Mikhail Shishkin, Maidenhair, Trans. by Marian Schwart, Open Letter Books, 2012.
Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter—the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise—and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter’s own reading: a history of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son “Nebuchadnezzasaurus,” ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia’s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions—of truth and fiction, of time and timelessness, of love and war, of Death and the Word—and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys.
"Maidenhair is as a whole a success, a potent, encyclopedic exploration of the art of storytelling. (...) Shishkin possesses an acute sense of the length of time he can spend in artful, fantastical language, and knows when he instead needs to tell a story that is easily comprehensible. His balancing of multiple narrative styles is perhaps the greatest feat of his narrative. For all that Shishkin does to craft a profound, beautiful work of literature, a potentially subpar translation occasionally disrupt the reader." - Grace E. Huckins
"Shishkin boldly manipulates his various materials (.....) Despite this potentially dehumanizing perspective, Shishkin finds faith of sorts in the next iteration of the story. A curiously beguiling, if exhausting, novel." - Publishers Weekly
“Briefly describe the reasons why you are requesting asylum,” comes an order in the early pages of Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair. The response begins, “There was a voivode by the name of Dracula in the Orthodox land of Wallachia,” and continues with a story of Dracula’s cruelty, first to a pair of foreign ambassadors, next to his own soldiers, and finally to a crowd of peasants, for whom he threw a luscious banquet, then “ordered the building locked, surrounded with straw, and set on fire. And the fire was great, and all in it burned.”
This stunning response reveals the logic of Maidenhair, the first of Shishkin’s novels to be translated into English. Although Shishkin’s prodigious talent has been recognized for many years in his native Russia, as well as in Germany and France, until now English readers have only had access to “The Half-Belt Overcoat.” That story, translated by Leo Shtutin, appeared in the Read Russia! anthology published earlier this year, and was, to my mind, easily the best in the collection. Maidenhair more than lives up to its promise; beautifully translated by Marian Schwartz, it is a fierce book from a sharp and generous mind.
There are, roughly, three narrative lines which structure the novel: in one, a nameless interpreter (Shishkin’s alter-ego), who works with asylum seekers in Switzerland, writes letters to his absent son, “Nebuchadnezzasaurus.” In another, two voices of unknown or unstable identity engage in a series of questions and answers. In the last, a Russian singer named Bella Dmitrievna records her life, and most of the twentieth century, in diaries which the interpreter will eventually read when he attempts to write her biography. With these three strands, Maidenhair weaves its tangled braid, although contained within it are also a dizzying array of historical digressions, philosophical preoccupations, parables, letters, jokes, and literary allusions.
I hesitate to describe the book as “universal” lest this imply that its themes, or its treatment of them, are banal; they are not. On the contrary, they are wonderfully inventive. So when I say that Maidenhair is universal, I mean that it wants to constitute a universe — or perhaps a map of the universe that is the same size as the universe itself.
Maidenhair operates in an epic time that makes little or no distinction between a story and a life, and in a pagan cosmos that allows the world to be continuously created, destroyed, and created again. Whether the creation and destruction take place in word or in flesh is inconsequential; it amounts to the same thing. For Shishkin, everything is of one substance, and so what we encounter are not new stories (for there are no new stories), but rather variations on a theme: translations, interpretations.
Despite its breadth, the novel is a closed system, and everything and everyone in it is ultimately an incarnation of something else. The interpreter — also referred to as “the biographer,” “the teacher,” and once, “the thief” — is a troubled echo of a person, constantly finding himself, like the nymph in Greek mythology, with a breaking heart and an inability to speak except through other people’s words. He substitutes history and legend for the stories of his own life: his letters to his son are mainly spent recounting ancient battles; to describe the dissolution of his marriage, he casts his wife as Isolde, and her former lover, who died in a car accident, as Tristan. “You’re mixing everything up!” the imaginary figure of his teacher shouts at him, “You always mixed everything up! You’re a bungler.”
And indeed, everything is bungled. Characters wander in and out of each other’s stories, distinguishing features migrate from person to person, ancient Greeks are confused with Chechens, and refugees demand asylum because Dracula once lit a great fire.
But this is only because they are all caught up in the same, non-linear river of time, perpetually re-enacting the same stories. The interpreter finds his counterpart and double in Bella Dmitrievna, who, like him, has lost a lover and a child, and who, like him, is an interpreter. Even in her own writing, Bella has become a vessel for the words of others. “I am sound, word, and gesture,” she writes, quoting her acting teacher. In fact, she is almost always quoting someone, as is the interpreter, as is nearly everyone in the book. If the text is, as Roland Barthes says, a fabric of quotations, then it is for Shishkin the fabric of the universe. As the asylum seeker asserts: “We are what we say.”
“All our Russian disasters come from our contempt for the flesh,” Bella writes later. Although she is only parroting a comment she has not entirely understood, the sentiment is not made entirely in jest. Maidenhair is largely about the problem of writing, or at least the problem of narrating, and what saves it from being self-indulgent is precisely its rebellion against contempt for the flesh.
