Q: I am about to travel to Russia for the World Cup. Leaving the classics to one side, what are the best contemporary Russian novels?
Sean Golding, 27, marketing consultant, London
A: Phoebe Taplin, journalist and author of four seasonal walking guides to Moscow, where she lived for five years
Russian fiction has been exploring national and existential questions since Nikolai Gogol asked in Dead Souls where the “winged troika” of his country was heading. There are still interesting, challenging postmodern novels coming out of Russia that continue this tradition: here are some that are (relatively) readable and available in English. Andrei Gelasimov’s The Lying Year is a dark poignant comedy set in 1990s Moscow that explores – like Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard – the moral confusion of a world in flux. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Tolstoyan novel The Big Green Tent tackles Judaism, feminism and family through the lives of three late-Soviet schoolfriends. She narrates a drunken teenage party or a KGB interrogation with an eye for comic detail and an ear for ominous cadence.
In his literary bestseller Laurus, a spiritual odyssey about the life of a 15th-century monk, Eugene Vodolazkin suggests that love exists beyond linear time. Mikhail Shishkin does something similar in his epistolary masterpiece The Light and the Dark, set simultaneously at different ends of the 20th century. Shishkin has won all three major literary prizes in Russia, but refused to be part of the Russian delegation to the 2012 US Book Expo, saying he did not want to represent “a country where power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime”.
Russian authors often revisit the past or imagine the future in order to glance sideways at the intractable present. Literary critic Olga Slavnikova plays with ideas of cyclical national destiny in her genre-defying fantasy 2017. The same themes haunt Dmitry Bykov’s ironic Living Souls; a journalist, satirical poet, and critic of the regime, Bykov’s characters wander through Russia in search of love, freedom, safety or meaning. Also drawing on Russian sci-fi traditions, most of them distinctly dystopian, are authors such as controversial Vladimir Sorokin. For a pacy, prophetic fable, read his violent satire Day of the Oprichnik, wherein the tsar’s security officers enjoy an orgy of mundane carnage and corruption. Have a great trip.
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