Handwriting and Siberian Pianos

Dina Rubina, Translated by Melanie Moore (Glagoslav, 470 pages) $24.50

A couple of months ago I had never heard of Dina Rubina, the bestselling Russian novelist who grew up in Tashkent, lived in Moscow for several years, and then moved to Israel in 1990. Born in 1953, she was precocious and began publishing her stories in 1969. She has published a couple of dozen collections of short stories since then and more than a dozen novels. Her On the Sunny Side of the Street won Russia’s Big Book award in 2007. In Russia, not having heard of Rubina would be like twenty years ago in America not having heard of, I don’t know, Philip Roth maybe. Now that I’ve read the two novels of hers that have been published in English, most recently Leonardo’s Handwriting (Почерк Леонардо, 2008) and Here Comes the Messiah!, as well as an excerpt from On Upper Maslovka and a few of her short stories, and a delightful interview with her from 2005 (in Izvestiya), I will go out on a limb to say that writing fiction is, for her, practically a game at which she amuses herself and that she is pleased has amused her millions of readers. She told one translator, rather too modestly, “It’s not a matter of talent. It’s simply that thanks to the gigantic circulation, a huge number of people came to know my name.”

In fiction’s midst, she seems to me to be happiest finding opportunities to digress, to catch a moment of life that she sees and feels vividly:

A few steps away from Masha, a small group of men and boys huddled over someone who was sitting on a wooden beer crate, his hands rapidly moving something around on a board set up on an identical crate. From a distance, they could have been taken for stamp-collectors had the entire company not given off a peculiar sense of danger and excitement. A belligerent silence reigned above them for two or three seconds to be shattered by disappointed cursing, laughter, and threats. In an instant, the company broke apart, revealing the red tufts of the seated man’s hair and his nimble, tricksy hands, [юркие озорные руки] seemingly about to flee the scene. Then it closed balefully around him again.

In Leonardo’s Handwriting Rubina’s interest is piqued by the day-to-day life of an aerialist in a Moscow circus troupe, and at other (less interesting) times by the wandering life of a classical musician, and by the rhythms of the Ukrainian countryside (where, in fact, Rubina’s parents were from); as the whim takes her, with the plot still in the air (aerialists must stay in the air), Rubina presents her research into ambidexterity and magic mirrors, the second of which seems but a half-hearted plot-device. Occasionally, as if pondering how to proceed, she thinks up situations in which to conduct interviews with her characters concerning the intriguing but not yet realized heroine, Anna Anatolyevna.

Here Comes the Messiah! (Вот идёт Мессия!, 1996), translated in 2000 by Daniel M. Jaffe with special attention and feeling for Rubina’s sharp lively wit, is more engaging, and funnier and has more at stake; in it, Rubina whirls us around Israel with the various bewildering characters and makes several entertaining rest-stops at a Russian émigré newspaper office. One example:

“Has the issue gone out?” Leva asked, breathing hard. And when he heard that it had—but of course—he began to mutter and moan, his mouth twisted up, he collapsed into a chair. …“Not … gray-haired … kids!” The expression on his face was of sorrow, genuine full-weighted despair. Everyone chimed in at once, soothing him, persuading that the average dumb reader doesn’t know dick. But Leva pulled his hand out of Irochka’s tender paws and, with all his might, punched his fists against his forehead.“Not gray-haired kids!” the leading culturologist Bronshtein cried out. “Gray-haired little goats!”

Here’s hoping an intrepid translator will take on a selection of Rubina’s best short stories or her Big Book award-winner.

– Bob Blaisdell

Sophy Roberts (Grove Atlantic, 470 pages) $27

Sophy Roberts is a journalist who specializes in covering remote parts of the world. A few years ago, while in Mongolia, she met a hyper-gifted pianist and decided to help her find a new piano to play on. It began a three-year investigation into pianos in Siberia, how they got there, how they have shaped the region, and what they tell us about Russian culture and history more broadly.

Roberts unravels a fascinating web of stories, giving us a new lens through which to see this near mythical region.

Siberia. The word makes everything it touches vibrate at a different pitch… Siberia is far more significant than a place on the map: it is a feeling which sticks like a burr, a temperature, the sound of sleepy flakes falling on snowy pillows and the crunch of uneven footsteps coming from behind. Siberia is a wardrobe problem – too cold in winter, and too hot in summer – with wooden cabins and chimney stacks belching corpse-grey smoke into wide white skies. It is a melancholy, a cinematic romance dipped in limpid moonshine, unhurried train journeys, pipes wrapped in sackcloth, and a broken swing hanging from a squeaky chain. You can hear Siberia in the big, soft chords in Russian music that evoke the hush of silver birch trees and the billowing winter snows.

The piano rose to prominence about the time of Catherine the Great, and many of them followed exiles and governors into the cold tundra during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But there were also the modest Soviet uprights the populated remote villages and towns.

How such instruments traveled into this wilderness in the first place are tales of fortitude by governors, exiles, and adventurers. The fact that they survive stands as testimony to the human spirit’s need for solace.

And a testimony to how the music of the piano has grafted itself onto the inimitable Russian Soul.

The book is in large part a travel essay about the author’s exploration and discovery of Siberia, with digressions into history and Cossacks, culture and Siberian tigers. And if it were that alone, it would be worth any Russophile’s read. But since it also centers on her search for pianos, about the impactful counterpoint between classical music and Russian life, it is utterly essential. It adds a new facet to our understanding of this realm, throughout which, music courses like a river.

[The piano tuner] showed me another private instrument in his home: an upright Smidt & Wegener piano which he had reason to believe belonged to, or was played by, the wife of Mikhail Frunze, a Red Army commander in the Russian Civil War. The tuner opened the piano up to show me where he had found three gold coins, dated 1898, minted with the face of Tsar Nicholas II. The tuner had sold the coins during perestroika to help make ends meet.

– Paul Richardson