Tag: Russian literature

`We must change `em all!` The Political Significance of `Evgeny Onegin`

Pushkin’s classic has been claimed by different generations. Is the latest screen ONEGIN anything more than a sterile extravaganza designed to glorify Russia’s Imperial past?

Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel `Evgeny Onegin`is the best-known work of Russia’s national poet and upheld as a pinnacle of Russian literature. Alexander Seergevich, an aristocrat with some African heritage, harboured sympathies with the Decembrists who plotted against Tsar Nicholas’s extended autocracy. Penned between 1825 and 1832 and published in serial form before the standardized version came out in 1837, `Evgeny Onegin` was very much about Pushkin’s time. It also represented a turning away from Romanticism and towards a new Naturalism.

The novel concerns the life and times a young nobleman – a `madcap youth` – blighted with `the British spleen/Transported to our Russian clime`. This takes place over eight Cantos which end on a rather avant-garde cliffhanger. It is known that Pushkin had some further Cantos up his sleeve but destroyed them possibly because they contained rebukes to the Tsar himself. There is even a tantalising suggestion that Onegin’s fate was to have been him joining forces with the Decembrists (whose attempted insurrection ended in 1825 when the novel finished).

What we are left with is not an obvious political protest (although it is difficult to imagine young Onegin being enlisted into any kind of army campaign). It is more a cautionary tale. Moving from the social whirl of St Petersburg to an estate in a village, Onegin meets a German romantic youth who is to become his best friend. He, in turn introduces him to a shy young woman – Tatiana – who becomes besotted with him. The best friend Onegin slays by accident in a pointless duel and he rebuffs the woman. Later, older and wiser and having been travelling he returns to reclaim Tatiana but now she is married and she leaves him in limbo….

Onegin as a metrosexual [source:Pictures pibig.info]

A Hero of Whose Times?

`Evgeny Onegin` proves a challenging work to realise on the screen, being based around the tone of its narration and a solitary anti-hero. The first attempt, from the trailblazer of Russian film Vasily Goncharov came in 1911. It would take another staggering 47 -years for another cinema version to appear – in the form of a filming of Tchiakovsky’s opera.

The new standard.

Coming out on March 8th, Women’s Day, of this year and just before the predetermined re-election of Putin, the newest film version was directed by Satrik Andreasyan. Known for his commercial approach to film making, he hails from Armenia but embraces the pro-war cause with the zeal of the convert.

`You should be ashamed to show such disrespect to your country`, he told fellow artists on Twitter who had come out against the war in February 2022.

Onegin comprises a lengthy and opulent family blockbuster. It gained first place in the box office for March 7th to 10th making 331 million roubles I four days (Dzen.ru, 11/3/24).

Through an Imperial lense….

Most people’s previous encounter with `Evgeny Onegin` will have come via one of the best-known operas by Tchiakovsky. This dates from 1878, a time when Russia was embroiled in the Russo-Turkish war (in which Russia sought to regain territory lost in previous engagements). This masterpiece, by the author of the 1812 Overture, cemented the novel’s reputation as a national mascot. However, it also relegates the anti-hero himself to the role of a supporting character. It is Tatiana and her feelings which take centre stage in this opera.

….and a Soviet one.

Post 1917, Tchiakovsky’s piece had become a part of the operatic repertoire. Nevertheless, the imperial grandeur it displayed was now out of step with the building of a communist future. Refreshing new directions in realism resulted. Now the players had to contend with mosquitoes and some of the scenery, such as the fountains were shown to be in a state of disrepair (to symbolize the moribund nature of the bourgeoise). (Operanews.ru/1610).

Following the Great Patriotic War, however, a measure of pomp and circumstance became allowable again if it could be framed as part of Russian national heritage. In 1958, as the Soviet Union’s third Sputnik whirled around the Earth, Lenfilm laid on a technicolour treatment of Tchiakovsky’s classic directed by Roman Tikhomirov. Still, this does not seem excessive in grandiosity: the focus is all on the character’s emotions as brought out by actors with opera singer’s voices dubbed on top.

