The experience one gets when reading Miller’s far from lapidary prose is akin to the vivifying abandon of driving at top speed on an unpaved road with no destination. If this seems at odds with the callous disregard Miller has for the filth that is, in his view, the world, it absolutely is. The genius of Miller is that of life itself; willingly acquiescing to the veritable shit that have become our environs and living symbiotically with them as if it were god-sent. “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

And, indeed, one gets a steadfast notion that Miller is perhaps the happiest man alive while reading Tropic of Cancer or, at the very least, one of the very few miserable inhabitants of this planet who is, in all ways, Alive. To hone in on the blatant mysogony and contradictions found on nearly every page of Cancer is precsiely to miss the tree and see the leaf. Miller’s zeal for life is the dynamo here; what spews out of it is merely more evidence of the organic nature the text. Nothing is calculated here, everything is begot as things tend to be in nature – chaotically.

Tropic of Cancer is one of few works of “art” that has the raw ability to elevate your soul with one swift blow to the head. I hate to use an oft barraged metaphor, but reading Miller is indeed a trip – one well worth taking.

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature

2. Total Objectivity

3. Truthful descriptions of persons and objects

4. Extreme brevity

5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype

6. Compassion

Dutifully transcribed by yours truly from the Pevear/Volokhonsky…

The Huntsman (Chekhov, 1885)

A sultry and stifling day. Not a cloud in the sky…The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there may be rain, but it will never be green again…The forest stands silent, motionless, as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.

A tall, narrow-shouldered man of about forty, in a red shirt, patched gentleman’s trousers, and big books, lazily saunters along the edge of the clearing. He saunters down the road. To his right are green trees, to his left, all the way to the horizon, stretches a golden sea of ripe rye…His face is red and sweaty. A white cap with a straight jockey’s visor, apparently the gift of some generous squire, sits dashingly on his handsome blond head. Over his shoulder hangs a game back with crumpled black grouse in it. The man is carrying a cocked double-barreled shotgun and squinting his eyes at his old, skinny dog, who runs ahead, sniffing about in the bushes. It is quiet, not a sound anywhere…Everything alive is hiding from the heat.

“Yegor Vlasych!” the hunter suddenly hears a soft voice.

He gives a start and turns around, scowling. Beside him, as if sprung from the ground, stands a pale-face woman of about thirty with a sickle in her hand. She tries to peer into his face and smiles shyly.

“Ah, it’s you, Pelageya!” says the hunter, stopping and slowly uncocking his gun. “Hm!…How did you turn up here?”

“The women from our village are working here, so I’m here with them…Hired help, Yegor Vlasych.”

“So-o…” Yegor Vlasych grunts and slowly goes on.”

“I haven’t seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlasych…” says Pelageya, gazing tenderly at the hunters moving shoulders and shoulder blades. “You stopped by our cottage for a drink of water on Easter day, and we haven’t seen you since…You stopped for a minute on Easter day, and that God knows how…in a drunken state…You swore at me, beat me, and left…I’ve been waiting and waiting…I’ve looked my eyes out waiting for you…Eh, Yegor Vlasych, Yegor Vlasych! If only you’d come one little time!”

“What’s there for me to do at your place?”

“There’s nothing for you to do there, of course, just…anyway there’s the household…Things to be seen to…You’re the master…Look at you, shot a grouse, Yegor Vlasych! Why don’t you sit down and rest…”

As she says all this, Pelageya laughs like a foold and looks up at Yegor’s face…Her own face breathes happiness…

“Sit down? Why not…” Yegor says in an indifferent tone and picks a spot between two pine saplings. “Why are you standing? Sit down, too!”

“Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with here hand. Two minutes pass in silence.

“If only you’d come one little time,” Pelageya says softly.

“What for?” sighs Yegor, taking of his cap and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “There’s no need. To stop by for an hour or two – dally around, get you stirred up – and my soul can’t stand living all the time in the village…You know I’m a spoiled man…I want there to be a bed, and good tea, and delicate conversation…I want to have all the degrees, and in the village there you’ve got poverty, soot…I couldn’t even live there a day. Suppose they issued a decree that I absolutely had to live with you, I’d either burn down the cottage or lay hands on myself. From early on I’ve been spoiled like this, there’s no help for it.”

