Tag Archives: Russia

Book of the month: Nino Haratischvili

March 31, 2020 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

In the UK, just before the Covid-19 lockdown came into force (an experience I have begun documenting on a new blog), there was a book-buying boom. Forced with the prospect of staying at home for weeks or even months, many people decided to stockpile reading matter. They favoured long reads, from contemporary tomes by authors such as Hilary Mantel and Hanya Yanagihara to epic classics by Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot.

I have another suggestion for those looking for lengthy, quality novels to add to their lists. Tipping the scales at around 940 pages, Hamburg-based Georgian author Nino Haratischvili’s The Eighth Life: (for Brilka), which has won multiple awards and is longlisted for the Booker International Prize, is a formidable text. Its subject matter is equally weighty, for it takes in 20th-century Georgian and Russian history, depicting the events of more than a hundred years through the lives of several generations of a single family.

The reading experience itself is far from heavy, however. Framed as an exploration of family history written by the grudging Niza, who is co-opted into recovering her niece, Brilka, after she tries to run away to Vienna, the book surprises with its playfulness and ingenuity.

This playfulness takes many forms. There are the structural games that see the reader offered multiple beginnings and teased with hints at events that may not unfold for hundreds of pages. There is the blending in of elements of the fantastic, most notably in the form of the devilishly addictive hot-chocolate, the recipe for which is only passed to select family members on account of the belief that it curses those who taste it. There is the frequent subversion of expectations, whereby characters defy their stereotypes, with the old proving to be much sturdier, the beautiful much more ugly, and the strong much weaker than their outward appearances suggest. There is plenty of humour too, at least in the early stages.

Humour in writing, particularly humour that carries through translation (credit here to Ruth Martin and Charlotte Collins), is often a sign that a writer has a sharp eye. This is certainly true of Haratischvili. The book teams with insights and observations about how we humans work that readers everywhere will recognise, making us feel deeply connected to the story.

This is a powerful tool because much of the history presented here will be unfamiliar to many English-language readers. As I found with several of the eastern European books I encountered during my 2012 quest to read the world (among them my Latvian and Armenian titles), exploring books from countries that have had little literature translated into English reveals how partial the prevailing anglophone understanding of political events is. In the case of the 20th century, the British involvement in the First and Second World Wars – and the subsequent focus on the fighting in Western Europe in history teaching and memorialisation – seems to have constructed a mental wall down central Europe, beyond which few people in this country look.

Haratischvili smashes through this barrier. She forces us to feel the personal consequences of Stalin’s reign of terror, Soviet brutality, the War in Abkhazia and the Sukhumi massacre.

In this, the novel’s length assists her. It takes so long to read that, by the time we reach the end, the events of the early volumes – kept alive in our minds by carefully deployed repetitions and references – have passed into our long-term memory. It is as though we, too, have lived through them, been changed by them and are now looking back on them with wiser eyes.

The book is a little patchy. There are some tropes that do not land quite as I suspect the author hopes (the carpet-weaving metaphor wheeled out in the opening chapters to describe the business of storymaking, for example, feels a little tired). There also seems to be some (possibly cultural) discrepancy between the things that Haratischvili feels needs stating and the things an anglophone author might leave implicit in the text. This has the effect of making some of the observations sound a little obvious or unnecessary. Occasionally, the writing is also a little stagey.

But bof! This is nitpicking. The point is: read this book. If you’re cooped up at home at the moment, this novel will provide some much-needed escapism. It will engross and absorb you. It will teach you many things. By the time you emerge, the world may be changed but so will you.

The Eighth Life: (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (Scribe, 2019)

Picture: ‘Tbilisi Old Town’ by Richard on flickr.com

Book of the month: Guzel Yakhina

April 30, 2019 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

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A little while ago, I was contacted by Anna, a teacher at Go-English language school in Blagoveshchensk city on the border with China in far east Russia – in fact, she tells me, you can see China just across the Amur river (pictured above in one of the photos she sent me).

Anna and her students had been discussing this project and wanted to know about my Russian choices. I sent back a reply and a question – which book would her students choose for me?

FullSizeRender-28-04-19-08-42-4A few days later, I received a response featuring a number of suggestions from Anna’s students, along with explanations for why they recommended each book. The titles they’d picked included Ukrainian author Anastasia Novykh’s Sensei of Shambala (which Evgeniya says completely changed her outlook on life) and Alexander Pushkin’s The Daughter of the Commandant (which describes the ‘Russian soul in every detail’, according to Alina). In addition, Anna had made her own suggestion: The History of a Town by 19th-century author Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, whom she calls ‘the king of Russian satire’.

In the end, however, it was a recommendation for a contemporary novel that caught my eye: the award-winning Zuleikha by Tartar author Guzel Yakhina, translated by Lisa C. Hayden. Irina describes it as ‘a deep thought-provoking book which leaves its positive mark on your heart’, and soon after I started it, I knew it would be my next book of the month.

Set during the period of Soviet dekulakization and collectivization introduced when Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s, Zuleikha tells the story of the nation through the life of the title character. After witnessing the murder of her harsh husband by government forces charged with disenfranchising wealthy peasants (kulaks), Zuleikha is exiled along with thousands of others to a remote region of Siberia. There, the handful of them who survive the cruel journey must build a society from scratch, questioning and overturning many of the assumptions on which their former lives rested in the process.

