Dear collegues, we´re glad to let you know that this year, as usual, we´ll be glad to welcome you at our table 34L at the LitAg Center.
Wishing you all a very good fair!
Featured titles
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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.” -
Poison and Honey, a novel by Yuri Buida (2014)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Russia - EKSMO, Serbia - GEOPOETIKA
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ivan Belkin literary award
Yuri Buida’s Poison and Honey is a modern Russian family saga that focuses on a house and a family, the Osorins, covering lives, ambitions, and deaths, including murder most foul. Buida manages to weave together what sometimes feels like legions of characters and an entire history book of world culture, creating a compact, packed story that’s realistic, mythical, and metaphysical. It’s also strangely enjoyable and even more strangely suspenseful.
Buida’s first-person narrator is Semyon Semyonovich, who’s not, by blood, an Osorin but who becomes part of the extended family when his grandfather, a physician’s assistant, brings him to the Osorins’ house as a little boy. The house, which is set on a hill, is sometimes known as the House of the Twelve Angels. The house is magnificent, and it contains, among other things, statues and paintings of naked women, a set of twelve bronze figures of horsemen, a cat named Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, and a matriarch known as Tati. Semyon becomes a long-term member of the extended household after Tati invites him back to play with her nephews: when the book ends, decades later, Semyon is working with the family’s archives, making him a sort of inside outsider. Semyon chronicles Osorin family history, too, as the narrator of Poison and Honey, telling of affairs, careers in literature and intelligence, and, of course, numerous enmities.
Everything changes in a very big way at the house on the hill when Ilya (son of one of Tati’s nephews) slides off an icy road, hits a young woman named Olga Shvarts, and then brings her home. Olga’s unhurt, at least initially: she stays at the house until she winds up dead (and naked) a few days later. Olga’s the archetypical outsider in many ways, someone who wants to become part of a house and family like the Osorins’, with its chiming clocks, heraldry, and old glory. After Olga’s death, Tati interviews members of the household, and Semyon duly describes the proceedings… until, that is, his wife gives birth during the night. Buida references Agatha Christie as well as Dostoevsky as he describes the interviews. One alibi is a bank robbery.
When Semyon returns the next morning (It’s a boy!), the whodunit aspect of the story has been resolved, at least on a certain level, though the identity of the killer isn’t revealed. Then follows the breakfast scene: everyone sits down to a usual breakfast—salads, sandwiches with ham and cheese, somewhat stale bread, butter, tea, and coffee—but the family is wearing nice dresses and suits, and the table is set with a white table cloth, crystal, and silver. There’s even Champagne. And then the resolution to the murder is announced.
Poison and Honey is thoroughly lively and oddly lovely, in part because the pace is brisk and Buida works in so many references to history and culture, folding in lots of high society and low doings. Like murder most foul, in its literal and literary senses. One of the central elements of Poison and Honey is clearly homes, homelessness, and uprootedness: toward the end of the novella, Tati tells Semyon that Russians are only truly at home in church and at war, after all, they might lose their homes because of war, arrest, and fire. Tati, however, wants her family to keep living in her house—where the clock will continue to chime and people will continue discussing the Russian idea—for hundreds of years. This, after all, is a house where artists, musicians, writers, and dissidents discussed everything from the Prague Spring to Solzhenitsyn.
For all that talk about the family and the house, though, just about everyone in the Osorin household seems supremely unhappy. That’s probably as it should be since this family—like the circumstances surrounding Olga’s murder—feels so hermetically sealed in at The House of Twelve Angels that the issue of who’s who as an individual feels almost as irrelevant as the issue of who-really-dunit in an atmosphere where guilt feels collective.
The Poison and Honey contains the novella plus a clutch of stories, collectively known as “chronicles,” about the Osorin family.
This text contains excerpts from the review published in Lizok's Bookshelf blog (http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com)
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