Glas New Russian Writing

Winner of four prizes, Hurramabad describes the eviction of Russians from Tajikistan and the national strife following the collapse of the USSR. A resident of Dushanbe, Andrei Volos witnessed the civil war with its insane destruction, ethnic hatred, bloody vengeance, ruthless struggle for power, and violent demonstrations instigated by cynical politicians.

Rubinstein succeeds in arranging his fragmented text in such a clever way that they invariably trigger off a series of associations, even in the reader who fails to catch all the allusions weaved in by the author. Thus his texts begin to speak to any reader anywhere and in any language, but they speak in a different way.

Death is a frequent presence in Ronshin's brilliantly crafted stories but it invariably appears in some funny guise, a toy character in a toy world of innocent violence. His characters often feel as if they themselves were not really real. In Ronshin's world the dead live side by side with the living without suspecting that they are dead.

Selin belongs to that rare Chekhovian type of writer who tells a story not straightforwardly but through a series of carefully chosen and cleverly arranged vivid details. Perhaps Selin has even more in common with Gogol – he demonstrates the same kind of healthy humor and rich imagination. Some of his stories resemble video-clips and are just as visual.

Owner of the Grass is about a disaster befalling a man in love with his own mirror reflection. Moving from the real to the surreal, she invites us to come with her into these two realities, which eventually turn out to be one, a place where the magic and the mundane merge.

»Galina's ingenuity in weaving together numerous mythological allusions and literary parallels is astounding. Apart from the Hellenic, Jewish and Arabic myths, she introduces references to popular legends and modern superstitions.»—The Moscow Times Iramifications has all the cheeky comedy of Ilf and Petrov with a touch of Gogolian barminess.

GLAS' third collection of top women writers includes some internationally known names (Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Svetlana Alexiyevich, Olga Slavnikova, Ludmila Ulitskaya) as well as some other noted women authors appearing for the first time in English (Nina Gorlanova, Margarita Sharapova, Natalia Smirnova, Anastasia Gosteva).

Russia is a country rich in talent which as often gone unrecognized or been actively suppressed and its literary achievements have frequently been inaccessible to non-Russians. GLAS has been designed to bridge the cultural gap between East and West by providing translations which allow the best modern Russian writing to speak directly to the Western reader. The sources at our disposal are vast new works by young talents and established writers, works well-known to the readers of samizdat but now freely available for the first time, works that have never been offered for publication before, works that have emerged from decades of imposed obscurity... The Russians write a lot. And they read a lot. In these turbulent times the Russian literature scene is changing rapidly, and every new contribution is avidly consumed. Our intention is to involve readers in this fascinating process. GLAS is produced through the efforts of a team of experienced writers, critics, editors and translators. Our greatest hope is that you will enjoy it.

This issue of Glas has a subtitle Soviet Grotesque and our subsequent numbers will follow a similar pattern, dealing with such themes as The Woman's View and The Jews in Russia. We hope this approach will increase our reader's enjoyment by offering them an integrated reading experience which gives us a clear insight into some aspect of life in Russia. The sense of the grotesque has a long and distinctive history in Russian literature. It can be argued that the Soviet period has provided particularly fertile ground for its development--many Russians would certainly think so. Grotesque literature has flourished here--without official acknowledgement or encouragement, of course--but only now can it be openly published and freely read. The pieces offered here clearly demonstrate the grotesque's ability to manifest itself in an unlimited range of style and form--the following pages offer lapidary jargon sketches, urbane self-referential prose, frantic stream of consciousness, surreal naturalistic detail and realistic narrative with lyrical interludes. In every case we feel the writer has something to say to the Western reader.

