Russian – Koba English

Resan till Armenien

Osip Mandelstam’s Resan till Armenien (Journey to Armenia) was the first book off my vacation TBR and I managed to finish it in one day of dedicated reading. It’s a short book, but it required a lot of my attention—or at least more attention than I could spare back in February. There were more than a few references to geography, literature, and Soviet history I needed to look up, in addition to the occasional Swedish word.

As I mentioned, this one was a recommendation from a book friend so it was at the top of the list. When I texted him that I’d finally finished, he replied: “Read it again. It’s a new book every time.”

It’s not only a new book every time; it’s a new book in every edition. Since the actual travelogues are so short, publishers seem to like to bundle them with some of Mandelstam’s other writing. My Swedish edition, for example, includes his “Armenia” cycle of poems, which aren’t part of the English translation available on Archive.Org. The newer 2018 edition from Penguin includes “Conversation About Dante,” which my Swedish edition lacks.

I also joked with my friend that the title seems like a bit of a misnomer, because it’s about more than just Armenia—it includes reflections on French painters and Moscow neighborhoods and evolution. I suppose that’s part of what makes it a new book every time. But the bulk of the text is, indeed, travels in Armenia, a notebook of observations, images, impressions and thoughts from a poet who was terrified that he might be losing his gift. In a lot of ways it’s kind of the inverse of Krleža’s Journey to Russia: Krleža is an outsider visiting Russia, while the Polish-Russian Mandelstam is leaving Russia to travel in the Caucuses; where Krleža deals in thorough-going concrete arguments, narratives, and strong opinions, Mandelstam’s pieces are brief, moody, and image-heavy. (This didn’t stop him from getting in trouble with censors, but who didn’t get in trouble with Soviet censors?)

The Swedish translation is from the award-winning Russian-Swedish translator Bengt Samuelson, and I don’t have much comment there. I wondered if his other Russian translations included Idioten, the only Russian novel I’ve attempted in Swedish, but no.

In short, a difficult book to summarize like I normally do for these dorky little book reports! Though I only got three or so hours of sleep last night, so that’s probably not helping either. But Resan till Armenien is so short, and so many of the episodes are so striking, that you don’t lose anything by reading it. Or even reading it again—a new book every time.

Vacation Reading List: Kiruna

By the time this post goes live, I’ll be sitting on a train to? from? Boden, en route to Kiruna for an eleven-day break from the grind. My plan is to visit the big hole in the ground, maybe take in a couple museums, and catch up on my reading backlog. To that end, my list!

Resan till Armenien, Osip Mandelstam

This was a recommendation from a book friend. I started it back in February but quickly realized I would want the time to really focus on it, in part due to lots of new vocabulary. That time has come.

Livet måste ha mening, Victor Frankl

A democratically chosen book for the philosophy reading group I’m in. Unfortunately I find that as the group grows larger, the suggestions devolve into academically dubious pseudo-intellectual New Age claptrap. But I’ll still read this to see for myself! And to remind the group members who suggested this that Frankl was out there trepanning suicidal Jewish people from 1940 to 1942.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras

I am far, far behind on my French reading goal for the year. Duras to the rescue! I’ll also be reading the Swedish translation.

Bastarden från Istanbul, Elif Shafak

The July pick for my international WhatsApp book club. It’s the longest book on this list, so we’ll see if I finish it or even get around to it.

Dead Souls

I first read Gogol’s Dead Souls in 2014, and I remember even then being mostly baffled by the story. Not only the ending, the legendary mid-sentence cliffhanger, but Chichikov’s entire plan. What was buying these dead souls doing for him, exactly? Then earlier this year it was floated as a suggestion for my Swedish language book club so I had the chance to revisit the story twelve years later to see if I was a better reader.

Short answer: no!

But this time around I went digging afterwards for reviews and commentary, which cleared up my biggest point of confusion—the dead souls, which he was presumably acquiring at a bargain, could function as collateral for a loan—even while Gogol’s satire didn’t entirely land. Individual moments of slapstick got a smile or a chuckle out of me, but I’m a reader who is too far removed in time and geography to appreciate the more subtle digs at Russian aristocracy. (Except all the jokes about them speaking French, I know enough history to understand that much about the Russian upper class of the time.) Russian drama and pathos? Fine, great, love it, lay it on me. Russian comedy? Absolute head-scratcher.

