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Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2015)
German rights are handled by Christina Links:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Azerbaijan - QANUN, Bosnia - BUYBOOK, Bulgaria - COLIBRI, China - The People´s Literature, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, Denmark - JP/POLITIKENS, Estonia - TANAPAEV, Finland - INTO, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, France (large print) - Éditions Voir de près, Germany - AUFBAU, Hungary - EUROPA, India - SHARDA (hindi), Italy - SALANI, Israel - CARMEL, Iran - NILOOFAR, Japan - HAKUSUISHA, Kazakhstan - FOLIANT, S.Korea - WALKER (Geodneunsaram), Latvia - ZVAIGZNE, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Mongolia - MASH NUUTS MEDIA, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Norway - CAPPELEN DAMM, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Portugal - BERTRAND, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - SAMIZDAT, Slovakia - SLOVART, Spain - Acantilado, Sweden - Ersatz, Tatar language – Tatar Publishing House, Turkey - TEAS, Ukraine - BookChef, Uzbekistan - ZABARJAD MEDIA (book edition), SUG'DIYONA (magazine rights), World English - ONEWORLD, World Arabic - ARAB SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHERS, World Esperanto - ARS LIBRI
Winner of the 2020 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Award (Italy)
Finalist of the the 2020 EBRD Literature Prize (UK)
Winner of the 2018 Abolhassan Najafi Award for the best translated novel (Iran)
FInalist of the Prix Médicis award (2017, France)
Prix du magazine "Transfuge" (2017, France)
Winner of the 2015 Big Book literary award
Winner of the People's Choice open online voting for the 2015 Big Book literary award
Winner of the 2015 "Ticket to the Stars" prize
Winner of the 2015 Best Prosaic Work of the Year prize
Winner of the 2015 Yasnaya Polyana award
Winner of the People's Choice open online voting for the 2015 Yasnaya Polyana award
Finalist of the 2015 Russian Booker literary award
Finalist of the the 2015 NOS literary award
Guzel Yakhina’s debut novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes is an enjoyable and smooth novel, unpretentious mainstream historical fiction that covers a lot of cultural, ethnic, religious, and sociopolitical issues.
The novel begins in 1930 in a Tatar village, from which a kulak woman Zuleikha is quickly sent into exile after her husband is murdered by communists. Zuleikha’s own life — after seeing her husband killed, after a horrendous train trip to a spot on the Angara River where her group of exiles will settle, and after a difficult first winter that kills many — settles into a new routine with characters nothing like her village neighbors. The characters are many but distinct, and they include a rather dotty doctor, an artist who paints on the sly, and urbane city dwellers who remember past European travels, as well as Ignatov, Zuleikha’s husband’s killer. Ignatov is persuaded to remain in the settlement, as its commandant, and he stays because of his own political issues back in Kazan. Most important, there is Zuleikha’s son Yuzuf, born in the settlement, who develops an interest for art and learns to paint.
Yakhina’s writing is simple, albeit sprinkled with Tatar words (there’s a glossary). Yakhina herself has said that the novel is about how Zuleikha wakes up, opens her eyes to the world, and finds happiness, albeit a bitter one. Another is, again, Yakhina’s ability to use a simple structure and language to tell her story, all as she plants details that will have meaning later in the book.
Guzel Yakhina´s novel hits directly in the heart. It’s a powerful praise for love and tenderness in hell.
Ludmila Ulitskaya
There’s something that Guzel Yakhina succeeded to transmit with amazing, sharp exactness: women’s attitude towards love. Not towards the subject of love, but towards the love itself.
Anna Narinskaya, literary critic
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Modern Day Patericon, by Maya Kuzherskaya (2005)
2006 Ivan Bunin Prize
Kucherskaya's honest and humorous account of life within the modern Russian Orthodox community, including short biographies of numerous batyushkas (low ranking priests), sometimes fictitious, but presenting easily recognizable prototypes all the same, have made her popular beyond the bounds of church circles. Kucherskaya is a master at describing them. The images of priests and parishioners that she creates are sometimes far from sainthood. Among her characters, you can find “manager” priests, “superman” priests and even one “cannibal” priest. They teach their parishioners in a way that has a Zen Buddhist element to it. One calls his followers “an academy of idiots” for hanging on his every word. Another induces a parishioner, whose wife has been coming home late, to feign drunkenness to show her how distraught he is with her absence. Surprisingly, the wife takes a renewed interest in her “drinking” husband and begins to come home earlier. She never discovered that, on the priest’s advice, her husband had collected empty vodka bottles and cigarette butts from the street and then strewn them all over the apartment before she came home. “Father Konstantin never laughed as much in his whole life,” Kucherskaya writes at the end of the story.
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Kucherskaya’s book is also full of overzealous female parishioners, whom the author does not treat with much sympathy. “If only one of them had killed someone!” a batyushka says in one of her stories, after listening to a long line of empty confessions from women reporting that they had eaten sardines on a Friday, or some other trifle. “What conclusion can we draw from this story? The girl was insane,” is how she wraps up a story of a Literary Institute graduate who idolized her priest so much that she made him the censor of all her writings, before drowning herself in the Moscow River after becoming disillusioned with writing.
“This is one of my criticisms of church subculture,” Kucherskaya said. “Sometimes, people there confine themselves to a small space and write the word “vanity” on the window to the outside world. The young church girls often call this penance. It has nothing in common with real penance, however.”
When the book was first released by the secular Vremya publisher, readers’ reactions were enthusiastic. But, when the second edition was published by Biblio-Polis, whose books are sold in Orthodox churches, the tone of the reactions shifted with the audience. A church newspaper in St.Petersburg even suggested that Kucherskaya was under the spell of “hostile demons.” “Kucherskaya is an alien, who came to our circle accidentally or, more likely, with an evil purpose,” an article in the religious newspaper Pravoslavnyi St.Peterburg said. “Our joys appear stupid to her, while our troubles are a laughing matter for her. This is just unbearable!”
Fortunately, Kucherskaya wasn’t turned into an Orthodox Russian version of Salman Rushdie. Many monks, nuns and regular churchgoers rushed to her defense. “An honest reader will quickly remember many examples similar to those described in the book,” one of her defenders, who identified herself as a nun by the name of Yekaterina, wrote in a letter to the media. “For this reader, Kucherskaya’s book is just one more reason to think about the illnesses which still plague our church.”