Maxim Osipov Edited by Boris Dralyuk New York Review Books Classics $17.95; 296 pp.
In February 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Maxim Osipov, winner of several literary prizes, whose work has been published in at least 14 languages, emigrated to Germany. He had been living and working in Tarusa, 101 kilometers south of Moscow, and apparently the cardiologist had seen enough of Putin’s terror and treachery and its depressing effect on his fellow citizens. “There’s no hope for recovery,” reflects Osipov. “Both the professor and K. are grown men, established in their fields – both have read The Gulag Archipelago, both know about the mass executions at the Butovo Firing Range, the camp at Solovki, the Katyn massacre, yet they prefer military might...” It is clear that Osipov had foreseen his emigration’s unhappy possibility: “My concerns today are exactly the same as they were some thirty years ago: …not to miss the moment when one ought to leave, forever.”
Kilometer 101 is the second collection of his short work translated into English. There are more remarkable stories, novellas and essays than in the Russian volume of the same name (101-й Километр: Очерки из Провинциалной Жизни, St. Petersburg 2019). The writings, which span 2007 to 2022, are restrained and grimly humorous: “The life experience you gained in the Soviet Union prepared you only for life in the Soviet Union.” One of his primary topics is time rather than character. The émigré protagonist of the novella “Pieces on a Plane,” Matvey, is no darling and annoys various San Franciscans and fellow Russian emigres; the clever but disillusioned and lost young man has run away from his father’s shameful Soviet legacy (he ratted out his classmates for their mild protest poems), but one day he has to return, post-haste, to Moscow for the old man’s funeral; he finally has a maturing revelation on a dizzying stopover in Rome. In the stellar “Luxemburg,” another novella, Osipov depicts not the tiny Western European country but a village-community outside Moscow. “Cape Cod” is about a young couple visiting Boston from Soviet Russia; they eventually emigrate to Massachusetts. To their dismay, their Americanized son’s tenth birthday wish is to no longer have to speak Russian. A further dismay, confusing their financial and social success, comes when he turns eighteen and enrolls at West Point. Even in the land of opportunity, children break their parents’ hearts.
Osipov’s powerful introductory essay, “Sventa,” describes the frustrations and challenges of twenty-first-century Russian life; his beautiful and heart-breaking concluding essay, “The Children of Dzhankoy,” recounts his years of experience at the hospital in Tarusa, his despair about the country’s social problems, and, finally, the death and burial of his mother. In “My Native Land,” Osipov reflects: “In a single decade Russia changes a lot, but in two centuries – not at all.”
Kilometer 101 has my vote for Russian book of the year.
Irina Mashinski MadHat Press; $21.95; 196 pp.
The Moscow native Irina Mashinski emigrated to America more than thirty years ago. In The Naked World, a memoir consisting of overlapping poetry and prose, Mashinski evokes time, but in a distinct way from the way Osipov does. For her, time shifts as disconcertingly as random openings and closings of a theater curtain. Is she really here in the U.S.? Or is she actually back then, back there in Moscow? Her life is emphatically divided, but time keeps crisscrossing, reminding her of the other life, the other possible life, the advantages of having left the USSR, and her regrets. She is in two places and times simultaneously.
She recounts in fleeting memories her family history: “My mother began stuttering when she was nine and the Germans bombed the train that was slowly taking her and her mother East, to the Urals. They had just left Kiev – only a couple of weeks before it fell to the Nazis.” Her grandfather spent years in the Gulag: “I am now at the age when Alexander… returned from Kolyma to resume life – crumpled, hacked – but still his own.” The prose-poem “Milk Bottles,” addressed to her daughter and recalling the challenges she had feeding her as a baby in wintry Moscow, is an especially fine piece. Mashinski’s deepest conclusion about her time-confusion comes in the midst of one of her poems: “No point / in looking for your yesterself.” And yet she shows us that she cannot help herself from doing so – and probably we can’t either.
Robert Leach Glagoslav Publications; $19.99; 282 pp.
Sergei Tretyakov (1892-1937) was a true believer in the Russian Revolution and, more worthily, in Art. The native-born Latvian was pals with, among others, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein, and with prominent art-oriented European Marxists, including Berthold Brecht. He had position and influence in the USSR, and he rode out the 1920s able to cultivate and promote poetry, photography, plays and films, seemingly without having to become “political.” In this excellent and ever readable biography, Leach, as an admirer and translator of Tretyakov’s poetry and plays, essays, and travel writing, continuously sympathizes with the idealist while being scrupulous about what is known and what isn’t about the many turns of Tretyakov’s development as an artist and bureaucrat.
No one knows what Tretyakov made of Stalin’s usurpation of the Revolution through the cult of personality, because Tretyakov couldn’t say or write anything in criticism of it. He was not a party member but a true internationalist who worked diligently to bring China, where he had lived and taught after the Revolution, into the worldwide brotherhood of socialism: “Tretyakov was a patriot, but he was also an internationalist. How did this sit with Stalin’s aim of ‘socialism in one country’? He was the editor of International Literature, in which he had published no fewer than ten sections from James Joyce’s Ulysses. It seems his answer was to throw himself into his work with more vigour than ever, even as his health deteriorated.” He was blocked in the mid-1930s from completing many of the writing and film projects that he had ambitiously started, because the winds of political acceptability were changing so quickly and unpredictably. When Tretyakov was arrested along with tens of thousands of others in 1937 and, probably, tortured into confessing to being a long-time spy for the Japanese, he was already sick and, undoubtedly, sickened by Stalin’s betrayal of Marxism and the Russian people.
