Translations from the Russian

2017
By Olga Slavnikova
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Overlook Press, 2010

In a translation funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and executed to perfection by prize-winning translator Marian Schwartz, 2017 is part literary romance, part political thriller, and a stunning tale of adventure, fantasy and obsession.

Set in the near future, on the 100th anniversary of the Revolution, 2017 reveals a Russia devoid of art and innovation, but full of danger, scandal, and wildly intriguing characters. With its harsh climate, social and ecological problems, its impoverished underclass and criminal upper class, the mythical Riphean Mountains become the perfect setting for this stunningly crafted Russian favorite.

Raised in the city’s slums where violence and theft are necessities of survival, Krylov discovers at a young age that he has a gift for gem cutting. This talent allows him to attend a university, where the greedy Professor Anfilogov – a man who lives a double life as a teacher and a gem smuggler – recognizes his gift and takes him under his wing. As Anfilogov embarks upon a dangerous expedition to hunt a lost treasure of priceless rubies, Krylov also begins an adventure of his own while he awaits the Professor’s return. He meets a mysterious and beautiful stranger named Tanya to whom he is irresistibly drawn. Their scandalous affair soon becomes dangerously complex as Kryov’s ex-wife Tamara, the wealthy owner of an undertaker’s business, hires a spy to shadow their every rendezvous and reveal the secret to Tanya’s identity. Soon Krylov finds himself navigating through diamond mines deep in the Urals, the criminal conventions of the illegal gem trade and carnivalesque riots that mark the centennial of the October Revolution.

Reviews

From Booklist:

Strange things are happening in the rugged Riphean Mountains in this rambunctious novel of Russian society 100 years after the revolution, winner of the Russian Booker Prize. Slavnikova’s imaginary mountains, which resemble the Urals where she grew up, harbor mischievous spirits protecting deep veins of rubies that attract two unlikely rock hounds, the impervious professor Anfilogov and his humble, steel-toothed conspirator, Kolyan. As Slavnikova’s high-strung, stubbornly romantic narrator, Krylov, a down-and-out historian turned gem cutter, sees them off at the train station, he falls in love with a stranger. Their affair is so clandestine they don’t know each other’s names or why they’re being followed. As Anfilogov and Kolyan dig for gemstones in a catastrophically poisoned landscape, Krylov’s ferocious ex-wife, Tamara, one of Russia’s new capitalists, faces a spectacular takedown, while a new, bizarrely theatrical civil war breaks out. Wildly elaborate descriptions, rampant anomalies, Krylov’s brooding, and a provocative mix of mystery and satire prove demanding. But Slavnikova’s characters are magnetizing, and her crystal clear vision of a world in which “commercial infinities” choke off humanism and art is salubriously caustic. -- Donna Seaman

From Three Percent:

It’s hard not to think of twentieth-century Russian history as you crack open 2017, Olga Slavnikova’s Russian Booker Prize winning novel. The year 2017 will mark, of course, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which culminated in the collapse of the Czarist autocracy and gave rise to the Soviet Union. It’s against this backdrop that readers enter this novel: a pot brimming with precious stones, a dash of spy novel intrigue, and a raw-to-the-bone social critique bubbling and boiling in a dense, evocative stew.

Excuse the metaphor. This is not a novel of food — far from it. But 2017 is a novel that asks you to savor it slowly, bite by bite. Translator Marian Schwartz, one of the most accomplished Russian translators working today — who has translated the works of Nina Berberova, Edvard Radzinsky, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others — has recreated Slavnikova’s dense novel in a smooth, eminently enjoyable English text. Passages describing the craft of obscure trades like gemcutting or rock-hounding flow from sentence to sentence with ease, making the translation seem effortless.