“Where do you live now?”

“At the squire Dmitri Ivanych’s, as a hunter. I furnish game for his table, but it’s more like…he keeps me because he’s pleased to.”

“It’s not a dignified thing to do, Yegor Vlasych…For people it’s just toying, but for you it’s like a trade…a real occupation…”

“You don’t understand, stupid,” say Yegor, dreamily looking at the sky. “In all your born days you’ve never understood and never will understand what kind of a man I am…To you, I’m a crazy, lost man, but for somebody who understands, I’m the best shot in the whole district. The gentlemen feel it and even printed something about me in a magazine. Nobody can match me in the line of hunting…And if I scorn your village occupations, It’s not because I’m spoiled or proud. Right from infancy, you know, I’ve never known any occupation but guns and dogs. Take away my gun, I’ll get a fishing pole, I’ll hunt bare-handed. Well, and I also did some horse trading, roamed around the fairs whenever I had some money, and you know yourself, if any peasant gets in with hunters or horse traders, it’s good-bye to the plough. Once a free spirit settles into a man, there’s no getting it out of him. It’s like when a squire goes to the actors or into some other kind of artistry, then for him there’s no being an official or a landowner. You’re a woman, you don’t understand, and it takes understanding.”

“I understand, Yegor Vlasych.”

“Meaning you don’t understand, because you’re about to cry…”

“I…I’m not crying…” says Pelageya, turning away. “It’s a sin, Yegor Vlasych! You could spend at least one little day with me, poor woman. It’s twelve years since I married you, and…and never once was there any love between us!…I…I”m not crying…”

“Love…” Yegor mutters, scratching his arm. “There can’t be any love, It’s just in name that we’re man and wife, but is it really so? For you I’m a wild man, and for me you’re a simple woman, with no understanding. Do we make a couple? I’m free, spoiled, loose, and you’re a barefoot farm worker, you live in dirt, you never straighten your back. I think like this about myself, that I’m first in the line of hunting, but you look at me with pity…What kind of couple are we?”

“But we were married in church, Yegor Vlasych!” Pelageya sobs.

“Not freely…Did you forget? You can thank count Sergei Pavlych…and yourself. The count was envious that I was a better shot than he was, kept me drunk for a whole month, and a drunk man can not only be married off but even be seduced into a different faith. In revenge he up and married me to you…A huntsman to a cow girl. You could see I was drunk, why did you marry me? You’re not a serf, you could have told him no! Of course, a cow girl’s lucky to marry a huntsman, but we need to be reasonable. Well, so now you can suffer and cry. It’s a joke for the count, but you cry…beat your head on the wall…”

Silence ensues. Three wild ducks fly over the clearing. Yegor looks at them and follows them with his eyes until they turn into three barely visible specks and go down beyond the forest.

“How do you live?” he asks, shifting his eyes from the ducks to Pelageya.

“I go out to work now, and in winter I take a baby from the orphanage and nurse him with a bottle. They give me a rouble and a half a month.”

“So-o…”

Again silence. From the harvested row comes a soft song, which breaks off at the very beginning. Its too hot for singing…

“They say you put up a new cottage for Akulina,” says Pelageya.

Yegor is silent.

“It means she’s after your own heart…”

“That’s just your luck, your fate!” says the hunter, stretching. “Bear with it, orphan. But, anyhow, good-bye, we’ve talked too much…I’ve got to make it to Boltovo by evening…”

Yegor gets up, stretches, shoulders his gun. Pelageya stands up.

“And when will you come to the village?” she asks softly.

“No point. I’ll never come sober, and when I’m drunk there’s not much profit for you. I get angry when I’m drunk…Good-bye!”

“Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych…”

Yegor puts his cap on the back of his head and, clucking for his dog, continues on his way. Pelageya stands where she is and looks at his back…She sees his moving shoulder blades, his dashing head, his lazy, nonchalant stride, and her eyes fill with sadness and a tender caress…Her gaze moves over the tall, skinny figure of her husband and caresses and fondles it…He seems to feel this gaze, stops, and looks back…He is silent, but Pelageya can see from his face, from his raised shoulders, that he wants to say something to her. She timidly goes up to him and looks at him with imploring eyes.

