Calligraphy lesson

Mikhail Shishkin is one of Russia’s most garlanded authors but somehow it has been more difficult for him than for his contemporaries to make it into English. This may partly be because Shishkin does not, unlike many contemporary Russian writers, use postmodernism as a shock tactic, and partly because he has lived abroad, mostly in Switzerland, since the early 1990s, so he is not generally an audible participant in the eternal dialogue between Russian writers and the state.

This extremely well-translated collection of fiction, memoirs and essays provides a useful point of entry, a summary of Shishkin’s abiding themes and approaches over the first twenty years of his career. In particular, Shishkin appears as a continuously, ironi cally, political writer. In the story Nabokov’s Inkblot, the narrator, a proxy for the author, is employed as a driver for a gangster capitalist who is visiting Montreux with his trophy wife and daughter. The expected boorishness is all there -the expensive cognac, the shopping sprees–but Shishkin, while making clear where the moral focus ought to lie, complicates matters until the initially unambiguous boundaries are dissolved and the narrator’s righteousness starts to appear as self-righteousness. (“The cognac was actually outstanding.”)

The two essays on language and exile, Language Saved and In a Boat Scratched on a Wall, are among the strongest entries in the collection, both making a case for the writer in his traditional Russian role of saviour or prophet, but approaching these cliches obliquely. Unlike Nabokov, who felt that leaving Russia required him to abandon Russian too, Shishkin sees his experience as an escape: “When I left Russia, I lost the language I wanted to lose”. The result of this elective loss -a pure, sympathetic and musical way of writing and thinking–comes across clearly in this book.

Unsurprisingly, Deep Vellum’s Latest Release, Calligraphy Lesson, Is All About Language

By Caroline North

“Dallas Observer”, 22.05.2015

In Language Saved, one of eight short stories in Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, Russian author Mikhail Shishkin writes, “The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into non-communicating vessels.” Translation is mutation, he insists, which makes Deep Vellum’s release of the first English translation of the collection all the more interesting. Much of Calligraphy Lesson is a reflexive meditation on the function of language, writing and the difficulty of adequately translating experience. But Deep Vellum publisher Will Evans clearly wasn’t afraid to try, and for the task he enlisted a number of renowned translators including Marian Schwartz, who also produced the English translation of Shishkin’s novel Maidenhair, which won Russias’s Big Book Award and National Best-Seller Prize.

Shishkin is widely regarded as Russia’s greatest contemporary author, and Calligraphy Lesson marks yet another challenging and important release from Deep Vellum. It falls nicely in line with the rest of their first catalog, which has included a number of philosophical and experimental works that explore the act of writing and challenge ideas about what literature should do. These include The Art of Flight by Sergio Pitol, a reflection on the Mexican writer’s life and influences; Sphinx by Oulipo member Anne Garréta, a genderless love story; and The Indian, the first of a raw and unusual three-part memoir by Icelandic politician and comedian Jon Gnarr.

The narrators of the somber and beautiful stories in Calligraphy Lesson have a lot in common with their author; many are male Russian writers, and several stories are set in Switzerland, where Shishkin currently lives. In the first, The Half-Belt Overcoat, we visit a narrator who contemplates his childhood growing up in the Soviet Union, a country without chewing gum that was “in the grip of a deadly word game,” causing people to fear their own past — say the wrong thing and you were punished. In another, The Blind Musician, the narrator says, “blindness is a seeing person’s concept. I live in a world where there is no light or dark, and that means there’s nothing awful about it.” Language does not convey truth, Shishkin argues. It is the means of our oppression, often creating the very concepts that enslave us.

The story for which the collection is named speaks the most directly to that theme. However, Calligraphy Lesson, which in 1993 became Shishkin’s first published work, argues the opposite side of the point, illustrating language’s usefulness as a tool for interpreting and managing an often pain-filled human existence. The story follows a police investigator who finds relief in writing, which allows him to impose order on the senseless violence he encounters daily. When a woman is killed by her son, the investigator is able to reduce the act to a form, a bureaucratic process. Language allows connections to be drawn in an inherently orderless universe; it allows a comforting period to be put at the end of an unresolvable mess. The crux of this philosophy is expressed when Shishkin writes: “A sheet of ordinary paper breaks free and rises above events! Its perfection immediately yields an alienation, a hostility even, toward all that exists, toward nature itself, as if another, higher world, a world of harmony, had wrested this space from that kingdom of worms!”

