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
Molochappears 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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).