Elise Blackwell, Hunger, 2003

The Soviet Union’s premier botanical institute is the setting for this rather peculiar novel about Leningrad under blockade from German forces in 1941, though the focus is more on the experience and memories of an unnamed protagonist as he, his wife and his colleagues struggle to deal with the ideological extremes of Stalin’s totalitarianism and Trofim Lysenko’s disastrous collectivisation of Soviet agriculture as their nation starves. In spite of the hardships in the worst times of the ‘hunger winter’, the scientists have made a pact: no matter how bad conditions become they will protect their precious cache of seeds that will be their gift to the country’s future. The unnamed narrator is a scientist who has already made various travels to remote places around the world, and the book’s triangular balance is between these memories, his experience of the Seige of Leningrad and assorted sexual reminiscences. He comes across as a particularly unlikeable person with both a bottomless pit of personal vanity and a considerable amount of emotional detachment from the suffering, prefering to recall his appetite for sexual infidelity or at least try to make sense of it in the context of the hunger he witnesses around him.

Despite this being her first novel Elise Blackwell has something of a literary pedigree, but quite why she chose this setting to make some existential points about hunger, appetite and remorse in this particular way was, while reading, largely beyond me, though when seen instead as a long parable about temptation and forbidden fruit it tends to make much more sense. Hunger may have been selected by the L.A. Times as a Notable Book of 2003, but this wasn’t quite the notable book I was expecting: disturbing and curious, I would have preferred a novel lighter on the existentialism and heavier on the real-world subject matter itself.  PY

MORE ON ELISE BLACKWELL :  AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog, 1925

The Heart of a Dog has ingredients that make it a satirical classic, yet it would surely have been funnier still to its intended Russian audience. Bulgakov had constant problems with censors and he never saw publication of The Heart of a Dog in the Soviet Union in his lifetime: he died in 1940 and it was suppressed there until as late as 1987, appearing only a few years before the fall of Soviet Communism. Philip Philipovich, a rich and respected Moscow doctor who specialises in rejuvenation, decides to experiment with some transplant surgery on a stray mongrel known as Sharik with a few body parts from a recently deceased prole, and unwittingly transforms the dog into a poor resemblance of a cultured man. What gives this book its spark is the downtrodden dog’s character, which kicks off and then punctuates the rest of the story very nicely indeed. Bulgakov displayed a splendid sense of fun in this satire on the Russian Revolution, in which the uneducated and common proletariat expected to simply be handed a share of the wealth, and when encapsulated in the character of Sharik they’re also satirised as aspiring – and of course failing – to take on the airs and graces of the bourgeois elite. The doctor’s frequent counter-revolutionary rants are what help this novel endure as a modern and edgy one: right or wrong, Bulgakov gave the reader room to still wish the world was a fairer and more evenly divided place, despite the entrenched imbalance between rich and poor that became the source of his best jokes. A book that can’t be missed by those with a taste for sharp satire.  PY

MORE ON MIKHAIL BULGAKOV : WIKIPEDIA

Yuri Buida, The Zero Train, 1993

The bête noire of post-Soviet writing from Russia would seem to be the question of what Stalinism did to individual lives, and The Zero Train is at heart a straightforward allegory on this theme with a straightforward answer: it sidelined them. Therefore we have a community of disparate people living in the sidings of Station Number 9, ensuring the Zero Train runs without a hitch as it passes through every day, a fast juggernaut with both an unknown cargo and an unknown destination. How the mysterious Zero Train defines the lives of these people is Buida’s meat and gravy and he spreads the allegory pretty thick, also with different meanings attached to individual lives: character X is a metaphor for this, character Y is a metaphor for that. It’s a lively and lyrical read though I made the mistake of expecting proper characterisation, which is clearly not Buida’s point at all. A second reading would probably explain more, but thankfully the translator’s afterword answered many of the questions I was inevitably left asking. Complex and slightly mad, and certainly entertaining.  PY

MORE ON YURI BUIDA :  WIKIPEDIA

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

Welcome to OneState, a soulless totalitarian regime based on mathematical principles, reason, logic and the efficiency models of the 19th century management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor. The designer of the spacecraft known as the Integral, the mathematician known only as D-503, has love and pity for the life found elsewhere in the solar system, considering them as yet uncivilized by the missionary nature of the Integral’s forthcoming journey. D-503’s diary entries depict a cold and unemotional civilization: OneState is obsessed with its own mathematical perfection, a dictatorship run through with expansionist dogma and rhetoric that it will impose on whatever aliens are encountered out there in the universe. But then there are his misadventures with the rebel movement Mephi and his infatuation with the woman I-330, both of which take his eye off the ball and force OneState to intervene. We was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship bureau and wasn’t published in Russia until 1988, despite having already inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s easy to see why this short dystopian masterpiece is considered to be among the greatest of its kind; described by its most recent translator Clarence Brown as a “clunky old postmodern monster” it feels very much of its time yet retains a great deal of charm, not least because D-503 knows he is not writing for posterity or his contemporaries but for his wild and remote ancestors, us.  PY

MORE ON YEVGENY ZAMYATIN :  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOVIET WRITERS  |  WIKIPEDIA

Andreï Makine, A Life’s Music, 2001

Of the twenty cover quotes used to promote this book possibly the most apt is “as assured as a self-contained Chopin nocturne”, and a particularly sad one at that: Makine is Russian but writes in French, something that somehow heightens the sense of detachment for this tale of a promising life sent completely off-track. In a snowbound railway station in the present-day, far Siberian east, a stranded passenger comes across an old man playing the piano. He is Alexeï Berg, and we learn that he was once a young concert pianist who had grown up in pre-war Stalinist Moscow at a time when the Russian intelligentsia were being ‘disappeared’. He gets secret word that he is next in line for the re-education camps, and before his first solo concert he is forced to disappear himself, away from his pursuers and instead into the arms of the Russian military as it repels the German invasion before returning to the old totalitarianism which Berg, once again, falls foul of.

Infusing the book from start to finish is Makine’s adopted concept of homo sovieticus, encapsulating the kind of stoic and peculiarly Russian patience that is required to deal with life’s endless difficulties. A Life’s Music pushes the reader in different and unexpected directions that may seem too sudden when told in such a short space as a hundred pages, but it is the right length because too much sentimentality would, otherwise, dilute its stunningly good ending.   PY

Andrey Kurkov, A Matter of Death and Life, 1996

At just thirty, Tolya is sick of life in Kiev and his failed marriage and sets himself up to be the next job for an acquaintance of an acquaintance: a hitman. But what can he do when, before the appointed hour on his last day, small opportunities come his way and he changes his mind, choosing to carry on instead? Kurkov sets up a bleakly comic situation but doesn’t play it for laughs, instead relying on some untidy situational complexities and possibilities to keep the reader engaged. Nevertheless it’s a realistically told and sometimes cynical domestic drama, and the sting in the tail is one you’ll never see coming.   PY