{"id":297386,"date":"2014-04-08T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/04\/08\/sankya\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:23","slug":"sankya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/04\/08\/sankya\/","title":{"rendered":"Sankya"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Sankya<\/em> was published in Russia in 2006, it became a sensation. It won the Yasnaya Polyana Award (bestowed by direct descendants of Leo Tolstoy) and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and the National Bestseller Award. Every member of the cultural elite had an opinion on it. There was even a hatchet job by the president of Russia\u2019s largest commercial bank; the banker-cum-critic received an avalanche of responses rebuking his review. Many reviewers disagreed with the Prilepin\u2019s political beliefs, but acknowledged that the novel is a literary masterpiece. Already widely translated in Europe, this book struck a raw nerve, to say the least. The timely English edition, featuring an excellent translation by Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker (with Alina Ryabovolova), and a heartfelt forward by Alexey Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption activist, will introduce America to a unique talent as well as the kind of Russia very few foreigners have seen. For the soul of the country is never in the news headlines; it is in literature. Sankya<\/em> succeeds brilliantly in plunging the reader into the psyche of the young people on the fringes of the success story Russia projected to the world during the Sochi Olympics.<\/p>\n

Twenty-two-year-old Sasha Tishin\u2014or Sankya, as his grandmother calls him\u2014and his friends are members of the Founders, an extremist right-wing group loosely based on the now-banned National Bolsheviks. The Founders want to tear down the corrupt government, destroy Western-style capitalism, and build a better country\u2014one based on dignity, on ideals, one close \u201cto the soil,\u201d something like the Soviet Union but not quite, not so bureaucratic. If that sounds vague, it\u2019s because in the beginning the Founders don\u2019t have a plan beyond demonstrations, which often devolve into street vandalism. The book opens with one such protest. Sasha and his friends narrowly escape the riot police, but even the possibility of jail hardly scares Sasha. He will survive it, he thinks, because he\u2019d survived his mandatory army service, a notoriously harsh ordeal in Russia. <\/p>\n

Sasha returns to his small, dreary town, visits his grandparents in the dying village of his childhood, then goes to Moscow again, to hang out in the \u201cbunker,\u201d the Founders\u2019 headquarters, and shyly court Yana, the rumored lover of their jailed leader. Sometimes he just meanders the streets as his thoughts meander in his head. What to do? Where to go? Sasha\u2019s father had died a year and a half before the novels opens; his father was the last of three brothers to succumb to alcoholism, and alcohol is a central character in the novel: a comforter, a friend, an agitator, and a truth-teller. Sasha\u2019s mother, \u201ctired, like every Russian woman who had been alive for more than half a century,\u201d works long shifts. The only jobs Sasha had been able to find are physically draining: loader, construction worker. Yet, Sasha is not simply the drunken hoodlum he may appear to a passerby. He is Holden Caulfield with a Molotov cocktail, at once aggressive and vulnerable, tender (especially when it comes to his mother) and rude, self-possessed and romantic. But apathetic he is not. Just as the novel asks the big questions\u2014What is our country? What is our history?\u2014Sasha constantly interrogates himself: \u201cWho am I? . . . Am I bad? Kind? Hopeful? Hopeless?\u201d Sometimes, he has dialogue with a voice inside his head. These conversations and the way Sasha sees the world are very interesting.<\/p>\n

The Founders stage an action in Riga to protest the imprisonment of seventeen elderly Red Army veterans by Latvian authorities on charges of foreign occupation. Though Sasha doesn\u2019t participate, he is picked up in Moscow and is tortured for information. He barely survives but is proud to not have cracked. The plot complicates when Sasha is tasked with assassinating the Riga judge who sentenced his Founders comrades to fifteen-year sentences for the nonviolent Riga protest. Fittingly, it\u2019s not the surprising outcome of Sasha\u2019s assignment, but rather Yana\u2019s success at emptying a bag of slop on the Russian president\u2019s head in Moscow that sets off a full-scale war between the authorities and the Founders. Sasha takes a prominent role in the battle in his hometown, leading a group of assorted Founders (a former member of the special police, a drug addict, and several skinny, impassioned youths) to the limit of opposition and the edge of reason.<\/p>\n

