What is a nerd to do?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in Russia to study Russian with the long-term goal of studying Russian literature. Russia has a pretty beastly literary tradition. I would argue that they have the best of the best, which ain’t bad for a country that didn’t get any literary fire under their buns until the late eighteenth century. But what a fire! Pushkin really started things off with a bang on the poetry front, and Gogol sure held his own to get prose going, and then comes Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and Chekhov, which are the ones that Americans know, and then the twentieth century rolls around and all of a sudden seriously top-calibre poets are a dime a dozen and they all sit around helping each other out, and then you’re inundated with ungodly good prose writers who all sit around bickering about what literature is, and you’ve got brilliant literary critics around for the whole ride commentating on every writer’s every move, underground or otherwise, and the coolest thing about this infinitely rich and varying and developing literary culture is that Russians would read this stuff. Top-quality literary journals abounded and people actually read them, and hand-printed copies of censored literature circulated with, considering Stalin, relatively reckless abandon, and poets were rockstars and novelists were politically important. And then socialist realism happened and pissed all over everything (pardon the expletive, but there’s no other way to describe it. Imagine the New York Times being taken over by Newsweek for sixty years. Or Starbucks being taken over by Dunk’n Donuts. Or The Beatles by the Backstreet Boys. And then multiply that by a bajillion.) And then in the seventies a few good authors appeared and printed some stuff, and then the crickets started chirping. And the crickets are still at it.

This doesn’t only mean that contemporary Russian literature isn’t as mind-blowingly good as the Russian literary tradition has set it up to be. It also has the following two practical manifestations on my life that I’m going to whine about now. The first is the institution of the bookstore. Every bookstore caries a couple sets of “Russian Classics,” and “classic” is pretty broadly defined to include all the heavy weights, including the ones who weren’t read in the Soviet Union, so that’s good. Other than that, though, there will be about two or three shelves of Russian prose, two-ish shelves of prose in translation, and then about eight billion shelves of detective novels, romance novels, and tripe. So if you want to get a lesser-known work of a well-known author, you’re more or less out of luck. For example, Osip Mandelshtam was one of those fantastic poets of the early twentieth century that I mentioned. But he also wrote some important literary criticism. I was trying to buy a collection of his essays, and was having trouble finding anything. So I asked a salesclerk for help finding Mandelshtam’s prose. The answer was, “Mandelshtam was a poet.”

“Yeah, I know, but he wrote literary criticism, too, and that’s what I’m looking for.”

“Mandelshtam was a poet.”

“Right. A poet who also sometimes wrote prose? I’m looking for his prose.”

“Mandelshtam was a poet.”

I’m probably being super naive and idealistic, but I feel like that wouldn’t have happened thirty years ago.

The second situation is that I’ve been trying since I got here, diligently, to find a contemporary literary journal to read. I know they’ve got to be out there. The Russian “thick” journal is a Russian institution! But they are not on the shelves with the detective novels, and they are not in the big “press” stores, and they certainly aren’t in the little newspaper/magazine kiosks at the metro. You can believe me, because I’ve asked no fewer than 50 separate people for different journal titles. On the advice of a literature teacher on my program, I’ve begun a search for the journal “Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie”, which means maybe “New Look at Literature” or something like that. The journal goes by “NLO” for short. Really fun coincidence: “NLO” in Russian more commonly stands for “Neizvestnij letjajushij objekt,” or something similar enough, which in English is “Unidentified Flying Object.” So I’m looking for a magazine called “UFO.” Great. Imagine having the following conversation three times a day for two weeks:

“Hello, do you have the literary journal “Novij mir (New World)?”

“No.”

“Okay, what about the literary journal UFO?”

“Oh yeah, we’ve got UFO, that’ll be 12 roubles.”

And then you’re handed a tabloid about aliens. They must think I’m a pretty odd bird referring to a tabloid about aliens as a “literary journal.”

So today was a particularly unsuccessful literary purchase day – I was looking for “Speak, Memory” by Nabokov, which I couldn’t find, which is outrageous, and then looked for UFO at about ten places with no luck (unless seeing a cover picture of a crashed alien spaceship is lucky). And this is on the heels of my most excellent compartive literature course, about which I will write one of these days, so I’m a little riled up about the whole “state of Russian literature today” question, which is maybe why this post is perhaps a bit over the top? Ask me about Russian literature on a day when I don’t want to punch a newspaper kiosk lady in the face and I’m sure we’ll have a perfectly pleasant conversation.