10 books to buy on non/fiction – Weekend – Kommersant
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From 6 to 9 April, Gostiny Dvor will host the Spring International Fair of Non/Fiction Intellectual Literature. Weekend has selected books worth paying special attention to.
Oksana Vasyakina “Rose”
New Literary Review
In the last few years, the poetess and prose writer Oksana Vasyakina has become the main practitioner and preacher of autofiction in Russia, a new mode of intimate documentary writing that insists on the importance of an extremely private, non-generalized experience, usually a painful experience. Manifesto books of this trend are Vasyakina’s novels The Wound and The Steppe. Both are dedicated to the deaths of parents, the first – to the mother, the second – to the father. The Rose is their sequel, the final part of the trilogy and another waste novel. His heroine is the writer’s aunt Svetlana, an unlucky, infantile, capricious, hard-drinking woman who lived all her life in an apartment with her mother in a love-hate symbiosis and died of tuberculosis before she was forty years old. In this seemingly very simple story there is a mystery, a deep secret darkness, into which Vasyakina peers with tenderness and ruthlessness. “Rose” is in many ways a diary of depression, and the longing for someone else’s fate here becomes the key to one’s own despair.
Hanya Yanagihara “To Heaven”
publishing house corpus
Translation Alexandra Borisenko, Anna Gaidenko, Anastasia Zavozova, Viktor Sonkin
The third novel by American writer Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life, one of the most successful English-language books of the past decade. All the Way to Heaven is also a massive volume, but the genre here is more complex: an experience in alternative history and dystopia, reflections on colonialism, biopolitics, state intervention in private life – and at the same time a sentimental queer novel that you can cry over. The action takes place in New York of three eras: a fantastic 1893, in which homosexual marriages and other freedoms are allowed, but there is still no happiness, a more or less real 1993 at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and in 2093, in fascist America future (the totalitarian regime was established after a series of pandemics, during which the state proclaimed a harsh security policy). The parts do not have a common plot, the novel rests on a grid of rhyming motifs. All the Way to Heaven didn’t make a splash like A Little Life, but Yanagihara’s die-hard fans still love it.
Werner Herzog “The Twilight of the World”
Ivan Limbakh Publishing House
Translation Egor Zaitsev
Originally published two years ago, the famous German director’s first novel is a loose retelling of the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who refused to believe that the Second World War was over, and for 30 years – until 1974 – held the defense on the Philippine island with his tiny detachment Lubang. Werner Herzog wrote his book after meeting and having long conversations with Onoda himself in 1997, but it bears little resemblance to a classic biography or reportage. This is expressive, laconic and furious prose, in which reality interferes with fantasy. Onoda himself is a typically Herzogian character like Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo – a proud and cruel loner, a majestically absurd mad visionary. The Twilight of the World could easily be thought of as an outline of the script for Herzog’s next film.
Eduard Lukoyanov “Father of connecting rods”
publishing house individual
Written by the poet, writer and critic Eduard Lukoyanov, the voluminous biography of Yuri Mamleev is very different from the usual examples of the genre, and from what one would expect from the biography of the creator of Shatunov. One of the most radical Russian writers of the last century, a mystic and provocateur turned conservative thinker, Mamleev is a figure surrounded by an aura of mystery, with a reputation of either a dark magician or almost a saint. Lukoyanov does not leave stone unturned from all this. He writes an evil, revealing book in which both the protagonist himself and his friends in the Yuzhinsky circle appear as rather comical figures, demonism looks like cheap fun, and traditionalist searches look like intellectual degradation. Although The Father of Rods is the fruit of a great deal of work, Lukoyanov abandons the documentary style and gives room for grotesque fantasy, so that the text of his book in places resembles the style of Mamleev himself. And for all the causticity, this is a fairly honest way to deal with the legacy of the writer.
Steven Kotkin “Stalin: In anticipation of Hitler”
Gaidar Institute Publishing House
Translation Nikolai Eidelman
The second volume of a monumental biography of Joseph Stalin written by one of the most influential American Sovietologists, Stephen Kotkin, author of Magnetic Mountain (a landmark monograph for the study of Soviet subjectivity) and Armageddon Averted, one of the best books on the collapse of the USSR. More precisely, in the Russian edition it is even two volumes, in total – almost two thousand pages. The first part, Paradoxes of Power, which was translated last year, covers the period from 1878 to 1928, from the birth of Stalin to his victory over his party rivals and his final assertion as a Soviet authoritarian leader. The second part begins in 1929 and ends in 1941. This is the time of Stalin’s main political and economic experiments: industrialization, collectivization, the Great Terror – an era during which he gradually turns from a dictator to a despot. There is another important character in the book – the second European dictator of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler, the confrontation with which will be devoted to the third part, which has not yet been completed.
