Translated material
Thick literary magazines
Nikolay Alexandrov
February 2000
The most remarkable February publication, in my opinion, was in “Friendship of Peoples”. And this is not “A Tale of Love and Vanity” by Nodar Jin, as one might assume, but “Diary. 1916-1966” by Alexander Karadzhev, still unknown to anyone. Essentially this is the autobiography of Karadzhev, a white emigrant who lived a life resembling an adventure novel. The “diary,” written when the author was 72 years old, can be considered an outline of the novel. It is amazing not only for the facts and the extraordinary dynamics of the narrative, but also for its tone, language, style, and extraordinary humor. It is written cheerfully and easily, although it mostly talks about events that are not at all cheerful: the First World War, the Civil War, emigration (Turkey, Persia, Serbia, France), the Second World War, service in the Foreign Legion, etc.
Otherwise, everything was more or less normal in February. The second issue of “Znamya” publishes “Poems of the Forties” by David Samoilov, poems “About Simple Things” by Mikhail Aizenberg and poems by DDT leader Yuri Shevchuk “Defenders of Troy”. From prose, we note the beginning of the publication of Vladimir Voinovich “Monumental Propaganda” (the life of the revolutionary pensioner Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina after the 20th Congress of the CPSU) and the elegant “little story” by Dina Rubina “High Water of the Venetians”. The story owes its title to a Russian guide to Venice, in which the flood is translated exactly like that. However, the story is not about a flood. The main character, having learned that she has cancer, goes to Venice. She thinks about life, remembers her deceased brother Anton, who loved her with anything but brotherly love. The hotel receptionist (who is also named Antonio) where she is staying is surprisingly similar to him.
In "New World" Viktor Astafiev writes about Nikolai Rubtsov in the genre of "ventures", Sergei Averintsev about the "family horizon", Alexander Kushner about Anna Andreevna and Anna Arkadyevna (that is, Anna Karenina), and Mikhail Butov in a detailed article "Alienation by Glory" trying to understand the prose of Umberto Eco, Jorge Borges, Milorad Pavic, Dmitry Galkovsky.
Readers of "October" in the second issue will find the ending of "Prince" by Mikhail Roshchin (this is the name of his "Book about Ivan Bunin, a Russian writer"), Anatoly Kim's novel "Twin" (we are talking about the brother of a certain writer Vasily Nemirny, artificially grown in a flask and formed “on material supplied through an invisible umbilical cord directly from ... the superprimary void”); "Three Stories" by Yuri Buida, written in his usual semi-fantastic manner; as well as Vladimir Kantor’s rather thorough answer to the question “Is it possible to think about Chernyshevsky today?” (It seems to Kantor that it is not only possible, but even necessary.)
In the February issue of "Stars" the reader can expect the journalistic story "Diabetes" by Mikhail Rumer-Zaraev, the biological story "The Mesozoic Advent" by Andrei Stolyarov, various articles: about Evgeny Boratynsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Zoshchenko, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and the English Booker (that is, Booker Prize).
PS This year, the Soros Foundation began to wind down its program aimed at supporting thick magazines. (For the past few years, the Open Society Institute has paid for that portion of the journals' circulation that was sent to Russian libraries.) They will have to decide how the journals will continue to live without this very significant help during this year.