In other stories language is revealed as having the power to raise people from the dead (when the narrator reads news of his long-missing uncle Borya in Of Saucepans and Star-Showers), or to create a false sense of closeness between two people who are far apart (letters exchanged between lovers in The Bell Tower of San Marco). Language creates our reality, for better or worse, Shishkin says, but in all cases but one it stands in contrast to nature.

The exception is literature, Calligraphy Lesson puts forward, which through its artfulness, can arrive at the exact right way of being “tongue-tied,” and make it possible for a truth to be grasped by the reader. In the collection’s final story, In a Boat Scratched on a Wall, Russian literature is described as having emerged along with the concept of human dignity: “…[it] squeezed through the crack between the shout and the moan … It used words to construct the great Russian wall between the state and the people.” In a world where language is often a hammer at worst and a coping mechanism at best, literature creates a space for beauty and truth.

As suggested, Russian literature is bound up inextricably with the country’s history, and that is no less true of this collection, which surely made the task of translating it formidable. But the artfulness of this translation helps it to surmount Shishkin’s own claim that languages cannot communicate with each other. And he makes no claim that communication within a single language is any easier, saying that, “Even speaking Russian, there is no understanding one another.” Though the stories in Calligraphy Lesson are steeped in Russian history and have a distinctly Russian tone, many of the philosophical quandaries they engage extend beyond language and borders — they are universal problems, and this translation boldly and successfully takes them on.

Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

Book review by Jacob Kiernan

Calligraphy Lessons: The Collected Stories, by Mikhail Shishkin. Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, Leo Shtutin, Mariya Bashkatova, and Sylvia Maizell. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015. $12, 180 pages.

New Orleans Review 2015

Mikhail Shishkin, one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Russian authors, has won all three major Russian literary prizes: the Russian Booker, the National Bestseller Prize, and the Big Book Award. In 2012, he was Russia’s representative at the Book Expo of America. In 2013, he was invited again. He refused to represent Vladimir Putin’s Russia because of the political degeneration of his motherland over the past year. He stated in an open letter: “Russia’s political development, and the events of last year in particular, have created a situation in the country that is absolutely unacceptable and demeaning for its people and its great culture.”

Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, Shishkin’s first collection of short stories to be translated into English, explores the dissolution and backwash of the Soviet Union. The leading question of this collection concurs with one he asked in a recent op-ed piece titled “How Russia Lost The War” which appeared in The New York Times: “If the fatherland is a monster, should it be loved or hated?”

Stylistically, contemporary Russian literature is a pitched battle. Authors like Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin are decidedly postmodern. They boldly experiment with form, plot and the boundaries of the profane. Pelevin’s Generation P, in which P stands for Pepsi, is a Carrollian trip through the post-Soviet world of consumerism, drug culture and fantasy. In contrast, authors like Tatyana Tolstaya and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya represent a brand of dirty realism. They dissect the harsh conditions of Soviet and post-Soviet famine, both the physical and metaphysical. For example, in Petrushevskaya’s story “There Once Lived a Woman who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby,” a woman trapped in desperate economic circumstances and the claustrophobia of tight group housing becomes obsessed with murdering her neighbor’s baby.

Shishkin represents a unique negotiation between these two camps. He has certain post-modern proclivities, such as in the title story, Calligraphy Lesson, which centers upon the act of writing as erotica. However, in large part, Shishkin’s stories are traditional narratives that harken back to Lev Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. As explained by his translator, Marian Schwartz, “translating Shishkin means maintaining his virtuosic tension between complex detail and deeply felt emotion.” That is, likewise, the experience of reading Calligraphy Lesson; characters with great pathos navigate a distinctly post-Soviet bedlam.

In the autobiographical opening story of Calligraphy Lesson, The Half-Belt Overcoat (an unabashed tribute to Nikolai Gogol) Shishkin discusses the provenance of his masterpiece novel, Maidenhair. Before her last operation, his mother gave him a thick, oilskin notebook filled with her girlish handwriting, which inspired the novel. She was a teacher of Russian language and literature, and an intrepid Party member. Shishkin recalls, “she would equally have sent me off to Afghanistan not only with sorrow but with a sense of having fulfilled her mother’s duty to the nation.” But as regimes shifted and Yuri Andropov came into power, a cavalcade of catastrophe came down upon her. She was fired from her job and then fell ill, first her heart, then cancer.

