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He and She, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1987)
Rights sold: Spain - Alfaguara, Cirulo de Lectores, Sweden - Bromberg
Main heroes of Makanin's 1987 novel He and She (Odin i odna) are "shestidesiatniki" Gennadii Goloshchekov and Ninel', two idealistic people who were involved in student politics during the 1950s, and who could never bring themselves to kow-tow to the regime, people who realized that ‘the intellect and conformism arc two incompatible things, Salieri’. They are depicted as innately honourable, but the harsh spotlight of Makanin’s prose shows them also to be pathetic and even farcical. Ninel' is always bathetically tormented by a sense of guilt over trifles, usually involving her co-workers. Gennadii is the kind of man who gets out of bed late at night to rescue a stranger whom his own drinking companion, Daev, confessed he had abandoned in a snowdrift. Gennadii the knight-errant then finds himself in the snowdrift — pushed in by an ungrateful rescuee who then co-opts Gennadii’s taxi. In such incidents Makanin’s Gennadii is rather like an intellectual version of some of the characters created by Makanin's contemporary author Evgenii Popov — people whom, despite their fundamental goodness, life treats unkindly according to its own rather black sense of humour.
Obliteration is the fate that lies in wait for these two people. The description of Ninel’s dream, in which she walks naked through a succession of empty rooms with tables laid for meals and looks for the ‘race of her time’ (‘vyvodok svoego vremeni’), suggests that Makanin’s text is about a generation which has disappeared, leaving no trace, like the victims of the purges. Ninel’s dream also suggests the desire that she has to ‘belong’, to be part of a collective, a desire which Makanin had examined in his earlier works. The two are unable to find common ground with the people, or even with other members of the intelligentsia; and, most damningly, they are unable even to recognize each other as members of that lost tribe of the shestidesiatniki. Attempts by Igor' Petrovich and his wife to draw the two together fail utterly, and Makanin suggests that even after death Ninel' and Gennadii would be unable to find a common tie. They will remain, as the text’s title indicates, alone.
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Envy, a novel by Yuri Olesha
Rights sold / Published by (rights may be available): Czech Republic - Melantrich, Svět Sovětů, Denmark - Akademisk Boghandel, France - Fayard, L'Age d'Homme, Hungary - Európa, Germany – Suhrkamp, Greece - Antipodes, Italy - Roma, Einaudi, Carbonio Editore, Israel - Keter, Latvia - Literatūras Kombains, Netherlands - Van Oorschot, Poland - Państwowy In-t Wydawniczy, Spain - Acantilado, Turkey - Kırmızı Kedi, Merkez Kitaplar, English - Norton, New York Review Books Classics
The central of Olesha's famous novel is the fate of the intelligentsia in Russia’s postrevolutionary society. Olesha’s obvious enthusiasm for the new state of affairs did not hinder him from seeing and conveying to the reader the dramatic clash between the rational industrial state and the creative aspirations of Nikolay Kavalerov, one of the main characters in the novel. This clash is also echoed in Kavalerov himself: he has talent and creative potential, but he throws it away. Envy is one of a number of 20th-century Russian novels in which the protagonists clash with Soviet reality and as a result find themselves marginalized.
In his best novel Envy, all wry humor and narrowed eyes, Olesha presents two sides of the same coin: a self-satisfied sausage king and a drunken failure the former picks up in the street. Poetic and satiric and quite an achievement, it is a novel everyone should read.” —Flavorwire
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