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I first picked up Kafka in my third year of college, at a rented dacha in Sheremetyevo. It was January, but I remember hearing those thawing drops drumming on my window sill; from time to time, cats screamed terribly. In the evenings, the owners drank vodka behind the wall and watched hypnosis sessions. At first, they looked in on me, to invite me to join them, but I was discouraged by my studies, although I passed my session early. Outside the thawed window, branches of the garden were black and swayed in the breeze, the stars burned brightly between the clouds. Sometimes landing airplanes seemed to crush the dacha, everything in it danced and rattled like in a thunderstorm, and dust fell from elk antlers above the mantelpiece. I turned the last page of “The Trial” and realized that I had just finished reading a biblical text. That’s when it occurred to me that literature is something that is no less involved in the creation of the world than the Big Bang once was. This realization began with Kafka, probably because in him the power of creation of the literary universe is as clear as the tension of a string in a violin concerto. After all, the novel “Amerika” was written on the basis not of personal experience but of an understanding of experience in general. Kafka is an impossible writer per se – because of the key, the hook on which he catches the reader – go to the root of the matter without pity for oneself and the world; he does not so much cheer one up as make it clear what the world really is: the bottom from which one can only push away. In other words – in Tsvetaeva’s words: “To your crazy world/There is only one answer – refusal.” But Kafka goes further: he pushes himself away from the refusal itself and somehow manages to soar at the expense of the ritual of surprise. There was an episode in a German concentration camp. Jewish prisoners gathered to celebrate the Sabbath. But before beginning, they decided to discuss a vital question: Is there God or is there no God? And they concluded that there was no God. And then there was a pause. No one knew what to do next. But somehow it happened by itself that everyone sighed and began to recite the Sabbath prayer… Isn’t the author of this story Kafka? Doesn’t Kafka give us something more than belief in a good or not-so-good ending? He gives us something more reliable than the world itself – an understanding of the world.
Alexander Ilichevsky (1970) is the author of ten novels, four collections of essays, three collections of short stories, and five books of poetry. He is the recipient of many awards, including the magazines New World (2005) and Znamya (2011), the Yuri Kazakov Award for Best Story (2005), the Russian Booker Prize for the novel Matisse (2007), the Russian national Big Book Award for the novel Pers (2010) and the novel Newton’s Blueprint (2020), and the Israeli Yuri Stern Prize (2015). His recent works are the short story collection From the Ship’s Journal and the novel Plato’s Body (2023).
A book of wartime poems by Alexandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, fighting for the independence of his country by means at his disposal – words and rhymes.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