Before this tragedy, Shishkin distinguishes himself from his mother by what he reads. While she read Brezhnev’s ghostwritten memoirs, he reads Varlam Shalamov’s short story collection The Kolyma Tales and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary-history The Gulag Archipelago, books about labor camps which were officially banned at the time. These books define Shishkin both politically and existentially. In Calligraphy Lessons, he explains, “Pushkin was a secret code, the key to the preservation of the human in this bedeviled country.” From Pushkin, Shishkin culled the most essential human emotions, repressed in a monolithic dictatorship.

Yet Shishkin does not blame his mother for her superannuated politics. He theorizes that what makes a good teacher is one who cultivates characteristics that will help them in that world. A bad teacher is one who instructs his charges to live by a different one. His mother was a hapless woman of integrity caught in changing political winds. He writes of his mother:

She never did anything but sing—like that grasshopper from the fable. Only in real life the survival of the ants building that Babelian ant-hill up to the heavens and turning into camp dust depended no less on her singing that on the supplies for the winter. She was the proverbial candle that illuminated, however faintly, their darkness.

While his mother’s politics were those of an antiquated regime, her stalwart sense of duty and preservation human dignity empowered Shishkin to write his novel. Recognizing the faults of the Soviet Union, Shishkin points to its citizen’s integral “human dignity” as endowing them with the potential for something greater.

The story Nabokov’s Inkblot describes a converse twist of fortune. The protagonist is an impoverished translator, who has emigrated from the USSR to Switzerland (much like Shishkin himself). After the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of wild capitalism in Russia, the protagonist is asked to act as the translator for a rich Russian bank executive, Kovalev, visiting Switzerland. The cretin turns out to be one of protagonist’s former classmates.

Corrupt Kovalev has made so much money in the dissolution of the USSR (“money smell everywhere…but in Russia, money reeks”) that he has decided to stay in Vladimir Nabokov’s room at the Montreux Palace. The protagonist is ecstatic to visit the sacred place, so he can peek at the rumored inkblot in Nabokov’s desk. He recalls:

“When we were young, Nabokov was banned. You had to copy him out by hand, type him on the typewriter. We passed him along secretly to one another and thought of ourselves as a persecuted sect, his books our treasured riches…Nabokov was more than a writer; he was our weapon. Reading was more than a way to pass the time out of boredom, but a fight, a defense. We didn’t want to be slaves and defended the only morsel of freedom in that life—our heads.”

Yet the protagonist does not understand Kovalev’s desire to share the author’s room. In his youth, Kovalev was a vocal Komsomol; now he is a churlish, money-obsessed businessman. Kovalev repeated interrogates the hotel staff to make sure that it is in fact Nabokov’s room, but when he arrives, he decides the room is too small, and moves to a larger one. Kovalev and his family drink, shop and criticize Switzerland for the duration of the trip, but tip well upon their departure. A couple of months later, the protagonist reads in the news that Kovalev has been shot dead in the streets in front of his bank—“Just a typical news story for Moscow at the time.”

The protagonist, however, does not revel in the Schadenfreude of this evening of fate. The last pages of the story turn into an address to Kovalev’s daughter, Yanochka: “What if you’re here now, reading this…I wonder what you have left in your memory about our trip…. You know, the only important thing is that there was a person for whom you were the most important being in the world.” Lachrymal perhaps, but even after the history has left him impoverished and Kovalev, the hypocrite, a dead, rich man, the protagonist empathizes with his counterpart.

The rest of the stories in Calligraphy Lesson continue in this vein. The collection consists of artfully constructed, empathetic tales of people living in the midst cyclonic time. While Shishkin’s criticized Putin in the press, he is more of humanist than a colporteur. He recognizes the failing of the Soviet regime as he recognizes those of the current regime. Among this carrion, Shishkin recovers a sense dignity of the individual that gives hope. Ultimately, this human dignity allows a breath optimism to run through these caliginous tales.

In an interview with “The American Reader“, Shishkin explained after communism, “[the Russian people] rebuilt the same barracks, we rebuilt the new dictatorship, we rebuilt the same regime that we used to live in.” Yet, the question that Shishkin asks in Calligraphy Lesson is the same one that the greatest Russian writers have been asking for centuries: how does one preserve human dignity in such humiliating circumstances? While the future of the nation remains unclear, Shishkin poses this question with subtlety and nuance. He counters dogmatism with humanity.

