Litro #99 Russia Teaser

The Litro Russian Issue

Literary Magazine

99

Adam Butler Peter Hajinian Olga Slavnikova Richard House Polina Klyukina www.litro.co.uk

Think Russia.

Find out more about business opportunities in Russia: http://www.youtube.com/uktiweb Search: UKTI Think Russia

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WELCOME TO ISSUE 99 OF LITRO From the Editor What do we think of when we think of Russia? Frozen steppes or Soviet tower blocks? Tolstoy’s aristocrats or Pushkin’s peasants? Tsarism or Stalinism? Who is the truest Russian: the heroic drunk of Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow Stations or Andrey Kurkov’s mild-mannered obituarist from Death and the Penguin?

Common images that spring to mind are billionaire oligarchs and gas princesses; dour black marketeers, mail-order brides and vodka-drinking men called Ivan. But Russia is far more than the sum of its clichés, and the variety of stories and subjects in this special issue of Litro goes to prove there’s plenty to explore in this fascinating place.

In the following pages you’ll meet stray dogs and Arctic fishermen, heartbroken ex-prisoners and fast-talking murderers. Old and new Russia rub shoulders and sometimes clash: Louise Phillips’s Ipatiev House tells the history of the country through the life of one man, while in Max405 Richard House gives us international love in cyberspace. Oppression and poverty are recurring themes, but so too are hope and survival: such a vast country with such a chequered past is bound to provoke radically diverse responses in authors.

Many of the writers featured in this issue are English and American. Some have spent time in the former USSR, but their Russia is primarily a country of the foreign imagination: an Eastern enigma seen through Western eyes. Our two Russian writers, Polina Klyukina and Olga Slavnikova, showcase the variety of modern Russian literature: Klyukina’s Free explores the fate of released convicts, while Slavnikova, winner of the Russian Booker Prize, gives us Chanel No. 5, the tragicomic tale of a post-Soviet lab-worker longing for Western luxuries: a Litro exclusive appearing here for the first time in English.

I hope you enjoy discovering these wonderful writers as much as I did – and there are more online exclusives on the website, so if this issue whets your appetite, why not visit litro.co.uk and explore further?

Спрездом в россию!* *(Welcome to Russia!)

Katy Darby Editor October 2010 *(Welcome to Russia!)

Editor-in-Chief & Publisher, Eric Akoto Editor, Katy Darby Contributing Editor, Sophie Lewis Online Editor, Laura Huxley Events Editor, Alex James

Litro is Sponsored by UK Trade and Investments

Litro Magazine is London’s leading short story magazine. Please either keep your copy, pass it on for someone else to enjoy, or recycle it – we like to think of it as a small monthly book of short stories.

Cover Artist: Iryna Yermolova, The Journey

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Contributors Adam Butler

William Falo

(“Fishing for crab in Arctic Russia” p.05) Adam Butler lives in Berlin. As a musician he has released five albums of experimental crunk showtunes under the pseudonym Vert, and has performed throughout Europe, the US and Asia – including, yes, Murmansk. This, his first published story, is an extract from a novel in progress, provisionally entitled *.

(“Russian Strays” p.17) William Falo’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Delinquent, Delivered, Mississippi Crow, Bottom of the World, Cantaraville, 34th Parallel, Skyline Review, First Edition, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Oak Bend Review, The Linnet’s Wings, The View From Here, Open Wide Magazine, and many others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Peter Hajinian (“Forty Rubles” p.12) Peter Hajinian lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife, their bulldog and chickens. He spends his days writing advertising copy, and his nights either recording radio dramas or visiting friends in the neighbourhood. A lifelong writer, this is his second publication.

Richard House

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(“Max405” p.15) Richard House’s novels, Bruiser and Uninvited, are published by Serpent’s Tail.

His collaborative projects with Chicago-based group Haha are documented online at hahahaha.org. His fiction and co-authored short films have received support from the Arts Council and the UK Film Council. He lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.

Louise Phillips (“Ipatiev House” p.24) Louise Phillips lives in Toronto, Canada. Her work has appeared in Dream Catcher, 3AM Magazine, The Copperfield Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Delinquent, and The Dirty Napkin.