At its core, 2017 is a deceptively simple novel that explores the notion of authenticity in a modern life. In the mythical region of the Riphean Mountains, a gifted gem cutter named Krylov meets a woman named Tanya who, unbeknownst to him, happens to be the wife of his rich but humorless mentor, the professor and gem trader Anfilogov. Krylov and Tanya begin a torrid affair that finds them in new beds each time they meet. Meanwhile Krylov’s ex-wife, Tamara, a wealthy and powerful funeral director who still has her eyes set on Krylov, enters the picture and thinks it’s about time she and Krylov get back together again. And what about that rotund spy trailing Tanya and Krylov’s every move? Well, he may or may not have been hired by Tamara to keep track of their affair. Read more – Kyle Semmel

From New York Journal of Books:

History seems to collide with the present and manifest itself physically in this novel. “Mountain Spirits” and even an occasional ghost also glide through the pages. Olga Slavnikova’s Russia of 2017 is an ugly consumer-driven society far removed from the dream of a proletarian utopia that sparked a revolution 100 years earlier. In 2017 everything is a commodity, even death — funerals are as much a lifestyle statement as the clothes people wear, the cars they drive, or the mobile phones they use. The fictional Riphean region, which seems to be vaguely located east of the Urals in the Asian part of Russia, still contains vast wildernesses, but even these are suffering under the impact of human exploitation. Rivers are polluted and forests are dying, while in the cities a rich elite flourishes as a disenfranchised underclass is kept subdued on a diet of trashy television. Krylov, the novel’s dysfunctional anti-hero, hovers between the two strands of society, born into the underclass but given access to the elite through his rich ex-wife. He tries to stay an outsider from both. “[T]he main goal of a Riphean man was not to fit into society — including female society — in a nice way. His main goal was to remain an outpost unto himself.” Krylov is a talented gem cutter whose mentor, Professor Anfilogov, sets off to a remote river in the Riphean Mountains in search of valuable stones. The illegal plundering, cutting, and sale of these rare gems for human adornment is symbolic of humanity’s exploitation of its environment in the name of shallow consumerism, sacrificing the very soul of the Riphean mountains for the sake of vanity. As Krylov sees off the professor on his expedition he meets a woman at the train station and they begin an affair, conducted at a series of random locations chosen by sticking a pin into a street map. Neither Krylov or his lover know each others’ true name or where one another lives and they thrive on the precariousness of their relationship and the disastrous possibility that if one of them misses an assignation they might never see each other again. An omnipresent private detective spying on them and Krylov’s ex-wife complicate the relationship in a series of set pieces that combine surrealism and farce.

The characters and scenarios are more Borges than Dostoevsky, the plot dipping into the realms of science fiction. A scene in which White Guards and revolutionary Red soldiers appear to be playing out episodes from the 1917 October Revolution turns violent and the line between reenactment and actual historic events echoing from the past into the modern day becomes blurred. “The virus of History, which you’d think had been suppressed long ago and barely existed anymore, was spreading freely,” writes Slavnikova. This Russian Booker Prize-winning novel, translated by Marian Schwartz, sets out to deliberately disorient as reality and the ethereal, past and future, conscious and unconscious intersect, leaving the reader scrambling to find his bearings in Slavnikov’s dystopian premonition of Russia in the near future. It is an unsettling but satisfying experience. -- Tony Bailie

From ForeWord Reviews:

Olga Slavnikova’s novel 2017, set one hundred years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, is an imagined amalgamation of Russia’s near future and its conflicted past. The fictional Riphean mountain region where the book takes place resembles post-revolutionary western Russia, except poets, writers, and artists have lost all cultural relevance and the Red Cavalry and White Guard have resumed fighting — some in the vintage uniforms left over from the original uprising. The region’s natural resources have been depleted, and in so doing, the landscape ravaged. But 2017 isn’t just a dystopian novel. Slavnikova is a cheeky, intelligent, and forceful storyteller, and the book — which won the 2006 Russian Booker Prize — is a love story and treasure hunt, with the unlikely, downtrodden hero Krylov at the helm.

Obsessed from an early age with collecting stones native to the region, Krylov becomes a gem-cutter to follow his passion. As the product of an obscured cultural history that is shape-shifting and corrupt, he seeks transparency and authenticity not only from the gems, but also from the increasingly disastrous world that surrounds him. Eventually, he becomes ensconced in the greed, espionage, and even murder that accompanies the illegal precious-gem trade. Arguably just as dangerous are the mythical creatures of mountain folklore believed to beget fortune-making gem excursions with which Krylov and his cohorts also become entangled.

