A new translation of Ilya Ehrenburg's satirical novel The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples made by Caterina Ciccotti has just been released in Italy by MERIDIANO ZERO as Le straordinarie avventure di Julio Jurenito.
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Modern Day Patericon, by Maya Kuzherskaya (2005)
2006 Ivan Bunin Prize
Kucherskaya's honest and humorous account of life within the modern Russian Orthodox community, including short biographies of numerous batyushkas (low ranking priests), sometimes fictitious, but presenting easily recognizable prototypes all the same, have made her popular beyond the bounds of church circles. Kucherskaya is a master at describing them. The images of priests and parishioners that she creates are sometimes far from sainthood. Among her characters, you can find “manager” priests, “superman” priests and even one “cannibal” priest. They teach their parishioners in a way that has a Zen Buddhist element to it. One calls his followers “an academy of idiots” for hanging on his every word. Another induces a parishioner, whose wife has been coming home late, to feign drunkenness to show her how distraught he is with her absence. Surprisingly, the wife takes a renewed interest in her “drinking” husband and begins to come home earlier. She never discovered that, on the priest’s advice, her husband had collected empty vodka bottles and cigarette butts from the street and then strewn them all over the apartment before she came home. “Father Konstantin never laughed as much in his whole life,” Kucherskaya writes at the end of the story.
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Kucherskaya’s book is also full of overzealous female parishioners, whom the author does not treat with much sympathy. “If only one of them had killed someone!” a batyushka says in one of her stories, after listening to a long line of empty confessions from women reporting that they had eaten sardines on a Friday, or some other trifle. “What conclusion can we draw from this story? The girl was insane,” is how she wraps up a story of a Literary Institute graduate who idolized her priest so much that she made him the censor of all her writings, before drowning herself in the Moscow River after becoming disillusioned with writing.
“This is one of my criticisms of church subculture,” Kucherskaya said. “Sometimes, people there confine themselves to a small space and write the word “vanity” on the window to the outside world. The young church girls often call this penance. It has nothing in common with real penance, however.”
When the book was first released by the secular Vremya publisher, readers’ reactions were enthusiastic. But, when the second edition was published by Biblio-Polis, whose books are sold in Orthodox churches, the tone of the reactions shifted with the audience. A church newspaper in St.Petersburg even suggested that Kucherskaya was under the spell of “hostile demons.” “Kucherskaya is an alien, who came to our circle accidentally or, more likely, with an evil purpose,” an article in the religious newspaper Pravoslavnyi St.Peterburg said. “Our joys appear stupid to her, while our troubles are a laughing matter for her. This is just unbearable!”
Fortunately, Kucherskaya wasn’t turned into an Orthodox Russian version of Salman Rushdie. Many monks, nuns and regular churchgoers rushed to her defense. “An honest reader will quickly remember many examples similar to those described in the book,” one of her defenders, who identified herself as a nun by the name of Yekaterina, wrote in a letter to the media. “For this reader, Kucherskaya’s book is just one more reason to think about the illnesses which still plague our church.” -
Daniel Stein, Interpreter, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2006)
2021 Kulturhuset Stadsteatern's international literature prize finalist (Sweden)
National Literary Prize BIG BOOK (2007, Russia)
Russian Booker of the Decade nominee (2011)Rights sold: Australia - SCRIBE, Bulgaria - PARADOX, Croatia - FRAKTURA, Czech Republic – PASEKA, Estonia - TANAPAEV, France – GALLIMARD, Georgia - Academic Press, Germany – HANSER, DTV, Hungary – MAGVETO, Italy – BOMPIANI, Japan – SHINCHOSHA, Korea - Moonji, Lithuania – JOTEMA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Poland - Świat Książki (Weltbild Polska), Romania – HUMANITAS FICTION, Russia - EKSMO, AST, Serbia – PAIDEIA, Slovakia – SLOVART, Slovenia – LITERA, Spain - ALBA, Sweden - ERSATZ, USA - OVERLOOK PRESS, Ukraine - FOLIO, World Esperanto - ARS LIBRI
Ludmila Ulitskaya, a mature master working in the best vein of the Russian literary tradition, has written a novel that poses an ageless moral question: What is good? Where is true virtue? She comes to the conclusion that the real marker of what is good is good itself, that is to act and be good, making the religious beliefs and internal contradictions of each of us secondary to this main moral principle.