Mikhail Shishkin´s Calligraphy Lesson

By M.A.Orthofer

“The complete review”, 9.06.2015

Calligraphy Lesson collects eight stories by Mikhail Shishkin written over some two decades, including his 1993 breakout story, the title piece. They fall into two main categories: the personal, in which Shishkin recounts or reflects on personal experience, and the polyphonic, such as the title-piece and The Blind Musician, in which an overlap of voices makes for a tapestry-story — with The Bell Tower of San Marco teetering between the two, Shishkin describing a relationship from over a century ago and quoting extensively from the correspondence of the two lovers.

Several personal stories offer insight into Shishkin’s life and path. The Half-Belt Overcoat revolves around the passing of his mother, allowing for a look back to his Soviet childhood and youth and his relationship with his mother. Shishkin repeatedly deals with memory — recorded, remembered, and reconstructed: several times in the collection he mentions the loss of most of the family memorabilia (including, as he notes here, a diary of his mother’s) in a fire at his brother’s house, and here he describes how he came to write Maidenhair — observing that there was little personal record to go on in his (re)construction of the central character, since during the long Soviet era she sensibly acted like most people: “In those years people were afraid of their own past — it was impossible to tell what might later put you in mortal danger”.

Shishkin moved to Switzerland, and several of the stories are set there, as he deals with holding onto his language and heritage in this very different environment. He recognizes that Russianness is hard to translate or understand away from the homeland, that so much goes into language and literature, and so much is informed by experience; he sees that he has to reposition himself in order to manage for himself. Meanwhile, it’s eye-opening to him that:

“The students in the Zurich Slavic seminar read Kharms (with a dictionary and delight), but it’s not the same Kharms. The Swiss Kharms is about something else. Ours is Platonov’s identical twin. Their words, their Russian substance, cast on the Alpine wind, are pure.”

Both Language Saved and the concluding piece, In a Boat Scratched on the Wall, seem more like personal essays than pieces of fiction, as Shishkin explains his relationship to the Russian language, and to holding onto it and finding a way to reclaim it for himself (after first enduring a descent into silence) — forced to build his own “Russian literary ark” away from the corrupted country.

In Nabokov’s Inkblot Shishkin accompanies Kovalev, a typical ‘New Russian’ — ridiculously wealthy, part of the new corrupt system — visiting Switzerland with his wife and young daughter. Ostensibly hired as an interpreter, Shishkin realizes that he’s being paid to be: “a lackey, not an interpreter”. The man doesn’t recognize him, but Shishkin remembers Kovalev from their student days, when Kovalev had loudly toed the Soviet line. The job does give Shishkin the opportunity to visit Nabokov’s room in the hotel in Montreux where the master and his wife lived so long — and to see and touch the famous inkblot in Nabokov’s desk-drawer — a simple pleasure in which Shishkin wants to see meaning, but being in the company of privileged Kovalev can make it difficult — at least in the moment — to fully appreciate what is truly meaningful and memorable. Yet even Kovalev, who can provide any and all material comforts for the family he genuinely seems to love — while Shishkin struggles to get by –, understand (very well, it turns out) that his own position is precarious.

In Calligraphy Lesson, The Blind Musician, and, to a slightly lesser extent, The Bell Tower of San Marco, Shishkin uses a variety of voices to construct his counterpoint stories.

It’s noteworthy that much here is epistolary, or at least documentary: Shishkin specifically relying on the written word, in letters or documents, and not merely the easier-lost spoken one. As if writing — right down to the form (as in the calligraphy) itself — can be determinative and shape any content, one of these characters suggests:

“Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offer that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset.”

With its manageable size and its variety — and the personal background revealed in some of the pieces –, Calligraphy Lesson is an ideal introduction to Shishkin and his work.

Book review: Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson

‘Only art is capable of creating moments where our “unreal”, mortal time intersects with its “real” counterpart,’ says Shishkin.

By Leo Shtutin

“Open Democracy”, 19.06.2015

‘Literature in modern Russia,’ writes historian Orlando Figes in A People’s Tragedy, his vast chronicle of the Russian Revolutions, ‘was always a surrogate for politics.’ ‘No other literature,’ he adds, ‘gave such prominence to the social novel’.

Indeed, the disciplinary distinction between politico-historical and novelistic narratives, which tends in the West to be regarded as more or less clear-cut, has been interrogated, and made fluid, by writers from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. And yet, if overt reflections on politics and society have often been implanted into literary texts by Russian and Soviet authors, self-consciously apolitical writing, emancipated from questions of ideology or industrial production, also took on a decidedly political character during the Soviet period: the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, for instance, was deemed particularly pernicious by the authorities precisely because of its capacity to break free and rise above contemporary events, prising readers from the grip of paltry Soviet reality and transporting them into a linguistic Elsewhere.

