"The Prodigal of Leningrad" by Daniel Taylor

I’m trying to remember when I first became interested in Russian history. Most likely, when I was 10, and one of my Christmas presents (my mother knew me) was a Horizon Caravel book entitled Russia Under the Czars. I must have read it a dozen times. And I still have it. 

My senior year in high school, I discovered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle. In college, I took two semesters of Russian history, and I was glad I knew more about Russia’s past than most people. The professor was a great lecturer; he was also an unapologetic defender of the Soviet regime. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

Is Carney’s Davos sermon the way forward? – David Robertson at Christian Today.

 

Only Mozart – Joseph Sobran at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream – Simon Sebag Montefiore at The Free Press.

Poets and Poems: Osip Mandelstam and “Tristia”

Imagine waking up one morning to discover a collection of your poetry has been published in another country, without your permission and in a mixed-up order you never would have approved. That’s what happened to Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; his second poetry collection, Tristia, appeared in Germany in 1922, via a friend who had the poems published. 

It was beginning to be a dangerous time for Russian poets and writers. The Russian Civil War would continue for another year, although the Bolsheviks were in control of large swaths of the country, including Moscow and St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd and soon to be renamed Leningrad). Mandelstam was in something of a double bind; not only was he a poet, he was also from a suspect social class. He was born in 1891 in Warsaw. His wealthy parents owned a prosperous leather manufacturing business, and his father won the privilege of being allowed to live in St. Petersburg. That’s where Mandelstam grew up and was educated.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Sir Raleigh, Storytelling, and the Sea – Alan Howell at Story Warren.

 

Arthur in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: The Search for Regeneration – Seth Myers at An Unexpected Journal.

 

Footsteps – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Explore the World of Willa Cather in Her Nebraska Hometown – Jeff MacGregor at Smithsonian Magazine. 

"Solovyov and Larionov" by Eugene Vodolazkin

Solovyov is a young historian, living in St. Petersburg. He grew up somewhere in the south; the village’s only name was its railroad mileage designation – Kilometer 715. His mother worked as a signaling worker for the railroad; when she died, his grandmother took her job for  time, but then the railroad closed the station. His closest friend was a girl, Leeza (for Elizabeth) Larionova, but Solovyov left the village to study at university. He hasn’t seen Leeza for six years. 

What the young historian has made the major focus of study is General Larionov (he seems always to have been called General, even as a child). The man (1882-1976) served as a general in the White (pro-tsarist) Army during the Russian Civil War. Many things are unknown about the general, despite the historical research done by many people. 

 

Solovyov determines to solve what is perhaps the biggest mystery of the general’s life: facing a victorious Red Army, Larionov saw his army off on ships sailing from Crimean ports. The general himself remained. He didn’t attempt to hide or disguise himself; the Reds knew who he was. Most expected him to be tortured and then killed. Instead, he was left alone, and he lived in Yalta for the rest of his life before dying of old age. His survival made no sense, and no one has been able to explain it.

 

Eugene Vodolazkin

Solovyov’s decision to solve the mystery takes him to the Crimea, to walk the same streets as the general walked in Yalta, to visit the people who were the general’s friends (or the children f his friends). He will learn that a significant clue is back in Kilometer 715, with his childhood friend. And he will come to understand that history isn’t so much written and studied as it is lived, that the general’s story will become his own story.

 

Solovyov and Larionov is the first novel published by Eugene Vodolazkin (in Russian, in 2012). It was translated and published in English in 2018, after his novels Laurus and The Aviator. It is the broad sweep of the last days of the Russian Civil War. It is about what it means to study history, and how history is often found in very unexpected places. It’s about finding oneself in many of those unexpected places. And it is a novel about railroads and travel, journeys to learn and discover, and sometimes journeys to escape.

 

In short, it is a very Russian novel written by a native Ukrainian. Translated by Lisa Hayden, Solovyov and Larionovmoves gradually but brilliantly to only what can be called its inevitable end. 

 

A native of Kiev, Vodolazkin works in the department of Old Russian Literature at the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg, where he is an expert in medieval Russian history and folklore. His novel Laurus won the National Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Award and had been translated into 18 languages. He lives in St. Petersburg; his new novel, A History of the Island, will be published in May.