Eric Muggler “Time of the Wild Ghosts”
Academic Studies Press
Translation Alexey Kamensky
The work of the American sinologist anthropologist Eric Muggler, despite its seemingly academic nature, is an interesting read even for those who have little knowledge of Chinese history and culture. The object of his research is a small people living in the mountains in northern China, usually called either Yi or Lolo, although they themselves prefer the name Lolopo. Until the middle of the 20th century, they successfully maintained an archaic communal way of life. Then Mao came to power, collectivization began, followed by the “cultural revolution”, and modernity invaded Lolopo’s life in the most bloody way. Their response to this violence was stories of ghosts that plagued the tribe during the Maoist era. These were the spirits of both victims of the regime and its activists, perpetrators of terror. Muggler analyzes in great detail the ghost stories and exorcism rituals he has witnessed. His book is an amazing evidence of how the archaic is not destroyed by modernity, but resists it, becomes a way to survive the traumas of history.
Vincent Bevins “The Jakarta Method”
Alpina non-fiction
Translation Natalia Kolpakova
The American journalist Vincent Bevins worked in Venezuela, Brazil and Indonesia, countries that experienced right-wing coups in the second half of the last century. Understanding their modernity, he turned to history and wrote a book about confrontations in third world countries. In the center here, as you might guess from the title, is the story of the Jakarta massacre of the mid-1960s, when almost all Indonesian communists were killed. These events became known to the rest of the world thanks in large part to Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Killing Act, but more documents have been declassified over the years. It follows from them that the Indonesian repressions were carried out with the direct participation and in many respects under the control of the American intelligence services. “Jakarta” soon became a household word for operations to eliminate the communists, carried out with more or less success in the following decades throughout Asia and South America. The Bevins investigation is something of a revisionist history of the entire Cold War. It is worth saying that, despite the shocking material, this book is very worthy, both intense and dry, written.
Peter Godfrey-Smith “Metazoa”
Alpina non-fiction
Translation Galina Borodina
Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher of science and a passionate diver who has spent many hours with shrimp, polyps and octopuses. His book “Another Mind”, published in Russian three years ago, is devoted to the latter. “Metazoa” is its continuation and development. Godfrey-Smith sets himself an extremely ambitious task – to re-answer the question of what consciousness is and where it arises. To do this, he literally descends to the rings and barnacles, alternating his observations of the inhabitants of the deep sea with excursions into the history of philosophy, biology and physics. His answer: subjectivity, memory, experience are not only in people and not even only in higher animals. Consciousness is a feature of all living organisms, starting almost with ciliates. Actually, the mysterious “metazoa” in the name simply means “multicellular”. Despite the complexity of the material, this is an accessible and fun book.
Beth Shapiro “The Life We Made”
corpus
Translation Anastasia Brodotskaya
Beth Shapiro is an American biologist who decodes the DNA of ancient animals, including the dodo and the mammoth. Her book is partly about this, but not only. Shapiro’s thesis: it is customary to say that modern biotechnologies have a destructive effect on nature, humanity is a danger to the whole world; this is foolishness and superstition. In fact, people have always influenced nature, changed the climate, contributed to the extinction of some species and the emergence of others, shuffled the cards of evolution. In this sense, nothing new is happening now – we just have new means. In the first half of the book, Shapiro tells what happened in the previous 50 millennia, in the second – what is happening now. “The Life We Created” is a manifesto of technological optimism: genetic engineering brings solutions to environmental and social problems, makes life easier and gives the most amazing prospects (for example, the ability to resurrect mammoths). Even if you take this worldview with a grain of salt, the book contains a lot of interesting details, including from the scientific biography of Shapiro herself.
Edward Slingerland “Drinky”
Alpina non-fiction
Translation Natalia Kolpakova
Edward Slingerland is an unusually broad-based author: cognitive linguist, Darwinist in cultural studies, historian of religion, expert in ancient Chinese philosophy and poetry, but also in digital methods in the humanities. All these areas of activity are presented in one way or another in his popular book, the theme of which is alcohol. There is a paradox in the stability of alcohol consumption by a person: it is obvious that alcohol intoxication does a lot of harm – it interferes with physical and mental activity, and harms heredity. Why, then, has evolution not taken care to wean us from this habit? Some see here an evolutionary mistake, a failure. However, Slingerland believes that the opposite is true: thanks to alcohol, humanity has achieved its greatness in many ways, it contributes to the basic skills of the existence of the Homo sapiens species – creativity and collectivism. To prove this, the whole history of culture is used, mixed with the data of the natural sciences. The slightly irritating positivist style in “Navesely” now and then turns into a real hymn to wine drinking – and this is the unconditional charm of Slingerland’s book.
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