Languor Management

Thumbtack and modernism

The Nailya Alexander Gallery on West 57th St. "specializes in Soviet photography and contemporary photography from the former Soviet Union." I don't understand why I've never heard of, let alone visited it.

Hostile activities

In honor of the upcoming 75th birthday of Vladimir Voinovich, Sovlit.com has posted a link to the Russian satirist's comic novel The Life and Amazing Adventures of the Soldier Ivan Chonkin: 

Says Comrade Chairman:

While most readers found this tale highly engaging and amusing, others--particularl y in the upper echelons of the Party--did not. As a result, Voinovich was kicked out of the Writers Union in 1974 and stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1981 for "activities hostile to the USSR". This citizenship was restored in 1991.

Do you like rock & roll?

While riding the train this morning, an older man in a business suit removed his earbuds and asked me, "Excuse me, are you into music?" He pointed at my book. I was rereading Nicholas Dawidoff's In the Country of Country, which is mostly excellent except for when Dawidoff slips into a narrative style similar to Weylan Jennings voiceovers for The Dukes of Hazzards.

I responded, "Sure, I guess." I was, after all, reading a specialized book about country music.

Satisfied, the man, with a smug look on his face replaced his earbuds, ending our conversation.

But why? I should have said, "No, cars are my thing."

So it was all a dream

Mark H. Teeter appreciates Vassily Aksyonov, author of Burn and Generations of Winter, at 75. Don't we all?

A memoir seldom conveys how others perceive its protagonist, but I suspect that Aksyonov's U.S. friends saw him as both a major writer and major nice guy, which is certainly how I perceived him. Not only did he introduce me, a junior researcher at the Kennan Institute during his tenure there, to several of his friends and fellow writers, he also invited me -- an unpublished novice translator -- to put several of his current works into English. This included a finely tuned seriocomic op-ed piece for The New York Times and a charming short story about a winter-weary Soviet apparatchik who decides to seek asylum abroad -- not political, but climatic.

Williamsburg Beltway

Bedford Avenue. On the way to work this morning, as on most mornings, I merged with a group of a dozen or so male students walking toward the Automotive High School. Almost as a body, they surrounded me and removed their wide leather belts right there on the street. Despite having long reached the autumn of my thirties, my stomach sank in preparation for the anticpated beat down by the teens. But then they turned right and entered the school leaving me alone on the sidewalk.

Chop them up and turn them into hassocks

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been writing a book about Dostoevsky. [Via Maud Newton]

Cut!

Madison Avenue. While thumbing through my book en route to lunch, I was told by a seemingly deranged woman to "Step to the left!" an action I certainly did not take, as I am not in the habit of taking instruction from the deranged. Regrettably, she turned out to be some sort of film crew worker and, because I had ignored her, I ended up strolling right into the spot a scene that was being shot, actually illiciting an angry "Cut! Cut!" from someone whom I now took to be the director.

The slow tortoise-lyre

My translation of Osip Mandelshtam's second collection of poetry, Tristia, has finally returned from the printers. It's not listed as available on Amazon or even on the publisher's (Green Integer Books) Web site yet, which is frustrating, but it's great to finally hold it in my hands and to be able to slip it into the Mandelshtam Autonomous Region (MAR) of my bookshelf, alongside all the works by critics, other translators, and biographers. But if anyone really wanted to order a copy, I'm sure Green Integer would oblige...

I'm happy that the designer went with the cover photo that he did, because it's from close to the time of when these poems were originally written. It's a detail from a larger photograph that includes, among others, his wife and the friend and poet Anna Akhmatova. Because of his tragic story, publishers usually like to use photographs taken toward the end of his life, when he was sick and impoverished. This photo (left) shows a young, sensitive man at the top of his game.

It's slim and small, and fits easily into a sportcoat's pocket without spoiling your smooth silhouette.

A high-end intellectual

The Guardian is running an interview with Russian literary sensation Boris Akunin, author of The Turkish Gambit and the Winter Queen.

"Boris Akunin" is the pen name of Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili, a Georgian-born essayist, literary translator (from Japanese) and, of course, novelist. I developed my guilty pleasure for Akunin's historical mysteries while summering in Los Angeles a few years back. Reading his books on the deck was the perfect pasttime for someone with absolutely nothing to do.

I was sort of tired of Russian literary tradition when you have to write in a very heavy style. Russian writers, Soviet writers, used to write in a very suffocating way even about things which are even not that serious. I prefer much more to write in easy style about serious things

Huge, dark canvases

My interview with Anya Ulinich is up at Maud Newton.

I tried to make paintings about the strangeness of being a culturally Soviet person, to be nostalgic for things that are, objectively speaking, not worth missing. I was really stuck, until I finally made up Sasha Goldberg and her hometown Asbestos 2.