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Stalen, a novel by Yuri Buida (2017)
Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Russia - EKSMO
Longlisted for the 2018 National Bestseller literary award
Yuri Buida's new novel is set in 1990s and early 2000s, and gives an account of the post-Soviet life in Moscow. It's written as an imitation of a "B-movie" script: the style is impeccable, form exact, characters solid, and it's abundantly stuffed with eroticism on verge of porn, with bloody murders, and incredible adventures of the protagonist.
The author calls his novel "the picaresque adventure story." Indeed, according to the laws of genre, its narrative is written in first person as autobiographical account of its main character Stalen Igruyev (the name is, of course, a provocation, a game, as it has nothing to do with Stalin and Lenin); the protagonist is of low social class, he gets by with wit and rarely deigns to hold a job; the story is told in a series of loosely connected adventures or episodes, and there is little if any character development: his circumstances change, but they rarely result in a change of heart. Also, the story is told with a plainness of narrative language and extreme realism of detail: the protagonist recounts episodes of his biography, explaining his often unseemly deeds by a necessity to survive in a cruel world.
The plot starts off with Stalen's arrival in the post-Soviet Moscow of the early 1990s, the most stormy and cruel period of New Russian history, the first post-perestroika decade. He carries only a small amount of money, and a recommendation letter from his grandfather addressed to an influential Moscow lady of high standing. His dream is to become a famous writer. In the background is his childhood and adolescence spent in a provincial town, and several deaths that Stalen believes to be his fault. The lady turns out to be a hostess of a literary salon, an elite hetaera endowed with an amazing gift - as a result of some rare genetic mutation, her body remains young despite her age. At this point, begins a series of erotic experiences entwined with teaching of writing skills, and gradual improvement of Stalen's living conditions. A talented young man writes what he is told to, sleeps with whom he is commanded, and survives to the best of his abilities.
Buida masterfully merges real facts with invented circumstances. His narrative constantly balances on verge of decency, it shocks, captivates, and to certain extent is reminiscent of Beigbeder's 9.99. The novel is a multi-layered game exploring a psychological (and sometimes psychiatric) jungle of human nature. It deals with a multitude of philosophical issues, including that of existence, through the medium of adventure story, crime, erotica, thriller, suspense, and bloody trash.
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Train to Samarkand, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2021)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Azerbaijan - QANUN, Bosnia - BUYBOOK, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Germany - AUFBAU, Hungary - HELIKON, Italy - E/O, Kazakhstan - FOLIANT, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LAGUNA, Slovakia - SLOVART, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA, Uzbekistan - BEST-BOOK, World Arabic - AL MADA, World English - EUROPA EDITIONS UK/USA
Winner of the Reader’s Choice Award of 2022 Big Book Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2022 Big Book Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2023 Prix Médicis Étranger (France)
Shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté (France)
During the last years of the Russian Civil war (1917-1922), the bony hand of famine strangled a heartland of Russia. The territory devastated most completely stretched along the Volga basin all the way from the Tatar Republic down to the river’s mouth, and it extended far north, east, and west. The long period of war had removed hundreds of thousands of peasants from the soil; also, the Bolsheviks’ policy of grain requisitioning (not to mention similar measures taken by their opponents), diminished food reserves. A severe drought blighted the crops of the Volga basin by the summer of 1921, inaugurating a catastrophe destined to claim at least five million lives. For nearly two years, chilling accounts surfaced from the famine region, describing a population driven to ever more wretched extremes by hunger. A variety of emergency measures, none more dramatic than mass evacuations of juveniles by railway transportation from afflicted provinces, were undertaken by the Bolsheviks. Altogether, the government evacuated approximately 150,000 children, a majority of them appear to have been orphans or otherwise homeless.
Action of Guzel Yakhina's novel Train To Samarkand takes place on one of these trains evacuating 500 hungry children from an orphanage in Kazan to a southern city of Samarkand in October, 1923. Rail convoy's commander Deyev, a young Civil war veteran with a compassionate and tender character, is accompanied and supervised by a children commission representative Belaya, a strong-willed Bolshevik woman. They are two opposite extremes united by a shared purpose of saving children's lives at all costs. Their journey lasts six weeks and four thousand miles.
Yakhina's Train To Samarkand is an adventure novel set on a backdrop of the most troublesome historical period in Russian history, a modern robinzonade, a travel story of epic drama caliber. A series of scary adventures along the way of Deyev's train—getting food or medical supplies for his young charges, finding a nurse for a newborn baby, wandering in the desert, clashing with gangs—are written as if they were a mythical events, but with extreme realism and vividness. Deyev, like his legendary predecessors—Odysseus, Hercules, Jason— on his way opposes to the absolute Evil, Death, coming to him in various guises—as Hunger, Disease, or Murder. At the same time, a constant suspense of their journey, a feeling of danger, and expectation of a tragedy, is masterfully seasoned by the author with unexpectedly touching and somewhat comic situations and mise-en-scenes.
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