Russian Stories

by Francesc Serés, Peter Bush

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Black Humor; Short Stories

Synopsis

Drift through outer space with a doomed cosmonaut whose engine is 'kaput!'; return to an irradiated village with an elderly couple who want to go home; ask yourself, did Elvis really play a concert in Red Square? Twenty-one impish and irrepressible stories by five neglected or forgotten Russian writers. Fresh-faced vignettes from modern St Petersburg; hair-raising tales of state insanity, snatched from the Soviet archives; dark fables from the days of serfdom, when the land was untamed and life was brutish and short. Each mines a discrete facet of Russian life, history or culture, and taken as a whole they sketch a historical arc from the nineteenth century to the age of the budget airline, offering the reader a unique combination of daring, wit, dash and charm.

Release date: July 4, 2013

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 182

Sample

My family lived in the industrial area where my father worked. My world was school there, doctors there, school trips in buses there and games played in the sports halls there. The foundry chimneys and the grey clouds they spewed out dominated the whole district and were the centre of my world.

An esplanade in front of the blast furnaces was made from ten-centimetre-thick blocks of steel. The gantries operated by the workers emptied all manner of scrap metal onto the esplanade: they flattened cars, gutted tanks and armaments, sliced through silos and trucks, twisted rails and multiple items from diverse, unknown sources. They worked non-stop, mixed scrap with iron ore that piled up into what I thought looked like huge mountains. Hammers and crushers broke and smashed everything, the magnets hoisted the pieces and dropped them until the scraps were small enough for the gantries to load and then empty them into the furnaces.

The scrap metal reached the foundry in trucks pulled by the train that came from the city on the western track. Sometimes, the train transported another train, trucks, engine and all, that the cranes hoisted as high as possible with their magnets. Then they switched off the current and the items fell on the esplanade, dropped without a second glance. It was a sorry sight to see an old train appear on the back of a young one: we thought we could look into their eyes. Our only consolation was the thought they would extract metal from them to make new, more handsome specimens.

On the southeast track they unloaded mineral that still had to be melted and refined. The trucks were only a third full, Father said they had to be careful: if a convoy was overloaded, the weight might buckle the rails and derail the train. The trucks tipped their contents into a hopper that emptied them onto a conveyor belt. The belt lifted the mineral up and dropped it on the ground until it made a perfect cone that other conveyor belts transported to the furnaces.

The whole district was astounded the day statues, even some quite colossal figures, began rolling in. Political leaders were eradicating them from towns and cities of the Union. It was the 1990s, I had grown up and knew that those statues didn’t simply represent what we were taught at school and I had also discovered there was more to the world than our district.

Stalins were the first to arrive, for some reason, and Lenins came months later. There were also some Marxes, but very few. Stalins arrived on special platforms, roped down on their side or sometimes they had been broken up, legs in one truck, head and body in another, sometimes in quite hilarious postures. As soon as Stalin was untied, the magnets lifted him up and dropped him onto the steel floor. Even when they were entangled in the folds of the overcoats the statues usually wore, the bodies and legs soon broke up after being dropped for a second or third time. However, the heads were often massive and solid and bounced. Some had been reinforced inside with various incredibly tough alloys. If they were small enough to enter the mouths of the furnaces, it was a simple process and the bodies slid inside as if it were a crematorium oven. But if they were too big, there was no way they could crack those heads open. They tried to slice or hack off part of the hair, the nose, the most prominent parts of the cheeks and cheekbones, but the saws bent and the enormously solid nostrils blunted their serrated edges. The only solution they found was to drill holes, fill them with an explosive charge, bury the heads underground and blow them up.

In the end it was too much work and they decided to let them be. Stalin’s heads, disfigured by all the bangs and cuts they had received, were piled in a corner, from where they scrutinised the foundry cycle as it resumed time and again, the red hot iron gradually turning grey and black. The stories in this anthology speak of the gazes from those heads and the way we looked into their eyes, as we questioned them about the past that shaped them, and also about the more recent past that threw them into the air and broke them. But our questions and gazes went on to ask them much more about the years of indifference, the preceding years and, above all, the years to come. The stories also form part of the cycle that old stories and themes engage with, re-shaping and re-firing them yet again.

An old proverb says that a plant needs roots and flowers in order to live. And it is true, it needs light and darkness, air and earth, the past of the seed from which it came and the future of the seeds born from the fruit it will bear. When I read these stories in succession I felt the proverb was being made flesh. There are roots here, roots that are the stories and authors that time and the twists and turns of history have concealed from us, roots of the tasks the makers of the anthology have had to perform, and flowers, flowers in the form of stories their readers must bring to life.