 

Related:

 

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.

 

The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin.

 

Brisbane by Eugene Vodolazkin.

“The Signal and Selected Stories” by Vsevolod Garshin

Perhaps it was the fact that he died young. Or perhaps it was because he never published any famous novels, or even unfamous ones. But Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888) may be the most famous Russian writer I never heard of. 

Garshin’s entire literary output consists of art exhibition reviews published in newspapers and 20 short stories published in one volume. The stories may be few in number, but they are wonderful works of experience, empathy, and observation. They’ve been published together as The Signal and Selected Stories.

 

I started reading Garshin’s stories without knowing anything about the author except that he died at 33. By the time I reached the second story, entitled “Four Days” and one of the author’s best known works, I knew he’d been a military veteran and had fought in a war. He had indeed; it was the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which involved several Eastern European countries and Russia against the Ottoman Empire. (The European countries were fighting against Ottoman oppression; Russia was hoping to regain territory it had lost in the Crimean War (1853-1856). 

 

“Four Days” may be the short Russian answer from the Russo-Turkish War to Erick Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front about World War I. A Russian soldier lies seriously wounded, forgotten by his comrades. And he lies next to a dead Turkish soldier, whose supplies keep the Russian alive and whose presence keeps the Russian from losing his mind. And what transpires is an understanding that two young men, trying to do their duty, were caught up in a terrible conflict.

 

Vsevolod Garshin

“The title story, “The Signal,” concerns the life of railroad signalmen. These were the men who, living near the rail lines, signaled open or busy lines to train engineers. One young signalman becomes disenchanted and angry with his treatment by the supervisor, and he decides to do something drastic in retaliation.

 

Other stories concern young men waiting to be called up for military service; love stories; stories of frustrated love, where a young man to get the attention of a nurse he’s infatuated with becomes deathly ill; and other things. Several of the stories remind me of the short stories of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who often wrote about military themes. Written 70 and 80 years after Garshin, Solzhenitsyn’s stories often have the same sense of fate and surprise twists at the end.

 

Garshin died of injuries from an attempted suicide; he threw himself down a flight of stone stairs. He had previously had mental problems. And yet his stories are clearheaded, straightforward narratives. He knew war, and he knew people, and it’s unfortunate that he died so young and with a small if insightful body of work.

"Brisbane" by Eugene Vodolazkin

It begins with a chance meeting on an airplane, traveling from Paris to St. Petersburg. Gleb Yanovsky, a world-famous guitarist, is seated next to a writer, Sergei Nesterov. They eventually agree to write a book about Yanovksy’s life. And this begins years of a collaboration that takes Yanovsky back to his childhood, his youth, and his adulthood, a story that coincides with the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the creation of Ukraine as an independent state, and the unsettled years that follow. 

Several books have been written about him, Gleb says, but none has told the story of his life. What plays a role in Gleb’s decision to allow Nesterov access for writing a book is that Gleb has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He’s facing the end of his career.

 

Yanovsky is Ukrainian, born in Kyiv. His father is an ardent Ukrainian nationalist. Early on, his mother separates and divorces his father. Gleb is essentially reared by his maternal grandmother. His mother’s dream is to live in Australia, and she will eventually correspond with a man in Brisbane and agree to marry him. Gleb remains home. He attends music school, but his father doubts whether the son has a gift for music. But the sound eventually proves the father wrong, although it will be many years in the future. 

 

Brisbane by Eugene Vodolazkin tells the story of Gleb Yanovsky. First published in Russian in 2018 and now translated by Marian Schwartz, it is a story of music, politics, love, and family. Given the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it is also an unsettling book to read. 

 

Eugene Vodolaazkin

The underlying animosity between Russia and Ukraine is ever-present. Gleb’s father is a Ukrainian; Gleb, educated in both Kyiv and St. Petersburg, feels part of both countries. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Ukraine, Gleb experiences the animosity more directly. 

 

But the novel is more about music and how music comes to structure a man’s life. It is only by chance that a producer, attending an art gallery show in Munich, happens to hear Gleb play the guitar and hum while he pays (which becomes his artistic trademark). His career doesn’t so much take flight as rockets upward, until decades later when Gleb must confront Parkinson’s disease.