The selection of texts in Calligraphy Lesson, the first anthology of Mikhail Shishkin’s short prose in English translation, straddles the divide between these extremes. Complex and allusive, the title story, which explores a court secretary’s metaphysical escape out of the violence of his world and into the pure domain of letters, graphic signifiers that ‘[clamp] an unraveling world together’, is juxtaposed with autobiographical – and at times overtly politicised – narratives such as The Half-Belt Overcoat and Nabokov’s Inkblot. Meanwhile, the anthology’s final story, In a Boat Scratched on a Wall, takes us beyond fiction and into the realm of the philosophical essay – justifying the back-cover hybrid categorisation of Calligraphy Lesson as ‘Fiction/Creative Nonfiction’. In this respect, the collection stands at the nexus between Shishkin’s novelistic output and his increasingly outspoken forays into the political arena, several of which have been published in The New York Times and The Guardian, among other British and American papers.

‘Current politics will never feature in my novels,’ Shishkin insists in an email interview with me. ‘Yesterday’s newspaper is a metaphor for death. Art, on the other hand, is an ark – you can take only what’s of utmost importance on board with you.

‘It’s really very simple. You’re staring at the Mona Lisa, say. And she’s staring back at you. And your gazes intersect in a space where time no longer exists. Or, listening to a piece of music that alighted in someone’s head three hundred years ago, you realise at a certain moment that the music has sprung from a place where there’s no death, and that, for the duration of that moment, it has rendered you, too, slightly immortal. Only art is capable of creating moments where our ‘unreal’, mortal time intersects with its ‘real’ counterpart, where the very notion of temporality, and therefore of death, does not exist. This is why we listen to music, pore over paintings, read books. We’re in search of such moments.’

Shishkin’s understanding of artistic practice owes much, it would appear, to the pan-European Romantic idea of art as a kind of redemptive project that offers us instants, however provisional or fleeting, of secular salvation. In Calligraphy Lesson, he celebrates art’s – and, more specifically, language’s – capacity to elevate us to the time-annihilating plateau that Gogol, in Diary of a Madman, dubbed the ‘86th of Marchember’: ‘A sheet of ordinary paper breaks free and rises above events! Its perfection immediately yields an alienation, a hostility even, toward all that exists, toward nature itself, as if another, higher world, a world of harmony, had wrested this space from that kingdom of worms!’

Another story, The Blind Musician, is explicitly ‘set’ on the ‘teenth of Martober’ – that is, nowhen and nowhere, Russian names and occasional toponyms notwithstanding.

He celebrates language’s capacity to elevate us to the time-annihilating plateau.

Nevertheless, Shishkin, who notoriously refused to represent a ‘Russia of impostors’ at Book Expo America 2013, also concedes that ‘it’s impossible not to talk about what’s currently happening’ in the country, proclaiming that ‘the existence of another Russia, beyond the Russia of Putin, is important for me.’

Though none of the texts featured in the anthology directly challenge, or even explicitly reference, the present Kremlin regime (and this in contrast to much of Shishkin’s recent output, including an essay accompanying Meinrad Schade’s photographs of war’s lingering presence throughout the former Soviet Union in the bilingual photography book War Without War/Krieg Ohne Krieg), the author’s political stance is unmistakeable, as is his ambivalence vis-à-vis the very notion of Russianness: ‘It’s an age-old question, and one that still hasn’t been answered: if you love your Motherland, should you wish her victory or defeat?’ asks the narrator of The Half-Belt Overcoat. ‘It’s still not completely clear where the Motherland ends and the regime begins, so entangled have they become.’

‘The very persistence of notions such as “homeland” and “fatherland”,’ asserts sociologist Hilary Pilkington, citing Steven Grosby in Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia, points to ‘the linking of individual identity to a territorially bounded collective identity via a perceived biological connectedness’. But Shishkin’s “Motherland” isn’t territorially bounded. (He would agree, I suspect, with Douglas Hofstadter’s eloquent suggestion in Le Ton beau de Marot that a ‘Russian’s soul transcends Russia’s soil,’ and that ‘there is no unsunderable unity of the physical land of Russia and the abstraction that is the core of Russian-ness.’)

