Doorinda – Daliya Truskinovskaya

“Doorinda” (excerpt) by Daliya Truskinovskaya

English Publication History: Red Star Tales (Russian Life Books, 2015)

Original: Russian (Дверинда), 1990

Translated by Julia M. Sidorova, 2015

Synopsis: Ksenya is seeing hard times since her husband left her and their son to live alone in their apartment block. Returning to her home on evening, she realizes that she had forgotten her keys, and at that moment of good fortune, a man on the run offers his help, which he does with several strange devices, but it also benefits him—as soon as he’s through the door, he disappears. When Ksenya tries the door on a rainy day, she suddenly appears at work. At first, thoughts of food and medicine stir in her mind.

Pre-analysis: A few words from Wiki regarding supply and rationing in the USSR in the 1980s:

Perestroika was a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, widely associated with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning “openness”) policy reform. The literal meaning of perestroika is “restructuring”, referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system. Perestroika is sometimes argued to be a cause of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and the end of the Cold War. (wiki)

In the 1980s shortages continued in basic consumer items, even in major population centers. Such goods occasionally were rationed in major cities well into the 1980s. Besides the built-in shortages caused by planning priorities, shoddy production of consumer goods limited actual supply …. By the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of 1991, nearly every kind of food was rationed. Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually disappeared from state owned stores. While the gap was partially filled by non-state stores which started to appear in the mid-1980s, the prices in non-state stores were often five to ten times higher than in state stores and were often out of reach for the general population. (wiki)

Analysis: Desperation settles upon Ksenya as she struggles with her life at home as she has to raise her son by herself. She considers their lack of food and medicine yet is hopeless against the inertia of perestroika to obtain anything useful. Her stroke of fortune comes from the fantastic run-in with a fugitive who enables her door to open to wherever she pleases. She allows her to immediately bypass to a number of everyday annoyances: (1) she can forego inconvenient public transportation, (2) she can pick and choose victual items from hoarded stockpiles, and (3) she can obtain medical supplies just when she needs it most.

In essence, the gift that Ksenya had been given was the gift of capitalism. Consider: (1) if she had a private car, she could avoid most the rain and arrive at work on time; (2) if she could go to a supermarket, she could purchase items for her two-member family within her budget; and (3) if she had a decent hospital, she could get the supplies and care she needed for her son.

Review: As she considers her life to have become magical, she interweaves herself into the fairy tales she tells her son, an aspect of the excerpt that adds a meta-fictional element to the longer novella-length story, which, according to various translated reviews, sees Ksenya travel to romantic fantasy lands. So, as a reader show doesn’t fancy anything related to “romantic fantasy”, perhaps its better that the story was abbreviated before it go into the magical lands. The full-version of the story could, however, offer a little more detail into the meta-fictional element of this excerpt that, at first glance, seems to follow the 1930s or 1940s pulp tradition of “inexplicable devices doing wondrous things without any reason”, if that’s a sub-genre or something.

Those Burdened by Evil – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

“Those Burdened by Evil” (excerpt) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

English Publication History: Red Star Tales (Russian Life Books, 2015)

Original: Russian (Отягощённые злом, или Сорок лет спустя), 1988

Translated by Kevin Reese, 2015

Synopsis: The dark, towering figure casts a deceptive appearance amid the otherwise vacant apartment building that overlooks the dreary scene of a town and its society, both on a downward spiral. He questions their ethics, he scorns their composure, but most importantly he hopes to help them in one way of another. Under his expansive parka rest the folded wings of his true nature, and at his figurative side sits the statuesque assistant who tells him of this earth yet walks a tenuous line of disobedience.

Pre-analysis: Leaders tend to come in two forms: agents of maintenance or agents of change. There are times when maintenance is greatly needed in order to find a base understanding, standardize whatever’s needed, and get it on track. Any element of change can greatly skew its ability to assess itself, thus hindering its progress. In contrast, sometimes systems needs a kick in the ass; here, an agent of change would be beneficial as they—hopefully—have the also have the ability to analyze problems and find efficient methods of change… efficient, here, being the key.

Analysis: Anyone with a shred of knowledge about the later years of the Soviet Union will know that Gorbachev had been introducing many changes to the Soviet government (e.g. elections and the economy) since 1985. Some saw these changes as damaging to the communist vision while others saw the same changes as not being progressive enough to change what really needed to be changed—e.g. the head of power. Though Gorbachev was an agent of change in contrast to the lineage of premiers who strove to maintain Cold War tensions and backwardness on the global scale, but sometimes some change is not change enough.

