Russian Reading Challenge 2008

Random notes:

The French have never been told not to change lanes in a tunnel. There are many tunnels here, zooming us under the Alps.

Speaking of the Alps, where is Mont Blanc, exactly? I’m pretty sure that’s the mountain I was looking at while insanely turned around (on foot, and schlepping LOADS of stuff from Monoprix, the K-Mart of France--even a school-crossing guard stopped me to say, “wow, the sale must have been pretty good!”, not to mention the woman who was driving with her windows down (in this weather?!) and remarked to her passenger, “look at the woman with all those red bags!”). I tell you, I was a memorable hit in Annecy.

I go to the market. My French does not extend to, would you please dress that fish? Actually, my English doesn’t extend to it, either. Do you “dress” a fish? Anyhow, I just drew a finger across my throat, so the fishmonger said, “Coupez la tete?” Oui, oui, please, cut off its head! I decided not to ask about scale and innards removal (“head” I know, but “innards”??), figuring (correctly, as it turns out) that was a freebie with decapitation.

The market was full of French lessons. One of the boulangers had so many fantastic-looking breads, but I didn’t know what most of them were. I asked if he spoke English, which he did, and so he told me, this one is half rye and half wheat, this one is spelt, etc. When I made my purchase, I said to him, oh, next weekend my French will be fabulous! “Grace a moi,” he replied, laughing--thanks to me!

Glorious things at the market:

• tiny little purple artichokes
• lemons with leaves attached
• dozens of kinds of oysters, and you can stand at the end of the bar and have a tasting, along with a glass of Muscadet! We passed, as it was 10 in the morning. . . .
• radishes, the very tiny elongated kind

Coming up: More on my day in Annecy

I go to my first dinner party

I rent a dog!

Russian Reading Challenge Roundup

For the Russian Reading Challenge we had to read at least four books related to Russia between January 1 and December 31, 2008. That was an easy target for me as I had a lot more books on Russia on my TBR-pile. The year ended up being very much colored by my reading for this challenge, but that was not a problem at all! I ended up readingsixteen books for this challenge and almost all of them were worth reading. In fact my two non-fiction favorites of 2008 are on the list. I have only two Russia-related books left on myTBR-pile, which I plan to read this year.

These are the books I read for the Russian Reading Challenge in 2008 (links are to my reviews):
* Orlando Figes - The Whisperers
* Simon Sebag Montefiore - Young Stalin
* Fazil Iskander - Tali, Het wonder van Tsjegem (Tali, The Miracle of Chegem)
* Vassily Aksyonov - Generations of Winter
* Факко & Сакко не теряют надежды - Reid, Geleijnse & Van Tol
* Corine de Vries - Dansen in een strafkamp
* Pieter Waterdrinker - Montagne Russe
* Anna Brouwer - Land van gebroken beloftes: Dochters van Rusland
* Anne Applebaum - Gulag: A History
* Jelle Brandt Corstius - Rusland voor gevorderden: Berichten van een overlever
* Edward Rutherfurd - Russka
* Tom Rob Smith - Child 44
* Åsne Seierstad - The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya
* Chaim Potok - The Gates of November (De familie Slepak)
* Laura Starink - De Russische kater
* Peter d’Hamecourt - Russen zien ze vliegen

There were a couple of books I read but didn't review. They are Факко & Сакко не теряют надежды (Fokke and Sukke won't loose hope), a Dutch comic translated into Russian. It was not really a book or a novel, but it was a quick and fun read. It was interesting to see how the Dutch jokes and blunt sense of humor of  the comic had been translated into Russian. Some worked very well, but other jokes kind of lost the edge they have in the Dutch language.

I didn't review Pieter Waterdrinker's Montagne Russe either. Initially I didn't get around to it and then I realized that I didn't have much to say about the book as I found it rather repetitive. It is a collection of short stories and essays by a Dutch writer/journalist living in Russia. It won't be a surprise then that this was the book I liked least. You can read an excerpt in English here.

The other two books I didn't review were actually rather good, both of them. I had planned to write about them, but then I postponed that too long so I don't really remember what I wanted to write.

Chaim Potok's The Gates of November (De familie Slepak in Dutch) is a biography of Volodya and Masha Slepak, a Jewish couple who became leaders in the refusenik-dissident movement in the 1970s and 80s in the Soviet Union. Chaim Potok is my favorite writer ever and I used to reread his books regularly when I was still living in Holland. His book The Promise is my favorite ever book, the only book I would reread every year. I miss reading his books, so next time I am in Holland I will dig into my bookstacks and bring some of his books back with me. It is high time for a reread. Though Gates of November is not my favorite Potok (I think this is partly because I read the book in Dutch translation, which was good but nothing like reading Potok in English), I still thoroughly enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it. Jew Wishes has a more extensive review on her blog here.