Polina Klyukina Translated by Annie Fisher (“Free” p.29)

Polina Klyukina was born in 1986 in the city of Perm in the Urals.

She is currently studying at the Moscow Literary Institute and the Publishing University’s Department of Journalism. Her stories have appeared in leading literary magazines. She was a finalist in the Debut Prize in 2008.

Olga Slavnikova Translated by Andrew Bromfield (“Chanel №5” p.34) Olga Slavnikova, a past winner of the Russian Booker Prize, is the director of the Debut Prize for young writers, and an internationally-renowned author of five awardwinning novels, which have been translated into

French and Italian. She rose to fame as a writer in her hometown of Ekaterinburg in the Urals before moving to Moscow.

Chanel No. 5 appears here for the first time in English, courtesy of Natasha Perova at Glas Publishing.

Carol Ermakova’s website is: www.websitehere.com

Event Listings – October (Edited by

Become A friend of Litro

Alexander James p.42)

www.litro.co.uk

This month on Litro.co.uk Litro Loyalty card: exciting new loyalty card: log in and find out about discounts on books, food, festivals and much more.

Q and A: read all about who we’re quizzing this month.

Blogs: Emily Cleaver continues with her musings on all things literary.

News: Find out which lucky person won this year’s short story award.

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Stories

Fishing for Crab in Arctic Russia Adam Butler

It works like this: During crab season, October until March, boats go out every day (bearing in mind that ‘day’, during many of these months, is a fairly arbitrary concept up here) stacked with half-cube cages, roughly one man wide by one man long by one four-year-old high. The cages, though – at least on board the boats that we’re interested in here – are often home-made, using processes that don’t lend themselves to uniformity, with the result that these stacks are haphazard and hazardous. The majority of these boats could easily be regarded as exemplary embodiments of the phrase ‘seen better days’ – were it not for the inherent difficulties of the whole ‘day’ thing, up here.

‘Seen better twenty-four-hour periods’ just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, especially in Russian. The boats have names like ‘Melkart’, ‘Matrioska’, ‘Maroanjoca’, ‘Maxim’, ‘Murman-2’.

Most of them used to fish for cod, back in the halcyon twenty-fourhour periods when cod from Murmansk fed the whole of Russia.

The thing is, it’s almost impossible to catch cod round here any more: you study the maps, tidal charts, weather, migratory records, the vagaries of the North Atlantic Drift (that global conveyor belt that keeps Murmansk ice-free all year round), maybe even the grounds at the bottom of your coffee cup. All of this to try and figure out where the cod will be – you have to be a codfish, is what the old-timers say, empathise with the fish, put yourself in their fins. Then after all the planning, the calculations, the divination, the role playing, you head up the Tupoma River, blithely ignoring on the left the hulking great Lenin (glorious relic of 1959! the world’s very first nuclear icebreaker! shortly thereafter site of the world’s very first floating nuclear reactor meltdown!) shielding your eyes also from out-of-bounds Severomorsk on the right, with its sad relics of Soviet history, the nuclear submarines lined up grey and rusting like some ghastly whale cancer ward.

Eyes forward, you chug across the Murmansk Bay and out into the Barents Sea, home in on your chosen coordinates, carefully set your nets; wait; carefully haul them in again … and all you end up with is a boatful of giant crabs, flapping about like malfunctioning robotic insects, their huge legs twisted clumsily around the sodden

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AUTHORS’CLUB

Undergoing

a major ref urbishment

do pop in for a tour

4 0 D O V E R S T R E E T M AY FA I R L O N D O N W 1 S 4 N P T: 0 2 0 7 4 9 9 8 5 8 1

E : S T E L L A @ T h E A R T S c Lu b. c O. u k

W: T h E A R T S c Lu b. c O. u k

Forty Rubles Peter Hajinian

Your Honour: This is my confession, not of murder, but of the events that led to the death of Vladimir Gargarovich Karpuk. Though I was present, I can attest it was an accident, and therefore I beg Your Honour’s leniency in any sentencing.

Karpuk was a bear of a man. He wore his moustache wild. Thick black hair crept out from under the collar of his woolly coat.

