Anna Muraveva's recommendations of contemporary Russian literature

1. Casual by Oksana Robski (Available through the public library)
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When her wealthy husband is shot to death by a hired killer, a wealthy widow embarks on a luxurious but precarious life of haute couture shopping, drunken orgies, gossip, red-carpet events, cocaine addiction, and torrid affairs in an exclusive Moscow suburb, in a debut novel based on the author's own life.

Some people treat life as consumption. Some, as an exploit. Some see it as a cup to be drained. To the bottom. I look at life as a partner in a game. . . . There are no rules, which make it a bit scary, but I've gotten used to that. There are no winners, either.

Moscow's exclusive Rublyovka neighborhood is the decadent playground of the Russian nouveau riche. Here, dachas come complete with steam baths, heated floors, and live-in masseurs; poodles are dyed pink to match designer dresses; days of haute couture shopping slip into nights of cocaine-fueled partying; and the city's most glamorous celebrities -- including Oscar-winning directors, world-renowned politicians, and gorgeous movie stars -- rub shoulders with its most notorious tycoons.

Oksana Robski knows firsthand the gripping reality of life in Rublyovka. Based on the author's own experiences, Casual tells the story of a wealthy young woman whose husband is mysteriously gunned down outside their Moscow apartment. Determined to avenge his murder while maintaining her lavish lifestyle, she must navigate through a treacherous labyrinth of high society and low company.


From running her own business to negotiating with hit men, the resilient widow becomes intimately involved in the corrupt and dangerous underbelly of the Russian business world. At once an entrepreneur and socialite, she and her equally rich and beautiful friends attend Moscow's wildest parties, spend thousands on plastic surgery, and stop at nothing to snag rich husbands.

A sensational bestseller in its native Russia, Casual exposes the secret lives of the country's new elite. In a world of double-crossing gangsters, torrid affairs, and truly desperate housewives, startling excess is often accompanied by violence, heartbreak, and betrayal.


2. Lives in transit : a collection of recent Russian women's writing (Available at the public library)

One of the most remarkable changes taking place in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet empire is the radical transformation of Russian women's culture. Despite a historically male-dominated culture, gender awareness has flourished in the 1990s, and is reflected in a new body of women's literature and a new concern for female experience. The prose and poetry included in this anthology examine essential issues in women's lives: women's sexuality, romantic love, motherhood, the economic and political life of women, their struggle to integrate domestic and professional roles, new family structures, physical health, abortion, rape, and so forth.

The issues covered here are common to women everywhere, but the different historical experience of Russian women in the twentieth century has created distinct understandings and values. It was a time of terrible suffering and drudgery for Russian women, who endured decades of war, political and cultural repression, and poverty. Women were given more equality in the workplace, but, as these works show, they were still expected to maintain their roles as conventional wives and mothers.

Contents:

• "Gulia" by Liudmila Ulitskaia
• "First try" by Viktoria Tokareva
• "Venetian mirrors" by Larisa Vaneeva
• "Going after goat-antelopes" by Svetlana Vasilenko
• "Wicked girls" by Nina Sadur
• "Sergusha" by Alla Kalinina
• "The chosen people" by Liudmila Ulitskaia
• "The phone call" by Tatiana Nabatnikova
• "Rendezvous" by Marian Palei
• "Slowly the old woman ..." by Nina Katerli
• "The way home" by Regina Raevskaia
• "The blackthorn" by Dina Rubina
• "Uncle Khlor and Koriakin" by Galina Shcherbakova
• "A bus driver named Astap" by Tatiana Nabatnikova
• "Rush job" by Elena Makarova
• "Life insurance" by Marina Tsvetaeva
• "The losers' division" by Marina Palei
• "Worm-eaten Sonny" by Nina Sadur
• "Vera Perova" by Nadezhda Kozhevnikova
• "Albinos" by Bella Ulanovskaia
• "The trap" by Anna Mass
• "Where did the streetcar go" by Irina Polianskaia
• "A woman in a one-room apartment" by Liubov Iunina.

3. The yellow arrow by Viktor Pelevin (at the public library)

Set during the advent of perestroika, a surreal, satirical novella by a critically acclaimed young Russian writer traces the fate of the passengers on The Yellow Arrow, a long-distance Russian train headed for a ruined bridge.