The final book I didn't get around to reviewing was Åsne Seierstad's The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya. Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist who became well-known as the author of the controversial The Bookseller of Kabul. She lived in Grozny, the capital of war-torn Chechnya, illegally in 2006 and 2007. Seierstad writes a gripping account of what life is like for ordinary people in a country ruined by war and where, despite Russia's official stance that the war is over, a simmering conflict is still going on, fueled in large part by the Russia-backed presidentRamzan Kadyrov and his private army of Kadyrovtsy. Seierstad focuses on the inhabitants of the orphanage where she lives during her stays in Grozny, and especially on the children who grew up only knowing war and violence.Seierstad's writing and her compassion for ordinary people suffering from the violence in Chechnya reminded me of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya's writing on Chechnya. If the subject interests you, I highly recommend The Angel of Grozny.

Though, as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed the large majority of the books I read for my challenge, there were two that stood out easily: The Whisperers and Gulag. They are easily my two favorite non-fiction reads of last year. In fact, The Whisperers was one of the first books I read in 2008 and already then I knew that it would end high in the list of favorite books of the year.

Thanks so much, Sharon, for hosting this challenge! It was easily the favorite challenge I participated in last year.

Myrthe

Crossposted at The Armenian Odar Reads.

I arrive in France

Arrived in Ferney-Voltaire after an easy but packed 7-hr flight from JFK to Geneva. The woman in front of me “needed to sleep,” as she told me, in quasi-Italian, while she reclined her seatback almost into my nose. I wasn’t sure I’d still have knees when we landed, but I seem to have partial joints, at any rate.

Had a minor nightmare at the airport when I learned I had rented a car not directly from a car rental agency, but from a middleman-type business. They got me a great deal, but then National had to have a printout of my voucher, which I didn’t have, and they wanted me to schlep all my belongings all the way back through the airport to the (attached) train station, where there is reportedly an Internet cafe where I could have printed the voucher. I dumped the luggage at National, where they were threatening to call the gendarmes because I had left my luggage cart and bags in front of their counter. I told them to go right ahead, figuring it was best to BEGIN AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON, zipped back through the airport and the train station, never did find the Internet cafe, and returned to said luggage and gendarme-threatening rental agents, told them I’d never rent a car from them again, and began to make my way over to Budget, or anywhere, to get a car, when Philippe, who is my new best friend, ran over and brought me back and straightened everything out. Eventually (oh, and after, of course, a phone fight with American Express--why was I in Switzerland? Why was I renting a car? Etc. That conversation ended when I finally told them VISA doesn’t ask me all these questions), I was practicing my French with him, and he was showing me how to use the Tom-Tom (the GPS unit), and we were laughing and saying we would see each other again on dimanche/Sunday. Whew.

Minor nightmare #2 had to do with getting all those bags to the car park. Some extremely nice fellow who drives the rental car shuttle gave me 2 Euros to rent a luggage cart (I didn’t have any monnaie, as change is called). Then I had to flag down some guy to undo the emergency brake, which had been yanked up to the ceiling. This rather amusing since I don’t know the word for “brake,” but I mimed the problem well enough, and he didn’t have any trouble releasing it, as no doubt he was the same fellow who yanked it up too far in the first place ;-)

From there it was on to my tiny apartment in the Citadines hotel. I have a nice, separate bedroom, and a small living room with pullout sofa, TV, and a dining room table, where I shall no doubt be hosting a dinner party by the weekend ;-) The lack of an oven (I do have 2 stovetop burners, a microwave, a small fridge, and, hilariously, a dishwasher (perhaps an oven might have gone well in that space? I ask you) may be a bit of a challenge. On the other hand, we will no doubt have fondue, which requires none of those things.

I dumped out all my stuff and headed straight to the local version of Wal-Mart, which is called Champion. Slight problem there right off the bat, as the only way to get a shopping cart is to put in 1 Euro (refundable on return), but, as above, I had NO MONNAIE! Another nice guy, a security type at Champion, gave me a free token. Hooray for all these nice guys.

Then it was a 2-hr marathon of trying to figure out what’s what in the French grocery store. I went to the section of “products for strangers” to make 100% sure there is no decent peanut butter, but alas, ‘tis true. If I liked Skippy, I’d be in clover. Bought some Marmite instead! I bought a number of extremely random items just to get me through the next couple of days.

