Russian novels. – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

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

AQUABOY: A new English language imprint of the strangest iconic tale to come out of Stalin’s Russia.

What enlivened a grey February afternoon in a bookshop was chancing on a new English version of The Amphibian (1928) by Alexander Belyaev.

The film adaptation of this had already introduced me to the premise of a young man who can live underwater, as it seems to be a permanent fixture on Russian television and is regarded with affection by many East Europeans of a certain age.

Until now though, I had not enjoyed the opportunity to snuggle up with the novel that had inspired the film. Karo Publishers based in St Petersburg – best known for their translated versions of Golden and Silver age greats by Pushkin and Tolstoy et al – have changed all that by bringing out The Amphibian last year.

Blockbuster.

Lenfilm’s Chelovek Amphibia (1962) constitutes a glitzy and exotic boy-meets-girl fantasy romance. The film provides a testimony to the swagger of the Khrushchev era when the Soviet Union was winning the Space Race.

Scene from ““Chelovek Amphibia`.
[polzam.ru]

With its impressive photography and sun-drenched location shots on Baku this film can hold its head up alongside America’s The West Side Story which came out in the same period.

The doomed lovers aspect of the film seems similar too: here an outcast boy with shark gill implants loves a local maiden. In contrast with American Science Fiction films, however, this situation is not a product of nuclear radiation nor science-gone-wrong, but of benign medical intervention.

The original constumes used in `Chelovek Amphibia` on display at Lenfilm studios in St Petersburg.

Soviet Michael Crichton.

The author, Alexander Romanovich Belyaev, had grown up in a religious household in the cathedral town of Smolensk. He became a lawyer before being struck down with tuberculosis which made him dependent on care for about six years.

During this trial Belyaev encountered the writings of Verne and Wells and this fired him up to embark on a career as one of Russia’s first career science fiction authors. He was to churn out seventeen – 17!- tales in this genre.

Belyaev’s life ended in 1941 or 1942 in the town of Pushkin outside St Petersburg from lack of nutrition. He was 58.

Nevertheless he had reached a wide readership in his lifetime. Professor Dowell’s Head (1937) and The Amphibian are the ones most known to the Anglophone world but if you go onto book discussion sites you will find that Belyaev still commands a reading public outside of that, and his other books remain popular too.

An installation commemorating the film `Professor Dowell’s Testament` (Lenfilm Studio, 1984) based on Belyaev’s` “Professor Dowell’s Head`. Also on display at Lenfilm studios in St Petersburg.

Unexpected.

Belyaev had The Amphibian published in a notorious era later seen as being the onset of Stalinism. The Soviet government ended the relaxed New Economic Policy amidst a fall in grain production and a new financial slump. The buzzword of the day was `sabotage` and the first Five Year Plan was being hatched and the show trials began. Hard times.

The Amphibian, in contrast, catapults us to the fishing community of Rio de Plata near Buenos Aires. The focus, furthermore is not on new mechanics but on fantastic medical science.

Water boy.

The pearl divers are thrown into superstitious dread by the appearance of a `sea devil` in their waters. This has created a journalistic splash too.

Icthyander (the amphibian) – for it is he – a young man of about twenty, is able to spend long periods swimming underwater on account of the shark gills implanted into his body. This superpower sets him apart from normal society.

His adoptive father, Doctor Salvatore – who had saved Icthyander’s life with this surgical innovation represents the maverick medical genius ( of the kind that Boris Karloff would later portray). Nevertheless he seems saner than the conniving rabble around him and gifts the poor Mexicans with free medical help. Otherwise he is a recluse, living in a walled laboratory which he shares with his servants and sundry modified animals.

Icthyander, meanwhile is smitten with a local beauty and entangled in a hopeless love tryst. The hard-bitten pearl diving mercenaries are plotting to kidnap him and put him to their own use. It will all end in a sensational court case in which Doctor Salvatore is in the dock – and against the world…

Fable.

The detached narrative is told with spare and simple prose, reminiscent of Paul Gallico, perhaps.It could work as junior fiction, although maybe it is L. Koslenikov’s 1959 translation that makes much of the dialogue seem clunky.

The beating heart of it all is the prolonged underwater sequences where we get Icthyander’s eye on the world. Here Jacques Cousteau is anticipated in fiction.

The theme of human-animal hybrids had been dealt with earlier by Mikhail Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog (1925) but this tends to be viewed as an allegory rather than science fiction.

There also exist indelible rumours claiming that the Stalin regime was attempting to breed human-monkey hybrids for military purposes. So perhaps Belyaev was closer to the truth than he thought!

Belyaev (via Salvatore) seems to mount a defence of medical progress against the prohibitions of religion in this novel. It is not clear, however, that the author had anything more in mind than writing a ripping yarn which could whisk the reader away from the daily grind of Soviet society of that time.

Contemporary echoes.