A country not to be found on any map, it’s a linguistically and culturally determined entity that can persist in the hearts and minds of Russians far beyond the geographic borders of the nation state – in the author’s adopted country of Switzerland, for instance, where his native tongue, together with ‘the letters [he’d] traced out [in Moscow],’ was suddenly defamiliarised, made alien, upon arrival in the canton of Zurich: ‘A combination of Russian sounds that was so obvious and natural on Malaya Dmitrovka, with the Chekhov Casino raging outside, can’t get through customs here. […] Here, any Russian word sounds all wrong and means something completely different’ (In a Boat Scratched on a Wall).

This linguistic defamiliarisation, as made clear elsewhere in the same essay, proves politically significant. ‘When I left Russia,’ Shishkin explains, ‘I lost the language I wanted to lose’ – namely, the language that has always served as an instrument for the propagation of what he calls ‘totalitarian consciousness’: ‘Russian reality developed a language of unbridled power and abasement. […] In a country that lives by an unwritten but distinct law – the weakest’s place is by the slop bucket – the dialect suits the reality. Words rape. Words abuse.’ It is by means of this language that the state ‘wag[es] war against its own people’ (Of Saucepans and Star-Showers). It is by means of this language, too, that the regime is constructing inflammatory Us-versus-Them narratives of negative self-definition on state-owned media.

Conversely, Shishkin’s Russia, a porous, trans-border region of the psyche, is underpinned by the ‘non-totalitarian’ language of literature, and has taken refuge in the ‘squiggles of an exotic alphabet. Russia has gathered all its goods and chattel and taken up residence in a font.’

The Russian phrase nositel’ yazyka (literally ‘bearer of language’) is usually rendered as ‘native speaker’, and tends to present few problems in translation; nositel’ kultury (‘bearer of culture”), on the other hand, has no common idiomatic equivalent in English, and suggests a deep-rooted ‘fluency’ in the cultural vernacular of a particular grouping.

Just as the Cyrillic alphabet may be ‘borne away’ into external or internal emigration (and ‘internal’ here, of course, means a retreat into one’s own mind), so too may other attributes of culture. ‘Russians have concocted another Russia for themselves,’ Shishkin tells me in our email interview. ‘It’s a country of Russian culture, replete with Russian literature, music and art, but devoid of Gulags, denunciations, “Cargo 200” [the sardonic term for army coffins returning from foreign wars], “Crimea-is-ours”, and so forth.’ Interestingly and provocatively, he speaks of this ‘other Russia’ in terms of citizenship, declaring himself ‘proud to be a citizen of this country, a citizen of Russian culture. My compatriots there,’ he adds, ‘are Rachmaninoff and Tolstoy, and not Beria and Putin.’

There has been much talk in the last two decades of a ‘post-Soviet Russian identity’, of the so-called homo post-sovieticus, and Calligraphy Lesson sheds little light on such notions, if not altogether calling them into doubt.

Shishkin is the inheritor of a Russian literary tradition and, simultaneously, of a pan-European one; the pieces featured here must be read, first and foremost, as literary creations, regardless of their status as fiction or otherwise, and irrespective of what they reveal of the author’s political stance.

Real literature always serves as a conduit for mutual comprehension – a conduit that transcends international borders and invariably does more than politics in fostering understanding of the Other. Nor must we overlook a second such conduit: that of translation, both as art and as industry. (Calligraphy Lesson has emerged into the light of day thanks to the efforts of Dallas-based indie publisher Deep Vellum.)

At a time of almost unprecedented tension between Russia and the West, and with mainstream print publishing under threat in both the former and the latter (though for markedly different reasons), I suspect that grassroots publishing enterprises on both sides of the divide will play a crucial part in maintaining trans-border dialogue.

Mikhail Shishkin, and what life does to us

Stanford University. The Book Haven. 3.07.2015

By Cynthia L.

Often, I am often so bogged down in various deadlines that you would have to thwack me with a rolled-up magazine to get my attention. So I’m grateful that my friend and colleague Scott Esposito did precisely that, in a metaphorical, cyberspace sort of way, with Mikhail Shishkin‘s superb collection, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, published by Deep Vellum.

I know, I know. I appear to be the last person in the Western world who hadn’t read Shishkin, who won the 2000 Booker Prize for his The Taking of Izmail and the 2005 National Bestseller Prize and the 2006 National “Big Book” Prize for Maidenhair (Open Letter, 2012). I still don’t know Shishkin, if it comes to that, since I haven’t read his novels, nor have I had the chance to do more than sample this new collection short stories, memoirs, and studies. Until I put a few more deadlines behind me, it will be one of my many postponed pleasures.