Everyone who met him thought “swarthy,” but most were too polite to say it. Let the truth be known: You wouldn’t find a lazier man in the entire Russian Empire.

I’m neither tall nor big. In fact, some have called me a bird of a man. My nose is hooked, and my chin disappears when I look down. I don’t have much of an upper lip, but I was born with small teeth. My arms are skinny, so I try to avoid coats and shirts that drape over me. As lazy as Karpuk is, I am diligent. I have mastered my emotions. Only a German expresses less, but it’s been scientifically proven Germans don’t feel much of anything.

But this begins with my sweet wife Emma. We had a happy life in Andropov, a village in the Kazarov District. Our life was happy. Then one day she complained she never enjoys the finer restaurants. I told her we don’t need to eat at the restaurants, because I hired a fine cook with the largest mole in all of Kazarov on her cheek. Emma said it wasn’t good enough. Just the week before Andrei Ivanovich Sokabokavich took his wife Silva to a fine restaurant in Moscow. How can I compete? I love my wife, Your Honour, and did what any man would do when confronted with these claims. I promised her I would take her to St. Petersburg for the finest lunch of smoked sturgeon and pickled eggs.

Trains are getting more and more expensive. Some time ago I had lent a sum of money to Karpuk, and on that fateful day Emma made her wishes known I decided it was time to collect. Everyone in Andropov knew you could find Karpuk sitting in the local public house, doing nothing. And that’s exactly where I found him.

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Max405 Richard House

He finds him, Max405, Max, but not that Max, the same name

but not the same person. Not quite. Similar features, to be sure: that mouth, that shorn red hair, those bright blue eyes, the achingly familiar incline to his shoulders. Max, who walked away without explanation, just upped and disappeared.

He tracks the profile for one week then deletes it from his favourites for no good reason. The proximity of this uncannily familiar face, the very same name, the oddness of it just exhausts him.

Two days later he runs a search and picks him out from thirtyfour pages of Max and Maxims, amazed again, gutted, by this double. His mouth, his eyes: Max405, haughty and distant. He searches on Facebook, on MSN, and finds similar profiles under the same name, Max405, Max but not his Max. The information becomes confusing; details do not tally between the accounts: Max405 on Man2Man lives in London; Max405 on Facebook lives in Rome; Max504 on Gaydar lives in Berlin. He waits to catch him online. A green button in the top left corner. Green: I’m here.

Red: I am away. Within one hour Max405 changes his location from London, to Rome, to Berlin, to New York, to Moscow. He sends a message: where are you? and receives a reply within the hour: I am in Moscow – Verkhnyaya Khokhlovka. And you?

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He closes his laptop, is halfway across the room before he changes his mind and returns to the profile, adds Max405 as a favourite, saves the message, makes sure not to lose him again, then downloads the three photographs from each of the profiles, which he opens in Photoshop. After increasing the image size, he doubles the pixels, trebles them, but this isn’t the movies, it isn’t CSI, and he can’t add information where nothing exists.

He examines these photographs, off and on, for two entire days.

Moscow, London, Rome, Berlin? The fuzz surrounding Max’s

Russian Strays William Falo

“It may be suggested by some books that it is not a sin to kill an animal, but it is written in our own hearts – more clearly than in any book – that we should take pity on animals in the same way as we do on humans.”

Leo Tolstoy

Petya placed the case of darts on the ground, and aimed the gun

at one of the stray dogs that sniffed the bait he’d placed near the entrance to the junkyard; he steadied his shaking until a sharp pain on the back of his leg made him wince. The world spun around him, and he started to black out; something edged into his fading view, and he saw a dark-haired girl glaring at him with canine eyes until a dog barked, and she disappeared along with the light.

He struggled to his feet only to discover the darts broken in pieces except for the one in his leg. “Damn her,” he said. “She won’t stop me from getting those stinking dogs.” Despite his anger, the image of her face with the penetrating eyes made him desire a woman for the first time in years. That night he walked past the vibrant nightclubs filled with excitement, and watched the prostitutes from across the street.

A woman in red boots called out to him, “Why are you staring at me? Come over, and we can get to know each other.” She lifted her skirt up higher than he’d ever seen a woman do before. Snow started to fall when he crossed the street with anticipation burning inside him. “Hey Ekaterina,” another girl called out.

