On accidental reading and "satirico-philosophical fantasy"

A Russian train that makes no stops, the Yellow Arrow has no end and no beginning, and its destination is a broken bridge.

This is the weekend I am supposed to be finishing Zamyatin's We and a series of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales.  And I'm reading those, I promise.  But then I got the last of my Amazon order yesterday (which included my gift-to-me hardcover box set of the Hunger Games trilogy), and found this tucked away inside:

According to the Times Literary Supplement, "Pelevin is a Russian David Foster Wallace, Will Self, Haruki Murakami."  I can totally get on board with (ba-dum!) the Murakami reference.

I mean, it wasn't a surprise; I did order it and pay cash (credit) money for it, after all.  I was surprised at it's length, however, or lack thereof (it is, like, hand-sized, and less than a hundred pages), so I started reading it.

And then I finished it.  It's quick as quick, and very compelling, so if any of you want a taste of contemporary Russian literature (this was published in 1993), take a look:  The Yellow Arrow.

From the back cover:  A Russian train that makes no stops, the Yellow Arrow has no end and no beginning, and its destination is a broken bridge.  Andrei, less and less lulled by the never-ending hum of the wheels, begins to look for a way to escape.  But life in the compartments is going on as always: Indifferent to their fate, the passengers carry on as usual – trading in nickel melted down from the carriage doors, attending the Upper Bunk avant-garde theater, leafing through Pasternak's Early Trains, or disposing of their dead through the compartment windows.


[a rundown of details for me to remember for the exam, and a comparison to The Giver, after the jump]

Capitalism made asses of our kind

Okay, two things here, people, only one of which is forgivable:

1) Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit (Котлован) is one single-chapter, 140 page book.  WHO DOES THAT.
          (Answer:  Platonov.  He was one of Olesha's contemporaries [of course he was], and managed to write things that no one could fit into any genre;  Mirra Ginsburg called The Foundation Pit "a satirical tragedy," and Caryl E., "experimental fiction.")

(Spoilers follow, if, um, I have readers who will really care about the ending to a Five Year Plan novel that I am summarizing for my own use as a study guide...)
…
2) Mirra Ginsburg's introduction, which is entirely helpful and lucid in many ways (I even highlighted a section on the general trends in Russian literature that aren't even directly relevant to Platonov!), includes a section on the character studies written in Foundation Pit.  It ends with this passage:

"And finally the child – one of Platonov's many unforgettable portraits of children – almost a dream child this time, a daughter of the dead […], the child who represents the 'bright Communist future' for whose sake all the present activity is carried on, who learns and mouths revolutionary slogans until they sound like cruel taunts, and who, in the sorrowfully ironic climax of the book, dies as winter sets in […]"


I will ask again, WHO DOES THAT.

Look, I read introductions.  I read authors' introductions, collectors' introductions, editors' introductions, translators' introductions, I even read (and revel in) fictional introductions.  I know not everybody does.  I get that.  But they are there for a reason, especially in the case of translated or edited texts.  And I don't mean "there" as in, published with the book, but "there" as in, BEFORE the freaking book begins.  Not after.  That's an Afterword.  That is a thing, people.

DO NOT TELL ME what characters are going to die.  Especially, especially, if that death is the crux of the sorrowfully ironic climax of the book.  That's just cruel.

(more on The Foundation Pit and it's sorrowfully ironic climax after the jump)

He showed his especially sparkling teeth manfully.

"And still, maybe, someday in a large waxworks museum there will stand a wax figure of a strange man, thicknosed, with a pale, kind face, with disheveled hair, boyishly plump, in a jacket which has one button left on the belly; and on the cube there'll be a plaque:

NIKOLAI KAVALEROV

And nothing more.  That's it.  And everyone seeing it will say, 'Ah, that's the one who lived at a famous time, hated everyone and envied everyone, bragged, got carried away, was obsessed with great plans, wanted to do a lot and did nothing – and ended up by committing a disgusting, malicious crime…'"

Завысть, or Envy

Not the cover of the book I read.  Or rather, the cover of the book in a different translation.  Berczynski's translation, which I did read, is invisible online.  I have no idea how I came to own it.

Author:  Yury Olesha.  Wrote this when he was 27.  He was… odd.  Not as odd as Gogol (but who is?), but still, the fact that Kavalerov's narrative style is a direct echo of Olesha's own worldview.  

"At the All-Union Congress of Writers in 1934, Olesha admitted that 'Kavalerov looked at the world' with his eyes and that the 'hues, colors, images, comparisons, metaphors and conclusions of Kavalerov' were his own.  Kavalerov's mode embraces the whole work, its conception and realization.  He is as much Envy for us as he is the 'envier' for Ivan Babichev." (emphasis mine)

Date published:  1927, right in the middle of what has been termed Russia's Silver Age (1917-1934).  Envy, like so much of Russian literature, was first published in a literary journal (Red Virgin Soil/Красная Новь - yes, that is a real thing).

What's so special about this, then?:  Envy is divided into two parts, the first told in first-person narration from the point of view of the envious Kavalerov, the second told in third-person and focusing more on Andrei and Ivan Babichev, but ending on Kavalerov's fate.  Furthermore, consistency in tense is as tenuous as Ivan's and Kavalerov's holds on reality.  There is even a Hamlet-esque "play within a play," with the "Tale of the Meeting of the Two Brothers" chapter in the second half of the book (which I really think is a dream).  Overall, the fluctuating, bizarre structure of the novel continues Pushkin's tradition of openly defying and disdaining lines of genre and rules of form.  

