Our review pile was teetering. Selecting just a couple of titles to review in this issue was too hard, so we decided to cover more titles this time, but with terser reviews.
You have to love any collection of Chekhov stories that begins with an introduction (by Boris Fishman) that says, “Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong.” This collection focuses attention on the great writer’s modernity, humanity, optimism and curiosity.
The translations are Constance Garnett’s and the collection offers yet another great excuse to pick up Anton Pavlovich and spend a few hours with the good doctor, smirking and nodding knowingly about the human condition.
If you find Chekhov a bit tame and want a more bite to your fiction, then you need a dose of Zoshchenko, the premier Russian satirist of the twentieth century.
His writings became popular in the Soviet Union when such humor was still safe, before the dictatorship had reached the fullness of its soul-crushing grotesqueness. Thus, the Powers That Be did not quite know what to do with him, or whose side he was on. Dictatorships have a notoriously bad sense of humor.
In any event, somehow he cowed to the winds of change enough to survive the purges, the War and more, only to be vilified again late in life (he died in 1958). Yet his fiction lives on, reminding that humor and irony, satire and good writing, can outlive even the worst that mankind can create.
The translations, as we would expect of Dralyuk, are light and fluid, allowing the full bite of Zoshchenko’s voice to power through. Snap up this thin volume and enjoy.
If you love historical fiction, this one is for you. It traces the fascinating fates of two Rembrandts, keystones in the art collection of the famous Yusupov family, from their creation in Amsterdam in the 1660s to their stays in France, Russia, England, and finally Washington.
Time and again, the paintings are protected by the family’s courageous women, and they accumulate a fascinating provenance, surviving nearly 300 years of war, revolution, and turmoil.
An amazing story of survival that Andresen half-fictionalizes (we can, of course never know the full story) into a novel that is as entertaining as it is informative.
A content, everyman clerk is thrown out on his ear after being accused of embezzlement. Remizov, no friend of the Revolution or modernization, follows poor Pyotr Marakulin’s fate, illuminating the lives of people who live on the fringes of society, while considering the great questions of suffering and existence, reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. It is a tale full of dreams – where dreams and reality are in fact bound together, and of the idiom of folklore and fairy tales.
This, the first translation of a seminal novel by one of the most important of the Symbolist writers (and one of the greatest Russian writers that few outside Russia know – he penned over 80 books and was hugely influential on the generation of writers that followed him), is a vital novel.
Whether you read it to get a sense of Petersburg in the pre-revolutionary era, or to savor the poeticism of Remizov’s prose, you won’t be disappointed.
Speaking of overlooked classics, this short novel by the grand daddies of Russian science fiction is a must read. The authors themselves called it their “most complete and important work.” Yet it has lived mostly in obscurity while other works by the authors (Roadside Picnic, Hard to Be a God, Monday Begins on Saturday) have become more popular and well known.
A story within a story, A Snail on the Slope grapples with the clash of civilizations, with how one copes with life in an oppressive bureaucracy (the Administration), or with life in a primitive, violent, yet also compelling society (the Forest).
Throughout the Soviet era, science fiction was a genre used for careful and pointed criticisms of the regime. Gifted authors such as the Strugatskys turned their vivid stories into searing portrayals of alienation with everyday life that resonated with many living inside the Soviet state. And this novel may have done it best of all.
If you have not yet read the Strugatskys, make this your first.
Part memoir, part cookbook, part cultural guide, part history, this new hardbound cookbook is a culinary adventure through Russian cuisine, with particular attention to the culture’s Asian side.
Mining Hudgins’ and her husband’s extensive travels around Eastern Russia, and her knowledge and experience as a Russian professor, the couple present over 140 recipes that seem more inclined to fusion than puritanism. There are Siberian Venison-and-Blueberry Dumplings, but there is also adzhiga, what they call “Russian Red Salsa; there are recipes for Sangria and for Korean Carrot Salad, for Pine Nut Salad and Trans-Siberian Chicken Salad.
Each recipe is well introduced and explained in detail, with chapters and recipes tied together with memoirs, travel stories, and a general sense of Russian “avos,” as in you make the best you can with what you have, even if, like the authors, that meant cooking on “stoves from Hell.”
The authors’ love for good food, cooking, and Russian culture, particularly of the Far East, all infuse this new collection. Should be on any gastronome’s bookshelf.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
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