That name made him stop, and his hands shook. The girl walked toward him; her boots clicked on the street despite the snow. The clicking haunted him.

The image of a girl laughing at the scar the dog made on his backside filled his mind. It marked him as a coward because he turned away and the dogs attacked his girlfriend. Ekaterina died from an infection she received from the wounds while he survived with only the scar.

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“Are you interested?” the prostitute called out, shattering the nightmare.

Iryna Yermolova The Journey An exhibition of painting works by UK based, Ukrainian artist Iryna Yermolov

Exhibition runs from: Friday 15th of October 2010 Thursday 21st of October 2010 Gallery Opening Hours: Mon, Tues, Wed, Fri: 11.00 am to 6.30 pm Sat: 12.30pm - 5.00 pm Last day of Exhibition: Thursday 21st of October: 10.00am to 5.00pm Iryna Yermolova’s educational background encompasses two absolutely diametrically opposed educational strands, one in graphic design and the other as an economist.

Ipatiev House Louise Phillips

Butka: A priest visits the village once a month to perform the Sacred Mysteries. On the first Sunday in March he is very late for a baptism. It gets stuffy in the hall where the villagers are waiting.

The women rock their unbaptised babies and the men lean outside to peer down Lenin Street. Smoky breath moistens their noses. Nests sway on the tips of bare trees against the white sky.

The batushka arrives with moonshine on his breath. His cheeks are flushed with crimson stipples. He leads toasts after each christening and leaves the final baby in the baptismal font. Only the baby’s mother notices. She pulls her son out of the basin and looks reprovingly at her husband, who was preoccupied with the toast. The soaking wet baby is unperturbed; the priest is impressed.

He announces that this baby is a warrior and names him ‘Boris.’

Even though she will have two more children, Borka remains extra special to his mother Klavdia. Sometimes she catches him observing her with an expression of real shrewdness on his face. He loves music. No one in the village owns a radio but their neighbour comes over with his fiddle specifically to play for Boris Nikolayevich, who waves his fists in the air and sways back and forth on his bandy baby legs.

The villagers work on the collective farm. There is a river, brown and stagnant in the summer and frozen for the rest of the year.

At night, leashed dogs bark and beams of starlight oscillate, while the river and Butka’s wooden buildings are swallowed up by the darkness of the Siberian plain.

Novgorod Oblast: Borka is on the roof of a railway carriage, somewhere between Novgorod and Moscow. He has grown into a tall and handsome man, just as the women in the barak in Bereznicki said he would.

He is self-conscious about his missing thumb and index finger, which he lost as a schoolboy when he pinched a grenade from

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Free Polina Klyukina Translated by Annie Fisher

T

he Simferopol train and dusty wool blankets. The train conductor with her tangled black locks and her bowing-andscraping “shh” in the phrase “Hush now, girls, hush now;” the clinking of the metal tea-glass holders. The rail-thin female convicts, puffy with drink, are crawling back home to Novosibirsk.

The road consists of short stories about other people’s long lives and the smiling phrase “Now don’t you go being afraid of us,” there between the loudspeakers and the inner ear membranes. The embarrassed passengers cover up children’s ears at the words “little bitch” and listen curiously to stories about murderers as cellmates.

The car is silent: Sveta is talking about Lyokha, the cannibal from Block Three, and sweet human meat. Calmly, she describes the uncle she killed, as if it were the rude saleslady.

“He used to treat my grandma real bad, he’d smother her with the plastic bag from a loaf of bread and rap two fingers on the table whenever he asked for money.” Sveta taps her plastic nails on her knee. Alyona agrees with her, adding, “People like that need to never even get born at all, much less live their lives; I would’ve also … except I’ve got kids, they’d never forgive a mother who was a murderer.”

