Quick Study: Aleksei Ivanov is well-known for writing absorbing novels – some set centuries ago, others taking place in our time, some utterly realistic, others featuring elements of fantasy – and his fame has broadened through screenplays and a starring role in the 2010 TV miniseries The Ridge of Russia, which combines adventure and Russian history.
The Ivanov File: Aleksei Ivanov’s earliest writings went unpublished for years but his first two published books, which came out in 2003, became two of his best-known works: The Geographer Drank His Globe Away, a novel about a modern-day teacher written in 1995, and Heart of Parma, a historical work about Perm written in 2000. Coming into print relatively late has clearly paid off for Ivanov: he followed those two books with two others that had been sitting in desk drawers plus Riot Gold, a historical action novel that won the 2006 Yasnaya Polyana Award for contemporary fiction and a Big Book Award readers’ choice prize. His Nasty Weather, a suspenseful social novel about Afghan War veterans, was shortlisted for the 2016 Big Book Award and adapted into a miniseries. He has written around two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. Ivanov’s Быть Ивановым (Being Ivanov), released in autumn 2020, collects readers’ questions to Ivanov and his answers, a dialogue that the book’s site says began in 2005, when Ivanov made his Web site. More than four thousand questions have appeared.
Psssst………: The film Tsar, written by Ivanov, directed by Pavel Lungin, and starring Petr Mamonov (as Ivan the Terrible!) and Oleg Yankovsky, competed in the 2009 Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival… Ivanov didn’t allow his books to be nominated for awards for some years after Heart of Parma (2005) was taken out of Russian Booker Prize contention for “lacking signs of a novel”… But Ivanov agreed to having his Nasty Weather nominated for the Big Book and Prose of the Year awards in 2016 and received results: the novel won Prose of the Year and was shortlisted for the Big Book… Ivanov received his first honorarium (three rubles, fifty kopecks) as a writer when he was a schoolboy, in 1986, when he wrote a piece that rebutted an article in Soviet Russia about the shortest letter in the world. He argued that Victor Hugo’s letter to his publisher reading only “!” after the release of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is longer than the blank sheet of paper a general sends to Kutuzov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace… Several years later, when Ivanov participated in a Latvian writers’ workshop, Sergei Lukyanenko was named the main discovery and Ivanov the main flop; Victor Pelevin also participated and apparently avoided those extremes… The Ridge of Russia is a four-episode TV miniseries for which Ivanov, journalist Leonid Parfenov, and producer Yuliya Zaitseva traveled the Urals, covering thousands of kilometers, over 100 cities and towns, and more than four centuries…
Ivanov’s Places: Born in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) but grew up in Perm, has said he lives where he works… studied art history on his second go at university studies (he’d tried earlier, as a journalism major, thinking that was the best course for a writer but realized it wasn’t so took some gap time) at Urals State University…
The Word on Ivanov: The first paragraph of Nadezhda Kazakova’s review of Nasty Weather for “Book Friends Club” ends by saying that in this novel about Afghan War veterans, “ideas that continue the humanistic ideas of great Russian classics including Dostoevsky stand behind a fairly simple plot.” When Ivanov’s Heart of Parma was released, critic Konstantin Milchin called it one of the year’s best, saying “If I tell you what the book is about, you’ll never believe it could be interesting.” After going on to mention that it’s about Russia’s conquest of the Perm region in the late fifteenth century, contains lots of Finno-Ugric words, and includes both real figures as well as immortals and werewolves, not to mention battle scenes more impeccable than those in The Lord of the Rings, Milchin says what’s most annoying is that the book didn’t even make the Russian Booker Prize’s longlist.
