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In honor of World Book Day, which is commemorated by UNESCO every year on April 23, the alumni of Global UGRAD exchange program took the floor at the American Center in Moscow (AMC) on April 27 to encourage Russian children and teenagers to read more classic American books.
The presentation took place within the framework of the AMC Teenagers’ Club, a monthly event that brings together Russian young people interested in American culture and U.S.-Russia relations.
Margarita Bondareva, a volunteer at the American Center who is also one of the organizers of the Teenagers’ Club and an alumna of the U.S. government-sponsored Flex exchange program, said the club usually “invites Russian schoolchildren and teenagers to participate in different cultural events such as a Halloween celebration or other American holidays.”
“Children are used to having fun in our club, so we try to diversify our programs as frequently as possible,” she said. “For example, we conducted a Vampire’s Day last Halloween and presented American authors who wrote books about vampires and watched some films based on these books. Cowboys’ Day was another event of our club that was also well-received by Russian teens.”          
This time the club’s organizers hoped its celebration of World Book Day would help spread cultural and literary awareness.
Global UGRAD alumna Ekaterina Pshenitsyna, gave a presentation about the importance of active reading and an impact it may have on developing personality, improving interpersonal relations and strengthening bilateral cultural ties between countries.
She talked about several American authors, including Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, and Ernest Hemingway and invited other speakers to share their experience.

Related:

"Such events can motivate children and students for participation in educational exchange programs which are aimed at developing bilateral relations and mutual understanding,” said Bayrta Nadbitova, an IREX program coordinator and one of the organizers of the event.
“It will give them a unique opportunity to receive good professional knowledge and skills which will help them in their future life,” she explains.  “The more people know of such opportunities the more of them will be interested in the participation in different programs. Such interest and future knowledge implementation will show the importance to keep such useful programs in future.”
I was also invited to take the floor in the AMC as an alumnus of the Global UGRAD exchange program. For me, it was very gratifying to share my experience with children and tell them what crucial role books play in contradicting stereotypes, fostering “soft power” and inspiring people.
The more I listened to my peers, the more questions preoccupied me. In particular, I wondered if Russia’s cultural centers organized such events in the U.S. to popularize Russian literature. Do American exchange students who visited Russia appear in these centers tell about their favorite Russian writers and importance of soft power? Does the Russian government encourage them to organize such events?

For such events to occur will require more active involvement of both authorities and ordinary people.       
Egor Kryukov, 14, from the Moscow Region town of Korolev, was one of the attendees of the World Book Day program.
“I like reading a great deal and the day may definitely may enrich my experience,” he said, adding: “My mother is an English teacher: She recommend this club and encouraged me to visit the American center."
Kryukov said the AMC Teenagers’ club gives him an opportunity to combine fun and learning.
“I can improve my English and learn more about the American culture and cross points between Russia and the U.S.,” he said.  

Global UGRAD alumna Ekaterina Pshenitsyna taking the floor in the AMC Teenagers' Club. Source: RBTH
“I think that this event had a success,” Nadbitova said. “The World Book Day is a very important day for encouraging children and teenagers for reading. And I think the presentation was informative and interesting. The event had a great impact on some of children definitely as they tried for follow it carefully and participated in discussion. All of the participants were very happy to receive books as presents, and it will motivate them for reading too. That was our main goal.”
Article from http://rbth.ru/blogs/2013/04/29/russian_exchange_students_popularize_classic_american_literature_25547.html

Fathers and Children by Ivan Tugenev: A book review

Fathers and Children is one of the most iconic works of the 19th century Russian literature and has invited widely varied opinions from Ivan Turgenev’s contemporaries, critics and academic scholars since its first publication. A literary text attracting so much literary discourse has got to be one of the most complex and multi-layered pieces of literature in the world. That, my friends, is the beauty of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. Scratch off each layer and you shall find more underneath, as if it were a puzzle.

The protagonist, Evgeny Vasil’evich Bazarov, is a medical student who considers himself a nihilist. He challenges the traditions and conventions of society and goes so far as to challenge liberal ideas. He pushes everything away from him if it goes against his nihilist beliefs; ridicules and criticises others for believing in ideas that are soft. He also has a friend, Arkady Nikolaevich Kirsanov, Bazarov’s best friend actually.

