Soviet and Post Soviet Writers

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS:

(forthcoming)

Fyodor Abramov 1920-1983, of a peasant background, associated with the Village Prose movement. Works available in English include: Two Winters and Three Summers and The Dodgers (also available in another translation as The New Life: A Day on a Collective Farm (VILLAGE PROSE)

M. Ageyev (believed to be the pseudonym of Mark Lazarevich Levi), 1898-1973. Little is known about this writer. Best known for Novel with Cocaine.

Chingiz Aitmatov (1928-2008), a Soviet Kyrgyz writer who wrote in both Kyrgyz and Russian, is Kyrgyzstan’s leading literary figure. Aitmatov rose to prominence during the Thaw. His best-known work in translation is Jamila (tr James Riordan). Other works available in English include Aitmatov’s first novel, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (tr F J French), Mother Earth and Other Stories (tr James Riordan), The Place of the Skull (translator unidentified) and Tales of the Mountains and Steppes (translator unidentified), for which he won the Soviet Union’s most prestigious literary prize, the Lenin Prize, in 1963. (KYRGYZ, THAW, SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Vasily Aksyonov, 1932-2009, a dissident writer who came to prominence during the Thaw, son of the author of Into the Whirlwind, Yevgenia Ginzburg. Aksyonov’s best-known works in English translation are probably The Burn and The Island of Crimea. Following the publication of the former in Italy in 1980, Aksyonov was stripped of his Soviet citizenship; The Island of Crimea recently enjoyed brisk sales following the invasion of the Crimea in 2014. (THAW) (DISSIDENT)

Boris Akunin, pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a Russian-speaking author of Georgian and Jewish origin, b. 1956. Well-known author of the Erast Fandorin series of historical mystery novels. Chkhartishvili is also a historian and Japanese-Russian translator. (POST-SOVIET)

Pyotr Aleshkovsky, b. 1957. Fish: A History of One Migration (translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray) is perhaps Aleshkovsky’s best known work in English translation. Glas New Russian Writing first introduced Aleshkovsky to English-language readers in 2000 with Skunk: A Life, in Arch Tait’s translation. Aleshkovsky has twice been nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. (POST SOVIET)

Yuz Aleshkovsky, b. 1929, a non-conformist writer admired by Jospeh Brodsky, who was compelled to publish in samizdat form during the Soviet era. One of the first Soviet writers to use obscenities in his work, which is also highly satirical. Works available in English include Kangaroo (translated by Tamara Glenny) and Two by Aleshkovsky, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive in August, consisting of two novellas, ‘Nikolai Nikolaevich’ and ‘Camouflage’, translated by Terry Myers and Nataliya Gravrilova. Read more about Yu. Aleshkovsky here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/yuz-aleshkovsky (SAMIZDAT)

Liza Alexandrovna-Zorina The Little Man, (tr Melanie Moore)

Viktor Astafiev (1924-2001), a Siberian writer associated with the Village Prose movement, his father was a mill owner, his mother came from a peasant family. In 1931, when he was a small boy, his father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all arrested during dekulakization and sent to labour camps, and his mother drowned in the Yenisei. His work in English translation includes To Live Your Life and Other Stories (translated by Graham Whittaker). (VILLAGE PROSE)

Isaac Babel (1894-1940), a Jewish Russian-language writer and one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Babel was born in the Moldavanka, Odessa’s Jewish ghetto, a neighbourhood he would later write about in his Odessa Tales (note that a new translation, entitled Odessa Stories, will be published by Pushkin Press in October 2016). As a journalist assigned to Simyon Budyonny’s 1st Calvary, Babel witnessed a Soviet-Polish campaign in 1920. His masterpiece Red Cavalry (available from Pushkin Press in a superb translation by Boris Dralyuk) is an account of this. Babel fell victim to the purges and was shot in 1940. (SOVIET, PURGED)

Dmitry Bakin (b. 1964), a writer of mostly short stories and novellas, his collection Reasons for Living (translated by Andrew Bromfield) won Russia’s ‘Anti Booker’ Prize in 1996. (There is an excellent blurb here: http://publishersweekly.com/978-1-86207-526-9) (POST SOVIET)

Polina Barskova

Pavel Basinsky is a contemporary writer best known for his account of Leo Tolstoy’s last days: Leo Tolstoy – Flight from Paradise (translated by Huw Davies and Scott Moss).

Vasily Belov (1932-2012), a conservative Russophile writer and a leading member of the Village Prose movement. Belov was a harsh critic of collectivisation. I can’t seem to find anything available in translation. (VILLAGE PROSE)

Nina Berberova (1901-1993), a writer of short stories and novellas who chronicled the lives of Russian emigrés in Paris. She later emigrated to the US. Berberova’s first husband (?) was the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. Berberova’s principal English translator, Marian Schwartz, has put together a useful page which includes a list of works available in translation: http://marianschwartz.com/berberova (ÉMIGRÉ)

Andrei Bitov (b. 1937) is a Russian writer best known for his novel Pushkin House (translated by Susan Brownsberg). His novel The Symmetry Teacher (translated by Polly Gannon) was published in English last year. Childhood: Zip and Other Stories was published by Glas New Russian Writing in 2000.

Ilya Boyashov (b. 1961) was born in St Petersburg. Boyashov won the National Bestseller Prize (the ‘NatsBest’) for The Way of Muri (translated by Amanda Love Darragh), his only book available in English. Read more about Boyashov here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/ilya-boyashov (POST SOVIET)

Yuri Buida was born in 1954 in the Kaliningrad region of Russia, which is formerly part of East Prussia and does not border greater Russia. His short story collection The Prussian Bride (translated by Oliver Ready) won the Apollon Grigoriev Prize in Russia in 1999, and his novel The Zero Train (also translated by Oliver Ready) won the Rossica Translation Prize in 2005.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), a Ukrainian-born novelist, playwright, and short story writer, whose novel The Master and Margarita, not published until 1967, in censored form, and not published in its entirety until 1989, is considered a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature. Other works include the absurdist Heart of a Dog (a biting satire, as well as one of the funniest books ever written), A Country Doctor’s Notebook, The White Guard, Diaboliad, The Fatal Eggs, and many plays. Bulgakov’s most popular works are available in multiple translations. (PERSECUTED)

Dmitry Bykov Living Souls

Alan Cherchesov, born in 1962 in Vladikavkaz, in North Ossetia, is an Ossetian who writes in Russian. His novel Requiem for the Living (translated by Subhi Shervell) was published in English in 2005. You can read more about Alan Cherchesov here: https://www.writinguniversity.org/author/alan-cherchesov (POST-SOVIET)

Elena Chizhova (b. 1959) won the Russian Booker Prize in 2009 with her novel The Time of Women, available in English translation (translated by Simon Patterson). Read more about Elena Chizhova here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/elena-chizhova (POST-SOVIET)

Yuli Daniel (1925-1988) was a Soviet dissident writer and poet who often wrote under the pseudonyms of Nikolai Arzhak and Yu. Petrov. Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were arrested and tried in the infamous Daniel-Sinyavsky trial. Daniel was sentenced to hard labour for “anti-Soviet activity”. His short story collection This is Moscow Speaking and Other Stories is available in English translation by Stuart Hood, Harold Shukman and John Richardson. (DISSIDENT)

Leonid Dobychin (1894-1936), a short story writer and novelist. His short story collection Encounters with Lise and novel The Town of N., referred to as "a Soviet masterpiece of the 1930s", are both available in English. The critical response to The Town of N (1935) was vicious, and Dobychin disappeared soon after. His body was recovered from the Neva several months later; he was assumed to have drowned. Following his death Dobychin was forgotten for many years. (PERSECUTED)

Yury Dombrovsky (1909-1978), born in Moscow to a Jewish lawyer father and a Russian mother. Dombrosvky fell afoul of authority in his early twenties and was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. In 1937 he was arrested again and imprisoned for several months, and in 1939 he was arrested again and this time sent to Kolyma, arguably the most terrifying camp in the gulag system. (See Varlam Shalamov’s entry.) Dombrovsky’s best-known novels are The Keeper of Antiquities (translated by Michael Glenny) and its sequel, The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (translated by Alan Myers). It is widely held that The Faculty of Useless Knowledge brought about his death. Following repeated threats and attacks, he was severely beaten and died of his injuries in 1978. Read more about Dombrovsky here: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/2014/01/17/discovering-dombrovsky/ (PERSECUTED)

Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), a native of Leningrad born into a family of creatives, he was a much-loved writer. Dovlatov had an eye for the absurd. As his friend the literary critic Andrey Aryev observed, "His humor was like that of Chaplin, and his works were saturated with comedy, irony, love and compassion." He was expelled from the Union of Journalists in 1976 and left the Soviet Union two years later, eventually ending up in the US. The Suitcase (translated by Antonina Bouis) and Pushkin Hills (translated by Dovlatov’s daughter, Katherine Dovlatov) are available in English. (SOVIET, ÉMIGRÉ)

Vladimir Dundintsev (1918-1998) was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer best known for his novel Not By Bread Alone (translated by Edith Bone), which was published during the Thaw. He was later criticised bitterly for it. (THAW)

Asar Eppel (1935-2012) was a Russian writer who was unable to publish his work during Soviet times. The Grassy Street: A Cycle of Novellas (translated by Joanne Turnbull) was published by Glas New Russian Writing in 1998, and his story “Red Caviar Sandwiches” is included in the superb 2005 anthology Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, edited by Robert Chandler.

Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990), a Russian writer who existed on the fringes. Moscow to the End of the Line (translated by H W Tjalsma), referred to as "a poem in prose form", has been described by American writer David Remnick as "the comic high-water mark of the Brezhnev era".

Viktor Erofeev (b. 1947 in Moscow), the son of a diplomat who interpreted for Molotov in the 1940s. Works available in English translation include the short story collection Life with an Idiot (Andrew Reynolds) (1980, in Russian) and the bawdy but sophisticated Russian Beauty (tr Andrew Reynolds) (1990, in Russian), a best-selling novel in Russia following its release. Erofeyev was a banned writer. (PERSECUTED)

Nina Gabrielyan (b. 1953) is an Armenian writer who lives in Moscow and writes in Russian, and a feminist activist. The scholar Brian James Baer describes her short story collection Master of the Grass (2001 in Russian, and in Kathleen Cook’s English translation in 2004, published by Glas New Russian Writing) as "one of the most interesting literary treatments of women and translation".

Maria Galina, born in 1958 in Kalinin, now Tver. A quirky writer who often incorporates elements of science fiction in her work, she came to prominence in the 1990s. Little of Galina’s work has been translated into English as yet, but thanks to Glas New Russian Writing, Galina’s Irramifications: An Adventure Novel, in Amanda Love Darragh’s translation, was published in 2008.

Sergei Gandlevsky, the poet, was born in 1952 into a religious family. His autobiographical novel Trepanation of the Skull (tr Susanne Fusso) has been compared to Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Read more here: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2015/may/trepanation-skull-sergey-gandlevsky and here: http://theconversant.org/?tag=sergey-gandlevsky.

Alisa Ganieva, born 1985, a Muscovite and ethnic Avar (a people from the area of Dagestan), is a young writer described in The Guardian as "one of the most interesting writers in Russia right now". Her first novel, Salaam, Dalgat! (in Russian), set in Dagestan, was written under a male pseudonym. Salaam, Dalgat! won the Debut Prize for young writers in Russia. Unfortunately it’s not yet available in English, but you can read it in Russian or French. Her second novel, The Mountain and the Wall (tr by Carol Apollonio and published by Deep Vellum in 2015), is her first book-length work available in English. Ganieva’s work has been nominated for many of Russia’s top literary prizes. Read more about Ganieva here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/alisa-ganieva

Andrei Gelasimov, born in 1966 in Irkutsk, first began publishing in 2001. Gelasimov is a prize-winning writer of short stories and novels. Works available in English include the novels Thirst, Gods of the Steppe, The Lying Year, and Rachel (all translated by Marian Schwartz). A short story, “Joan” (tr Alexei Bayer), can be read online at Words without Borders: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/joan. Read more about Gelasimov here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/andrei-gelasimov (POST-SOVIET)

Evgenia Ginzburg (1904-1977), a Russian author whose account of eighteen years in the gulag, Into the Whirlwind (also published as Journey into the Whirlwind), was published in Italy in 1967. Vasily Aksyonov is one of Ginzburg’s sons. (PERSECUTED)

Fyodor Gladkov (1883-1958) was a Socialist Realist writer whose novel Cement is arguably the first in the genre and was “a literary standard for socialist realist writing during the 1930s” (Wikipedia). (SOCIAL REALISM)

Dmitry Glukhovsky (b. 1979) is a Moscow-based writer whose futuristic novels incorporate social and political themes. His novels Metro 2033, Metro 2034, and Metro 2035 as well as Future are available in English. (I haven’t been able to identify the translators.) (POST-SOVIET)

Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Alexei Peshkov (1868-1936), founder of Socialist Realism and first chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers. Gorky spent much of the 20s in Italy, but returned to the Soviet Union for good in 1932. He died in suspicious circumstances in 1936. He published numerous work after the October Revolution. (SOCIALIST REALISM)

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) was a Soviet Russian writer and journalist. He was a war correspondent for the Red Army during WWII, witnessing at firsthand the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin, as well as the Treblinka death camp. Grossman is best known for his novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows (both translated by Robert Chandler). Neither book was published in the Soviet Union during Grossman’s lifetime: this did not occur until the period of Glasnost; although Life and Fate was published in Switzerland in 1980. A number of other works are also available in English, including Grossman’s last work, An Armenian Sketchbook (translated by Robert Chandler), first published in English in 2013. (PERSECUTED)

Alexander Grin, pseudonym of Aleksandr Grinvesky, (1880-1932), "was a Russian writer, notable for his romantic novels and short stories, mostly set in an unnamed fantasy land with a European or Latin American flavor (Grin's fans often refer to this land as Grinlandia). Most of his writings deal with sea, adventures, and love." (Thank you, Wikipedia.) His most famous work has been translated into English, and is available as either Scarlet Sails or Crimson Sails (Alyye Parusa or Алые Паруса in Russian). It was also made into a film during the Thaw. There is also a Selected Short Stories, translated by Nicholas Luker and published by Ardis, however some or all of these may have been written before the Revolution. (1920s)

Alexander Ikonnikov (b. 1974), a Russian writer whose novel Lizka & Her Men was published in 2003, in 2007 in the English translation by Andrew Bromfield. (POST-SOVIET)

Ilf and Petrov (or Ilya Feinsilberg (1897-1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (1903-1942)) were natives of Odessa and Soviet prose writers of the 1920s and 1930s. The pair usually wrote together. Much loved authors of the picaresque novels The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931), written during an innovative and relatively relaxed period of Soviet culture and connected by the character Ostap Bender, “a con man in pursuit of elusive riches” (Wikipedia). The film Dvenadtsat Stulyev The Twelve Chairs remains one of the most popular in the Russian-speaking world. A planet has been named after Ilf and Petrov. (1920s-1930s)

Fazil Iskander (b. 1929), an Abkhazian who writes predominantly in Russian and a much-lauded writer. He’s known for his writing about life in the Caucasus. Iskander’s Iranian father was a victim of Stalin’s genocidal policies against ethnic minorities in the Caucasus. Iskander rose to prominence in the 1960s, during the Thaw. His best-know works in English translation include the picaresque novel Sandro of Chegem (cannot identify the translator) and The Goatibex Costellation (tr Helen Burlingame), among others. (THAW)

Valentin Kataev (1897-1996), born in Odessa. Kataev was a “Russian and Soviet novelist and playwright who managed to create penetrating works discussing post-revolutionary social conditions without running afoul of the demands of official Soviet style. Kataev is credited with suggesting the idea for The Twelve Chairs to his brother Yevgeni Petrov and Ilya Ilf.” His best-known work in English is Time, Forward! (tr Charles Malamuth). Also available in English are The Embezzlers, The Grass of Oblivion and A Mosaic of Life (translators unidentified in each case), among others.

Veniamin Kaverin (1902-1989) belonged to the Serapion Brothers movement of the 1920s. Later in life he was highly critical of Soviet policies for literature. His best-known work, The Two Captains, was reissued 42 times over 25 years and twice adapted for the screen. The Two Captains is available in English translation. (SOVIET)

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist, and founder of the avant-garde collective OBERIU. He was arrested in 1931 and banished to Kursk for a year. As the 1930s progressed and main stream Soviet literature grew more and more conservative under Socialist Realism, "Kharms found refuge in children’s literature". He was arrested again in 1941 and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1942. On the whole, his ‘adult’ works were not published during his lifetime. (OBERIU, SURREALIST, PERSECUTED)

Margarita Khemlin (1960-2015) was a Russian-language Jewish-Ukrainian novelist and short-story writer whose work was consistently nominated for the big literary prizes. Works available in English are her novel The Investigator (tr Melanie Moore, published by Glagoslav), and the stories “Shady Business” in Subtropics 17 and “Basya Solomonovna’s Third World War” in Counterfeits (both stories translated Lisa Hayden). Some of her best work is yet to be translated.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was born in Kiev into a Polish family. A Soviet Russian-language short story writer “who described himself as being ‘known for being unknown’; the bulk of his writings were published posthumously. … In 1976, scholar Vadim Perelmuter discovered Krzhizhanovsky's archive and in 1989 published one of his short stories. As the five volumes of his collected works followed, Krzhizhanovsky emerged from obscurity as a remarkable Soviet writer, who polished his prose to the verge of poetry. His short parables, written with an abundance of poetic detail and wonderful fertility of invention – though occasionally bordering on the whimsical – are sometimes compared to the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. Quadraturin (1926), the best known of such phantasmagoric stories, is a Kafkaesque novella in which allegory meets existentialism.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Available in English: Autobiography of a Corpse, Memories of the Future, The Letter Killers Club, and The Return of Munchausen forthcoming in December 2016, (all translated by Joanne Turnbull), as well as Seven Stories (translator unidentified. (SOVIET)

Edward Kuznetsov (b. 1939 in Moscow) was a Soviet dissident and is a human rights activist and writer. Kuznetsov was involved in early samizdat, and was arrested in 1961 for his samizdat activities and overtly political poetry readings. Following his release from prison in 1968, he was involved in the hijacking of a Leningrad plane and faced the death penalty. Instead he was sentenced to 15 years in a labour camp, and thanks to a dissidents-for-spies prisoner exchange with the US, he was released in 1979. He then emigrated to Israel. Kuznetsov’s works in English translation include Russian Novel (tr J Bradshaw). (DISSIDENT)

Leonid Latynin (b. 1938 in Moscow) is a poet and novelist. He has published six collections of poetry, but was only able to published his novels after perestroika. His novels, The Face-Maker and the Muse and Sleeper at Harvest Time (both tr by Andrew Bromfield), are both available in English, published by Glas New Russian Writing. (SOVIET)

Anna Lavrinenko (b. 1984 in Yaroslavl) is a winner of the Debut Prize for young writers. Her collection Yaroslavl Stories (tr Christopher Tauchen) is published by Glas New Russian Writing. (POST-SOVIET)

Mikhail Levitin (b. 1945 in Odessa) is a Russian theatre director, writer and teacher and a National Artist of Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Artist_of_Russia). His work A Jewish God in Paris: Three Novellas (tr Amanda Love Darragh and published by Glas New Russian Writing) is available in English.

