The New Russian Novelists

Quadrant readers will be familiar with the great classics of Russian literature and will probably have read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and perhaps Gogol’s Dead Souls. The writers mostly known to the West from the Soviet period are undoubtedly Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his novels The First Circle and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Boris Pasternak for his beloved Doctor Zhivago. But which novelists rose to prominence during perestroika and after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union? [1]

In the new market economy, the means of literary production and distribution were quickly privatised and resulted in a flood of pulp fiction on the market. In this instantly commercial context, the value of formal education, cultural achievements and book learning plummeted. Literature instantly lost its authority, and writers were no longer regarded as spiritual prophets, as they had been in Tsarist times, or as courageous dissidents as they were seen to be during communism.

The nouveaux riches quickly took advantage of the changed economic situation, leaving the poor intelligentsia to collect their meagre salaries as low-paid public servants, artists and writers, academics, museum curators and other guardians of the country’s rich cultural heritage. These, the principal book readers in the country, were left with a very limited budget to buy books after they paid for the increasingly costly necessities of life. 

What about protection for the work of writers in this new market economy? Russia joined the Berne Convention in 1995 and, as a result, writers were given automatic copyright over their work. Of course, enforcing copyright is another matter altogether and most writers stand Buckley’s chance of winning any kind of court case in Russia over breaches of copyright.

Royalty payments in Russia are small because print runs in general are small. In 2001, more than a third of all titles published in Russia were printed in editions of less than 500 copies, an extraordinarily small number for a population of 141 million. An acquaintance of mine who went to Russia several years ago to publish a memoir of his dramatic escape from the Soviet Union was offered a 5 per cent royalty on 5000 copies. With the book selling for the equivalent of 10 euros, this amounts to 2500 euros or about $3300. This does not amount to a living wage even if an author produced one book a year.

Advances against royalties, as authors are generally offered in Australia and other Western countries, are unheard of unless you are a big-name author. And forget about the public and educational lending rights enjoyed by Australian writers. Russian writers can only dream about such largesse from their government.

One writer, Oleg Pavlov, commented in 1999 that “literary work in Russia is equal to slave labour. There is no protection for the author’s copyrights … and no way to keep in check the publishing monopoly which brought down the writers’ pay to a level below the poverty line”.

Literary awards and prizes

In the 1990s there was a sudden proliferation of literary awards and prizes, some of them awarded in dubious circumstances to dubious recipients. The most prestigious is the Booker Russian Novel Prize, which was awarded for the first time in 1992 for the best novel published that year. There is also a Little Booker Prize which is awarded annually for literary accomplishments; recipients extend to literary journals and critics.

The Russian Federation awards state prizes for literature. But members of the judging panel have been allowed to submit their own work; in 2001, one-third of all the prizes were awarded to jury members.

Yet another prize, sponsored by the conservative writers’ community, saw fit in 2002 to award the Sholokhov Prize to Slobodan Milosevic for “his irreconcilable position in the struggle for the human rights and freedom of the Serbian and Balkan people”. Milosevic was on trial in the same year at The Hague for genocide in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia.

With all these and many other prizes inaugurated in post-Soviet Russia, it is no wonder that readers might have been confused and standards of literary merit eroded.

The readers and writers

In 2005 Russia’s National Library commissioned a survey which found that 52 per cent of the respondents never bought books, 37 per cent said they never read books, and only 23 per cent considered themselves active readers. (The source did not state how many people were surveyed.) The survey also showed that readers preferred detective and romance novels to the classics of Russian literature, and that most of the younger generation were not interested in books, lured away as they were by the distractions of PlayStation, social media, television and the internet, much like their counterparts in the West.[2]

Of the books that were being read, the online bookstore Ozon.ru, the country’s equivalent of Amazon, showed that in 2005 six of the top ten best-sellers in Russia were translations of foreign authors.

