The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Nine of Russia's Foremost Women Writers, published in Glas New Russian Writing, translated by Joanne Turnbull
reviewed by Michael Pinker

Nine of Russia’s Foremost Women Writers. Glas New Russian Writing 30. Trans. Joanne Turnbull, et al. Glas, 2003. 286 pp. Paper: $17.95.

Nine is a delightful collection of familiar and unfamiliar names whose considerable range and striking individuality highlight the richness of contemporary Russian fiction by women. Three early stories illustrate variations on the abuse that pregnant women endure from the state medical establishment. Svetlana Alexiyevich’s lonely “voices” recount a series of childbirth horrors. Maria Arbatova’s mother-to-be cannot be granted proper care, let alone a name. Nina Gorlanova satirizes the bleak comedy of incompetence that expectant mothers face. Each protagonist delivers herself of more than she might have imagined, including withering contempt for what ails the new Russia. Anastasia Gosteva, the most experimental of this company, uses her blasé heroine’s inner monologue to suggest the fashionable frenzy of a new intelligentsia’s cultural sophistication and myopic human relations. Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s two stories unfold delicate explorations of characters on the edge: an old woman so taken by Robert Taylor in Waterloo Bridge that she believes she has glimpsed him fleetingly reincarnated; a father desperately trying to revive his dear dead child in yet another nightmare hospital. Margarita Sharapova follows two circus athletes left in the lurch on a tour of Siberia as they pursue a comic railway-journey to rejoin their elusive troupe. Olga Slavnikova offers the first chapter of a novel about a certain Krylov’s early life, zany and perverse amid the spiritual expansiveness of the Urals. Natalia Smirnova’s two tales are parables, one of a family of women finally dispatching a plague of conniving shoemakers, the other of clever “Nina” turning a fortunate rendezvous with an attractive man into a relationship. Finally, Ludmila Ulitskaya unravels the figure of a modern Penelope, deftly capturing the pathos of one repeatedly inveigled by the convincing designs of other women’s lies, perhaps standing for all of us subject to the enchantment of a well-told tale.