New Russian poets

While looking for contemporary female Russian writers to include in the Summer 2013 issue of Chtenia, which I'll be guest-curating in June, I came across one of the best poets I've read in a while: Polina Barskova. Originally from St. Petersburg, she lives and works in the United States, as a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College.

She calls St. Petersburg "the home that I have left, the home that is absolutely impossible to leave." I like that a lot. It's how I feel about Moscow. She also studied abroad in Prague as a graduate student at Berkeley (she talks about her experience here). I like that too, for reasons everyone who knows me, knows.

Barskova has been publishing poetry since she was nine, and is acknowledged as one of the best contemporary Russian poet under the age of 40. Many of her works appear in English translation, but the best, in my opinion, remain untapped by the English audience. I hope to change that just a little with the upcoming issue.

For now, I'll share a video of Barskova reading a Russian poem by Vsevolod Zelchenko, another young(ish) poet of incredible talent. It's called "Ballada," or "Ballad," and in it the astute listener will hear allusions to many of my favorite works: to Bob Dylan's winding songs, to T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and even the first line of Nabokov's autobiography.

Just listening to her read the poem is an experience in itself. She's not merely reading the words; she's savoring them out loud. I'm starting to think that the best way to learn how to read poetry is to listen to another poet do it.

The enigma of Anna Karenina

All average books are alike; each great book is great in its own way.

Anna Karenina, the crowning jewel of Leo Tolstoy's work, is without a doubt one of the great books of our time. Spanning well over 800 pages, it is great not only in size but in the scope of its moral and intellectual reaches. It has been described as a "flawless" work of art by Dostoevsky and by the notoriously dismissive Nabokov. Faulkner called it the "best ever written." In a 2007 Time magazine poll of leading contemporary authors, Anna Karenina was declared the greatest novel of all time.

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina in the 2012 British adaptation.

What is it about this book that has conquered continents and generations of readers? Hundreds of critics have been unable to pin it down. To me, it's precisely the elusiveness of that something that has made this book so great. And that elusiveness flows from Anna herself. She is the queen, the namesake of the novel; we feel her presence in every scene, regardless of whether she is there. "He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun. But he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."

By his own accounts, Tolstoy set out to write a moralistic novel about a ravishing woman who has everything she wants in life but who knowingly brings about her own downfall by renouncing the societal conventions of her time. As the novel developed, however, he found that his attitude toward the sinful heroine was changing; just as she was gradually winning over the other characters in the book, Anna was simultaneously putting a spell on Tolstoy. Eventually, as the translator Richard Pevear writes in his introduction, Tolstoy "lost sight of her...as he drew closer to her, and finally became one with her." The mystery and force of Anna's character, so bewitching to those who encounter her within the novel, also defies the preconceived notions of the reader and the moral convictions of the author himself. She was borne of Tolstoy, but escaped his grasp, fluttering out of life before he could understand her completely. The need to understand her--the mystery inside an enigma that is Anna--is what keeps readers returning to the novel time and time again.

Other adaptations:

Greta Garbo in a 1935 American adaptation.

Vivien Leigh, 1948.

Tatiana Samoilova in the 1967 Soviet adaption.

Anna Karenina has been brought to life  in more than 10 film adaptations, from the 1935 American version starring Greta Garbo, to the faithful 1967 Soviet version (my personal favorite, with the actress's dark coiffure and exotic eyes), to the 2012 rendition by a divine Keira Knightley. But despite these well-executed roles, it's the invisible Anna in the novel who remains the most memorable, the most alive.

French actress Sophie Marceau in the first American version filmed entirely in Russia, 1997.

 
When it comes to this book, there is no substitute for reading, and re-reading, its luxurious words. A Russian acquaintance of mine who is well into her 60s recently told me she's read the book seven times. I myself am currently on my second reading, marveling at all the ways the novel--or is it me?--has changed since the time I first picked it up. It is a book that keeps developing with you. You don't just read it; you live with it for several weeks. This is what a great book should be.

