It was nearly 30 years ago that I first read a book by Mikhail Bulgakov – I was living in Athens at the time at the extraordinary events of The Master and Margarita remain with me to this day. It was with some pleasure, then, that I found The Heart of a Dog a few weeks ago. This is a much slighter work but, with its themes of transformation, degeneration and the inability to transcend cultural origins clearly no less dangerous in the Soviet Union.
Read the full review here.
Vasily Grossman never had the chance to see his masterpiece published and, indeed, apparently died thinking that it would never be read. Fortunately for us, a copy of the manuscript did manage to make its way to friendly hands and it has become published and celebrated around the world – although its reception in Russia remains problematic, as might be imagined. Recently, a dramatized version was performed on BBC radio (which I have not heard) and a number of other programmes have been discussing the book, in the context of it being perhaps Russia’s greatest novel and one of the great novels of world literature.
Read the full review here.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is one of a number of Soviet era Russian (in fact Ukrainian) authors unable either to settle into the post-revolutionary lifestyle or to have his fiction published. In fact he died, in 1950, forty years before the stories in this collection were published and these were the first to be made available to the public. It is not, of course, very surprising in retrospect to consider that the individualist Krzhizhanovsky, unable to blend in to society as a whole, would constantly find his work rejected by the official censors and the editors who acted as their gatekeepers.
Read the full review here.
The work of Vasily Grossman has been rather rediscovered in recent years – his masterpiece Life and Fate has been accorded lavish screen treatment and the ending of the Soviet system made possible the publication of numerous manuscripts which had previously been suppressed in one way or another. For the first time, then, we the readers are able to enjoy properly translated editions of full versions of the books as intended by the author, complete with chronology, explanatory notes and so forth. In addition, the translation is completely new, by Antony Beevor, and is said to wholly supersede previous versions (none of which I have read so I am relying on second hand reports for this point).
Read the full review here.
The apocalypse has arrived via a massive nuclear war and a few thousand desperate survivors cling to what remains of life in the once glorious metro system of Moscow. Their lives are hard, brutish and short. Most people are tied to the micro-regimes that have emerged at one or a small number of subway stations as part of the system – in fact, numerous such regimes have emerged and it is the differences between them that mark the majority of the action of the plot.
Read the full review here.
About half way through this book, I was thinking in admiring terms of the bravery of the author in including an extensive episode in which the protagonist (the master thief Harold) investigates the closed to the outside world blighted area within the city walls in a way that reminded me slightly of the wonderful Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, which I have also reviewed at this website.
Read the full review here.
From Moscow to Edinburgh to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Light Magician (Higher) Anton Gorodetsky endeavours to solve the murders apparently committed by a vampire and to uncover a conspiracy that might date back to the time of the legendary Merlin. Anton is both rooted in a modern Russian sensibility (although he has mellowed somewhat here, perhaps because of his marriage to Svetlana and the birth of his daughter Nadya) and also a fully-fledged member of the Night Watch, being aware of the tricks and treacheries that those on the side of Darkness are capable of creating.
Read the full review here.
Just because life is miserable now does not mean that it is going to become any better in the future. That would seem to be the rather depressing summary of the main themes explored in Victor Pelevin’s very strong collection of short stories The Blue Lantern. In various environments, often bizarre ones, the protagonists search for a means of escape but find that breaking through whatever barrier constrains them does not improve their situation. This is, of course, entirely consistent with the Soviet atheist worldview, which was rather depressing for all those involved by all accounts.
Read the full review here.
