Russian Literature

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by Liam

Yeah, I'm so anti-Russian,

didn't say that hon

regards'n all.

[SergeyM]

Thank you Mirabell, my command of English is one thing I am always dubious of... So it was good to know I succeeded at telling what I wanted to.

No, Eric, not "Pizdostan", that's for sure. Actually, I have tried some Russian searching machines and Wikipedia, and I have found that Checkhov has used it:

"За кого же им прикажете выходить? Ну, за неимением порядочных, развитых людей, и выходят бог знает за кого, за разных маклеров да пиндосов, которые только и умеют, что пить да в клубе скандальничать..." = Whom should they (girls) marry? When there are no respectable, intelligent people about, they marry people of no merits, clerks and PINDOSES, who know nothing better than drink and start bar scandals..."

And Fazil' Iskander:

"Если Тико возьмут, его лучший осведомитель накрылся. Его бедный пиндос так усердно следил за преступниками, что не заметил, как один из них уже сам идёт по его следу..." = "If they catch Tiko, there goes his best informant. His poor PINDOS has been so zealously spying on criminals, so he didn't notice that one of them already followed him..."

(Both translations are mine, sorry).

Konstantin Paustovsky used it, and so did Kuprin.

It seems the word comes, as a lot of other things, from ancient Greece, where it meant people from Greek provinces and other countries, who came to Greece and tried to look and behave like the natural Greek did, but succeeded only in getting themselves laughed at.

There are several other versions as well, one using Spanish word "PENDEJO" (an idiot), another - Serbish-croatian word meaning "pinguins".

To finalize it I have to mention that, acc. to Wiki, most Russians using this word do not know its origins or definitions other than "these foolish Americans", and they actually connect it with "Pidor", i.e., passive homosexual.

I came to this length to show that many Russians think that Americans are arrogant fools. And many Americans, thinking that they do not care, think as well that Russians are a bunch of drunkard fools. They also feel something like that about the British, German, French, Arabs and Jews. And the British, German, French, Arabs and Jews also have their thoughts.

But I am sure that when somebody starts to speak about any nation in general, he makes a mistake. We have too much in common with each other, nevermind the nationalty, and to call Americans "arrogant fools" is as foolish as call Russians "drunkard fools", or I do not know how we are usually called where one lives.

[Liam]

Amen to that.

[Eric]

I don't think that most people who've travelled around a bit, and met people, make so many generalisations about nationalities as a whole. But many Americans have never travelled abroad, except on those tours where you follow the guide around all the time. So they were sealed off from the local people.

However, this was surely also the case during Soviet times with Soviet citizens who were obliged to follow the guide when they travelled abroad with their special passports that they handed back to the authorities after their visit. So they too were sealed off from the local people.

I think it's healthier to be allowed to travel abroad freely, speak to the locals and try to understand their mentality. A lack of information, and falling back on prejudices and clichés, constantly make our world a more dangerous place.

[SergeyM]

Originally Posted by Eric

I don't think that most people who've travelled around a bit, and met people, make so many generalisations about nationalities as a whole. But many Americans have never travelled abroad, except on those tours where you follow the guide around all the time. So they were sealed off from the local people.

Actually, this is how it is with most Russians now. You know, we are still mostly illiterate...
And I fear that the Ossetin conflict helped our government to show Russian people that we are circled by the enemies, who never care about truth or justice (but very much pretend, of course), and detest our guts, and use every chance to bite us, nevermind what we do: kill "Chechen bandits" or help Ossetin civilians.
The result of it could be another Cold War, but this time we will be behind the wall of lie, not of iron.

[Eric]

Сергей, just out of interest, when Iskander uses the word осведомитель, does he mean an "informant" or an "informer"? My Russian-English dictionary makes no distinction. But in English, the former word is neutral i.e. "someone who provides information", while the latter word means "police spy". Is the word ambiguous in Russian, in this quote?

