Russian Literature – serie

"Addendum to a Photo Album" is the saga of the births, deaths, and disappearances within the eccentric Mandrykin family. Following patriarch Malach, a Cossack captain, his wife Annushka, and his many sons all born with sideburns, the novel details their fraught relationships, particularly when sitting for family photographs. Vladislav Otroshenko's flowing sentences and rich metaphorical language describe characters whose concerns embrace the heroic, the metaphysical, and the mundane, as they fulfill their duties as Cossack warriors and family members. Otroshenko draws on his upbringing in Novocherkassk, a city on the Don River, creating a world and a book inhabited with absurdity, filial love, and unusual facial hair.

One of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, Viktor Shklovsky writes the critical equivalent of what Ross Chambers calls “loiterature”—writing that roams, playfully digresses, moving freely between the literary work and the world. In Energy of Delusion, a masterpiece that Shklovsky worked on over thirty years, he turns his unique critical sensibility to Tolstoy’s life and novels, applying the famous “formalist method” he invented in the 1920s to Tolstoy’s massive body of work, and at the same time taking Tolstoy (as well as Boccaccio, Pushkin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev) as a springboard to consider the devices of literature—how novels work and what they do.Available in English for the first time, Energy of Delusion provides contemporary readers with a new way of thinking about how great literature is written (and how great criticism might be) that is as timely today as ever.

"Shklovsky: Witness to an Era" is a blend of riotous anecdote, personal history, and literary reflection, collecting interviews with Viktor Shklovsky conducted by scholar Serena Vitale in the '70s, toward the end of the great critic's life, and in the face of interference and even veiled threats of violence from the Soviet government. Shklovsky's answers are wonderfully intimate, focusing particularly on the years of the early Soviet avant-garde, and his relationships with such figures as Eisenstein and Mayakovsky. Bearing witness to a vanished age whose promise ended in despair, Shklovsky is in great form throughout, summing up a century of triumphs and disappointments, personal and historical.

From the man Arturo Pérez-Reverte has called “the most talented young Russian author” comes this extraordinary family saga, a journey into the depths of the human soul.The Round-dance of Water is a detailed portrait of three generations of a large family, but in this story there is no division into primary and secondary characters: each individual fate carries its weight and runs into the bloody river of the twentieth century. The novel drifts between years, tones, and styles, and the range of its influences is overwhelming, ranging from Rudyard Kipling to Andrei Platonov and Daniil Kharms, from gangster movies to Japanese anime.