By John Thornhill
Published: October 30 2009 23:33 | Last updated: October 30 2009 23:33
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
By Victor Pelevin
Trans by Andrew Bromfield
Faber £8.99
FT Bookshop price: £7.19The Good Angel of Death
By Andrey Kurkov
Trans by A Bromfield
Harvill Secker £12.99
FT Bookshop price: £10.39One More Year
By Sana Krasikov
Portobello £10.99
FT Bookshop price: £8.79She Lover of Death
By Boris Akunin
Trans by A Bromfield
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £16.99
FT Bookshop price: £13.59
The death of Russian literature has been declared many times. Russian poetry was supposed to have perished tragically early, interred with the body of Alexander Pushkin in 1837 following his fateful duel. Then along came Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, an astonishing quartet of poets who revived and reinvented the genre in an explosion of creativity in the early 20th century.
Epic Russian novels, meanwhile, were pronounced dead after Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. But in describing the brutalities of the second world war and the gulag, Vasily Grossman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn proved worthy heirs of those 19th-century masters.
Once again it has become fashionable to argue that Russian fiction is over, buried under the rubble of the former Soviet Union. Critics have decreed that no classic works of Russian literature have emerged in the past 18 years.
That may be true, but green shoots are now pushing through the fallen masonry. Four new Russian novels reveal flashes of fabulous writing, at times reminiscent of the wild imaginings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the dystopic visions of Yevgeny Zamyatin or the gentle humanity of Anton Chekhov. Russian literature has long ago left Socialist Realism panting behind – now it is striding out in the company of Capitalist Surrealism.
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