As a preview, you can listen to an in-depth discussion of Anna Karenina on the Slate Audio Book Club podcast here.

Pruning the classics

Here in the US, Russian writers seem to hold an undisputed pedestal among the ranks of world literary giants. But students in Russia would apparently beg to differ.  As experts in the country compile a list of the top 100 books that they consider required reading, the magazine Bolshoi Gorod ran an article where it polled 600 upperclassmen about their most unloved works of Russian literature. Stunned by the results--and by the audacity of the responses--I decided to post the poll's findings and translate the more memorable things that Russian students had to say about their supposed literary heroes.

Top Russian writers that students would exclude from the reading program


1. Leo Tolstoy

Main works: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

"They should exclude Leo Tolstoy with his novel War and Peace. His chauvinistic views are a serious cause for concern. The novel is simply saturated with condescension towards women. And the saddest part is that Tolstoy portrays it as the right attitude to have: like, yeah, I'm a patriarchal bore, but such is life, and women's fates are already determined."

"I would take out Leo Tolstoy because I didn't read his novel War and Peace, and reading it was really important in order to write a good essay on the Russian-language section of the EGE [Russian equivalent to the SAT]. No novel, no problem."

"I would gladly take out L.N. Tolstoy and all writers like him from the school program. It's like he did it on purpose: sat down and wrote a thousand pages just for his own pleasure, and for the pain of millions of today's students."


2. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Main works: Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov; Demons; The Idiot.

"They need to take out the dreary Dostoevsky, because he's a completely unintelligible schizophrenic."

"I would exclude Dostoevsky, because he's depressive, maniacal and absolutely awful. When you're a teenager and everything already kind of sucks, and you get Dostoevsky in your reading program, it makes life miserable beyond belief."

"As wrong as this may sound, I would exclude Dostoevsky. I think his works are too heavy. People have to find their way to them on their own."


3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Main works: The Gulag Archipelago; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; The Cancer Ward.

"I'm voting to exclude Solzhenitsyn--he's a blue-collar writer, not an artist."

"He's whiny, tedious and boring. It's like he's asking people to feel sorry for him."

"I suggest we exclude Solzhenitsyn. He doesn't add any literary or artistic value. It's bad for you to read so many lies, especially when they're presented in such crude language."


4. Mikhail Sholokhov

Main works: And Quiet Flows the Don; The Fate of a Man.

"Reading Sholokhov is impossible."

"Sholokhov should be excluded. I can't think of a single person who managed to get through him. And Cossaks aren't Russians, so it's not interesting to read about them."

"They should take out Sholokhov. I really don't think his works have any artistic value, and his Nobel prize should have gone to Bulgakov."


5. Alexander Pushkin

Main works: Eugene Onegin; Boris Godunov; pretty much all of Russia's most famous poems, fairy tales and plays.

"After 11 years of schooling, everybody's had it with Pushkin. They should cut him down by about a factor of three. After such intensive studying, you don't even want to hold one of his books in your hands."

"Take out A.S. Pushkin. His works are considered classics of Russian literature because he wrote badly when those before him wrote even worse."

"Take Pushkin out of the program. His works no longer make sense to most representatives of contemporary youth."


6. Nikolai Gogol

 Main works: Dead Souls; The Government Inspector; "The Overcoat;" "The Nose."

"Dead Souls is like personal torture."

"The program should get rid of Gogol, because he despises Jews."

"Gogol. His delivery is too particular. Teachers who follow the syllabus and stick to the standards of teaching are like death for Gogol. And he didn't die in order to have to repeat himself every time."

______________________________________________________

For those not familiar with Russian literature, this list just about covered the country's most well-known writers. On the other hand, the students listed great Russian writers whom they would include in the reading program instead. These include the sci-fi Strugatsky brothers, along with Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Dovlatov--with the first being prominent Soviet-era dissidents, and the latter two emigrating from the Soviet Union altogether. Among foreign writers, Russian students preferred Dante, Ayn Rand, Chuck Palahniuk, Roberto Coelho, James Joyce and... J.K. Rowling. I guess some things are the same, no matter what country you're in.