Back home, I took a bath and a nap and am now trying to stay awake till 7:30 pm. Real unpacking and organizing tomorrow, Scarlett!

Okay, so maybe I went a bit overboard

First, many thanks to Sharon for coming up with the idea and having the blog.  I hit four of the six books on my initial list in April.

I was fortunate enough to spend three days in St. Petersburg in July as part of a Baltic cruise. During the cruise I read War and Peace. But between the start given me by the challenge and that trip, I ended up reading 14 books this year that met the challenge. The final list:

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (I've read this before but The Whisperers by Orlando Figes prompts me to read it again.)
• Ice, Vladimir Sorokin
• One Soldier's War, Arkady Babchenko
• The Slynx, Tatyana Tolstaya
• The Story of a Nobody, Anton Chekhov
• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
• The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
• Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power, Virginia Rounding
• The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia, Tim Tzouliadis
• Leningrad: State of Siege, Michael Jones
• Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore
• The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean
• Child 44, Tom Rob Smith
• The Archivist's Story, Travis Holland

I shuld have posted here quite a bit more during my reading adventures but I guess I was just too busy reading. Anyway, thanks again Sharon and congrats to everyone else participating. It was a fun and educational journey.

Conclusion of Russian Reading Challenge - Sharon (Ex Libris)

It is hard to believe that 2008 is almost over!  And that means, unfortunately, the conclusion of the Russian Reading Challenge.  What a year this has been! I want to thank each and every one of you for taking time out of your year to read Russian fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama.  Whether or not you successfully completed your reading goals, just the fact that you considered participating at some level is awesome.  I hope that you have gained a new insight into Russian literature.  I know I have.

As for my participation in the challenge, I completed a total of 5 books.  They are:

 

• Alexander I by Janet M. Hartley (book with no cover) - rated 3/5 - this was a biography of Alexander I.  OK, but not great.
• Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov - rated 5/5 - exquisite writing
• Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov - rated 5/5 - wonderful book, equal amounts of comedy and sadness
• Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer - rated 4/5 - these poems were very depressing.  I felt that it could be the translation.  I would like to read Jane Kenyon's translations again, as that is what made me want to read Akhmatova in the first place.
• Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov - rated 4.5/5 - an interesting look at late 20th century politics between Russia and the Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a would-be novelist who writes obituaries for a living and his pet penguin.

Although I did not read as much Russian literature as I had hoped I would, I thoroughly enjoyed what I did read.  I still plan to return to War and Peace one of these days, and I have put Crime and Punishment back on my reading list for 2009.

I plan to keep the blog up for the month of January, so if you have any last minute reviews you would like to post, please feel free to do so.

Thank you again to each and every one of you.  It has been a joy.  Happy new year and happy reading for 2009!

"I Dreamed I was a Ballerina"

                         Anna Pavlova: "I Dreamed I was a  Ballerina ..."

A review of "Anna Pavlova" by V. Svetloff, translated from the Russian by A. Grey. First published in a limited edition by M. de Brunoff, Paris, 1922. A reproduction edition was published by Dover, New York, in 1974

Supplementary information from Naerebout, F. "Anna Pavlova, a short biography".

Svetloff wrote a monograph detailing the artistic achievements of Anna Pavlova. It is remarkable for two reasons: first, it contains 75 illustrations of her career, many of them no longer available elsewhere; second, it contains a reproduction of Pavlova's own charming autobiography titled "Pages of My Life", in which the ballerina presents her own interpretation of her rise to glory. Svetloff's book is written in the most extreme flowery prose, an attempt to use mere words to describe the ethereal nature of the dance. It also contains a brief history of ballet, and a description of the change in costumes over time.

Ballet began as court entertainment in Tortona (Italy) in 1549, with young boys playing the female roles, wearing stiff court costumes ("heavy ample stiff wide dresses') which impeded movement and breathing alike. It was not until 1683 that females began to dance on stage. By the mid 1750s, lighter Greek tunics appeared and in 1790 flesh colored tights were added to disguise the emerging nakedness. (The Pope approved of tights, but specified they must be Royal Blue in color). Skirts got ever shorter until by 1870 the Italian ballet dress looked like a "spinning top" (forerunner of the tutu).

