"Road of Change"

Richard Yates

St. Petersburg: Azbuka-Classics, 2009

The release of the Russian translation of Yates' novel is obviously timed to coincide with the premiere of its film adaptation, which was directed by Sam Mendes, who once made "American Beauty." The pair formed in this way must be broken up. So let's say right away: the book is much better than the movie. In all respects, but personally what gets me the most is this: the creators of the film adaptation treat Yeats's text in many ways like a literary critic - they explain. That is, they show what the author meant. What he, in essence, wanted to say with his book. To achieve this, expressive music plays behind the scenes, the characters gesticulate intensely, and also pronounce additional confessional monologues that Yeats could not have written in principle. He couldn’t because his prose is an example of literary restraint, almost minimalism. An amazing example of how, by telling an everyday story, paying almost no attention to substantive details, without plunging into philosophizing and practically not dissecting the psyche of his heroes, the author creates a picture of time that works better than any documentary films, and a picture of the soul, and today not even an ounce has not lost its relevance. And Mendes’s retro painting, full of emotions and maxims, looks rough and rustic in comparison.

Richard Yates was born in 1926 in the town of Yonkers, bordering the New York borough of the Bronx. The events of his childhood and youth look like a blueprint for future works. His parents divorced when he was three. During the Great Depression, the boy and his mother had to wander from place to place. In 1944, Yates was drafted into the army, he fought in France, and served in occupied Germany. In the army, Yates contracted tuberculosis, then became disabled, then returned to America, then got married. To support his family, he earned money in whatever way he could - for example, he wrote several speeches for Senator Robert Kennedy. In 1959, his wife left him, having won custody of their two daughters in court.

In 1961, Yeats's first novel, Revolutionary Road, was published - it is now published in our country under the title Revolutionary Road. This translation of the title, it must be said, completely destroys its ambiguity: Revolutionary Road is not only a metaphor for what is happening, or rather, could happen to the heroes of the book, but also simply the name of the street in the village in Western Connecticut where they live. Although the translator Alexander Safronov cannot be blamed here - this play on words seems to be truly untranslatable. It's much more frustrating to watch him struggle with other difficult tasks like adequately translating New York slang, forcing Yates's characters into tirades like, "Well, the shrinks would be crazy about me. I'm like a nest of psychos."

In the year of its release, Revolutionary Road was shortlisted for the prestigious National Book Award (along with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Walker Percy's The Movie Man), critics unanimously declared that a great new talent had appeared in American literature, and famous writers Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Parker, William Styron, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever all acknowledged that their regiment had arrived. But neither this nor any subsequent book by Yeats sold more than 12 thousand copies, which is quite a bit for the American book scale. Since Yeats's death in 1992, his books had not been republished until a new surge of critical interest in the “forgotten writer” at the beginning of the 2000s. In theory, Sam Mendes' film is designed to translate this “interest in narrow circles” into mass interest.

But the problem here is this: this film is a mass version of the book. Those who like the film adaptation will most likely not like the book. The novel - and this is even more important than any better/worse - is immeasurably tougher and scarier than the film. Yeats in general may be the toughest writer who has undertaken to chronicle the “hopeless emptiness” of the existence of provincial America. The unclouded directness of his view is not distorted by either the irony inherent in his contemporary John Cheever, or the poetry inherent in his follower Raymond Carver. And although Yeats's heroes are quite charming - attractive spouses who made the exciting decision to move from the suffocating American province to the brilliant Paris - the seed of their death is laid in them from the very beginning. They - this is important - are by no means victims of social conditions or circumstances. They themselves are these circumstances. Their mistakes are irrevocable, as is their disaster. Like the ancient tragedians, Yeats, having placed his heroes in their starting positions, steps aside and watches them from the side. The ancients abandoned their characters to the will of fate. Yeats too. Only the fate of his heroes is themselves.

Where to buy the book?

"Euterpe, is that you?"

