All posts by Margarita Mospanova

Book

[December 10, 1965] For the People, By the People The Makepeace Experiment, by Andrei Sinyavsky

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by Margarita Mospanova

Long time no read, dear readers!

My dearly beloved, but monumentally aggravating home country has once again done what it has been doing since its unfortunate conception — the USSR has arrested another pair of writers that happened to disagree with some of its tenets. The court has yet to pass judgement but there is very little doubt the case will not go in favor of the accused, even despite the very public demonstration in Moscow in their defense on December 5.

Andrei Sinyavsky

Andrei Sinyavsky, who some of you might know under the name of Abram Tertz, is a prolific Russian writer and literary critic. He has published some of his works in the West due to their… stylistic differences compared to the usual sort of literature permitted in the USSR.

The demonstration in support of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel

As such, I thought it would be appropriate to review one of his fantastical novellas.

Lyubimov or The Makepeace Experiment is an allegorical story about Leonid Tikhomirov (Lenny Makepeace) and a small town of Lyubimov. Lenny starts out as a simple bicycle repairman who falls in love with a new school teacher in town, Serafima. Serafima spurns his affection, saying he is too unambitious and unimportant for her. In despair, Lenny ransacks the local library, trying to find a way to improve himself, until he comes across an old tome containing the secret to mind control.

Yes, dear readers. Mind control. I was surprised, too.

Armed with that new power, he gains control over Lyubimov, forces Serafima to marry him, and attempts to create a veritable communist utopia in his town while cutting all ties to the USSR. Spoiler: he fails. And fails spectacularly.

So does the Soviet military while trying to retake the town, but at least that is expected in a story like this.

The novella, while absurdist, is also a political satire and commentary on human nature, rational versus irrational, and the dangers of the cult of personality. Unsurprisingly, it’s one of the reasons for the author’s arrest.

While the protagonist of Lyubimov is undoubtedly Lenny, the story is told to us by the town’s librarian (who becomes Lenny’s assistant) and commented upon by the librarian’s ancestor (a disembodied ghost who sometimes hijacks the narrative completely) through rather amusing footnotes. In the beginning the humor had me in stitches, even reminding me of Gogol sometimes. Sharp, cutting, and borderline sarcastic, it added richness to an otherwise not particularly compelling plot. Unfortunately, the farther in we got, the more jumbled the text itself became. It might have been on purpose, but it was hard to tell.

Still, the footnotes where the narrator argues with his ancestor about how to start the story or the scenes where Lenny makes the whole town see mineral water as pure alcohol or toothpaste as vobla paste were pretty funny. So was the way the Soviet military attempted to disguise itself to get into Lyubimov.

Vobla. For those of you who have no idea what vobla paste is.

It is a pity that most of the humor was lost in translation, as far as I could tell. The style of the original text was incredibly informal, almost folksy, which added to the absurdism of the whole mind controlled utopia situation, but I saw practically none of that in the translated version. That is not to say that the translation is bad, exactly. It is functional. However, it could be better.

The same could be said about the story itself. It could be better. As I said earlier, it started off well enough. But by the time the plot got to the middle of the book it was so meandering and vague it was hard to pay attention to the characters. The abundance of metaphors and allegories did not help matters.

The core ideas do still come through loud and clear, but I would have preferred them to be adorned in something I didn’t need to muddle through on the way over. By the end of the book I was actually looking to when I could turn the last page and finally say goodbye to it. It is certainly not something I would ever pick up on a whim to reread. Which is, again, a pity, since the first few chapters were incredibly enjoyable.

Another thing that made me grimace with disappointment was female characters. The novella has only three types: superstitious old women, harlots, or stupid peasants. Not the best combination at the best of times. Even Serafima, Lenny’s wife, is depicted as a harlot who our main hero is trying to mold into a respectable woman. Watching him get jealous over Serafima’s past lovers was not pleasant. Or, really, all that necessary to the plot or the characters’ development, now that I think about it.

That is not to say that the male characters are all the shining examples of intellect and nobility, but they are all somewhat sympathetic. The narrator is probably the only one that can be categorized as a good man. But at least the men are not cardboard cutouts of the worst stereotypes in literature.

