http://newsru.com/cinema/08dec2012/chukprem.html
On December 8, 2012, Grigory Oster became a winner of the 2012 Korney Chukovsky Prize for children literature.
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Ceylon, a novel by Yuri Buida (2015)
Rights sold: Russia - EKSMO
Longlisted for the 2016 NOS literary award
Longlisted for the 2016 Big Book literary award
Yuri Buida's Ceylon is a family chronicle narrated in first person by Andrei Cherepnin, the last living representative of his family. Generation after generation, Cherepnins played a significant role in the life of a small provincial town Osorin; their private lives became integral part of its history, of the history of Russia. They were among the founders of the city, they have grown up and developed with it, they actively participated to the first industrial revolution, then to WWI and the Bolshevik revolution, the family was torn apart by the Russian Civil War, it survived the WWII, then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Perestroika, and faced up with a new reality of modern Russia.
Family history of Cherepnins - just as the history of Russia - features an endless line of secrets, betrayals, deaths, and recompenses for their sins: narrator's great-grandfather, a prominent revolutionary, once executed his own brother, who was a counter-revolutionary. Narrator's grandfather, a director of the military plant, killed a murderer of his granddaughter. Life Andrei is also overfilled with losses and deaths of his most loved ones.
Ceylon is a parable novel, a tale of a broken reality, of the world nearing its end, but still aching for the impossible ideal, for the City of Sun. In Buida's vision, the Cherpnins are the metaphoric depiction of Russia. Their deliberate or intuitive intents to put together their broken lives only lead them to a new tragedy. The only thing that remains intact, and gives them strength to continue is their permanent longing for love and their native ability to share love with others.
(From the review published by Lizok's Bookshelf blog):
I might not call Yuri Buida's Цейлон (Ceylon) the author's headiest or most metaphysical novel—I definitely prefer both his Blue Blood and Zero Train—but Ceylon, like Poison and Honey, his previous book, is thoroughly readable and enjoyable. Lots of Ceylon felt familiar after reading several other Buida novels: part of my enjoyment, I suspect, came from just that because I love observing how authors reuse structures and tropes in various books. That familiarity may also help explain why I think Ceylon feels more accessible and mainstream (these aren't bad words!) to me than, say, his Blue Blood or Zero Train...
As with Blue Blood and Poison and Honey, a family home feels like a key character in Ceylon: in this case, as in Poison, there's a house on a hill. The area it's in is known as "Ceylon," which reminds of how a building in Blue Blood is known as "Africa." Both those names are introduced early in their respective novels, leading to questions about the origins of the building names. In the case of Ceylon, named thusly by a traveler in the eighteenth century enamored of the island, there were early attempts to dress up dogs as tigers, boys as monkeys, and wooden structures as palm trees. Not quite a tropical paradise but an attempt at paradise nevertheless and (long story short, since of course there's much more to things) the place, though not the original house, which burned, is now home to the Cherepin family, five generations of which are described in varying levels of detail in the book by Andrei Ilyich Cherepin, a first-person narrator who's genial and, though heavily involved in events, feels surprisingly reliable.
Ceylon, though, feels almost more like some form of "absurd realism" or at least "quirky realism" to me, what with brothers on opposite sides at revolution time—this, by the way, feels like another case of attempts at paradise, of which there are many in Ceylon and Ceylon, including through marriage—and a taxidermied bear and unlikely loves and a woman dancing the lambada at the grave of her son, who died in Chechnya. There's lots of everyday oddity. And I nearly forgot the big elm tree growing through the house. A sort of family tree.
There's a lot of history, too: Andrei's first job is at a dig, where he charms all the young women, he goes on to be a teacher, work at the local museum, and write his dissertation about local history that includes his family. Digs and cultural layers come up a lot in contemporary Russian fiction and Buida piles together Russian history, local history, and family history for the reader to dig through, working in the two brothers' conflicts about the revolution—I mention this again because I thought it's one of the strongest and best-integrated subplots in the book, with its combination of "big" history and family history—the military-industrial complex, whose secrets another family member keeps; the crime-ridden banditry of the nineties; the wars in Chechnya; and even the conflict in Ukraine. Some of these chunks of history are more successful than others, I think: as often happens in fiction, particularly family sagas that draw on and reflect a country's history, more distant events usually feel better contextualized and grounded than those more recent.
