Take a look at some of the best contemporary writing to come out of Russia. The list contains selected titles to be promoted and translated into English. As a helpful guide, we set out biographies, extracts and synopsis to make your discovery of today's Russian literary greats even easier.
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I open yesterday’s Evening News, and it’s all about you and me.
It’s going to be the word in the beginning again, they write. But meanwhile in the schools they rattle on in the same old way, saying first of all there was a big bang, and the whole of existence went flying apart.
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by Dina Rubina
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He decided to call his aunt before his departure, anyway. Typically, he was the first to make a conciliatory move. The important thing here was not to curry favor or pander, but to conduct himself as if there hadn’t been a real quarrel – a mere trifle, a light tiff.
“So, tell me,” he asked, “what should I bring you – castañuelas?”
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‘We all put on a brave face with each other, and forget that without love we’re the most wretched of the wretched. But we grow used to acting this way and become spiteful and proud, and mistake sick chickens for fierce lions.’
Letter from Tolstoy to his friend Vladimir Chertkov
DEPARTURE OR ESCAPE?
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After all the years (decades!) we have been standing in queues, we still have not managed to get used to them. They wear us down, they wear us out, we can’t take any more breathing down each other’s necks while placidly shuffling from foot to foot. The idea seems inapplicable to us that in those tedious moments of queueing yesterday and today the most important thing in life is taking place within us: our soul is living.
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by Lev Danilkin
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Having once escaped from the Earth’s gravitational pull, on his return Gagarin naturally found himself back in its power and he felt it just like everyone else. But the unique status that in reality was his for only one and a half hours was miraculously prolonged: in the eyes of virtually the entire population of the planet he remained a body free of the influence of earthly gravity
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He was born at a halt with the unexceptional name of Kilometre 715. For all its three digits, the halt was extremely small with neither a cinema, a post office, nor even a school. It consisted of six wooden huts strung along the railway track. On reaching the age of 16, he left, went to St Petersburg, entered the University, and began the study of history. In view of the surname he inherited at birth – Solovyov – this was only to be expected.
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Screw-ups and setups were commonplace in Koka’s life. He decided to put the matter on the back burner, telling himself, enough is enough! I’m going to Paris to escape from this savage barbarism.
He was sitting in front of the TV, bored, when his neighbor Nukri, an avid reader of porn magazines, dropped by with a bit of weed from Asia. He promised to find out where he could get more and how much it would be.
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by Master Chen (Dmitry Kosyrev)
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The Book of Necromancers
The hero is caught in a fog, in the midst of a dreadful and a wondrous story, groping to find his way. He is surrounded by enigmas at every turn and can’t begin to fathom the direction from which deadly arrows are flying. Lo! He hears the heavy, cruel word war, which cuts through the fog like an icy wind and begins to disperse it.
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by Dmitry Bykov
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Life has been good’ were his words during one of the many illnesses that preceded his death, when he was bedridden in Peredelkino and could no longer expect help from any quarter: the ambulance service would not travel outside Moscow and the government and writers’ hospitals would no longer admit him. ‘I’ve done everything I wanted to do.’ ‘If this is dying, then it is nothing to be scared of,’ he said three days before he died, after the latest blood transfusion had briefly renewed his strength.
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by Ernst Henry
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In December 1952, three months before Stalin’s death, the French Communist Party abruptly expelled two of the most distinguished members of its Politburo, André Marty and Charles Tillon. These were exalted veterans of the revolutionary movement in France, having risen to prominence as far back as the 1920s. Both belonged to the party’s founding core but had enjoyed Lenin’s trust even during the Russian Civil War.
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Hopelessly stuck in the traffic, Nastya cursed the laziness that had made her accept the offer of an official car from her new boss, Bolshakov. It would have been so much quicker by metro. Of course, if only she’d bothered to think for just a moment, she wouldn’t have taken the car, but everything happened so fast, she was caught on the hop.
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Maxim T. Yermakov, the happy owner of a three-year-old Toyota and brand manager for several appalling varieties of milk chocolate, drove up to his chocolate office with his customary feeling of having no head on his shoulders. Meanwhile, the head was smoking and it could see the wet car park with the inflatable snowman standing in the black January puddle.
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On May 1, 200.., a certain individual arrived in Prague. I was that individual: Ilya Korolenko, attractively clean-featured and inconspicuous, with a dreamy look in my eyes and hair spiralling into a passionate, babyish twist over my forehead. In terms of intimate predilection, in terms of my mission, I am a poet, sometimes I put a few words together and revel in their magic, their incongruous voodoo
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Living as a tramp was hard, but fascinating. He kept trying to find a new angle on things, an interesting way to get his teeth into Moscow, which he now saw as the same kind of special setting for thrills and action as his childhood – a kingdom of scrap yards and rubbish dumps, basements, warehouses, abandoned locomotives and empty workshops where you could load up with carbide
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