Eduard Limonov (b. 1943), a Russian nationalist novelist and poet, formerly an opponent of Putin, now his staunch supporter. Nevertheless is work is said to be very interesting. One work, His Butler’s Story (translator unidentified), appears to be available in English translation.

Vladimir Makanin (b. 1937) is a Russian realist writer of novels and short stories and the winner of numerous literary prizes. Escape Hatch and Long Road Ahead (tr Mary Ann Szporluk), Baize-covered Table with Decanter (tr Arch Tait), and The Loss: A Novella and Two Short Stories (tr Byron Lindsey) are available in English, among other works. (SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Yuri Mamleyev (b. 1931). Mamleyev’s writing was initially available only in samizdat form, and did not begin to apear in the West (in Russian) until the 1980s. Mamleyev emigrated to the US in 1973, then to Paris, and returned to Russia in 1993. He founded “metaphysical realism”. His novel The Sublimes (published as samizdat in 1966 and recently published in a translation by Marian Schwartz – read more here: http://www.hauteculturebooks.com/yuri-mamleyev-luxury-edition.html) is available in English. Read more about Mamleyev here: http://www.dursthoff.de/author.php?aid=21&m=3&PHPSESSID=de9ef61f40d8db4e...

Irina Muravyova was born in Moscow in 1952 and emigrated to the US in 1985. She is an award-winning contemporary Russian writer. Read more here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/irina-muravyova Her novels The Nomadic Soul (published by Glas New Russian Writing in 1999) and Day of the Angel (Thames River Press, 2013) are available in John Dewey’s English translation. (POST-SOVIET)

Yuri Olesha (1899-1960) “is considered one of the greatest Russian novelists of the 20th century, one of the few to have succeeded in writing works of lasting artistic value despite the stifling censorship of the era. His works are delicate balancing acts that superficially send pro-Communist messages but reveal far greater subtlety and richness upon a deeper reading. Sometimes, he is grouped with his friends Ilf and Petrov, Isaac Babel, and Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky into the Odessa School of Writers.” (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Olesha’s best-known work in English translation is Envy (most recently translated by Marian Schwartz). Also available in English are: The Three Fat Men (Hugh Aplin), Olesha’s memoirs, No Day Without A Line (tr Judson Rosengrant), and a book published in English back in 1960, The Wayward Comrade and the Commissars (tr Andrew McAndrew)(cover blurb reads: ‘One of Russia’s outstanding modern writers takes a rollicking, satirical look at life among the bureaucrats’). (SOVIET)

Maxim Osipov (b. 1963) is a cardiologist, activist, and prize-winning short story writer often referred to as a modern Chekhov. Although no collection of his work as yet been published in English, a number of individual stories have been translated into English and published in various places. Osipov has made these available for download on his website (http://maxim-osipov.ru/translations.html): “Kilometer 101” (tr Margo Shohl Rosen), “Moscow-Petrozavodsk” (tr Anne Marie Jackson), “Rock, Paper, Scissors” (tr Alexandra Fleming), “The Mill” (tr Alexandra Fleming), “Scapegoats” (tr John Freedman). There’s an interesting article about Osipov here: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/doctor-osipov-writer-maxim/49...

Boris Pasternak

Konstantin Paustovsky (1892-1968), Russian Soviet writer of novels, short stories, and an autobiography. In 1965, Paustovsky was nominated for the Nobel Prize, which was instead won by Sholokhkov. His multi-volume autobiography, The Story of a Life (a 1964 review is available at the New York Review of Books, but it is behind a paywall: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/08/20/a-russian-soul/ as welll as this: http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=166) was published in English translation between 1964 and 1969. (SOVIET)

Oleg Pavlov (b. 1970) ia prominent contemporary Russian writer and a winner of the Russian Booker Prize. Pavlov did his military service as a prison guard in Kazakhstan, which has furnished inspiration for his writing. His novels Captain of the Steppe (tr Ian Appleby), The Matiushin Case (tr Andrew Bromfield), Requiem for a Soldier (tr Anna Gunin) and Asystole (tr Arch Tait) are available in English. (POST SOVIET)

Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962), one of the best known contemporary Russian writers. Pelevin, who has won many literary awards, began publishing in the early 1990s. According to Wikipedia: “His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre.” Pelevin’s work is consistently published in English translation. (POST-SOVIET)

Ludmila Petrushevskaya (born 1938) is a Russian short story writer, novelist and playwright, as well as an artist and singer. She is one of the most prominent living Russian writers. Petrushevskaya’s plays, particularly Cinzano, were among her first works to reach a Western audience. Petrushevskaya’s wonderful story “The New Robinson Crusoes”, arguable her best-known work, is included in the short story collection There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (tr Anna Summers, published ). Further collections are also available in translations by Summers. Read more about Petrushevskaya here https://next.ft.com/content/611ad6fa-1def-11e0-badd-00144feab49a and here http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/ludmila-petrushevskaya (SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Boris Pilnyak, (1894-1938) has been described as a “writer’s writer”. According to Wikipedia, “he was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society,” views that “often brought him into disfavour with Communist critics. His most famous works are The Naked Year (1922; translated into English in 1928), Mahogany (1927, translated 1965), and The Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea (1930; translated 1931), all novels concerning revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia. Another of his well-known works is Okay! An American Novel (1931; translated 1932), an unflattering travelogue of his 1931 visit to the United States. He visited Japan at this point also and used that journey to write A story about how stories come to be written.” Read more about Pilnyak: http://www.sovlit.net/bios/pilnyak.html (SOVIET, VICTIM OF PURGES)

Stepan Pisakhov (1879-1960), from Arkhangelsk in the far north of European Russia, was a Soviet artist, writer, ethnographer and teller of tales. Pisakhov’s writing derives from the oral story-telling tradition, and his narrator Senya Malina is possibly the most hyperbolic storyteller of all times. Senya Malina Tells It Like It Was is available in an English translation by Blackwell Boyce. (SOVIET)

Andrei Platonov was the pseudonym of Andrei Platonovich Klementov (1899-1951), a Soviet writer, poet, playwright and engineer “whose works anticipate existentialism. Although Platonov was a Communist, most of his work was banned in his own lifetime for its skeptical attitude toward collectivization and other Stalinist policies, as well as for its experimental, avant-garde form.” “Stalin held deeply ambivalent views regarding Platonov's worth. According to archival evidence Stalin called Platonov ‘fool, idiot, scoundrel’, but later in the same meeting called him ‘a prophet, a genius’." (Source: Wikipedia) Works available in English translation include: The Foundation Pit (tr Robert and Elizabeth Chandler), Soul (tr John Berger), Happy Moscow (tr Robert and Elizabeth Chandler), The Return and Other Stories (tr Robert and Elizabeth Chandler), The Fierce and Beautiful World (tr Joseph Barnes) and Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays (tr Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) (forthcoming in 2017). (SOVIET, BANNED)

Valentin Rasputin (1937-2015) a Siberian, born in Irkutsk, “Rasputin's works depict rootless urban characters and the fight for survival of centuries-old traditional rural ways of life, addressing complex questions of ethics and spiritual revival” (source: Wikipedia). Works available in English include: Money for Maria (Russian 1967; Eng 1998 tr by Amanda Calvart and Margaret Wettlin), Live and Remember (Russian 1974, Eng 1992 translator unidentified), Farewell to Matyora (Russian 1976, Eng 1991 tr Antonina Bouis), You Live and Love: Stories (Russian 82, Eng 86 tr unidentified), Siberia on Fire: Stories and Essays (1989, compiled and translated into English by Gerald Mikkelson and Margaret Winchell), and Siberia, Siberia (Russian 1991, Eng 1996 tr by Gerald Mikkelson and Margaret Winchell). (VILLAGE PROSE)