They’ve left behind them tons of innocent people, guilty only of rapping on their knees the same way. They don’t throw their cigarette butts on the floor for fear of being put in the hole for ten days, and they don’t buy things on the cheap from their cellmates so they won’t get their parole deferred. Parole is a term that gets heard a lot but is rarely explained. It’s like the long-awaited paroyal treatment, or pa-roll in the hay: all it means is getting out before your sentence is up. But lots of the ones looking through bars (ones like, for example, Alyona) decode this term differently: pa-rope to hang their husbands with, or else their relatives, whoever locked them up for a couple of years. You can always give the rap on your fellow inmates, you’ll get out earlier, but you won’t get

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New Voices in Russian Literature

Squaring the Circle

Winners of the Debut Prize for Fiction NEW from GLAS

Supported by the Pokolenie Foundation and its president Andrei Skoch this collection presents short stories by young Russian authors who are free of the Soviet legacy and do not resonate to the sort of art that attempts to turn everything Soviet into vintage chic. Living in a system of multiple uncertainties they have no algorithms for building their lives and careers. There are no guarantees, but anything is possible. Theirs is a fundamentally new way of thinking, a new way of seeing the world. Clearly, a person’s life experience at any age is complete in and of itself. What a person knows about the world in his early 20s has been forgotten by the time he is 30. They commit to literature their unique experiences, what might be described as the shock of their first encounter with grown-up life.

Today an unusually gifted generation is entering Russian literature. Literature has not seen such an influx of energy in a long time. This new generation writing in Russian — both the individual writers and the phenomenon as a whole — is declaring itself with increasing confidence in all literary areas.

True to its commitment to bring new and overlooked names to the attention of the English-speaking reader GLAS has launched a series of new-generation writings providing a glimpse into the future of Russia.

www.glas.msk.su

in the UK order from customerservices@inpressbooks.co.uk POKOLENIE

Chanel №5 Olga Slavnikova Translated by Andrew Bromfield

In the Research Facility of... but it is better not to say which

one. A quarter of a century ago this institution was top secret, and it can still easily make a lot of trouble for someone even in today’s free climate when we no longer have any technological secrets whatsoever and when, even if the government did decide to classify something as secret, no-one would be the least bit interested in it anyway.

So, in a certain research facility, a Soviet woman worked as a draughtswoman and her name was Viktorina Tractor-Boots. This name may strike the reader as somewhat odd, and if so, we heartily congratulate the reader on being a very lucky person. Viktorina Tractor-Boots was a puny, gingerish woman with feeble eyes.

She wore heavy glasses with thick, complicated lenses like the bottoms of milk bottles, but her eyes didn’t seem any sharper behind those lenses; in fact, they were completely blotted out and merely blinked from time to time, reminding whoever was talking to her of micro-organisms under a poorly-focused microscope. As it happens, hardly anyone ever talked to Viktorina Tractor-Boots.

No matter how often the management of the facility was changed – the heads of departments and sections, even the chief designer, all came and went – they all saw her in the same position: bent over her drawing-board, her sharp nose tracing the same ideal lines as her pencil or rapidograph was tracing on the Whatman sheet.

Viktorina Tractor-Boots was a Soviet woman and she loved her work. She had never in her life actually seen those deadly thingamajigs whose ideal, refined images she created on her sheets of Whatman paper. To the technically uniformed, these images were more like the insides of musical instruments, and that is exactly what Viktorina Tractor-Boots felt as she tightened the string-lines on the elegant pins. Viktorina Tractor-Boots’s rapidographs were always spotless and her pencils were always sharpened to the point where the tips seemed invisible, so for the first half hour after being sharpened, they could create ghostly outlines, until the materiality of the Whatman paper blunted them

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Events Listings – October Bringing colour to the big smoke is this month’s event fest: there’s two whopping art events, a festival of film, and drama to be spooked by. All of it to be washed down by a serving of the world’s finest rum during this month’s outings for literature lovers, edited by Alexander James.

