Glas New Russian Writing

Noted for its fresh and positive approach, extraordinary vitality, and fearless acceptance of life in its good and bad manifestations, this book shows young Russians' minds and souls. The plays focus on the painful problem of neglected children abused or abandoned by alcoholic single mothers, and the children's thirst for the love and understanding they are not getting. The four young authors are winners of the top prizes for drama. Living in different parts of Russia (Siberia, the Urals, and the Volga) and writing in different styles, they share a deep interest in people's inner lives, following the tradition of Anton Chekhov.

Merciless and beautiful prose, pithy and precise... leaves no one unmoved. Ex Libris Real-life dialogues, vivid imagery, striking metaphors. Literary Russia A remarkable novel of social discontent written by a sure hand. SNOB Gangsters take complete control of an industrial town with its corrupt authorities, business, and police. Defending his daughter, the protagonist accidentally shoots the chief gangster and has to go into hiding, first among the homeless at the town garbage dump, and then in the forest among Saami deer-breeders. He becomes transformed from a little man into a people's avenger, killing the corrupt mayor and the chief of police. Through a series of tricky manipulations, a different person is accused of the serial murders in the interests of the new gangsters, who seize control of the town in the end.The setting — a town on the Kola Peninsula above the Arctic Circle where the author spent her formative years — is clearly meant as a portrait in miniature of all of Russia and expresses young people's social discontent. Action-packed and highly revealing, this novel abounds in interesting ethnographic details related to the indigenous Northern tribes of Saami and life in the Northern provinces. A finalist in two major literary contests, Debut and NOS, and winner of the Northern Star Prize, Liza Alexandrova-Zorina (b. 1984) is an outstanding spokeswoman for her generation and a prolific author. The Little Man is also coming out in France and Egypt.

A cycle of stories about the difficult process of coming of age: young people who see themselves as outcasts, oddballs, and freaks, and who grow up through some experience of love and loss. These Ugly Duckling — type stories are timeless and the author has managed to make them new again. They are united by the one thousand-year-old city of Yaroslavl, Russia, and provide a host of exciting details which go unseen by tourists: the real adventure begins where the tourist trail ends. Winner of the Debut and other prizes, Anna Lavrinenko (b. 1984) lives in Yaroslavl, Russia, the vivid backdrop for all her stories.

Excerpts from the novels shortlisted for the third Booker Russian Novel Prize read like complete stories and are followed by summaries of the novels and authors' notes. Included are: Bulat Okudzhava (Winner), The Show is Over; Peter Aleshkovsky, The Life of Ferret; Yuri Buida, Don Domino; Alexei Slapovsky, The First Second Coming; Mikhail Levitin, Total Impropriety; Igor Dolinyak, The Third World. Also a story by Mark Kharitonov, the first winner of the Russian Booker, which is a sequel to his prize-winning novel. Others include Asar Eppel whose style and themes are reminiscent of Babel and Sholem Aleichem, and Nikolai Klimontovich, a Soviet Casanova, telling his naughty stories where sex and politics are intertwined.

These two novels by Debut Prize finalists present typical provincial towns in central Russia and a gallery of modern-day types: radically minded youths, ruthless thugs, drunken intellectuals, the local elite, and failed fortune seekers. The heroes are yearning for faraway glamorous cities and trying to find their identities. They suffer through various weird misadventures, but for many readers their tales may be a survival guide. A vivid portrait of the younger generation in today's Russia: stunned by their first painful contacts with harsh reality. The authors will present the book at BEA 2011 in New York, NY.

»Today an unusually gifted generation is entering Russian literature... Literature has not seen such an influx of energy in a long time.» Olga Slavnikova, director of the Debut PrizeBy and about Russian hitchhikers, these stories take the reader along the endless roads of central Russia, the Urals, the Altai, Siberia, and beyond. In energetic and vivid prose they depict all sorts of curious Russian types: exotic adventures in far-flung places, the complex psychological relationships that develop on the road, and these hitchhikers' inexplicable passion for tramping. «In via veritas» is their motto. The authors are all winners of the Debut Prize, and will present the book at BEA in 2012 in New York.Irina Bogatyreva lives in Moscow. She has won several prizes, including the Debut, for her novel «AUTO-STOP.» She has several published books to her credit.Tatiana Mazepina is the latest Debut Prize winner. She is a member of the Society of Free Travellers. She works as a journalist and writes on religious matters.Igor Savelyev lives in Ufa (Bashkiria) where he works as a crime reporter. He is the winner of the Debut Prize and several other prizes.

This is the tragicomic story of a successful young architect, Fyodor, the reluctant single father of an adolescent son with Down syndrome. The son is a terrible embarrassment to Fyodor, who relies on his own parents to take care of him. Fyodor has fraught relationship with them as well. But then a fatal car crash and the accidental discovery of a mystical painting, Petroleum Venus, force this self-involved father to ultimately embrace his troubled son, his parents' moral values, and the real things in life. Petroleum Venus won the Debut Prize, was shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize, nominated for the Russian Booker, and sat on the www.ozon.ru bestseller list for a year.