Arkady isn’t the same kind of nihilist like his friend though. He may subscribe to the concept as something that he felt would help him to find himself and make sense of the world around him. He does that in the beginning but later dissociates himself from his best friend’s beliefs. That is because he finds himself in what he had always appreciated, somewhat proving that he really is his father’s son because his ideas are derived from his father’s and are only different to the extent that he incorporates other beliefs and life lessons that he learnt.

The older generation cannot come to terms with the whole concept of nihilism. They deal with this situation in many different ways. This is where the generation gap comes in. Arkady’s father, Nikolai Petrovich, is a landlord and owns an estate in the country, cannot understand his son’s new ideas despite trying very hard. While Arkady’s uncle, Pavel Petrovich, is a complete opposite of his brother and probably the only character in the novel that is the most alike Bazarov, yet despises his nephew’s friend on ‘ideological’ differences.

On the other hand, Bazarov’s parents – simple, God-fearing Russians who are deeply entrenched in the Russian Orthodox tradition – cannot understand their son either. Their situation, however, evokes pity because their son is pushing them away just because he cannot handle the excessive emotion that his parents feel and display when they see their only son after about three years. And the reason why he cannot handle the overflow of emotion is that it is against his beliefs. There are a number of scenes in the novel where Bazarov’s mother is shown to be behaving more timidly in front of her son than she does in front of her husband. Her love for her son outdoes her timidity.

Neither can he bear this overflow when it is directed at him from the outside and nor can he bear it when it occurs within him. The latter happens when he encounters love for the first time. It is not just an infatuation; it’s a burning passion raging within him. But he is forced to ignore it, to kill it within him but can’t because the passion is so strong. The beginning of this passion, the very point where the reader begins to sense the change occurring within him, marks the moment where Bazarov’s end begins.

Turgenev’s treatment of female characters in Fathers and Children is rather varied. In the novel, both the traditional women from the Russian countryside, like Arina Vlas’sevna Bazarova, lived alongside (almost) to intelligent, educated and independent women like Anna Sergeevna Odintsova. However, one cannot really be sure how realistic Turgenev’s obviously fictional account of the 19th century Russian provincial society is.

Odintsova is a highly educated, articulate, intelligent woman who runs her entire estate independently. Of course, in a traditional society like the one she lives in, her existence is kind of an anomaly. It makes sense when the reader becomes aware of her loneliness and acute lack of intellectually stimulating company, both of which seem to go hand in hand. She finds the kind of company she requires in Bazarov; while he also experiences the same in meeting her. She is a highly relatable female character except when one discovers that she runs her estate with unprecedented military discipline. The meal and tea times are so strictly enforced that one may think that her estate operates like a strict boarding school with a fearful disciplinarian heading it. Display the slightest sign of tardiness and you would have hell to pay.

Odintsova’s sister, Katya, is a different kind of independent. Despite whatever she has learnt about the latest scientific and political beliefs and what she learnt from Bazarov, she continues to stick to her personal beliefs. In fact, she helps Arkady find himself and realise where his true feelings and loyalties lie, which is to the liberal beliefs of his family and Katya.

Then there is Arina Vlas’sevna, Bazarov’s mother. She is a conventional female character: meek, submissive, fears to directly speak to her son about whatever’s bothering her because she finds him so intimidating. Bazarov loves his mother, which is evident in his interactions with her but at the same time, regards her with disdain. Because his parents are not his intellectual equals in any way, Bazarov finds it tedious to stay with them too long, interact with them and even tell them how he feels because he is convinced that his doting parents cannot and will never be able to understand what he feels.

Understanding Fathers and Children fully is difficult because of its complexity. It is as if our knowledge of the book shall remain forever incomplete. The character of Bazarov and his relationships with other characters forms the conflict in the novel, as well as provides the crux of the novel’s central theme(s). No wonder Bazarov’s character has been so widely written about by critics and Turgenev’s contemporaries. At several points in his life, Turgenev himself had to defend Bazarov even though he wasn’t exactly sure how he felt about his protagonist*.

*From Turgenev’s letters – pp. 165-89, The Author on the Novel, Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Children, (W. W. Norton, New York, 2009)

View Dawn.com’s weekly book review archive here.