Ivanov on Ivanov & Writing: Ivanov has said on his site (answering a question from “Vladimir” on May 24, 2020) that he plans to write a book about the Russian Civil War. In answering another question (from “Dmitry,” June 2, 2020), Ivanov says that he doesn’t currently plan to write additional novels about contemporary Russia, citing aggression and discord he wishes to avoid. (link to this page)
Ivanov Recommends: When asked by a reader (Sergei) on his site (June 12, 2020), for nonfiction recommendations of interesting books that are classics in their genres, Ivanov suggested Peter Ackroyd’s London and Daniel Yergin’s The Prize. When an interviewer for Afisha asked if there were any books he wished he’d written, Ivanov mentioned Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Winston Groom’s Forest Gump. When questioned about the best vampire book, he named Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
Quick Study: Ksenia Buksha is a St. Petersburg-based poet and writer whose fiction combines humor, elements of speculative fiction, and, frequently, her city’s atmosphere. She’s also an artist whose work often appears in the pages and on the covers of her own books.
The Buksha File: Although Ksenia Buksha began publishing her writing in the early noughties, she began gaining broader notice in 2014, when her The Freedom Factory (translated into English by Anne O. Fisher) won the National Bestseller Award and hit the Big Book Award shortlist. This polyphonic novel, based on factual material, tells of a Soviet military factory in post-Soviet times. Her futuristic The Detector focuses on a group of people held on a remote island and her Churov and Churbanov, a very Petersburg novel that was also a Big Book finalist, describes two classmates with similar names and intersecting fates while considering what might happen if hearts could be synchronized. Buksha’s diverse portfolio of publications includes poetry and story collections, and other novels, as well as a biography of artist Kazimir Malevich; she has also worked as a journalist.
Psssst………: Buksha began writing as a teenager, finishing her first book when she was eighteen… Buksha has written under the pseudonym Kshishtof Bakush, whom she sees as “a virtual grampa who’s seventy-four” and whose surname rearranges her own. She says she invented him – an eccentric old millionaire – because he can say whatever he wants thanks to his age and wealth and “nobody can say I’m showing off and talking about things ‘I haven’t the slightest idea’ about. It’s not really me, it’s grandpa Bakush”… Buksha said she learned German so she could read and understand the words of Bach’s cantatas and Gunther Grass…
Buksha’s Places: Born in Leningrad, studied at St. Petersburg State University, majoring in economics…
The Word on Buksha: Writer and critic Dmitry Bykov once called Buksha “a normal twenty-five-year-old genius” and said of her writing that “if Khlebnikov understood anything about economics and Kharms had looked optimistically into the future, this is about how they would have written.” Critic Galina Yuzefovich concluded her review of Buksha’s connected stories, Opens In, by writing, “In short, if there’s someone today who can vie for the title of a Russian Alice Munro, that’s unquestionably [Buksha] and that’s excellent news for [Russian] literature.”
Buksha on Buksha: In a 2010 piece for Sobaka.ru, Buksha said she doesn’t see herself as being part of any sort of literary trend, though she doesn’t have any other sort of separate position either. “Basically, no single literary space exists now. More specifically, there’s global intellect but that’s a space for all human thought, not just literature. As far as I go, I enjoy writing books and poetry and want very much for them to be read all over but without people being curious about me.”
On Writing: Buksha said in an interview with Russian Esquire that Oberiu (on Wikipedia, in brief, here) is where it’s at for writing poetry. This isn’t surprising, considering that in the same piece she says, “I don’t like the Russian poetry tradition very much.”
Buksha Recommends: In an interview with Russian Esquire, Buksha names favorite poets including Grigory Danishevsky, Viktor Ivanov, and particularly Galina Rymbu. She also lists three authors she considers “close”: Konstantin Vaginov, Alexander Vvedensky, and Lidia Ginzburg. She says she adores Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak.
When asked if she prefered Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, she opted in favor of Dostoevsky, adding that she lives near Sennaya Square so “everybody I run into is a Dostoevsky figure. Absolutely everyone.”
Quick Study: Guzel Yakhina is known for writing cinematic novels that are both sweeping depictions of places and historical times, and intimate portraits of characters.