The number of self-publishing companies rose sharply in the new market economy but even if writers could afford this expensive option, distribution, promotion and sales remain a huge problem. Desperate to be published, some writers were offered their books on a subscription basis, asking their readers to pay up-front for a book that would only be printed when sufficient numbers subscribed. In other cases, publishers asked writers to pay money up-front to finance the publication of their books.

The cost of paper, which rose 500 per cent between 1998 and 2001, also put the brakes on publishing. Moreover, a new tax on books in 2002 increased the sale price of books by 30 to 40 per cent, making readers more dependent than ever on libraries. However, the libraries themselves are seriously under-funded and very few can afford to buy newly published books or subscribe to literary journals.

With the economy suffering from rampant inflation and rising unemployment, it is not surprising that readers, looking for distraction and entertainment, turn to books that are cheap and easy to read. As a result, many writers gave up producing literary works and turned to churning out the pot-boilers that would earn them an income to feed their families.

One commentator, N.N. Schneidman, wrote: “The 1990s was, perhaps, the first decade in Russian history that did not produce either a single great new writer or a work of prose which could be placed among the recognized classics.”[3] His criticism is scathing as he goes on: 

The novel in Russia is no longer a carefully constructed artistic edifice, but rather a haphazard collage, written, in most instances, in poor literary Russian and littered with slang and foreign words. The structure of this novel is loose, and there is seldom psychological exploration of the reasons which motivate human action. Characterization in the novel is shunned, and direct speech and Aesopian language are replaced with the play of words and experimentation with various styes. The modern hero is often characterized by a sick imagination and morbid fantasy. Moreover, most novels … lack atmosphere, sincerity, and depth.[4] 

However, ten years have passed since he wrote this, and the books written in the first decade of the new century may well have given him pause for thought.

It was reported in March 2011 by Pavel Basinsky, a prominent Russian critic, writer and winner of the 2010 Big Book Award for his biography of Leo Tolstoy, that as the readers of pulp fiction turned to television, publishers began to support more serious works of literature such as those of the writers I will be discussing.[5] Encouragingly, Basinsky also reported that “being an active reader is still fashionable in Russia, and keeping up with the works of writers such as Pelevin and Sorokin means that you are ‘with it’”.

Victor Pelevin

Victor Olegovich Pelevin was born in 1962 in Moscow to a father who taught military science and a schoolteacher mother. He graduated as an engineer then enrolled in the Literary Institute, from which he was expelled in 1991.

Pelevin is a rebel and a recluse. He hates publicity, rarely gives interviews, doesn’t mix in literary circles, and renounces any moral or social responsibility as a writer. He has as many detractors as admirers but he doesn’t care. He devotes a lot of time to meditating with Buddhist monks, and his credo is, “Reality is any hallucination you believe in 100 per cent”. Pelevin has written many novels and short stories, blending self-conscious postmodernism with magic realism, Russian history, Eastern mysticism and Western pop culture, and he freely experiments with style, language and form.

His fourth novel, Babylon, was written in 1999. It picks up where Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita left off, with its satiric vision of the greed and vanity and corruption of Moscow which, in Pelevin’s book, focuses on the Russian advertising industry.

Like Pelevin, the hero Tatarsky first studies engineering then enrols in the Literary Institute. And, in parallel with Pelevin’s interest in Buddhism, Tatarsky contemplates the infinite while trying to identify his role in post-Soviet Russian society. He eventually gets a job as an advertising copywriter and creates advertisements such as “Gucci for Men—Be a European, Smell Better”.

The UK version of Babylon bears the following inscription: “Any thought that occurs in the process of reading this book is subject to copyright. Unauthorized thinking of it is prohibited.” The book is dedicated “To the memory of the middle class” and one of the characters is a mystic carpet salesman called Gurdjieff. Pelevin certainly has an offbeat sense of humour.

Two years after he was expelled from the Literary Institute, Pelevin became the first writer to win the Little Booker Prize. In 2000 he won Germany’s Richard Schonfeld Prize for satire and in 2003 he won the National Bestseller Prize and the Apollon Grigoriev Award. His books have been translated into many languages, including Japanese and Chinese.

