Volume 50, Number 3 · February 27, 2003
Haunted by the Russian Devil
By John Bayley
Pushkin's Children: Writings on Russia and Russians
by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated from the Russianby Jamey Gambrell, with an introduction by Alma Guillermoprieto
Mariner, 242 pp., $15.00 (paper)
The Slynx
by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
Houghton Mifflin, 278 pp., $24.00
Ever since Gogol's extraordinary fantasy 'The Nose,' about a pompous captain's nose which starts to lead a life of its own, Russian authors have had a peculiar gift for mingling the cheerful freedom of unresponsible fantasy with the seriousness of social and political satire. In the twentieth century Zamyatin and Platonov excelled at the technique, which did not endear them to the arbiters of Soviet correctness. Indeed Soviet 'satire,' if it can be called that, was utterly dead and mechanical because it was confined to politically proper formulas and was wholly lacking in this verbal freedom, the freedom of an exceptionally rich language, with an unsurpassed verbal agility.
Review, 3112 words
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