Languor Management

A sketchbook

A neat gallery of old Russian book jackets from the New York Public Library's digital collection. [Spaceeba, Keith!]

Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed

On October 23, 1958, The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Soviet writer Boris Pasternak "for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition." Pasternak was pleased and flattered to win the award, and he sent the following telegram to the Nobel Foundation: "Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed." Official Soviet circles, however, were not so pleased...

Sovlit on Pasternak's two telegrams to the Nobel Committee.

Charm and flouride

Maud reviews Ellen Litman's  The Last Chicken in America for the New York Times.

When a good novel fails to find an audience, it’s the fault of bad marketing, unappealing cover art or a public too dim to appreciate literary fiction. But if short stories don’t sell, publishers blame the form. The resulting skittishness may account for the rise of the “novel in stories,” a hybridized creature typically denoted, as in the case of Ellen Litman’s “Last Chicken in America,” by an italicized subtitle.

The worst of these books are chilly and labyrinthine. You follow dour characters down corridors of plot, theme or emotion that threaten to lead to some destination, but never actually do. Litman’s elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is the converse of such aimless solemnity. It’s warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.

The mutual aid society

Sovlit.com presents Eric Konkol's translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical sketch "Three Kopeks," which he wrote while working for the railroad newspaper Gudok. It is the story of a railroad employee coming up against bureaucracy and the taxman.

See also Bulgakov's "Remembering Gudok."

Families in decline

New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tenenhaus is moderating a month-long reading group on Richard Pevear's and Larissa Volokhonsky's new translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace at the reading room. This makes me realize how long it's been since I read the book and how woefully inadequate I feel in discussing it...so I won't.

The silent generation

According to the Moscow News, they're building a statue of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), the late Nobel laureate poet, outside the American Embassy on Novinsky Bulvar in Moscow.

Brodsky's early career was not marked with success. He was born to Jewish parents in St. Petersburg, where his father was a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy. He tried entering the Navy himself after he left school at 15, but the school for submariners would not take him and he went to work at a plant as a machine operator. In time, he developed ambitions to be a doctor and so accepted a job in the morgue of Kresty prison in St Petersburg.

While working at the prison, and later at a hospital and a ship's boiler room, Brodsky absorbed knowledge. He read widely and his interests led him to an in-depth knowledge of classical philosophy, religion and mythology. He also taught himself English and Polish, the latter so as to read the poems of his friend and favorite poet, Czeslaw Milosz. He belongs to that group of writers, The Silent Generation, whose works were prohibited during the days of the Soviet Union. After the publication of his poems during the sixties he was arrested and condemned to seven years of hard labor for "parasitism."

From Brodsky's Wikipedia entry:

In 1963, he was arrested and in 1964 charged with parasitism ("тунеядство") by the Soviet authorities. A famous excerpt from the transcript of his trial made by journalist Frida Vigdorova was smuggled to the West:

Judge: And what is your profession, in general?
Brodsky: I am a poet and a literary translator.
Judge: Who recognizes you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of humankind?
Judge: Did you study this?
Brodsky: This?
Judge: How to become a poet. You did not even try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach?
Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school.
Judge: How then?
Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.
For his "parasitism" Brodsky was sentenced to five years of internal exile with obligatory engagement in physical work and served 18 months in Archangelsk region. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet and foreign literary figures, such as Evgeny Evtushenko and Jean Paul Sartre, protested.

Here's a link to some of his English language poems.

A bilingual evening of contemporary Russian Literature

RUSSIAN SAMOVAR and CECartslink are presenting an evening of contemporary Russian literature with

Maria Galina
Leonid Kostyukov
Sergei Soloukh
Ekaterina Taratuta

It's a bilingual reading so don't sweat it if your Russian is rusty. There will also be a conversation with the authors following the reading.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Upstairs in the St. Petersburg Hall at the Russian Samovar
256 West 52nd Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue

The event is FREE with RSVP to eryabova@cecartslink.org

The Aqua Velva Man

While I was eating a modest lunch in Madison Square Park, a man and a woman sat near me on the base of the Eternal Light Memorial Flagpole, which was designed by architect Thomas Hastings and erected in 1918 to honor the military heroes of World War I. The couple appeared old beyond their years, and while they did not appear homeless, their russet and wind-burned faces and weatherworn clothing suggested a hard life knocking around the streets of New York. Each held a can of Budweiser in a paper bag with a straw sticking out of it. Tall and heavyset, the man held a bottle of Aqua Velva aftershave in his other hand. The woman, short and plump, held a pack of cigarettes in her's.

"Why do you wear that Aqua Velva shit anyway?" The woman asked in a gravelly voice as the pair took their seats.

"It gets me laid, doesn't it?" was the gentleman's response.

At least he wasn't drinking it, as US sailors in WWII were rumored to have done on account of its high alcohol content. While it contains a bittering agent, denatonium benzoate, to discourage consumption, the flavor was improved by adding vanilla extract or orange juice. In my neighbor's defense, I saw neither additive on his person. But from my vantage, I could also detect no scent other than beer on his person. Perhaps he wasn't feeling amorous just then.

I glanced at the pair for what I thought was only a moment but the man still managed to catch my eye and say, "Why else, right?" With that, he started cackling and swung his arm around his companion, who managed somehow to blush an even deeper shade of red than a lifetime of booze had allotted her.

I didn't answer his question, so he asked me another: "Hey, what kind of aftershave do you wear?"

"I don't wear aftershave," I said, looking back down at my book. I wasn't trying to come off as a snob; the sad truth is that I rarely have to shave, so I have no need for the product.

"What, you don't wanna get laid?" He looked incredulous and, shaking his head, turned his attention to his companion.

When he started splashing the blue liquid on his neck and chest, I knew that lunchtime was over.

One year after her murder

Columbia University's Harriman Institute is hosting: The Life of Anna Politkovskaya: A Panel Discussion. Presenters inlcude:

Ann Cooper, Coordinator, Broadcast Program at the Columbia Journalism School, and former Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists; Rachel Denber, Acting Director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division; Mary Holland, NYU School of Law; Michaela Pohl, Vassar College. Moderator: Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Director, Harriman Institute

Sunday, October 7 @ 5:00pm

Refectory, Union Theological Seminary
Broadway and 121st Street
New York

Twain in vain

Thank you all for your generous support in the wake of my denial of access to the Hartford home of Mark Twain. Some of you have taken great personal risk to provide me with some level of consolation. Your sacrifice is warmly welcome in these difficult times. Twain House, however, must suffer the wrath of Octobriana and the Russian Underground!