Just as love is very much part of any human life, for the soviet citizen it was often accompanied by another powerful emotion--fear. For various reasons, as this collection shows, the two have always gone hand in hand in Russia. Here love is seen from various angles: the imprisonment of the first Soviet president's wife under Stalin (Razgon), homosexual love punishable by Soviet law (Kharitonov), unrequited love driving man to disaster (Makanin), adolescent longing for love and fear of rejection (Gareyev), an old granny's love for the shopping bag which is her provider (Gorenstein), love as adventure and misunderstanding (Zinik), anti-love among the dregs of society (Miloslavsky), trans-sexuals' surreal experiences (Pelevin), and love in that typically Soviet institution, the communal flat. Each person models his or her own world to live in, alone with oneself. Only writing gives us the chance to discover these innumerable unique worlds-from cancer wards to prison camps, those hells on Earth to which we are drawn by a strange fascination. Literature has been written for centuries, yet each generation's authors still manage to find new angles of vision and new literary idioms. This has been aptly demonstrated by the recent awarding of the first Russian Booker Prize. Two short listed authors-Makanin and Gorenstein-have been included in this issue, while Vladimir Sorokin, another short listed author, was published in the second issue of Glas. The closing interview with Alla Latynina, the first chairman of the Russian Booker Prize jury, gives a reflection into Russia's literary scene today. Despite Russia's present problems, the literary process continues.

Bulgakov and Mandelstam never met and yet their lives had much in common. Both men were born in the same year, 1891, and both lives ended prematurely, crushed by the cruel totalitarian system. Mandelstam died in a Siberian gulag in December 1938, and Bulgakov 14 months later, in March 1940, from a terminal illness, probably brought on by unbearable stress and disillusionment. Despite their obvious genius both were largely unappreciated and unrecognized except by a handful of close friend who gave them encouragement and moral support. Both had unusually close relationships with their wives who inspired their work during their lifetime and enthusiastically promoted it after their deaths. If it were not for the wives' courageous efforts against all odds, world literature would have lost Mandelstam's luminous poetry and Bulgakov's superb magic realism forever.

The love-hate relationship between Jews and Russians dates back to the early 19th century as is testified by four essays in this issue, looking at this ages-old Russian problem from different angles.

Maybe time in itself does not exist at all, and there exists instead only a spider's web of endless histories and tales tracing patterns in the boundless and deafening deep of eternity? Maybe Time is but a means of retelling them and listening to them? Requiem for the Living is the life story of an orphan boy who grows up alone in a mountain village in the Caucasus and then leaves his home to find fame but not happiness. Wherever he tries to settle down he seems always to cause chaos and despair in a hitherto peaceful community. When he leaves the inhabitants are changed and resentful, living with the consequences of the events that he has set in motion, questioning the nature and the basis of their former existence. No matter how rootless the boy may seem or wish to be, human contact and the bonds of love and family are inescapable and catch up with him in the end. The boy's unique abilities and alienation underscore the distinctive Caucasian culture and their strict code of honor.

How was it possible that an entire country could live in mute fear? Why did Soviet intellectuals denounce each other and conspire with the authorities to brainwash ordinary people? Why did submarines sink and nuclear power stations explode in the Soviet Union? This collection contains stories by leading Russian writers Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Boris Yampolsky, Alexander Pokrovsky, Vladimir Kuzemko, Ilya Zverev. They attempt to explain the idiosyncrasies of Russian society by bringing to life experiences such as the vicious competition over private apartments, the ever-present threat of the GULAG, the precarious world of the Soviet atomic submarine, the Chernobyl disaster and its consequences, and the bizarre justice of the Soviet legal system.

A rediscovered classic Krzhizhanovsky was banned during his lifetime and only published in 1990s.

The heroines range from a wide-eyed child to a 95-year-old sculptress in love with a man sixty years her junior, a noblewoman adrift in Moscow to an old lady forgotten in an abandoned village, from a gynaecologist to a fairytale princess... facing up to a world of illness, old age, death, madness, and men.

The appeal of this book is not only in its infectious eroticism, its wit and humor but mainly in its masterful portrayal of Soviet Russia in the 1970s and 80s through a multitude of cleverly observed details. Although «The Road to Rome» is actually a collection of reminiscences about real events it is structured as a plot-driven narrative and was in fact nominated for the Booker Prize in 1995 as a novel.