Mostly I want to take the time to complain about The Internet These Days. After I finished Dead Souls again, I did what I normally do these days after a real puzzler of a book: look for blog posts or podcasts that might fill in the gaps of my understanding. The vast majority of what I found for Dead Souls was AI-generated slop. Most of it was simple Cliff’s Notes study guides for the YouTube generation—artificial voiceovers explaining the story to you over janky (I’d go so far as to say Eurojanky) art, either still or animated depending budget. A similarly janky short turned out to be an ad for a series of self-published historical fiction prequels (for lack of a better word) to famous classics. A couple videos, notable for being slightly less janky, used Dead Souls to support, of all things, the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory, and lo and behold the channels associated with both of them are dedicated to proving, or propagandizing for, the mythical lost civilization.

Dead souls commenting on Dead Souls, if you will.

We’re drowning in useless bullshit that no one asked for, and that makes it impossible to find the useful stuff that we actually want. Of course, this is hardly news anymore and I’m not breaking any new ground with this claim. I just needed to vent my spleen for a minute. And since it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, here are the cool and useful tidbits I managed to find despite the tsunami of slop.

The Bowie Book Club podcast is a great idea for a podcast. Even if I’m not a David Bowie fan myself, I’m glad people are out there doing something fun and creative like this. They did an episode on Dead Souls back in 2024.

While I can’t comment on the rest of his content, Mike Tyulpakov is at least a human standing there talking to you about Gogol. I’m willing to overlook uncritical appreciation of Jordan Peterson elsewhere in his videos in exchange for an interesting alternative interpretation/model of Dead Souls as a Russian language Odyssey rather than Russian language Divine Comedy. Admittedly it’s not an entirely new reading, but it’s always nice to get a hot take on Russian literature from an actual Russian.

For all my complaining about AI slop, the top hit in YouTube for me was still a human podcast with human faces. Unfortunately, it seems like to get to the top the two hosts have to lean into Manic Internet Hype Machine Podcast Energy, which I hate.

I also found a podcast episode from Vollrath Publishing, a one-man (or possibly husband-and-wife) publishing and podcasting venture. So far the one book they’ve released is a new edition of Frankenstein with new original artwork for the cover and the host’s own footnotes to the text. Could possibly be a publisher to watch? I might pick up their Frankenstein to see what exactly they’re doing.

And finally, the crowning jewel of all of this human work is StandardEbooks.org. They take public domain texts from online sources like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg and clean them up into polished, attractive, and eminently readable ebooks. Nice fonts, comfortable margins and line spacing, properly linked footnotes, no OCR madness. This time around I read their HTML version in my phone’s browser window, but they offer a variety of formats, including for Kindle and Kobo. They don’t know me, I’m not getting any kickback or commission, I’m just hyping them up because I appreciate what they’re doing.

Three Apples Fell From the Sky

My original objective when I was at the library to pick up Save Me the Waltz was Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell From the Sky. It was on my TBR because a (long) past issue of Karavan featured a favorable review, and it was the first book from my TBR that was available at a nearby library while I was in between appointments.

The story centers on the Armenian village of Maran, ravaged by war and natural disaster. The youngest resident is the 58-year-old Anatolia, whose deathbed preparations are the opening action of the book. Naturally, of course, she doesn’t die. Instead she is at the center of a series of events that have the potential to revitalize Maran; our entrance point into a multifaceted history of the village.

Abgaryan is an accomplished novelist with several works out by now, but Three Apples is the one with the most accolades: the English PEN Translates award, the Yasnaya Polyana Award in Russia. Reviews call it “a balm for the soul,” “an enchanting fable,” “an absolute joy,” or “a tender and quirky tale.” Lord knows I could have used a bit of feel-good reading when I picked it up!

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Maybe I’m too cynical for “quirky,” I don’t know, but it’s hard to feel rejuvenated or inspired by anything in the magical realism genre. The last I checked, I don’t have a totemic white peacock shielding me from harm. Being unimpressed with this book feels a bit like kicking puppies—though unlike Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, I didn’t actively dislike Three Apples. I just wasn’t especially charmed by it.

