Word: novellas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...break through," concluded Soviet Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, as the Stalin era faded. And still they come: surprising new writers who have shattered the deadening conventions of the past. They have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away -back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major Russian writers to produce big novels, did so in the classical manner...
...novella Starry Ticket, for example, a group of Muscovite dropouts run away to the Baltic beaches to escape the crushing conservatism of their elders. Old guard critics were scandalized, as much by the "uncivic" behavior of Aksyonov's heroes and heroines as by their use of colloquial speech, mixed with underworld and concentration-camp slang, invented words and such Americanisms as gudbai, Brodvei and bugi-vugi. Funny, fresh and richly expressive, Aksyonov's idiom has been his contribution to the larger effort of modern Russian poets to rescue the Russian language from deadening officialese...
...Steel Bird, which was published last year in the U.S., marks Aksyonov's break with realism in favor of the grotesque. This novella features a ghastly humanoid with a metal carapace who blackmails the superintendent of an apartment house into letting him live in the elevator. Acting with Stalinist guile, the steel bird takes over the entire building and its tenants. The structure soon collapses; the creature is left to roost triumphantly atop the elevator shaft, surveying the debris...
...which were recently published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton under the title Kolyma Tales, have been in samizdat for 20 years. Currently the most prized samizdat work is Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushki. The account of a phantasmagoric drunken excursion on a suburban train, Yerofeyev's novella may be the most innovative piece of prose written in the U.S.S.R. for more than four decades. The Russian text has been published in France...
...effective means. Of these, the most common are infidelity and divorce. It is hard to tell who suffers more, the wandering parents or their children. Delivering follows two thoroughly upset brothers on their newspaper route the morning after their mother and father noisily called it quits. In the title novella, Finding a Girl in America, Dubus picks up the saga of Hank Allison that he began in two earlier volumes of stories. Experiments in consensual philandering ultimately broke up the Allison marriage. Now Hank, 35, lives alone, teaches at a small Massachusetts college and has sequential affairs with matriculating young...