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Children of the Volga, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2018)
German rights are handled by Christina Links:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 8th Lu Xun Literature Award (2022, China)
Meilleur livre étranger 2021 (France)
Finalist of the Prix Médicis 2021 (France)
Longlisted for the European Literature Prize 2021 (Netherlands)
Winner of the 2020 Georg Dehio-Buchpreis (Germany)
Winner of THE GRAND PRIZE IVO ANDRIĆ 2019 (Serbia)
Winner of the 2019 Big Book Award (Russia, third prize)
Winner of the 2018 Made In Russia award by SNOB project (Russia)Rights sold: Azerbaijan - QUANUN, Bulgaria - COLIBRI, China - Beijing Publishing Group, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Germany - AUFBAU, Hungary - HELICON, Iran - NILOOFAR, Italy - SALANI, S.Korea - EUNHAENG NAMU PUBLISHING, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - SAMIZDAT, LAGUNA, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA, Ukraine - BookChef, World Arabic - DAR ALMADA, World English - EUROPA EDITIONS UK/USA
In 18th century, Russian empress Catherine the Great invited Europeans to immigrate and become Russian citizens and farm Russian lands while maintaining their language and culture. The settlers came mainly from Germany. In Russia, they retained their German language and culture. Following the Russian Revolution, the Volga German Soviet Republic was established in 1924, and it lasted until 1941. Shortly after the German invasion, the Republic was officially abolished, and at the end of September 1941 all Volga Germans were deported. The number sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan totaled approximately 500,000.
Schulmeister (schoolmaster) Jacob Bach's existence was to match that of his native colony, Gnadenthal: slow-running, measured, and boring. His quiet and humble life changed in 1916, when the teacher fell in love with lovely Clara. Expelled from Gnadenthal, a loving couple run away and settled in a secluded hamlet hidden deep in woods at the other bank of river Volga. After Clara was raped by a bunch of bandits, and died nine months later in childbirth. As a result of trauma Bach was stricken by a conversion disorder and became mute. He raised his baby daughter Anche alone. A need to get food for the girl forced Bach to start composing fairy tales for a local German newspaper; his writings became widely known and popular; and gradually, the tide of life in all German colonies along Volga began to develop in line with Bach's writings. Nevertheless, Bach kept living a life of hermit with his daughter in the woods, protecting her by loneliness and silence, and his fears continued to haunt him. And not in vain: cruel life destroyed his illusions, and his fairy tales turned into horror stories. His worst fears came true when his daughter left Bach alone.
Jacob Bach's story is tragic, it's full of losses and failures: he could not save those he loved, his tales did not change the world, and he himself died. However, Bach's true trajectory is a path of overcoming one's own self, it's a story of a humble person growing up into a giant with no fear whatsoever, as powerful as the great river Volga. What is more, his tenderness and creativity did not disappear, they sprouted into a Kazakh boy, his stepson Vas'ka. Thus, the circle has been closed: the boy grew up and became a teacher.
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Savely's Days, a novel by Grigory Sluzhitel
Winner of the 2020 Moscow Art Prize (Russia)
Winner of the 2019 Big Book Award (Russia)Rights sold: Bulgaria - GNEZDOTO, China (simplified Chinese) - GINKGO, Estonia - TANAPAEV, France - SYRTES, Hungary - TERICUM, Italy - FRANCESCO BRIOSCHI EDITORE, Latvia - JANIS ROZES, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LOGOS
Grigory Sluzhitel’s Savely’s Days, narrated by a male cat named Savely who was likely named for a brand of a cottage cheese, is so affecting and charming that it makes even experienced reader smile, laugh, and even sob. Savely’s story isn’t just a chronicle of a cat’s life, it’s also a love letter to Moscow, and a bittersweet story of kinship, friendship, and separations.
As the novel’s title indicates, Savely, a very literate and literary cat, tells his life story, beginning with memories from the womb, birth, and early life in a Chiquita banana box. Savely’s childhood is pretty happy, featuring food from benefactors, regular visits to see his aunt (who lives in a front-loading washing machine), and good relationships with his sisters and mother. His upbringing is solid: his mother tells him that cats don’t really have nine lives so there’s no sense in taking chances by walking in front of motorized transportation. Savely loses touch with his family after a well-meaning human takes him in. He’s not particularly happy in his new life despite nice possessions like a laser mouse, scratchers, and rubber balls, not to mention a Sunday ritual of climbing into a tea pot. He ends up bolting on the way to a vet visit (he’s already been neutered), leaving Vitya, a bookish teenager who’s something of an outcast, catless.
Savely cycles through quite a few lives in the book, serving as a rat catcher at the Tretyakov Gallery and having to co-habit, albeit briefly, with a parrot named Iggy, a situation not fated to end well. Then he's hosted by a young Kirgiz man who rescues Savely after he’s attacked and left badly injured. After Askar is fired from his job at Gorky Park he finds work as a bicycle deliveryman and brings Savely with him. They even deliver food to a theater backstage in a scene that seems to include Sluzhitel in a cameo appearance.
Savely wants to see the world (or at least Moscow) and even gives the impression of being something of an existentialist with a phobia for commitment, too. At least, that is, until he meets a beautiful young cat, in some of the book’s nicest passages, and starts a happy cat-family life in a doghouse with his love and a dog
In his introduction to Savely’s Days, Eugene Vodolazkin says that Sluzhitel draws on his acting skills and becomes a full-fledged cat in the novel. Indeed, Sluzhitel is so good at writing about a cat’s life that at certain point Savely’s descriptions of his own life are more convincing than his passages about his humans’ backstories. The humans’ stories feel like slivers of a portrait of Moscow in the twenty-first century, but they only really come alive when Savely is interacting with his people in some way, by climbing into the teapot, observing Vitya’s grandmother, or making sushi deliveries. Or sitting inside someone’s coat on a park bench during a time of mourning.
Somehow this doesn’t just feel like a matter of Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, something else Vodolazkin mentions in his introduction. It feels as if Sluzhitel’ isn’t just showing the world from a novel perspective. He’s an actor who’s an author (and an author who’s an actor) and channels his inner catness to thoroughly inhabit a character who’s not even of his own species. In doing so, he manages to find an internal logic for his text that makes the feline perspective feel perfectly natural, as if it’s not just a literary device. Savely may be a cat but he can tell a story – an exceedingly rare quality these days – at least as well as he can chase his tail.
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