As happens with many Russian writers today, Western journalists tend to situate Shishkin in the middle of Russia’s traumatic present, and interviews tend to focus on news rather than literature, even though Shishkin has been based in faraway Zurich for years. The tendency is reinforced because he is an articulate spokesman for a free Russia, as he shows in this 2013 interview:

“In Russia, before the revolution, after the revolution, the most popular writers were forbidden—it was impossible to buy or sell these books. But these were the most popular writings, so the ideal of writing was not to entertain, was not to sell. The idea of writing was to ask some questions that were very important for the writer himself, with the understanding that his book might never reach a reader.

“But all these questions are very important for everyone: How to live a humiliating situation under the dictatorship, but still preserve human dignity? And this is the question of questions. Russian literature of every generation has to answer it. Every writer has to answer this question, and we are a very strange country. Every generation needs its war and needs its dictatorship.”

The word “genius” has been used, and the Times Literary Supplement had this to say: “Shishkin’s language is wonderfully lucid and concise. Without sounding archaic, it reaches over the heads of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (whose relationship with the Russian language was often uneasy) to the tradition of Pushkin.”

Nothing I read about him, however, quite prepared me for the desperate urgency of Calligraphy Lesson, as if its lyricism were only a last match struck against the darkness. His prose breathes life – doesn’t breathe it, gasps it, aware of the perishability of words, of worlds dying in each instant, and us dying with them, as life is beaten out of us second by second. (“And I heard myself breathing, heard my lungs gulping in life.”)

The Half-Belt Overcoat, he recalls his “Mum,” a dedicated headmistress humiliated, dismissed, and broken during the Andropov era, and then dying inch-by-inch of cancer. After her death, he discovers among her things a long-ago “ordinary girl’s diary” that gives no traces of the terror that was gripping the Soviet Union during the Stalin years: “Its pages are awash with the unthinking youthful confidence that life will give you more than you asked of it.” The diary and family photographs are stashed away in Moscow after he emigrates, and turn to ashes in a fire, but the persona she left in her youthful diary stays with him: “That girl was born into a prison nation, into darkness, yet she still looked upon her life as a gift, as an opportunity to realize herself in love, to give love, to share her happiness with the world.”

“The world around is cold and dark, but into it has been sent a girl so that, candle-like, she might illuminate the all-pervasive human darkness with her need for love.” It’s the hopeless forever task of life breeding life: “this was not the naïveté and folly of a silly young girl who had failed to understand what was going on around her, this was the wisdom of the one who has sent, does send and always shall send girls into the world, no matter what hell we’ve turned it into.”

And what a hell it is – not only in the Soviet Union. The twentieth century is one of ideologies making a beeline to genocide. Even in peaceful Switzerland offered no refuge from extreme thoughts and incalculable grief. In The Bell Tower of San Marco, Shishkin traces the letters of Russian revolutionary Lydia Kochetkova, who writes incessantly to her future husband, Swiss anarchist Fritz Brupbacher – obscure historical figures, but oddly universal. Six thousand letters are preserved in Amsterdam, to give you an idea of the volume of the correspondence. In words that breathe the same infinite hope and aspiration that his Soviet-era Mum had had – before the illness, before the grinding poverty, before the political slap down – Lydia writes at the beginning of her new love in 1898: “‘Be fruitful and multiply!’ Can that really be all that’s bequeathed to us? Why even the mice and Koch’s microbes honor this behest. But man is infinitely greater than his physical self. And how can you reduce all of me, all my untapped resources, the yearning to accomplish something important, essential, that serves mankind, my people, my country – to propagation!”

After the marriage was over, she continued writing letter after unanswered letter to him. We know nothing of her death, presumably around 1915. Alone, alienated, or abandoned by family and friends, her last written words are a muffled cry that will likely meet many of us at life’s end, as lost and frantic as Desdemona’s desperate cry for one more hour: “My darling! Do you know what I regret most of all? I could have given you all the fullness of my love, but I gave you nothing but pain. Forgive me, if you can. And my heart cries out at the thought that my highest calling was just that – to give you affection and tenderness, but instead I squandered my worthless life on phantoms.”

Calligraphy Lesson by Mikhail Shishkin

This collection of short stories reveals the author as a true master of Russian letters

By Roger Pulvers

“Canberra Times”, 7.01.2023

The ideal book, to my mind,” said Mikhail Shishkin in a Russian interview in 2011, “must be made up of my life and of 10 centuries of Russian literature.”