Through October, Shakespeare is German, at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Of course he’s not really. But Germans speak of “unser” (our) Shakespeare. He remains the most played author on the German stage, where more Shakespeare plays are performed than in England. His work has been translated and admired through the centuries

by German greats Christoph Martin Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Heine and Nietzsche. This autumn’s season celebrates Germany’s special affinity with Shakespeare. “http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/”

1 - 10 October 2010, The Story of London, various locations. London’s rich history as a centre for world beating ideas, invention and pioneers is being celebrated this autumn, when the Story of London returns. The event aims to encourage visitors and Londoners to share in the story of London, while raising the profile of cultural attractions throughout the city. “http://www.london.gov.uk/”

5 October 2010 – 2 January 2011, The Turner Prize,

Tate Britain. Established in 1984 to draw

greater public attention to contemporary art, the Turner Prize has both reflected and informed the popular reception of new British art in this country and internationally. Each year a

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specialist jury has shortlisted some of the most important artists working today, and made the difficult decision to award the Prize to one of them, causing annual controversy and debate. “http://www.tate.org.uk/”

7

October,

Hamlet,

National

Theatre

Not to be outdone by The Globe, Nicholas Hytner directs Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the final production of the 2010 Travelex £10 Tickets season, opening in the Olivier Theatre on 7 October. Rory Kinnear plays Hamlet, following his acclaimed performance at the National in Burnt by the Sun. “http://www.nationaltheatre. org.uk/59866/productions/hamlet.html”

12 October, Liars’ League: Dark & Stormy, The Phoenix, Oxford Circus. London’s premier storytelling night returns with a new crop of stories by up-and-coming authors, performed by the League’s talented company of actors.

This month’s theme is Dark & Stormy, so bring a friend along to hold your hand as you get in the mood for Hallowe’en. “http://www.liarsleague.com/”

13 October 2010 – April 2011, The Unconscious, The Science Museum, South Kensington. The theory of the unconscious was a massive influence on writers like D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. The Science Museum will explore the workings of the unconscious mind with a new exhibition which celebrates psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and as a treatment.

The exhibition will focus on a key concept of psychoanalysis – how the unconscious can be interpreted through everyday experiences and in artefacts, both historical and contemporary.

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“http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/”

13 - 28 October 2010, The BFI London Film Festival, South Bank. The London Film Festival champions creativity, originality, vision and imagination by annually showcasing the best of contemporary world cinema, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental film. It’s a highly regarded and anticipated event in Europe’s cultural calendar, attracting leading international filmmakers, industry professionals and the media, together with large public audiences, to London for a two-week showcase of the best in contemporary world cinema. “http://www.bfi.org.uk”

14 – 17 October 2010, Frieze Art Fair, Regent’s Park. Frieze Art Fair takes place every October in Regent’s Park, featuring work from over 170 of the most exciting contemporary art galleries in the world. The fair also includes specially commissioned artists’ projects, a prestigious talks programme and an artist-led education schedule. “http://www.friezeartfair.com”

16 – 17 October 2010, UK Rumfest, Olympia Rum is the drink that inspired Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, and a tribute to the amber stuff will arrive at Olympia 2 bringing with it more than 400 rums to sample and buy, cocktail demonstrations and live music including salsa, soca, reggae, zouk and samba. It’s the world’s biggest celebration of the diversity of rum. “http://www.rumfest.co.uk/”

22 – 24 October 2010, The Bloomsbury Festival In the London district that’s spawned a legacy of great writers, Bloomsbury-based organisations including The British Museum and The Wellcome Collection are coming together to create a festival

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celebrating the cultural vibrancy of the local area. Bringing together The Foundling Museum, The October Gallery, The Slade, The Place and over 60 other partner organisations from Bloomsbury, The Bloomsbury Festival will take over the public parks and squares of the area with a programme of live music, theatre, comedy, dance, walks, talks and food. “http://www.bloomsburyfestival.org.uk/”

26 to 30 October, 1984 by George Orwell, Rose Theatre, Kingston. Some say this classic has never been more pertinent. Winston Smith clings to a vision of a different future.

What begins as an act of rebellion and hope quickly descends into a nightmare of doomed love, personal betrayal and the terrors of Room 101. Following on from Othello, Romeo and Juliet and The Canterbury Tales, Conrad Nelson directs another classic. “http://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/whats-on/1984”

30 October, Ghost Stories, The Duke of York’s Theatre. The best spookfest this Hallowe’en! It’s this year’s must-see West End phenomenon, earning a sell-out run in Hammersmith last year. Prepare for a truly terrifying theatrical experience brought to you

by The League of Gentlemen’s master of the macabre Jeremy Dyson, and Andy Nyman. “http://www.ghoststoriestheshow.co.uk/”

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