As with many books that span years and capture the maturing and changing of the central characters, the tone of Zuleikha varies. The grim cruelty of the early chapters recalls other contemporary gulag-related fiction, such as Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, but there are moments of bathos too, as well as arresting imagery. After Zuleikha leaves her hometown and embarks on the punishing six-month train ride around rural Russia that will be the death of many of her companions, a softness creeps in as she begins to forge connections with those around her. This in turn shrinks to baldness in the early days at the settlement, where life is reduced to nothing but a series of punishing tasks necessary for survival, before blossoming to readmit wonder and creativity, seen through the eyes of a child and captured in art.

Tonal shifts notwithstanding, the ingenuity required to survive remains a constant theme. Whether we are witnessing Zuleikha creeping about her husband’s home in an effort to avoid her vicious mother-in-law, or seeing the official put in charge of her train risk arrest with each rare flash of humanity he shows his charges, Yakhina leaves us in no doubt of the precariousness of life in this world. The characters’ physical hardships pale in comparison to the mental suffering they endure and the self-deception they are obliged to practice to negotiate a society hostile to free thought.

Indeed, Yakhina’s ability to depict the collapse of the human psyche under extreme pressure is one of her greatest talents. The supreme example of this involves her portrayal of the breakdown of celebrated medical professor Volf Karlovich, who spends many pages believing that he is insulated from the horrors surrounding him by virtue of the fact that he lives inside an egg, until events force him to break out of his imaginary shell and engage with the real world once more. The unfolding of this episode is exquisite and credit must go to both the author and translator Lisa C. Hayden for the work they have done to imbue it with such tenderness and power.

It’s almost inevitable that in such a sweeping book, some parts drag. Indeed, the nature of the story – in which life is stripped back to its essentials and imagined afresh – necessitates a certain amount of simple, technical description. At points, there is a level of detail and lingering on certain incidental bits of information and action that some anglophone readers may find frustrating, given that such passages would usually be paced differently in comparable English-language novels. There is also a fair amount of recapping, some of which feels redundant.

Overall, however, this is a triumph of a book. It is a masterclass in synthesizing historical research with imagination and insight into how people think and feel. As Irina says, it ‘leaves its positive mark on your heart’. Thanks to Anna and the B2 students at Go-English in Blagoveshchensk for bringing it and the other titles above to my attention.

Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2019)

Photos courtesy of Anna

Russia: cold comfort

January 24, 2012 By in Asia, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

‘How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?’

I’m being a bit self-indulgent here given the hundreds of excellent and intriguing contemporary Russian novels out there. But the truth is, I’ve been wanting to read this book nearly half my life, ever since one of my A-level English teachers described how she’d spent one Christmas absorbed in it in her teens.

I’m not the first to feel this way. When it was published in the journal Novy Mir (New World) in November 1962, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s portrait of life in the Siberian Gulag, which drew on his own eight years imprisonment in labour camps, flew off the shelves, causing the magazine to sell out, whipping up international outrage and eventually leading to his deportation on the grounds that he opposed the principles of the Soviet Union. (He was allowed back and award the Nobel Prize in the end, but not for long time.)

One of the Ronseal school when it comes to titles, the novel does exactly what its name suggests: it follows one prisoner, Ivan Denisovich (or Shukhov), through a single day. Yet this window of time and experience becomes the prism through which Solzhenitsyn diffracts the Gulag system, separating out its psychological, political, emotional and sociological impact on the prisoners, the guards and the wider world for all to see.

When your world is shrunk to a single punishing routine, little things come to matter very much: the mittens you hide under your pillow, the piece of bread squirreled into an inner pocket, the trowel concealed in the wall because it is slightly better than the others and will help you work faster. Dignity and identity also shrink but are not extinguished: they persist in your pride at not scrounging, in playing fair with your peers, in finding little loopholes through which to gain an extra portion by rendering someone a service.

Likewise, the guards are diminished and hardened by their daily efforts to limit and control the existence of others. Meanness glimmers in the thermometer placed in a sheltered corner so that it never drops below the -41 degrees that would enforce a day off work and in the carelessness that sees prisoners hauled out of bed again and again to be recounted.

The narrative reflects this shrinking, slipping into the present second person now and then, as though the reader is a new arrival whom Shukhov has taken under his wing and is showing the ropes. So engrossing is the text (which features on the Translators Association’s list of 50 Outstanding Translations from the Last 50 Years), that it can be quite jolt to find yourself looking up and realising you are not in the Gulag anymore.

All of which is doubly impressive because, really, this is a novel that shouldn’t work. If Solzhenitsyn had submitted it to the weekly workshop on my UEA Creative Writing master’s course, I can imagine the group sitting round, shaking its head, telling him that though the prose was well-written, there was a fundamental problem with the plot. ‘A man getting up, going to work, going back and going to bed is not a story,’ we would have told him. ‘Nothing happens. Nothing changes. Try again.’

What we would have missed is that the change that this book brings about is in its readers. Through immersing us in the details of the Gulag life and making us feel what it is like to have to bank all your happiness and comfort on the ability to secure an extra minute’s rest or a slurp more of cold gruel, Solzhenitsyn bridges the barrier between the imprisoned and the free.

How can a man who is warm understand one who’s cold? Well perhaps he can’t. But he could try reading this book.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (translated from the Russian by Ralph Parker). Publisher (this edition): Penguin Classics (2000)