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 3
By Vlada 5 September 09
More info from a Russian teacher in London, or something you may be interested to know but may not learn in Russian lessons.
My students doing advanced Russian lessons often ask me about modern Russian literature: What is it like? Who are the most best-selling authors and which of them are “readable” from the point of view of foreign learners of Russian? In the previous blog article I talked about 2 of the most popular modern Russian writers – Dina Rubina and Ludmilla Ulitskaya.
Today I would like to continue the same blog and talk about two more leading ladies of modern Russian literature – Victoria Tokareva and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.
Victoria Tokareva is famous for her short stories. She was born in Leningrad; she is a musician and a script-writer by education. She published her first short story called “A Day without lying” in 1964 and has written a lot of best-selling books since. In 1995-96 she was among the 10 most published authors in Russia. She is the script writer of some very popular Soviet films which are still loved and watched in Russia, such as “Mimino” and “Gentlemen of Fortune” (“Dzhentlmeny Udachy”).
Tokareva’s stories are easy to read (I often recommend them to students doing advanced courses of Russian for home reading), they depict human types which are totally recognisable and exist in real life around us. Her stories are often called “female prose” because they concentrate around lives of women in modern Russia, their problems and destinies. Needless to say, the majority of Tokareva’s readership are women. This prompted some foreign commentators to label her prose ‘feminist’ – which is absolutely not the case if they mean feminism as it is known in the West. The books are just clever and often ironic descriptions of ordinary women’s lives in ordinary circumstances.
The majority of her characters seem dull and incapable of strong feelings, sad and unable to escape from the monotonous grinding routine of their lives. And when they try to break free from the routine, they become even unhappier. However, traditionally for Russian literature, love is the thing that changes everything and turns them into stronger and better people. “Because I was in love I touched immortality and became younger”, says one of her characters.
Reading Tokareva’s prose gives you a good warm feeling – and that’s probably the secret of their popularity. Her stories have open endings, without any conclusions or moralising, and the readers can make (or not) their own judgements.
One of the foreign critics of her works wrote: “Tokareva’s stories are as identical, prosaic and monotonous as life itself, if you see life as a routine; and as exciting as life if you want to look deeper into its underlying mechanism.”
Her most well-known collections of stories are:
Den’ bez vranya (A Day Without Lying)
Zvezda v Tumane (A Star in the Fog)
Mezhdu Nebom i Zemley (Between Heaven and Earth)
Kazino (Casino)
Etot luchshiy iz Mirov (The Best of Worlds)
Strelets (Saggitarius)
Odna iz mnogikh (One of Many)
Samyi schastlivyi Den’ (The Happiest Day)
Salto Mortale (Sommersault)
O lubvi (About Love)
Ptitsa Schastya (The Bird of Happiness)
A iz nashego Okna (From our Window)
Tokareva’s stories have been translated into several foreign languages, but I would strongly recommend reading them in the original for those students of Russian who are interested in modern Russian life and its characters.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow; she is a journalist by training who published her first short story in 1970s. She has written a lot of short stories and plays, as well as “fairy tales” – little allegorical sketches about the people and their way of life. Her works were not published much in Soviet times because they were regarded as too gloomy, describing the “shadow” side of life, as well as too experimental and untraditional, so she became known only at the end of the 80s, after Perestroika.
Her short stories, as with Victoria Tokareva, are mostly about women of different ages in different circumstances, a feature that attracts female readers to her books. However, unlike Tokareva’s stories, they do not leave you with an easy and warm feeling; they feel rather heavy and can be depressing.
There is no doubt that Petrushevskaya is a talented author and a significant figure in modern Russian literature. However, I should say that she is not one of my personal favourites. Most of her stories are written in a very colloquial “spoken” style, perhaps too spoken and informal for my liking. When you read her prose, you feel like you are talking to a real person, perhaps a neighbour or a friend (and not a very sophisticated one, at that) rather than reading a book. I can see how some people may like it but I personally find it a bit irritating. Also, readers accuse her books of being too dark and gloomy and call her prose “chernukha” (black stuff), and I am afraid it is true of some of her stories. Petrushevskaya herself says that only people who do not understand her work may call it black, and if so, I am one of those… On a more positive note, her fairy tales, especially the ones about animals with human names and features, are very funny and are written in a sparkling, amusing and inventive idiom (but full of slang and made up words, so not really suitable for students of Russian!)
Her most well known collections of stories are:
Vremya Noch’ (The Time is Night)
Zhizn’ eto Teatr (Life is a Theatre)
Svoy Krug (Your Own Circle)
Boginya Parka (Parca the Goddess)
Malen’kaya Devochka iz Metropolya (A Little Girl from the Metropol)
Most Waterloo (Waterloo Bridge)
Tayna Doma (A Mistery of a House)
Some of her books (not mentioned here) are experimental and hard to read, so despite my great respect for the author I couldn’t recommend using her works for reading in Russian lessons!