Irina Ratushinskaya (b. 1954 in Odessa, Ukraine), a Russian dissident, poet and writer. She was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation in 1982, and sentenced to seven years of hard labour followed by five years of internal exile. Released on the eve of the Reykjavik summit between Gorbachev and Reagan, Ratushinskaya then emigrated to the US. Work by Ratushinskaya that’s available in English includes: Grey is the Colour of Hope (her best-known translated work), Odessans, No, I’m Not Afraid, Fictions and Lies and In the Beginning (both forthcoming in August 2016) (translator information not obvious). (DISSIDENT, SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Dina Rubina (b. 1953 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan), winner in 2007 of Russia’s Big Book (Bol’shaya Kniga), Prize, is a Russian-language novelist and short story writer who emigrated to Israel in 1990. “Her major themes are theatre, autobiography, and the interplay between the Israeli and Russian Jewish cultures and between Hebrew and Russian” (source: Wikipedia). Her novel Here Comes the Messiah! (1996 in Russian) is available in an English translation by Daniel Jaffe. Evidently three further volumes of her work are forthcoming in English translation. (ÉMIGRÉ, RUSSIAN-ISRAELI)

Yuri Rytkheu (1930-2008) was a Chukchi writer who wrote in both Chukchi and Russian. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, his work was no longer published in the post-Soviet states. Thanks to the intervention of Chenghiz Aitmatov, his work began to be published outside of the former Soviet Union. Work available in English translation includes Dream in Polar Fog and The Chukchi Bible (both tr by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse). (CHUKCHI, SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Igor Savelyev (born 1983 in Ufa) is a Russian novelist who has been nominated for several prestigious Russian literary prizes. Work available in English Mission to Mars (tr Amanda Love Darragh). (POST-SOVIET

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was sent to the Kolyma prison camp in 1937 for five years; his sentence was extended for another ten years for calling Bunin a “classic writer”. Shalamov is best known for his Kolyma Tales about labour camp life (a selection of the original stories are available in English translation by John Glad). Shalamov was also an exceptional poet – a selection of his poems have been included in the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. (SOVIET, IMPRISONED)

Vladimir Sharov (b. 1952), a prize-winning contemporary writer and a “mediaeval historian by education, debuted as a writer in the late 1970s, first publishing poetry, later fiction. (The 1993) publication of Sharov’s Before and During (the prize-winning English translation by Oliver Ready was published in 2014) … caused a considerable scandal, which Anna Aslanyan has summarized in a review for The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/before-and-during-by-vladimir-sharov-book-review-madness-fantasy-and-biblical-references-9155406.html).” Sharov plays around with historical figures and ideas, injecting a bit of magic as he does so. Read more about Sharov here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/vladimir-sharov1 (SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Vladimir Shinkarev (b. 1954) is an important contemporary Russian painter and the author of the “very popular and funny” novels Mitki (published in Russian in 1984) and Maxim and Fyodor (the latter, written during 1978-1980, was first published in Russian in samizdat form; it is available in an English translation by Andrew Bromfield). Read more about Shinkarev here: http://www.whitespacegallery.co.uk/artist/vladimir-shinkaryov/ (SAMIZDAT, SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Mikhail Shishkin (b. 1961) is a leading contemporary Russian writer who has won all of Russia’s biggest literature prizes. In 2013 Shishkin publicly refused to participate in the showcase of Russian writers at Book Expo in 2013, refusing to represent the country’s “criminal regime” – read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/07/mikhail-shishkin-russia-us-book-ex.... Works by Shishkin that are available in English include: Maidenhair (tr Marian Schwartz) and The Light and the Dark (tr Andrew Bromfield). (POST-SOVIET)

Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984), winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature for his epic novel And Quiet Flows the Don (available in multiple translations, including of the title), “considered one of the most significant works of Russian literature in the 20th century, (depicting) the lives and struggles of Don Cossacks during the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Russian Civil War” (source: Wikipedia). It is also described as “reminiscent of Tolstoy in its vividly realistic scenes, its stark character descriptions and, above all, its vast panorama of the revolutionary period” (source: www.Nobelprize.org). Other work available in English includes: Virgin Soil Upturned and The Fate of a Man. (SOVIET, NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE)

Vasily Shukshin (1929-1974) was born to a Siberian peasant family. His father was killed in 1933 during Collectivisation. Shuskshin was not only a short story writer but also an award-winning film director and actor, being designated a Distinguished Artist of the RSFSR in 1969. His filmography includes the well-loved Kalina Krasnaya, in which he payed the leading role. His stories have been published in translation in a number of collections, including Stories from a Siberian Village (tr Laura Michael and John Givens) (from the blurb: “These stories … are set in a remote Siberian village caught in transition between rural traditions and modern Soviet life. There Shukshin's peasant survivors of revolution, collectivization, and war seek their identity in a ‘brave new world’. Eccentrics and oddballs, Shukshin's protagonists are restless freedom seekers whose dreams and foibles are as broad and inexplicable as their native Siberian landscape. As touchy as artists and as unpretentious as truck drivers, they struggle with questions of life and death, faith and reason, custom and progress. From their mutual misapprehensions and the gap between their dreams and reality arises Shukshin's biting humor.”). (VILLAGE PROSE, SOVIET)

Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997), often published novels in the West under the pseudonym ‘Abram Tertz’ (DISSIDENT, SOVIET)

Olga Slavnikova (b. 1957) is a Russian novelist and literary critic who won the Russian Booker Prize for 2017: A Novel (available in an English translation by Marian Schwartz). Also available in English is her novel Light Headed (tr Andrew Bromfield). You can also read a short essay, “Bird-Cherry Pie” in The Novel of the World, available here (along with short pieces by countless other women writers): http://www.we.expo2015.org/sites/default/files/attaches/project/novel_of_the_wor... Slavnikova's style is often compared to Nabokov's. Read more about Slavnikova here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/olga-slavnikova. (SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Alexander Snegirev (b. 1980) is an award-winning Russian writer and a member of the new literary generation. His novel Petroleum Venus was translated into English by Arch Tait. Reviewer Bradley Gorski (World Literature Today) observes that “Petroleum Venus stands out against the backdrop of Russia’s contemporary literary scene, where conceptual postmodernism is still in vogue. In contrast, this slightly absurd but character-driven novel seems positively realistic.” (For full review, see: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/november/petroleum-venus-alexander-sneg... Snegirev’s novel Vera won the 2015 Russian Booker Prize, but has not yet been translated int English – however, if you read and enjoy Petroleum Venus, you might want to keep an eye out for this too. Read more about Snegirev here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/alexander-snegirev. (POST-SOVIET)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955) is an award-winning and often controversial postmodernist writer based in Moscow and Berlin. Sorokin has been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin. Banned during the Soviet period, Sorokin was one of the earliest nominees for the Russian Booker prize, in 1992. Works in English translation include The Queue, The Ice Trilogy, Day of the Oprichnik, and The Blizzard, all translated by Jamey Gambrell. (The LA Review of Books has recently published a conversation with Gambrell about translating Sorokin, which may be of interest to some readers of the translations, or to readers of translation in general: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-strange-and-endless-journey-a-conversation.... (BANNED, SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Marina Stepnova (b. 1971) has enjoyed popularity with readers and critics alike. Her novel The Women of Lazarus is available in English (tr Lisa Hayden). Read more about Stepnova here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/marina-stepnova. (POST-SOVIET)

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1925-1991 and 1933-2012 respectively) were brothers who collaborated to write science fiction. They developed a unique style of science fiction “that emerged from the period of Soviet rationalism in Soviet literature and evolved into novels interpreted as works of social criticism” (Wikipedia). A number of their works are available in English: The Doomed City (tr Andrew Bromfield), Roadside Picnic (tr Olena Bormashenko), Hard to be a God (tr Olena Bormashenko), Monday Begins on Saturday (to be published in August 2016, tr Andrew Bromfield), The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn (tr Josh Billings), Definitely Maybe (tr Antonina Bouis), and, in older editions, The Time Wanderers, Noon: 22nd Century, Far Rainbow, Prisoners of Power, The Final Circle of Paradise, Space Apprentice, and The Ugly Swans (tr not immediately identifiable). (SCIENCE FICTION, SOVIET

Viktoria Tokareva (b. 1937) is a prolific writer of short stories and screenplays. According to Wikipedia, “Tokareva’s characters tend to be ordinary people facing ordinary problems – people to whom her readers can easily relate. The majority of her characters are women, and as such she is regarded primarily as a women’s writer. Her writing can on occasion seem moralistic, upholding traditional values and gender roles, which has led to Western critics labeling her ‘pre-feminist’. Although she writes mainly in the realist tradition, she sometimes dips into what she calls ‘fantastic realism’, weaving magical events into accounts of everyday lives.” One collection of her stories is available in English, in a translation by Rosamund Bartlett: The Talisman and Other Tales. (SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Alexei Tolstoy (1883-1945), a remote relative of Leo Tolstoy, wrote in many genres, but is credited with some of the earliest Russian works of science fiction. The best known among these are Aelita (English translation by Lucy Flaxman), first published in Russian in 1923 and inspiring an early science fiction film in 1924, and The Garin Death Ray (1927), regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as Tolstoy’s finest work. Tolstoy was also a historical novelist, his best-known work in this genre being Peter the Great (which does not appear to have been translated - apologies). (SCIENCE FICTION, HISTORICAL, SOVIET)