Styled as Oriental tales, these parables are unexpected, exciting, colorful, and tremendously readable. Vlas Doroshevich could not stand tyranny in any form and in his tales he availed himself of complete freedom to mock, to despise, and to accuse the authorities for their wickedness, hypocrisy, and stupidity. These tales could be written by and for rebellious anti-establishment youth of today. Doroshevich's works were often banned during the tsarist times and then finally banned completely under the Bolsheviks. This great Russian writer, who was a friend of Anton Chekhov, is only now being resurrected from oblivion. This is the first English translation of his tales. Vlas Doroshevich (1864-1922) was widely known as the king of journalism in his time. He was also a novelist, drama critic, and short story writer.

Young man's rebellious search for identity against the background of radical political youth movements in Russia today.

»Il secondo cerchio» raccoglie quattro romanzi brevi di giovani scrittori russi che entrano da protagonisti nella realta e nella letteratura del loro paese. In comune hanno l'eta e il potente desiderio di raccontare un tempo di incertezze e mutamenti. Completamente estranei all'eredita sovietica, questi autori segnano un punto di svolta rispetto alla precedente generazione, che alla lotta contro il regime ha consacrato tutta la propria esperienza creativa. Non si pensi pero a un movimento o a una nuova avanguardia. I quattro sfuggono ai canoni letterari vecchi e nuovi: provengono da storie personali e contesti geografici diversi, propongono stilemi e tematiche originali e intendono fornire un'espressione letteraria riferita a un'esperienza unica, il trauma del primo impatto con la vita adulta. C'e il racconto di Alisa Ganieva, del Daghestan, incentrato sul meticciato culturale con l'Islam; l'on the road in autostop di Igor Savelyev per le strade della sconfinata provincia russa; l'ironica presa in giro della propaganda nel racconto di Aleksej Lukjanov; e ancora, finalmente, la vita quotidiana e l'amore di Anna Lavrinenko. Selezionati tra migliaia di proposte, questi lavori sono stati insigniti del premio Debut, istituito dalla fondazione Pokolenie; la loro prosa testimonia la nuova forza e il nuovo slancio della letteratura russa.

The novel is about displaced persons and their cultural and psychological problems in an alien society. It consists of monologues by several male and female protagonists – repatriated Russian Germans -- whose lives become entangled at a certain point in the country of law and order, where they suddenly realize that they feel more Russian than German. They find themselves culturally different from the locals and often fail to integrate in the local communities. On the other hand they have never felt quite at home in Russia. Germans were encouraged to settle in the Russian countryside from the times of Peter the Great. Over the centuries they tried to preserve their national culture and traditions, but in the 20th century, marked with two great wars which made them highly unpopular, when they started repatriating they found themselves foreigners in their cherished homeland. The characters exist in the cross-cultural space between Russia and Germany, a space populated by about three million Russian-speaking Germans, who will be quickly disappearing and will probably no longer be around in 50 years time. Dmitry Vachedin was born in 1982 in St Petersburg and moved to Germany with his parents in 1999. He graduated from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz with a degree in Political Science and Slavic Studies. Currently he lives in Bonn and works as a journalist for Deutsche Welle. At the age of 25 he won the Debut Prize for his short stories. In 2010 his novel Snow Germans was nominated for the Russian Prize, and in 2012 he became the winner of the Russian Prize for his short stories.

Savelyev is a professional in a good sense: his language consists of energetic short sentences, abundance of well-chosen details, and recurrent juxtaposition of the fictional and the documentary. The novel is written masterfully, aptly phrased and rich in interesting details; it will look good in Volume One of his Collected Works a couple of decades from now. Afisha Mars symbolizes freedom and a daring goal, different for each character. One goes to America to break away from the humdrum provincial life. Other protagonists launch a campaign against a dishonest airline exploiting people's fear of flying by promising false guarantees of safety, for an extra price. The protest peters out after the arrests, sobering the young people's enthusiasm. Reports of actual plane crashes accompany the narrative, providing a frightening backdrop. New heroes of our times: confused and disillusioned young Russians growing up in conditions of wild capitalism and political stagnation. Throughout the novel reports of actual airplane crushes interfere matter-of-factly into the narrative, providing a frightening a refrain to the story and symbolically in tune with the characters' personal moral downfalls. The Martian theme is crowned by the seventy-five-year-old ex-cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's letter to President Putin suggesting that she should be sent to Mars on a one-way mission for the glory of her homeland. Twenty-eight-year-old Igor Savelyev won many literary prizes for his masterful prose based on brilliant counterpoints. His stories have been translated into many languages.

Since 2002, readers all over the world have been enjoying and learning from Michele A. Berdy's column «The Word's Worth» in The Moscow limes. In this quirky, opinionated, sometimes hilarious yet always thoughtful and authoritative guide, Berdy looks at Russia's changing culture, social scene and everyday life through language and the art of translation. She discusses colloquialisms and youth slang, the language of politics, the workplace, and the often comical struggle of expats to feel at home in a foreign idiom and culture. The Russian Word's Worth is essential reading for students and teachers of Russian, translators, Russia-watchers, expats, and anyone who wants to understand Russia today.