Here’s a taste of his work from Babylon. In this scene, Tatarsky’s friend Morkovin is trying to persuade him to become a copywriter. 

“The situation”s like this,” Morkovin went on. “There are only a few studios that make the videos, and they’re desperate for writers with nous, because these days everything depends on the writer. The job itself works like this: the people from the studio find a client who wants to get himself on TV. You take a look at him. He tells you something. You listen to what he wants to say. Then you write the scenario. It’s usually about a page long, because the clips are short. It might only take you a couple of minutes, but you don’t go back to him for at least a week—he has to think you’ve spent all that time dashing backwards and forwards across your room, tearing your hair out and thinking, thinking, thinking … And if you can hypnotise the client, you take ten per cent of the total price of the video.”

“And how much does a video cost?”

“Usually from fifteen to thirty grand. Say twenty on average.”

“What?” Tatarsky asked in disbelief.

“O God, not roubles. Dollars.”

In a split second Tatarsky had calculated what ten per cent of twenty thousand would be. He swallowed hard and stared at Morkovin with dog-like eyes …

“My God,” said Tatarsky. “Money like that … It”s kind of frightening.”

“It’s Dostoievsky’s old eternal question,” Morkovin said, laughing. “Am I a timid cowering creature or have I got moral rights?”

“Seems to me you’ve already answered that question.”

“Yes,” said Morkovin, “I reckon I have.”

“And what is your answer?”

“It’s very simple. I’m a timid cowering creature with alienable rights.”[6] 

In an interview, Pelevin was asked: “Today you are one of the most famous writers in Russia. How adequately have your works been received there?” His answer? “I don’t know. I don’t even know how adequately I’m writing them.”[7]

His readers know. Babylon and his other novels have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Russia and abroad.

Boris Akunin

Let’s turn now to the writer who got me started on this journey into the Russian novelists of today, Boris Akunin, or should I say, Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili, who was born in 1956, in Georgia, as you may have guessed from his name.

Akunin is an essayist, literary scholar, translator and author of highbrow detective fiction set in Imperial Russia. His hero, with the wonderfully eccentric name of Erast Petrovich Fandorin, is a gifted linguist, like his creator. He is also a master of disguise and attractive to women despite his unprepossessing appearance (perhaps a bit of wishful thinking on the part of his creator). His stammer disappears when he is in disguise, and he has strong ethical principles to which he unfailingly adheres.

This is how the twenty-year-old Erast is introduced in The Winter Queen: 

Xavier Feofilaktovich Grushin, detective superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Police, genuinely wished the boy well and felt a fatherly concern for him, for there was no denying life had dealt hard with the novice clerk, leaving him an orphan at the tender age of nineteen years. He had known no mother since he was a young child, and his hothead of a father had squandered his entire estate on worthless projects and then … promptly departed this life under the blow [leaving] his only son nothing but a bundle of promissory notes. The boy should have finished his studies at the gymnasium and gone on to the university, but instead it was out of the parental halls and off into the street with you to earn a crust of bread. Xavier Grushin snorted in commiseration. The orphan had passed the examination for collegiate registrar all right (that was no problem for such a well-brought-up lad), but what on earth could have made him want to join the police? He should have a post in the Office of Statistics or perhaps in the Department of Justice. His head was full of romantic nonsense and dreams … Xavier Grushin shook his head disapprovingly. We spend most of our time around here polishing the seat of our pants and writing reports about the petty bourgeois Potbelly dispatching his lawful spouse and three little ones with an ax in a drunken fit.[8] 

The word “Akunin” means “outlaw” in Japanese and it reflects Akunin’s purpose in deliberately creating this new genre of mystery novel. Inspired by his wife’s love of detective novels, and bemused by the fact that she always wrapped the books in brown paper to conceal her lowbrow taste in fiction, Akunin hatched a plot to satisfy the literary tastes of the emerging middle class. This is how he described it in an interview conducted in 2007: 