The author is a Multimedia Producer at Dawn.com

Bulgakov's A Young Doctor’s Notebook: Soviet-era stories

This online supplement is produced and published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia), which takes sole responsibility for the content.

A Young Doctor’s Notebook: John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe – two incarnations of the same character Photo: KINOPOISK.RU

By Alexandra Guzeva

9:29PM BST 06 Apr 2013

^{Find more stories at Russia Beyond The Headlines}

Sky Arts’ TV version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Young Doctor’s Notebook surprised many, as he is better known for other works.

Like Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov was a doctor; he worked for a clinic in a village about 200 miles from Moscow. But in the early part of the 20th century, travelling to an emergency at night through snowdrifts by troika, it might as well have been 2,000 miles from the metropolis.

The script for the TV drama series, like the short-story collection, begins with a young, inexperienced doctor who goes to work in such a village. Immediately, he is called upon to extract teeth, supervise births and
treat syphilis.

Swapping wizard’s wand for doctor’s bag, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe masterfully depicts the panic of the main protagonist,
scurrying from the agonised patient back to his room to consult his medical textbooks.

Less well-known than The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov's magnum opus) and Heart of a Dog, A Young Doctor’s Notebook is not the only collection that draws heavily on Bulgakov’s life. Notes on the Cuff (1923) reflects on his literary journey, especially his experience of living on a writer’s salary in post-revolutionary chaos. In it, the main character, delirious with typhus, is surrounded by mysterious events.

It also pokes fun at the Soviet censors – Bulgakov had scores to settle with them. In a letter to the Russian writer and dramatist Maxim Gorky, Bulgakov wrote: “All my plays are banned; there is not a single line of
my prose printed anywhere.”

 
^{Sense and censored ability: Bulgakov was blacklisted}

Bulgakov considered A Theatrical Novel his best work. When an unhappy journalist decides to quit his boring job to write a novel, the guests he invites to his house promise him that his novel will be staged at a theatre, only to deceive him. Sadly, Bulgakov had experienced this situation personally, too.

Written in his characteristic note-like style and, again, autobiographical in nature, the narrator reads “Notes of the dead” supposedly given to the writer by someone about to commit suicide, with the request that nothing be edited or changed. Despite being written 10 years after Notes on the Cuff and A Young Doctor’s Notebook, the novel present a similar exploration of despair.

Joseph Stalin refused to approve Bulgakov’s play Days of the Turbins, a drama based on one of his earliest autobiographical works, the novelThe White Guard. Examining the toll the Revolution has taken on the
everyday life of the Turbin family, readers feel the tumult as the horrors
of civil war unfold, disrupting normal family life, during an especially
harsh winter in Kiev.

Blizzards are one of Bulgakov’s favorite motifs, and these storms make brutally effective appearances in The White Guard and A Young Doctor’s Notebook. For Bulgakov, snow both accompanies and generates chaos and confusion.

In fact, many of the trials that characterise his work – civil war, injustice, illness, despair – also characterised his life. What is truly moving is the sometimes funny, always terrifying, beauty he made of it all.

(Article from www.telegraph.co.uk)

A long chapter's lasting journey

William A.P. Martin, the US missionary who first translated Russian literature into Chinese, which appeared in a Shanghai magazine in 1872, would never have expected Russian works to go on a lasting journey deep into the neighboring country.

Liu Wenfei, a veteran researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told China Daily on Thursday on the eve of President Xi Jinping's visit to Russia: "Seldom in the world do we find so large a readership of Russian literature, and with such a persevering tradition of reading it, as we do here in China."

Liu, who is also president of the Chinese Association of Russian Literature Studies, said almost all Russian writers have been translated and introduced into China systematically.

Even during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), a time when Jack Kerouac's On the Road was a class-A banned book, Russian literature still found a way through so-called yellow-covered books into Chinese intellectual life.

In more than a century, Russian literature - before, during and after the Soviet Union - has affected the establishment of contemporary Chinese ideology and influenced literary taste and Chinese writing, Liu said.

"Russian literature is like a mirror to Russian society, from which Chinese see China's past, present and future," he added.

Yellow-covered books

To poet Bei Dao, whose real name is Zhao Zhenkai, the yellow-covered books, secretly circulated underground in the 1960s and 1970s, when most foreign books were banned, were the source of his poetic inspiration.