Yuri Trifonov (1925-1981) was a “leading representative of so-called Soviet ‘Urban Prose’ … and considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.” (Source: Wikipedia) He is best known for The House on the Embankment (published together with another novella, Another Life) (tr Michael Glenny), about the luxurious building in the Arbat neighbourhood of Moscow where Trifonov was brought up until 1937, when his father was executed during the Terror. Other works include: The Exchange and Other Stories (tr Ellendea Proffer et al.), and Disappearance (tr David Lowe). Read more about Trifonov here: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/29/obituaries/yuri-trifonov-author-dies-at-55-he-... (SOVIET)

Ludmila Ulitskaya (b. 1943) is “an internationally acclaimed modern Russian novelist and short-story writer who, in 2014, was awarded the prestigious Austrian State Prize for European Literature for her oeuvre” (source: Wikipedia). Her work first began to be published in 1990, since which time it has received countless awards. Some of her work available in English: Sonechka: A Novella and Stories (tr Arch Tait), Medea and Her Children (translator not identified), The Funeral Party (tr Cathy Porter), The Kukotsky Enigman: A Novel (forthcoming in August 2016, presumably tr by Diane Nemec Ignashev), Daniel Stein, Interpreter (tr Arch Tait), and The Big Green Tent (tr Polly Gannon). (POST-SOVIET)

Dmitry Vachedin (b. 1982) is a winner of Russia’s Debut Prize for young writers. His novel Snow Germans (tr Arch Tait) is published by Glas New Russian Writing. You can read a review here: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2014/march/snow-germans-dmitry-vachedin. (POST-SOVIET)

Svetlana Vasilenko (date of birth unclear, but she graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute in 1983) - Vasilenko’s Shamara and Other Writings (various translators), a collection of short stories and two novellas including the Russian Booker-nominated novella “The Little Fool”, is described by Publsher’s Weekly as “urgent and politically suggestive” (http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8101-1721-1). (SOVIET, POST-SOVIET)

Georgi Vladimov, pseudonym of Georgy Volosevich (1931-2003), “resigned from the Soviet Writers Union in 1977, whereupon he established an office of Amnesty International, an officially outlawed organisation. Vladimov emigrated to Germany in 1983 and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. His novel A General and His Army (does not appear to be available in English translation) won the Russian Booker Prize in 1995. Vladimov died in Frankfurt in 2003.” Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan (tr Michael Glenny), published in Russia in samizdat form, has been described by Richard Adams (author of Watership Down) as “among the greatest animal stories ever written”. Also available in English is Three Minutes’ Silence (tr Michael Glenny). (SAMIZDAT, SOVIET, ÉMIGRÉ)

Eugene Vodolazkin (b. 1964) is an award-winning contemporary Russian writer whose novel Laurus, recently publised Lisa Hayden’s translation, has met with widespread critical acclaim. Vodolazkin’s work “examines the nature of time and history, drawing on Vodolazkin’s medieval scholarship”. If you’ve enjoyed Laurus, you’ll be happy to know that more of his novel Solvyov and Larionov (tr Lisa Hayden) is scheduled for publication this year. Read more about Vodolazkin here: http://readrussia.org/writers/writer/eugene-vodolazkin (POST-SOVIET)

POETS

SOVIET EMIGRE and POST-SOVIET FSU

ANTHOLOGIES

This category is intended to help make up for those writers whose works in translation are available only in anthologised form.

NOT AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

This category will be of interest to those who do read Russian. It is entirely possible that nothing here will be new to you!

RESERVING ONE MORE JUST IN CASE

Wow! Thanks, anisoara - lots of interesting stuff there for us to get our teeth into already, and you haven't even posted it all yet :-)

I know almost nothing about (post-)Soviet writing (I've kept putting it off for "when I learn Russian", which is probably another way of saying "never"...). If I look back over the past two or three years, the only writers linked to the former USSR I've read are long-term émigrés (or their children) who write in German - Alina Bronsky, Olga Grjasnowa, Wladimir Kaminer. Interesting, but not really core material for this theme. I'm looking forward to putting that right...

I picked a name from the list above, almost at random, to get started:

The time of women (2009, tr. Simon Patterson 2012) by Elena Chizhova (USSR/Russia, 1957 - ) (*)

 

Elena Chizhova is from Leningrad/St Petersburg. She was trained as an economist and worked as a teacher and in business before becoming a full-time writer relatively late in life.

The time of women has a foreground story set in Leningrad in the early 1960s, when post-war housing shortages were still making life very difficult. A single mother and her small daughter move in with three elderly women, who are happy to give them houseroom in exchange for granny rights. Chizhova exploits the classic device of viewpoints-of-three-generations to look at a century of Russian history as seen by those on the receiving end: the grannies, who come from different strata of society but have all now lost their families, have memories that go back to Tsarist times; the mother was a child during the second world war, and the daughter is able to look back on her childhood from a post-Soviet perspective. But this isn't a historical epic: it's a book about how ordinary women find the physical, social and psychological strength to live through both ordinary and extraordinary hardship, and in particular how religion, storytelling and art play their part in that process.

There's a lot of reference to particularly Russian experiences, but there's also a lot there that is common to people who've lived through extreme situations anywhere in the world. When the mother describes a dream she's had about the communist paradise where money will become obsolete, the grannies immediately conclude that there's another currency reform coming, and want to rush out to hoard food. Exactly what my grandmother would have done. Some things are so painfully engraved in memory that the brain can't cope with jokes or fantasies about them any more.

I found the subject-matter very interesting, but I wasn't so sure about the style and technique. The viewpoint and the first-person narration jumps about between the characters, and this is often not very clearly signalled in the text, so I found myself going back a paragraph or two to try to work out who was speaking. Some of the confusion is obviously intentional, a way of stressing the alliance between the three generations, but I don't think it quite comes off. Maybe the different voices come over more clearly in the Russian original, but in the translation it felt unnecessarily irritating. On the other hand, I thought the use of interpolated stories was very effective (even if it has become something of a cliché of feminist writing...).

(*) Chizhova has different birth-years depending on which site you consult: I've taken the one from her publishers

Another one picked from anisoara's list: since I realised that I knew essentially nothing about Dagestan (I don't think I'd have got any closer than "somewhere to the right of the Black Sea" if you asked me to stick a pin in the map) it seemed like a good time to find out more...

Salam, Dalgat! (2009; French translation by Joëlle Dublanchet, 2013) by Alisa Ganieva (Russia, 1985 - )

  

As anisoara mentions above, Alisa Ganieva is originally from Dagestan and lives in Moscow. Her debut novella Salam, Dalgat! won a major prize when it was originally published under a male nom de plume, and she's since published another novel.

Salam, Dalgat! describes a young man's experiences during a single day in the city of Makhachkala. Dalgat needs to find his uncle to deliver a document to him (as with many other details in this very compact story, Ganieva leaves us in the dark about what the document is and why it matters). As he chases the uncle around the city, never quite catching up with him, he's forever being interrupted by friends, relatives and strangers who greet him (hence the title) and try to draw him into something complicated. Through these Ulysses-like episodes, Ganieva gives us a lightning (and relatively light-hearted) tour of the problems and joys of Dagestan. Amongst other things, we spend some time in the aunt's house, attend a Soviet-style book launch (with speeches so boring that even the dignitaries who give them are disheartened by the whole thing), take part in a rowdy wedding party, and look over Dalgat's shoulder as he reads the opening chapter of a lyrical travel book about Dagestan. Dalgat is urged to become a better Muslim, to avoid (and by someone else, to join) the Islamist extremists who clearly threaten the stability of the republic, to join the senseless fighting of teenage gangs, to buy pictures or poetry, to marry a nice girl, to pay more attention to the corruption of the Russian administration, to run away from all this to St Petersburg, etc. Ganieva obviously had a lot of fun coming up with things to happen to Dalgat, but she doesn't make him interesting or curious as a personality: he never reacts to anything that's proposed to him other than to brush it away more or less politely, like a teenager who hates decisions almost as much as he hates other people trying to push him into taking them. I suspect there's more than a little Meursault in his make-up, as well as a big chunk of Stephen Daedalus.

This is an idea that would probably have grated on me in a longer book, but it works really well in the 70-page novella format. I learnt something about Dagestan without being made to feel I was getting a geography lesson, I enjoyed the glimpses of street life, and I found Joëlle Dublanchet's French translation very readable and quite unobtrusive.

So many choices but based on the fact that I have never heard of Isaak Babel despite anisoara saying he is one of the great writers of the twentieth century I have put a hold on Red Cavalry from my library. It is showing as out until July 31 but maybe it will be available earlier. Thanks for this very comprehensive list.

Missing Anatoli Rybakov--Children of the Arbat and Fear. Both are awesome books.

>10 thorold: Your pick about Dagestan reminded me of The Kindness of Enemies published earlier this year. It switches between two story lines, 19th century Crimean War between Georgia/Dagestan/Russia and the other runs in present day Scotland and Sudan. It's a bit hard to summarize, but I don't think it received the attention it deserved. Might be worth a look for a different challenge!

>1 anisoara: Awesome list! It was really hard for me to decide what I wanted to read first.