It was clear to me that something like this had to come along in Russia. There was a demand for it; readers expected it. A new category of readers appeared that hadn’t existed before, and they needed reading matter that hadn’t existed before. We can very conditionally call it entertaining reading for the educated cultured reader, something we didn’t have here at all … At first I tried to persuade my friends to write in this genre. I failed, because as befits Russian writers, most of them are talented but lazy. Finally I decided to begin by doing a kind of prototype of the genre to show what it might look like. I’ll demonstrate the technique, I thought, the public will be overjoyed, writers will catch it on the fly, and after that it will be easy.[9] 

Akunin had to wait until his fifth book to achieve success, but after that, sales of subsequent books in the series shot through the roof, selling millions of copies in Russia and abroad. He has won numerous awards. In 2000 he was named Russian Writer of the Year and won the “Antibooker” prize for another Erast Fandorin novel, Coronation, or the Last of the Romanovs, and several of his novels have been made into successful films.

If you want to read intelligent mystery with a uniquely Russky touch, you couldn’t do better than to read Akunin—and you won’t have to use a brown paper wrapper when you carry his books onto public transport!

Vassily Aksyonov

Born in 1932, Vassily Aksyonov was the son of Evgenia Ginsburg, who spent eighteen years in the gulag and wrote about it in two well-known memoirs. Aksyonov was arrested as the son of “enemies of the people” when he was five years old and sent to an orphanage until rescued by an uncle a year later.

Although he graduated as a doctor, he soon left the profession to become a writer. He rebelled against the prescribed social-realist Soviet style and, with his contemporary voice and his pro-Western stance, he became a leader of the so-called “Shestidesyatniki”, the 1960s generation that defied the Communist Party’s ideology and cultural restrictions. This brought him into conflict with the KGB and when he was given an opportunity to leave the USSR in 1980 he took it and went to America. This resulted in his being stripped of Soviet citizenship which he regained only during perestroika under Gorbachev’s rule.

He is best known in the West for Generations of Winter, written in 1994, which describes the lives of three generations of the Gradov family between the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin’s death in 1953. The book was turned into a mini-series for Russian television. If any book is worthy of inheriting the mantle of the nineteenth-century Russian novel tradition, this is it. Written with a Tolstoyan command of narrative and the grand vision of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, this novel deserves the many accolades it has received.

The following passage will give you some idea of the subtlety of Aksyonov’s writing: 

Meanwhile, one of the many paradoxical events of the Revolution was taking place at the dacha in Silver Forest: it turned out that the Charleston, the dernier cri of the season, delighted the “old fogeys” of the bourgeoisie but outraged the “progressive” young people.

“What the hell do we want with that kind of decadence?” asked, for example, Nina’s friend Semyon Stroilo. “It’s just some shaking-about invented by the capitalists as a distraction, bread and circuses for the masses. It’s of no use to the proletariat.”

“Yes, but the proletariat abroad does dance the Charleston,” said Pulkovo, who had recently traveled halfway across Europe after his studies at Oxford. “Young men and girls from the lower classes, and just about anyone who has the energy.”

“A Western whim,” said Stroilo with a dismissive wave of his hand that had a touch of class arrogance about it.” [10] 

In 1994 Aksyonov was awarded Russia’s highest literary award, the Russian Booker Prize, for his historical novel called Voltairian Men and Women, about a meeting between the philosopher Voltaire and Empress Catherine the Great.

I have yet to read that book, but I can promise you that if you read Generations of Winter, your desire for a big book in the mould of the Russian classic novel will be more than satisfied.

Dmitry Bykov

You may have heard Ramona Koval’s fascinating interview with Dmitry Bykov on the ABC’s Bookshow program in May. Born in 1967, Bykov has achieved recognition for his biographies of Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky and Bulat Okudzhava, the popular singer-songwriter. He is also a poet, essayist, journalist and radio broadcaster and was host of the influential television show Vremechko.