The yellow-covered books, largely translations of Russian literature and theories of the then-Soviet Union, were first published as "internal material" in small print runs for Party leaders to study and argue against the then political line of the Soviet leadership, after relations between the two countries soured in the early 1960s, said Zhang Fusheng, a veteran editor with the People's Literature Publishing House, the main publisher of those books.

"But the situation took a twist: The books became luxuries among young people. They could be exchanged for other reading material and goods," 61-year-old Zhang said.

Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Ilya Erenburg's The Thaw were first introduced as yellow-covered books. They were hugely popular among young readers who circulated and even hand-copied them.

Three high times

But except for low points in Sino-Russian relations, Russian and Soviet literature was top choice in the Chinese literary scene in the early 1900s, the 1950s and the 1980s.

"It's more like a natural option for Chinese readers," said researcher Liu, "because they feel they can sympathize with Russian literature that is educational, understandable and is about 'us' people but not 'them' higher classes."

Liu added that Chinese read French literature for the plot, while reading Russian works for guidance in life.

Since Alexander Pushkin's novel The Captain's Daughter was published in China in 1903, Russian literature has proven popular in the country.

Writer Lu Xun described Russian literature as "weapons for the rising slaves". He even borrowed a Nikolai Gogol book title for his celebrated novel Diary of A Madman.

Lu, together with other literary masters of China - Guo Moruo, Ba Jin and Mao Dun - were also translators and fans of the powerful literature.

"Russian literature played the role of one of the three thoughts that shaped China's enlightening May Fourth Movement in 1919, which shaped contemporary Chinese culture," Liu said.

Following the founding of the People's Republic of China, Sino-Soviet relations enjoyed a honeymoon in the 1950s.

At the time, Russian was the top foreign language in schools. Many Chinese people read Soviet literature, and gained knowledge of other culture and literature via the Russian language.

According to Chen Jianhua, with East China Normal University, 3,526 titles of more than 1,000 Russian and Soviet writers were published from 1949 to 1958. The 82 million copies amounted to three-quarters of all published translated works.

Zhang, of the People's Literature Publishing House, said that half of the editors at the time worked in the Russian section.

Chen Fumin, veteran critic of Chinese contemporary literature with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, views the close ties of the two countries' literature in the context of their shared paths of development.

"Chinese writers always find that the most efficient ways of expressing their observation and values is through Russian ways, instead of Western post-modernist approaches," Chen said.

By Russian ways, Chen means the realistic approaches and the focus on the country's basic missions: national awareness, liberation and social transformation.

Returning to literature

While 3,000 Chinese are studying Russian literature, and more than 20 publishing houses are presenting 100 titles of new translations into Chinese, people feel that the enthusiasm for Russian literature is ebbing, Liu said.

But Russian literature researcher Liu argued that the apparent decline in interest is actually a return to normal.

"We see Russian literature is developing, in a sense that it appeals to no national political propaganda, nor appeals to Western taste," Liu said.

With that, the Chinese view Russian literature with a less ideological bent and more on its aesthetic value, he added.

Editor Zhang, who published several works of Russia's younger writers, hopes to see more concern for national fate in Chinese young writers, as the Russians do.

The enduring charm of Russian literature on Chinese minds is the reason that many Chinese lamented Boris Vasilyev's death in mid-March.

Chinese publishers are planning this year to print more of the writer's The Dawns Here Are Quiet.

Chen Jianhua with East China Normal University, and Zhang Xiaoqiang with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences contributed to this story.

A captivating blogger poet makes her London debut

Riding the wave from unknown blogger to charismatic poet, 27-year-old poet Vera Polozkova shows why she is a sensation in Russia.

Now the 27-year-old Vera often seeks inspiration in far-off lands and cultures. She recently returned from India, from where she seems to have discovered a certain eastern reasoning concerning the ordering of the world. Source: ITAR-TASS

The 4th annual Slovo Festival of Russian Literature held in London in March was as accessible as it was grand in scope. The widely feted poet and performance artist Vera Polozkova, who was invited to headline the festival, set a magical tone. Polozkova appeared at the opening like a capsizing wave, her full-length dark blue dress set off by enormous expressive eyes, the epitome of femininity. As she began to beat out her crisp, incisive verse, her sharp, almost masculine mind flashed like a serrated blade.