In the end, though, the town cemetery, known as Red Mountain, felt almost more significant to me than Ceylon, both because Andrei speaks, early on, of his youthful hope for immortality and because his grandfather has taken on a gigantic cemetery renovation project (financed in a way that doesn't sound perfectly legal) that dovetails nicely with Andrei's thoughts about the afterlife at the end of the book, when he's the father of three (almost four) children and has described rather dramatic losses of family members. There's a lot of mortality in Ceylon but also lots of birth.
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Memoirs Of a Wartime Interpreter by Elena Rzhevskaya (NF)
Rights sold: Czech Republic - PASEKA, Estonia – TANAPAEV, France - CHRISTIAN BOURGOIS, Italy - VOLAND, Japan – HAKUSUISHA, The Netherlands – MOURIA, Poland - PWN, World English - Greenhill Books
On May 8, 1945, the soldiers of the Red Army broke into Hitler’s bunker. With them was Elena Rzhevskaya, a young military interpreter. She and other members of the Soviet military witnessed firsthand the charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun. Important documents were uncovered in the search of the Berlin bunker: the notes of Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler’s personal secretary and the diaries of propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, whose corpse lay nearby with those of his family.
Elena was entrusted with the irrefutable proof of the Hitler’s death. Tucked safely in her coat pocket, were the jawbones of Adolf Hitler, wrenched from his corpse just hours earlier. Much of the evidence uncovered from the bunker remained buried in the Soviet archives until 1994. Elena’s role as an interpreter allowed her to forge a link between the Soviet troops and the Germans. Confronted with the dramatic reality of war, she also witnessed the unfolding civilian tragedy in its messy aftermath of violence and rape perpetrated by the Soviets. Her diaries of those years became the source of her writings and this book is the capstone of a life dedicated to bearing witness to the truth.The book includes the latest Russian edition of “Berlin, May 1945”, specially adapted for translation and circulation abroad. It incorporates such later written and published parts of the whole story, as conversation with Zhukov, letters of Shkaravsky and a novel-memoirs The Distant Rumble in which Rzhevskaya returns again to the events of the last months of the war.
The famous “Berlin, May 1945” forms the central piece of the book, but the name of the whole work is changed so that this publication is not mixed with much shorter version published about 40 years ago. The name “MEMOIRS OF A WARTIME INTERPRETER” is important for Rzhevskaya, as it was her position in war, which, together with her being a woman and a most personal and even lyrical author, never fit to about battles, but to see the suffering, the “human face” of history, makes her recollections and her books so unique. She gives the readers not only bare facts, now included in encyclopedias, but precious details, which only her memory retains, the atmosphere of these times, very precise personal characteristics.
Rzhevskaya writes about the greatest historical events and everyday life in frontlines in her own inimitable style, mixing creative prose and documents, interspersing her work with letters and diary entries (from “other side”, as well as her own), with archival material and responses from readers. The book grows before our eyes and history becomes a part of today. Rzhevskaya talks in depth of human suffering, of the bitter-sweet taste of victory, of the responsibility of an author, of strange laws of memory, which lives by associations, by heartache, compassion and unresolved feeling of guilt.
Before bringing us to Berlin, Rzevskaya leads us by the Roads and Days of the battle for Rzhev (1942-1943) and makes us listen to Distant Rumble, that reaches her from Poland, 60 plus years ago – Poland, whose liberation from the nazist hell immediately turned into new political games and more human suffering. Here she elaborates the theme of woman’s position in war, first touched in two German documentaries, where Rzhevskaya played a major part: “Lucy, Wanda, Yelena. It was not their War” (by Raimond Koplin and Renate Stegmuller, 1995) and “Befreier and Befreite” (1992), where she says the keywords about the rapes committed on German territory: “Violence is the genocide of love”.
This memoir is shocking in its relevancy, the author’s first-hand participation in the making of this history brings one very close to the events all generations should remain mindful of, including our own, polarized by the ongoing political and military conflicts around the world. There is a lesson to be learned from Rzhevskaya’s writing, and there are episodes from her personal encounters with the war from both sides of the conflict, given her role as the translator, that stick with you long after finishing the book.
Her story is a telling reminder of the jealousy and rivalries that split the Allies even in their hour of victory, and foreshadowed the Cold War. Tom Parfitt, Guardian, May 8, 2005
Excerpts of Rzhevskaya's book were translated into about twenty languages and published in the periodical press of many countries. The face of the author appeared on the covers of magazines in Germany and Italy.
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