“For you!” he says, turning away.

He hands her a worn rouble and quickly walks off.

“Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” she says, mechanically accepting the rouble.

He walks down the long road straight as a stretched-out belt…She stands pale, motionless as a statue, and catches his ever step with her eyes. But now the red color of his shirt merges with the dark color of his trousers, his steps can no longer be seen, the dog is indistinguishable from his boots. Only his visored cap can still be seen, but…suddenly Yegor turns sharply to the right in the clearing and the cap disappears into the greenery.

“Good-bye, Yegor Vlaysch!” Pelageya whispers and stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.
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The Best Tales of Hoffmann is a mixed lot in terms of both content and quality. Hoffman is at his best, I feel, when his prose is almost seamlessly in cohort with the fantastic. He comes closest to this in “The Golden Flower Pot”, “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” and, at his darkest, in the truly strange “The Sand Man.” His stories fall their flattest when he is unable to reconcile his concept of the fantastic with that of reality. Rath Krespel, Automata and The Mines of Falun are prime examples of this.

Inherent in a lot of the stories is the very concept of inspiration and creation. For Hoffman, there is a fine line between poetry and sheer intoxication. This manifold collection is ripe with instances of this idea. The best representation of it, perhaps, is the story of the blooming poet in “The Golden Flower Pot” who wavers between his devotion to a world of fantasy and one of sober reality. Anselmus finds himself caught between two women – one is an ordinary girl named Veronica and the other is a mystical serpent. Choosing (for lack of a better word) the latter, he lands himself in the mythical land of Atlantis.

The relationship between inebriation and sobriety, in the artistic as well as carnal sense, is to be found elsewhere in Hoffmann’s work. In “Tobias Martin, Master Cooper, and His Men,” Hoffman presents two young men who have abandoned their true artistic calling (sculpting for Friedrich and painting for Reinhold) and taken up the position of apprentice coopers in hope of winning the heart of Rosa. Hoffmann seems to begrudge their decision, suggesting that art and inspiration should supplant the need for more worldly delights.

Moscow to the End of the Line is a harrowing look at the link between addiction and madness with a sense of desperation akin to that of Hamson’s Hunger or, indeed, Dostoevsky’s Notes From Under the Carpet (as my Russian speaking professor use to insist was the actual title). The physical and mental slavery of addiction, in this case to spirits, is presented to the reader in ways that are both humorous (with a heavy dosage of the pitch-black) and horrifying.

Erofeev stars in his own novel as the obsessive compulsive (but chaotic) alcoholic writer who finds himself waking up in hallways and lamenting the hours that will pass until the liquor stores open their doors. He measures everything in grams and their portents, beginning with a bizarre diagram delineating the connection between worker productivity and libation that ultimately loses him his job.

The bulk of the novel recounts his subsequent trip from Moscow to Petrushki where, supposedly, a beautiful woman who bore him a child awaits at the station. On the train, where tickets are paid in grams of vodka, Erofeev finds himself a few drinking buddies and begins to wax both prosaic and poetic about the nature of hiccups and the connection between creation and the bottle.

Plenty of this makes for hilarious reading. After a litany of famous drunk authors are bantered about, Erofeev and his partner find themselves stumped by the case of Goethe – who supposedly never touched the bottle. Not content with this, they come to the conclusion that Goethe was of course an alcoholic – albeit a cowardly one who drinks vicariously through his characters. Comparing Goethe to a comrade who didn’t drink but all the same poured it down the throats of his friends, Erofeev solves the conundrum; “The same goes for your vaunted Johann von Goethe. Schiller would serve him something, but he would refuse – and how. He was an alcoholic, he was an alky, your Privy Counselor, Johann von Goethe, and his hands shook, as it were” (85).