His great sprawling novel Living Souls, a dystopian satire, caused a furore in Russia when it was published in 2006. It is set in Russia’s near future, when the country has erupted in civil war between the northerners, who are the descendants of the Aryan Varangian tribes which occupied Russia in the middle ages, and the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who adopted Judaism and live in the south. Caught between these opposing forces are the hapless natives who preserve the country’s folklore and language but are incapable of governing themselves.

The book follows the journey of four couples whose miscegenetic unions attract opprobrium from all sides. Think Gogol’s Dead Souls or Heller’s Catch-22 or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and you will get an idea of the powerful black comedy of this satirical epic that weaves ideas, history and fairy tales in equal measure to produce a knockout of a read.

At one point in the story, the government decides to impose a tax on words in order to increase state revenue, but the wily newspaper proprietors find a way around this financial impost: 

There were no more than six papers in Moscow now, plus the two government ones which were practically identical, and each tried in their different way to avoid the tax. Izvestiya, which he was reading, would change one letter in a word, and each time it would be different, so the law couldn’t keep up with them. The reader would understand everything, but the words weren’t taxable since they weren’t to be found in Ushakov’s definitive dictionary of the language. Thus: “The advence of liberol forces in the Sooth … ” Or “The glittering crows at the premiere of the blackbuster The Farest at the Okhtober cinamo … ” The newspaper Power was even more inventive, creating dozens of new words each week to keep the government busy compiling an alternative dictionary. Almost all their new Esperanto consisted of strange Russified Western borrowings, such as “Changy and transaktsii, bringushchi and bankovki”. The patriotic press, whose patriotism didn’t extend to paying for every word, took another route with its own anti-Esperanto, a new language with unquestionably Russian roots but only a vaguely discernible meaning: “The vehicle of the government’s integrated Russification objectives as indicated by the projections of its collateral multinational targets … ” Naturally it took a lot of time to write like this, but with nothing much happening in the country it wasn’t hard to put such papers out. [11] 

Futuristic books have never been my cup of tea, but Bykov’s Living Souls converted me, largely because of the wisdom, erudition, humour and wonderful use of magic realism to be found in this great expansive novel with its fascinating cast of characters and vivid descriptive passages.

Tatiana Tolstaya

The period of perestroika heralded a whole new generation of talented women writers who came to challenge the dominance of males in the literary sphere. Much of their work describes the devastating impact on women of the market economy, their hardships, their struggle to survive, the suffering of the poor, the corruption of the New Russian class, and so on.

They discussed taboo subjects that had been relegated to private life, they challenged the establishment with their take on what should be fit subjects for fiction, and they demythologised the intelligentsia by exposing the frailty of ideas in the face of the realities of life. They simultaneously took on the moral, philosophical, historical and metaphysical problems of their society, and some critics claim that their collective work eclipses that of their male colleagues.

One writer who has reached national and international prominence is Tatyana Tolstaya, the great grand-niece of Leo Tolstoy. She was born in St Petersburg in 1951 and as well as being the author of several novels and short stories is also an essayist and broadcaster. With a great interest in current affairs, she hosted a television program called The School for Scandal, on which she interviewed figures from politics and the arts. She is a well-known public intellectual and is well respected in both Russia and the USA, where she has spent much of her time teaching and lecturing at Princeton and other American universities. 

Her first novel, The Slynx, written in 2000, is described as a vaudevillian-dystopian novel, and it is a mixture of folktale and science fiction fantasy which can be read as a satirical allegory of Russian and Soviet history. Starting the novel in the year of the Chernobyl explosion, she set it 200 years in the future after an apocalyptic disaster destroys Russia.

The story focuses on a community of survivors living a feudal existence in a small town spread out over seven hills, like Moscow. The village is squeezed between the ominous forests to the north, where the dreaded Slynx lives, and the hostile Chechen territory to the south. Mice provide the villagers with their staple diet, their clothing, and their currency. The hero, Benedikt, is employed as a humble scribe who transcribes the words of old books which are then attributed to the dictator Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, after whom the town is named.