DANIEL STEIN is at once a skilfully crafted literary roman epistolaire, a philosophical tale, a profound historical survey and an entertaining piece of fiction. It covers wide geographical areas – Germany, Israel, the US, Russia – and dramatic historical epochs - from the Second World War in Warsaw to modern Israel. It enters into deep historical detail: the tragedy of Holocaust, the rise and fall of Communism and, even more important, it gives a new reading to the role of Christianity. Far from being commonplace this novel breaks new ground and ventures boldly into a new literary spaces pulling down many established “rules” of literary form along the way.
The book is constructed as a patchwork of private histories recounted through the letters, personal diaries, taped conversations and a liberal supply of official notes, interrogation reports, documents and letters of formal complaints to the authorities. The element that links all of theses sources, the core of this multi-faceted narrative gem, is the story of DANIEL STEIN, the common thread woven throughout the lives of each of the book’s characters.
Daniel Stein, is a Polish Jew, who survives the Holocaust by disguising himself as a Gestapo interpreter and translator. This charade allows him to not only save himself, but to help save hundreds of human lives by sharing vital information with those whose in peril. After WWII Daniel converts to Christianity, is ordained, enters the Order of Barefoot Carmelites and emigrates to Israel where he creates a Christian community; this is one of many times throughout his life when Daniel makes the difficult choice to swim against the current.But the story of DANIEL STEIN, is not the story of Brother Daniel alone. Rather, Daniel is that connecting thread; a string on which other peoples lives are threaded like multicolored pearls. The novel presents us with a wealth of wonderful characters, and each is portrayed with the richness of detail that is so typical of Ulitskaya’s literary style. Each character is created by Ulitskaya with deep psychological insight and an understanding so profound that the reader is given the impression that at any second, any moment, the plot—as with life itself—might unfold in any direction. But…alas.... the Writer can choose only one path. (Yet all the other directions are still there, living as a tree’s branches each ready to stem off into a new direction and into a new book.)
The novel abounds in gentle humor with a touch of paradox: among the many extraordinary characters in this novel is a young German woman, who is obsessed with the idea of her nation’s guilt, but at the same time absorbed with the Christian idea of holiness. She falls in love with a young Arab, who is an erudite and profound scholar of Judaica. An old German communist mother, survives through the care of a Hebrew hospice, finding peace from a deep moral crisis through the Christian faith. Every character in the book faces some sort of moral crisis, every civilization is at a turning point, the book a precise sketch of so many of the big questions and conflicts of modern culture: the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, historical aspects of the life of Jesus Christ, the Jewish question and the coexistence of today’s residents of Israel (Catholics, Jews, Arabs, Poles, Germans, and others), violence and soullessness of the modern life.
We should also not ignore the fact that the book draws from a sound biographical basis, as the character of DANIEL STEIN is inspired by the life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel, who was a Carmelite Monk, lived at the Stella Maris monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa, died in Israel in 1998.
It is interesting to note that Ludmila Ulitskaya drew her inspiration for DANIEL STEIN from a story from the Bible, the story in which, on Pentecostal Sunday, the apostles are granted the gift to speak languages that were before unknown to them. Daniel’s ability and willingness to speak with everyone is his true language - a symbol of love, humanity, and tolerance. Ulitskaya beautifully renders the life, the extraordinary warmth and humanness of this modern saint, who inevitably ends his life as a martyr, the victim of his own will to help others at all costs.
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