There are some more disturbing fun and games to be had on the train, although it all comes crashing down as Erofeev paints a picture of insanity that would be more comfortable if it could be taken for a case of serapionism rather than a hallucinatory bout with the DT’s. The end of Moscow to the End of the Line is fairly terrifying, although I would hardly toss out the word sobering. The work is too twisted and drunk for that to enter into any realm of possibility.

There is, for me, something about Russian literature that is culturally insular in all the right ways. One almost always feels that their authors are deeply in touch with not only their country, but its artistic heritage as well. This, naturally, often comes at the expense of Russia itself. Such is the case with The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a soviet era novel brazen enough to mock all the cornerstones of political hierarchy.

Voinovich and his family were exiled from Russia some years after Chonkin was published. His telephone line was cut, he was exiled from the writers union and, finally, forced to emigrate in 1980. You would think that all of this would lead to a very cynical and bitter writer. On the contrary, despite his multitude of political smears, Voinovich’s fiction is playful, hilarious and, in ways, almost reverential toward his heritage. As good satire is apt to accomplish, one senses a deep seeded love for much of what Voinovich critizes. Sure, he makes a complete mockery of government, although one gets the sense that beneath his veneer there is sympathy for the circumstances of the faces he blantantly sends up.

Chonkin is the absurd tale of an ordinary Russian man, complete with his set of faults, sent to play sentry over a plane that has crashed in the remote country village of Krasnoye. From there the novel springboards into a succession of misunderstandings and happenstance that find Chonkin at war with his own army and an institution akin to that of the KGB. It is a deeply enjoyable read whose laughs will remind you of those you proffered while reading Gogol.

Vladimir Voinovich’s The Fur Hat is a charmingly hilarious satire that spares none of its characters, save perhaps the narrator, the indignation they all deserve. Voinovich, banished from Russian in 1980 for “defaming the motherland,” writes prose that is crisp, modern and frequently laugh out loud (or chuckle quietly) funny. The premise of the book is an absurd one. One of Russia’s authors, Yefim Rakhlin, a terrible writer and a Jew who only writes about “decent men,” is given a hat made of tomcat by The Writers Union. The trouble is, Yefim and his inflated ego feel that he at least deserves a hat made of rabbit (as some other writers were given). His quest for the hat drives him to madness and culminates in and act of comical violence Mike Tyson would be proud of.

The delights to be found in The Fur Hat are many. For starters, there is the convivial portrail of Yefim. Yefim writes books, which he aptly titles with a single word with hopes of them making it into crossword puzzles, about men who perform feats of improbably ridiculous heroism. He has written 11 of them and is fiercely proud of each to the point where he reviews them himself. In the same apartment as Yefim lives Vaska, a Russian who feels that the Jews have a universal plot against mankind that is manifesting itself in the most unlikely places. In one case, this involves starfish with 5 legs rather than 6. In another, he combines newspaper headlines to come to the imporbable conclusion that the newspaper is suggesting “We Will Never Allow a Russian Song Festival.”

There hardly is a page of prose in The Fur Hat which escapes the winsome and playful hand of Voinovich. If you are familiar with Russian literature and are looking for a pleasing way to spend an afternoon, look no further.

Zoshchenko comes across as an ordinary, intelligent and above all humorous documentarian of the state of Russia during trying times. His prose is a marked departure from the excess and fantastical visions of authors such as Bely and Gogol. Here one’s senses are not under the constant deluge of delirium and stimuli that adumbrates, say, Petersburg. Zoschenko eschews this approach in favor of a down to earth and sincerely sad snap shots of urban life where families occupy bathrooms and priests, who themsevles aren’t sure of their faith, listen to the confessions of others. In spite of their melancholy leitmotif when read in succession, all of Zoshchenkos stories are very humorous.

This marriage of sadness and authentic day-to-day absurdity is encapsulated well in the title tale. In Scenes From the Bathhouse, men find themselves without the materials they need to wash, no place to put their tickets and the constant threat of their clothes being stolen. The latter happens in the stories second iteration, leaving a man trembling with the humiliation that he might have to walk home with no pants on. When the manager is brought in, he is embarassed further when a woman walks in on his precarious situation. All of this is funny reading, although it is underscored by the realities of a country in a state of poverty.

