the big screen shook its fist: the film adaptation of Dmitri Glukhovsky’s TEXT held up a mirror to present day Russian society and created an emblem for these times – and not just for Russia.

WISHING ALL MY READERS A PEACEFUL AND PROGRESSIVE NEW YEAR! From GENERATION P: The one-stop shop for all things of promise to come out of Modern Russia.

Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future – Maxim Gorky.

THE BYKOV CHALLENGE: Living Souls.

Russia's Catch 22 serves up a spicy goulash combining social satire, poetry, science fiction, magical realism, and polemic. Can YOU take it?`

`You should call me Comrade Major, you’re in the army aren’t you? Have you forgotten your rank? `

`No I haven’t comrade Major. `

I know I’m Comrade Major.`….

`I didn’t just turn up, Comrade Major, I came at your request -`

`I know I called you, I’m not senile! ` Evdokimov interrupted him loudly. `Do you think we’re all senile in Smersh? Answer me!`

`Not at all, Comrade Major`

`Not at all what?`

`Not at all senile in Smersh Comrade Major`

`How do you know what we’re like in Smersh? Perhaps you’ve been here before?`

This farcical interrogation appears in Living Souls, a state of the nation novel about Russia by Dmitry Bykov – an ebullient figure who has become a public intellectual, one of the last living representatives of the fabled `intellegentsia`, through his poetry and biographies. He will be fifty-two this year, and this novel came out in 2006 (as `ZH.D`) and was translated four years later.

Poet of dissent: Dmitry Bykov [Litschool.pro]

At 433 pages long it is a Brontosaurus of a novel which provides a panoramic odyssey through post-communist Russia.

Tomorrow’s world.

However, it is a Russia of an unspecified future. This is a nation which has broken up into two ethnic tribal groups locked in a weary civil war.

There are the quasi-Hitlerian Varangians who consider themselves to be the descendants of the Vikings and the Khazars who are made up of Jews and of Muscovite liberals. Opposed to both of them are a smaller, forgotten lost race who espouse a Tao-like approach to life which worships polarity and cycles.

Having discovered free energy in the form of `phlogiston`, the rest of the world has no need for Russian oil. No longer able to sell it, the Russians convert their black gold into foodstuffs. The government, moreover, has imposed a tax on the use of certain words hence journalists have to invent their own, and homeless people are diagnosed as suffering from `Vasilenko syndrome` and are available to adopted as pets in middle class homes.

Citizen’s tales.

Against this pessimistic backdrop where everything, and religion in particular has been militarised, a number of characters play out their own stories. These are told with great meticulousness and often through intense one to one dialogues.

There is an army general cohabiting with a native from one of the captured villages, a Varangian journalist in love with a Jewess and a young girl accompanying a homeless person. All of their fates are bound up with the fabled village of Degunino, to which they make their way….

Bringing it to the West.

Cathy Porter is a very experienced translator, but when it came to bringing this difficult novel out in English she worked alongside Bykov. They had to jettison some of it, but the gritty yet lyrical evocation of the vastness of old-new Russia remains. Bykov clearly loves the damp forests, dusty cabins and rundown villages of his homeland and that is why he is so critical of it. `You almost have to be Russian to read it`, complained a British reviewer in the Financial Times (April 6^th, 2010).

The satire recalls Kafka and Burgess but it was the British poetess Elaine Feinstein who made the most memorable comparison: `A Catch 22 for modern Russia` is how she described it. Indeed, readers Joseph Heller’s rambling comic novel will find the same sense of the absurdity of military life in these pages.

Big Russian read.

Should you get the urge to devour a Big Russian novel then – aside from the obligatory War and Peace –the obvious choices are between Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) which evokes the Bolshevik uprising and its aftermath and Solhenitzyn’s Cancer Ward (1970) which concerns the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras. Living Souls completes the next step by offering a chronicle of modern Russia, or be it through the prism of a dystopia.

I am enough of a glutton for punishment to have read this novel not twice but three times. The first attempt was on a twelve-hour stopover at Frankfurt airport where, with the help of much German Weisbeir, I got a sense of the novels power. The second time I read it more slowly and in dribs and drabs and I was rewarded by getting more of its humour.In the third slog I could savour the different chunks of meat and vegetable in the goulash I was gorging on. Like Russia itself, Living Souls is worth persevering with in the end.

Living Souls by Dmitry Bykov (Translated by Cathy Porter) is published by Alma Books Ltd, UK.