Pavlova was born in 1881 two months premature, frail and weak, to a washer woman named Lyubov Pavlova, and an unknown father, perhaps a Russian Jewish soldier.  They lived an impoverished life, although, as was the case for many Russian families, their summers were spent in a dacha in the countryside. In her story, little Anna describes the pleasure of playing in the soft light of the forest and taking tea on the verandah. One year, as a Christmas present, her mother took the 8 year old Anna to see Sleeping Beauty at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. When asked during intermission  if she would like to be dancing on the stage with the others, Anna replied: "No! I want to dance alone". And so, eventually, she did.

After 8 years of training at the Imperial Dance School, Anna graduated and was immediately promoted to Corephee, one step above the Corps de Ballet. She was given small starring roles in short ballets and Divertissements. At the same time, she fearlessly involved herself in Russian internal politics, taking part in 1905 in the demonstrations brought on by Bloody Sunday  Soon she was promoted to Prima Ballerina. In 1907 Fokine choreographed for her "The Dying Swan" to the music of Saint-Saens. An expression of the frailty of life, this was to become her signature piece, danced all over the world on her many tours.

In 1914, as World War I broke out, Pavlova was traveling in Germany, and from then on was effectively excluded from Russia. She made her home after that in London, together with Victor Dandre, her lover, manager, and perhaps also her husband. It is estimated that during her 15 year career she traveled 350,000 miles, appearing in all sorts of venues, from open fields illuminated by the headlights of cars, to circus arenas, to the grand theatres of all nations. 

The tours eventually took their toll. In 1931, she was involved in a minor train accident while traveling between Cannes and Paris. Impetuously, she ran the length of the train, from back to front, wearing only a flimsy nightgown. Soon she contracted a cold which turned into pneumonia, and she died three weeks later. It is reported that on her death bed she clutched her Swan costume, murmuring: "Play the last measure very softly". She was 50 years old, and had devoted her entire life to her art.

Pavlova's style was both classical and revolutionary. Blessed with an unusual body shape, she had to work hard to conquer all the classical moves; this she did. But in the same period as she danced her frail, mystical interpretation of Giselle, her favourite ballet, she also threw herself with passionate abandon into roles of great seductive power, such as those in "The Syrian Dance" and "Dionysos". Both frail and wild, nothing could limit her. It has been said that she did not leap from the earth, rather, she danced suspended from the sky, as light and insubstantial as a cloud. And at the end, The Dying Swan.

My vision will  be of a white wraith dancing in the darkness always before the train.

Russian Reading Challenge 4: Gogol Potpourri

I began and ended the Russian Reading Challenge with Nikolai Gogol, taking the year to work my way through short stories in Beчера на хуторе близ Диканьки (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka) and Миргород(Mirgorod). I finished with the play Ревизор (The Government Inspector/The Inspector General).

The stories in Dikanka and Mirgorod, which focus on Ukrainian country life, are of very mixed quality and genre. The Dikanka stories were particularly painful reading for me, though I did finish them. My composite recollections from early 2008 include numerous bops over the head, deceptions, people hiding in hay, and, of course, devils and unclean forces.

I didn’t especially enjoy the stories, though there were some occasional nice passages. A description of the Dnepr in the gothic “Страшная месть” (“The Terrible Vengeance”) for example, is rather poetic, and bits of “Майская ночь, или Утопленница” (“A May Night or the Drowned Maiden”), which included witches, reminded me a bit of Master and Margarita. Many of the stories in these two collections showed двоеверие, dual belief, a combination of religious and pagan traditions. “Вий” (“The Viy”), a story in Mirgorod, is a sort of ghost story involving a seminary student and a shapeshifting, flying witch.

I wondered why I didn’t find much amusement in Dikanka, which D.S. Mirsky describes in A History of Russian Literature as simple and unadulterated fun. Feeling lost and humorless, I appealed to Vladimir Nabokov, via his book Nikolai Gogol. I was relieved to find I had company. Nabokov is scathing: 

“There is nothing more dull and sickening to my taste than romantic folklore or rollicking yarns about lumberjacks or Yorkshiremen or French villagers or Ukrainian good companions. It is for this reason that the two volumes of the Evenings as well as the two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod… which followed in 1835, leave me completely indifferent. It was however this kind of stuff, the juvenilia of the false humorist Gogol, that teachers in Russian schools crammed down a fellow’s throat.” (page 31)

I was able to find laughs in “Повесть о том, как поссорился Иван Иванович с Иваном Никифоровичем” (“How Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich Quarrelled”). I thought this story was the best of the two collections, with its humorous picture of how small-town neighbors feud for years after an argument that involves a silly insult and wishful thinking about gun ownership. You lawyers out there will be happy to know the Ivans decide to sue.