Shishkin has an animist mind; there are beautiful moments of minute observation scattered unexpectedly throughout the novel: speculations on the writings of beetles, for example, or about snow or grass. Everyone in Maidenhair is a writer or a storyteller, but writing and storytelling are not sacred activities; or at least, they are no more sacred than anything else that comes out of life. It was the detail of the finger in the wound that made the Resurrection credible, Shishkin writes; holiness is not in words but in words andfingers, words and insects, words and whales. Writing is no guarantee of immortality, nor, perhaps, is it important.
Shishkin has been described as the heir apparent of the great Russian novelists, and indeed, there are times when he seems to have taken the best from each of them. From Tolstoy he has inherited a sense for the epic; from Dostoevsky, spiritual acuity and a social conscience. He takes Nabokov’s remarkable linguistic flexibility but none of his arrogance; like Chekhov, he looks on humanity with humor and compassion. Shishkin’s Baroque turns of phrases seem written out of necessity and joy rather than pretention; he respects his readers, he delights in language, and he does not need to show off.
Dare I call him a happy Russian? Though Maidenhair is laced with political brutality and sorrow, it nevertheless embodies a kind of inner freedom, a clear-eyed belief in the value of life. With tender determination, characters urge each other to love and be happy, not because they wish to deny or even to combat suffering, but simply because they recognize that no feeling is final. Suffering is guaranteed, so we must make sure that joy is as well.
“Everything is always happening simultaneously,” Shishkin writes. “It’s a matter of time zones.” The reader may approach the end of the novelwith an increasing sense of déjà vu, and that is no accident. Everything starts to converge, or rather, we finally become aware of the convergence that has been there from the start.-
“Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is the type of novel that professors of Russian literature can hold up as a shining example in their classrooms that no, Russian literature is not dead (nor has it ever been), while those who might not know their Pushkin from their Shishkin can read and enjoy Maidenhair as a standalone work of literary brilliance; while at the same time the notoriously fickle American readers who might have read Anna Karenina when Oprah’s Book Club made their recommendation or stumbled upon and enjoyed Master & Margarita can sink their mindsteeth into Marian Schwartz’s incredible translation of Shishkin’s novel and marvel in the fact that Maidenhair harkens back to the great classic Russian novels of ideas in every way.”
Contemporary Russian literature all too often falls into a ghettoized section of world literature that keep fans of translated and international literature from fully enjoying the best works of the last twenty years. One problem is a tendency for Western sources to focus on the political elements in a Russian text that inevitably denigrates the quality of the literature itself. At the same time, too many scholars of Russian literature place contemporary Russian literature into a different ghetto altogether, with the predominant sentiment in American universities being that great Russian literature died once upon a time with Bulgakov or Pasternak. This fact is, of course, 100% not true. Both of these problems keep Russian literature from its proper place in discussions of world literature. We appreciate so many of the Russian classics as above politics and existent outside of but wholly influenced by the passage of historical time, while their themes are inherently but subtly political as they discuss the contradictions and distortions in the daily realities of the Russian society that combine to make the stories so timeless and powerful.
Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is the type of novel that professors of Russian literature can hold up as a shining example in their classrooms that no, Russian literature is not dead (nor has it ever been), while those who might not know their Pushkin from their Shishkin can read and enjoy Maidenhair as a standalone work of literary brilliance; while at the same time the notoriously fickle American readers who might have read Anna Karenina when Oprah’s Book Club made their recommendation or stumbled upon and enjoyed Master & Margarita can sink their mindsteeth into Marian Schwartz’s incredible translation of Shishkin’s novel and marvel in the fact that Maidenhair harkens back to the great classic Russian novels of ideas in every way.
Since his first novel came out in 1994, Shishkin has won Russia’s three most prestigious literary prizes: the Russian Booker, the National Bestseller, and the Big Book. Despite his prodigious and award-winning talents, Maidenhair is his first novel published in English, and will be formally released on October 23, 2012 by Open Letter Books. Shishkin’s former day job was as an interpreter in Switzerland; and he splits his time these days between Zurich and Moscow – both facts play in to the characters in Maidenhair. He has previously taught for a semester at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and is returning to the USA in spring 2013 to teach a seminar at Columbia and to give talks across the country relating to Maidenhair. The international nature of Shishkin himself plays in to the narrative structure of Maidenhair, as his characters inhabit positions across the globe and throughout history all at once; the émigré Russian writer of the past has given way to the globalized Russian writer of the 21st century, wherein borders are insignificant, the author is at once entirely Russian and at the same time entirely a global citizen.
