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Ceylon, a novel by Yuri Buida (2015)
Rights sold: Russia - EKSMO
Longlisted for the 2016 NOS literary award
Longlisted for the 2016 Big Book literary award
Yuri Buida's Ceylon is a family chronicle narrated in first person by Andrei Cherepnin, the last living representative of his family. Generation after generation, Cherepnins played a significant role in the life of a small provincial town Osorin; their private lives became integral part of its history, of the history of Russia. They were among the founders of the city, they have grown up and developed with it, they actively participated to the first industrial revolution, then to WWI and the Bolshevik revolution, the family was torn apart by the Russian Civil War, it survived the WWII, then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Perestroika, and faced up with a new reality of modern Russia.
Family history of Cherepnins - just as the history of Russia - features an endless line of secrets, betrayals, deaths, and recompenses for their sins: narrator's great-grandfather, a prominent revolutionary, once executed his own brother, who was a counter-revolutionary. Narrator's grandfather, a director of the military plant, killed a murderer of his granddaughter. Life Andrei is also overfilled with losses and deaths of his most loved ones.
Ceylon is a parable novel, a tale of a broken reality, of the world nearing its end, but still aching for the impossible ideal, for the City of Sun. In Buida's vision, the Cherpnins are the metaphoric depiction of Russia. Their deliberate or intuitive intents to put together their broken lives only lead them to a new tragedy. The only thing that remains intact, and gives them strength to continue is their permanent longing for love and their native ability to share love with others.
(From the review published by Lizok's Bookshelf blog):
I might not call Yuri Buida's Цейлон (Ceylon) the author's headiest or most metaphysical novel—I definitely prefer both his Blue Blood and Zero Train—but Ceylon, like Poison and Honey, his previous book, is thoroughly readable and enjoyable. Lots of Ceylon felt familiar after reading several other Buida novels: part of my enjoyment, I suspect, came from just that because I love observing how authors reuse structures and tropes in various books. That familiarity may also help explain why I think Ceylon feels more accessible and mainstream (these aren't bad words!) to me than, say, his Blue Blood or Zero Train...
As with Blue Blood and Poison and Honey, a family home feels like a key character in Ceylon: in this case, as in Poison, there's a house on a hill. The area it's in is known as "Ceylon," which reminds of how a building in Blue Blood is known as "Africa." Both those names are introduced early in their respective novels, leading to questions about the origins of the building names. In the case of Ceylon, named thusly by a traveler in the eighteenth century enamored of the island, there were early attempts to dress up dogs as tigers, boys as monkeys, and wooden structures as palm trees. Not quite a tropical paradise but an attempt at paradise nevertheless and (long story short, since of course there's much more to things) the place, though not the original house, which burned, is now home to the Cherepin family, five generations of which are described in varying levels of detail in the book by Andrei Ilyich Cherepin, a first-person narrator who's genial and, though heavily involved in events, feels surprisingly reliable.
Ceylon, though, feels almost more like some form of "absurd realism" or at least "quirky realism" to me, what with brothers on opposite sides at revolution time—this, by the way, feels like another case of attempts at paradise, of which there are many in Ceylon and Ceylon, including through marriage—and a taxidermied bear and unlikely loves and a woman dancing the lambada at the grave of her son, who died in Chechnya. There's lots of everyday oddity. And I nearly forgot the big elm tree growing through the house. A sort of family tree.
There's a lot of history, too: Andrei's first job is at a dig, where he charms all the young women, he goes on to be a teacher, work at the local museum, and write his dissertation about local history that includes his family. Digs and cultural layers come up a lot in contemporary Russian fiction and Buida piles together Russian history, local history, and family history for the reader to dig through, working in the two brothers' conflicts about the revolution—I mention this again because I thought it's one of the strongest and best-integrated subplots in the book, with its combination of "big" history and family history—the military-industrial complex, whose secrets another family member keeps; the crime-ridden banditry of the nineties; the wars in Chechnya; and even the conflict in Ukraine. Some of these chunks of history are more successful than others, I think: as often happens in fiction, particularly family sagas that draw on and reflect a country's history, more distant events usually feel better contextualized and grounded than those more recent.
In the end, though, the town cemetery, known as Red Mountain, felt almost more significant to me than Ceylon, both because Andrei speaks, early on, of his youthful hope for immortality and because his grandfather has taken on a gigantic cemetery renovation project (financed in a way that doesn't sound perfectly legal) that dovetails nicely with Andrei's thoughts about the afterlife at the end of the book, when he's the father of three (almost four) children and has described rather dramatic losses of family members. There's a lot of mortality in Ceylon but also lots of birth.
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Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery, a novel by Andrei Ivanov (2019)
Rights sold: Estonia - VARRAK, Russia - EKSMO
Winner of the 2019 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award
Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery is a panoramic novel which vividly brings to life the worlds of three generations of Russian émigrés in Paris. To recap, the Russian emigration began with the October Revolution and continued apace for two decades, meaning that by the start of the Second World War almost 80,000 Russians had established themselves in France. Paris quickly became the capital of the Russian emigration, not to be replaced by New York until the middle of the century.
