books @ cc.

by Danilo Kiš (1983)

A collection of metaphysical short stories set in various times and places, luminously darkened with the themes of fate and death’s impenetrability. With strong political undercurrents and recondite personal insights, Kiš’s reworked facts, Gnostic, Biblical, Koran myths and legends, political situations, rural folktales, depicting the delicate multitude and vicissitude of human life, perhaps with less faux vérité style than A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, yet with the same finely-crafted prose, subtle ironies and detachment that is both powerful and constrained.

by Danilo Kiš (1976)

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich consists of seven different yet casually interlinked short stories about revolutionaries, mostly centering around the Russian Revolution and its blind Stalinist totalitarianism that arbitrarily consumes its children. In its loose labyrinth of characters, loose deeds, occurences and details artfully described, readers find shadows of Borgesian influence. While the literary polemic with Borges is unmistakably deliberate with his faux documentary style (particularly A Universal History of Iniquity), Kiš’ lyrical mastery is all the more remarkably powerful in his detached yet delicate constructions of the grim subjects.

Menjadi Mahasiswa di Uni Soviet
by Koesalah Soebagyo Toer (2003)

A collection of vignettes about his study in the former USSR, Kampus Kabelnaya is divided into two parts: the first written as a recollection, the second more of diary entry-like short pieces, written during Toer’s study. Most of the pieces in the first part are longer, carefully-thought of (taking age into consideration), while the second has the youthful (if sometimes naive) romanticism.

by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

A renowned Moscow scientist (surgeon), Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky, with his assistant Ivan Arnoldovich Bromenthal, implanted the pituitary’s gland and the testes of a recently dead criminal into a stray dog, Sharik, with the unexpected result of Sharik turning into a complete human, a caricature stereotype of a boorish and stupid proletarian spouting revolutionary slogans (Engels & Kautsky) he doesn’t understand.

A Cultural History of Russia
by Orlando Figes (2002)

Thematically organized, the book encompasses the cultural history of Russia from around 17th to 20th century, with heavy emphasis on the earlier period, especially the 18th and 19th century. Central to all these themes are the questions of quintessential “Russian culture” and national identities: the European and Asian identities, the bourgeois and peasant differences occur as pervasive leitmotif throughout (sometimes to the point where its dichotomization begs a question of validity).

From Nicholas II to Putin
by Robert Service (2003)

Lucidly written with a lack of political bent and a handful of wry humour, this revised and updated history of Russia is a useful general reference on Soviet past with the main focus on the period of communist government.

Chronicle of the Future
by Svetlana Alexievich (1997)

( New version from the Dalkey Archive Press available )

“This is not a book about Chernobyl, but about the world of Chernobyl,” so Alexievich wrote, and indeed, instead of writing about what happened, she compiled a wide range of oral, first-hand testimony, accounts, sometimes occasional rant and condemnations from broad range of people involved and/or affected by Chernobyl. Plenty of tongue-in-cheek resignations in the face of something big and unknown gone wrong. Alexievich is mostly invisible—she allows everyone to speak for themselves—although a certain amount of editing has definitely been done. Alexievich realises that “suffering is our refuge”, that, as one of her interviewee said, people who haven’t suffered hungered for stories about suffering— “cheap philosophy”.