Literature

For more about Ivan's Daughter, read our interview with translator Margaret Winchell. 

As E. L. Doctorow noted, “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” Understanding present-day Russia requires a grasp of the country’s history. While the facts may be plain, what life was actually like for the citizens of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union is the subject of this collection of fiction by one of the country’s greatest contemporary writers, Valentin Rasputin.
Born and raised in rural Siberia, Rasputin rose from the humblest of origins to the heights of literary acclaim during the 1970s. While his novellas from that period exemplify the village-prose movement in Russian literature, they also display a distinctive voice, narrative technique, and style along with universal appeal that set them apart. Although never a member of the Communist Party, the author received the Soviet Union’s highest literary awards and became extremely popular among its avid readers.
During the tumultuous years of perestroika, Rasputin, deeply concerned about his homeland, stopped writing fiction and became involved in politics. But after serving in the Congress of People’s Deputies and as an adviser to Gorbachev, he soon became disillusioned with Russia’s political process and returned to his literary calling, creating works that depict a new world whose trials and traumas he knew well.
The stories and novella in this collection delve into the burning issues of that time, including questions of morality and sheer survival. By bringing a variety of characters to life—from young children, teenagers, and middle-aged adults to old peasants and new Russians—Rasputin allows readers to experience the immediate post-Soviet past together with ordinary folks. In addition to shedding light on the present, these works offer an armchair trip to Siberia along with the aesthetic pleasures that flow from the pen of a master storyteller.

Book Reviews

Review by Paul Richardson in Russian Life, Jul/Aug2017, Vol. 60 Issue 4

Unlike the other titles we are releasing as part of this jubilee series, Ol’ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days is not out of print, so if you want to own the printed book, don’t hesitate to order it. However, the book has never been distributed widely in Russia, where its primary readership is actually located, so this seemed like an auspicious opportunity to make it available to scholars in Russia. Nina Perlina was our colleague at Indiana University when she published this book with Slavica, the first from our local faculty to take advantage of the fact that we now run a publishing house.

Slavica would like to express its sincere thanks to Nina Perlina for graciously granting permission for this reprint. We welcome comments on this and other forthcoming titles to be released in this series.

Click 05_Perlina_Ol’ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days to begin download

This is the first title in Slavica's new imprint, Three String Books. Three String Books is an imprint of Slavica Publishers devoted to translations of literary works and belles-lettres from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and the other successor states of the former Soviet Union. Apollon Bezobrazov is a novel by a “recovered Surrealist.” Making an uncharacteristic detour into prose in the 1920s, the Russian émigré poet Boris Poplavsky presents a novel that reveals the Surrealist influence of prominent Parisian contemporaries like André Breton and Louis Aragon and rebels from it. The hero, and the novel’s namesake, embodies the figure of the urban hippie—the flâneur of French literature—while the narrator, a young Russian, falls under his spell. The story describes in colorful, poetic detail the hand-to-mouth existence of a small band of displaced Russians in Paris and Italy. It chronicles their poverty, their diversions, their intensely played out love affairs, and Bezobrazov’s gradual transformation in the eyes of his admiring followers. The novel abounds in allusions to eastern religion, western philosophy, and 19th-century Russian literature. In its experimental mixing of genres, the work echoes Joyce’s Ulysses, while in its use of extended metaphors it reveals the stylistic impact of Marcel Proust. Not published in complete form in Russian until 1993, Apollon Bezobrazov significantly broadens our understanding of Russian prose produced in the interwar emigration. John M. Kopper is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He has co-edited Essays in the Art and Theory of Translation (1997) and “A Convenient Territory”: Russian Literature at the Edge of Modernity (2015), and in addition to articles devoted to Poplavsky, has published on Tolstoy, Gogol, Nabokov, and Bely.

Book Reviews

Review by Bryan Karetnyk in The Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 2016

Over his distinguished career, Barry Scherr has contributed prolifically and insightfully to Russian literary scholarship. His work is remarkable both for its depth and its breadth. His book on Russian poetry covered the entire verse tradition and placed him at the forefront of scholarship on Russian poetics. In the decades since that book appeared, he has continued to explore questions of verse form both within the Russian tradition and from a comparative perspective. He has also written widely on Russian prose of the early twentieth century, from science fiction to socialist realism. His publications include incisive essays about translation, about cinema, about Russian-Jewish writers. Scherr’s devotion to the field is legendary, as is his generosity of spirit. He has been and remains an inspired mentor and interlocutor to generations of students and colleagues, often reading their work before publication, generously supplying suggestions and, when necessary, gentle corrections. The present collection is a chance for many who have benefited from Scherr’s wisdom to pay him back in kind. The articles, written by colleagues and former students, intersect with the major fields of his work: poetry and poetics, prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as translation, cinema, science fiction, and sociolinguistics.

Contents

ELLEN CHANCES: Tarkovskii's Film The Sacrifice and its Russian Liteary Roots     9

E.W. CLOWES: Berdiaev's Samopoznanie: Philosophical Autobiography as Creative Act     21

JULIAN W. CONNOLLY: Metamorphosis of a Dreamer: From Dostoevskii's "White Nights" to Nabokov's The Eye     31

JOSEPH L. CONRAD: Devils and Devilry in Chekhov's Vory     39

CRAIG CRAVENS: A Proliferation of Prolixity: The Multiple Narrators of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk     47

DAVID S. DANAHER: Conceptual Metaphors for the Domains TRUTH and FALSEHOOD in Russian and the Image of the Black Sack in Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Il'ich     61

ANDREW R. DURKIN: Pushkin and Joseph Conrad: From the Povesti Belkina to the Limits of Parody     77

DAVID A. GOLDFARB: Gogol's Cornucopia: Dead Souls and Arcimboldo     85

JANE GARY HARRIS: Damskii Mir and the Gendering of the Occult     99

SUSAN MCREYNOLDS: From Cultural Curator to Religious Savior: Dostoevskii's Changing Vision of Russia's World Role     115

JASON MERRILL: Fedor Sologub's Symbolist Recreation of Lev Tolstoi     123

CATHARINE THEIMER NEPOMNYASHCHY: Koshkin Dom: Following the Golden Shoelace     139

ROBERT A. ROTHSTEIN: From the Traditional Ballad to the "Cruel Romance"     151

DARIUSZ TOĿCZYK: Literature of the Gulag in the Context of Nazi Camp Literature: Towards a Poetics of Testimony     167

CAROL R. UELAND: Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr Kushner: The Relationship in Verse     181

RUSSELL SCOTT VALENTINO: What's a Person Worth: Character and Commerce in Dostoevskii's Double     203

City of Memory brings together 122 poems written by 21 authors in the last quarter century. These writers draw upon the deep-rooted tradition of Polish literature established by poets like Kochanowski, Norwid, and Herbert, whose worldviews and aesthetics they often challenge. Experimenting with new verse forms and literary conventions, individual poets marvel at the beauty of the surrounding scenery, express their fears or evoke fleeting memories of people and places, yet in the end return to the storehouse of native heritage and history. Michael J. Mikos is Professor and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of 15 books, including a six-volume history and anthology of Polish literature, and recipient of the PEN Club Prize for his translations of Polish literature into English.

Book Reviews

The Sarmatian Review, April 2016