The villagers are divided into different classes which remind us of both imperial and communist social orders. There are the Oldeners, who inexplicably do not age and can remember what life was like before the Blast that destroyed everything. There are the cruel Murzas or Tartar feudal lords, and the Degenerators, sub-human creatures who perform the dirty work of this subsistence society. Then there are the sinister Saniturions, who constitute the secret police force, and there are the rest, those who suffered in the Blast and suffer the “Consequences” of exposure to radiation, such as the tail that wags impromptu on Benedikt’s behind.

The idea at the centre of this book is books, which many in this feudal village believe have been contaminated by the Blast. Indeed, the mission of the Saniturions is to search out and destroy the books that people have hidden in their huts and hovels. We, the reader, know that the books are dangerous not because they are radioactive but because they contain subversive ideas which threaten to undermine the dictatorial rule of Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe.

Throughout the narrative there are many allusions to and quotes from famous Russian poets, while the neologisms coined in this primitive society, such as “feelosophy”, are not only a source of much amusement but also reflect Benedikt’s inchoate stirrings towards higher things.

However, Benedikt comes to love books only as objects, rather than gaining any moral, philosophical or aesthetic enlightenment from them. In the following passage he ponders on a book called shoppinghower (read Schopenhauer). 

Last year, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, decided to write a shoppinghower, which is kind of like a story, only you can’t make heads nor tails of it. A long sucker, they read it for three months, copied it a dozen times, wore themselves to the bone. Konstantin Leontich bragged that he understood everything—but he always brags: everyone just laughed. So you think you understood it, Golubchik—then tell us the story: who goes where, who do they see, how’re they gonna do that shopping, what hanky panky do they get up to, who do they murder? Huh? You can’t? Well, there you go. It was called The World as Will and Idea. A good name, inviting. After all, you’ve always got a lot of ideas in your head, especially at bedtime. You wrap your coat around you so there’s no draft, cover your head with a cloth, draw up one leg, stretch out the other, put your fist or your elbow under your head; then turn over, flip your pillow onto the cold side, wrap your coat up again if it slipped, toss and turn—and start to drift off.

And the ideas come. [12] 

At the end of the book, Benedikt’s father-in-law, the head Saniturion, enlists Benedikt’s help in overthrowing Kuzmich, Glorybe, only to replace him and become an even more tyrannical ruler than his predecessor. And so the cycle continues, reflecting a bleak but humorous view of the cycle of Russian history.

Tolstaya’s book is loaded with references to the past, especially literary references, and her language is rich and witty, drawing on folklore, street language, rural idioms, the dialect of her nanny, and even the correspondence of Ivan the Terrible.[13] Her eccentric characters are sharply delineated, and the plot is intriguing and deeply unsettling. She is the worthy successor of Russian satirists and surrealists such as Zinoviev, whose novel The Yawning Heights, like The Slynx, exposed the greed and corruption of society with scathing satire and biting wit in an ebullient flight of the imagination. She deservedly won the Triumph Prize for literary achievement for The Slynx.

If there is any message to be derived from Tolstaya’s exuberant work, it is that the human quest for freedom, knowledge and enlightenment struggles to survive authoritarian regimes and natural disasters, and even the presence of good books is not necessarily a guarantee of humanity in the people who read them.

The American Russia specialist David Remnick called Tolstaya “the most promising of all the ‘post-Soviet’ writers” and said “she sounds like no one else”, and I would have to agree. The Slynx, like Bykov’s Living Souls, is written in a richly textured, allusive language that is exhilarating to read even though the subject matter is dark. This is black humour that tickles your intellect.

Ludmilla Ulitskaya

Ludmilla Ulitskaya was born in 1943 in the autonomous southern Ural republic of Bashkiria and graduated with a degree in biology and genetics. After working for two years at the Institute of General Genetics in Moscow, she was dismissed for reproducing samizdat (or banned publications).