After I've finished my first two books (Secondhand Time and The Master and Margarita), then I'll allow myself to fall down the rabbit hole and pick at random/add to my TBR pile. I hope to get to at least two of these that I have sitting on my shelves:
The Big Green Tent - didn't know this until re-reading the New Yorker article I mention below, but the author of this one, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Svetlana Alexievich are friends
There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself
Day of the Oprichnik

My first two books are:
1. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year and has a really unique style ... her books are basically collections of interviews she conducted with regular people, but she edits them so each interview reads like a monologue. Secondhand Time is about the experiences of Russian/post-Soviet citizens over the past 30 years.
Here's a really good profile of Svetlana Alexievich in the New Yorker from October 2015.
I thought I would share these tidbits, which I found really interesting:
-Alexievich is Belarusian, but moved to Paris in part due to political persecution by Lukashenko's regime (link). Now she's moved back to Belarus.
-She was extremely popular in Russia before the USSR collapsed and she won one of the highest awards there. Then she fell WAY out of favor and was kindof forgotten.
-Her books are extremely difficult to find in Belarus and aren't published there. It's either black market or private/underground publishers
I read her book Voices from Chernobyl a few months ago- the topic is certainly not light or uplifting, but I would absolutely recommend it. Voices from Chernobyl is a shorter book, whereas Secondhand Time is a doorstop (close to 500 pages).

2. The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. It's really good, but it's the type of book I have to set aside for a while then come back to. I'm about halfway at this point. There are parts that definitely wouldn't make sense without the endnotes in the edition I have (Penguin Classics Deluxe). I've also been visiting this website, that has lots of things, including maps and pictures of the real locations, which adds to the fun. http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/

Thanks Anne Marie for the very thorough introduction to the topic! I have an ongoing interest in Russian literature, so I'll be sure to mark this thread to return to in the future when I need inspiration for new authors to read.

I have a number of titles I had in mind for this quarter, but so far I haven't made much progress except for Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line, which didn't quite work for me, although I can't quite put my finger on what I didn't like -- it is amusing (it helps if one has modest knowledge of Russian culture and literature), but particularly towards the end it felt rather unstructured and thematically didn't really come to any kind of satisfying resolution, although that may kind of be the point in this case -- it reminded me a bit of Gogol's "Dead Souls", with its hapless hero travelling aimlessly across the countryside, drinking and conversing with people on the way or with his imaginary angels about the Russian experience. In this case, our hero is, in fact, trying to get somewhere, but in his state of drunkenness he is hardly able to find the train station, and even once on his way, his attention seems little focused on the destination. This may, I suppose, be an appropriate description of the Soviet experiment in the late 1960s, but for me as a reader it made the plot rather unfulfilling. (And it may simply be that drunken escapades simply aren't my thing; I've never felt particularly drawn to the American Beat writers or novels like Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises", either.)

For anyone who is looking for inspiration and perhaps overwhelmed by the choices, I want to mention Read Russia, a very nice anthology of major contemporary writers that was produced as part of a project to promote Russian literature and make it available to English-speaking readers. It can be downloaded as a free e-book here: http://readrussia.org/anthology/read-russia-anthology. I've been dipping in and out of it and found it's a great way to get a taste of different authors and figure out who I might want to read more of.

One of my goals this quarter is to work on my reading skills in Russian, which I still struggle with, so I'll probably be focusing mostly on short stories, although I also have a few novels lined up which I'll be reading in translation. In the past I've found that Daniil Kharms and Fazil Iskander are relatively easy to read, and if I can track it down I think there's an edition of Ilf and Petrov's Twelve Chairs with notes for learners of Russian. I have a couple of short story anthologies from German publishers (either bilingual or in Russian with vocab notes) that I'll be working through, and I have an e-book with some of Teffi's stories (hat tip to anisoara) that I've been reading on my phone during my subway commute. So, not sure how much of my reading will turn out to be relevant to others here if it's mostly individual short stories, but I'll try to post here occasionally about my progress and note anything of particular interest that I've read.

>1 anisoara:

Thanks for your effort! I went looking through my Russian literature tag and found some more authors with at least one title translated into English. These have all been active and lived in the Soviet and/or post-Soviet period (emigrant dissidents not included):

Nikolai Ostrovsky (author of seminal How the steel was tempered), Fyodor Sologub, Yuri Tynanov, Bulat Okudzava (predominantly a poet but with many prose works to his name, several of which have been translated into English in preference to his poems), Alexandra Kollontai, Mikhail Kuzmin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Nikolai Erdman, Lydia Chukovskaya, I. Grekova, Konstantin Fedin, Arkady Gaidar (important children's author), Dmitry Furmanov, Ilya Ehrenburg, Kir Bulychev, Vasily Bykov, Mikhail Prishvin, Leonid Tsypkin, Tatyana Tolstaya, Ivan Yefremov. Olga Larionova seems to have only a few stories available in English, but as she's one of rare Soviet female science fiction writers, I feel she deserves a mention...

The Big Green Tent by Ljudmila Ulitskaya

I really liked this sprawling, Russian novel. This is a book with a big scope, that gives a picture of life as a dissident in post-Stalin Russia. The structure is interesting... the book starts as a straight-forward narrative about three school friends with a shared love of literature, and then, switches into a non-linear narrative, a series of chapters, each focusing on different characters and events.

I ended up reading the book too fast (it was due back at the library) and felt like I missed parts of the stories. I wished I had a list of characters and relationships. (but that would have included too many spoilers). Also, I missed out because of my lack of knowledge about Soviet history and culture. But I did enjoy learning, and also enjoyed the Russian poetry quoted throughout the book.

I have started reading The Red Cavalry and I am enjoying it. Unlike many other Russian writers I have tackled Babel knows how to be succinct but still get the story across. Maybe that's because he is writing short stories but I appreciate his style. There is a preface in this book written by his daughter. Babel was executed during the Stalin era but it took years for the family to discover what happened to him. He probably could have avoided his fate because he was allowed to travel freely to Europe and his wife and daughter lived in Paris. He told another Russian writer that his fate if he stayed would be to be a taxi driver in Paris and I guess he just couldn't face that.

>18 banjo123: I like Ulitskaya's writing a lot as well. She's a great storyteller and has a knack for creating interesting, believable characters. Her range also strikes me as impressive -- I've read Medea and Her Children and Daniel Stein and they're very different in terms of both style and content.

I've been very slowly working my way through a some short stories by Solzhenitsyn in a bilingual Russian-German volume, as well as a volume in Reclam's "red" series of foreign language texts, entitled "Pro Ljubov" ("On Love"), which has stories by Ljudmila Petrushevskaya, Anna Politovskaya, Olga Slavnikova, Viktorija Tokareva, Ljudmila Ulitskaya, and Yuri Nagibin (the sole male author represented the volume). Petrushevskaya is fun -- I think she is best known abroad for her modern fairy tales, like the one in this volume. Fortunately for me, the fairy tale style also means that it is relatively simple to read. I'm finding the other authors more difficult, mostly because there's too much vocabulary I don't know.

I just finished Juja by Nino Haratischwili, who I'm deciding counts for the purposes of this theme read, even though she writes in German. She grew up in Georgia in the 1980s, where she was involved in a Georgian-German theater group, and subsequently moved to Germany as an adult to pursue a theater career. Unlike the German immigrant authors mentioned in >10 thorold:, her writing doesn’t thematize the sense of experience of uprootedness and displacement. Her most recent novel, Das achte Leben (Für Brilka), is a 1000+ page family saga set in Georgia and spanning the twentieth century.

Juja, on the other hand, isn't about the Soviet experience at all. It's a cosmopolitan novel about literature and identity and desire which feels like it belongs more to a shared Western literary tradition than to any particular national literature. It requires some patience at the beginning, as the narrative jumps between a handful of characters across a 50-year period and it’s not initially clear what connects them except perhaps for a certain spiritual quality: they all seem to have been very traumatized by something in their past and they struggle with a sense of anxiety and emptiness, a disconnect with the world. Which all sounds very grim, but I found there is something oddly compelling about the author’s writing and imagery which made me want to keep reading and learn more about the characters. Perhaps because they’re all also very hungry for life, for passion and it’s that yearning that apparently also has a profound effect on the characters as well. Gradually four main strands emerge: a girl in Paris in the 1950s, who committed suicide at 17, leaving behind a notebook with reflections entitled "The Ice Age"; the eventual publisher of the manuscript, whom we meet at the beginning of his own career as a writer, as a young man in the unrest of Paris in 1968; a woman in the 1980s who becomes one of a series of suicides inspired by reading The Ice Age; three individuals in the present day, who embark on a search to find out more about the book and its mysterious author in an attempt to understand how it could have such power over the young women who killed themselves. In the second half of the book these strands come together in a mostly satisfying conclusion. The final message about how art can serve as sort of an amplifier of the reader/viewer's thoughts and feelings felt a little bit artificial, but in the end it was, for me, the characters and their unresolved pain and struggles -- no easy closure, just a pause, a regrouping, for more strength to continue anew -- who left the most vivid impression after the last page was turned.

I read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy this month. Second time. It was good to reread it.