I should note, however, that the book did have one high point for me: food. The book doesn’t skimp on details about various regional foods and desserts, and everything sounds amazing. Perhaps some of this is an artifact of translation (and credit to translator Lisa C. Hayden, the language is beautiful), but given this is a novel about the Armenian countryside written in Russian for a largely not-Armenian audience, I’d be willing to bet that most of the flavor descriptions and explanations were in the original as well. Time to see if there are any Armenian restaurants in Stockholm!

Döden och pingvinen

Nothing like book clubs for finding new books and keeping you on track for reading goals!

Andrey Kurkov’s Döden och pingvinen (Death and the Penguin) was the pick for my WhatsApp book club, a motley international crew put together by an American online acquaintance currently residing in Türkiye. She also happens to have a background in Russian literature, so between her own history and the diversity of geographies in the group, the selection ends up being pretty eclectic.

Döden och pingvinen is a satire and a farce, and was generally a fun relief from other books I had on the go at the same time (e.g. a revisit of Rien où poser sa tête, which deserves to be required reading in the face of ongoing ICE raids in the US). Viktor is a struggling writer in post Soviet Kyiv who suddenly finds himself with a new job: writing obituaries for still-living people of note. He also happens to own an emperor penguin named Misha. These two factors bring a whirlwind of new people into his life, but of course things quickly spiral out of control and Viktor eventually finds himself in the crosshairs.

A lot of the satire probably missed me since I’m not intimately familiar with the post-Soviet politics of Ukraine in the mid-90s. That knowledge might have provided some structure to the story; as it was, most of the time the story revolves around things just happening to Viktor. This works fine as satire—when absurd things happen to a straight-laced protagonist, there’s still narrative satisfaction to be had—but in the last act of the story, the satire takes a backseat to actual pathos. People have died (or are at least presumed dead), Viktor’s life is in danger, and an aura of menace hangs over his newly-found loved ones. In that kind of situation, the protagonist’s lack of action becomes more frustrating. There are also events in the first part of the book that have a foreshadowing aura, where you expect they will be part of a coming plot twist or complication, but nothing ever comes of them. When Döden och pingvinen is straight comedy, it’s fantastic, but when it starts to dip into spy thriller territory it gets slightly confused and deflating. The ending, too, is much more of a downer than the first several chapters would suggest. Black humor is definitely a thing, absolutely, but for me it wasn’t quite the same. I don’t want to get too into the weeds with that, though, because I consider it a spoiler.

It’s also not worth noting except in passing my deep, world-weary sigh at Viktor’s love interest. Another man approaching 40 who gets a “barely legal” ingenue dumped in his lap, as was the style at the time.

Most of us were in agreement that the book started off strong but that by the end we were the most concerned about what would happen with Misha the penguin. Good news for us, Kurkov wrote a sequel!

The House of the Dead

As a rule I generally pack light for my vacations, but this is always in favor of bringing too many books. The prospect of long hours of travel always inspires me to bring a selection, so that if my mood or attention span should shift, I’m more likely to have something suitable on hand. Plus there’s just the fact that I never want to feel like I “only” have one thing to read. Yes, there is Kindle (or the Kindle app, in my case) but sometimes phone battery is at a premium. Inevitably, then, I travel with at least two or three paperbacks, ideally ones without sentimental value so I can leave them behind (to make room for new books). Only sometimes, against my better judgment, do I bring library books or hardbacks that I was desperate to finish at that particular moment.

Nor can these books be just any random unread book off the shelf, either. A mysterious quality guides my hand, the “vibes” if you will. This is how I choose most things, actually—I have to bask in the collective presence of the options and contemplate them until one suddenly just feels right. The decision cannot be rushed or rationalized. Ice cream parlors with miles and miles of flavors were agony for me as a child (and no doubt for the parent accompanying me).

All of that preamble is to say that I can’t for the life of me explain why I chucked Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead into my bag beyond “the vibes.” Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite books out of my entire high school English career and afterwards I set about acquiring, but never actually reading, other works by Dostoyevsky. The next book of his that I read to completion was The Idiot last January—some twenty years later, in other words.

