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The Underground, or a Hero of Our Time, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1998)
Rights sold: France - Gallimard, Germany - Luchterhand, Greece - Kastaniotis, Italy - Jaca Book, the Netherlands - De Arbeiderspers, Norway - Cappelen Damm, Romania - POLIROM, Russia - Vagrius, Slovenia - Cankarjeva založba, Turkey - Everest
Underground chronicles, in first-person narrative, a homeless 50-something nonwriting writer’s wanderings through mental and physical corridors that he compares to life itself. Petrovich apartment-sits for residents of a dormitory-like building, drinks quite a bit, and twice commits murder. The first half of this 550-page book felt like baggy, linked, almost stream-of-consciousness stories, but the second half read like a suspenseful and emotional novel, in chapters. I got so caught up in the end that I had a strange, dazed feeling when I finished.
Makanin builds much of Underground around references to Russian literature, which Petrovich claims as a key value, though I don’t seem to recall him reading much. The title refers to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground plus Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time. Petrovich certainly is an underground, intelligentsia, superfluous poster guy for the perestroika era, someone with a lot of “I” but no set home, job, or apparent value to society. Makanin opens the book with an epigraph from Lermontov, the famous line saying that his character’s portrait is a composite.
Petrovich likens himself and an old friend – a writer-double who is successful in the West – to a fable about a wolf with its freedom and a well-fed dog wearing a collar. Petrovich, of course, is the free wolf, and a proud Undergrounder, too. According to Petrovich, “The Underground is society’s subconscious.” Petrovich traces the Underground and his own intellectual heritage to Russia’s hermit monks, émigrés, and dissidents. Makanin also used an underground theme in Escape Hatch: a man crawls through a hole between above- and below-ground worlds.
Petrovich’s preference for the Underground fits with Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he writes that the dominant aspect of the Underground Man is self-consciousness. Petrovich’s goal, even in killing, is always to preserve his “I”, which he also calls his "living place".
The combination of gritty, naturalistic details and literariness makes the book feel hyperreal and symbolic or allegorical. Petrovich’s breakdown in a homeless shelter is particularly scary in both real and symbolic ways, with its monosyllabic shrieks, Vietnamese neighbors jumping on him, and extreme existential distress.
Petrovich ends up in the same hospital as his brother Venya, another double of sorts. Venya is an artist who represents the brothers’ childhood; he has spent most of his adult life in the hospital and reverts to childhood behaviors when he has a day out. More allusions? The name Venya reminded me of Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, with its introspection and drinking, and it may be unintentional, but one of the hospital episodes churned up distant memories of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another: the chapter on Venya’s day of freedom refers to the title One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Lisa Hyden,
read full review here: http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2009/09/wandering-lifes-corridors-in-makanins.html
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In Love with a Pencil, essays by Sasha Okun (NF)
Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO
The book was created as a textbook on pencil drawing techniques for beginners and professionals, but it is in fact something much more broad and interesting than just a manual on drawing. It is rather a manual on artistic perception of reality.
"All great masters of the past regardless of their main craft, be it sculpture or painting, were great draftsmen: Rubens, Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, Moore, Rodin... Drawing is the foundation, the cornerstone of any visual art. There's an endless amount of books and manuals about the art of drawing. Among them, there are bad, good, and very good ones. The question is, why write yet one more? The fact is that regardless of their quality, all of these books answer the question "how"? Some of them are even entitled "How to draw a portrait (landscape, model, still life, hands, etc.)." However, in my humble opinion, every "how" depends on"what" and "why". These "what" and "why" define the "how" on every stage of creative process, from initial choice of format to the techniques used to achieve the desired result.This book is an attempt to discuss a multitude of drawing-related issues from the point of view of artistic goals set by draftsmen, to take a look at artistic techniques and devices not as of something that exist abstractly and independently, but as of instruments, of means for achieving the goal, and of means that are an integral part of this goal, because in visual art "what" and "how" are inseparable.Still, any book regardless of its genre - be it a textbook, a memoir, a novel, or a tour guide - should fist and foremost make an interesting read. As Alexandre Dumas put it once, "all genres are good, except the boring." This commandment of the great novelist and culinary specialist is more important to me than purity of the genre. So, there a bit of everything in my book: analysis of the works by great masters of the past, practical advice, reflections, memories, anecdotes, and my thoughts about art accumulated over more than forty years I've been teaching people to draw." - writes Okun in a preface to In Love with a Pencil.
Surprisingly, the book conceived as a drawing manual turned out to be a tutorial on the vision of the world in all its diversity. Of course, this book will be extremely valuable and useful to artists, especially for beginners. But at the same time, it will be of use to everyone seeking to expand his general vision of life. Today's literary market is like a food store where dairy, meat, fruits, and booze each belong to its department. Same with books: there are a separate shelves for fiction, educational literature, philosophy, technical books etc. Everything is sorted out by its genre. Okun's book is rare product, a piece that does not fit into one single category, but to many. For publisher, such a non-standard books is a great challenge, but for readers it’s a rare joy. -- Ludmila Ulitskaya
Original languages: Hebrew, Russian. Around 55.000 words, color illustrations.
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