Readers with a background in formalism and its successors will find this of interest, though Bulgakov, Sholokhov, and...
Slender, allusive novel of clerical foibles by Russian/Soviet novelist Shklovsky (1893-1984).
Gavriil Dobrynin is born into the Orthodox Church—literally, his father a priest, both grandfathers priests. Social mobility being what it was in the age of Catherine the Great, Gavriil might have done worse, though the churchly world he falls into is full of politics and intrigue; his introduction is a coup against an archimandrite who “was an enemy of God and should be squealed on under the first and second articles,” as one of his denouncers, an altar boy, has it. The first article, explains Shklovsky (The Hamburg Score, 2017, etc.), concerns slanders against God, the second slanders against the state; either one brings pain on the heads of those found guilty of violations. In this sort-of biography, novelized with invented dialogue and episodes, Gavriil falls under the tutelage of a bishop named “Kirill Florinsky, or Fliorinsky, as he whimsically called himself,” who’s a little more frivolous than his office might tolerate—though he’s no weakling and not afraid to throw a punch. As the story progresses, the master outfoxes the student, and then the student the master; fortunes wax and wane, though Gavriil soon learns that ambitions go far when matched with wine and fireworks. There’s some enjoyable cat and mouse here, but in the end the story is a touch arid, written as if to conform either to the censor or the requirements of the reigning literary theory. At its best, though, Shklovsky’s short novel serves up some subtly funny, suggestively subversive resonances that might remind the reader of his contemporary Mikhail Bulgakov. Had the edition included good notes and an introduction, these resonances and how the book fits into Shklovsky’s broad-ranging body of work might have been made more comprehensible to readers new to the writer or, for that matter, to literature of the Soviet era.
Readers with a background in formalism and its successors will find this of interest, though Bulgakov, Sholokhov, and Pasternak remain the cornerstone writers of the era for nonspecialist readers.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62897-174-3
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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