Olga zilberbourg is a Russian writer representing the fourth generation of story tellers. I mean the one that happened to appear after Russian renaissance, soviet Russia and writers in exile. She reflects in her stories much concerns about two points.. social upheaval and being uprooted.
Olga was raised in Sant Petersburg before she settled in San Fransisco. Most recently she serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.
About Russian literature and her creative works we had this little chat.
*For a start what do you think about the contemporary scene of Russian literature?..
Olga: With the fall of the Soviet Union, contemporary Russian literature has become decentralized. On the one hand, the print runs are a lot smaller, but on the other hand, many new publishers have entered the space, and many new voices. In the past few years, the market pressures have led to some consolidation in the publishing industry -- but there remains a number of small presses that discover new voices -- none of that existed in the Soviet Union.
*Do you think recent writers retained some principals of soviet era.. in contents and in forms. Or went back completely to great traditions of russian poetry and novels. And who is more influential. Soviet or russian writers. Inside and beyond borders?.
Olga: In 2018, Yuriy Saprikin, an influential Moscow-based journalist and editor, launched a project "Polka" -- "Bookshelf" -- where he asked a group of experts (teachers, writers, critics, etc) to nominate the most influential works of Russian literature. As a result, his team came out with a list of 108 books. At the top of this list is Lermontov's The Hero of Our Time, then Tostoy's Anna Karenina, then Gogol's The Dead Souls. Numbers six and seven are works written during the Soviet era, though anti-Soviet in effect: Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit and Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow-Petushki. So, the answer is: both, though I do believe that what we took most from the Soviet period is less the officially sanctioned literature (say, Gorky and Sholokhov -- though each of these is represented on "Polka"), but the underground and counter-cultural literature.
https://polka.academy/books?sort_direction=desc
*Of course there is some concern about who is more contemporary and influential.. Bakhtin or Berdyaev?. Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?. Is Gorky out of date or is still alive within new emerging voices?..
Olga: Hah, great questions. To me, Bakhtin, is definitely more relevant. I definitely aspire to writing carnivalesque and dialogic literature. I haven't reread Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy since graduate school, but I do return to Pushkin with great joy. His short stories are so much fun!. Gorky could probably stand a contemporary reevaluation and rereading. He still matters, for sure -- one of the best contemporary online literary magazines is named after him:https://gorky.media/
Any analysis of his work today would still read very political, I think.
* Do you have comments on the authorship of “Quiet Flows the Don” by Sholokhov and Freud by Bakhtin?.. in more direct words: Did they write the novel and the book or not?..
Olga: It seems that Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack writer had died in 1920 of typhus during the Russian civil war, participated in it, at least shared in writing the first draft. Most probably Sholokhov took Kryukov's unfinished manuscript, and worked on it. Although the Soviet state took side with Sholokhov, the daughter of Stalin asserted these claims. You can say it was not totally unfounded doubts.
On Bakhtin’s issue perhaps it's really Voloshinov writing, but using Bakhtin's ideas?. From what I've read on Wikipedia, this possibility seems entirely open.I don't know too much about Bakhtin, so I can't tell
*Who is the best Russian writer in recent time in your opinion.
Olga: I would highly recommend Svetlana Aleksievich, Liudmilla Petrushevkaya, Linor Goralik, Guzel Yakhina, Alisa Ganieva and more.
*And what aboutVladimir Sarov who is available in English and Arabic translations?..
Olga: I'm curious what you'll make of him. I've heard of him, for sure, but I don't particularly find his religious speculation interesting. My personal perspective, of course. Would love to know your take!.
*Now to the exile. How do you look at the writings of Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov. Do you think they had given new dimensions to Russian literature. Or others more represented Russian literature but lingered in the shadows. Who and why??.
Olga: In her recent essay "A Century of Russian Culture(s) Abroad" (published in a volume called "Global Russian Cultures," edited by Kevin M.F. Platt), Maria Rubens argues for moving away from the idea of "waves" of Russian emigration to the notion that loci of Russian culture exist in various places and time periods, and they are a permanent and evolving formation. "Each locus of Russian life that has emerged over the last century generated its own models of extraterrestrial identities, shaped by evolving relations with the metropolitan space and local geography." I find these ideas appealing.
Nabokov in his time, and Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn in their time had a lot to say against the totalitarian regime that sent them into exile. I grew up in a different era, and went abroad following different pressures. I'm not cut off from Russia--I could return there if I wanted to, and I don't hold a grudge. At the moment, I'm particularly drawn to stories of Russian Jews who found home in America. For instance, I've recently discovered the work of Anzia Yezierska, who achieved considerable popularity writing about the Jewish ghetto in New York City in the 1920s. Her book, Salome in the Tenements, was adapted into a silent movie. In the 1950s, she published her "fictionalized biography," that I haven't read yet but looking forward to.
*How do the Americans receive the Russian literature. And what is more respectable. Old great writers or contemporaries?.
