Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New RussiaMikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, editorsTin House Books |
 |
|---|
Reviewed by Jill Meyers
According to the U.S. Translation Database, which tracks new works in translation (that means no Tolstoy, no Dostoyevsky), there will be less than 350 translations published this year. Chad Post, head of the translation press Open Letter, has stated "less than 1 percent of all books published each year in the United States are literary translations." This is a sad statistic, laying bare America’s literary isolationism, and so it is a triumph that Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia is one of those very few new translations surfacing in bookstores, because the voices in this collection are fresh and vital.
Rasskazy, an ambitious anthology from Tin House, collects 22 stories by young Russian writers—here is the New Russian Realism, say the editors. The anthology is varied, its stories taking on many shapes and subjects. “They Talk,” Rasskazy's first story, transforms overheard cell phone monologues into a fragmented narrative; “Have Mercy, Your Majesty Fish” incorporates posts from a character's rather fatuous blog; “Why the Sky Doesn't Fall” reaches further back for its structure, offering detours through fables.
On the whole, the stories in Rasskazy are much more political and topical than the short fiction published in the American market, and the subject matter pushes and deepens these stories. Some of the anthology's best stories, including “The Diesel Stop” and “Why the Sky Doesn’t Fall,” address the war with Chechnya, and many take on Russian military life, bureaucracy, tension toward immigrants, xenophobia. Some, such as “History,” speak directly to the current political situation in the country. This piece follows an apolitical professor of history who wanders onto the site of anti-Kremlin rally and protest march and is seized in a mass arrest. (The story is based on an actual event, the 2007 protest organized by the Other Russia coalition, headed by world chess champion Garry Kasparov.) Without being overly didactic, “History” leads its readers on a tour of Russian current events and suggests the country may be entering a phase similar to Germany in 1933—shutting down free media, suppressing choice in elections, rounding up and detaining innocent citizens. “History” ends with not a bang or a whimper, but a flicker of recognition. And it is chilling.
The more domestic stories are a pleasure as well: “A Potential Customer,” the collection’s second story, and “A Year in Paradise,” its last, bookend the collection, each providing the inverse of the other. In “A Potential Customer,” Ilya comes to Moscow on break from his forestry job in Siberia, looking to buy a hunting gun for work and also to live a little while in the city. Momentarily, he moves out from beyond his own ego, his “wall of mirror,” and falls into an old-fashioned love affair. In “A Year in Paradise,” the recently divorced narrator, drunk and possessed of a fierce “thirst for the real,” flees Moscow by train, bus, and then foot—and soon finds himself in possession of a cottage in the village of Paradise, not far from where his grandfather died in World War II. There in the country, his only company is a pair of chatty elderly sisters and a positively ancient woman who lives in a small house with her goat. While in Paradise, he builds a garden, grows closer to those strange folks around him, contends with local crime and lack of electricity, and buries three bodies, each new event slaking his once unquenchable thirst for the real. Both of these stories are masterfully told, marbled with black humor, particularly “A Potential Customer,” which allows us a delicious (and bittersweet) ironic distance as Ilya backslides into his old habits of chasing women.
A few of the stories in the collection appear to be here for the sake of variety alone; one story, about a wife’s forcing her husband to become a male prostitute, abounds in silliness (and never finds its footing in the absurd). There are also occasional oddities with the translations—tone misfires, curious changeups in diction, places where it appears Russian slang would work but American slang does not.
However, these are exceptions to the rule. More often, the translations are artful. The translation of Maria Boteva’s "It All Depends upon Who You Believe" is particularly nimble and elegant. The story reads like a confused, searching confession of guilt: after a trauma, a beautiful young woman disappears so deeply into the church that her friends have come to think of her as if she is dead. Translator Victoria Mesopir maintains the breathless conversational tone and segues gracefully into American idiom without losing the story’s essential Russianness:
depending on the time of year maybe they’ll not even let you near her. They’ll think that now it’s bad for her how bad for her? Getting there it’s not that it’s far but while you’re going you see not only the city but you see the fields also and then again houses but before these were fields and they still remain in your eyes and the smells of the earth also every time you look at the fields your eyes become sad that is, your glance sort of brightens but if you go often and see a lot all the others suddenly after some time say: you’re a good person only your eyes are so sad that’s all they tell you, and how are you to know if it’s good or bad this kind of eyes and so she had eyes like these. Not always.
The story continues in this stream-of-consciousness fashion, appearing to digress and drift but actually picking up momentum. The story’s little accelerators are its repeated words and phrases—“eyes like these” “as a result”—that shift slightly in meaning each time they reoccur. The speaker repeats these words looking for justifications for her own behavior, searching out the turning point, but ultimately throws up her hands and abandons the narrative altogether: “The thing is she believes I don’t know how to end this story pity what a pity so sad.” It is a lovely story, one that begs to be read aloud.
The narrator in “A Year in Paradise,” throughout his quiet year of labor, watches as a map of the Russian Federation in his cottage falls apart. First the Far East drifts to the floor, then Kamchatka, followed by Taymir, the Urals. Finally, the map of Russia itself peels off the wall:
I ran over and held it up with my hands. The urge to smoke was unbearable. I turned around in such a way that the map lay across my shoulders; I pushed it against the wall with my back and took the cigarettes out of my pocket.
Outside the window, darkness was falling quickly. I smoked, holding up the motherland. I wasn’t in a hurry to be anywhere.
The image captures the essence of this collection—young writers, holding up the motherland. Rasskazy’s stories—varied, sometimes uneven, but always deeply Russian—are a fascinating glimpse into the modern Russia, and a welcome departure from our self-imposed American isolation.