Once again I have been wandering one of the side-paths of this quarter’s theme read -- in this case rather dusty paths, for the novel Das Geheimnis der Schildkröte (Russian: Cherepakha Tarazi, in English roughly "The Tarazi Turtle") is set somewhere in the deserts of Inner Asia during the time of Ghengis Khan. Timur Pulatov is an Uzbek writer who seems to be virtually unknown in English; I read this novel in German translation. The Russian Wikipedia page on him suggests he had trouble with censorship, so I'm not sure how much of his writing has been published. Like many other authors from the Soviet republics (I was reminded a bit of Fazil Iskander), he draws on local folklore and cultural traditions even though he writes in Russian. I enjoyed this quite a bit.

This novel follows Tarazi, a wandering scholar whose irreverence towards proper behavior (both towards rulers and regarding the Muslim faith and judicial system) got him exiled from his homeland. Although once an adherent of the alchemists, he became disillusioned with their goals and turned to the study of “testudology” instead -- the transformation of turtles into humans; he is interested in this for practical reasons, seeing this as a source of much-needed labor.

On one of his stops, Tarazi is called in to get rid of a giant turtle whose appearance caused great consternation -- the people fear it is a sign of impending war, while others believe that such turtles are people who had been transformed as a result of their misdeeds. This turtle, as it turns out, was indeed once a human -- a misfortunate man named Bessas. After several months of treatment (which primarily seem to consist of infusions of human blood to dilute his animal substance), Tarazi and his student are able to gradually restore Bessas to human form and during his reconvalescence he tells his story to the two men. Bessas’ story, which takes up the middle third of the book, involves his journey as a young magistrate who has been sent to a village where a storm broke off one side of a giant hill of salt, revealing a man chained to the mountain. A man who, we gradually discover, has likely been hanging there for centuries. Eagles fly about the mountain, stealing pieces of the corpse’s liver, and the dead man holds a pipe in his hand (a pipe that once held fire, and perhaps hashish), as evidence of his transgression. The classically trained reader recognizes the motif, of course, long before the characters do: Prometheus (who according to legend was chained to a mountain in the Caucasus). Bessas’ transformation begins during his stay in this village, but it seems to be more a recidivism, a return to the animal nature that runs through his family line, than it is due to any crime of his own.

The novel is not tightly plotted, and occasionally feels a bit rambling, but the pleasure is really in the countless details and digressions which the author makes so memorable. We get to read a delightful treatise by Tarazi that is basically an exuberent hymn to laziness, and another about waiting for an audience with the ruler/Lord, not because one actually wants an audience, but because that is what one is expected to do. There are moments that are reminescent of Kafka, although Pulatov, ultimately, is more carnivalesque and less hermetic. There are is the city, made up, apparently, of circular roads which only natives know how to navigate; foreigners wishing require a guide to lead them through the tunnels that link them -- originally constructed for the city’s defense during war, but turned into a way to fill the khan’s coffers with the money of tourists. There is a surely rather phallic obsession with Bessas’ tail, and some (I suspect deliberate) humor derived from the fact that the word for “turtle” is of feminine gender in German (as it is in Russian), so the descriptions of Bessas-as-turtle constantly refer to him, the turtle, using feminine forms.

In spite of the fantastical elements, the novel is really about science -- about both the promise of progress and the failure of human reason to master nature. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's engaging and playful but with a slightly melancholic philosophical streak that invites further reflection. It's readable even without a detailed understanding of the Soviet context or the culture of Uzbekistan, although there are certainly bits that take on a somewhat different significance when read in that light (the handling of the Prometheus episode, for example, seems particularly ironic).

The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin translated from the Russian by Sally Laird
first published as Ochered' in Russian in Paris in 1985

If you are one of those people who gets upset when your computer starts up too slowly for you, then the idea of a queue will seem totally preposterous. Yet in many parts of the world, they are an established part of daily routine. So it was in Soviet Russia, where queues as the translator says "...acquired such potency as a symbol" and reached unimaginable lengths.

Vladimir Sorokin's queue is in Brezhnev's Moscow. There is no narration of plot. The reader picks up what is going on through snatches of dialogue, heard as if actually standing in the queue; to call it standing in line would confer too much structure on this entity.

As snippets are heard from here and there, characters start to emerge. There is the young boy darting in and out, waiting for his mother to finish waiting, the old women, students. It becomes obvious no one is really sure what is being sold way up at the front, but that contributes a great deal of enjoyable speculation to help pass the time. Places are held for others, people drop in and out as they complete their errands, vendors of tea and kvass have stalls along the way.

It becomes obvious the front of the line wouldn't be reached today. Numbers are assigned, people bed down for the night as best they can; there will be roll call early in the morning and to miss it is to lose your spot. Two things unite the crowd: its communal antipathy to Georgians whom everyone believes will somehow manage to scoop up everything, and the insistence that newcomers go to the end of the line.

In his Afterward written after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sorokin says An era can be judged by street conversations, giving an example from the Brezhnev era:

"Look, there's a line".
"What're they giving out?"
"Just get on it, then we'll find out".
"How much should I get?"
"As much as they'll give you." (trans Jamey Gambrell)

He goes on to say that queues have now been replaced by crowds, which have a completely different mentality and rules. The communal, the shared ritual, has been lost. Should anyone need to go back for a quick fix though, Sorokin's novel is the way.

Really nice to find some Ulitskaya fans here. She's so great and underappreciated. None of my "literary" friends read her and they are all missing out. Daniel Stein Interpreter is wonderful but all of her books are in different ways.

Ulitskaia sounds like a writer I should try. I need to try and get one of her books, but they seem a bit hard to find in French translations.

I've read (in French) The sacred book of the werewolf by Viktor Pelevin.

For the record some friend of mine had found the book in Russian on a bench in Paris and had given it to me just before I went to spend one year in Moscow. I had tried to read it but my Russian was far too rudimentary.

The main character is a she-Fox looking almost like a human except she has a tail, who hypnothises men to feed from their energy. She has a very critical look on post-soviet era. The idea is nice, but.

First I really don't have the background to understand the jabs against Russian society. Second, a very large part of the book is devoted to esoterico-philosophical musings, the goal of the she-fox being to reach enlightenment. I'm not sure if these parts are meant seriously or ironically, but either way I got bored by them.

I tried to read something of Pelevin's (I can't remember what) and it didn't hold my attention either. :-(

>27 bostonbibliophile: In a sense I'm not sorry when I read a book from an author I should get to know and I don't like it: it leaves me with more time to focus on the authors I like. ;)

Yeah. I don't regret the time spent on Pelevin. Satisified my curiosity anyway.

Encouraged by >19 gypsysmom: (and by accidentally discovering that the recent Pushkin Press edition was available on Scribd), I had a go at Red cavalry, a book I should have read long ago...

Red cavalry (1926) by Isaac Babel (Russia, 1894–1940), translated by Boris Dralyuk (Russia, US, 1982 -)

   

A remarkable assembly of short pieces of writing, somewhere between journalism, short-story collection and novel, making up a composite picture of the experience of war in a Cossack Red Army cavalry unit fighting against the Poles in 1920.

This isn't an anti-war book, of course - as far as Babel and his readers were concerned, their country was being attacked from all sides and had every reason to defend itself - but it's a book that makes no attempt to conceal the cruelty and disorder that go with the suspension of the normal limits of civil society. Passages that seem to be celebrating the exuberance, skill and bloody-mindedness of the Cossacks are set against descriptions of rapes, brutal torture and casual vandalism, and those in turn with lyrical passages where the narrator is caught up in the beauty of something in the towns and villages that they are all busy destroying.

The Catholic and Jewish religion of the locals is particularly involved in this: the narrator feels obliged to mock the superstition and exploitation that goes with it, but clearly still has the relics of a religious (urban Jewish) upbringing and the respect for religious leaders and sites that goes with that: in a church with excrement and holy relics scattered over the floor, we get a loving and detailed description of the wonderful naive wall-paintings in which the saints are clearly all modelled on local characters. There are similar tensions going on when the narrator comes into contact with local Jews. He's clearly simultaneously attracted and disgusted by the Hasidic shtetl-culture.

This must have been a very tricky book to translate, as Babel is constantly switching voices and registers without warning, drawing on everything from high literary language to extremely coarse dialect. Dralyuk seems to have done very well and most of the text reads quite naturally, but this isn't a book where you can ever escape from the awareness that what you are reading is a translation. Dialect is always a problem: I found it disconcerting that his Cossacks were using so many Americanisms, but of course it's almost impossible to write earthy dialect that doesn't have some sort of regional marker to it. There were passages I had some trouble making sense of at first, but that probably comes from Dralyuk's poetic instinct to render the full complexity of Babel's layering of images, leaving the reader with a lot of unpacking to do (one of these is the "milk" passage Dralyuk discusses in his English Pen article).

Very interesting, and definitely a book that increased my motivation to learn Russian (although I suspect that it would be quite challenging for a beginner...).

Boris Dralyuk on translating Isaac Babel: http://worldbookshelf.englishpen.org/Writers-in-Translation-blog?item=26

(Cross-posted from my Club Read thread)

>26 chlorine:, >27 bostonbibliophile:: I've found Pelevin to be rather hit-or-miss. I really enjoyed most of the stories in The Blue Lantern, but I've tried reading a couple of his novels and couldn't get into them: too bizarre and perhaps also too much stylistic experimenting for the sake of experimenting.