Forced out of work as a geneticist, she became a literary director of the Chamber Jewish Theatre and wrote dramatisations for radio and puppet theatre, reviewed plays and translated poetry. The two scripts she wrote for films produced in the early 1990s, and her first novel Sonechka (1992), which was shortlisted for the first Russian Booker, gained her wide recognition. In 1994, Sonechka won the French Medici Prize for the best translated work of the year. In 2001 Ulitskaya became the first woman to receive the Russian Booker for her novel Kukotsky’s Case and in 2009 was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.

The book of Ulitskaya’s I want to focus on is Medea and Her Children, written in 1996, which was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize the following year. The novel reflects Ulitskaya’s interest in genetics in a family saga centred on the elderly family matriarch, Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez, a descendant of a long line of Pontian Greeks who settled on the Tauride coast 2000 thousand years before.

Medea is the last member of the family who speaks the medieval Pontic Greek. Although childless, she became a mother to her younger siblings and matriarch to the multitude of nieces and nephews born to her twelve siblings and their various lovers and spouses. The story is set in the summer of 1977, when her family members make the annual pilgrimage to the Sinoply family home in a village twenty kilometres from the town of Theodosia in the Crimea. During this fateful summer, love blossoms, is betrayed and dies and Medea becomes the repository of old and new secrets that sorely test her understanding and compassion.

Although essentially a personal story, historical events such as two world wars, the Bolshevik revolution, the civil war and Stalin’s rule form a sinister background to the story as we learn obliquely of family members and friends caught up in them.

Medea says: “God help us, my brother Philip was shot by the Reds; my brother Nikifor was hanged by the Whites, but before that both of them had become murderers themselves.” [14]

The following extract will give you a glimpse of Medea’s world as well as of Ulitskaya’s writing style, albeit in translation: 

Medea had grown up in a house where meals were cooked in cauldrons, eggplants pickled by the barrel, and fruit dried many kilograms at a time on the roof, yielding up its sweet fragrances to the salty sea breeze. While this was going on, brothers and sisters were being born and filling up the house. By midseason, Medea’s present dwelling, lonely and silent in the winter, was reminding her of that childhood home, so crowded and full of children had it become. Laundry was endlessly boiling in great vessels standing on iron tripods; in the kitchen there was always someone drinking coffee or wine; guests were arriving from Koktebel or Sudak. Sometimes free-spirited young people—unshaven students and unkempt girls—would pitch a tent nearby, loudly playing their new music and surprising everyone with their politically daring new songs. And Medea, introverted, childless Medea, although long accustomed to this free-for-all in the summer, did sometimes wonder why it should be her house, baked by the sun and blown by the winds from the sea, that should draw all these tribes from Lithuania, Georgia, Siberia, and Central Asia.[15] 

Earlier, I quoted Shneidman, who said he believed that the 1990s had not produced “a single great new writer or a work of prose which could be placed among the recognized classics”. It is clear to me that he could not have read this work, which I think is going to stand the test of time.

That Ulitskaya’s work has been translated into twenty-five languages is surely a testament to the love that many readers from all over the world have for her books.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Born in 1938, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been called “one of the finest living Russian writers”. She is a novelist and playwright and her novels and short stories have been published in more than thirty languages. She has won numerous literary prizes in Russia and abroad, her paintings hang in the Tretyakov and other galleries, and as if this is not enough to express her creativity, she began a new career in her sixties as a singer-songwriter.

It was not all plain sailing for Petrushevskaya, however. Few editors in the communist state would publish her stories because their subject matter showed up the appalling conditions of Soviet life. In 1969, when she took her first stories to the editor of Novy Mir, the editor rejected them but noted: “Withhold publication but don’t lose track of the author.” Had he not rejected her, perhaps she would not have developed her extraordinary creativity in other fields, especially playwriting, in which she excelled, attracting large audiences for her “underground” productions at factories, in back rooms and other makeshift venues.