Olga: Unfortunately, most non-Russian speaking Americans still recognize only a few names from the body of Russian-language literature. I say "unfortunately" because these authors, though important, provide a reductive view of Russian literature. Fortunately, however, there's a very strong group of translators who work from Russian to English. And these translators are often willing to be champions for their authors. I loved seeing recent translations of the work of Guzel Yakhina, Ksenia Buksha, Linor Goralik, Olga Slavnikova, Akram Aylisli -- an author from Azerbaijan, who writes both in Azeri and Russian. Lisa Hayden runs a wonderful blog "Lizok's Bookshelf" where she catalogs the top translations from Russian. I highly recommend it: http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2018/12/russian-to-english-translations-for-2018.html
*What do books do you have published in Russian and in English so far. And where you put your self. In Russian or American scene. In other words, to whom you do belong. Why?.
Olga: LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES was just published by WTAW Press in California. My previous book, The Clapping Land (Khlop-strana) came out in Moscow, in 2016, from Vremya Press. Two previous collections of stories were published by independent presses in St. Petersburg. I do most of my writing in English and work with translators who help me to adapt these stories to Russian. On occasion, I do write stories in Russian as well. I do love pondering the question of belonging and identification -- the answer to it has never been simple and straightforward one. As a writer, I strongly identify with my writing community in San Francisco--and I keep discovering new voices here.
*Do you have a say about American literature since you live in SF?.
O;ga: My view of American literature is definitely impacted by living in San Francisco. The voices that I hear most strongly around me often reach the commercial publishing houses in New York, but often they don't. Writerly San Francisco is a very cosmopolitan space in a way that's very different from New York. My recent favorite was a book by Lillian Howan, THE CHARM BUYERS, set in Tahiti and telling a story of a young man from the Hakka Chinese community on Tahiti who falls in love with his cousin. Two Lines Press, a San Francisco-based publisher that focuses on literature in translation, recently published BRIGHT by Duanwad Pimwana and translated by Mui Poopoksakul, which is the first novel by a Thai woman to be translated to English. My other favorite local writers include Tamim Ansary, who was born in Kabul and went to college at Reed College, in Oregon, Peg Alford Pursell, Charlie Jane Anders, just to name a few.
*What is the difference between American and Russian literatures in your view. Or both belong to one mind and two tongues?..
Olga: My sense is that barriers to entry into American literature are lower. You want to be a writer? Great -- get a degree in creative writing, and learn all about that profession. Obviously, this path depends on having money to get the education and to support yourself through this challenging and not very financially rewarding career -- and underprivileged groups have much smaller chances of accessing this path. In Russia, as far as I know, there's still only one university that teaches creative writing. Creative writing workshops have been popping up in various places in Russia, but they don't have the same clout as a university degree, and few publishers pay attention to them. So, a path to a writing career can be a lot more circuitous and depend on personal connections.
*Do you know something about Arabic literature. What. And what do you think about it. Who is better involved with Arabic scene, The states or Russia?.
Olga: The dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that traditional publishing connections vanished. The previous generations of Soviet readers were a lot better informed about Arabic literature than mine is. If literature from Arabic is getting translated in Russia (and I'm sure it is), I haven't seen it reach the mainstream booksellers and reviewers. Translation often happens through English--just the other day, I saw a review of a Russian translation of a book by a British writer, Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History.
Two writers who were equally present in the Soviet Union and in the United States are probably Egyptian writers Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris. Personally, I have very much enjoyed Idris's short fiction. But I'm not sure if he's read in Russia anymore. In the US today, I think Arab literature is best represented less through translation than through the work of the exilic authors. Translation does happen: I very much appreciate Fady Joudah's versions of Mahmoud Darwish's poems -- I still remember the line from his poem published in Narrative Magazine, where I used to work: "What / will we do / without / exile?" And speaking about exiles, you've introduced me to the books by Hisham Matar. I particularly appreciated his memoir The Return, but I went back and read his novels that I found quite wonderful.
*Does 11/9 catastrophe affect Russian literature? .
Olga: I don't think 9/11 affected Russian literature. Perhaps, it speaks more to the limitations of my perspective, but I haven't seen references to 9/11 of any significance in Russian literature.
*What kind of project you are working on now?..
Olga: I've been working on personal essays -- it's a new form for me, and I'm trying to see if it will be a productive for the stories I have to tell. I'd really like to explore more of my memories from growing up in the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution. Being a teenager in a country that was suddenly left without history gave a very particular slant of my understanding of the world, and I want to explore that.
*What do you read now. What do you think about it?.
I'm interested in reading more of women's stories and learning more from women. Yelena Furman and I have recently started a blog called "Punctured Lines" with the goal of gathering underrepresented voices of the post-Soviet literature. It's been a thrilling project and I'm learning a ton through it.
https://puncturedlines.wordpress.com/
*What do you think of Abdulrazak Guran, the new Nobel winner in 2021?.
Olga: I was very happy about Lyudmila Ulitskaya's nomination, but i had doubts she can win. I do not know much about Gurna. I look forward to reading his books!. His work looks very interesting!.
Interviewed by: S. Razzouk