One intriguing leitmotif in Russian literature is sending people to labour camps in Siberia or the Kola Peninsula. For instance, Dostoevsky "Memoirs from the Dead House" (1858); Chekhov's report from the katorga on Sakhalin Island (around 1890); Solzhenitsyn's "First Circle" (1968) and other works. Even foreigners have described the GULag (e.g. Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski [2 years], Jaan Kross [8 years]), but that seems more understandable. Why is there so much GULag in Russian literature, decade after decade? Forced labour, slave labour, hints and descriptions. Haven't Russians had enough of the descriptions of a system that no longer exists, or of memoirs from the Great Patriotic War? Can't Russia move on, in literary terms?

[SergeyM]

Oh, Eric, I am sorry, that was my poor memory playing tricks on me: I thought "informant" had the right feel about it... Of course Iskander told about someone spying for police.

You know, Russian society is divided between those fabulously reach and living as they wish, and the poor majority, who have to abide by the law. I would say that it has been so for a very long period - maybe starting in dark medieval past. I do not know if in other societes this stage has been fully overcame, but here the elite and others live very different lives still. Remember Raskolnikov, who spent so much time thinking if he was different from those around him and so able to kill if he wished so? Remember Stalin, who caught many people near to him, and sent them to death together with ordinary people - this fact shocked us greatly, but he killed much more poor citizens, than his own mighty comrades...

Actually, we understand justice as a function of certain qualities rather than a solid law. For example, I had seen a TV show not long ago about people who had lost and found their relatives or friends. There was some woman somewhere in Russian country back in 1943 or 42, married to an officer of low rank in the Army, with three babies on her hands (one of them an infant of several month) who worked at a tabacco factory. Wages were small, and money cheap, and babies wanted to be fed. So one day the woman has stolen half a glass or so of the tabacco leaves and tried to change it for some bread. Naturally she was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in labour camps. She with her babies had been delivered to some place in Siberia, where she has died after two years or so. And her babies, now old people, found each other on that show. The situation got hotly discussed, and many people said, that the judges were not right, to send the woman to the camps. Why, they said, she had a husband, who had fought the Germans at the time, and she had babies, one of them an infant, how could the judges overlooked that? And nobody said that to kill legally a person, any person, for a glass of tabacco leaves, is VERY WRONG. Do you understand? Of course if you asked them, they would have confirmed - yes, it was wrong. But the first thing that came to their mind was - why, she had a husband in the Army and small babies, so to kill her was unjust...

So, acc. my personal opinion, many Russians subconsciously hope that one day we will have a wise and just tsar, who will send all these millionairs and clerks with their pockets full of bribes to the labour camps, and poor will became rich and happy. I think this story goes on for ages. So this question of labour camps goes up again and again, sometimes as wishes of the poor, and sometimes as brooding of the intelligent people, who can see no change to the better.
(Of course I may be absolutely wrong, it is just a thought that came to my mind when I had thought on this fenomena myself).

[Eric]

The bit of all of this that I do not understand is why Russia started this system of labour camps in the first place. Having such a system has given many authors lots of things to write about. But except for the Nazis in Germany, there have been very few countries in Western Europe that have put people in camps and worked them to death. It doesn't seem a very good way of running a country, as the country is then run on fear and lying. Most people will say one thing and do another. Remember what happened when the pro-Communist French author André Gide visited Russia in about 1934. He saw through all the deception and Potëmkin façades, and wrote a very critical book on his return to France.

Stalin first of all killed all the leading Russian generals in the 1930s, then made a treaty (!) with Nazi Germany in 1939. This seems suicidal to me. Why did Russia allow itself to be dominated by a murderous and paranoid foreigner? There were surely enough Russians to make a government. This is the same as Germany, that imported an Austrian to teach them mass murder, anti-Semitism and war.

Without all this, people like Rybakov, Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, and so on, wouldn't have had anything to write about.

But to rely on a guru, a great leader, a tsar, a god, to get you out of the mess is not the way we think over here in Western Europe. When the banking system nearly collapsed, democratically elected governments started inventing ways of stopping the catastrophe. As Western Europe doesn't have lots of oil & gas to sell, things had to change. Russia still has lots of raw materials, but huge investment will be needed in the oil & gas infrastructure. Otherwise Russia won't be able to sell fuel to us.