 

One suspects that Brisbane contains a not inconsiderable number of autobiographic elements. Like his protagonist, Vodolazkin was born in Kyiv and educated in St. Petersburg. Both initially become teachers (Volodolazkin remains one). Both are involved in philology and literature. Voloalazkin works in the department of Old Russian Literature at the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg, where he is an expert in medieval Russian history and folklore. The author of several novels, he was awarded the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize in 2019. His novel Laurus won the Russian Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award. 

 

A word about the translation. I don’t speak or read Russian, so I can’t speak to the quality of the translation. But I can say that the novel doesn’t have any of the linguistic awkwardness one can often find in translations. Swartz also has extensive experience in translation works of Russian literature, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s multi-volume The Red Wheel, his story of the Russian Revolution.

 

To read Brisbane is to discover conflict, language, music, and life. It’s a wonderful novel. 

 

Related:

 

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.

 

The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin.

 

How the Russian and Ukrainian Languages Intersect in Eugene Volodolazkin’s Brisbane (by Marian Schwartz, the translator).

"The Aviator" by Eugene Vodolazkin

Innokenty Petrovich Platonov slowly awakens. He’s in a hospital bed. At first, he doesn’t know his own name or why he’s there. Slowly and over an extended period, a nurse and a physician, Dr. Geiger, explain. 

Childhood memories come first. His favorite book to read was Robinson Crusoe; he can recall his grandmother reading it to him when he was sick. His fascination with airplanes and aviators. Memories of traveling to a summer retreat and playing airplanes with a cousin. 

 

The nurse unintentionally leaves a bottle of his pills on the beside. And he sees the manufacture and expiration dates – 1997 and 1999, respectively. It’s the first indication that something is not right. He looks like he’s 30 years old, but he was born in 1900 and is “as old as the century.”

 

As more is gradually revealed, the doctor has him keep a journal. Innokenty comes to understand that he raised in the middle or upper middle class of pre-Revolutionary Russia, that the Revolution destroyed the life he’d known, and that he was eventually imprisoned in the Gulag of Stalin and the Soviet system. And more: he became a test animal in a scientific program – he was frozen in a tank of liquid nitrogen to be thawed at some future date. Dr. Geiger succeeded in unfreezing him. Innokenty is now living is a culture and time he doesn’t understand, where little outside a few buildings in St. Petersburg is recognizable. He is a man of a vanished time having to make his way, much like the Robinson Crusoe of his childhood stories.

 

Eugene Vodolazkin

Innokenty had a great love, a young woman named Anastasia, a professor’s daughter. He will learn she is still alive, barely hanging on in a hospital, watched over by her granddaughter, also named Anastasia. 

 

The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated by Lisa Hayden) is a novel of Russia in the immediate post-Soviet period and the pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods. Innokenty Platonov is a representative of a vanished time and the soul so many strive for, the people who believed that the end of Soviet dictatorship would bring true democracy, only to be disappointed. Innokenty sees and understands this disconnect, and his story because a debate, not only of the Russian soul and Russian people, but a debate about all of us. And while his name implies “innocence,” his personal history may not.

 

Voloalazkin works in the department of Old Russian Literature at the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg, where he is an expert in medieval Russian history and folklore. The author of several novels, he was awarded the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize in 2019. His novel Laurus won the Russian Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award. 

 

The Aviator is a remarkable, wonderful story. It is a Russian story and a universal story. It’s a love story, and a story about science and faith. It is a novel of the gulag. It is a story about the Robinson Crusoe in each of us, we strangers in a strange land. And it’s a romance of the dashing aviator contained in each of us, the hero taking both courageous and foolhardy risks. 

 

Related:

 

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.

Poets and Poems: Osip Mandelstam and “Poems”

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is considered one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20^th century. We have his much of his poetry today only because his wife Nadezhda Khazina protected them the only way she could at the time – she memorized them. 

Mandelstam was born to a wealthy Polish-Jewish in Warsaw. He studied for short periods at the Sorbonne, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of St. Petersburg, which excluded Jew, forcing him to convert to Methodism. 