The novel stands up better than the film which is too Old School for most people’s tastes today.

However,the science fiction geek of our time expects more involved narratives which involves multiple technological twists and turns as opposed to a one premise fable like this. The Amphibian is out of fashion.

Or is it?

Fellow baby boomers may recall an American TV show (1977-1978) called The Man From Atlantis This featured Patrick Duffy as an amphibian man. (It would be churlish to point out that one of Belyaev’s novels from 1926 is titled Posledniy Chelovek iz Atlantidi – The Last Man from Atlantis!)

Then there is Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape of Water from two years back. The similarities between this and what has been discussed does not need to be spelt out (it even features a Soviet scientist!)

So The Amphibian remains an extraordinary novel – as extraordinary as the sad life of the man who dreamt it all up.

Chelovek Amphibia- Full movie.

Mad Metropolis: In exhuming `The Doomed City` by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Gollancz have rediscovered a difficult masterpiece that still has something to say about our own times.

Supernovas in the science fiction galaxy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a St Petersburg writing duo, were feted in their time and their novels have been treated to numerous cinema adaptations, from the somewhat weighty `Stalker` (1979) to the more popcorn friendly `Inhabited Island` (2008).

As much as some of their visions – such as the autocratic regime in `Hard to be a God` (1964) – contain metaphorical critiques of their own government, the Strugatsky brothers have not really been viewed as dissident writers as such. That may be about to change. As a part of an S.F Masterworks series, which has been re-issuing classics of the genre since 1999, Andrew Bromfield introduced the Anglophone world to `The Doomed City` last year.

The brothers, following many years of secret gestation, completed this novel in 1972. However it only saw print, courtesy of `Neva press` between 1988 and 1989. This delay owes to the fact that the novel comprised – as Dmitry Glukhovsky (`Metro`2033 and 2034`) says in his indispensable Foreword -`…an allusion to the Soviet Union…so transparent that there was a reason to fear not only for the Strugatskys but also for the censors who allowed the book to see print` (p-xi).

Human zoo.

I am required by law to describe this whopping 453-page dystopia as `Kafkaesque` and indeed it is. The protagonist, Andrei Voronin is a conventional young man from Fifties period Soviet Russia. Somehow he has found himself in the world of The Experiment. In this a group of humans, some volunteers and others conscripts, are put together in a nameless City with no known location or time. Their artificial sun is switched on and off and their living space `was clearly divided into two equal halves. Looking to the west there was a boundless, blue green void – not sea and not even sky…To the east…was an unbounded expanse of solid yellow…Infinite Void to the west and infinite Solidity to the east`. (Pages 266-267).

The inhabitants undergo what seem to be meaningless trials but there are wraithlike Mentors who seem to appear out of nowhere to dispense gnomic wisdom, and to remind Voronin that `The Experiment is the Experiment`.

The Experiment means The Experiment.

The plot appears quite formless but follows the episodic career of Voronin. First he works as a garbage collector, then an investigator, then as a newspaper editor and after that a counsellor – job rotation being a feature of the Experiment. Then, however, there is a fascistic uprising in which he lands on top of the heap. Later he leads an expedition outside the city to see if the rumours of gathering anti-city forces are true.

Throughout this, and all told with the Strugatsky’s trademark attention to detail, we see riotous kitchen parties, an invasion of baboons, and the City bedevilled by a sinister unidentified Red Building which manifests itself in different parts of the City, swallowing up its citizens.

Most of all the novel concerns itself with people. This feels like a man’s world where there is a lot of camaraderie between men as they jostle and scheme and dream amongst themselves and much of the writing consisting of intense dialogue. In fact a philosophical Jew, Izya Katzman, functions as the nearest thing the novel to a hero.

Worth it in the end.

Boris Strugatsky himself, in an Afterword, refers to the novel’s ` stubborn reluctance to glorify or acclaim anything` (p-461). Indeed, this is not comfort reading!

It was with a sense of duty that I turned the pages. Sometimes I leant in closer with a sense of intrigue. I chuckled once or twice at the slapstick humour and my pulse quickened here and there at the adventures and I knew that the creepy Red Building and the presence of Katzman would continue to haunt me. I was pleased to finish the last page and put the book to one side though.

As a science fiction `The Doomed City` falls flat. The cosmography is too meagre and the science background too thin for this to be a world that one can escape into. (Compare and contrast it with Philip Jose Farmer’s `Riverworld Saga` from 1971 to 1983. This dealt with a somewhat similar premise but constructed a much more credible alternate world in so doing).

As a novel about hypereality, however `The Doomed City` resonates more than ever, and not just in the Russian Federation. Also its in influence on many contemporary Russian writers, such as Dmitry Bykov, is clear to see.

Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris: The Doomed City (Translated by Andrew Bromfield) (Great Britian: Gollancz, 2017) All quotations are from this text.