So, to summarize. Does the book work as intended political satire? Yes. Do I recommend it to those interested in the subject? Yes. Do I recommend it to anyone just looking to have a good time? A definite no.

Additional warning for an extremely non consensual nature of the relationship between Lenny and Serafima which includes some very degrading and upsetting scenes. Mind control is not a healthy basis for a successful marriage; please remember that, folks.

I give Lyubimov a very generous two red stars.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 4, 1964] (The Soviet novella, From Beyond)

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by Margarita Mospanova

Imagine a picture, dear readers. It’s a rainy day, the light coming in from the windows dark and heavy. You have a day off work and there’s nothing requiring your immediate attention. You make yourself a cup of tea or a mug of coffee and drag your favorite chair to the nearest window. Turn to the bookshelf to grab that novel that you’ve been dying to read but couldn’t find the time to and… several minutes later realize that you’ve been stuck on the first page for a while. You sigh, take a sip of something tasty, and force yourself to muddle through. And yet, the magic of the day is gone, the perfect atmosphere is gone, the enthusiasm for a new book is gone. The novel lies half open on your knees, its pages crinkling softly in protest, and, unreasonably irritated by the whisper of the rain outside, you resign yourself to another wasted day.

Well. That got pretty dark pretty fast. But because that’s happened to me more than once in the past, I now keep a stack of perfect remedies right by the chair. Novels are too long, short stories are, as you might guess, too short, but novellas and novelettes are ideal for when you want to relax for an hour or two but have no desire to commit yourself to something really time-consuming.

And the latest novella I had the pleasure of reading came from the authors easily recognized by our most attentive readers. From Beyond by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (From the Outside, Strangers, or whatever title the eventual translated edition will bear) started as a small short story and was later reworked into the novella first published in 1960.

Composed of three parts, the story follows professor Lozovsky, an archeologist leading an excavation site in Tajikistan. But each part has its own narrator: a military officer on a camping trip, a scientist from the excavation site, and finally the professor himself.

The structure of the novella deserves a separate mention because not only it is divided by characters and places, but it is also not set chronologically. Which, to my experience, does not happen as often as I would like, being a fan of experimental fiction myself. The first story actually deals with the very end of the professor’s journey and reads a bit like horror to boot!

And for each character the Strugatskys create a completely unique voice which adds a different mood for each chapter. The somewhat direct and down-to-earth officer leads us from a simple hiking trip on a sleeping volcano to a mysterious night encounter with a mad man. The scientist recounts the events in a dry and somewhat formal manner, sticking to facts and nothing but facts. And the professor is a bit naive and as enthusiastic as a child in a candy-shop, which makes his dedication and commitment to science all the more apparent.

All three parts of the novella deal with a first-contact scenario. Or rather a version of it, where humans are not supposed to be a part of the action, so to speak. The novella is fairly short and I do not see a reason to divulge all the details and completely spoil the plot for you, dear readers, but some things are just too good to ignore. As such I will allow myself to gush over one small, but still very much story-relevant part of the novella:

It has a space zoo in it! These two simple words are usually a surefire way for me to completely fall in love with whatever they appear inside. And this novella did not let me down. The zoo was probably my favorite part of it, if I have to choose. Yes, some of the details are a bit hard to believe. Yes, there are plenty of things to nitpick from the science side of things. But let’s be honest here. It’s a space zoo. Very little matters compared to that.

I have to admit that out of all the Soviet science fiction writers the Strugatsky brothers are fast becoming my favorites. So far, most of what I’ve read from them are short stories and I’ve been ready to move onto something bigger for a while now. As such, I am very glad I managed to get my hands on this novella.

No matter the subject, Strugatskys’ characters turn out alive and exceptionally well fleshed out. With just a few word strokes, they paint a picture so vivid, it is better than many a movie I had to suffer through in the past.

And so, it is my great pleasure to award From Beyond by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky five flying tigers out of five.

(Space zoo in zero gravity, dear readers. The tigers aren’t the only ones flying in this one.)