An anti-utopian novel about a society where success depends on the degree of a person's likeness to the Model Face.

As Russian society passes through a stage of wrenching transformation, the vision of its writers has veered toward the absurd. Even those who work in a realist style enrich their stories with fantasy and a sense of the impossible. This unique collection presents the latest work of some of the modern absurdist writers, Genrikh Sapgir, Victor Pelevin, Valery Ronshin, Alexander Selin, Grigory Kruzhkov. The more realist writers Alexander Kabakov, Nikolai Klimontovich and Ludmilla Shtern contribute work that testify to the grim humor that persists throughout contemporary Russian literature.

In this collection, centred on the theme of Childhood, we offer two early stories by Andrei Bitov which reflect the growing awareness in children of life's mystery and beauty; a story by Andrei Platonov, bearing the stamp of his inimitable style; Ludmilla Ulitskaya's perspicacious insight into the complex relationship between twin sisters; an impressionistic story by Zufar Gareev about the torments of adolescence; Leonid Latynin's epic, set in pre-Christian Russia and giving us a glimpse of the dawn of Russian civilisation; Alan Cherchesov's account of an unusually bright Chechen boy living alone in a highland village in the Caucasus; Anatoly Pristavkin tells about childhood in a special orphanage for children of «enemies of the people»; and the latest Booker winners Andrei Sergeev and Sergei Gandlevsky.

»Stamp Album» paints a picture of hitherto unknown «catacomb Russia». The communal apartment Sergeev describes is not a typical community of Soviet citizens... They neither fight the regime, nor adapt to it... Sergeev's memory seems to collect mere trifles: children's ditties, counting rhymes, old slogans, newspaper clippings, snatches of conversations, official documents, urban folklore and much else. He fishes various fragments out of this detritus and files them carefuUy away in his stamp album». Natalia Pervukhina in «Russkaya Mysl» Sergeev's extraordinary memory, the skill of a professional collector, his fantastic sharpness of vision, his passion for details and objects as well as for individuals — all these make «Stamp Album» fascinating reading».

Leonid Latynin was born in a small town on the Volga and raised by his old grandmother on old religious books and Russian folklore. Since childhood he has been fascinated with pre-Christian Russian culture, which found expression in his highly original novels. Latynin was trained as a philologist and has become an expert in pre-Christian Russian culture and Russian icons. Both of these interests are apparent in his fiction. The work of Leonid Latynin can hardly be classed with any existing literary trends or movements. Asked in an interview whether he had been associated with the literary underground back in Soviet times Latynin said that he existed on its margins, living alone like a hermit. He has several collections of poetry to his name, the novel «The Face-maker and the Muse», and the novel «The Russian Truth» in four books. «Sleeper at Harvest Time» (Book One of the tetralogy) was published in French by Flammarion, and in English by Zephyr Press.

»Sea Stories» depicts the realities of life inside the army. Alexander Pokrovsky's cycle of satirical stories about the trials and trivialities of life on a nuclear submarine are both funny and frightening. Alexander Terekhov relates his traumatic first-hand experiences in the army without losing sight of man's better nature.

Boris Slutsky has now emerged as one of Russia's great twentieth-century poets. Unlike his contemporary Solzhenitsyn, this once ardent Stalinist remained inside the Soviet literary establishment, and kept his unacceptable work to himself. His best poetry and prose were published only after his death. In «Things That Happened» the innermost thoughts of this clear-eyed tragedian are revealed as he enthused during the dynamism and terror of the 1930's, fought heroically in Russia, Romania, and Yugoslavia during the Second World War, and then became an increasingly sceptical witness to the de-stalinizations and re-stalinizations that preceded the terminal senility of the Soviet system under Brezhnev. Gerald Smith, Professor of Russian in the University of Oxford, supplies a detailed running commentary to a testament that appears for the first time here in English.