^{Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia
edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker
400 pages
Tin House Books
(September 1, 2009)}

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, which includes the work of about two-dozen young Russian writers and nearly as many translators, can be read as something of a survey of contemporary Russian literature. While many of the pieces here were previously published in Russian journals and magazines, this is the first time these writers have been published in America.

The idea of a new Russia enticed me. In both contemporary media and the popular imagination, the attraction to a stereotypical, dreary and neglected Russian cityscape, in which people furtively connect between shots of vodka and bouts of unhappiness, seems inescapable.  Upon reading Rasskazy it becomes apparent that fiction from the new Russia too often relies on retreading these images of the past or, as in Arkady Babenko’s story “Diesel Stop,” which takes place in the dire landscape of Chechnyan conflict, history merely repeats itself.  Oleg Zobern’s story “Bregovich’s Sixth Journey” highlights the preeminence of the past and the shadow of Russia’s cultural history: “The dead: they’re like family to me already. Take Tarkovsky, take Pasternak. There’s no place I’d rather drink a Crimean red with a girl than at Pasternak’s grave.”

The melancholy and apathy that flourish among people who lack control of their own fates fill many of these stories. Should we be concerned that Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker characterize the stories as “New Russian Realism” in their foreward?  Aleksander Bezzubtsev-Kondakov’s “Russian Halloween” contains the bitterness of divorce, alcoholism, and loneliness. The past is contained in the landmark of the story itself, the Soviet-era block-style apartment building where Igor lives, which shapes his outlook on the world because it smells of “unhappiness and suffering.” In that apartment building he helps an alcoholic to his abode and he has sex with a young girl who frightens him with her foreign Halloween festivities. Even the image that represents a hopeful note connected with Igor’s friend’s decision to be born again by leaving his present life is concealed in ugliness: “A green Zhiguli six, which sped indifferently along the street toward the two of them, squealed its brakes and flew into a puddle covered in thin, caramel crustlike ice, almost splashing Anton with a murky wave.”