People compare Vera Polozkova’s recitals to a rock concert - such is the force of the outpouring of feeling between the artist and her audience. Her verse works like short film clips about far-off lands and hot islands. She tells fleeting, exotic tales that bring to mind the captivating charm of Nikolai Gumilev and his poetic musings about Africa. In Polozkova’s case, however, there is no apparent attachment to places, as her focus lingers on her cinematic subjects (with names like Manou, Joe, Lou) and the elusive elements that form relationships: melancholy; human understanding and miscomprehension; craving for love and fear of it; gentle gestures; and smiles forming from the corners of a mouth.

 These accounts of people with foreign-sounding names are like a mini-show in which she is writer, director and performer. The poet also admits with a twinkle that foreign names offer her a certain freedom and enable her to escape questions from the audience like “My name is Katya, why did you decide to write so harshly about Katya?!”

 Polozkova has become increasingly known for her dramatic monologues, which are caustic, witty and wrenching; they are also deeply conversational, and sound like the interior monologues of young, educated women of the 21st century. Born to a rapid and punchy modern rock rhythm, Polozkova fires off phrases like arrows, eschewing mysticism and imparting a clear message devoid of frills. Her words are astonishingly precise and resonant.

Polozkova is most frequently likened to the great poet Joseph Brodsky, for her intelligence, her precise imagery and her rhythmic meter. Words for her are “a powerful force and magic,” the poet once revealed in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta. “I am a perfectionist. My consciousness nurtures the concept of a certain universal order; I have dreamed about this my whole life. And poetry is also an attempt to establish metaphysical order.”

Vera Polozkova had studied in Lomonosov University's Faculty of Journalism in Moscow. Her work was soon published in glossy magazines, but then just three months before her graduation the diligent student suddenly quit university. The blogging culture was just appearing in Russia at the time, and Polozkova published her poetry on her personal blog titled “Miss Understanding.” She instantly drew a readership of thousands and went on to become one the most popular poet bloggers on the Russian Internet. She has since published three books, received several literary awards and started to act in the theatre.

 Now the 27-year-old Vera often seeks inspiration in far-off lands and cultures. She recently returned from India, from where she seems to have discovered a certain eastern reasoning concerning the ordering of the world.

 Vera Polozkova’s appearance at the Slovo Festival was also her London debut. As she gave a dramatic reading of about the sea, a saxophone emitted the sound of the tide. Three musicians accompanied her verse; each improvised behind her to emphasize and riff off of the drama of her words. They played when instinct prompted them, creating a fusion of feeling and rhythm, flawlessly performed to the verse. The entire hall was tuned into the same frequency, into a wave called Vera.

Vera Polozkova 'And it may be not God'

And it may be not God but someone like His designee

 Taking you to his face as his eyes aren't keen to see,

 Like a dried dead bee, like a pebble naked -

 His breath rich like liquor of well tested quality,

Like a thick old spirit of wonderful quality -

 And extending a “happy belated”...

 What’s belated?

 All is belated.

 Scratching you at the corner and rolling you on his palm –

 Curly hair of tea,

The forehead of milky balm,

 Helpless clavicles stick out so open and so clear.

 Move your eyes to look down – the clouds are quiet and calm,

 Far beneath you they drift nonchalantly, swaying some.

 Nothing happens to you

 On from here.

Well, so hi, here is God and I’m His commander at war,

 I was picky when choosing to call you out the door,

 And so took you with all your stuff

 And possession,

 Human mineral that’s all traversed by vein and pore,

 Why, you look in a strangely astonished fashion,

Like you haven’t died

 Ever before...

Soviet prose: Censoring surrealistic art of a prominent writer

March 30, 2013Phoebe Taplin, special to RBTH

Story-teller, socialist, soldier, scum: RBTH describes the extraordinary life and work of Andrey Platonov which was censored during his life.

Stalin wrote “scum” in the margin of one of Andrey Platonov’s surreal stories and told the editor to “give him a good belting.” Censored and supressed during his lifetime, Platonov, who was born in 1899, is now seen as a creative beacon of Soviet literature.