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Book, Movies

[Apr. 4, 1964] A taste of brine (the book and movie, The Amphibian)

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by Margarita Mospanova

In every reader’s life there comes a time which we all dread. A time we try to forget as soon as it happens. A time when we finish reading a book that by all accounts should be a delight but that instead bores us to tears and makes us wish time travel was real just so we could go back in time and skip the experience altogether.

And sadly, dear readers, that is exactly what happened to me when I turned the last page of The Amphibian.

But first things first.

The novel was written by Alexander Beliaev in 1927 and published just a year later, first in a magazine, and then as a stand-alone book. It was published in English in 1962 by Moscow’s Foreign Languages Publishing House.

The story is set in Argentina and follows Ichthyander, an adopted son of a world-renowned surgeon, Salvator. When he was but an infant, Ichthyander was very ill and to save his life Salvator transplanted a set of shark gills onto him, giving his son the ability to breathe underwater. Hence the name, as the parts of it come from Ancient Greek, translating to “fish” and “man”. The pair live a fairly idyllic life in large mansion, the father treating locals and the son spending much of his time playing in the ocean.

However, as Ichthyander grows older, he become more reckless, attacking Argentinian fishermen and returning their hauls back to the water. Until one day, one of the local pearl gatherers, Pedro Zurita, sees him, and realizing the boy’s potential as a pearl diver, tries to catch him.

That doesn’t sound too bad, you might say. And you would be right, the plot looks quite interesting. In theory. In practice, the story has been flung head first against a truly horrendous writing style, flat characters, and unnatural dialogues.

The Russian text reads like a badly done translation. It is all the more unfortunate, when the rest of Beliaev’s books (at least the ones I’m familiar with) are written perfectly well. I suppose the author wanted to mimic the often more abrupt style favored by Western writers, but if so, he failed. And failed spectacularly.

Therefore, it will not come as a surprise when I say: read the book in English. Ignore the original Russian text and skip right to the translated version. I dare say, you will find yourselves much more satisfied with the book than I did.

Still, there were a couple of passages, all of them describing nature, the ocean specifically, that hinted at what the book might have been had the prose been more… engaging. But they were few and far between.

Out of all the characters the only ones that had at least a small spark of life in them were Baltasar, Zurita’s right hand and the father of Ichthyander’s love interest (don’t start me on that particular train wreck), and Zurita’s mother, a cranky old woman. The rest were blander than cardboard.

(You might have noticed – I really didn’t like the book.)

And now we come to the crux of the problem. The book was bad. Why would I, or anyone else for that matter, bother to read it?

And the answer, dear readers, is that in 1962 it was made into one of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life.

The Amphibian Man turned flat and uninteresting characters into real people, dry prose into stunning visuals. It has you gripping the edges of your seat, from the beginning to the very end. You fret over Ichthyander’s naive and innocent nature, tie yourself into conflicted knots over don Pedro’s actions, empathize with Salvator, and curse the cruel Argentinian policemen.

This is a movie that, I’m sure, we will be watching even after the turn of the second millennium, no matter how optimistic that sounds.

And The Amphibian is the book that made it possible. That alone turns it into a worthy read, even if nothing else does. That is why, at the end of it, I give The Amphibian one bookish and five cinematic stars out of five.

(Now go watch the movie!)

[And come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge!  Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Book

[November 11, 1963] An integral future (Yevgeny Zamyatin's We)

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by Margarita Mospanova

Hello, dear readers!

Do you have books that you’ve always wanted to read but never got the chance to? Books that you’ve heard so much about they’ve long since made their place in your bookish plans and budgets, but haven’t quite managed to reach your hands?

The reason these books remain unopened still might be lack of time. Not quite full wallet. Or simply their absence from the nearest bookstore. But in my case, the reason often was censorship.

It won’t come as a surprise to many of you, but being a published author in the USSR almost unfailingly meant having to obey various rules and regulations of the people in power, written or unwritten. As such, many of the titles that I undoubtedly would have greatly enjoyed at the time were rebuffed by the editors before they even saw the light of day.

Now that I no longer reside in the Soviet Union, obtaining Soviet books is even harder. However, some of them were fortunate enough to trickle through the borders, with or without their authors. And here we come to the subject of this humble review.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin written in 1921 and first published in English in 1924 in New York, is still very much forbidden in USSR. The original Russian edition only came out in 1952 and, again, only in New York.

