Word: soviet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book begins by openly challenging the model for daily life in the Soviet Union in a series of stories that emphasize the various shortcomings and irrationalities of the Soviet regime. “Paris Lost” by Wladimir Kaminer is the account of a counterfeit Paris, built by the Soviet government as part of a program to supposedly send some of the nation’s most productive workers on a free vacation to the European center of culture. Of course, they couldn’t possibly do this in reality—after all, capitalist temptations were lying...
...Freedom had hit Russia like a great slap, and people were still reeling from the shock,” Irakli Iosebashevili writes of the mood among Muscovites in 1993 in his short story “The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist.” The authors of the essays and vignettes collected in “The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain” agree on few things, but on this subject they find common ground: the world changed in 1989, and the peoples of the former Soviet...
...written portions investigate the Soviet Union and its collapse from most every geographical, social and ideological perspective. But the collection’s subtitle is misleading. “The Wall in My Head” isn’t a meditation on the end of communism in the Soviet Bloc, but its history entire—its successes, its failures, and its absurdities. Thought-provoking, oddly nostalgic, and ultimately inconclusive, “The Wall in My Head” is a worthy investigation of a way of life which, for all its flaws, found a place...
...entire immense country in which [he] lived was made up of lots and lots of these lousy little closets where there was a smell of garbage and people had just been drinking cheap port,” an acknowledgment of the tedium and squalidness of quotidian life in the Soviet Union. Other stories critique the endless, labyrinthine bureaucracy and the culture of mistrust, where civilians spy on their fellow citizens...
...contrary, several of the stories and essays seem to almost pine for its simplicity and order. One of the finest essays in the collection, “Farewell to the Queue,” by Vladimir Sorokin, uses queues as a metaphor for the togetherness and order of Soviet society—a “quasi-surrogate for church,” which taught obedience while giving people time to ponder the advantages of socialism. In his view, the market economy replaced order with chaos, collectiveness with competition, simplicity with complexity; it replaced the queue with the crowd...