Russian Blog
This is a blog by JustRussian about learning Russian. You will find useful tips for learning Russian, Russian courses available in London, information about Russian culture and links to websites with information for students of Russian.
Learning Russian Literature: it’s a woman’s world? Part 1
By Vlada 28 May 09
More info from a Russian teacher in London, or something you may be interested to know but may not learn in a Russian course.
My students doing advanced Russian lessons often ask me about modern Russian literature: what is it like? Who are the most famous best-selling authors and which of them are “readable” from the point of view of foreign learners of Russian? So here are some facts and comments about contemporary Russian authors and their works.
Present day Russian literature is dominated by women, and I don’t quite know why. Are modern women more creative or just more active in the world of publishing fiction? The best known modern Russian writers are: Tatiana Tolstaya, Ludmilla Ulitskaya, Lundmila Petrushevskaya, Dina Rubina, Victoria Tokareva. There is one major exception from this female company, though: Boris Akunin, a hugely successful and charismatic writer who has managed to produce a large number of best-selling novels written in really good Russian. So I am going to ignore the polite “ladies first” principle and talk about him first.
Boris Akunin (real name – Grigory Chkhartishvili) appeared on the Russian literary scene about 8-10 years ago and conquered the reading public instantly. A specialist in Oriental studies (Japanese language and culture; apparently his penname means “villain” in Japanese), he is a master of brilliant plots with a refined writing style. He combines real historical facts with fictional plots so skilfully that it’s sometimes hard to tell the fact from the fiction. His novels are a winning combination of interesting facts, fascinating (mostly detective) plots and impeccable Russian. His first novels were about a super-detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin, a late 19th-early 20th century sophisticated Russian gentleman working as a very successful private investigator: dashing, lucky, hard working, loved by women and envied by men, with a mysterious past (obviously a must for this type of character), with a loyal Japanese servant called Masa who happens to be a former Ninja. In a whole series of novels, Erast Fandorin, and later his descendants living in present day Russia, as well as his ancestors living 300 years ago, go through turbulent times in the history of Russia, solve mysteries, fall in love, win and lose and keep the reader glued to the page. Needless to say, some of the adventures take place in Japan where an exotic world of Japanese culture is revealed to us by the author.
I must say, although I can cynically dissect a work of fiction to see how it is put together, and I don’t like detective stories, I became one of Akunin’s faithful readers. Not only can he write beautifully in his own idiom, he can also imitate the styles of famous writers, both Russian and foreign. Thus, in one of his novels entitled “FM” he created mock parts of “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky, which, according to the plot, were accidentally found in an unknown manuscript – and it looked remarkably like Dostoevsky. In another project, a collection of stories called “Nefritovye Chetki” – “Nephritis Worry Beads” he recreated the styles of famous world writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and others without naming them, thus offering the reader a chance to guess whom he’s imitating.
In one of his newspaper interviews Akunin said he had managed to realise the eternal Russian national dream: have a lot of fun and make money out of it! It looks like he succeeded, although it took him about 10 years to have his first book published.
His most popular novels are: “Azazel”, “Statsky Sovetnik”, Smert Achillesa”, “Osobye Poruchenija”, “Leviafan”, “Koronatsiya”, “Lubovnik Smerti”, “Lubovnitsa Smerti”, “Almaznaya Kolesnitsa”.
My personal favourite is a collection of short stories called “Tales from Graveyards” (“Kladbishenskiye Istorii”) where he gives interesting facts about the most famous cemeteries in the world, and tells a fictional tale related to each of them.
A couple of Akunin’s books are translated into English, and I even saw people on the tube in London reading them, but I don’t know if the translation is as good as the original.
As a downside I should mention that some of his novels, especially the later ones, are so full of miracles and crazy plot lines that they made me wonder whether it’s some kind of self-parody, not intended to be taken seriously. His latest novel “Quest” written in the form of a computer game, I didn’t like at all (but then, I hate computer games!)
My friend Julia who introduced the first book by Akunin to me, said “Don’t take any notice of the fact that it looks like a common detective story – just start reading, and you won’t be able to leave this book till you read it from cover to cover!” And she was right! So I would recommend Akunin to anyone who wants to read something interesting in Russian, whether a student learning Russian, or a native speaker.
Now, back to the ladies:
Tatiana Tolstaya is an accomplished intellectual related through her family to writers, academics and translators of foreign classical literature. She is a philologist by education and speaks several foreign languages. She is witty, sarcastic, clever and ruthless. She wrote several collections of short stories about lives of ordinary people in modern-day Russia, as well as some journalistic essays about modern Russian and Western life, covering topics such as the peculiarities of usage of the Russian language, political correctness in the West, and the Russian national character. She also published one novel with a rather strange title “Kys’ – an invented word which does not exist in real Russian – an apocalyptic but at the same time funny story about a post-nuclear war society on the territory of a city which used to be called Moscow before the catastrophe. It’s satirical, scary and gripping. The way she plays with language in this novel is the most admirable thing about it: she creates a whole new lingo for survivors who return to a primitive state of existence but have the same ambitions and personal problems as their more advanced ancestors. Some of the words created by the author are so juicy that you want to start using them. The word “gribyshi” instead of “griby” (“mushrooms”), for example, is especially good. But, as a result of these linguistic experiments, as you can imagine, this novel would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to read for a non-native Russian speaker, even a very advanced student of Russian. Generally, her style of writing is very “grown-up” and sophisticated – a real pleasure to read, but not an easy kind of reading.
Her most well known collections of stories are: “Day” (“Den’), “Night” (“Noch”), “Raisins” (“Isum”), “Reka Okkervil” (“The Okkervil River”), plus the novel “Kys’” which is my personal favourite. I may be abnormal but this book cheered me up for some reason, instead of being depressing – perhaps because it is so brilliantly written. I sometimes read her essays with my advanced students, especially the ones about the Russian language, but all her books are difficult to read for foreign learners of Russian.
It looks like she is not writing much at the moment, because she has become a TV celebrity, participating in a TV talent show as a judge and co-hosting an intellectual talk show on one of the TV channels (unfortunately it is shown at 1 am!) called “The School of Scandal” (“Shkola Zlosloviya”). Her co-host is another writer called Dunya Smirnova; they invite famous people to the programme and ask them difficult questions about life, politics, philosophy, taking every opportunity to kill them with sarcasm.
Well, modern Russian literature is a huge subject which deserves to be spoken about, so this blog is to be continued…