At its core, Maidenhair is a novel of ideas that reads like a 21st-century Tolstoy, concerned with the big questions of life, death, love, and everything in between:
…here, in the trenches, people never talk out loud about the main thing. People smoke, drink, eat, and talk about trivial things, boots, for instance… (251)Maidenhair is a novel that talks about the main things constantly: faith and spirituality; the importance of enjoying fleeting moments of beauty in the face of death; throughout, the quest for love, affection, and human ethics touches on every character, and make themselves apparent in philosophical dialogue, mythological references, and spiritual ruminations:
Life is a string and death is the air. A string makes no sound without air. (150)Maidenhair is at the same time, like the great works of Russian literature, above politics and timeless. Its narrative grace and the power of its ideas would feel every bit at home in literary salons alongside Tolstoy and Chekhov 1902, though it was written a full century later.
To discuss the plot of Maidenhair feels vulgar. It is hard to describe and seemingly banal. But as Zakhar Prilepin (another incredible contemporary Russian author who is awaiting his first published translation in America) discussed at a recent Read Russia event at Book Expo America, the plots of the greatest works of Russian literature are all exceedingly banal: young man kills a pawnbroker and an investigation follows; a young woman cheats on her husband with a young officer. What makes these stories original is not their plot but the presentation of the author’s ideas and their critiques of social mores that exist at once across the globe. So it is with Maidenhair. The plot is, in fact, rather banal; four narratives are interwoven throughout the novel: stories told by Russian refugees seeking asylum in Switzerland to a Russian interpreter working for the Swiss government; the interpreter’s trips to Italy and his subsequent estrangement from his wife and son; letters written by the interpreter to his son, addressing him as an emperor of a far-off made-up land, all starting out with, “Dear Nebuchadnezzasaurus!” and incorporating elements of historical and mythological texts the interpreter is reading on his breaks from work; and diary entries written by an Isabella on whom the interpreter was supposed to write a biography, who the not-so-average Western reader might not know is the famous Russian singer of the first half of the 20th-century, Isabella Yurieva*.
The interpreter is the only character that ties the four narratives together. The reader lives inside the nameless interpreter’s head, with the narratives combining throughout as a mixture of things that he is reading at the time (a lot of mythology and classical history), things he is working on (including the diary entries and the extensive Q&A sections with asylum-seekers), and things he is doing (trips to Italy, writing letters to his son). The style is confusing to discuss, but easy to read, because Shishkin repeats the themes of humanity’s interconnectedness throughout history and fate.
You just have to understand destiny’s language and its cooing. We’re blind from birth. We don’t see anything and don’t pick up on the connection between events, the oneness of things, like a mole digging its tunnel… (268)Rather than discuss the plot structure and the “action” in the book, so as not to give away any of the brilliance in the text, it must be said that Maidenhair is a novel not to be understood (to use Shishkin’s own quote), but to be felt at every turn of the page, a novel to be processed as the narrative progresses, though the further you read, the less time matters, and you find yourself living inside a narrative world where everything is connected, and everything is happening all at once:
Before I just couldn’t understand how all this could be happening to me simultaneously, but I am now, loupe in hand, and at the same time I’m there, holding him close and feeling that I’m about to pass out, dying, I can’t catch my breath. But now I understand that it’s all so simple. Everything is always happening simultaneously. Here you are writing this line now, while I’m reading it. Here you are putting a period at the end of this sentence, while I reach it at the very same time. It’s not a matter of hands on the clock! They can be moved forward and back. It’s a matter of time zones. Steps of the dial. Everything is happening simultaneously, it’s just that the hands have gone every which way on all the clocks. (497)Shishkin has declared in Russian-language interviews that Maidenhair is a novel about everything, and in more recent novels he attempts to solve humanity’s crisis of life and death. Maidenhair is no different.
This is what I believe: If somewhere on earth the wounded are finished off with rifle butts, that means somewhere else people have to be singing and rejoicing in life! The more death there is around, the more important to counter it with life, love, and beauty! (328)Everything in the book makes sense together, even when reading and the narrative shifts from the singer’s diary in the 1920s to the interpreter’s mystical Q&A session with a refugee to Rome and to letters, everything is connected to the greater whole of what Shishkin is attempting to create, an entire universe of beauty, of yearning for love, of life in the face of death, of the history in everything, all tied in to the much greater questions of God’s role in everything:
The divine idea of the river is the river itself. (24)The title of the book is emblematic of Shishkin’s themes of God and love at the same time: maidenhair is a type of fern that grows wild in Rome, the Eternal City that plays such a central role in the novel. Yet in Russia, maidenhair is a house plant that cannot grow without human care and affection:
For us, this is a house plant, otherwise it wouldn’t survive, without human warmth, but here it’s a weed. So you see, this is in a dead language, signifying something alive: Adiantum capillus veneris. Venus hair, genus Adiantum. Maidenhair. God of life. The wind barely stirs. As if nodding, yes yes, that’s true: this is my temple, my land, my wind, my life. The greenest of grasses. It grew here before your Eternal City and will grow here after. (500)Even the epigraph to Maidenhair is so significant to the work that it deserves to be quoted, for it contains the essence of what Shishkin is up to:
And your ashes will be called, and will be told:
“Return that which does not belong to you;
reveal what you have kept to this time.”