This would make a great subject for a novel. Has anyone written novels about this? A kind of anti-utopia novel, visualising the breakdown of Russian society under a president elected for six years?

Talking of Iskander, I saw the name in the newspapers today. But it was missiles of that name which are going to be stationed in the Kaliningrad oblast, not the author called Fazil'! Quote, from Gazeta.ru:

Разместить в Калининградской области расчет ракет «Искандер-Э» как ответ на развертывание в Польше и Чехии элементов американской системы ПРО.

I also see that famous Russian author Eduard Limonov is in the Russian news today. Unfortunately, I read Russian so slowly and imperfectly that I haven't read the article at:

Ëèìîíîâó îòäàëè ëàìïó è ìàøèíêó - Ãàçåòà.Ru

But this all seems to be about a legal dispute and a desk lamp, not his novels.

There was an interesting-looking article in the culture section about the Helsinki Book Fair, which was held a week ago:

Ïîëíûé finnish - Ãàçåòà.Ru

[Mirabell]

that imported an Austrian to teach them mass murder, anti-Semitism and war.

Nope, we did fine with each of that on our own before.
This is one fine country yessir.

[nnyhav]

Hi Sergey^2,

I'm curious about to what extent literature from the XSSRs and Eastern Europe are being engaged by Russian writers and by Russian readers. Much is made of a 3% figure for Anglo publishing of translations, but there's still a lot available from some of these countries, and more in Western Europe; how is it for translation into Russian?

For that matter, while I'm aware that top emigres' works (such as Nabokov, copyright issues notwithstanding) have long filtered back in, has this been the case with stuff like Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov (published in English a couple of years ago, with its late Soviet Moscow setting)?

[Eric]

Nnyhav: if you're prepared to plod through 69 pages on the following website for fiction alone, you can get some idea what has been translated into Russian and is available in bookshops:

Russia-on-line <book store>

On the first twenty pages of the fiction section you have Umberto Eco, Washington Irving, Henry Miller, Richard Bach, Milan Kundera, Theodore Dreiser, Evelyn Waugh, Sydney Sheldon, Murakami, Iain Banks, Nancy Farmer, Patrick Suskind, Anna Gavalda, John Fowles, Orhan Pamuk, Nick Hornby, Mishima, Coetzee, Nothomb, Esquivel, Du Maurier, Khayyam, Greenaway, Hatch, Almadóvar, and a few others. But about 8 out of ten books seem to be Russian originals.

This bookstore appears to be an American one, specialising in Russian books. So maybe the percentages are different for ones in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

If you can read Cyrillic you can also browse the names at:

Russian Book Store No. 21 , Ðóññêèé êíèæíûé ìàãàçèí ¹21.

There are 755 entries there in the "Foreign Bestseller" category for prose alone. These are a mixture of classics, modern classics and contemporary novels. Totally at random: Aldiss, Kafka, Balzac, Oates, Oz, Pamuk, O'Henry, London, Lawrence, McCullers, Lem, Coelho, Coetzee, Cortázar, Kipling, Cocteau, Conan-Doyle, Capote, Ionesco, Yeats, Canetti, Gide, Sacher-Masoch, Singer, Zola, Ibsen, Yehoshua, Dumas, Jelinek, Genet, Joyce, Dickens, Doctorow, Dos Passos, Du Maurier, Greene, Dante, Lawrence Durrell, de Saint-Exupéry, DeLillo, Golding, Galsworthy, Hofmann, Grass, Graves, Gary, Heym, Hesse, Vonnegut, Woolf, Hamsun, Werfel, Voltaire, Buzzati, Valéry, Vargas Llosa, Brecht, Brontë, Bradbury, Beckett, Bellow, Burgess, etc., etc., etc.

Sergey! Your turn.

