Russia’s Open Book

If you do not live the United States or did not get a chance to watch PBS’ Russia’s Open Book, I strongly urge you to do so if you have any interest in the contemporary novel. This film, funnily enough introduced by the very English (and bearded) Stephen Fry and narrated by the very English Juliet Stephenson, is about six contemporary Russian novelists: Zakhar Prilepin, Dmitry Bykov, Anna Starobinets, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Mariam Petrosyan and Vladimir Sorokin. As Stephen Fry points out in in his introduction, these are not modern Tolstoys or Dostoevskys but very much writers in their own mould, dealing with contemporary issues. Some of them are very much involved in contemporary politics, primarily anti-Putin, either directly or in their writing, though Prilepin says he remembers the Soviet Union with fondness, as he had a happy childhood and associates the Soviet Union with his happy childhood. All of them have had success in Russia (a couple of critics are interviewed). While Ulitskaya and Sorokin have a certain reputation in the West, I suspect the others are less well-known.

Mariam Petrosyan is the only who has not been published in English, though her only book has been published in Italian. She is part Armenian and, indeed, speaks Armenian at home but writes in Russian. She had written the book – Дом в котором… [The House In Which…] – over a period of years, in longhand. She had typed it out and given a copy to friends in Moscow. The singer Sasha Magerova had met a young man on the Internet and on the first date he told her that he had a very special present for her. To her surprise, he handed her a somewhat tatty typescript manuscript. She was surprised but then read it. It was, of course, Дом в котором… [The House In Which…] – and she was gripped by the story. She passed it to a friend in a publishing house who put it aside but then had a few minutes and started reading it and was also gripped. She published it and it became a big hit. Petrosyan has not written a follow-up, as her many fans have requested, nor has she even decided what she is going to write next. I have the Italian version of this book as well as at least one work by each of the others and plan to read them next year. And, yes you can see the film on YouTube.