Current ex-Soviet Lit

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The most current thing I enjoyed reading this year was Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin -- by a Ukranian writer, and very much involved with the weird and ruleless post-Communist bureaucracy that seems to pervade the entire post-Soviet enterprise. (The narrator gets his penguin because the mismanaged zoo cannot afford food and has to give all the animals away!)

The situation of the post-Communist state seems ideal for literature, a many of the reviews I've read of the Kurkov claim that it's part of a vague new wave of writers with similar concerns. The only similar thing I know of is the work of Gary Shteyngart, who spent most of his youth in the U.S. but has made eastern Europe his literary setting; I was eventually won over by his last short story in the New Yorker, but I've yet to read his novel.

Do you know of any stuff in this vein? Have you read any? What do you think?

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 14 November 2002 17:36 (twenty-three years ago)

Oddly enough, I know there's a thread on this very subject in the archives somewhere! Josh to thread.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 14 November 2002 18:05 (twenty-three years ago)

i'm readin death and the penguin at the moment! umm, does victor pelevin count?

― toby (tsg20), Thursday, 14 November 2002 18:10 (twenty-three years ago)

i'm reading death and the penguin at the moment! umm, does victor pelevin count?

― toby (tsg20), Thursday, 14 November 2002 18:10 (twenty-three years ago)

grr. anyway pelevin is ace, too, or at least his most recent stuff is.

― toby (tsg20), Thursday, 14 November 2002 18:10 (twenty-three years ago)

I loved it even apart from the fact that I have this thing about penguins.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 14 November 2002 19:59 (twenty-three years ago)

yea, that penguin book looked pretty interesting.

here is the previous thread on post-soviet literature

since then ive picked up dimitry bakhins reasons for living, but i havent read it yet

― gareth (gareth), Friday, 15 November 2002 09:50 (twenty-three years ago)

The situation of the post-Communist state seems ideal for literature

This is an interesting statement. In what way?

― Sam (chirombo), Friday, 15 November 2002 10:05 (twenty-three years ago)

I think because it politicizes everyday life, perhaps? A big literary problem in the comfortable west seems to have been that the everday lives of people do not appear to many writers to contain much that is of paramount importance beyond the standard emotional relations with others (and a lot of fretting about the course of our culture and consumerism and etc). Whereas the post-Communist situation seems to be that the details and organization of everyday life are themselves in question, in deep political and philosophical question, making just about everything a potential exercise in the very important; modern life and a sence of urgency and change coexist more so than elsewhere, maybe. I may be talking out of my ass here, but that's the sense I get.

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 15 November 2002 18:17 (twenty-three years ago)

I think Nabisco's right. I remember some Eastern European writer (can't remember who) explaining that the difference between the literatures of the supposed hemispheres was that in the West everything was permitted but nothing mattered, and in the East the other way around. Now the state oppression has gone, but the sense of it mattering has not. This includes the state of flux, the sense that the future is up for grabs, there to be won and defined.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Sunday, 17 November 2002 16:02 (twenty-three years ago)

two months pass...

You could try Venedikt Yarofeev, he's not post Soviet exactly, he was published around the late 70's. Moscow to the End of the Line (sometimes called Moscow Circles i think) is excelent in the traditonal Russian vodka drinking, poverty stricken, sackcloth wearing philosopher way. There's also Evgeny Popov, not read him myself, but heard good things.

― Weekly Weekly, Sunday, 2 February 2003 02:39 (twenty-three years ago)

gareth have you read death and the penguin yet? if not i can lend it to you, i've finally got my copy back.

― toby (tsg20), Sunday, 2 February 2003 08:33 (twenty-three years ago)

to go slightly off-topic, cd someone recommend stalin biographies? ta.

― naked as sin (naked as sin), Sunday, 2 February 2003 16:23 (twenty-three years ago)

death and the penguin is ace, kurkov has a new book coming out in the spring.

― jel -- (jel), Sunday, 2 February 2003 16:46 (twenty-three years ago)

Hooray! The penguin was a stroke of genius. I am actually reading Pelevin right now, but in a taster's format (4 by Pelevin).

― nabisco (nabisco), Sunday, 2 February 2003 20:41 (twenty-three years ago)

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