For by the word was the world created, and by the word shall we be resurrected.
–Revelation of Baruch ben Neriah. 4, XLIIThe theme of the word is one of the big themes that recur throughout Maidenhair in each narrative, with the importance of the recorded dialogue in the interpreter’s mission or in the diary entries of Isabella. The themes are complex and deep, but the sentiments expressed in them, the emotion of the characters that come through in the text, are all human and completely relatable. The most important themes that are discussed throughout the work include God (faith and spirituality), fate (and the individual), time (and time/space), war (across time and history), history (or the power of memory), diaspora (especially interesting as Shishkin spends much of his time outside of Russia, yet remains a quintessentially Russian writer), intertextuality (as a narrative and rhetorical style, and for the novel’s use of text-in-text-in-text), Russia’s role in the world (and their view of themselves in the world), the role of art in human society (the power of beauty to transcend the mundane day-to-day), migration/immigration (and the connection to paradise myths), mythology (of all stripes), Rome (after all, it is the Eternal City, so emblematic of humanity’s Eternal Problems) . . . The list could go on forever, the themes are huge, the book is a page-turner, not in the sense of plot-twists, but in the sense that every page contains a new revelation.
May I make one recommendation to you, the future reader of this brilliant novel? If so, please be an active reader while you read this book: keep a pen in hand, Post-It notes at the ready, or your e-book highlighting function at the ready, because every single page in this book contains ideas encapsulated in perfect quotes that you will want to revisit, along with the entirety of the novel, time and time again.
Maidenhair is the first Russian book of the 21st-century to appear in English translation that can be truly counted as an instant classic in the broad field of world literature, capable of being taught in university classrooms and discussed in book clubs for centuries to come. Every individual, every emotion, every idea that humanity has ever generated and will forever generate is encapsulated in the 500 pages of Maidenhair. With its perfect combination of style and substance, Maidenhair might just be the book you’ve been waiting your entire life to read. - Will Evans
“Have you understood your rights and responsibilities and that no one gets into paradise anyway?” Peter, a government official, is the man who decides the fate of the men and women seeking refugee status in Switzerland. His formal, matter-of-fact interview style (Name? Age? Reason for requesting asylum?) obscures Peter’s true aim: he’s really just trying to uncover lies. For the petitioners, it’s a harrowing experience. How can you convince anyone of the truth when the only evidence you have is your word? Any other corroborating materials—documents, the testimony of loved ones—you’ve had to leave behind. What if the “reason for asylum,” the story you tell the ever-skeptical Peter, is all that remains?
Mikhail Shishkin’s third novel, Maidenhair, attempts to answer this and a host of other questions on the nature of life and death, love, war, and God. It is an ambitious novel that defies easy summary. Events in the lives of two characters—a Russian interpreter who works with Peter, and a singer from the early twentieth century—serve as jumping-off points for page after page of the author’s lyric, stream-of-consciousness prose. The writing is often so tightly packed with literary allusion and verbal trickery that it makes googling every second sentence a constant temptation. The book follows a kind of dream-logic that holds together only when you stop trying to work out what’s going on. Whatever meaning exists is sensory and associative, like the flickering stuff of memory. Here’s an example passage, chosen more or less at random:
That’s how to slide away from time, from Herod, downhill on frozen manure. Eyes watering in the cold, night clouds overlapping, the track sparkly, snake-bodied. There aren’t so very many people on earth, in fact: on resurrection day it’s really going to fill up. That’s how I remembered that room: winter in one window, and branches of flowering lilac in another nudging a cloud. Bottles along the tracks, but no message in any of them.This moves on, in the same dozen-page-long paragraph, to merge seamlessly into the interpreter’s memories; these recollections consist of events from his own life, horrifying tales from the asylum-seekers, and half-remembered snippets of ancient history and myth. Speakers and subjects change without warning, and just when you’ve gotten completely lost, you half-recognize something—an object, a name, a place—but can’t quite remember why. The curious effect throughout these passages is that you are bombarded with stories and experiences that, though you’ve not encountered them before, feel familiar. The intellectual sensation is like having some impossibly elusive word on the tip of your tongue.
Shishkin presents large sections of the book in an unusual question-and-answer format. This begins as a transcript of the interviews Peter and the interpreter conduct with asylum-seekers, most of whom escaped (or claim to have escaped) from the wars in Chechnya. After a while, the roles of questioner and answerer merge: “And once again question-answer, question-answer. It’s like talking to yourself. You ask yourself the questions. And answer them.” The questions start to become longer—and more revealing—than the answers
The only discernable plot exists in the notebooks of Isabella, a young girl from Rostov who dreams of becoming a famous singer. The book includes sections of her diary entries, small islands of much-appreciated realism. Her observations are often banal and self-pitying (“I have such ugly hands!”). But as she grows up and survives war and revolution, she arrives at a coping mechanism that Shishkin will take up later: “The more death there is around, the more important to counter it with life, love, and beauty!” For Isabella, this is a philosophy of convenience: “I want to sing. It’s not my fault that my youth came in time of war! I won’t get another youth!” In the novel as a whole, however, Isabella’s justifications raise the question of whether there is zero-balance relationship between good and evil, life and death, love and hate. Can the bad be “countered” by the good?
