Tag: Russian writing

THE INTRIGUER, THE MINDBLOWER AND THE ROMANCER: A Look Back at Three Soviet period Science fiction writers

Leaving aside the translated works of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and, to a lesser extent, those of Alexander Belyaev, the science fictioneers of Soviet period Russia are not much trumpeted in the Western world.

So what a pleasant thrill it gave me to chance upon, in an expat bookstore, three compendiums of translated science fiction stories by authors new to myself and from that period.

Thank you Raduga.

From their base in Zubotsky Boulevard in the Park Kultury region of Moscow, Raduga (`Rainbow`) Publishers began making available foreign language imprints from their inception in 1931 up until the end of the Soviet Union. These publications included children’s books, language guides, photographic albums and popular fiction. As a part of a series called `Adventure & Fantasy`, Raduga brought some representative science fiction authors to the Anglophone world in the era when glasnost and perestroika where being spoken of in the Kremlin.

A futuristic doppelganger tale.

Vladimir Mihanovsky’s The Doubles was first published by Progress Publishers in 1981 but Raduga bought the story six years later when the Ukranian writer was 56 years of age. By this time Mikhanovsky had been a teacher of Maths and Physics at Kharkov University and penned a few tales speculating on humanity’s relationship with robotic technologies.

The intriguer: Vladimir Mikhanoivsky [esu.com.va]

Mikhanovsky’s stories – there are four in this collection -take place in an urbanized future that appears to be somewhere in America (`the Rockies` get a mention in one story). Interplanetary travel is a part of daily life (but not integral to these tales), domestic robots grace every home and the cities are crisscrossed with moving walkways. The Land of Informa is the exception, being a charming Wellsian tale of a man stumbling on an alternate world near a railway station outside of Moscow. The Violet is a sometimes zany detective tale set in the aforementioned future world (indeed the author would later devote himself entirely to the detective genre).

The title story – The Doubles – seems to have as its title a play on Dostoevsky’s tale The Double (1846) – the quintessential doppelganger story. In it we meet Newmore, an obsessive and gifted scientific researcher who, very much like Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll, dreams of isolating the more virtuous side of man’s psyche away from his baser part. He employs the latest in particle physics to do so and creates a sort of ethereal anti-human entity (which he calls `Alva`) which has the capacity to absorb the worst of a human being and turn into their negative doppelganger in the process. However, the original person and their Alva must never meet as this will result in mutually assured destruction in the form of an explosion – yet the Alva is drawn by magnetism to seek out it’s opposite and so needs must be avoided at all costs.

Despite these drawbacks, Newmore finds an all too willing guinea pig. Arben is a man desperate to rid himself of the guilt and irascibility that has overruled his life so far.

Indeed, after Newmore’s procedure, Arben does gain a new life: he receives a new approval from his workmates, forgets his guilts, gets back with an old, now adoring, girlfriend, acquires a swish new automobile and so on. However, the Alva is always Out There, seeking him….

Illustration from The Doubles.

Soon he is begging Newmore to reverse the whole experiment, particularly as his double seems to be breaking the expected rules in its urge to meet him. With a heavy heart Newmore agrees, but will the Alva get to Arben first?

Mikhanovksy tells a fine up-tempo tale even if some of the dialogue (in translation at least) reads like something from a television soap opera. His writing – not all that `Russian` really – resembles an Asimov but with a more vivid appreciation of the pitfalls of technological development.

Signals from a doomed species.

The Odessa born Segei Snegov died at the age of 84 in 1994 after having become best known for his space opera extravaganza People as Gods which he tapped out between 1966 and 1977 delighting many fans in Eastern Europe who resonated with his galaxy spanning quasi-Biblical excursions.

The mindblower: Sergei Snegov [Yandex.Zen]

First appearing in Detskaya Literatura in 1977, Snegov’s addition to the `Adventure & Fantasy` series consists of twelve stories which revolve around Roy and Henry, two scientific investigators tasked with getting to the bottom of inexplicable events or unusual crimes involving technology.