*

The 3% statistic is only for Britain and the USA. It covers, I think, all books translated into English; so in the "fiction" category, the actual percentage may be higher. But the equivalent figure is nonetheless 23% in France, and between 50% and 60% in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. So, however you twist it ("lies, damn lies and statistics") my brief look at the Russian bookshops and what is available in translation into that language gives me the impression that it is better than Britain.

[Eric]

I think my posting yesterday proved adequately that whatever problems Russia may have, translating an adequate amount of world literature isn't one of them. Judging by those two websites, Russia has a perfectly respectable pedigree regarding taking an interest in the literature of other countries.

Today, I discovered a review of Swedish translations of Russian short-stories. The editor has already written a book - translated into English (!) - about contemporary Russian authors with Glas publishers. Watch this space for more details.

[nnyhav]

I think the foregoing amply demonstrates a lack of understanding of my question, not less to whom it was addressed.

I'm still curious ...

[SergeyM]

Sorry, I had logging problems for a couple of days. Now they seem to be solved, so I will try to comment at last.

Our bookstores are packed to the roof with tons of Russian and translated books. One could find almost anything there. What is gets bought is quite another question.

I would like to tell you what we were told back in soviet times: "USSR is the country of readers, and we are the most reading country in the world". And it has been enough to go down to Moscow underground (metro) to get exactly that impression: most of the passengers spent their time reading books and newspapers. Now it is almost the same. Maybe half of the passengers are still reading while on the way to their destinations. Others are doing crosswords, playing games on their phones and PSPs, listening to music, and just sleeping or pretending to (it is supposed that younger males are not to take sitting places in metro in presence of elders, women etc., so some prefer to pretend they are sleeping and keep sitting).
What are we reading? Some are reading books in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. I see such readers every day, and sometimes belong with them myself. Then people read translated books. The champion would be Harry Potter, I think. Murakami, Koelho, Richard Bach, O'Henry, Douglas Adams, London, Irwing Shaw, King, Zola, Dumas, Eco, Conan Doyle, Dickens, and many others would indeed be present in the list, together with Bernard Verber, Chak Polanik and Dan Brown. Lord of the Rings will also be there, as well as many other fantasy, SciFi, horror and criminal stories. Stone's biographies of Michelangelo and others, too.
But the most read are Russian books, of course. "Women stories", fantasy, criminal stories. Historical stories and biographies. Religious literature. Professional and educational books. Actually, I think the most popular list will enclude not more than twenty names or so, which will take about 75% of what is read in Russia these days.

Sorry, I have to go and do some electrical repairs: we plan to get our country house ready for New Year, and that is not far away already... The weather is fine, so there are many things to do at the moment, other than to sit before the keyboard...

[Eric]

I'm glad that Sergey's posting bears out what I intuited to be the case when I examined the internet bookshops that do translated literature from foreign languages into Russia.

Sergei speaks with the authority of someone who actually lives and works in the country in question. But like anyone on this books board who knows the Cyrillic alphabet, I was able to find out a significant number of translations into Russian, without even setting foot on Russian soil. I think that my findings complement Sergey's nicely, despite the suggestion that I am muscling my way in.

I got a good glimpse of what they were producing in Russia during the mid- and late 1990s when living in Tallinn. There were stalls on the railway station there (Balti jaam), as well as bookshops in the centre and suburbs that sold Russian books. What seemed to be popular then were biographies, astrological and religious books and some novels, especially crime. The covers of the hardbacks were rather garish by Western standards, with lots of bright colours and gold, but the content was more varied. Even the Orthodox Cathedral had a bookstall, where I bought a couple of books in Russian about Russian Orthodox priests in Estonia that were murdered by the Bolsheviks.

I presume that Nnyhav is also curious about whether the literature of the former Soviet republics gets translated into Russian and read. That is something that obviously interests me a lot, translating as I do from an ex-Soviet language, one which used to have quotas into Russian. This is where Sergey will have a knowledge of something you can't just guess from the internet. As both Georgia and, to a certain extent, the Baltic countries, are in the doghouse in Russia for various political things (e.g. the Georgian War and the Statue Incident in Tallinn), it would be intriguing to know if these sorts of incidents have reduced the interest among Russian readers in what authors from these ex-Soviet republics are writing nowadays.

