“Russia’s most celebrated writers - including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam - are often depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.”
The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial.
Two takes on Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s fiction courtesy of Michael Robbins and our own Janet Potter.
“The collection’s subtitle, Love Stories, is apt not in the sense that many people end up with love and happiness, but in the sense that the characters — uniformly underpaid, underhoused, underappreciated, and low on groceries — have nothing to hope for but love, the one resource that can’t be rationed. They live in cramped city apartments, assigned to them by the state, with one or two generations of their family, and work in thankless jobs. The most depressing love affairs — emotionless, unrequited, exploitative — shine with promise in these settings.”
Today, Janet Potter reviews Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself for us.
And here I ran up against the first great fallacy of the mainstream media’s OWS coverage. Of course the occupation as such was heavy on students, the unemployed, and men who looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Wavy Gravy. Stroller-pushing contingent-workers like me were constrained from spending all day and night at Zuccotti by the very conditions that made them want to do so. Thus does insecurity—financial, physical, psychological—become the stick that keeps us on the rutted path of late capitalism. (Consumer electronics being the carrot.)
“Occupy Parnassus!: Kirill Medvedev’s ‘It’s No Good’,” Garth Risk Hallberg.
It will take you longer to read this post and click through to its attached link than it would for you to simply read Anton Chekhov’s shortest-ever short story in its entirety.
When Tolstoy first started working on the novel, he envisioned Anna as a kind of empty tramp, but the more he wrote, the more sympathetic he became to her plight. Still, at no point does he absolve her of moral responsibility for her own decisions, as some readers are too apt to do. Anna is a tragic figure, not merely because she is an emotionally deprived woman in a loveless marriage surrounded by empty hypocrites. She is also a victim of her own her romantic illusions, of making, in Tolstoy’s words, “the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.” By giving herself over to the fantasy of complete liberation, Anna becomes a slave to her passions, a star in a tragic story partly of her own design. She is a stark illustration of Tolstoy’s belief that one of the central problems of modern social life isn’t just that we’re all playing roles on a stage, but that those roles often end up playing — and destroying — us.
Andrew D. Kaufman, “How Joe Wright Got Anna Right, and the Critics Got It Wrong”
““…a range of products appeared on the market carrying Pushkin’s image to the masses – cigarettes, matches, candy, pens, stationery, inkstands, liqueur, knives, watches, vases, cups, shoes, dresses, lamps, fans and perfumes. There was even a board game called ‘Pushkin’s Duel.’”
A look at the omnipresent cultural status of Pushkin in Russia.
(Chorus)
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee!
Congregations genuflect,
Black robes brag gilt epaulettes,
Freedom’s phantom’s gone to heaven,
Gay Pride’s chained and in detention.
KGB’s chief saint descends
To guide the punks to prison vans.
Don’t upset His Saintship, ladies,
Stick to making love and babies.
Crap, crap, this godliness crap!
Crap, crap, this holiness crap!
(Chorus)
Virgin Mary, Mother of God.
Be a feminist, we pray thee,
Be a feminist, we pray thee.
Bless our festering bastard-boss.
Let black cars parade the Cross.
The Missionary’s in class for cash.
Meet him there, and pay his stash.
Patriarch Gundy believes in Putin.
Better believe in God, you vermin!
Fight for rights, forget the rite –
Join our protest, Holy Virgin.
(Chorus)
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we pray thee, banish him!
—Carol Rumens translates Punk Prayer, the song that put Pussy Riot in jail, and explains why previous translations weren’t up to snuff.
Also of note: the literary influences Pussy riot cited in their closing argument.
Source: wp.me
Good news for fans of literature from the motherland: The Morning News launched a new series on contemporary Russian fiction, and The New Yorker posted an interesting profile of Boris Akunin, Russian dissident and writer of potboilers.
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