Shishkin is often seen as a kind of hybrid between Lev Tolstoy and James Joyce. He uses experimental forms to probe the kinds of earnest, what-is-the-meaning-of-it-all questions that have been out of fashion since, well, Tolstoy. And, much like War and Peace, Shishkin’s Maidenhair is a novel about everything: it explores the workings of the world, history, memory, and mankind’s interaction with the divine. This novel is an attempt to create and explain everything in existence.
In Russia, Shishkin’s books are known for being at once difficult and extremely rewarding. As an extraordinary prose stylist, Shishkin has license to be unconventional simply because the text itself is so beautiful. The danger in translation is obvious: the more the English falters or fails to enchant, the closer the novel approaches complete unreadability. Marian Schwartz’s spectacular translation, which is far more than a bulwark against this eventuality, triumphs in its own right. The long passages of constantly shifting voices and registers come off effortlessly. The only part of the translation that seemed odd was the faithful replication of the Russian footnotes for foreign words and phrases. While it is the convention in Russian, what is to be gained by explaining things like “Herr Fischer” in a note (“Mr. Fischer [Ger.]”) for English-speakers? But these are extremely minor infelicities. And they pale beside Schwartz’s overwhelming accomplishment.
Maidenhair is likely a work of genius—as many in Russia and elsewhere believe—and the key to understanding the novel must lie in Shishkin’s descriptions of beauty in the everyday. Take this passage, where the interpreter observes his sleeping lover: "Where did the girl swim to at night, one arm forward, under the pillow, the other hand back, palm up and you so wanted to kiss that palm but you were afraid to wake her up?" I could quote hundreds more like this. The mistake in interpretation is to try to add these moments up to create a grand, overarching message. In the end, the value resides in the descriptions themselves, in the stories and words. That is where salvation lies:
Resurrection of the flesh. Out of nothingness, out of the void, out of white plaster, out of a dense fog, out of a snowy field, out of a sheet of paper there suddenly will appear people, living bodies, they rise up to remain forever, because they can’t vanish, disappearing is simply not an option; death has already come and gone. First the contour, outlines, edges. Period, period, comma makes a crooked little face. Cross-out. The man stretches from this crack in the wall to that spot of sun. Stretches from nail to nail.Let’s hope this is not wishful thinking. If Shishkin is right about the power of words to resurrect the dead, Maidenhair has all but secured his immortality. - Christopher Tauchen
Maidenhair seems like an unusual novel, first offering one thing then another, and certainly not offering some story with a nice arc from beginning to end. The protagonist is known only as 'the interpreter'. He lives in Switzerland and is employed as a translator for Russian-speaking asylum-seekers (and the occasional prisoner) when they deal with the authorities. Years earlier, when he was still living in Russia (where he was 'the teacher'), he had been hired by a publisher to write the biography of long-lived singer Bella Dmitrievna, born in Czarist Russia and surviving well past the downfall of the Soviet empire; the project collapsed, but long excerpts from her reminiscences and diaries -- the raw material he was to use -- are included in the novel. There are also the letters he writes to his son, whom he calls his Nebuchadnezzasaurus, as well as some episodes from his own life.
Maidenhair consists of a variety of life-accounts. The biggest chunk is devoted to Bella's life, but there are also transcriptions of many of the interviews with asylum-seekers where the interpreter is the middle-man (neither posing nor answering questions, and yet an essential conduit). The Swiss official the interpreter works for, Peter Fischer, is the: "Master of fates", determining what becomes of the asylum-seekers. As he explains about the interrogations:
It's about clarifying circumstances. In order to keep them out of paradise, we have to ferret out what really happened. But how can you of people become the stories they tell ? You just can't. That means it's all very simple. Since you can't clarify the truth, you at least need to clarify the lie.The stories Peter and the interpreter hear are often horrible -- yet clearly, too, the asylum-seekers are manipulating the facts or in some cases even simply inventing stories which they know will make their applications more likely to be accepted. Doubting Peter has seen most of the tricks, and sees through most of these -- but Shishkin presents these encounters largely simply in Q & A form, with little embellishment or interpretation: the stories as given.
Early on an asylum seeker explains:
Those speaking may be fictitious, but what they say is real. Truth lies only in where it is concealed. Fine, the people aren't real but the stories, oh the stories are ! [...] What difference does it make who it happened to ? It's always a sure thing. The people here are irrelevant. It's the stories that can be authentic or not. You just need to tell an authentic story. Just the way it happened. And not invent anything. We are what we say. A freshly planned destiny is packed with people no one needs, like an ark; all the rest is the floodgates of heaven. We become what is written in the transcript. The words.Indeed, the focus is on the stories -- and so, for example, the interpreter also has little sense of what become of these people after their interviews, regardless of the outcome: the people are reduced to these brief life-summaries that they have tailored for themselves (for this specific purpose).
