Latest Review: "Day of the Oprichnik" by Vladimir Sorokin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which just came out from FSG in Jamey Gambrell’s translation. Since this is a day of Sorokin (the event write-up, the discussion in the podcast), I’m going to skip all the normal author and ...
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Day of the Oprichnik
Set in a futuristic Moscow (2028 according to the jacket copy), Day of the Oprichnik is exactly that: a day in the life of Andrei Danilovich Komiaga. The oprichniki were essentially a cultish “death squad” that was set up by Tsar Ivan the Terrible back in the mid 1500s to protect his ass and slay his enemies, and ...
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Vladimir Sorokin's Coming Out Party
As mentioned on last week’s podcast, and further elaborated on in this week’s one (BTW, you can subscribe to the Three Percent podcast at iTunes), Vladimir Sorokin was one of the authors I was most interested in seeing at the PEN World Voices Festival. Way back when, I read his short, early novel The Queue in a ...
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Outspoken Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Kind of in conjunction with the release of Daniel Stein, Interpreter, the Guardian has a longish piece on Ulitskaya that focuses on her more dissident side, especially in relation to Mikhail Khodorkovsky: Articles, Dialogues, Interviews, a collection of her letters with jailed billionaire Khodorkovsky: [Ulitskaya] was ...
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Latest Review: "The Chukchi Bible" by Yuri Rytkheu
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaija Straumanis on Yuri Rytkheu’s The Chukchi Bible, translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse and soon to be available from Archipelago Books. Rytkheu is one of the only (if not the only) Chukchi writers to be translated into English. His A Dream ...
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The Chukchi Bible
A bird flies around, takes a few shits, the shit turns into land and, voilà, the world is created. That may sound like a summary of a terrible animated short or a 1970s acid trip, but it’s simply my poorly hyper-abridged version of one of many truly beautiful Chukchi folk tales that mark the beginning of time and man ...
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Russia's Young, Exportable Writers
Following up on yesterday’s posts, here’s a piece on the Russian Debut Prize that I also wrote for Publishing Perspectives. Interesting project and seems crazy in its scope—30,000+ entries a year?! Back in 2000, the “Debut Prize” was established by the Pokolenie (Generation) Foundation to support ...
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