Where I struggled with The Idiot, I deeply enjoyed The House of the Dead. The character studies are more penetrating, more engaging, more revealing. The back of my Dover Thrift edition (ah, yes, Constance Garnett, my old friend!) describes the book as a “semi-autobiographical memoir,” which I take to mean as more or less true. The introduction purporting to be “oh look at these notes I just happened to find among a dead man’s papers” seems to be the plausible deniability cover-your-ass gloss of fiction over the rest of what’s to come.

The various prison personalities are interesting enough that you can overlook the lack of overarching plot or conflict. The narrator relates various observations that roughly correspond to a year, from winter to summer to winter again. Not really a strict chronological year, as such; it’s maybe akin to a thematic grouping, with several summers or winters collapsed into one, with a substantial chunk of time elided: Dostoyevsky himself served four years at a prison camp, and the self-insert narrator (Alexandr Petrovich) claims to have served ten. Petrovich acknowledges this gap and explains that he was the most observant and inquisitive during his first few months at the prison, so those memories are the strongest.

Since The House of the Dead is set in a Siberian prison camp, certain comparisons spring to mind. Not only Solzhenitsyn and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—the portraits of the various inmates reminded me a lot of Homeboy. Enough that I might send my Homeboy book buddy a copy of The House of the Dead. Preferably a newer translation than Garnett’s, though. Several have been put out since then, including Pevear & Volokhonsky! My own copy is now residing on the shelves of Što čitaš? in Zagreb, where it will hopefully find a second life.

The Idiot

The Idiot made me feel like an idiot: there’s my pithy one-sentence review.

Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite pieces of required reading in high school (and one of my favorite books, full stop), so I went on a bit of a Dostoyevsky collecting spree in my early twenties. The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From the Underground, The House of the Dead and, of course, The Idiot got piled on my TBR with abandon, but I only ever finished Brothers.

Well, now that I’m making a more concerted effort to clear out my TBR, it was time to finish that project!

I made an attempt at The Idiot in Swedish a few years ago, but I quickly gave up—I was swamped with work and didn’t have the focus left for Dostoyevsky in Swedish (even if I was curious about translations besides Constance Garnett’s). Browsing the shelves at the freshly renovated library at Medborgarplatsen back in January, I came across the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (pictured here) and decided why not! So here we are.

The translation is great and I would like to sing the praises of the abundance of explanatory end notes. Very interesting, very informative, very essential. Well done, Pevear and Volokhonsky! I might have cleared one book out of the TBR queue by finishing this, but I also just added two more because now I’m deeply curious about their treatment of the Dostoyevsky I’ve already read.

But man oh man, as far as a story goes this was a confounding bummer for me, which is why it made me feel like an idiot. I am bad at subtext even in the best of times; with novels of a certain age it’s all but impossible. I would never have guessed at Totsky’s sexual exploitation of Nastasya Filippovna if I weren’t reading summaries of the book as I finished each part.

And while I appreciate the larger point, or the thought, or motivation, or whatever behind the book—what happens when you take an Actually Good person and throw them into real society?—the society in question felt populated by flat characters who were either extreme melodramatic stereotypes or bland interchangeable nobodies, making their response to pure angelic precious baby Myshkin not particularly interesting. In a lot of ways The Idiot was the complete opposite of what I remember from Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, with complicated characters presented with nuance and depth, but I read them so long ago that maybe I’m just making that up.

Characters aside, the structure is also a bit loosey-goosey. There are whole pivotal sections that just happen off-screen, off the page, that people only refer to in weird info dumps, like Nastasya Filippovna ping-ponging back and forth between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin. There’s no urgent organizing crisis or imminent threat, no murder to solve (or get away with), just a Jane Austen problem of who gets to marry whom. The one saving grace is that it ends in murder, which is more than you can say for a Jane Austen novel.

Speaking of: it would be great if someone could Wide Sargasso Sea the novel from Nastasya Flippovna’s perspective, and maybe someday someone will. I’d be the first to sign up to read it.

