Rossica 18
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The Ties of Blood
Russian Literature from the 21st Century
Edited by Oliver Ready
Poetry edited by Emily Lygo
144 pp., £10
ISBN 978-1-905345-04-5
The list of contemporary Russian authors widely available in English is small and has altered little in recent years: Pelevin, Ulitskaya, Akunin, Tolstaya, Sorokin. Yet these authors, who have been well-established at home and abroad for a decade or more, represent only a fragment – albeit a very visible fragment – of the Russian literary scene. The Ties of Blood: Russian Literature from the 21st Century will offer the English reader and publisher the opportunity to sample a far greater variety of the prose-writers and poets shaping Russian literature today. Virtually unknown over here, they are, in many cases, renowned in their homeland.
Among the entries are short stories by Dmitry Novikov, German Sadulaev, and Aleksandr Ilichevsky (the most recent recipient of the Russian Booker Prize), and excerpts from recent novels by Aleksei Ivanov, Dina Rubina, and Aleksei Slapovsky. The collection ranges from Uzbekistan to Chechnya, from the experiences of a literary hack in the post-Soviet Moscow of glamour and celebrity to the lives of rafters on the Chusovaya River in the eighteenth century. If a common thread can be discerned, it is the persistence of the eternal theme of kinship: sibling rivalries, generational conflicts, and ancestral memory. No less striking than the topics are the style and formal composition of the pieces included, as writers all across Russia attempt to create a fresh literary context in the wake of both Soviet optimism and post-Soviet cynicism.
Rather like the authors themselves, the translators are a mixture of the established and the emerging, with several having already been acclaimed by the judges of Rossica’s sister project, the Rossica Translation Prize.
This volume is planned as the first in a series of anthologies of contemporary Russian literature to be published by Academia Rossica.
Contents
‘Like a Tree Growing Backwards’: Contemporary Prose Between Past and Present
Introduction by Oliver Ready
Heirs of the Tradition: The Private Experience of Poetry in Today’s Russia
Introduction to Poetry by Emily Lygo
Petrovich (extract)
Oleg Zaionchkovsky
The Gold of the Rebellion (extract)
Aleksei Ivanov
Two Poems by Andrei Rodionov
On the Sunny Side of the Street (extract)
Dina Rubina
Four Poems by Alexei Tsvetkov
I am Chechen! (extract)
German Sadulaev
3 July 2004
A Poem by Maria Stepanova
The Toads of Revenge and Conscience
Dmitry Novikov
Poems by Maria Galina
Quality of Life (extract)
Aleksei Slapovsky
Three Poems by Boris Ryzhii
The Waxen Yonder and The Passing of the Shade
Irina Polyanskaya
The Sparrow
Aleksandr Ilichevsky
Two Poems by Maxim Amelin
Boris Pasternak, A Biography (extract)
Dmitry Bykov
The Raising of Lazarus
Vladimir Sharov
Poetry Texts in Russian