Vasyl Shevchuk Translated from the Ukrainian by Yuri Tkacz Glagoslav Publications; $19.99; 294 pp.
Hryhoriy Skovoroda (1722-1794) was a Ukrainian freedom-loving patriot, an eighteenth-century philosopher who teased and taunted the rich and powerful. Even as a student prodigy in Kyiv, the farmer’s son twitted professors, schoolmates, and religious leaders for their un-Christian behavior, namely their enslavement of fellow human beings in the form of serfdom and their self-justified indulgence in luxury. He composed songs and poems and twenty books of philosophy. The novelist Vasyl Shevchuk (1932-1999), another freedom-loving Ukrainian patriot, spins a never-ending road tale, recounting and reimagining the adventures and troubles Skovoroda encountered wherever he landed.
In the first half of the philosopher’s life, he partakes of the world, studying in various European locales and in Ukraine and Russia. As a young man, Skovoroda has his heart broken over a perfect Ukrainian lass: “His star, his Mariana, shone for him! The lord’s blue-eyed housemaid had broken through the ice in his soul like a warm spring breeze, stirring, disturbing and breaking the banks of an irrepressible blue tide. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he saw before him the mirage of her blouse covered in red-and-black poppies, her cheerful, tender gaze and the flaxen hair of her plait.” He moves on to love, chastely but deeply, one of his pupils (who wrote in real life a memoir of his mentor). Later, Shevchuk has 44-year-old Skovoroda lose his heart again, this time to another model of Ukrainian female attractiveness. My guess is that Shevchuk made up approximately 96 percent of the charming romances, whose primary inspiration may have been Pushkin’s tales. It’s not clear that the second woman ever forgives Skovoroda for jilting her at the altar, and it’s hard not to see Skovoroda’s next 28 years of unenchanted wandering as just punishment. Marriage never ruined a good writer. On the other hand, what Skovoroda always sought, in life and certainly in the novel, is personal freedom. No matter his good fortune or happy opportunities, the character never regrets hitting the road: “Once more you are free, as free can be, Hrytsko! A vagabond Cossack for whom the steppe is your home, the grass your bed, and the book your wife.”
Shevchuk’s charming and wise novel, first published in 1969, is, according to the publisher, a standard text now in Ukrainian schools. If Skovoroda sometimes seems too good to be true, he’s found, perhaps, his heir in Volodymyr Zelensky, who has taken on the role of a lifetime and, so far during the resistance to Russia’s wanton invasion, has himself been almost too good to be true.
Edited by Lisa Rogak and Daisy Gibbons Pegasus Books, $28; 192 pp.
Volodymyr Zelensky in His Own Words is a handy, pint-sized quotebook that categorizes Zelensky’s comments, quips and observations on acting and of course on presiding over Ukraine in its current time of troubles. This compilation arranges the quotations under several dozen categories. In the section “On Hanging His Presidential Photo in Government Offices,” we discover that the newly elected president of Ukraine humbly and most sensibly declared, “Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
The quotebook’s wide net shows Zelensky as a quick-witted, resolute, and decent modern man who just might, with luck, persistence, and the aid of the West, outlast the little demon leading Russia. It might be news to some of us that Zelensky earned a law degree in Kyiv at the same time he was becoming a comic actor. “All my life I tried to do all I could so that Ukrainians laughed,” he declared in his inaugural address. “That was my mission. Now I will do all I can so that Ukrainians at least do not cry anymore.” There are some politicians who prove again and again that self-interest is their only true cause; Zelensky has proved, in wartime, to be the leader independent Ukraine needs in its fight against the invaders. As he has reminded the world: “We are a young country with a thousand-year history.”
Hryhoriy Skovoroda and Vasyl Shevchuk would admire this sparky leader who insists: “Our independence must be defended every day and by each of us. Someone with a weapon in hands, someone with a teacher’s pointer, and someone with a medical scalpel.” In Precursor, Skovoroda similarly declares his commitment to Ukrainian independence and the necessity of each person performing their own role, he as a philosopher and teacher: “The republic in which I too would like to live will be a country of love, friendship and toil! There must be no enmity and hostility. No one would be discriminated against because of old age, gender, or any other differences… The laws would be humane, wise, as opposed to those that blossom under tyranny. There would be a great brotherhood, a society of concordant people … This is the kind of republic which will replace a kingdom of darkness!”
On May 7, 2022, a Russian missile destroyed the Skovoroda Museum in the Kharkiv-region village where the philosopher was born.* “Tyrants can only rule amid fear and ignorance. But the night cannot last forever,” Skovoroda once hopefully declared. “Dawn must come.”
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