The Yakhina File: Yakhina became a literary and cultural celebrity with the 2015 publication of her debut novel, Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, which was published by Elena Shubina’s imprint at AST with an introduction by the popular novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya. The novel won both the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana awards in 2015 and rights have been sold for translation into more than thirty languages; a television miniseries aired in 2020. Yakhina followed Zuleikha – a novel informed by her grandmother’s own stories about the exile of kulaks during the Stalin era – with Children of the Volga in 2018. Children of the Volga examines the life of a Russian German schoolteacher during the 1920s and 1930s; foreign translation rights have been sold for more than a dozen languages.
Psssst………: Yakhina studied to be a German teacher; she first learned the language from her grandfather, who was also a teacher… She also studied screenwriting (which, in an interview, she credits with teaching her about structure) and Zuleikha began as a screenplay…
Quick Study: Yulia Yakovleva is a versatile writer who is particularly known for two types of historical fiction set in Stalin-era Leningrad: children’s chapter books that address Soviet history and retro detective novels with colorful sociocultural and -political details.
The Yakovleva File: Yakovleva has written a series of children’s novels – known as “The Leningrad Tales” – that examine aspects of the Stalin era, including political repressions and World War 2. The first book, The Raven’s Children, which was published in 2016 and translated into English by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp in 2018, is set in 1938 and tells of a brother and sister whose parents are taken away during the night. Later “Leningrad Tales” books cover the blockade of Leningrad, World War 2 evacuation, and returning home. Yakovleva’s series of three adult historical detective novels about Leningrad police investigator Vasily Zaitsev, a character with an interesting moral code, is set in the 1930s. Yakovleva’s Zaitsev books, to which Pushkin Press has acquired English-language translation rights, are suspenseful and filled with atmospheric and period-specific details including the smells, quarrels, and density of communal apartments, as well as elements such as art, missing jewels, thoroughbred horses, and the plight of the dekulakized. Her ABCs of Love, a book for all ages, looks at love through classic Russian literature; a 2020 novel, Poets and Gentlemen, is a sort of manga (in the ranobe subgenre) involving a battle between literary “dream teams” from Russia (Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Chekhov) and Britain (Austin, Shelley, Radcliffe).
Psssst………: Yakovleva is also a ballet historian who wrote an ABCs of Ballet book (2008)… her 2020 novel Cannibals is about murder, the Bolshoy Theater, and political intrigue… her theater reviews have been published in periodicals including Kommersant and Afisha… she wrote a play that was performed at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2012 as part of a “Pussy Riot” event… Yakovleva also writes in Norwegian… According to Yakovleva’s bio in the English translation of The Raven’s Children, the book “was inspired by true events from Yulia’s family’s past,” including her great-grandfather’s arrest and execution…
Yakovleva’s Places: Leningrad/St. Petersburg, including the Mariinsky Theater, where she worked during the 1990s-2000s… London, where she has been an international writer in residence at the Royal Court Theatre… Norway, where she currently lives…
The Word on Yakovleva: Critic Lev Danilkin called Yakovleva’s ABCs of Love “a surprisingly smart and touching book. But the most surprising thing in it, of course, is the intonation: where did she learn to speak to children like that?” Writing for Kommsersant, critic Kira Dolinina mentions the many layers of Yakovleva’s Taming the Red Horse (a Zaitsev novel) and says that at some point, the reader “hardly cares who the murderer is and wants to read more and more about Zaitsev.”
On Writing: In discussing technical aspects of writing her first Zaitsev detective novel, Вдруг охотник выбегает (a.k.a. Tinker, Tailor), set in the 1930s, Yakovleva notes her love for detail: “It’s a lot of work because the sets, costumes, and details should all establish a plausible historical atmosphere. I aimed for maximum precision. Of course my book is a novel, not a scholarly reference book of historical life, but I tried to be as precise as possible with the historical details.”
Yakovleva Recommends: Yakovleva said in an interview on publisher Eksmo’s site that her favorite dramaturgs are Tom Stoppard and Martin McDonagh. When asked what authors/books she likes to reread, she mentioned Anna Karenina, Chekhov’s stories, Peter Høeg’s stories, Nabokov’s Gift, Stoppard and McDonagh’s plays, Pushkin, and Lermontov. Sometimes she owns multiple editions of books, one for home, the other for travel.
