Stamp Album
Andrei Sergeev
Glas #28 (Distributed by Northwestern University Press), $17.95
The latest addition to the Glas series on New Russian Writing is a gem. It is an able translation of a Booker Russian Novel winner, Andrei Sergeev’s Stamp Album, a memoir of growing up in a communal flat in Stalin’s Russia.
The title of the book is appropriate—Sergeev has pasted his well-tuned memories in a favorite album, in more or less chronological order, so they can be savored randomly, depending on where the book opens.
In fact, one of the beauties of this novel is that you can dive in anywhere and find amusing tidbits, observations, biographies of flat mates, etc. The characters appear and disappear like phantoms and time becomes irrelevant. There are poems, jokes, slogans and documentary inserts, offering a taste of this eerie time in Russian history.
Stamp Album is best read haphazardly, over many months. Like a banquet hall full of amazing appetizers, it would be too much to properly digest in one sitting. But just don’t miss it.
Ivan the Terrible
Robert Payne & Nikita Romanoff
Cooper Square Press, $18.95
Writing history is not a science, but an art—the art of storytelling. It is about one’s skill in telling a tale whose outcome the reader likely already knows. And when it comes to a history of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, you know from the outset that it is going to end badly.
Payne and Romanoff meet the challenge in this paperback re-issue of a 1975 edition. They draw a compelling portrait of Ivan, without sinking into the melodrama of his childhood trials and their impact on his psyche. The character of Ivan is vividly presented against the backdrop of the brutally cruel era in which he lived. Ivan, we see in this well-documentated biography, was as much a product of his times as of his troublingly psychotic mind.
It can be deeply satisfying to read close-focus histories such as this. It stems the temptation toward generalizations about an era, in which we forget that history, like art, is much more subtle. Ivan’s reign lasted 54 years, more than a lifetime (perhaps two?) for people of his time. And, together with the evil he perpetrated, he had an immense effect on Russian architecture, the arts, governance and geography. His reign merits better understanding, and this book tells the story in a manner that makes the study enjoyable.
Russia’s Virtual Economy
Clifford G. Gaddy & Barry W. Ickes
Brookings, $19.95
Just as the impending darkness of the Time of Troubles hangs over any biography of Ivan the Terrible, so there is a looming shadow darkening the Russian economy. There are debates about its size and importance, but few can deny it is out there. Fewer still name it.
Gaddy and Ickes think the shadow is dark indeed. And they name it too: “Gazprom.” Or perhaps “Gazprom and the other Soviet behemoths who are holding the Russian economy at gun point.”
Their diagnosis, oversimply put, is that much of Russia is controlled by a “virtual economy”: the State continues to prop up unwieldy, feudal enterprises which produce less than the sum of their inputs; the State must do this because these enterprises subsidize social services, provide moderate employment, and have immense political capital; real, market-oriented enterprises are penalized because they cannot afford to play by these warped economic rules.
The diagnosis seems sound, and the authors’ trenchant analysis of the economy’s particular dependence on Gazprom (which is allowed favorable export rights in exchange for pricing domestic gas at one-tenth market prices) offers a scary picture.
How is Russia to break out of this cycle of dependence? Cold turkey? The authors’ are less clear on this point. But certainly knowing the outline of the problem does aid in its resolution.
The Russian Context
Eloise M. Boyle & Genevra Gerhart, eds.
Slavica, $49.95
The long-awaited re-issue of Genevra Gerhart’s The Russian’s World by Slavica came with the added good news of the publication of this companion volume.
The study of a language is much more than memorizing words and grammatical rules. Mastering it requires understanding the cultural significance of terms and realities which are unique to native speakers of the language—what might be called “cultural intelligence.” The Russian’s World fleshes out the topography of Russian cultural intelligence, providing an invaluable reference on everything from holidays to first names to numbers and superstitions. The Russian Context takes us below the surface by providing copious examples of poetry, song, literature, images and more (and putting recordings of many examples and some images on an included CD). And, like Russian’s World, it is well indexed, both in English and Russian.
For a Russophile, this can be a very dangerous book. You enter it in search of information on Shukshin, find it quickly, but are then distracted to read a lengthy article on Soviet film, then skim to the section on proverbs and try memorizing some of them ... the next thing you know, 45 minutes has passed.
Nonetheless, no Russophile’s reference shelf is complete without this book. Let’s hope it stays in print for some time to come.
— Paul E. Richardson
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