ELKOST International literary agency - Guzel Yakhina in Italy, September 2017

Guzel Yakhina is a guest of the Festival Internazionaledella Letteratura in Mantova

On Thursday, Spetember 07, at 11:00 at Palazzo San Sebastiano.

DALLE SPONDE DEL VOLGA

Guzel' Jachina con Chicca Gagliardo

Dal 1930, per volere di Stalin, milioni di contadini vennero deportati o uccisi e le loro terre confiscate in nome della collettivizzazione totale. Una tragedia che Guzel' Jachina, russa del Tatarstan, utilizza come motore degli eventi nel suo lavoro d'esordio, un romanzo ambientato fra desolati paesaggi innevati che presenta un'eroina "degna erede delle grandi donne della letteratura russa". Zuleika apre gli occhi è lo spaccato della terribile vita di una donna in un villaggio contadino ai confini dell'Unione Sovietica, maltrattata da marito e suocera eppure febbrilmente attaccata alla vita. Nonostante vessazioni, follie di regime ed esilio, l'amore non è mai assente, sia esso quello filiale o quello per la sopravvivenza stessa. Perché anche nella gelida Siberia, in mezzo all'orrore, può esistere la luce. La incontra la scrittrice e giornalista Chicca Gagliardo.

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...

Blue and Red, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1983)

Rights sold: Italy - Edizioni e/o,

Makanin’s view of man’s nature is a pessimistic one, and his depictions of love and harmonious interrelationships lack the power of his descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man (or to beast). He is most at ease describing love linked to violence, as in Blue and Red (Goluhoe i krasnoe) (1983), which describes how two grandmothers battle for the love of their young grandson Kliucharev, who is ‘unused to love’ — a phrase which perhaps could be used to describe many of Makanin’s heroes.The love which Makanin’s heroes advocate is a tough, universal and unselfish love, as typified by the healer Yakushkin with his philosophy of brotherly love in Makanin's previous novel Predlecha (1982). It is love for one’s family and kin, love for one’s people, birthplace, for Russia, love which has a basis in conscience, which interests Makanin, which means that his characters, are seekers...

Guzel Yakhina in Italy, September 2017

Featured titles

The Underground, or a Hero of Our Time, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1998)

Blue and Red, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1983)