Aptly, there is a tale in the collection titled Poverty. One of my favorites in the bunch, Poverty recounts the introduction of electricity into an apartment building previously lit by more natural means. This great invasion of techniclogical progress only makes the characters double-take at the true desparity they had previously been living in before they had the artificial light to illuminate it. One of the tenants immediately begins to clean only to find out that the landlord has decided, to the tenant’s displeasure, to remove this great technilogical advance from her building; she cannot come to grips with how shabby her own abode looks and decides not to deal with the extra work necessary in tidying up.

Nearly all of the stories are written in a slightly spruced up version of common street language. Almost none of the characters are admirable, although Zoshchenko refrains from any true moral judgement of their character. He is, and rightly so, more concerned with the circumstance that surrounds them.

The second book in a row that I have read where parallelepipeds were mentioned, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a strong testament and pillar (perhaps the first that was installed) of the dystopian genre. Dashed out in broad strokes (“every word must be supercharged, high voltage”), We is the tale of a man and society composed entirely of numbers and willing servitude. Happiness, in the One True State, is precisely linked to the lack of free will. You know where this is going by now, I suppose.

D-503, our dedicated engineer and narrator, falls in love (or something like that) with a fiery revolutionary who may or may not be using D as means to a chaotic end where walls (which D prizes above all else) are demolished and chaos (nature) is allowed to breath. All of it makes for engaging reading that immediately brings to mind Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and a host of other nightmarish visions such as lobotomies and mechanized (literally) citizens.

As in so many great Russian texts, D-503 suffers with a schizophrenic madness that becomes the soul of a text which satirizes the mere idea of a soul. In no uncertain terms, a soul is a disease in the eyes of a society built upon the ideals of Frederick Winslow Taylor (who really was a fucking crazy guy, by the way). The literary delights to be had in We are many, albeit of the same sort. Though it deals with ideas that have become tropes of Science Fiction, Zamyatin’s novel manages to feel entirely fresh. This is partially due to the circumstances in which it was written (Russia didn’t even see its publication until the 1980′s) and the curious way in which Zamyatin inhabits his protagonist.

D-503 attempts to quantify life, quite literally, and cannot come to grips with the fact that an irrational number could exist in a world where rationality has taken the throne. His madness would seem silly if Zamyatin hadn’t done such a noble job of envisioning a world so far outside the grips of reality that it, paradoxically, feels like it could come to exist. Quote after the…

Take two trays of a weight scale: put a gram on one, and on the other, put a ton. On one side is the “I,” on the other side is the “WE,” the One State. Isn’t it clear? Assuming taht “I” has the same “rights” compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a gram can counterbalance a ton. Here is the distribution: a ton has rights, a gram has duties. And this is the natural path from insignificance to greatness: forget that you are the gram, and feel as though you are a millionth part of the ton…

Petersburg is an astonishing composition that blends much of what many love about 19th century Russian Lit with a daunting symbolist aesthetic that practically swallows its strands of plot into a prenatal existence. Sure, there is a narrative – a bomb, politics, parricide – but the crux of Petersburg is the dazzling imagery and false signifiers that Bely relentlessly cascades from every page.

The novel is nearly as concerned with shapes as it is with humans. Cubes, pyramids and, yes, even parallelepipeds are given the same (and on occasions more) notice than the men and women who stroll about them. The result is a dizzying and at times hallucinatory painting of a city and  a world where symbolic sensation does not correspond to the stimulus.  Everything is caught in an integument of shapes and sensations with nowhere to expand. Nowhere is this captured better than in the case of Alexandr Ivanovich.

His ephemeral descent into delirium is perhaps the most perfectly realized account of madness I have read in any Russian novel (and if we’re talking madness here, Russian authors hold the throne imo). I would try to describe the end of chapter six, but my words would be impotent. I will simply sum it up with the word “enfranshish” and remark that it involves a giant bronze horse come to life and a host of other things that make for some breathtaking reading along the lines of Gogol although, and its hard for me to say, likely better.

There is plenty more to talk about here – language, narration, bodily deatchment, repetition – but I would simply like to say that this is a book worth reading. Well worth reading. It’s astonishing.