The women's movement and women's literature are relatively new phenomena in Russian cultural life. Before perestroika there was only one organization for women, and that was the government-controlled Soviet Women's Committee. In the last few years sixty-two have been registered, six newspapers for women are now published, there is a TV programme called «Career Woman», and we have four feminist organizations. In devoting this issue to women's writing we are not proposing a rigid approach to Russian literature on the basis of gender, just as age or race strike us as only marginally relevant. It just so happened that in our search for new and interesting works of literature we have found an abundance of excellent stories by women writers. Some of these we are offering here for your attention as representative of woman's view of the world, and her present search for identity. To a large extent Russia's women are bearing the brunt of the present upheavals in our society.

Squaring the Circle is Russian prose by a new generation of authors from various parts of Russia who never lived in the USSR and who, unlike older writers, are not fighting the Soviet past. Young people have no algorithms for building their lives and careers. There are no guarantees, but anything is possible.

»The picture resembles a Chagall painting.... Or perhaps this anti-autobiography is meant to satirize the old Russian question 'Who is to blame?' with the Jewish answer: Me.» — «The Times Literary Supplement». In the title novella the hero, after a marital infidelity, takes his family to Paris hoping to win his beautiful wife's forgiveness.

War&Peace: a compelling portrait of post-post-perestroika Russia. War&Peace brings together 12 stories by new generation of Russian writers. These 'state of the nation' stories imaginatively explore current Russian definitions of war and peace. WAR: controversial stories about life in the modern Russian army where the continuing war in the Caucasus has bred discontent and corruption. PEACE: stories from the frontline of contemporary life for women in Russia — from relationships and violence to aging and the generation gap.

This frank and detailed memoir of Sergey Esenin is indispensable for anyone interested in the literary avant-garde of the twenties.

The living voices of eleven leading Russian authors. Kristina Rotkirch's book presents the reader with an overview of contemporary Russian literature: Boris Akunin, Yuri Mamleev, Yevgeni Grishkovets, Eduard Limonov, Victor Pelevin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Nina Sadur, Vladimir Sorokin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Ivan Shishkin, and Tatyana Tolstaya. The contrast in styles, life experiences, and outlooks lends it a width of perspective that few books can offer.

The theme was suggested not primarily by the emerging erotic press in Russia, although that is represented here, nor by the uninhibited writings of the younger generation of Russian writers, some of whom we also present (Ergali Ger, Igor Yarkevich, Sergei Task), but by a story by the 1993 Booker Prize winner Vladimir Makanin about an unmarried woman who carries on an unsatisfactory relationship with a married man, then with two married men both of whom eventually abandon her. The detail of her slow-moving, torturous love affair vividly characterizes the hopeless and humiliating position of the unmarried woman in Russia, no matter how independent and uncomplaining she is trying to be. There is a highly original treatment of the love theme by Sigizmund Krziszanovsky, a recently rediscovered author of the 1950's who didn't see a single line of his work published in his lifetime but who is now being extensively published all over the world as well as in Russia. We are proud to present an interesting woman author, Nina Gabrielian, one of the editors of the first Russian feminist almanac Transfiguration and an activist in the fast developing feminist movement in Russia. Women are only just finding their voice, and outstanding women writers of the stature of Petrushevskaya or Tolstaya are still few and far between. Changes for the better in this area are nevertheless very obvious. In subsequent issues we hope increasingly to present new women authors speaking out about their everyday experiences and sharing their views of the world. The recognized leader of Russian post-moderninsm, Prigov, is a man of many outstanding talents. He is represented here by his poems, drawings, and last but not least, his thoughts on the state of contemporary Russian culture. This issue of Glas pays tribute to two great Russian writers of the 1920's whose centenaries fall this year: Mikhail Zoschenko (1894-1958) and Isaac Babel (1894-1941). There are two essays, on Mayakovsky's love for Lily Brik, and on Nina Berberova's life with the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. Although Glad generally focuses on contemporary authors, we believe that the Silver Age of Russian literature is still so little known, and still holds so many surprises, that even for the Russian reader the work of those returned from the obscurity of the past decades is refreshingly new. This is why we intend to continue acquainting our readers with rediscovered gems, as well as exciting new works by young authors.

»As the narrative delivers glimpses of human life in bite-size chunks, [Asar] Eppel's extraordinary compassion and humor is revealed, combined with his Jewish sense of history and merciless insight into people's true natures» Good Book Guide «Unsentimental but humane, his spare realism penetrates daily life» The New York Times Book Review

Dramatic history of several generations of an upper-class family during the First World War and the Civil War in Russia

These literary pieces by one of Russia's foremost essayists reflect the author's bi-culturalism – Russian and American civilizations are compared in their various manifestations. Genis is a shrewd and observant critic. His essays are dynamic, informative, and a joy to read.

»[Larissa] Miller recalls what it was like to come of age as a Jewish girl during Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaigns and beyond... Despite the taunts and the insults, despite her feeling that pogroms could begin any moment, she remains resilient and undaunted». —The Forward