Some fans would make even greater claims. In his introduction to a collection of Platonov’s stories called “Soul” (NYRB 2007), the translator Robert Chandler said: “All Russians consider Pushkin their greatest poet; in time, I believe, it will become equally clear that Platonov is their greatest prose writer.”

“Soul”includes the translator’s personal favorite, “The Return,” which also appeared in the anthology “Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida” (Penguin, 2005).

“This story about an army captain's fraught return to his family at the end of the Second World War is witty, tender and wise," Chandler said in a recent interview with RBTH. "It is full of vivid detail, but it is of universal relevance."

"Anyone who has ever, in moments of impatience, felt the desire to smash up his existing, imperfect life and run off in pursuit of some illusion of a perfect life elsewhere … can learn something from this story,” Chandler added.

Platonov has always been widely admired by fellow writers, including Pasternak andBulgakov; the poet, Joseph Brodsky, saw him as the equal of Joyce and Kafka; the historian, Orlando Figes, considers the discovery of Platonov’s previously unpublished manuscripts as “the most precious [literary] dividend from the collapse of the Soviet system.”

A working class boy from Voronezh, Platonov worked on the railroad as a teenager, fought with the Red Army before he was twenty, and died in obscure poverty at the age of 52.

Many of his texts were published only posthumously, like the unfinished “Happy Moscow,” written during the 1930s; this bizarre, hypnotic tale finally appeared in 1991 and NYRB Classics have just issued a revised translation.

In his first works in the early 1920s, Platonov dreamed of a utopian future in which electricity transformed human nature. He worked enthusiastically on land reclamation projects, wrote baffling, ambiguous novels and stories, became a war reporter and a publisher of children’s literature. He caught tuberculosis from his son, who had returned from a prison camp.

Introducing three chapters from “Chevengeur,” Platonov’s 1928 novel about an imaginary town, Chandler wrote in “The Portable Platonov” (Glas, 1999):“Much of Platonov’s work can be seen as an attempt to give words back to those who have been forced into inarticulacy.”

His surrealism, Chandler explained, reflects the chaos of the times. The - sometimes darkly comic - attempts of Chevengeur’s confused inhabitants to establish communism include a messianic belief that political change will cause the sky to “become bluer and more transparent” or that “Rosa Luxemburg will once again come to life as a living citizen.”

The Foundation Pit is Platonov’s best-known novel, written in 1929, but unpublished in Russia until 1988. The bleakly satirical story describes a group of early Soviet workers trying to dig the foundations for a grand building which will never be built.

Geoffrey Hosking, reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, pinpointed its power in revealing “the strange and tormented mixture of hope and despair by which many ordinary people must have lived during Stalin’s revolution from above.”

“There is certainly no other writer who was able to convey, simultaneously, the beauty and hope of the Soviet dream and its terrible reality,” Chandler said in an interview with the New Yorker.

What is it about Platonov's prose style that makes some people rate his work so highly?

“On the surface, Platonov is the least ‘literary’ of writers," Chandler said "His language can seem crude, elemental; it has been described as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees.’ At the same time, however, this language is extraordinarily subtle, packed with the most delicate of puns and allusions.”

Platonov’s stories operate on numerous levels, with political metaphors made flesh and vice versa.

Daniel Kalder, in the Guardian, described Platonov as a committed communist who became appalled by the excesses of Stalinism and – unusually - “tried to negotiate a space within Soviet culture in which he could write honestly about what was going on.”

Chandler points out that he did manage to publish great stories in his lifetime, although they were viciously criticized, and he directly influenced younger writers, like Vasily Grossman.

A recent anthology of “Russian Magic Tales” included late stories by Platonov, written while he was dying.

“His courage and tenacity were remarkable,” said Chandler, quoting a passage that describes a plane tree whose trunk has incorporated huge stones and “encircled them with patient bark, made them something it could live with … meekly lifting up as it grew taller what should have destroyed it.”

Written in 1934, this “now seems to be a description of Platonov himself.”

What Chandler calls a “distorted” western view of Soviet literature, where international scandals meant Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn initially became better known than the equally great Grossman or Platonov, is gradually changing.

Writers from the generation who “shared the hopes of the revolution,” who wrote complicated, challenging works “from inside the Soviet experience”are gaining worldwide fame.