The agent of change in “Those Burdened by Evil” is a winged angel of impressive stature whose origins are well known in general yet here veiled in the story (will avoid any spoilers read from fantlab.ru). If Gorbachev wasn’t an angel with power enough to scare its flock to alter its moral fabric, then was he just a saint with good intentions. So who was the archangel who wielded God’s word for democracy? I’d hardly compare Yeltsin to an archangel let alone a saint, prophet or priest, but as he was ushered into the seat of power after the USSR’s collapse, he must fit the role of angel.

As this is only an excerpt to a novel, there’s more room to postulate the allegories and parallelisms. Perhaps the Strugatsky brothers also felt that their society was crumbling from underneath them and that Gorbachev wasn’t the agent of change that they needed. Creating an angel as that agent would be one form of worry, but creating an even higher spiritual body as that agent would be complete desperation.

Review: Of all the stories included in Read Star Tales, the novel-length edition of “Those Burdened by Evil” is the one story that received the highest rating (8.41/10) and had the most reviews (54), according to the fantlab.ru website. The reviews heavily point out that the novel is deep and ripe for analysis with its religious allegories and social parallelisms. Most mention that they need to re-read and compare it to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967) for its themes of religion. Even though this is an excerpt, there’s still a tangible depth and enough setting to intrigue the reader. By itself, however, the general theme of religion is only superficial and doesn’t come into focus by the excerpt’s conclusion. To placate the reader, the conclusion does offer a certain motion: expectation of change. Pray that this novel is translated to English, one day.

Rays of Life – Yuri Dolgushin

“Rays of Life” (excerpt) by Yuri Dolgushin

English Publication History: Red Star Tales (Russian Life Books, 2015)

Original: Russian (Генератор чудес), 1939

Translated by Yvonne Howell, 2015

 

Synopsis: Collaborating, Nikolai and Ridan have a device and a method that’s able to literally kill a body and later revive it free of its previous symptoms of disease or illness. A number of other mammals have undergone the routine, each taking longer to revive as they move up the evolutionary ladder, so the current experiment with Anna is taking considerably longer. Amid the tense atmosphere, they discover a German spy who is bent on sabotaging their experiment, but their angst at success weighs more heavily upon their shoulders.

Pre-analysis: “Rays of Life” comes between Belyaev’s original novelette “Professor Dowell’s Head” (1926) and Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain (1942), both dealing with prolonging the life of a disembodied mind. This vivification of life or the sustenance of the spark of life seems to be a trend during these three decades. Dolgushin isn’t a widely known writer in the sphere of English literature, neither in the literary sense nor in the genre sense. According to my resources, only the above-mentioned novel has been translated into another language—Romanian (1961). So, with Red Star Tales, this excerpt from a novel is the English-language sphere’s first exposure to Dolgushin. He’s also published screenplays, so-called sketches, and articles, but Generator Wonderland (1939) remains his only stand-alone novel.

Analysis: As this novel (the spy element of which involves a Nazi) was written on the eve of Europe’s descent into total war, perhaps the novel is best taken into context with the chaos that ensued from the war: shifting alliances, redrawing of borders, and the millions of deaths. Hitler invaded Poland in the same year as the story was published, the same year, also, when Russia invaded their own “spheres of influence”, according to their non-aggression pact in August, 1939.

“War is hell” is largely attributed to the American Army Civil War general named William Tecumseh Sherman. Hell on earth wasn’t limited to the American civil, but found more fertile and expanse grounds in Europe with World War One (around five million military deaths, one-third of which was Russian). World War Two, however, saw more than eleven million military deaths in addition to more than seven million civilian deaths. Russia knows hell very well, all too well.

But what if the plague (war) could be eliminated by killing the body (government)? Acts of aggression between nations can only be perpetrated by heads of government and their respective bodies of government. Suppress, quash, or eliminate said government, and war with another nation is thereby cut off… in theory, of course—remove an aggressor and there’s no aggression. This is abstract, naturally, as the opposing aggressor would remain steeped in anger and would take occasion of any situation to gain an advantage (like flogging a dead horse, as if it were an enemy).

It’s a romantic vision of life as a simple routine: A becomes infected with B, suppress/deaden A, B passes away as a consequence, revive A to its full natural state. This romanticism works in parallel with the excerpt’s themes; on the cursory level, it’s meant to be the thriller rather than a thinker, a science experiment rather than a social experiment.

Review: Dolgushin has a different take on this disembodied-mind theme yet spices it with romance, spy thrill, and science. As the introduction states: “Dolgushin wanted to fill his novel [505 pages of which] with lightly fictionalized, but genuinely exciting information about new discoveries in the biological and physical sciences” (14). This mere excerpt captures all these themes: revivification, romance, spy thrill, and science… and the chapter excerpt feels as forced as you might expect. Stated again in the introduction, the original full-length novel “does not stand out for its artistic merits” (14).