Found Life Read online

  FOUND LIFE

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

  Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

  Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

  Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

  City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

  Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Copyright © 2018 Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokour

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54497-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Goralik, Linor, author. | Morse, Ainsley, editor. | Vassileva, Maria, 1988– editor. | Vinokour, Maya, editor.

  Title: Found life: poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview / Linor Goralik; edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokour.

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Russian library

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017018317 (print) | LCCN 2017025478 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231544979 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231183505 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231183512 (pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PG3481.2.R117 (ebook) | LCC PG3481.2.R117 A2 2017 (print) | DDC 891.78/509—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018317

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Stephanie Sandler

  PART I: SHORT PROSE

  She Said, He Said

  Found Life

  In Short: Ninety-One Rather Short Stories

  Something Like That (A War Story)

  The Blind Eye

  Excerpts from Biblical Zoo

  PART II: LONGER PROSE

  Agatha Goes Home

  Valerii: A Short Novel

  PART III: THEATER

  PART IV: COMICS

  PART V: POETRY

  PART VI: INTERVIEW

  “Everyone Reads the Text That’s in Their Own Head”: An Interview with Lina Goralik

  INTRODUCTION

  STEPHANIE SANDLER

  Imagine a story, an insignificant, small story about no one in particular, that opens out, like all good stories do, to the largest possible cultural truths. There is a plot twist, another requirement of good stories, but it all happens in a single paragraph. It is written down, but it sounds like it was whispered in your ear.

  Take, for example, the story of the young journalist N., whose non-name links him to all the no-name representative heroes of Russian literature. He is intelligent-looking, softly bearded with round eyeglasses, and he is walking through a dark passageway that is unavoidable on his way home. There in the dark he uneasily senses a shadowed individual, with a menacing outline. All of this has been conveyed in three sentences in our little story, which now concludes:

  The shade approaches and asks in a hollow voice if he has a smoke. N. has never smoked in his whole life, but in his terror, he searches around in his pockets as if a pack of cigarettes might mystically appear. The shade flicks open his lighter, illuminating his own podgy face, and he starts to study his prey in the flickering light. The young journalist N. runs his hands along the seams of his pants and tries to show in all possible ways that he is endlessly sorry not to have cigarettes. “None?” hoarsely asks the shade in a voice that promises nothing good. “None,” honestly answers N. “Are you poor?” the shade says. “Not exactly rich,” says N., again honestly. “Too bad,” says the shade. “Solzhenitsyn, you know, used to say that there can be no independent citizens without private property. It’s because of people like you and me that Russia will never be free.” With these words, the shade once again presses himself against the wall, and disappears into the dark. The young journalist N. stands there a moment longer, noiselessly moving his mouth.

  Readers may find themselves reacting much like the young journalist N., mouth slightly agape with lips still moving, as if trying to formulate some verbal response. The expected scene of robbery has turned into an enigmatic colloquy on the absence of private property, and freedom. Fear has melted into a piercing insight about a culture where pretty much anyone might have read Alexander Solzhenitsyn (or Nikolai Gogol or Daniil Kharms) and have passionate feelings about the nature of citizenship and freedom. Our little story, published by the contemporary writer Linor Goralik in 2017, is essentially an uncanny encounter with the other, with someone who turns out to be very much like oneself.1 What looks to be alien, incomprehensible, and scary, hits unnervingly close to home.

  There is much more where this story came from. A prolific, immensely talented writer of multiple points of origin and cultural orientations, Goralik has written more than a dozen books. Her work is widely published in Russia, with countless publications in print and online venues. She has won multiple prizes, including the Moscow Triumph Prize for young writers in 2003 and a stipend from the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Foundation in 2016. She has written novellas, miniature stories, flash fiction, comic strips, fairy tales, poems, drama, and essays; translated contemporary fiction from Hebrew to Russian; had periods of time in her life when she was a prolific blogger, writer of tweets, editor at leading online publications, and consultant in marketing and cultural project production. More than one of her books is presented as if written for children, while resisting entirely the sentimentalism and pedagogical aims associated with children’s literature. Goralik’s work in its many and varied forms has drawn considerable attention, so much so that interviewers typically try to pin her down and get her to tell them what kind of writer or cultural professional she “really” is. Her most common response is that she is nothing more than a private individual, and ironically her book of interviews with contemporary writers was entitled Private Persons (Chastnye litsa, 2013). But in a television interview in 2007, when asked to describe herself as a writer, she called herself an “essayist,” acknowledging even so that it did not cover all of what she hoped to do.2