We've seen the interesting case of Boris Akunin; and one Russian author, Mikhail Veller, actually lives in Tallinn, as did Sergei Dovlatov, for a while.

Sergey, what about Belarusian authors? Are the more dissident ones among them read in Russia? People such as Uladimir Arlau, or emigré writers such as Valzhyna Mort.

I'll deal with this new anthology of Russian stories in Swedish, and the introductory book, in English, to Russian authors that the same editor wrote, in my next posting.

[Eric]

Here is a book, in English, about contemporary Russian fiction. This looks to be an interesting introduction to Russian authors, by way of interviews. Why I'm especially interested in this book is because wit was edited by a Finland-Swede, Kristina Rotkirch [pronounced: root-cheerk, not in the German way].

ISBN: 9785717200844



Contemporary Russian Fiction: A Short List

by Kristina Rotkirch (Editor), Anna Ljunggren (Editor), Charles Rougle (Translator)


About this title: The living voices of eleven leading Russian authors: Boris Akunin, Evgeny Grishkovets, Eduard Limonov, Yuri Mamleev, Viktor Pelevin, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Nina Sadur, Mikhail Shishkin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya.

The writers interviewed for this book represent various tendencies and age groups, reflecting the diversity of themes and styles in Russian literature. The book also touches on the question of how literature is reacting to the rising neo-conservatism and political pressure in Russian society and culture.

None of the authors were acknowledged in the Soviet Union and were carried into Russian literature on the waves of the perestroika. While Limonov and Mamleyev were known abroad even back in Soviet times, the others were published in English translation only in the 1990s. They are all hugely known in Russia.

Kristina Rotkirch is also the editor of a new Finland-Swedish book with the Swedish translations of short-stories by Russian authors. Maybe this could form the basis for a similar book in English. The authors included are Viktor Pelevin, Nina Sadur, Yevgeni Grishkovets, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Andrei Gelasimov, Yuri Buida, Jurij Buida, Nina Garielyan, Anatoli Gavrilov, Yevgeni Popov, Roman Senchin, Olga Slavnikova, Vladimir Sorokin.

For those of you that can read Swedish, here are details:

Att begrava en ängel : ryska kärleksnoveller - Bokus bokhandel

Söderström

Kristina Rotkirch is herself the Swedish translator of books by Ostrovsky, Akunin, Tolstaya, Tsypkin and others.

[SergeyM]

As I have already mentioned, I am glad there are people interested in Russian literature and authors outside of our borders. So any post on our literature makes me feel good.

Alas, I am not that much of a reader myself these days. (I have glimpsed earlier today a large pile of books that I have read during all of my life - we delivered them to our country house, and will store them here in special bookshelves I will construct one day... Several cubic meters of books look quite astonishing... But most of them I have read earlier, when I had spare time for reading). Cannot say that I am looking for new books to read all the time... I read (or write) not more than two hours every working day - during my trip to the office and back.
So, my opinion is not one of a specialist, but one of a man of the crowd... And I cannot remember when have I read (or have seen anybody reading) a book of a writer from any republic of the former USSR, whether Baltic Republics, Belorussia, Georgia nor any of the Asian republics. We had a relative a "National writer of Uzbekistan" (an official title), and I think the last Uzbek book I read was his... And that has been twenty years ago or so.
To tell the truth, I have too often felt that I am loosing my precious time for nothing, when reading some of Russian books. So I have read much more books in English... Not that all of them were much better than the Russian books I've read, but at least I could have pretended that I was doing it to learn English language.

As to the Georgian war or the statue incident, I do not think that influenced our readers in the least. (As to the statue, I hold the neutral position: I do not think that it is wise to fight statues, but I also think that our authorities could have had our Russian soldiers re-buried somewhere on a Moscow or St.Petersburg cemetary. And to have all that fuss over that problem has been very much a quarrell between spoiled children in a sand-box.