Mikhail Meilakh

M.: New Literary Review, 2008

Mikhail Meilakh is a St. Petersburg philologist, a specialist in Vagants and Oberiuts, a dissident, a Soviet prisoner who served four years for distributing anti-Soviet literature and immediately after his release left the disgusted Soviet Union. For 16 years in the world's capitals and in the world's backyards, he asked Russian and non-Russian ballet elders about their adventurous lives, about long-vanished troupes, about forgotten and world-famous characters. From seven dozen conversations, an alternative history of Russian ballet of the 20th century emerged.

Meilakh, of course, is biased - as, indeed, are all authors who are in love with their subject. From the facts he collected, it turns out that all the ballet schools and troupes in the world came out of the St. Petersburg Imperial Mariinsky Theater. That from Great Britain to South America and Australia, the main national personnel were forged in private schools of Russian teachers, the repertoire was supplied by Russian choreographers, and Russian artists excelled in all troupes. Having made our way through the thicket of names of ballet figures and ballet titles unknown in Russia, we can finally understand what happened to the Diaghilev troupe after the death of the great impresario, how the “Russian Ballets of Colonel de Basil” differ from the “Russian Ballet of Monte Carlo”, where the Russian troupe came from a man with the fabulous name Marquis de Cuevas, from which the American Ballet Theater grew and much more.

But this is for ballet fans. And normal people can read absolutely festive stories about fantastic escapes from the land of the Soviets. About the poor descendants of aristocrats who were taught ballet for free by the legendary ballerinas of the Mariinsky Theater, whose husbands with princely titles, dressed in tailcoats, lit the stoves in the rehearsal halls and prepared dinners.

About the wanderings of traveling ballet troupes, who often did not have the money to move to another city, but invited Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy, Joan Miro, Andre Masson and other luminaries to design their performances. About baby ballerinas - about 13-15 year old girls who became stars, looked after by strict mothers who cooked them borscht, monitored morality and were jealous of the successes of their competitors.

"Amnesia"

Sam Taylor

M.: Eksmo

The second novel by a young American author, formerly an American correspondent for The Observer and author of a dissertation on Bruce Springsteen. In America and England, "Amnesia" made the most favorable impression on reviewers; it was unanimously praised even by the usually not at all affectionate critics of British newspapers.

The main character, James Padue, lives in Amsterdam with his girlfriend Ingrid and suddenly realizes that he has forgotten something. Literally - he has absolutely no memory of the three years of his life preceding his move to Amsterdam. He returns to the university town where he studied, rents an apartment there and tries to find answers to questions that he cannot even formulate. James realizes that his amnesia has something to do with the suicide of a student who committed suicide three years ago. His search often turns into a phantasmagoria: when he finds a manuscript that describes the events that took place in London at the beginning of the 20th century, and recognizes himself in one of the heroes, when he pursues a mysterious man named M., or when he enters a bar full of astrologers ready to predict James's future. The hero does not like novels and could not finish reading almost a single book, “irritated or tired of the lack of meaning, the obvious madness of the author or the protractedness of the story... Isn’t it obvious that the surveyor K. should have given up trying to get to the castle, Ahab should have stopped pursuing the white whale, and the judges should acquit Meursault?” In his search for meaning, he does not suffer from the obsession typical of a literary hero; on the contrary, the past and memory come to him on their own. And although James himself does not like books, the novel about him turns out to be a novel about reading as an experience that comes to you from the outside, metaphysics that overtakes you against your will. It's a pity that the author never came up with a suitable conclusion to this whole story, and the only thing that disappoints here is the end. It would probably be better if Taylor, like Kafka, whom he obviously imitates, stopped mid-sentence - after all, aspirations and searches are always more interesting than anything that can be imagined in the finale.

Where to buy the book?

Magazine "Kommersant Weekend" (Ukraine) No. 15 dated January 30, 2009, p. 11

Authors:

Anna Narinskaya

Books with Anna Narinskaya