Having read the book, I can certainly see why.

The story is set far in the future, at least a thousand years or more, with the world having been conquered by a so called United State. As the name implies, there are no other countries or nations, though that might be attributed to the fact that a war wiped out more than 99% of the planet’s population several centuries earlier.

Curiously enough, though perhaps not unexpectedly at all, the war was fought over food and resulted in the creation of a petroleum-based substance that took its place on the people’s plates. The more conventional meals were slowly forgotten.

The nation, meanwhile, is governed by a single person, called the Well-Doer, who is overly fond of mass surveillance and standardizing his subjects. Names have been replaced by given numbers. People live in glass, completely transparent, apartments, and cannot draw down the curtains unless they have, ah, received the pink permission slip. Yes, it means exactly what you think it means.

When they go to sleep, they no longer dream, as dreaming is an illness and has been cured long ago. At breakfast, they chew exactly 50 times per each bite. On the streets, they move as one, marching in lines, wearing the same uniforms. Confusing emotions and imagination gave way to logic and reason. To formulae, equations, and science. There is no freedom. The people are happy.

They are also planning to build a space rocket (with the appropriate mathematical name, "The Integral") to share their way of life with any extraterrestrial life forms they might encounter.

The story follows one of the lead builders working on the rocket. A model citizen, D-503, decides to start a journal, depicting his daily life and thoughts, and then put it onto the rocket. Enlighten the aliens, so to speak.


the author

I will let you, dear readers, read for yourself exactly what we learn through each of D-503’s entries, but suffice it to say, action, drama, and (really, really awkward) romance abound. As well as, at times, rather confused ramblings of a man who has never before been confronted with illogical feelings.

Naturally, I read the novel in Russian. However, I did take time to peruse the 1924 English translation as well. On its own, it seems to be a fairly good read, but I’m afraid it falls somewhat short of the source. In the Russian We the writing is uneven, full of short bursts and ragged edges, that seem to be smoothed or faded when one opens up the English copy. And I’m not talking about the length of the sentences, but rather the structure and choice of words. Still, that slight demerit only really matters if one makes it a point to compare the two versions. If you have the chance (and ability) read it in Russian. Otherwise, the English copy will serve perfectly well.

The style of prose itself is very much in tune with the character, never straying too far from what we might expect, and yet delivering a gripping account of D-503’s deconstruction of his own world. The contrast between the mathematical precision of some parts and emotional upheavals of the others works nicely to highlight the faults of the world Zamyatin built.

Despite the bleakness and sheer uniformness of the United State, the characters we meet throughout the novel are vibrant and very much alive. Every single one of them has something to say, and every single one of them is worth listening to. The characters are the novel’s strongest side, and after finishing the book, I caught myself wanting to know what happens to them next.

In fact, the characters have quite possibly outshone any and all possible allusions to USSR and its problems for me. The satire and criticisms are plain, don’t get me wrong, but considering that Zamyatin wrote the book when the Soviet Union was only in its infancy, the impression they left with me is not quite as deep as one might expect. 

I greatly enjoyed We, for all its dystopian gloominess. This is a book that has now become a permanent fixture on my bookshelves and I foresee many rereads in its future. And so, dear readers, I invite you to try it out for yourselves. I promise it will not disappoint.

I give “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin five integrals out of five. 




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Book

[August 18, 1963] The Grass is Redder in the Future (Yefremov's Andromeda: A Space Age Tale)

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[The Journey always delights at the opportunity to broaden its coverage of current science fiction.  So you can imagine how blessed we felt when we discovered a stunning new talent fresh from the city of Leningrad.  We are certain you will enjoy what we hope will be the first of many articles from 'Rita…]


by Margarita Mospanova

A journey of a thousand books begins with a single page, a single sentence, a single word. And happy is the reader that can travel more than one language in his lifetime. Often, your journey happens without you taking a single step, but sometimes it can lead you halfway around the world, a single suitcase and a loudly hammering heart in tow.