I began to collect these flowers eight years ago, some from roadsides and places of transit, but others from distant fields, dangerous valleys and lofty peaks. There are canonical stories, anthologised elsewhere, like “The Forfeit” by Ola Yevgueniyeva, “Guilt” by Vera-Margarita Abanserev or “Elvis Presley Sings in Red Square” by Vitali Kroptkin. There are others, like “The Riders” by Jossef Bergchenko, published in a magazine in 1922 and not seen since. Or unfinished and unpublished stories, like “The War against the Voromians” by Aleksandr Volkov.

Salvaging these texts was a real challenge. This project could not have been brought to fruition without the support of the Department of Contemporary Literature in the University of Nizhny Novgorod. My thanks to all those who have collaborated – relatives, academics, collectors, archivists, curators, publishers and booksellers, all readers – without whom many of the texts in this anthology would have been completely forgotten.

Many years after their first readers held them in their hands, the stories by Jossef Bergchenko or Aleksandr Volkov and the characters that inspired them, having survived the era of Vitali Kroptkin, now join with the characters strolling through St Petersburg or Moscow in the stories by Ola Yevgueniyeva or Vera-Margarita Abanserev. The publication of this Catalan translation means all that work has borne fruit and that those roots that originated in Russia bear fruit today in Catalunya.

I visited Minsk two years ago at the invitation of the Byelorussian critic Karl Batlovitch. The hotel he booked me into, one of the city’s two or three prestige hotels, was near the centre.

The first morning I went down for breakfast I picked up a laminated sheet of paper, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy – the menu. The menu in English was at the top and in the local language at the bottom. By each dish was a number that served to connect them in both languages. Apart from the omelette, the remaining options were only recognisable via English translation.

I ordered number 3, ham, but when it arrived, an omelette sat in the middle of my plate, an undercooked, greasy plain omelette. I told the waitress she had made a mistake, that the omelette must be for another table, but she rudely told me it wasn’t, that it was mine. She seemed to be telling me to eat it, whether I liked it or not.

The following morning, that waitress was not on duty. I ordered ham, pointing to the ham on another table and they brought me ham. Juicy ham, juicy and off the bone. As on the previous day, I didn’t risk the coffee.

On my third day, the waitress was back. I tried to avoid her radius of activity: if she went right, I went left; if she headed to the entrance, I went towards the exit … A total waste of time, as soon as I sat down, she came and asked me what I wanted … and brought me another omelette. In protest, I cut it into thin slices and shaped them into a “NO” on my plate and left.

The fourth time I went into the dining room, I ordered ham for a fourth time; but before the waitress could return from the kitchen, I got up and spoke to the maître d’, who theoretically knew a little English, and asked him why they brought me omelette when I had ordered ham.

He looked at the sheet, the menu, and said he didn’t understand. I persisted. He told me to sit down, they’d bring me my ham; but when the waitress came, she brought me yet another omelette. I pursued the maître d’, on my high horse, and dragged him by the arm to my table: an omelette.

The maître d’ scratched the scruff of his neck, asked in the kitchen, asked the waitress and was none the wiser. That’s to say, he looked at me as if I were an awkward customer, someone who orders an omelette and then complains when they bring it, saying he had ordered ham.

By the fifth day I was beginning to see this as a matter of honour, and was fortunate that a lady sitting on the next table, an air hostess, spoke both English and the local language. I asked her if she had had any problems or if they brought her what she ordered. Or if it was traditional to serve omelettes or if there was a five-year overproduction of eggs. The lady, who initially didn’t understand what I was talking about and told the maître d’ – already on his way, looking horrified – that there was nothing to worry about, then glanced at the menu and laughed. Someone had made a mistake copying out the translations and had put one dish down twice. As a result, 3 for ham became 3 for omelette and that meant the remaining dishes were out of order as well.

I checked the other menus that were photocopies of a photocopy … I grabbed them all and went in pursuit of the maître d’ who was beginning to look daggers at me. I told him it was all down to a mistake on the menu, that all the dishes in English were wrong. He said right, that was true, but as they had so few customers from abroad … I asked him if they would change them and he said they would, but the day after and subsequently the photocopies were the same, intact. I ordered number 4, which was a total mystery, but matched ham off the bone in the local language. And they brought it, looking equally sour, but they did bring it. After battling on so many mornings, I suddenly remembered some of the stories Anastasia had told me about and, in particular, their constant reference to exhaustion, resistance and hardness, as well as a sense of humour that is a form of resistance against injustice that reaches everywhere, even a tourist’s breakfast.