Foreign interpretations.

[videosdeballetclassica]

The South African John Cranko adapted `Evgeny Onegin` into a ballet in 1965 (just called `Onegin`). For this he used the music of Tchiakovsky, but not from the opera. Here the emphasis was on a man who, despite all of his wealth and privilege, nevertheless finds himself ineffectual. This toured Leningrad in 1972 and elicited criticisms from a Russian audience who felt their national property was being trod on. Tatiana’s name day celebration in the ballet was in the summer -when every one knows it would have to be in January, and so on. Nevertheless the ballet has since been much staged in Russia. I caught it in Moscow just a few years back.

The British actor Ralph Fiennes played the titular role in Onegin from 1999. Fiennes had already made his name seven years earlier playing a similar Byronic character, Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights. Here Onegin is portrayed as a tortured soul in the Gothic tradition. This was an overt English interpretation. Yet it is the case that Pushkin name checks Byron’s antihero Childe Harold a few times in his novel.

Picture perfect.

Onegin 2024: accent on the splendour [recommend.ru]

The new Onegin comes with the tagline: ‘The love story that conquered the world`. Like `Doctor Zhivago` then, it is being framed as a romance, which is a half-truth. Throughout its two and a half hours running time it retells the story with efficiency. We get to see some location shots – the Palace of the Grand Duke of Vladimir Alexandrovich and the Pushkin mountains. We see brass knockers, wood burning samovars and white top hats. It all looks new and clean and everything is arranged before the camera for the best view. Unmemorable muzak of a classical kind underpins it all. Some are comparing it to the British film Pride and Prejudice (which came out in 2005, when the U.K was party to an invasion of Iraq), but it is too well-scrubbed for even that comparison.

The main players – Viktor Dobronravov (Onegin) and Elizaveta Moryak (Tatiana) are 41 and 29 respectively. There may be something in Andreasyan’s claim that the middle-aged of today are the teens and twenty-somethings of yesteryear but the sociopolitical concern with disaffected youth is lost. In particular, the tall and stocky Dobronravov looks more like an alpha-chad than any superfluous man.

Also lost is the saucy foot fetishism of the narrator, Tatiana’s involvement in pagan divination, the disheartening journey to Moscow, the mistreatment of the serfs and – above all -the mordant take on the upper-middle-classes (`Rogue and enchanter of yore/now buffoon, glutton and a bore`)

Let’s allow some caveats. Dobronravov does do a good line in ennui. The character of Lenski is well realized and the wonderful Alexander Yatso features as Tatiana’s husband. Also, there is an interesting innovation where Onegin has a parallel dream to that of Tatiana’s.

This constitutes a Z- Patriot film at heart. It looks forward to the past. It is a bland and kitsch waxworks museum and too precious to offer any nourishment for either the mind or the soul.

All quotations from the text (which includes the title) come from Henry Spalding’s translation published by Karo, St Pwetersburg, 2017.

The lead image, showing a scene from the 1958 film, is from:bacilleraticoefilo.com

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 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.

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.

Leo Tolstoy’s grave at Yasnaya Polyana.

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

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).

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.

Roaring Boy: the personal and political in Arslan Khasavov’s `Sense`.

Did a Central Asian immigrant write a Catcher in the Rye for the Moscow millenial generation?

Arslan Khasavov

I hate cheesy boys and pert, pretty girls who smell of expensive perfumes and drive around in large cars with tainted windows. With wads of money in their designer label bags to satisfy every whim, they have all they need: money, girls, shooters, nice gear…In their world everything matters except your heart.

I once had the acquaintance of a precocious fifteen year old student (now studying Literature at Moscow State University) who had some literary aspirations. He would tell me of the Golden and Silver Ages of Russian writing but never about anything current, until one day I said to him: `You need to get into something a bit more up to the minute, something with people like you in`.

