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Opens Inward, collected short stories by Ksenia Buksha
Rights sold: Russia - AST
Longlisted for the 2019 National Bestseller Award
Ksenia Buksha's 2018 collection of short stories, Opens Inward, follows a transport route stretching from one end of her own Petersburg region to the other while interlocking its denizens in a poignant triptych of birth (“Orphanage”), life (“The Asylum”), and death (“Last Stop”).
Buksha’s collection provides a fitting occasion for reviving old cliché: this is “a whole world packed under a single cover.” Dozens of stories,all true to life, weave together, intersect, and fall apart around the trajectory of Route 306. Characters drive along it, wait beside it, or watch it from their windows. Those who star as protagonists in one story make a brief cameos in others, flash in and out of the reader’s peripheral vision, and simply pop up in conversation, creating the illusion of a space that is both very dense and thoroughly inhabited. That space also feels practically infinite — it stretches far beyond the horizon.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, titled “The Orphanage,” displays all the possible species and subspecies of parentlessness from all possible angles. Thirteen year-old Asya suspects that the woman who raised her is not her birth mother and takes great pains to construct the questions that might enable her to learn the truth about herself. On the way, she adopts three children from an orphanage: a tame young girl named Dasha who is still grieving her own recentlydeceased mother and two orphaned boys — the mischievous Roma and his brother, little Seryozha. In another story, terrible teen Angelica battles her adoptive mother “Aunt Lena,” a chess coach, without realizing what terrible cost Lena paid to save her from slavery in a children’s home. (The reader does realize this at the very end of the story, but only thanks to a brief aside tossed out by one of the characters.) Zhenya, a grown-up orphan who seems to have been entirely well-socialized, makes occasional trips to the city to meet her doppleganger, the person she could have been if her life had been just slightly different. Alisa, who takes drugs that have expanded her waistline to the point that she passes for pregnant, sits in the foyer of a swimming pool watching a strange, lonely boy in a ragged jacket.
The book’s second part, “The Asylum,” unites stories of insanity, some of which are autonomous and some of which are connected to the orphans. It is here, for example, that we discover exactly what pills Alisa has been taking. The last part, “Finale,” features stories of death in which many of the book’s plots find their end or acquire a new beginning. This is where we learn how Dasha’s mother died and just what happened to the parents of the boy wearing rags.
All that said, the borders between the parts of Opens Inward feel provisional, just like any attempt to dismember the variegated, fluid, morally ambiguous fabric of being. And it is that wholeness, that highly tragic amorality, that incredible ability to convey existential horror without falling into either sentimentality or despair, that is the greatest achievement of this brilliant — and that's not an exaggeration — collection by Ksenia Buksha. In a word, if anyone alive today can lay claim to the title of the Russian Alice Munro, it is undoubtedly she.
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TEMPTATION BY REVOLUTION (RUSSIAN SUPREME POWER), collected essays by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: Russia - ARSIS BOOKS
The volume shows us the author as a philosopher of Russian geopolitics. Its nine essays develop a unified rationale for Russia’s fate from the Time of Troubles to the death of Stalin, driven largely by an internal, eschatological dynamic. Exemplary is an essay from 2000, “Capital and Province”, on the capital (the seat of Power) versus the provinces (home of the people) as two conceptual modes. Power identifies with heaven and ravages the earth even while constantly expanding over it, while the provinces align with the soil, hover over it, nurture it—and neither is much interested in the other except instrumentally, each side fearing the other with “areciprocal terror, persecution mania and mutual flight”.
Other entries range from hardcore history to opinion pieces: on Ivan IV’s oprichnina; on Saint George the Dragon-Slayer; a history of absolute power in Russia titled; several pages of political insights under the title “Grandfather’s Jottings”; a savage meditation “On the Past of thePresent and Future” that addresses our self-serving need for a cleansed history; a discussion of the “Conflict of Civilizations” (Christian and Islam) and the refugee crisis; and two brilliant essays that peak on Andrei Platonov but cover far more philosophical territory.
The “Temptation” of the book’s title is an attitude toward time. For a people of the End, revolution means the wait is over. Time’s slow, incremental passing can at last be short-circuited, permitting a leap out, or up. Clarity and simplicity reign in moments of revolutionary ardor. But paradoxically, as time speeds up and our surroundings stay the same (or degenerate), human agents slow down or stop altogether, leaving us with the dreamy ineffectual subjects of Chevengur, whose revolutionary slogans lack all real-world referents. Sharov notes in his preface to this collection: “with salvific regularity, whenever my major task [novel-writing] hit adead end, history would suddenly come to my aid”.
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