Maidenhair presents this array of life-stories, that range from appropriated ones to the ones people fashion for themselves out of their own facts. The interpreter is desperate for stories: he constantly whinges in his letters to his son that he hears so little from him -- i.e. complains that he doesn't have the son's own narrative, allowing him to form a better picture of the distant boy. Foolishly, too, he would occasionally look into his wife's diary -- and find there the alternative narratives she toyed with, as she clearly never entirely got over the loss of her first love in a tragic accident. Aside from Bella's diaries and reminiscences, the interpreter also retreats into historical accounts -- adapting them to his own reality: stories from Xenophon, Tristan and Isolde, Daphnis and Chloe (which comes up in one of the interrogations), and the like.
The interpreter meets a former teacher while in Rome, and she complains to him:
You're mixing everything up ! You've always mixed everything up ! You're a bungler.Maidenhair displays that confusion -- yet the bungling is as revealing as any ostensible clarity.
Bella wonders in her reminiscences, looking far, far back:
But why do I remember it ? Who needs to know about a nonexistent number in a nonexistent cloakroom ? After all, no one is going to hang my coat, the hand-me-down from my sisters, on that hook. And never again in winter after classes will I go down to the cloakroom and pull on the detested thick trousers under my school dress and tie my hood before setting off for home. My home doesn't even exist. Nothing I once had now exists. No one and nothing.Shishkin is fascinated by the concept of the narratives we create for ourselves, whether entirely imagined, or based on what we think is memory and fact. Yet he doesn't ram that idea down readers' throats; he merely offers it here, in many variations, but also allows the stories themselves to be spun out. It makes for an unusual novel -- unusual in the sense that it is unlike what one has encountered before, and unlike what one has come to expect. It expands, in a small but significant way, our understanding of what the novel can be and do -- quite a remarkable achievement.
Or maybe it does. Here it is, before my eyes, the auditorium on the second floor where the windows' reflections can snake so over the parquet floor.
A big, odd novel, well worth experiencing.
Note that the German edition of Maidenhair comes with nearly two-hundred endnotes, while the English version offers little more than footnotes that translate phrases and the like that are in other languages (although one also finds the odd lone explanatory footnote 20: "A reference to Gogol's 'Diary of a Madman'") -- and additional foot- or endnotes might have been helpful with regards to some (or many ...) of the references. (Oddly, too, for all the translated German, Latin, French, and Italian names and exchanges, the shout: "Eloi ! Eloi ! Lama sabachthani ?" at the book's closing remains unfootnoted or translated; is that really such a given ?) - M.A.Orthofer
Russia has one of the world’s great literary traditions, which for many is defined by bearded sages who write philosophically and morally committed mega-tomes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn fit that mold, and not uncoincidentally was the last Russian author to attain global fame.
Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, American audiences still expect Russian writers to conform to the dissident vs. tyrant stereotype. Contemporary Russian prose is far richer than that, and since 1991 all kinds of writing have blossomed.
One of the most acclaimed authors is Mikhail Shishkin, a multiple-award winner at home and in Europe, whose novel Maidenhair has just been published in an elegant English rendering by translator Marian Schwartz.
The first thing to stress about Maidenhair is that any attempt at summarizing the novel’s extraordinary complexity will fail miserably. “Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter — the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise — and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else.” So reads the first sentence of the publisher’s blurb, and while technically true it makes the book sound like a worthy, potentially tedious exercise.
In fact, the most important information is contained in the subsidiary clauses — that many of these stories are untrue, or legendary. For although the Swiss officers’ Q&A sessions begin in realistic mode, they rapidly mutate as the interrogations roam across time and space, blending myth, history, hearsay and memory. The identities of the speakers become blurred, as if the stories themselves and not the speakers control the narrative.
Shishkin also blends in other modes of writing. For instance, his narrator writes letters to his son, “Nebuchadnezzasaurus.” At first they discuss school and history before the writer details the breakdown of his relationship with his son’s mother. As the novel progresses, Shishkin incorporates the diaries of a real-life Soviet-era singer into the text.
Thus Maidenhair exhibits an extraordinary multiplicity of voices, eras and styles. It is this, not politics, that has made Shishkin an occasionally controversial author in Russia. His allegedly demanding style, his use of found material and even his residence in Switzerland have provoked and alienated critics, with one even claiming that he would “eat his underpants in public” if Maidenhair sold more than 50,000 copies — which it did in the first 12 months following publication. Sadly, the boxer shorts were not ingested.
Maidenhair is neither dry nor difficult. It is a delight to read. Yes, the book addresses the Russian experience, but it is not post-Soviet exotica. Shishkin has spoken of a desire to return Russian literature to its place in world culture, and he addresses themes that affect everyone — love, loss, war, illness, guilt, fear, death — without ever becoming trite or banal.