2017’s investigation of human suffering is familiar to Russian literature fans. Krylov’s recurring vision of his own specter and his relentless foot travel to every corner of his city bring to mind Nikolai Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich and his ghost tripping through the streets of St. Petersburg. At the same time, Slavnikova is a thoroughly modern writer; her cutting humor and over-the-top descriptions of classic Russian characters and nouveau-riche thugs recall Russian-born American writer Gary Shteyngart. In what critic Viktor Shklovsky called Russian literature’s “bad tradition [of being] devoted to the description of unsuccessful love affairs,” the love story between Krylov and the woman he knows only by the pseudonym Tanya hangs on by the barest of threads. Each knows no identifying facts about the other; they determine their rendezvous locations by selecting map coordinates at random and meeting at the point where they intersect. Though the plot twists can be outlandish, Slavnikova’s sensitivity to detail, character, and the human condition keeps 2017 clear in the reader’s mind, long after the excursion is over. -- Kara Mason

From Russian Life:

Krylov is a young and extremely talented gem cutter who is obsessed by transparency, with the luminous quality of rubies and other precious stones. He is also obsessed by the mysterious Tanya, with whom he has a prolonged, bizarre affair founded on exceptional uncertainties, and who — he fantasizes — will help him (as soon as he has enough money) escape the prison that is his life. But this is the centenary of the October Revolution, and reality and fantasy, past and future, hopes and hazards, are getting hard to separate. This is a Russia of the future, where the country’s harsh realities, ecological disasters and criminality have become amplified with time. Krylov, who just wants to slough off his violent, criminal exoskeleton, finds instead that his life is getting increasingly complicated, that the noose is tightening and there may be no way out. 2017 is a novel of ideas in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, yet set in the mineral- and myth-rich Urals. Slavnikova’s prose is dauntingly dense in the first third of the novel, and it is difficult to slog through her layering of back stories, but the payoff is well worth it. Marian Schwartz’s translation is opulent and lucid, belying the countless linguistic knots she had to unravel in order to birth this dense Booker-winning novel into English. In short, a gem.

From barnesandnoblereview.com:

Olga Slavnikova’s profound new novel 2017 evokes, with uncanny vividness, a Russia of the near-future in which a character reasonably wonders  “…how much about human beings is human?”  One hundred years after the Bolshevik revolution, the masses enslaved by electronic entertainment and cyber-wizadry now inhabit roles rather than lives.  Or so it seems to Krylov and his ex-wife, Tamara who deliver the novel’s darker existential pronouncements.  Readers, thankfully, are allowed a more thrilling view as they follow characters that, despite their shabbily futuristic environment, are as human as any found in Tolstoy or Chekhov.   

“For months he had lived with an incomprehensible hunger,” Slavnikova writes of the yearning Krylov, a gifted gem-cutter who begins an obsessive affair with a woman he meets on a railway platform as the gem-hunting expedition of shady Professor Anfilogov departs for the Riphean mountains.  Krylov is the professor’s most gifted protege, but who is this “Tanya”?  

As Krylov’s obsession intensifies, the novel simultaneously follows the Anfilogov expedition into a wilderness alive with myth and danger.  “In the light of the barbed stars the untrodden snow was like a televisions screen flickering on an empty channel,” Slavnikova writes, “the northern lights flickered in the sky like a flame from burning alcohol.” In the city, the moon shines overhead “like an elevator button” and when a 1917 anniversary parade turns bloody, federal helicopters swoop down “like sledgehammers with dragonfly wings….” Descriptions such as these, along with Slavnikova’s flawless portraits -- of a gigolo TV celebrity, for instance, or a fatalistic peasant -- transport the reader to an alien yet weirdly recognizable world, one that remains, for all Krylov’s doubts, only too human. -- Anna Mundow