  Calling Goralik an essayist has its advantages, however, and to an English-language audience, the thought provocations and boundary breaking associated with Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Susan Sontag, and, from a younger generation, Lena Dunham, would not be an inappropriate context in which to appreciate Goralik. More
than they, however, she has marched into so many other genres that her achievement may more aptly be described as taking the project of the essay—its self-inventions, its philosophical challenges, its skepticism and its wit—onto unfamiliar terrain, one where she can almost always retain the role of storyteller. Goralik makes sense among these American women writers for another reason, though: the not-so-subtle fact of gender. Like them, she is alert to the sexism of her culture and its media, and she is quick to deride the harassments of daily life and the assumptions made about women based on dress, body shape, and modulations of voice. In interviews, Goralik often speaks in the masculine gender (that young journalist N. is not an isolated male persona), and when asked about it, she answered that to speak in the grammatically masculine gender is to speak as a person, not specifically as a woman. Feminists might disagree, asserting that the masculine is inherently no more unmarked than the feminine, but in Goralik’s many different speech acts, these moments of taking over grammatically masculine forms amount to nothing less than a quiet form of cultural occupation. This is a writer who refuses to let others limit how or where she will speak.

  Goralik is herself an extraordinarily perceptive interviewer (her work has emerged as the gold standard for interviews with contemporary poets; every issue of the premier poetry journal The Air [Vozdukh] includes an interview she has conducted with the featured poet). While that may have made her an adept if not cagey subject when the tables are turned, it has also given her the chance to learn about her fellow writers as if from inside their creative process. She has her finger on the pulse of any number of contemporary trends in Russian culture, making her work, for all its idiosyncratic variety, a surprisingly representative instantiation of Russian literature today. Her life story has elements that are also broadly typical, including her multiple geographical and linguistic points of orientation.

  Born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1975, she moved to Israel in 1989 (where she earned a degree in computer science); since 2001, she has lived and worked mostly in Moscow, but when asked about defining her homeland (her rodina), she reluctantly answered that it would have to be Israel. As of this writing (2017), she is an editor at Booknik, a Russian-language site devoted to Jewish writing and thinking in the broadest senses of what the Jewish tradition might mean; she has worked in a similar lead capacity at the culture journal Snob. In these journalistic venues, she has become an outstanding chronicler of current cultural events. Her eye for the meaning of externally apparent details is sharp, and it is no coincidence that she has taught courses in fashion and culture as well as advocating for the significance of fashion as a marker of cultural change. She contributes essays on the topic to leading intellectual journals like Fashion Theory (Teoriia mody) and New Literary Review (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie) and has a regular column on clothing and fashion for the newspaper The Gazette (Vedomosti). Her publications thus range freely across the boundaries of elite and popular culture, as the texts included in this volume show vividly.

  A time-tested way to bring popular culture into literary texts is through incorporating spoken language, and Russian literature has seen examples as different as Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin, Nikolai Leskov’s tales that rely on the stylized spoken registers of skaz, and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s harrowing monologue-based fiction. Much of Goralik’s work depends on creating the illusion that her written text has captured spoken language, small bits of which we get in the little story of young journalist N. As much as anyone writing in Russian today, Goralik strives to catch hold of the speech patterns and everyday topics that animate conversations among friends or strangers. Her ear is alert to the rhythms of spoken Russian, to its subtle ways of skirting around some topics while dwelling endlessly on others, its obsessions, neuroses, curiosities, and stumbling blocks. She has admitted to spending her time riding around on the endless circle line of the Moscow metro, eavesdropping assiduously, but she has added that she reworks fairly seriously anything she overhears or is told directly: her stories or poems may be based on this kind of live reporting, but by the time they are entries in her own texts, the details may be almost unrecognizable but with the emotions preserved, intensified.