The novel contains multiple voices, including three first-person protagonists, whose voices start to overlap, to intertwine, and set off unexpected echoes. The novel’s main narrator is the Soviet émigré Viktor Lipatov (not necessarily his real name), a former dissident who spent several years in psychiatric detention, fled to America, and then arrived in Paris at the beginning of 1968, where he found work in the editorial offices of a Russian émigré newspaper.
The second first-person narrator is Alexandr Krushchevsky, a doctor who was born to first generation Russian émigrés in Belgium, served as a volunteer in the Belgian army during the Second World War, was captured by the Germans, fled, and then lived in Saint-Ouen in France, where he mixed in French avantgarde art circles, before turning up again in Paris in 1968.
The main protagonist of the novel, who brings the diverging stories together, is the multitalented Alfred Morgenstern, also a first-generation Russian émigré who was born in Moscow in 1896 before leaving with his family for Paris in 1906. A doctor by profession, he is also a pianist, an actor, a model, and an obsessive writer. Morgenstern and Krushchevsky are good friends, they are united by several shared experiences, and they share a secret which adds a subtle element of crime-fiction to the novel.
The colourful lives of the Russian émigrés are portrayed from the perspectives of these three characters. We learn about the difficulties they have acclimatising, the traumas inflicted on them by war, their struggle against Communism, and their homesickness. In this world, real-life and fictional characters mingle freely; at the risk of oversimplification one can argue that there are three types of characters in the novel: fictional characters, characters inspired by real-life people, and real-life historical figures.
The three main protagonists are examples of the first type, embodying certain general features of the Russian émigrés, but lacking any specific historical counterparts. There are several ancillary characters who serve as examples of the second type: Ilja Gvozdevich, who is based on the émigré artist Ilja Zhdanevich (1894-1975), Sergei Shershnyov, a character inspired by the émigré writer and artist Sergei Sarshun (1888-1975) and Anatoly Igumnov, whose real-life counterpart was the Russian émigré historian, publicist and politician Sergey Melgunov (1879-1956). A whole gallery of historical figures feature in the novel, including Nikolay Berdyaev, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Théodore Fraenkel, Charles de Gaulle, Pavel Milyukov and Boris Poplavsky.
It could be said that the city of Paris is the fourth character in the novel. Ivanov makes Paris almost physically tangible, and does so for all three of the historical periods which the novel covers. At the start of the novel, the author gives a captivating description of Paris life, through the words of the character Morgenstern. To provide a flavour this, I quote at length: ‘Paris whips you on, kicks you up the backside, sprinkles you with rain, splashes you in puddles, plays pranks on you, spits swearwords at you, whispers gossip in your ear, grabs at coat hems and shopfronts, pulls you close, kisses you on both cheeks, fishes cash out of your pocket, waves its hat at you, looks you longingly in the eye, and then embraces you in its dark, satin night.’ (pg. 44).
Ivanov has gone to great lengths to ensure that all of the historical details are correct, including the physical environment (it’s clear that he has visited all of the novel’s locations), and the historical events. He has taken inspiration from a range of Russian émigré memoires and diaries, including those of Boris Poplavsky, Ivan Bunin, Felix Yusupov, Teffi (Nadezhda Lohvitskaya) and Anna Kashina-Yevreinova.
In addition to the richness of historical detail, The Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery is a homage to the art of the novel. Ivanov has found space for the majority of his literary influences here. There are multiple references to Dickens, in particular the Pickwick Papers, to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, while Celine and Joyce interact in intriguing ways, as do Bunin and Nabokov. One can detect the stylistic influence of Mikhail Bulgakov, traces of Cormac McCarthy’s approach to form, as well as the influence of Goncharov’s Oblomov.
But the greatest appeal of ‘The Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery’ lies in Ivanov’s command of language. No one else writes quite like Ivanov. Literary scholars Eneken Laanes and Daniele Monticelli have fittingly described his style as ‘hysterical realism interspersed with epiphanic revelations (Keel ja Kirjandus, 2017, nr. 1)’. Ivanov’s writing grabs the reader and pulls her into its embrace, wraps her in multiple narrative strands, leads her through labyrinths, providing intermittent flashes of light and relief, before dragging her back into its depths.
Irina Belobrovtseva and Aurika Maimre have compared Ivanov’s style to rock music (Ivanov is a devoted fan): ‘It has a discernible rock rhythm, with all its crazy energy and drive, it grabs hold of you and pulls you along, releasing you from your physical surroundings.’ (Language and Literature 2015, nr. 1).
Ivanov creates entrancing literary worlds, he gets under the reader’s skin, conjuring up colours, smells, emotions; he dictates the pace, providing a cathartic experience which is almost physically tangible.
Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery is Ivanov’s first full-length symphony, a work in which he demonstrates his talents in every literary form, and on every instrument. It is one of the most brilliant achievements in Estonian literature of the last few decades.
(from a review by Marek Tamm)
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