They live in a future world not unlike Mikhaonovsky’s. We are not given a location but weather is controlled, we have interstellar travel, robots of course, and a hinted at world government. The means exist to record and project the thoughts and dreams of the human mind and this features in a great many of the stories.

 In the title story Ambassador Without Credentials Roy’s job has become personal. He is investigating the mysterious crash onto Mars of a spaceship which was carrying Hemry, his brother who is now lying comatose in a hospital on Mars.

Events accelerate when it transpires that the catastrophe had defied the laws of physics. The crew were befuddled by receiving warning signals that had reached them at faster than light speeds (an impossibility). Meanwhile, in his coma Henry is dreaming about physical and mathematical concepts which are way beyond his own capabilities….

The plot, as brilliant as it is preposterous, goes on to encompass an imperiled civilisation trying to reach out by using pseudo-humans planted into Earth’s society and by moulding the dreams of performers who sell their own dreams for entertainment purposes. We also get an alien visitor masquerading as a monkey that feeds off electricity and the use of an invisibility suit.

The tone is upbeat, even jocular at times, yet it is a very homosocial world. There are no women in this story, not even there as objects of desire. Despite this Ambassador Without Credentials delivered one of the most fun reading experiences I have had for a long time whilst playing with such solemn themes as the nature of Good and Evil and personal responsibility in the face of cataclysm.

An archeologist’s Mediterranean mission.

The still living Yuri Medvedev, from Krasnoyarsk, is the youngest of the three and his reputation still precedes him. Type his name into Yandex.ru and you will encounter shadowy insinuations about this writer including him being a key player in the “defeat of Soviet science fiction` no less.

The romancer: Yuri Medvedev. [swarogfond.livejournal.com]

Such accusations, which he has rebuffed, seem to refer back to his time as the Editor of Molodiya Gvardira  . He steered this publication in the direction of pan -Slavic nationalism and in so doing set himself up in opposition to such figures as Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

This was all some time ago and it is now difficult to sort out the facts from the gossip so – to the texts themselves!

The first and longest tale in The Chariot of Time (a collection introduced by the cosmonaut Vitaly Sevastyanov!) is called The Cup of Patience, a sort of science fantasy folk tale narrated by a young archeologist called Oleg Preobrazhensky.

In the Far East of the Soviet Union, Preobrazhensky had unearthed the dwelling and preserved body of a legendary princess called Snow Face. Later, however, his breakthrough discovery gets buried under the rubble of an avalanche triggered by an earthquake.

Later an imperious teacher of his sends him on an unexplained errand in Sicily, where most of the action will henceforth unfold. In Sicily a strange epidemic is underway and there is talk of UFO sightings and fires that seem to be caused by them. Nearby there resides an American military base. What part does this play in it all?

Preobrazhensky then meets up with Snow Face – except she is really the representative of an intergalactic community bent on safeguarding the Earth’s environment….

This itemization of the main plot elements does little to convey the experience of reading it. Medvedev seems to be a part of the Ray Bradbury school of science fiction which has a lot of poetic ruminations throughout. Stylish and sophisticated though his prose is, it is also high-falutin and over-romantic and I came close to returning the book to the shelf unfinished. The Cup of Patience does reach a kind of focused conclusion however, and it seems to be a simple `Yanks Go Home` one (and which had already dated by the time of the translation of this story in 1985).

A Challenge to Stereotypes.

Encountering Soviet Period culture can so often be something of an eyebrow raiser, failing, as it often does, to conform to our prejudices. The only writer here with a clear ideological axe to grind is Medvedev although even his brand of Pan-Slavism meets Green consciousness was not exactly the party line in the Eighties. As for Mikhanovsky and Snegov, they were very akin to their Western science fiction counterparts of their day. They even gave their protagonists Western sounding names.

Mikhanovsky, Vladimir The Doubles (Moscow: Rasduga Publishers, 1987) (Translators: Raisa Bobrova, Miriam Katz, Katherine Judelson).