Picknick vid vägkanten

It’s always interesting to me to read books that had to undergo significant censorship for their initial publication. Sometimes the ideological clash between author and state is pretty clear, but other times it’s a head-scratcher. Picknick vid vägkanten is one of the latter. It’s difficult for me to find what Soviet censors would have objected to, as opposed to books like We or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All the implied black market and organized crime, maybe? Regardless, a censored version was published in the Soviet Union, and Tartovsky worked with the Strugatsky brothers to turn the idea into the 1979 movie Stalker. (The entire movie, with English subtitles, is available for free on YouTube from Mosfilm.)

A strange alien visitation in the near future (officially the book takes place at some unspecified year in the twentieth century) has resulted in six Zones around the world, all filled with baffling scientific marvels and unpredictable hazards. Picknick follows Red, one of the people who now make a living by navigating the life-threatening terrain to bring back items, a group of people who have come to be called “stalkers.” It’s implied that Red’s regular exposure to the Zone is the reason for the strange mutation in his daughter, who is born mostly normal but covered with long fur and black eyes. She starts out life with the same mental capacity and personality as any child, but eventually becomes withdrawn and non-verbal. Hoping to cure his daughter, Red makes one last incursion into the Zone to reach the Golden Sphere, which is rumored to grant wishes.

Picknick is another classic that feels a bit pointless to review, established as it is within the science fiction canon. I appreciate its weirdness and its refusal to provide any kind of explanation for the Zones or the items, or to descend into a pew-pew space lasers alien invasion story. Instead it’s just people dealing with the fallout (pun intended) of a brief and inexplicable encounter with an alien Other. Science fiction really does get an unfair reputation because everyone’s seen Star Wars and no one’s read books like Roadside Picnic. Next thing you know, we have Ian McEwan convincing himself he’s invented an entirely new genre.

Sigh.

The Swedish translation is worth noting, since it took a lot more research than one would expect to dig up the details of its history. Ola Wallin—who was also responsible for translating and publishing Trötthetssamhället—put out a new translation of Picknick in 2020. That’s the one I read and it’s a fine translation. I think. My Russian is far too gone to attempt a meaningful comparison.

But! Before Ersatz and Olla Wallin, there was a Swedish translation from Delta by Kjell Rehnström, which Wikipedia purports (by way of Neil Cornwell’s Reference Guide to Russian Literature) won the “Jules Verne prize for best novel of the year published in Swedish.” Confirming that last part is proving trickier than one might expect, and will involve a trip to the library over the weekend to check an actual physical reference book. Stockholm Library also appears to have a copy (in addition to Wallin’s), which I might read for comparison’s sake if the mood strikes me.

Olla Wallin is alive and well, so finding out more about his biography isn’t particularly difficult. Kjell Rehnström is, well, alive at least, but if Ratsit is to be believed he’s also 85 years old. Unsurprising that he doesn’t have much of an online presence, then, though it seems he also translates from Polish, including Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz.

Book Review: One Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich

I’ve long been interested in Russian literature, so when this title came up in the comments section of my favorite writing blog, I added it to my towering GoodReads “to read” shelf. A book club buddy gifted me a copy earlier this year and so I immediately sat down to read it.

The Penguin Classics cover of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, featuring a black and white photograph of someone in a prison.

Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; H. T. Willetts, translator

My GoodReads rating: 4 stars

Average GoodReads rating: 3.95

Language scaling: C1+

Summary: One day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet gulag.

Recommended audience: Anyone interested in hyper-realism; anyone interested in Russian literature from the Soviet era

In-depth thoughts: Nothing happens, which will either bother you or it won’t. I’ve long been a fan of the “slice of life” kind of stories, where small struggles gain epic proportions (television shows like The Adventures of Pete and Pete or Seinfeld, movies like Clerks), and that’s largely what One Day… is. It’s just that the backdrop is a prison camp instead of American suburban life. If your tastes overlap with mine, then you’ll get a lot out of it. But if “a book about nothing, set in a gulag” sounds tedious to you, then it probably won’t be a lot of fun to read. (Not that it was “fun,” exactly.)

Because of the specific setting, and because so much of it centers around very small details and very small, easily overlooked items, reading the English translation might be difficult for lower level readers. (Unless you want to look up a whole bunch of new words about army barracks and stonemasony and so on). But for those already familiar with the original, or with a higher level of English, this translation is of interest.