 

The pre-World War I period was a time of intense social, cultural, and political ferment in Russia and a time when poets were aligning themselves into “schools” and groups. Mandelstam was associated with the Poet’s Guild, a group that included Anna Ahkmatova. It was also known as the Acemists, and the group’s poets emphasized form and expression. This group was part of the Silver Age of Russian poetry, a period of intense creative activity from the 1890s to the 1920s.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Ken Fry’s “The Brodsky Affair”

Londoner Jack Manton is somewhat at loose ends. He specializes in art, and is occasionally able to spot a gem hidden, so to speak, in plain sight – other experts not realizing they’re seeing a forgotten or unknown masterpiece. His recent luck earned him a cool 85,000 pounds, but that’s mostly spent, so he’s on the hunt for more. He gets help with research from his live-in girlfriend, Tamsin Greene, but she’s rather quickly coming to resent his unstable ways and general lack of seriousness.

And then he finds an auction in Perth, Australia. For sale are a paired set of paintings by a Russian artist, Mikhail Brodsky, who died in World War II and is already being ranked with the likes of other Russian artists like Wassily Kandinsky. Except neither the auction house nor anyone else, supposedly, knows these are works by Brodsky. Manton goes to Australia, secures the paintings for a ridiculously low price, and has them shipped home.

After he returns to London, he learns that the manager at the auction house has been killed, and the only thing taken was the records of who bought those two paintings. As it turns out, a Russian collector is also after works by Brodsky and other Russians, and employs a professional assassin to get what he wants. And he wants those paintings.

So does Manton. He knows there must be more. And so beings a narrative of travels to Russia, Paris, and Lyon, travels that leave a trail of bodies and general mayhem.

Ken Fry

The Brodsky Affair: Murder is a Dying Art is one of six suspense thrillers written by author Ken Fry, and it’s a humdinger of a read. It’s about the corruption of post-Soviet Russia, the art market, and the passions that drive art collectors. Fry places the roots of the story in World War II and the Nazi German invasion of Russia, but this isn’t a Nazi-looting-of-art kind of story – the Nazis hated the kind of art produced by abstract and expressionist painters (Brodsky is a fiction, but others mentioned in the story like Kandinsky are not).

Manton is the hero of the story, but he’s a distinctly flawed one. He finds himself up against a ruthless assassin, who will do anything and kill anyone to get what his client wants. And the bodies keep piling up.

The Brodsky Affair is an intriguing, well-written story about art, and corruption, and murder.

Painting: Autumn Landscape with Boats by Wassily Kandinsky (1908).

Poets and Poems: Marina Tsvetaeva and “My Poems”

The life of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva reads like a microcosm of the tragedy that befell Russia in the first half of the 20^th century. Born in 1892 in Moscow to an upper class family, she married fairly young, only to have her firstborn child, a son, raised by her in-laws, with her husband’s concurrence. Two daughters followed.

She published her first book of poems when she was 18, and she was something of an overnight literary sensation. She continued to publish, and then came World War I and the Russian Revolution. Her husband, Sergei Efron, joined the White Army during the Russian civil war. During the great Moscow famine in 1919, she placed her daughters in a state orphanage; one of them died of starvation. Three years later, the family fled Russia and eventually settled in Paris. They lived in poverty; her husband found work as an agent for the Soviet secret police.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Sergei Efron and Marina Tsvetaeva about 1912.

Anna Akhmatova and the Poetry of Resilience

She was born to an upper class family in what is now the Ukraine in 1889. Her father called her poetry decadent, but more as a commentary on poetry than his daughter. She married and had a son; he was raised by her in-laws with her husband’s agreement. She and husband divorced, although that didn’t help her when he was arrested and executed by the Soviets in 1921.

She would marry twice more; her third husband would die in a Siberian labor camp in 1953. Her son was imprisoned from 1949 to 1956. She would see her poetry published and then banned, published and then publication halted. For a long time, she could not publish poetry, and turned to essays and other non-fiction.

Through enough tribulation to last several lifetimes, Anna Akhmatova continued to write poetry. She is now considered one of the icons of the Silver Age in Russian literature (roughly 1880 to 1920), associated with poets and writers like Alexander Blok and Boris Pasternak. In her own lifetime, she became a symbol of hope and survival to millions of Russians.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.