Thematically, lines between what is the object of the satire (Soviet models of living) and what is the subject (dreamers and fantasists) is blurred, as neither comes out winning. 

From the backflap of the Berczynski (which is far more useful than this Schwartz version pictured): 

"First published in 1927, Yury Olesha's Envy is, both stylistically and thematically, one of the most provocative novels from the Soviet era.  Andrei Babichev is a paragon of Soviet values, an innovative and practical man, Director of the Food Industry Trust, a man whose vision encompasses such future advances for mankind as the 35-kopeck sausage and the self-peeling potato.

[…all this a clip from Torchwood after the jump!]

On $100 Amazon Orders

They would be better if you didn't feel obligated to make them.

I am, however, more than excited for this:

NY Times Review:  There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby

Oh, Russian lit, you still manage to find ways to surprise me, and after all these years.

Stay crazy, Russia, stay gloriously crazy.

Today

DID Include:  crying at a brutal, commentary-free documentary of the Leningrad blockade.

DID NOT Include:  exam prep.

Thoughts (apropos of nothing):  Doctor Zhivago, which I am in the first few chapters of, begins surprisingly like a YA novel.  Has this been explored?  I am so desperately interested in Russian YA lit.  Too bad I already started a thesis on Siberian national literary culture.  Post-grad?  Probably.

Tarek Sharif as age 8 Yura in the Doctor Zhivago film (which no, I have not seen.  I also did not know there was a Keira Knightley version.)

"... and then he goes down the opium trail."

Master and Margarita is too big for me to think about writing up right now.  I take novels and pull out one aspect and spend twenty-five pages on it.  I can't quite see how to effectively turn that around and spend only one or two pages summing up all I need to remember of import for the exam.

So I'm going to look at the Gogol Petersburg tale, "Nevsky Prospect."

In tiny letters at the bottom it says Nevsky Prospect.  Believe me.  It does.

I took a class on Gogol and Dostoevsky in my junior year at Mac, with the inimitable Gitta Hammarberg, and after finishing this story this morning and furrowing my brow over every single thing I had underlined or bracketed or otherwise highlighted within the text, I have come to the conclusion:  I did not really read this story.  I can't have done.  I literally remembered nothing about what happened in the plot, nothing about what stood out in the writing.

And there was a whole page dedicated to the beautiful minutiae of facial hair:  I would remember that.

Once I read the short story "Monster" by Kelly Link, and then forgot all about it.  A year or so later, I finally read the book the story was collected in, and reading it again, had no recollection of ever having done so before.  It was as horrifying as if I was reading it for the first time, and only five or ten minutes after I finished reading it did I realize that yes, yes I did remember reading it before.  Evidently I have a kick-ass brain, tamping down the horror after the first time around so effectively that it stayed tamped until I had forced myself through it again.

Shaun Tan's illustration for "Monster," the quote which accompanies it in the book being, "After awhile, everyone had become a zombie.  So they went for a swim."

"Nevsky Prospect" was not like that.  I have yet to have the moment of revelation where I realize, yes, yes I did read that.  And I have an entire page of notes about the story.  Details.  Obviously from in-class discussion, because it also includes the requisite Gitta-isms that I would always try to record whenever they stood out (such example being, of course, the title of this very post).

All the same, I volunteered to lead the discussion on this story in our Petersburg class tomorrow – and, yes, I did think I would be a couple steps ahead, having read it before, but at least I do have some extra notes to draw from, if not, alas, my memories.

So let's see.  "Nevsky Prospect."

Bulgakov, Bulgakov

I've had every intention to get back to this.  I've thought about how gosh dang useful it's going to be, here in just over two months, when I have to sit down and actually write this crazy exam.  I've considered how many details I will better be able to remember if I take the time to write them out (kinesthetic learner, you see).

And then I've thought, hey, wasn't there an episode of Fringe I never got to?  Or what have you.

(and in searching for some nice Fringe-related image, I managed to discover that there is a hidden code in these between-breaks glyphs, which now I will be obsessed with tracking… you have an exam, you have an exam, you have an exam)

Really, the worst obstacle that came up was actually directly related to what should have been most helpful:  my modernism seminar last term.  After coming up with the idea for this blog, it occurred to me, hey, what an easy way to knock a couple dozen titles off my list:  take my notes from class and write 'em up on the blog, save myself the trouble of having to come back to it later.

But then I thought, oh, I'm a couple weeks late thinking of it.  A couple weeks is a couple poets is a dozen poems, and by then it felt far too onerous.

So I read the sequels to Howl's Moving Castle instead.

Alright, I also read all those modernist poems.  And the Tatyana Tolstaya short story from the list, and one of Pelevin's, and the Tyutchev poems, and started both And Quiet Flows the Don and Doktor Zhivago, and have about finished Olesha's Envy (super weird Christmas reading, by the way).  And I finished Bulgakov's Master and Margarita and The Heart of a Dog.

So now I am going to suck it up and *write* about them.  Because that's really what's going to help, right?