You may be joking about your Russian, Mirabell, but I'm doing just that. The easiest way to expand your vocabulary is to print a few articles from the internet and get out your dictionary.
But reading about murder, mayhem, explosions, threats, shuttle diplomacy, and occupied ports does get a bit wearing after a while. So I now vary it a bit by reading the odd article in
Knizhnoye obozrenie which is a good monthly that presents new books. The problem with literature is that it, for obvious reasons, uses a vastly larger and more subtle vocabulary than politics. Once you know the word for "warship", "explosion", "peacekeeper", and so on, the variations are limited. Also the verbs used are limited. And you have already read things in the British, German, etc., press.
But when you turn to
literature (i.e. belles lettres), the vocabulary could be coming from anywhere: country life and agriculture, drug addiction and alcoholism, family life in high-rise flats or wooden houses, war and the military, new literary movements, sex, and a mass of other things. Then your reading vocabulary, standard, colloquial and slang is
really put to the test. And mine's not up to it yet. I can manage to read the biographies of all these interesting-looking young authors, but the works themselves suddenly introduce so many new words that I am overwhelmed.
And cultural and national allusions are another problematical area. I have never lived in Russia, so even the simplest things, like the names of the supermarket chains, or kids films on TV, are totally unknown to me.
One interesting-looking name of all those I listed is Nadezhda Gorlova, a student of the Gorki Literature Institute, like many writers. The critic there says that Russian literature was getting in a rut, then along came Nadezhda Gorlova. Now this may be exaggeration for effect, but the critic Timur Zulfikarov does say:
Quote:
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(...) And then a real writer turned up - Nadezhda Gorlova. She's about thirty. But writes at the level of Thomas Mann and Borges. I am thinking principally of the story-poem "Rebecca's Bedspread".
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The name of the story-poem doesn't sound too thrilling - but it depends on the style,
nicht wahr?
My Russian stretches to translating that kind of little quote, but I've not even tackled the first story,
Exlibris, or
Musical Period, Word and
Thirst (or:
Lust)
, four miniature stories featured in the anthology.
The anthology was published this year by the
PoRog publishing house in Moscow and contains work by the winners of the Eureka Prize, which is held every other year.