In any case, Petrushevskaya wore the ban on her writing as a badge of pride, as she said in an interview in 1993: “it was a great compliment to have your work singled out for banning—it was a sign of quality … To be banned was the opposite of being stigmatised, they banned you out of sheer enthusiasm for your work”.[16]

Twenty-three years were to pass before she was published in Novy Mir, but in the meantime they supported her, giving her work as a reviewer and asking her to write book reports, and also read and commented on her work. Her mentor at Novy Mir, Nina Petrovna Borisova, once said to her: “You’re in such good company Lyusya, you’ve no idea [how many] excellent books and stories I’ve got stashed in there.”

Petrushevskaya’s only novel, The Time: Night, was shortlisted for the first Russian Booker Prize in 1992. It is an extended monologue, a cri de coeur from a woman on the sorrows and hardships of her embittered life—poverty, loneliness, ungrateful children, unwanted pregnancy, lack of dignity, alcoholism, prostitution—it’s all there. And yet, there is a streak of black humour that redeems the story from total despair. Not only that, but through Petrushevskaya’s sly and unsentimental style, we come to find out much more about her protagonist Anna Andrianovna, an ageing aspiring poet, than Anna would like us to know. In this I am reminded of Alan Bennett’s wonderful monologues for his Talking Heads television series.

Petrushevskaya flings us into the story in media res, and we have to pick up what we can from Anna Andrianovna’s apparently random ravings which, we are told at the beginning, Anna’s daughter presented to a publisher after Anna’s death. These were in the from of a “dusty file stuffed with loose pages, children’s exercise books, blank telegram forms all covered in writing” and called “Notes from the Edge of the Table”.

Here’s an episode that reveals Anna’s misplaced good intentions as well as Petrushevskaya’s knowing style: 

Once I saw a man with his little girl on the tram, no doubt collecting her from kindergarten. And he was pestering her to death with his kisses, right on the lips. I told him off sharply right in front of everyone else. He started as if caught red-handed, all crimson and agitated, and his poor little girl, about five years old, was completely overcome with all the giggling and tickling—he’d been tickling her as well. He came to and started cursing me filthily, looking at me with hurt hunted eyes. How could he have known? He said what everyone else says: Stop bloody meddling in other people’s business.

“Look what you’re doing to the child!” I said. “I can just imagine what you get up to with her at home! Don’t you know it’s a crime!”

The whole tram started bristling, but against me, not him.

“What business is it of yours, you old [ … ]! An old bag like you still trying to stick your oar in!”

“My sole concern is the well-being of your child. People can be imprisoned for that, you know. Depraved acts with minors! Raping children!”

“Bloody madwoman! Cretin!”

“Just you wait till she’s twelve and suddenly, hey presto, she’s pregnant! And not by you either!”

Thank God I’d managed to distract him—now he was consumed by quite another desire: to knock me unconscious on the spot. Maybe now every time he starts subjecting his daughter to caresses he’ll remember me and switch to hating instead. And I will have saved another child![17] 

Speaking of her female characters, Petrushevskaya explains why she is compelled to tell the stories of women like Anna Andrianovna: 

Russia is a land of women Homers—women who tell their stories orally, just like that, without inventing anything. They’re extraordinarily talented storytellers. I’m just a listener among them. But I dare to hope that The Time: Night is a kind of encyclopaedia of all their lives. However terrible these narratives may be, people’s lives, it turns out, are infinitely rich, rich in humour as well as tragedy.[18]

Conclusion

What my research has revealed so far is that the contemporary Russian novel is a rich field and I hope I have encouraged you to venture beyond the great classics into this exciting new era of literary fiction in Russia.

The writers I have mentioned are among the best of those currently writing novels in Russia. Whether they come to be regarded as “classics” only time will tell.

Irina Dunn, a former independent senator for New South Wales, is the author of The Writer’s Guide: A Companion to Writing for Pleasure or Publication.