The Iron Curtain may not be a physical thing but it is a perfectly tangible one nevertheless. Especially when you’ve lived your whole life on the Soviet soil and the thin trickle of Western literature could hardly slake your bookish thirst for science fiction and fantasy.

So, dear readers, you can imagine my joy when I first stepped off the ship in an American harbor and felt my literal literary horizon expanding before my eyes. A friend of a friend of a friend, that so courteously provided me with lodgings while I tried to get my wits around me and carve myself a piece of Western life, had only been too happy to encourage me.

I have to confess that in beginning I practically devoured the bookshops, without much care to what I read as long as it was halfway interesting. But that initial fever has long since faded and, several new favorite books richer, I can now take a breath and approach the shelves at a more sedate pace.

And in a corner of a small bookshop of which I have a particular fondness, I encountered several copies of this very magazine that you’re holding in your hands right now. Delighted, I read them almost in one sitting and wrote to the editor to express my appreciation. A short and exciting exchange later, I was asked to share my thoughts on the state of Soviet science fiction.

Oh my, I thought. That would be easy, I thought. There are so many to choose from, I thought.

Well, dear readers, I’m very unhappy so say that reality does so like to burn and salt the bridge before you can even step on it. Because while Soviet science fiction and fantasy books are indeed many, the number of them translated into English is… far from desirable.

Still, Lady Fortuna was on my side. The same friend that welcomed me to America has managed to procure a translated edition of Andromeda: A Space Age Tale by Ivan Yefremov, a book I finished reading just before my rather unplanned one way journey to the west.

Almost a year ago, the Journey covered a collection of short stories by Soviet authors, featuring The Heart of the Serpent also by Ivan Yefremov. Both stories belong to the same universe, and while the timing is a bit tricky, Andromeda seems to be set slightly earlier. The novel was first published in 1957 and later translated into English in 1959 by George Hanna and printed by Moscow’s Foreign Language Publishing House. And despite my expectations, the translation itself is done fairly close to the original text, retaining its slightly cumbersome style.

The story, while not quite action driven, still has a few tense moments that might have you gripping the pages in excitement. But overall the author focuses more on the social and cultural sides of his characters’ lives, preferring to use the future Communist utopia as a background for various social and philosophical issues.

It has been several millennia since our time and the world has changed. Earth has joined the Great Circle, a collection of sentient races capable of space travel and communication, but more often than not, not yet advanced enough to meet their neighbours face to face. The spaceship travel takes centuries and faster than light speeds are still out of the scientists’ grasp.

One of the plot lines follows the crew of a spaceship sent to investigate another planet after it goes into complete and sudden radio silence. On the way back home they run out of fuel and have to make an emergency landing on a planet shrouded in heavy darkness.

I will refrain from spoiling their struggle for survival, but will say that for me that part of the novel is easily the most engaging. But that is most likely my fascination with horror stories rearing its misshapen head.

The second plot line is centered around the Director of the Outer Stations of the Great Circle (a mouthful, that’s for sure) and his life after he leaves the post to his successor and struggles to find a new job for himself. His deep and enduring love for space makes the search much more difficult than it might seem at the first glance.

The cast of principle characters also includes a historian that is also an archaeologist, a psychiatrist, a scientist, and a biologist.


In the preface the author warns the reader that the novel is full to the brim with science terms, ideas, and details. And, boy, he wasn’t kidding. If anything, he understated the technical aspects of the book. The characters spend almost half of the book going on various science-themed tangents or engaging in discussions of philosophy, sociology, or how the grass was definitely not greener back in our times.

Still, the world Yefremov built is wonderfully bright and optimistic. Despite my… differences with the regime of my home, Andromeda’s future is one I would be happy to live in.

The novel’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness, in my opinion, is its extreme attention to details. It is easy to get buried under all the little things Yefremov includes to paint the future, but the same small brush strokes eventually form a rich and fascinating world, that I, for one, would grab a chance to explore.

And I advise you to do the same. Andromeda is a book that might leave you with mixed feelings, but it will not let you remain unaffected. It challenges you to think and evaluate the world we live in today, draw your own conclusions, and imagine what your own utopian future might look like.

I give Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale four iron stars out of five.

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