Gogol balances his humor, though, with a devastating final paragraph that includes mud, dampness, and one of the most quoted lines (in my experience, anyway) in Russian literature: “Скучно на этом свете, господа!” The line is not easy to translate because the word скучно combines boring and dreary. But here’s a go: “It’s tedious on this world, gentlemen!” And really, what could be more tedious/boring/dreary than two neighbors hating each other for years because of trivialities and name-calling?

As for the rest of Mirgorod, I admit I couldn’t make my way through “Старосветские помещики” (“Old World Landowners”) despite multiple attempts. I read the novella ТарасБульба (Taras Bulba), about warring Cossacks, several years ago, so didn’t include it in this RRC selection.

I’m very happy I finished my Gogol reading with The Government Inspector, which includes a wonderful combination of slapstickish humor and observations about human nature and identity. The basic plot: rumor has it that a guest at the local inn is an inspector so townspeople look for ways to impress him.

Nabokov makes much of ghost-like characters in The Inspector General who create a rich social backdrop despite never appearing onstage other than as topics of conversation for the townspeople. Of course the play’s characters, many of whom have very funny names that reflect their personalities and frailties, are terribly unreliable and imaginative narrators, particularly when they talk about themselves. Khlestakov, the alleged inspector, for example, reinvents himself completely in conversation, and most of the other characters also show tremendous vanity in creating new narratives for themselves.

The play contains some strong elements of carnival, with plenty of chaos, masks, and changes in the power structure for characters of varied social strata. It seems to me that the final scene, in which the actors freeze for a minute and a half, is Gogol’s way of forcing spectators to, literally, look at his characters and recognize bits of themselves.

Even if I didn’t much enjoy the Dikanka stories, I’m glad I read them: I got a better feel for the variations in Gogol’s writing and the influence he exerts on Russian literature. I’ve been familiar with The Inspector General for years, having read pieces of it and seeing it performed, so was glad to finally fill in a big hole in my Russian reading.

Thank you, Sharon, for creating the Russian Reading Challenge! 

Cross-posted at Lizok’s Bookshelf

P.S. My apologies for the spacing problems: I fixed as many as I could! 

Russen zien ze vliegen by Peter d’Hamecourt

Russen zien ze vliegen by Peter d'Hamecourt is the final book I have read for the Russian Reading Challenge this year. There are two other books I finished that I still need to write a review for, which I hope to do next week. Together with De Russische kater, this is probably the best of the books on Russia by Dutch journalists that I read this year.

D'Hamecourt has lived in Russia for the last twenty years and worked as a correspondent for Dutch TV and radio to a lesser extent for printed media. Russen zien ze vliegen (which literally translates as Russians see them fly, an expression meaning something like 'Russians are imagining things') is a collection of the columns and some other articles d'Hamecourt wrote for print media and media-blogs over the years. In the book they appear chronologically, divided in five sections: The final years of the Soviet-Union (1989-1991); the first years of Boris Yeltsin (1992-1995); Yeltsin's later years (1996-1999); Vladimir Putin's first years (2000-20004); and Putin's last years as president (2005-2007). The book was published in late 2007, so the  2008 presidential elections are only referred to as a future event.

I read the book in less than a week, which was probably not the best way to read it, considering that it consists of columns of about one and a half to two pages. That makes this book more one to pick up every now and then and read a bit. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book. I especially enjoyed the earlier parts, revisiting the demise of the Soviet-Union and the utter chaos that reigned in the first years after the Soviet empire fell apart. The subjects are mostly taken from everyday life, with lots of examples of how politics and economics affected the life of the ordinary Muscovite. D'Hamecourt talks with his neighbors, the fruitsellers in his neighborhood market, taxidrivers and many others; they were the inspiration for most of his pieces. D'Hamecourt notes the surprises and sometimes absurd situations one encounters living in Moscow. He does this in a nice way, though. Throughout the book you feel that he enjoys life in Moscow with all its quirkiness and unusual situations and encounters. All in all I found this a nice, light, entertaining book from which you still take away a lot of new things.

Myrthe

Crossposted at The Armenian Odar Reads.

De Russische kater by Laura Starink

Another book written by a Dutch journalist who knows Russia well. De Russische kater (Dutch for The Russian Hangover) is arguably the best of the lot I have read this year. I finished this book in two days and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Laura Starink is a journalist who has long worked for the best newspaper in Holland, and incidentally the one that over the years has reported about Russia and the former Soviet republics consistently more often and better than other Dutch newspapers. Starink spent time in the Soviet-Union in the late seventies studying Russian, and over a decade later as the newspaper's correspondent in Moscow during the era of perestroika and the implosion of the Soviet-Union. In 2007 she returned to Russia trying to find out what happened to the high expectations people had in the late eighties, early nineties and how Russians had managed in the years since then.

