Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2013 0:16:08 GMT -5
In a recent T.L.S. we find an article about one Mikhail Shishkin, said to be a novelist of "increasingly imposing stature." In the profundity of my ignorance I have never heard of him, nor of any of the four names with whose his is compared: Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya, or Boris Akunin.
It is Boris Dralyuk who has written in to tell us that "Among the things that set Shishkin apart from many of his contemporaries is the fact that he has spent most of the past eighteen years abroad. This places him in the illustrious tradition of Russian émigré authors and has invited the resentment, if not ire, of several critics back in Russia. The fact that he makes his home in Switzerland has also invited inevitable comparisons to Vladimir Nabokoff, away from which Shishkin has not shied."
Only now are some of his things being translated into our language.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2013 2:03:18 GMT -5
According to Wikipedia, Shishkin's books have been translated into more than ten languages. His prose is universally praised for style, e.g., "Shishkin's language is wonderfully lucid and concise. Without sounding archaic, it reaches over the heads of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (whose relationship with the Russian language was often uneasy) to the tradition of Pushkin." He deals with universal themes like death, resurrection, and love. Shishkin has been compared to numerous great writers, including Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, while he admits to being influenced by Chekhov along with Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Bunin, saying "Bunin taught me not to compromise, and to go on believing in myself. Chekhov passed on his sense of humanity – that there can’t be any wholly negative characters in your text. And from Tolstoy I learned not to be afraid of being naïve." Mikhail Pavlovich ShishkinI, too, shall have to track Mikhail Shishkin down, Sydney Grew! |
|
|
|
Post by neilmcgowan on Apr 16, 2013 14:35:31 GMT -5
I have never heard of him, nor of any of the four names with whose his is compared: Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya, or Boris Akunin. Three, at least, are excellent writers. Viktor Pelevin is probably the biggest-selling of them all, and the top-selling living novelist in Russia. He is the son of a scientist who worked on Russia's nuclear weapons program, and as such he grew up in spookland - top-secret military bases in utterly remote locations. This is Pelevin's world - the decaying, festering aftermath of the USSR, and its reluctant metamorphosis into modern-day Russia. Pelevin is especially luckily to have the marvelously talented Andrew Bromfield as his English translator these days. Almost all of his books are available in mainstream English editions. I haven't really enjoyed his most recent output, which has been a bit 'samey'. Highly recommended are his mid-90s books - especially "Omon-Ra"*, "Chapaev & Emptiness", and most especially "Generation P". Boris Akunin is the pen-name of astounding academic Grigory Chkhartishvili, a refusenik Georgian intellectual who teaches Japanese at Moscow University - but has recently been active in the anti-Putin opposition movement. He shuns the tag of 'public intellectual' - he is a true academic in the best sense of the world, and carries enormous authority in every sphere in which he is active. His writing is, you might say, a profitable hobby for him? Everything he does is an intellectual chess-match with his readers - even from his pen-name (a pun on the name of the anarchist philosopher Bakunin). His output consists almost entirely of stylistic pastiches of detective novels - written in a spoof-C19th literary style so perfect, that one would never spot the spoof were it not for the intentional howlers he inserts to amuse the reader. He has two detectives - one is the old lady Pelagia (a loving tribute to Miss Marple), and the other the Secret Agent, Fandorin - a peculiar admixture of Holmes, George Smiley, and Poirot. Literary pyrotechnics of the most dazzling kind - I read him with true envy. Yet my favourite work is actually a play called THE SEAGULL  The closing line of Chekhov's THE SEAGULL: DORN. [Looking through the pages of a magazine, to TRIGORIN] There was an article from America in this magazine about two months ago that I wanted to ask you about, among other things. [He leads TRIGORIN to the front of the stage] I am very much interested in this question. [He lowers his voice and whispers] You must take Madame Arkadina away from here; what I wanted to say was, that Constantine has shot himself.
The curtain falls.The opening lines of Akunin's THE SEAGULL: DORN. [Looking through the pages of a magazine, to TRIGORIN] There was an article from America in this magazine about two months ago that I wanted to ask you about, among other things. [He leads TRIGORIN to the front of the stage] I am very much interested in this question. [He lowers his voice and whispers] You must take Madame Arkadina away from here; what I wanted to say was, that Constantine has shot himself.
TRIGORIN: Shot himself? Nonsense! Someone has shot him! We must discover who!
Thereafter follows a spoof Agatha-Christie murder mystery, featuring the characters of Chekhov's play. Both plays now appear published in one volume. In one Moscow theatre both plays are given as a double bill, with the same cast. Vladimir Sorokin is a magnificent essayist, who has been heavily clobbered by the loutish "Marching Together" youth movement of the Putinist thugs. * an untranslatable pun - OMON are the Russian Riot Police. |
|