I met Anastasia Maximova at a writers’ forum in Prague. I spoke about how difficult it was to describe the work of a turner and she talked about an author who had written several stories that were set in ball-bearing factories in Karkhov. The translation of that first story was followed by others we e-mailed to each other in Spanish. Of course, I didn’t know Russian – and still don’t – I recognise the alphabet and the script and can pronounce it, but I don’t understand a word apart from those the Catalan language has incorporated in one way or another. Anastasia Maximova started sending me stories, excerpts from other writers that I mostly found to be excellent. The fact that our interests and tastes dovetail has been very helpful as we go about our correspondence, recovering these writers and making our final selection. Beyond her translating, Anastasia Maximova’s contribution has been invaluable in terms of her choice of writers and stories, some of which – writers and stories – had been concealed by layers and layers of grim years, of decades that seemed even longer because of the tremendous amount that happened in them.

That was five years ago. In the meantime, Anastasia Maximova has completed her degree in Hispanic Language and Literature, worked as a tour guide, written her doctoral thesis on mechanisms for spreading subcultures, reached a highly respectable level in Catalan and translated many more stories by many more authors than those who appear in this anthology. She now works as a sworn legal translator.

My dilettante attitude restricts my knowledge of Russia, the U.S.S.R. and of Russian. Anastasia Maximova asked me to write this prologue despite my strange interactions with the embassy – that I will reveal shortly – and my ignorance of any of the issues and themes explored here. This prologue is mine but the choice of writers and stories was a joint affair. Some authors were left out of this first selection that we hope to publish in a sequel.

We have chosen writers who could bear witness to some of the events that have shaped the development of Russia and have reversed the conventional time sequence by starting with Ola Yevgueniyeva and ending with Jossef Bergchenko. The reader will find a Russia that is familiar, themes that speak to our most immediate present, experiences lived on the other side of Europe, far from here and yet right here. In the words of Anastasia Maximova, everything is translatable, “even language, even literature”.

My first contact with Russia was with the U.S.S.R. I now know that the U.S.S.R. wasn’t Russia and that Russia wasn’t the U.S.S.R.

At the time, however, there were things that belied such a perception. When I looked at a map, it seemed as if the red that marked the whole of that vast country, should spread everywhere and saturate, not only the republics, but also Comecon, and thus splash over into such remote spots as Cuba, Angola, the Yemen or Vietnam. Even its shape: Russia was like the main trunk that was extending its roots to the south and the whole of the world. Besides, there was the name, U.R.S.S. in Catalan, which out of sheer serendipity ended up resembling the name of the central country that dominated the rest.

We had a number of books at home on the Russian Revolution and Second World War. As well as a history of the post-war wars. All these books had excellent accompanying photos (an excellent range for a child living in Saidí almost thirty years ago). There was also The Gulag Archipelago, which easily balanced whatever was put on the other side of the scales.

Had I been a slightly more gullible child, I might have put a lot more things on the propaganda side. Readers may find this highly unlikely but, for a couple of years, from the age of nine to eleven, I had contact with the Russian Embassy in Madrid. Minimal contact; I sent letters and the embassy employees sent me books about the U.S.S.R. As I write this I think “how stupid could you have been”, but the fact is I received booklets about the Soviet Union’s scientific advances, aerospace power or wonderful health services. I say “booklets” because they were small format with equally small contents. The propaganda was so obvious that even I, a pre-adolescent, in Saidí, in 1982, could detect it. The Russian health services were magnificent, as was state education. Workers were awarded the status of heroes and the peoples of the U.S.S.R. co-existed in a folkloric harmony that prevented any kind of dissidence. Etcetera.

Nevertheless, I continued to be interested. I placed what films I received from the U.S.S.R. next to the film myths of the U.S.A. I remember buying a V.H.S. Russian version of “Treasure Island”. It was a year after my exchanges with the embassy and coincided with the arrival in Saidí of a tramp who claimed to have visited Russia. He was no ordinary tramp. He was reasonably well dressed and accompanied by a dog, a wolfhound that obeyed instructions in three or four different languages. I hardly need to add how fascinating we found him and how sick he must have been of all those kids waiting to see the dog duck down and spring up at such strange words. Besides, he always had a tale to tell, about Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia … Had he really visited all those countries? I will never know, the tramp lived up to his name and disappeared.

Then I read what you would expect. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin … As the years passed, I added Platonov, Tsvetlaieva, Bunin and, above all, Bulgakov.

When I left Saidí, Russians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians started to arrive. Now Saidí is remote territory for me and gradually, as I have been writing all I have had to write, it has become a distant Russia, and now Saidí and I aren’t what we used to be, Saidí is also slightly Russian.

Mark Kharitonov, Boris Akunin, Vassili Ashionov, Vladimir Sorokin, Ludmila Ulitskaia and Mikhail Shishkin are some of the best known writers of contemporary literature today. The authors included in this anthology are part of one of the many underground currents in Russian fiction over the last hundred years. What remains of these writers? I don’t know and would say that nobody knows, but I am certain that they have helped, in one way or another, to create this world that moves on from one set of writers to another and that they have left their trace. In the end, sooner or later, deep down or in the shallows all writers will go underground together with what they hav. . .