My review of Tin House's Rasskazy: New Fiction for a New Russia is up at The Rumpus:
It’s safe to say the Soviets learned that culture is never altogether replaced. Art doesn’t occur in isolation, it responds to what has come before and then, however reluctantly, closes ranks: “Time is turned over. The rose was once dirt.” Again, Mandelshtam. And Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, the editors of Rasskazy (which means “stories”), understand this. The authors they’ve included may all have spent their entire adult lives in the post-Soviet era, but their work demonstrates the full breadth of aesthetics and topical concerns of this young generation. Many of the writers, like Arkady Babchenko and German Sadulaev, who portray opposing perspectives on the wars with Chechnya, explicitly address recent historical events à la Isaac Babel. “History,” by Roman Senchin, is set against the April, 2007, government opposition rally at which former chess champion Garry Kasparov was arrested. And Ilya Kochergin’s protagonist in “A Potential Customer” spends his days playing Civilization on the computer, “quietly building cities and waging wars with neighboring states.”