Prilepin, who has served in special police forces as well in the Russian military in Chechnya before becoming one of the leaders of the National Bolshevik group and getting arrested more than 150 times, clearly draws from his own experience. But the novel is not a polemic; it is a piece of art. It looks long and hard into the darkest crevasses of the consciousness of the young people stuck between eras, the young people who must be understood rather than dismissed if the country is to move forward. There are several instances where Sasha gets into heated discussions about Russia\u2019s future and is challenged to formulate and defend his philosophy. <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAnd how does this \u2018new-well-forgotten-old\u2019 society contradict the idea of the nation\u2019s future that irks you so much?\u201d Sasha asks Lev, his roommate at the hospital, where Sasha is recovering from his beating.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cBecause the idea of the nation\u2019s future, Sasha, has been slipped to you by the angry and slovenly Slavophiles and contradicts anthropology. It contradicts evolution! It\u2019s this idea that perpetuates the eternal circle we just discussed-from violence to chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Later Sasha says: \u201cBut I don\u2019t live in Russia. I\u2019m trying to bring her back. She was taken away from me,\u201d and Lev replies: \u201cSome executioners took Russia away from other executioners. And no one knows which of the executioners is the better. The current ones let you live, at least.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These passages continue the dialogue that has been going on in Russian literature for centuries, with notable contributions from Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons<\/em> on the topic of Westerners vs. Slavophiles to What Is to Be Done?<\/em>, Nikolai Chernyshevsky\u2019s response to Turgenev, and on to Lev Tolstoy\u2019s own What Is to Be Done?<\/em> During most of the twentieth century, when Soviet literature was censored, the dialogue proceeded underground, in Chronicle of Current Events<\/em>, a long-running samizdat periodical, and in books by Russian writers in exile abroad, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn.<\/p>\n

But it is not so much Prilepin\u2019s engagement with politics that compels comparisons to the Russian greats\u2014one prominent Russian critic called him the next Gorky\u2014it is his language and his ability to vividly portray everyday life. Prilepin imbues everything with its own mood and secret history. Here\u2019s how he describes the dying village of Sasha\u2019s childhood: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cLike a pockmarked, hardened, dark ice floe, it had separated from the shore and was drifting away quietly . . . Farther along were the stables, where Granny hadn\u2019t kept a goat for the past year, no pigs for three, and ten years since Domanka the \tcow was led away on her last walk. The stables emitted no scents of life, no manure smell. Not a single furry soul shuffled its hooves\u2014nothing chewed, breathed noisily, nothing was frightened by Sasha\u2019s steps. Only the smell of rot and dirt.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Prilepin applies an equally nuanced and sensitive brush to his portraits of people. Interestingly, at places an authorial voice peeps from behind the third-person narrator close to Sasha: \u201cHe sat in the corner, slept sitting up, deeply, easily\u2014young bones don\u2019t care where they are thrown. However they fall, so be it.\u201d In the middle of Sasha\u2019s love scene with Yana, an episode that would not be nominated for one of those gleefully beloved worst-sex-scene contests, Prilepin writes: \u201cShe lay there, panting, quivering like a smooth lizard, some little-known, regal breed. Perhaps some kind of lunar lizard.\u201d He pays vigilant attention to Sasha\u2019s inner life, often introducing passages of introspection in a way that would be sneered at in some MFA<\/span> workshops. Here is Sasha in the hospital, recovering after the beating: \u201ca sudden realization simply descended upon him . . .\u201d At the same time, the author is always alert to Sasha\u2019s physical body, the persistent sentience of it that is more honest than Sasha\u2019s unquiet, often drunken mind: \u201cSasha felt as if someone had taken out all his organs, boiled them, and put them back in\u2014overcooked and trembly.\u201d<\/p>\n

I must note one scene in particular that left me devastated. In it, Sasha recalls his father\u2019s funeral. His father is to be buried in the village so that his parents, Sasha\u2019s grandparents, can visit the grave. However, the road to this village is so bad that it\u2019s only accessible by car and only during the warm and dry May. Other times, you need a tractor, or a horse. Sasha gets a van driver to agree to drive the coffin to the village by not telling him where exactly they are heading. The only other people in the mourning party are Sasha\u2019s mother and Bezletov, a former student of Sasha\u2019s father. As they set out from the town, the lightly falling snow turns into a snowstorm. Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ two-thirds of the way to the village, the car gets stuck in the snow. The driver refuses to go any farther, and Sasha and Bezletov end up dragging the heavy coffin for several hours while his mother follows with a bag of food meant for the wake. As I read this tragic, absurd, darkly humorous scene, I cringed and thought: now this is a truly Russian funeral. The mourners, who are themselves about to expire from cold and exhaustion, are saved in an unexpectedly heartwarming fashion.<\/p>\n

This is a novel of ideas, a novel of action, and a novel of heartbreak and beauty. Many might consider Sasha an anti-hero due to his political beliefs and his destructive tendencies, yet it is undeniable that he is trying to fill the well deep within himself with meaning. To me, that makes him a riveting character, and with him at the helm, Sankya<\/em> takes its place among the best coming-of-age and political novels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Sankya was published in Russia in 2006, it became a sensation. It won the Yasnaya Polyana Award (bestowed by direct descendants of Leo Tolstoy) and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and the National Bestseller Award. Every member of the cultural elite had an opinion on it. There was even a hatchet job by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[55706,55716,27086,55686,1646,4636,55696,49796],"class_list":["post-297386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-alina-ryabovolova","tag-dzanc-books","tag-jeff-parker","tag-kseniya-melnik","tag-review","tag-russian-literature","tag-sankya-mariya-gusev","tag-zakhar-prilepin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317546,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297386\/revisions\/317546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}