This is beginning to feel like a bit of a common element in a number of post-Soviet Russian writers I've been exploring: Sorokin's Goluboe salo ("The Blue Fat"), which I started reading in German translation, is, undoubtably an impressive achievement in terms of style (it has a Clockwork-Orangesque made up futuristic language which incorporates Chinese vocabulary and technobabble, and the story includes numerous parodies of famous Russian authors). However, I quickly gave up because I found it all but unreadable -- it's simply too much. Based on some reviews I've read, there's not enough actual substance behind the stylistic experiment to actually justify putting my time into it, so I suspect I'll abandon this one with a clean conscience.

I'm enjoying Shishkin's Maidenhair somewhat more, but it, too, is a sprawling narrative full of all sorts of allusions (from Xenophon to the Bible to Agatha Christie) that switches back and forth between multiple storylines. The premise interests me -- it centers around an interpreter for asylum-seekers in Switzerland who tell their stories, partly real, partly borrowed or exaggerated, in an effort to convince the gatekeeper to let them in -- but it's an incredibly demanding read. I find that need to be in the right mood for it and also have uninterrupted blocks of time to read largish chunks at a time. Not a book for bedtime reading or taking with me on the subway.

>30 thorold: Thanks for giving a much more complete review of Red Cavalry than I did.

>30 thorold: Great review!

>30 thorold: >31 spiphany:
Thanks for the reviews!

Not officially relevant to this thread, as it is neither Soviet nor fiction, and for that matter wasn't even written in Russian, but I've been reading Kropotkin's Memoirs of a revolutionist - see my Club Read thread here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/226517#5729378

Checking in a bit late here to report back on the final books I read for this quarter (there were a couple of others I started but didn't finish; I may come back and post about them later): two novels looking at the Soviet phenomenon of queuing: The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin, for which >23 SassyLassy: has already provided an excellent review, and a book by Russian-American author Olga Grushin, likewise entitled The Line (or in the UK, "The Concert Ticket"). Grushin was born in 1971 and came to the US at the tail end of the Cold War as a university student; she writes in English.

I was curious as to how the two authors would handle a very similar theme, for both novels are based on the same premise: following what happens to people waiting in line for days (or in Grushin's novel, for months). Sorokin's novel is stylistically very spare, consisting only of dialogue, along with some typographical tricks, such as blank pages, that give the impression of pauses and time passing. It would be interesting to see this adapted as a play, although it would be challenging to maintain one key feature of the novel, which is that we don't know who is talking at any given time.

Grushin has a more conventional narrative style, and the plot centres around a single family who take shifts standing in line for a ticket to a concert with music by a legendary (and banned) composer. Each of the family members has their own reason for wanting the ticket, and we see the rifts in their relationships emerge during the long periods of waiting. Grushin's novel is set in a dream-like Russia, thirty-seven years after the "Change"; in her afterword she indicates that the setting is loosely based on three different periods in Soviet history rather than a specific time. There's a slight romanticization of the time spent in line: the waiting opens up space for longing for beauty and freedom that isn't available in everyday life. Here, I think, her distance (geographic and temporal) from the Soviet context is visible; it allows her a certain almost nostalgic or mythologizing view of the past which I'm not sure would be likely from an author who had lived through the height of repression and shortages.

Interestingly, both novels end with a very similar twist that means the characters go home empty-handed, without the longed-for item they stood in line so long for. But the thematic treatment is strikingly different: In Sorokin the waiting in line is an absurd farce, but one which reveals the creativity and community spirit of the strangers thrown together to make the best of it. Whereas Grushin's novel is the chronicle of a family falling apart, each distracted by futile dreams, so that when the waiting finally ends, they are brought back to reality and given a second chance to show they care about one another.

I read Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party. It centres on the last days of a dying man in New York and the other Russian emigrees in his sick room.

Before I read it I'd read comments about her making a link between the dying man and the Russian state (the attempted coup against Gorbachev takes place during the novel). I don't know much about Russia in this period so most of that went straight over my head. Instead I was reminded of other novels about the emigrant experience - the different attempts to deal with a new home, from holding onto the old to trying to erase the past altogether. The reviews of her other books above make me think I should try some more too.

I actually read this during the third quarter, but have only now done my review, crossposted from my Club Read thread:



Generations of Winter by Vassily Aksyonov translated from the Russian by John Glad and Christopher Morris
first published as Moskovskaya Saga in 1992

In the fall of 1925, eight years after the Revolution, Moscow appeared to be returning to a certain sense of normality, at least the veneer was there. The NEP had allowed a partial reversion to private ownership and there were those who believed there would be a return to capitalism. However, beneath the surface, change was coming. The difficulty was that everything was secret, so no one knew which direction to choose. As Karl Radek had said, "The Party can't seem to get out of the habit of working underground."

The Gradov family was one that had survived intact and thought themselves well suited to continue to flourish. The head of the family was one of the best surgeons in Moscow. His wife was a talented pianist from Georgia. His elder son Nikita was a Brigade Commander and his second son Kirill was a theoretical revolutionary. Daughter Nina was a university student who fancied herself a proletarian. The family home was a dacha straight out of nineteenth century Russian literature. However, readers know what the family cannot and so the reader wonders "How could such a family survive unscathed through the whirlwind to come?"

Aksyonov leads the reader slowly into the wreck, perhaps sensing some resistance. Dr Gradov was summoned to a consultation on the health of Mikhail Frunze, the Commissar for Defense. Frunze had devised a plan for military reform. Unfortunately for him, it involved reducing the Army by over half a million men and getting rid of political commissars; not a plan likely to be approved by the new regime. The Party decided on an operation to treat Frunze's ulcer, against the advice of doctors such as Gradov. Frunze died on the operating table. Gradov's dossier grew larger.

So the cataclysm began for the Gradov family and for the country. Collectivization, purges, army reorganization, more purges, show trials and still more purges. On and on it went, a revolving door of favour:

In the textbooks of Soviet history schoolchildren, under the supervision of their teachers, smeared ink thickly over the names and pictures of the old heroes, now become enemies. The next year the textbooks were handed down to younger students, and no one remembered the names that had vanished into the inky night. No shortage of heroes was felt, though. Life went on giving birth to a new hero almost every week.

Nikita and Kirill wound up in different camps for different reasons. The doctor and his wife struggled on. Her Georgian connections proved both useful and problematic.

Aksyonov relieves the oppression with a device he calls Intermissions. In these, plants and animals are revealed as reincarnations of characters from the Russian past. The family dog emerges as Prince Andrei. A ficus and geranium argue heatedly. Other Intermissions quote snippets from the western press, suggesting that all is not transparent in its reporting either.

From Time magazine July 7, 1941
The Finns are unhappy that Russian phosphorus rounds incinerated the forest around Khanko Lake, in which they loved to relax in the summer...

The reality is never far off though, as Aksyonov details his characters' lives in the camps and prisons, including a chilling description of the latest in execution chambers, circa 1938. Characters from history such as Frunze appear often.

Years of horror take the reader to October 1941, when desperate times called for truly desperate measures. General Zhukov went before Molotov, Kaganovich, Beria, Voroshilov, Krushchev and others to convince them that in order to stop the German advance, the army would need among other things, to

...sharply and immediately increase the complement of upper- and middle-level officer cadres. I request that this be reported to Comrade Stalin immediately.

The higher-ups immediately understood what Zhukov had in mind and suddenly found themselves engrossed in their folders and documents...

For what Zhukov had in mind was the release of such officers from their scattered camps, those at least for whom there were still records.

War and Jail make up Volume II of this novel. Aksyonov has used a quote from War and Peace, The human mind cannot grasp the absolute continuity of motion, as an epigraph for this second half of the novel, in which there is no rest until the book ends with the end of WWII. The novel's ending leaves scope for a sequel, but that did not happen.

Blurbs on this edition almost all referenced War and Peace as a comparator for this novel, but I think Dr Zhivago seems more apt. There is a sense of futility and beaten down acceptance here which is absent in Tolstoy. Aksyonov's mother was Yevgenia Ginzburg. She and his father Pavel Akysonov were both sent to camps for Trotskyite connections when Vassily was only five. He eventually wound up in an orphanage as a child of "enemies of the people" before eventually being reunited with his parents. This gave his writing an experience and desperation Tolstoy could not have known.

Aksyonov himself was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1980 after he left for the US. He regained it in the Gorbachev era. He seems to have official sanction for now, with a Russian literary award in 1994, and the production of a Russian TV miniseries of Generations of Winter in 2004. Aksyonov died in Moscow in 2009.

Great reviews, thanks!

>30 thorold: Pushkin Press have published Dralyuk's translation of Odessa stories - there's a review by Robert Minto here : http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/passion-rules-the-world/

Sana Krasikov, who writes in English, has a new book coming in January, The Patriots. It's good.

>15 mbecken: These two books are all I can think about lately!
I read Secondhand Time and have been thinking on it ever since. It has really resonated with me, so thanks for all your background info.
I remembered someone in that book mentioned The Master and Margarita, plus it was on David Bowie's top 100 list, so now I am reading that.