4. Voices of Russian literature : interviews with ten contemporary writers by Sally Laird (at the public library)

Contents:

• Fazil Iskander
• Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
• Vladimir Makanin
• Andrei Bitov
• Tatyana Tolstaya
• Yevgeny Popov
• Vladimir Sorokin
• Zufar Gareyev
• Viktor Pelevin
• Igor Pomerantsev.

5. The Kukotsky Incident by Ludmila Ulitskaya

[This from John Clark: I don't thik The Kukotsky Incident is translated into English ... too bad, the novel won the prestigious Russian Booker Award in 2002.]


6. White Walls: Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya

Some reviews of Tolstaya's book:

• Angels, imaginary friends, near-saints, shades and über-ogres fall to Earth among ordinary Russians and routinely succeed in whetting the imagination in this sparkling collection from Tolstoy's great-grandniece, a longtime New Yorker fiction contributor. It includes her two previous story collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with more recent work. The opening story, "Loves Me, Loves Me Not," presents the classic hateful nanny/spoiled kids dyad, setting it in a Leningrad full of wonders: some menacing, others joyous. In "Okkerivil River," the hapless Simeonov sets off to rescue (or so he imagines) chanteuse Vera Vasilevna, who has serenaded him from his Victrola for half a lifetime. When he does find her, she turns out to be exactly like the title river: vivid, repugnant and polluted beyond human redress. In "The Circle," Vassily Mikailovich (Tolstaya wryly leaves him without a surname) turns 60 and finds little behind or ahead of him, despite meeting the ghost of former lover Isolde. In "Yorick," a baleen whale, provider of bone for button-making and enabler of childhood fantasies, is elegized as Hamlet's nursemaid and human cairn to the narrator. Beautiful, imaginative and disconcerting, Tolstaya's Russia is a labyrinth of treasures and horrors.

• "Tolstaya demonstrates an impressive range in these 23 stories...[that encompass] political satire, flights of surrealism and realistic urban and domestic dramas, nearly all set in the Soviet era...Children, old folks and the struggling in-betweens–Tolstaya sees into all their hearts. Remarkable"

• “Tolstaya offsets layers of exquisitely constructed language with the colloquial and the idiomatic and in a similar way layers the commonplace with the supernatural. The creation of a brilliant jumble of motley metaphors is her gift – not plot, trajectory, or the arc of a story, but the plunge into the middle of dazzling verbiage, her bright universe.”

7. Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians by Tatyana Tolstaya.

Written between 1990 and 2000, the 20 essays in this collection offer a progressive, dynamic meditation on Russia's recent political and cultural climate. Many of the pieces are book reviews culled from such publications as the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, but Tolstaya, an internationally acclaimed journalist and fiction writer (The Golden Porch; Sleepwalker in a Fog), goes far beyond the task of reviewing. Her careful and succinct critiques offer original, highly informed takes on the books' subjects, ranging from political biography to cultural history. Tolstaya has little patience for writers who shore shoddy research with patronizing egotism, illustrated by such lines from this stinger of a review of Gail Sheehy's 1990 biography of Gorbachev: "You have to be quite fearless, an adventurer, extraordinarily self-assured, to offer American readers a book about a country that you yourself do not understand." In 1991, Tolstaya defends Yeltsin against criticisms that his decrees to wrest power from Communist Party leaders were undemocratic: "A man who watches a wolf devouring his child does not begin a discussion of animal rights." Tolstaya reserves particular contempt for Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In reviews of two of his works, she finds that the isolated writer and political activist idol was rendered obsolete long before his 1995 return to Russia. In the end, Tolstaya's essays in this compact, historically significant volume offer a fascinating, highly intelligent analysis of Russian society and politics.

8. Life Stories: Original Works by Russian Writers by Andrei Gelasimov, Yevgeny Grishkovets, Alexander Kabakov, Sergei Lukyanenko, Vladimir Makanin, Marina Moskvina, Viktor Pelevin (Author), Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Dina Rubina and others.

These are just some of the stories in this wonderful collection of original works by 19 leading Russian writers. They are life-affirming stories of love, family, hope, rebirth, mystery and imagination. Masterfully translated by some of the best Russian-English translators working today, these tales reassert the power of Russian literature to affect readers of all cultures in profound and lasting ways. Best of all, 100% of the profits from the sale of this book will go to benefit Russian hospice -- not-for-profit care for fellow human beings who are nearing the end of their own life stories.