Snegov, Sergei Ambassador Without Credentials (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1989) (Translated by Alex Miller).

Medvedev, Yuri The Chariot of Time (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1988) (Translated by Robert King).

    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


    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

    The Scary Fairy Tales of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

    The Grand Old Lady of Russian letters has some weird tales to tell.

     

    Nina had always been a disorganised person who let things go; thus her leave from the newspaper to go `freelance` and the apparent total unravelling of her life…. She ate, she drank…and they didn’t need any money, since every day the young fisherman would bring the fruits of the sea home to them.

    `Who is he? ` I asked, and Nina, without any hesitation answered that he was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, that he could breathe underwater, that he brought home literally everything from there….

     

    For all the reputation for `chauvinism` that still sticks to Russian society, the fact remains that one of its most revered authors is a woman, an elderly woman at that. Moreover, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is neither a veteran critic of Soviet repression like a Solhenitzyn, nor someone exulting in the shiny new capitalism like a Sergey Minaev. As such, this writer, playwright and novelist can offer the Western reader a fresh take on how a great many Russians really think and feel.

    Amongst the nation’s best-known contemporary writers, Petrushevskaya cuts a figure of a sort of literary godmother. From her thirties this Muscovite has been producing stories and plays and following a long period of being disregarded came to prominence in the 1980s when her dramas – compared by some to Harold Pinter’s -were seen as fit to be performed. Then as she reached fifty her first book of short stories saw print in Russia.

    Now these tales have been translated into English by two Americans, Ann Summers – a Slavic literature academic – and the Moscow born Keith Gessen, founder of `n+1` magazine. Penguin Modern classics have collected them under the title There Once Was A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby which hit the shelves in 2009.

    This collection is made up of 19 short tales grouped into four categories: Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems and Fairy Tales. They defy easy categorisation but the tag `magical realism` is a hard one to avoid. Readers who have encountered Vladimir Sorokin might also be reminded of him, but her work relies less on shock tactics.

    To a British reader they offer not such a great challenge as similar developments occurred in British fiction in the same general period. I am thinking of The Cement Garden period Ian Mc Ewan (or `Ian Macabre` as he was then sometimes dubbed) as well as the Gothic fantasias of Angela Carter.

    Petrushevskaya tells us of women, married couples and families who undergo strange life and death situations. Some of these invoke the supernatural, others can be accounted for in terms of psychology but in all cases individual experience is paramount. Whilst Petrushevskaya avoids local and historical references it is clear that it is the seedy apartments of the Russia of the Eighties to the present day that she is showing us.

    Two of her stories – `Hygiene` and the infamous `The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century` function as sketches of dystopian catastrophe. In the former, for example, a man who has recovered from a mystery plague knocks on the door of a family apartment to warn them of the coming social collapse. This does indeed occur but the family survives through robbery, although end up having to quarantine their own daughter.

    Others such as `The God Poseidon` (quoted from above) and `The Black Coat` can be enjoyed as supernatural chillers. It would not be difficult to imagine them being anthologised in the more thoughtful type of Horror collection sandwiched between Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. (Indeed Petrushevskaya won a World Fantasy award for this book in 2009).

    `There is Someone in the House` however, suggests a study in morbid psychology whereas `Marllena`s Secret` is a bold fantasia and `My Love` an extended exercise in tragic pathos.

    Her prose is spare but with enough observant detail to bring some reality to her fables. The fast paced narrative is told by an earthy and unsentimental voice, which is matter-of-fact, and without overt humour. The resulting effect – pithy and sensational- resonates in the West as much as it does in Russia. She has been on the New York Times bestseller list.

     

    Petrushevskaya casts a flamboyant figure, dressing like a grand dame and singing cabaret. From not being able to get published in her own country at all she has become its national treasure, an icon of survival.

     

    There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers is published by the Penguin Group (London: 2009)

    (The above quotation is from p-85, `The God Poseidon`).