Story time: David Sedaris reads Miranda July

One of my favorite podcasts is The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, a monthly gem in which a well-known writer reads a short piece by another, often lesser-known writer. In this month’s fiction podcast, David Sedaris reads “Roy Spivey,” by the writer and filmmaker Miranda July. You may have seen her in the film she wrote and starred in, "You and Me and Everyone we Know," or the more recent "The Future." She's also published multiple short story collections, produced music videos and staged performances, and curated exhibits of her own work at  the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. She even designed a set of pillowcases. And all this from someone who dropped out of college her sophomore year. Most people either worship or hate her, but the latter, as Sedaris says, are probably just jealous.

Miranda July: writer, filmmaker, performance artist.

I listened to this story during a leafy walk home from the grocery store. It made me smile to myself, causing passersby to give me curious looks. To quote the podcast website, "the story, which appeared in the The New Yorker in 2007, is about a young woman’s encounter with a famous actor aboard an airplane and the reverberations of their exchange throughout her life."

He slept for the first hour, and it was startling to see such a famous face look so vulnerable and empty. He had the window seat and I had the aisle, but I felt as though I were watching over him, protecting him from the bright lights and the paparazzi. Sleep, little spy, sleep. He was actually not little, but we're all children when we sleep. For this reason, I always let men see me asleep early on in the relationship. It makes them realize that even though I am 5 feet 11, I am fragile and need to be taken care of. A man who can see the weakness of a giant knows that he is a man indeed...

 This story is wonderfully written and wonderfully read. A meeting through words of two great contemporary American writers. Take a listen.

recent reads

Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

by Maria Semple

Ice. It's trippy, symphonies frozen, the unconscious come to life, and smacking of color: blue. (Snow is white; ice is blue. You'll know why, Bee, because you're knowledgeable about these things, but I had no idea.) It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidden black.

Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette is referred to in multiple reviews as an "epistolary novel"--a fancy way to describe the ultra-modern lack of narrative that makes this book feel as hip and unorthodox as its heroine, and the city she spends most of her time trying to flee. Stitched together from a trail of emails, police reports and handwritten notes, Bernadette tells the story of crumbling architect Bernadette Fox, a former MacArthur genius gone cuckoo amid the rain and riffraff of Seattle. After Bernadette gradually disconnects from her Microsoft-god husband and disappears without a trace, it falls on her clever daughter, Bee, to find her. Add to the mix a demonic blackberry bush, a swarm of private-school moms collectively known as "the gnats" and a virtual personal assistant named Manjula, and you're not even close to describing the mayhem that animates this unusual novel. It ends with a wild chase across Antarctica--bringing the story, and Bernadette, back to the city she might love after all. I normally wouldn't go for a TV-show type plot like this, but the book's style, in addition to my own love-hate relationship with Seattle, made me appreciate its caffeine-like jolt.

Death and the Penguin 

by Andrey Kurkov

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complimentary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than amity.

So much for disproving the cold-weather stereotypes: Death and the Penguin, originally written in Russian by dark humorist Andrey Kurkov, sets the reader in the middle of snowy, post-Soviet Ukraine, packing the place with copious deaths and, yes, even a penguin. The main protagonist is Viktor, a struggling writer getting by on writing advance obituaries for the targets of a local crime ring, who adopts a penguin named Misha, not realizing the pet will become his mute and melancholy alter-ego. Misha bears a touching resemblance to the disoriented post-Soviet man, spending most of his time half-asleep in the "hidey hole" behind the couch and emerging only to guzzle frozen herring and to get a sniff of his master's vodka. At times, the English translation--completed, fittingly, by one George Bird--reads with the unsteadiness of a penguin's waddle, but it's not the language that gives the book its charm. It's the combination of crime noir and communist-era humor, which, thankfully, didn't get lost in translation.