The result of this quest is De Russische kater. The book consists of eleven portraits of Russians from different walks of life, some fairly well-known, but mostly unknown, some Starink interviewed in the course of her work, some she has known for some twenty years. Initially it seems that the people depicted are not really representing 'your average Russian': they all live and work in Moscow and they all are to a certain extent successful in politics, business, culture, education, TV and other spheres. Taken together, though, the interviews give a good idea of the development of Russia in the last twenty years and of the current state of the country. All interviewees are of what in the West is known as the babyboom generation, born between 1946 and 1966. At first I thought this a bit of a limitation, until I realized that this segment of the population was old enough to consciously experience the late eighties and nineties and that they already had their professional careers underway at this time. I ended up seeing the age of the interviewees not as a negative aspect anymore, because they are probably of the generation that can best compare their experiences before and after the end of the communist era.

The first portrait is of former longtime parliamentarian Vladimir Ryzhkov (link in Russian) and is as much a portrait of him as an introduction to the political situation in Russia over the past twenty years. The second portrait is based on an interview with former prime-minister Yegor Gaydar, who is better known for introducing the shock therapy to Russia, throwing the country into the deep end of capitalism in the early nineties. This shock therapy, the wild capitalism and financial crisis of the nineties obviously return over and over again in the later interviews, so the first two interviews are not only portraits of Gaydar and Ryzhkov, but also in a way an introduction to Russia after communism.

Some of the ther people portrayed are former dissidents and current human rights activists Lyudmila Saraskina and Arseniy Roginskiy (director of Memorial), a scientist who founded and heads one of the view relatively successful science-institutes in the country, TV- and Radio personality Viktor Shenderovich (in Russian; his blog, also in Russian, is here), a history teacher who tries to teach her students to look at texts and other historical sources critically and to ask questions, a lawyer, an architect, and a businessman. Their personal histories and views on the current situation in Russia under Vladimir Putin (the book was published early this year, before the presidential elections in which Putin's handpicked successor Dimitry Medvedev won as expected) are given plenty of space. Most or the interviewed are critical of Vladimir Putin and the regression of freedom and democracy, but some more so than others.

If you know Dutch and are interested in contemporary Russia, I highly recommend De Russische kater , as it gives a good overview of the Putin-era, going into much more detail than what you get from the mainstream media.

I would love if Starink decided to write a book of a similar setup with portraits of younger Russians in their twenties and thirties to see what their thoughts are and how they have experienced the last twenty years and the current regression in economic and political freedom, freedom of speech and freedom to criticize the authorities, among others. Such a book would have a very different atmosphere, but would not be less interesting.

Myrthe 

Crossposted at The Armenian Odar Reads.

Russian Reading Wrap-up from The Library Ladder

The list below is the one I made at the beginning of the Russian Reading Challenge. I got ambitious and added Crime & Punishment as well as The Master and Margarita. I never finished Crime & Punishment and am currently still reading the very enjoyable Master and Margarita.

Poetry

Pushkin - The Bronze Horseman

Zabolotsky - Autumn

Akhmatova - In The Evening

Mandelshtam - Beacause I couldn't hold onto your hands...

Brinsov - Twilight

Balmont - In my dreams I pursued the fleeting shadows...

Ivanov - The Russian Mind

Out of the above listed poems, the one that stood out the most for me was ‘In The Evening’. I suppose I was in a romantic mood when I read this because the picture it painted for me was very vivid. I’ll probably explore more of Anna Akhmatova’s writing in the future. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman was also very good and I’m sure I’ll be exploring more of his work as well.

Short Story

Chekhov - A Boring Story

Unfortunately, I never got around to reading this. I suppose subconsciously, the title turned me off! Did anyone else happen to read it?

Novels

Lukyanenko - The Night Watch

Lukyanenko - The Day Watch

Lukyanenko - The Twilight Watch

I made it through the first, second and part of the third book before I stopped torturing myself. The premise of the series is the classic struggle of good versus evil but with a lot of ‘twilight’ areas thrown in. They are well written and a fun read but I just couldn’t get into them. For me there definitely was something lost in the translation.

I’m holding a draw at my blog for the lot of them so pop over and comment for your chance to win.