As to the Baltic Republics, Russians do not like their showing-off liking of the former Nazis. Of course people that were on the different sides in a conflict could hardly be blamed after 50 years or so, but the Baltic Nazis are different, as they still organize marches, clothed in SS outfits, etc. Of course Russia had been very wrong to occupy the Baltic Republics back in 1939, but the Balts do not look wise doing what they do, sorry.

But again, I do not think any Russian would say: these Balts demonstrate their foolish dislike to us, so we will not read their books. Yes, our government have the propaganda campaign for many years here, and it goes up all the time. But it is centered on showing Russians that Russia is circled by enemies, and that Russians must try to become better, and gain better results in everything, but not to eliminate cultural influence from abroad.
Of course, some popular people here say that American culture is a profanation, and we have a TV programme telling us every week that the British had always been our bitter enemies. But that have no influencs whatsoever on what we read or watch.

[Deborah]

I think it should probably be Rebecca's Veil, a biblical reference...She's just had a book published under that title, which of course I can't get here in the States...yet.


"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:

'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".'

The name of the story-poem doesn't sound too thrilling - but it depends on the style, nicht wahr?"

[Eric]

As I translate novels and stories from Estonian, I have of course been the country itself. Tallinn has some fine bookshops, restaurants and pubs, and the Estonians are simply glad to have seen the last of the Soviet Union. But Tallinn bookshops do still have a section catering for the many Russian-speaking readers. And Veller, Dostoevsky, Dovlatov, Pelevin, and quite a few other serious Russian authors can be found in Estonian translation, even today.

This curious thing about Baltic Nazis that Sergey mentions, is that they are not in evidence there. I have lived for well over a year in Tallinn in the 1990s, and never saw anyone dressed up in Nazi uniform or parading through the streets. A few old men celebrating in a cemetery don't constitute a powerful movement. During the Nazi occupation of Estonia (1941-44), the German occupiers forcibly conscripted Estonians into the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht. I translated a story about this (which must be available in Russian) by Jaan Kross, called "Lead Piping", set in 1943. Kross includes an amusing autobiographical part showing how he got out of conscription by taking some medicine that affected his blood pressure temporarily, so that he would be declared unfit for military service.

Some Balts are also supposed to have collaborated with the Nazis to murder Jews. There were definitely collaborators who helped at the concentration camp in Klooga (Estonia), Salaspils (Latvia) and Ponary (Lithuania), but this was not on a grand scale, as with the GULag. And the Finnish Jew, Max Jacobson, along with the Estonian then President Lennart Meri, did a recent investigation and exonerated Estonia from accusations of war crimes during WWII. These facts can be read in great detail in various publications.

So Estonian, as opposed to Russian, GULag and liberation literature focuses on deportations to Siberia (e.g. 20,000 Estonians in 1949), the Forest Brethren anti-Soviet guerrillas, and other things that show "their side of the story". The SS veterans are only mentioned in history books there. No one is proud of them, and no one has written gloriously nationalist novels about them either. Most were, after all, conscripts, not pathologically sadistic volunteers.

I'm glad to read that the average Russian reader is still happy to read Estonian literature, despite certain tensions between the Russian and Estonian governments.

[Eric]

One little pedantic point. Sergey says:

Of course Russia had been very wrong to occupy the Baltic Republics back in 1939, but the Balts do not look wise doing what they do, sorry.

Actually, in 1939 the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was too busy signing a peace and friendship treaty, called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with Hitler's Nazi Germany (!) to have time to occupy the Baltic countries.

The Soviet Union occupied the Baltic countries the following year, 1940, when the Soviets immediately arrested all the members of the "bourgeois" governments, plus many members of the three Baltic parliaments, and sent them to Siberia, where some were shot in 1942, while many died from the slave labour they underwent. The Estonian President, Konstantin Päts, who was, in fact, Russian Orthodox by religion, was confined to a Russian mental hospital where he died in 1952. I think Rybakov and Solzhenitsyn touch upon these subjects a little in some of their books.

The Balts have long memories, as, luckily, some noble Russian authors do, as well.