I urged him to read Sense by Arslan Khasavov, a representative tirade from which is given above (pages 44 to 43).

Sense is the first novel (and a calling card) by Arslan Khasavov who is now just reaching thirty. When he authored this mini-masterpiece he was just twenty and, in it, he set down the Moscow of `here-and-now`, at least as it was in 2008. Whilst Khasavov is a Kumyk by birth –an ethnic group found for the most part in Dagestan-he resides in, and has undertaken his studies in the capital of Russia.

Dream come true.

Sense was shortlisted from one of the 50,000 works sent in to the Debut Prize (which gives annual awards to new Russian writers). Arch Tait PEN literature awarded translator (best known for making Anna Politkovskaya’s journalism available in English), took note of the novel and translated it into English. As he is also the UK editor of the Glas new Writing series, this lead to Sense being published by Glas in 2012. Thus it took its place alongside the other 170 authors who have been published by Glas since 1991.

True to life.

Sense is not so much a story as a slice-of-life as seen through the eyes of Artur Kara, a club-footed twenty-year old student who is the first in his family to study at a university. A self-described `day-dreaming slob` he belongs to the post-Soviet Muscovite tribe. Disdainful of the banal lives of his factory working father and mother, he derives inspiration from literature, information from the internet and TV, and his student life allows him the time to mull over it all.

He feels himself to be ranged against those born in the 60’s and 70’s who have presided over the `death of idealism` (p-151). To vault himself above the kind of people he thinks are `unaware that a stupid life has no value` (p-20) he goes in search of greatness. To this end he turns up to meetings, and gets to know the supporters and, in particular the writers, of the youth movements of his time. So we get a journalistic roll call of many of the (real life) hopeful reformers, would-be revolutionaries and militant Islamists who were around in 2008. Kara, however, finds that none of these outfits answer to his need for romance. Then, prompted by some feverish visions that come to him, he creates his own movement which forms the title of the novel – Sense.

Even when cruel reality intervenes in the form of the death of his father, he is only put off his stride for a short while before teetering on the brink of madness….

Intimate.

To read the novel – and I did so in one sitting – is a bit like being collared by a voluble twenty-year old who insists on pouring his heart out to you. This effect gets achieved through intense and sometimes florid prose which is, nevertheless, conversational. Some passages are didactic, but Khasavov has enough distance from his anti-hero to be able to present him in a satirical way (rather as Thomas Mann does with Felix Krull in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man).

So we are treated to an edgy, but not too hard edged confessional: and it is refreshing to find that it does not concern the Second World War, rural life, or Soviet dissidents and the tone is upbeat. The events all occur in the radius of the Tverskaya area.

In the Moscow of 2008 the economy was still doing quite well and there were more political opposition activities than there are now. Even so, Artur cannot see how he can improve his position within society. His place is at the opposite end of the spectrum as that depicted in Minaev’s bestseller Soulless (2006). Well he knows this too:

I was handsome, strong and talented, and nobody wanted to know. Nobody cared. Was it my fault I wasn’t born into a wealthy family but instead was the son of an ordinary mechanic? Did I stand condemned for that? (P-127).

Critical reader.

My millennial friend came back having read the novel. He shrugged his shoulders.

`I got the bit about him rowing with his parents and all, but it’s not original, is it? And, anyway, it’s written by an immigrant`.

That was his verdict. Perhaps, I wondered to myself that, being still in his teens he was a little too young to really relate to it. What about you though?

If you are in your twenties then I can guarantee that this will contain some words that will speak to you, even if not for you. For those of you who are older it will remind you of what it felt like to be that age.

 

Sense (translated by Arch Tait) is published by Glas Publishers, Moscow, 2012.

My interview with Khasavov for Moskvaer.

Featured image from Fenbook.ml (Cover picture courtesy Sever Publishing House).