From Russia, With Love

So I love Russian Literature. I do. If I could eat it instead of food, I would.

But something odd happens every time I try to recommend Tolstoy, Dosteovsky, Bulgakov, Gogol, what have you, to my average friend/family member/person I'm sitting next to on the bus to school. This person's eye start to twitch. I see knuckles crack, feet tap frenetically, and all of a sudden I hear excuses about being late for mysterious appointments, suspicious-sounding errands, the list goes on.

Russian Lit has a reputation for being longwinded and hyperbolic, dense heady stuff where you have to remember like 5 different names for each individual character ("Oh, hey, Raskolnikov, just to super-confuse the reader, we're also going to call you 'Rodion Romanovich', 'Rodya', and 'Rodka', okay?" "Okay Dosteovsky, that's cool, do I still get to quote Nietzche and kill little old ladies? "Oh totally Rodya/Rodka/Raskolnikov, I mean, I don't have a book otherwise." "Cool, just checking.") So all those things about Rush Lit (as I'm abbreviating it) are, to an extent true,  it's hyperbolic and takes forever to read.  This actually, for me, is part of the genre's charm. But long, dense, and complicated aren't charming for everyone. Right, I don't get it either.

But have found a compromise for my blogreaders-- a book (rather a trilogy) that is exciting, compelling, romantic, accessible yet edifying and--- BAH BAH BUUUUUHHHH-- Russian!

Children of the Arbat, people!

My friend Ariel Goldberg lent me his ratty, beat-up Soviet Union copy of this book like-- I want to say maybe two years ago? Ariel Goldberg's got Russia coming out of his ears. His parents are both from St. Petersburg, his Grandma survived Leningrad-- G knows his stuff. And he was like-- oh this is such a great book, you have to read it over the holidays. And I'm like-- I'm sure it is, I totally will. Dasvadanya, Goldberg have a nice break

And I started the book that night. And good God, it was good! And then I got the second book "Fear" out of the library as soon as the Young Research Library opened again for winter quarter. I was practically camping outside waiting for them to open the f***ing doors, for reals. Devoured "Fear" in maybe four days. Ran to the library again in my robe and curlers to get the third volume "Dust and Ashes", finished in tears. I really did. The other stuff was me being mildly hyperbolic, but that last bit is true, the last chapter made me cry and cry.

So here's what the trilogy is about. "Children of the Arbat" takes place in Moscow between 1933 and 1934 and follows the lives of a young group of friends growing up under Stalin's reign. There is of course, our lead, handsome, whip-smart, perfect, dreamy Sasha Pankratov, and yes I totally have a book crush on him. There is  sassy, mischievous Varya Ivanovna, her strictly by-the-book sister Nina, the lovely, gentle Lena I-forget-her-last-name-and-can't-find-it-online, Lena's boyfriend questionably moral Yuri Sharok, Stalin-era golddigger-ain't-messing-with-no-broke-what-what Vika Marasevitch, Vika's brother whose name I can't remember but he's kind of manipulative too. 

And so they're all friends at first. And then STUFF happens you guys!  Characters get exiled, characters get killed, characters flee the country, characters join the KGB and totally sell out their friends, drama, drama, drama for the next 2,0000-something pages of this trilogy. And we also every once in a while cut to Stalin, and have these really frightening revealing scenes with him, and it's really fun to go back and forth between this dictator and the people he's affecting and see how everything connects and plays out-- Rybakov just does a superb job of this.

This is a picture of Stalin looking really happy and evil.

I just thought this posting needed another picture.

 At the center of it all is a love story, I'm not going to say with who in case you read the book, because the way the two people discover it halfway through "Arbat" is so beautiful and surprising I wouldn't want to ruin it for the one person who reads this blog and ends up picking up the book. But it's a beautiful, beautiful love story-- for me on par with "Gone With the Wind" as far as that against-all-odds romance set against the epic backdrop of history thing.

So here's what you get with the "Children of the Arbat"-- fantastic story, brilliant characters, wonderful romance-- and--- and--- wait for it--- a history lesson! After reading this trilogy you can actually speak fairly intelligently about the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1941, "How about that 1934 Kirov murder igniting that Great Purge where Stalin ordered all those Trotskyites and other suspected enemies of the state to be arrested and murdered, heralding in the gruesome and terrifying new change in Stalin's already gruesome and terrifying Reign?" But the thing is, you don't even need to study and try that hard to be this smart, you can just read the books and you'll just be that smart through osmosis! Yay! Osmosis!

I feel like the way Jessica Seinfeld wrote that book about tricking your kids into eating vegetables by hiding broccoli in brownies, I feel like I should write a book about tricking people into being smarter by reading! Like the person reading is all "Oh this book is just as fun and page-turning as the DaVinci Code" and I'm cackling sinisterly in the corner all "Heh, heh, heh! You're learning, you're learning!"

Also the trilogy is semi-autobiographical, a lot of these nuts things really did happen to Rybakov, which makes reading these books even cooler/scarier. Also, look how handsome Rybakov is! Was, whatever. This is important too.

Also, this book was banned in Russia until the 1990's. They don't ban books unless they're good. Everybody knows this.

Last thing, and this is sort of off topic but also sort of not. So you know how it's kind of a cliche to say if someone is super mean and unfair that they are a Nazi? ("I can't believe my professor gave me this sucky grade on this paper I started at 4AM the morning it was due! What a NAZI!") You know how people do that? Right. So here's a really fun twist on that tired old joke (comedy writer/blogger Jane Espenson calls them "clams") Here's a fun spin on this clam. So here it is-- you use the name of a DIFFERENT fascist police force and all of a sudden you are just so clever! Like I've been known, on occasion, to quip, "The UCLA Parking services suck, they're the f****ing KGB." And everyone laughs and agrees. Try it. It helps if you put a four-letter word in front of said extremist group, that makes it more accessible to the more sophomoric members of the crowd you're joking to. But you have to use a fascist regime that's been gone for a while, Islamic terrorist groups aren't funny in jokes.... yet. I'm kidding, they never will be. Nothing that is topical right now will ever change. Ever, ever.

All right, that's all for now people. This book is just dazzlingly brilliant. Go read it and be happy you did. It's out of print (because I wasn't there to champion it, Pauline Kael style, when it was first published in English and it just didn't get the buzz going...) but you can still get it on Amazon and stuff. And if your library is big enough, they probably have it. But get it and read it. Promise. It's like "Harry Potter" cause it's a series and you just gobble it up, but it actually has application to events that really happened in history. (Kit to Self- That should get them going on Amazon and 2 day shipping this sucker to their houses. Potter references always work. (Cackles evilly for the second time this posting). Always.)

Okay. That's it for reals. Go read. I am, as always...

Affectionately,

Kit Steinkellner