As he drinks, Venya communes with angels, demons, and fellow passengers. Moscow to the End of the Line is a story of an alcoholic poet traveling on a local train to a utopian town, where his beloved and their young son await him. William Tjalsma Northwestern University Press Written in the 1970s and passed around in samizdat, Venedikt Erofeev’s postmodernist “poem in prose” has been described, alternatively, as an odyssey, a pilgrimage, a confession, a lamentation, and a Dantean journey through hell. Venedikt Erofeev Moscow to the End of the Line Trans. But that doesn’t mean she is not searching for a way out. The strangeness of her job increases by the minute, and as Lena plugs along, in a tale reminiscent of Kafka, Pelevin offers a compelling psychological portrait of a human being forced to live in cruel and absurd circumstances. Victor Pelevin’s surrealist novella takes place in a post-Soviet, money-crazed Moscow, where a young girl by the name of Lena wins the dubious opportunity to entertain the well-to-dos in an elite club. Andrew Bromfield New Directions A society is best understood through the plight of its frailest in Russia, women, routinely referred to as the “weaker sex,” often bear the brunt of economic and military disasters. Victor Pelevin Hall of Singing Caryatids Trans. Like most of Alexievich’s books, Voices of Chernobyl cannot be bought in Moscow bookstores. In the narratives of survivors-wives of firemen, refugees, resettlers, soldiers, pilots-the desire to forget wrestles with the obligation to remember the veneration of heroism with rage at the country that has consumed their sacrifice but failed to save them. Voices of Chernobyl narrates the catastrophic aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. Keith Gessen Picador Svetlana Alexievich’s books constitute a genre of its own, in which individual narratives merge into something akin to a Greek chorus that the writer moves from the periphery to center stage. Svetlana Alexievich Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster Trans. The three books discussed below convincingly and imaginatively articulate reality as it is today for many Russians while remaining true to the high principles set by the literary masters of the past. It is a nation haunted by its violent past and struggling to find meaning in the ideological void left by several collapses of statehood. Yet Russia of the twenty-first century is as far removed from the world created by its literary classics as is Europe or America. IT IS NOT UNUSUAL FOR those on a quest to understand Russia to plough through Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy the more adventurous add Bulgakov and Pasternak to their lists. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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