In short, Maidenhair is the best post-Soviet Russian novel I have read. Simply put, it is true literature, a phenomenon we encounter too rarely in any language.- Daniel Kalder
I love novels like Mikhail Shishkin’s Венерин волос – the title means, literally, Venus Hair, and Marian Schwartz is translating it as Maidenhair for Open Letter, for the fern the name denotes – that seep into my thoughts and occupy my mind so much that any other reading, whether a newspaper or another book, feels like an intrusion. I’ll try to explain without giving away too much… I enjoyed Maidenhair’s unexpected twists and transitions so was glad I didn’t know many specifics before I began reading.
If forced to summarize, I’d say Maidenhair is an omnibus of life – or maybe Life – that presents full ranges of pain and joy, simplicity and complexity, truth and fiction, love and war, and, of course, Mars and Venus. Maidenhair is relentlessly literary, with references to mythology and history that cross timelines and borders, but it is also relentlessly readable, even suspenseful, if you’re willing to accept its flow. I’ve heard complaints about Maidenhair’s naturalism but I think the book would felt terribly empty without it. In summary:
“И всегда так было: кому-то отрубают голову, а у двоих в толпе на площади перед эшафотом в это время первая любовь.”
“And that’s how it’s always been: at the same time someone’s head is being lopped off, two in the crowd, on the square in front of the scaffold, are in love for the first time.”
And that, dear readers – along with attendant marriages, births, bust-ups, ambitions, aging, and finding balance in the world – is how I see the crux of Maidenhair. A richly stitched, multi-layered homage to the coexistence of love and death. (NB: Without Woody Allen.) One other thing: Maidenhair also reminds that we, along with the stories we live and tell, repeat, like doubles. Shishkin reinforces the importance of our written stories in several ways. Characters mention written records and repeat old stories (I’m not telling). And the interpreter visits the remains of St. Cyril, co-creator of Cyrillic, in Rome, because those letters mean so much to him. Rome, as Eternal City, by the way, plays an important role in Maidenhair. So do belly buttons.
Yes, Maidenhair lacks a single unified plot and its story threads, knitted together by history, chance, and archetypes, sometimes wander. A lot, which can make the reading challenging but very rewarding. Two characters anchor the novel: a Russian speaker who interprets immigration interviews for Swiss authorities and a female singer named Izabella. We read Q&A sessions, we read of the interpreter’s family problems, and we read Izabella’s intermittent diaries, where we witness her growth from gushing teenager to a wife resigned to a husband’s infidelities.
Though the book’s structure and histories may sound complicated, despite familiar tropes, even Shishkin says the core is simple. Shishkin says in an interview in Contemporary Russian Fiction: A Short List: Russian Authors Interviewed by Kristina Rotkirch, that Maidenhair presents the concept “that life is not only in Russia, life is not only fear and is not at all to be feared – life is to be enjoyed.” At the 2011 London Book Fair, Shishkin likened Maidenhair and Взятие Измаила (The Taking of Ishmael) to conversations he hadn’t had with his parents. I heard Shishkin say that before I read Maidenhair, and I found the thought particularly moving after I read the book and felt the cathartic effect of its portrayal and cataloguing of the kindnesses and brutalities that life -- and thus our parents -- give us.
With difficult conversations in mind, here’s another line that struck me in its emblematic simplicity. It’s from a letter written by Izabella’s boyfriend, a soldier in World War 1:
“Это я с тобой разговариваю обо всем на свете, а здесь, в окопах, вообще никогда не говорят вслух о главном – люди курят, пьют, едят, разговаривают о пустяках, о сапогах, например.”
“I can speak with you about anything in the world but here, in the trenches, nobody ever talks out loud about the main thing – people smoke, drink, eat, and speak of trivial things, boots, for example.”
Of course boots are pretty important to a soldier, but his meaning is clear: the minutiae of life are fine but death, the underlying main thing, is off the list. Things probably aren’t so different for civilians.
After staring at Maidenhair’s spine on my shelf for more than a year, a bit afraid of it after hearing its reputation for difficulty, I’m happy I read straight through without researching too much as I read. It’s not that I felt lazy: I think it was important to accept the book’s flow – Maidenhair has such a mesmerizing flow that one friend likened it to a fountain – so I could appreciate the cumulative emotional effect and heady surprises of all those drops, lives, histories, people, stories, and words that Shishkin piles on. Though I picked up plenty of references, I know I missed nuances (and more) because of my lopsided knowledge of history and classics, but I’ll save a detailed analysis of Maidenhair’s shards of history, mythology, language, and, yes, Rome for another reading.
Also: Maidenhair won the National Bestseller prize in 2005.
Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: Close to top difficulty, though some portions, particularly the diary, are easy reading in terms of bare vocabulary.- lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/
Understanding is Not the Most Important Thing: Shishkin, Schwartz, and Post in Conversation
By Katherine Sanders
At the end of Book Expo America events on June 7, readers gathered at McNally Jackson Books for a Bridge Series discussion with Russian author Mikhail Shishkin, his translator Marian Schwartz, and editor Chad Post about Maidenhair (being released in October by Open Letter), a groundbreaking novel that traces both personal and collective histories through fact and fiction. Shishkin and Shwartz started the discussion by reading from the first chapter in both the original Russian and the English translation. It is mesmerizing:
Question: Briefly describe the reasons why you are requesting asylum in Switzerland.Answer: I lived in an orphanage since I was ten. Our director raped me. I ran away. At the bus stop I met drivers taking trucks across the border. One took me out.Question: Why didn’t you go to the police and file a statement against your director?Answer: They would have killed me.
The format of this conversation, and many like it throughout the novel, no doubt come directly from Shishkin’s own experience working as a translator for Asylum Seekers within Switzerland’s Immigration Department. The book is filled with these interviews as well as diary entries from a Russian singer living in war-torn Russia in the early twentieth century, and letters the protagonist writes to his young son whom he nicknames “Nebuchadnezzasaurus.” Shishkin has lived in Germany and spent many years in Switzerland, but he was born and attended school in Moscow. Fans of his work talk about his unique approach to the Russian language, and perhaps this comes from his conscientious distance from the motherland. Shishkin himself said from an early age he felt that “the Russian language is my enemy.” He didn’t relate to the “great, mighty Russian language” taught to him in school and, as a writer, he tried to bring what he termed “dead words” to life.
One way Shishkin brings his prose to life is by filling it with the voices of many characters. Translator Marian Schwarz talked about the challenge of recreating all these voices in English. She admitted that when she first started the project she received a more-than-forty-page document of explanatory notes from Shishkin himself to aid with the translation, but “even this wasn’t enough.” Considering not just the voices, but the various registers within these voices, along with allusions, neologisms, palindromes, and what Schwartz called a “fantasmagorical group monologue,” translating Maidenhair was no simple work. She talked about recognizing early in the process that translating this book would mean not just bringing it to a new language, but recreating its artistry in a new language. “I had to find a way to make English do what he does with Russian,” she said.
It was clear that Shishkin and Schwartz had a high level of trust for each other. In another interview about having his work translated, Shishkin has said, “I would compare the situation with the theater—like a director, a translator must feel completely free. The translation is like an adaptation for the stage, an interpretation.” Shishkin not only gave Schwartz a dynamic text to translate and supplementary text to support that translation, but also his total trust. As Schwartz noted, she often had to make difficult decisions, even cutting a sentence or passage altogether if it just didn’t work in English, which Shishkin fully supported. The overall effect is a stunning work in English that is sensitive to characters, voices, and emotions, and despite being over five hundred pages long, is constantly engaging. A draft of this translation was delivered to Chad Post, Director of Open Letter Books, who immediately fell in love with it. Maidenhair includes a combination of letters, diary entries, official reports, interviews, and stories wrapped up into a mosaic-like, yet seamless, narrative. Post echoed Knizhnaya Vitrina, a Russian book reviews publication, in saying, “this is the kind of book they give the Nobel Prize for.” Post is a translation enthusiast, having worked at Dalkey Archive Press before founding the University of Rochester’s Open Letter Books more than five years ago. The press’s mission is “to increase access to world literature for English readers” and Post knew immediately that Maidenhair would open up not only contemporary Russian literature to new readers, but give them an unforgettable reading experience. Post described the process of reading the book as sometimes ambiguous. The reader is left “not always knowing what is going on,” but the overall aesthetic creates an instinctual coherence along with a sense of searching and wonderment.
Shishkin summed up this feeling another way when he said, “Understanding is not the most important thing.” He talked about the phenomena of being in love, “you don’t know how it works, you just love.” He explained that he had the chance to read his mother’s diaries from when she was a teenager living in the 1940s and 1950s in Russia. At first he was shocked and disappointed that there were little to no references in those entries to the important historical events that were going on at the time; instead she wrote about her everyday life and her ongoing hope of finding love. Shishkin soon came to realize that her writing wasn’t from a simple naïveté, but a seeking for love in dark times—“seeking beauty in a world filled with destruction.” This in turn led him to write Maidenhair, “a book about human warmth.”
This human warmth was felt at McNally Jackson as guests lined up to purchase advance copies of the book and have Shishkin sign them. People seemed reluctant to leave. One of my favorite moments during the evening was when Shishkin told a story about a man who was imprisoned and drew a picture of the ocean and a boat on the wall of his cell. He drew it with great care and detail until it was completed. Then one day the guards realized the prisoner was no longer in his cell and the drawing had disappeared too. “Reading is part of my struggle for human dignity,” said Shishkin. And maybe this is more important than understanding—human dignity and warmth; and we can expect an abundance of both from the pages of Maidenhair.
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