This is a telling remark for an author who is managing to synthesise his own experiences, from his early years in Moscow to his expatriate life in Zurich, with the themes of a literature that vary, like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope, with every twist and turn of its country’s history.

Calligraphy Lesson is a collection of eight works, some fictional, others plainly autobiographical. In this book he has blended many of the themes of Russian classical literature into a unique contemporary record, a grammar of the Russian heart, in ways that Andrei Tarkovsky did visually in film. There is not so much as a trace of the soppy semiology of that wicked artifice, “the Russian soul”, here. It is the stark reality and brutal routines of Russia’s serial pasts that make themselves all-too-painfully present in the lives of the characters depicted.

Shishkin’s childhood memories feature large. In The Half–Belt Overcoat, an obvious reference to Gogol’s famous story, The Overcoat, we encounter him as a pupil at a school in which his mother teaches. His mother, a patriotic martinet no less at home than at school, “would equally have sent me off to Afghanistan not only with sorrow but also with a sense of having fulfilled her mother’s duty to the nation”. But little Misha rebels. After all, he is growing up in the samizdat generation, freaking out over Vladimir Vysotsky’s sardonic blatnyie pesni (criminal, or pariah, songs) about the gulag. His mother, however, is a “good teacher”. He writes:

“A bad teacher, meanwhile, will instruct his charges to live by a different law, the law of the conservation of human dignity. By and large this is a road to marginalisation at best, and to jail or suicide at worst. Unless they just shoot you.”

Shishkin escapes this bleak, if average, Soviet childhood and makes a life for himself in Switzerland, managing to look upon it all with clear-eyed equanimity and a good portion of wit.

These stories are delightful reads, despite the journeys they take you into the barren cruelty perpetrated on people by rulers and those who will kill to be rulers.

In another story, Of Saucepans and Star-Showers, the author is caught in a narrative between his estranged alcoholic father and his son, a bright university student in Switzerland. But this is no “home drama”. In 15 pages, he manages to connect the narratives of several lives running through his own. How he discovered the fate of his Uncle Boris, shot by German captors in 1942, gives us a grim reminder of the way in which the legacy of Red Army soldiers was manipulated by the government. His grandmother was never informed of the death, only told that he was missing in action and compelled to wait and pine for him until she herself passed away.

“The state was waging war against its own people,” Shishkin writes. And reading this story one feels that this applies to Russia in 2022 as surely as it did in 1942.

Shishkin turns to history as documentary in The Bell Tower of San Marco. Here he tells the story of Lydia Kochetkova (1872-1921), physician and socialist activist, and her husband, Swiss physician Fritz Brupbacher (1872-1945), who went on, after her death, to author books and lecture on sexual equality, contraception and legalised abortion.

The narrative contrasts their highly charged letters to each other with Fritz’s confessional diary entries, documenting a relationship of high purpose and emotional disaffection. Lydia deliberately abandons any semblance of Swiss stability, returning to Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet she finds herself drastically overwhelmed by her choice. The descriptions of the squalor of life in the backblocks of Russia are reminiscent of those in Mikhail Bulgakov’s notebooks when he was a country doctor two decades later.

Lydia’s fate, so dryly yet powerfully portrayed in the story, is a symbol of the revolution itself: ecstasy that turns into disillusion; betrayal by “comrades”; and the forfeiture of everything humane.

The story Nabokov’s Inkblot describes the re-encounter he has with an old schoolmate who was once a Komsomol toady, but is now an arrogant oligarch. Nabokov left this black mark in a drawer at a Swiss hotel they visit together. Though we learn the arrogant oligarch is himself blotted out by a contract killer in Moscow, we wonder what happened to his innocent, if spoiled, daughter, in an affectionate portrait of her.

The stories in this collection are beautifully rendered by four translators into a single consistent voice.

Mikhail Shishkin is well known as an unrelenting critic of Vladimir Putin and all that he and his tight circle represent.

“In Russia,” he said in a Russian interview in 2010, before the annexation of Crimea that he continues to oppose, “the government is the chief enemy. Writers are always divided into the militant (my example of this is Solzhenitsyn) and the staunch deserter, who, as a matter of principle, abandons all sinking ships. And if I had to, I would absolutely choose the role of the militant.”

He is currently fulfilling this role as, in my book, the greatest Russian wordsmith living outside, if not also within, that country’s borders.