  A cycle of texts featured in this volume, “She Said, He Said” shows her brilliant facility with the spoken word, and its condensations and displacements might be taken as exemplary of Goralik’s work more broadly.3 The author presents seemingly unrelated anecdotes and short dramatic scenes from the daily life of contemporary urban dwellers. People tell stories of their own daily lives, repeating weird details heard from others and reporting on the sights that can be striking or deadly dull as one walks to work or rides the metro. These are short bits of concentrated language, a quality that also defines the collection of short texts from that gives this volume its title, “Found Life,” as well as “Ninety-One Rather Short Stories,” “Blind Eye,” and “Something Like That (A War Story).” When Goralik published “Found Life” in Russian, she gave it this English-language title, and the puns and double-meanings of the phrase in English reverberate across its pages. Life is found, she suggests, as one catches sight of an eight-year-old girl excitedly talking to herself in sign language as she rides down an escalator; or when a fly shoots out of the pocket of a man riding on the subway, a pocket into which other passengers were stuffing change offered as alms; or when a man gently holds back the long, falling hair of his wife so that she can eat spaghetti. These glimpses of what life looks like are offered to readers as if a catalogue or list, but the author’s gaze is less that of a scientist bent on classification than a kind of verbal photographer, hoping to catch in the click of her shutter an unforgettable, lasting imprint of how people interact in a quickly moving world. These bits of flash fiction can be understood through a variety of technological metaphors, including the camera suggested here, but digital communication with its ephemeral, instantaneous modes of transmission is also a basis for Goralik’s inspired choice of aesthetic form. Most of the entries in “Found Life,” for instance, are Twitter-length or shorter, and Goralik for several years was a deft user of Twitter: her (Russian-language) tweets were always structured as statements beginning “I see,” followed by some quirky juxtaposition of events or persons—for her last post on one account, December 7, 2016, she reports seeing a young man, running and sobbing, wearing a laurel wreath. Similarly, she published a set of “transgressive histories” in spring 2017, in which our story of the young journalist N. appeared. The combination of informality, spoken reportage, and discerning detail gives these records of daily life the aura of urban folklore. Goralik senses that her readers, who may have first encountered her on LiveJournal or Twitter or Facebook, are open to the possibilities that the boundaries between printed literature and digital media are porous.

  Goralik’s writings also have important shared border zones with journalism. Followers of literary innovation may immediately wonder whether that makes Goralik comparable to Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, but Goralik herself has pointed out that there are significant differences between her writing and Alexievich’s documentary prose, starting with her impulse to fictionalize and fundamentally reshape the stories she hears. It is an important distinction, and one might add that the presence of other literary forms in Goralik’s work, like comic strips and poetry, also push her narrative prose toward visual expressiveness on the one hand, and greater compactness on the other. But there is still something to be learned about Goralik if one thinks about journalism, because the writer has herself produced so much journalism. For Booknik, she published a series of articles that are psychological in focus: how parents talk to their children about danger; what memories of childhood summers are retained long into adulthood; what, to a citizen of Israel, offers surprise and pleasure in daily life, rather than fear and anxiety? These articles survey multiple informants, but often focus on a single individual—a museum director, a book publisher, a college professor—chosen to discus
s a question relating to child development. Goralik’s wide range of publications show a persistent fascination with the world of children, particularly in books intended for child and young adult audiences (a young person’s guide to Israel, a set of comic strips that veer off into philosophy as often as obscenity). One final reason, then, for readers to find their way to Goralik’s texts is for her insights into how children become adults, and how adults living in a dangerous and cynical world might sustain the wonder and curiosity that marks childhood.

  Remarkably, Goralik pursues this extended curiosity about psyche, verbal expression, and emotional development in her poetry by eschewing conventions of lyric subjectivity. As Grigory Dashevsky noted in describing her terse, sometimes nearly formulaic poems, something closer to folkloric expression has been substituted for the usual psychological rhetoric of individual experience.4 Situations and commentary feel at once typical and idiosyncratic, as if an individual’s utterance might contain an entire world view. And perhaps that tendency toward a kind of ethnography of the present is also behind her deep interest in fashion: she has spoken out on topics ranging from fashion-shaming to clothing and disability. She reads clothing choices and fashion criticism as a code that has the power to regulate but also to liberate daily life, in all its pleasures and dangers.

  There is no flinching at that danger, it has to be said, even if the danger flickers falsely in a dark passageway on one’s daily walk home. In one of her poems, Goralik writes that the world “gleams like a knife.” Sometimes her work sites the dangerous world in Israel, and some of the short prose pieces refer to the daily routines of living in a zone of war, but the references are often oblique, as in “—…how do you say ‘nails’ in Hebrew? Like, all those nails, nuts and bolts, all that shrapnel?” It’s a telling juxtaposition of speech habits and the mental urge to register but also to find ways to hide violence. In many of the texts translated here, readers will find tremendous charm and vitality, the wicked wit of a discerning adult and the naïve stubbornness of a child. We should be alert to the dangers and distress that lurk beneath these surfaces: Goralik is not one to turn away from suffering, but she is also never one to glorify it as the heroic achievement of the Israeli, the Russian, or anyone else. She explores what it means to be part of a community, but without blind patriotism or submission to social norms. In her work, speech acts open the pathways for connection to others; they record the failures of speech as well, the lies of intimacy and protection, the aggressive attempts to ward off others. The varieties of human experience fill these pages, then, offering us extended tales, dramatic encounters, all in the staccato bursts of these hundreds of short prose pieces, poems, and comics. They add up to a picture of where life is lived, where it is found—a picture that is uncannily familiar in all its strangeness.