Some thoughts on Mikhail Shishkin

On April 4th the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco presented a discussion moderated by Scott Esposito with the Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin, and his American translator, Marian Schwartz. Shishkin, who is considered one of the major contemporary writers (and not only in Russia), is a charming, intelligent interlocutor. He now lives in Switzerland, where he worked for several years as an interpreter. It is very important for a writer, Shishkin said, to live abroad because otherwise it’s like living in a house without mirrors. Then, he added that if he could, he would make it obligatory for everybody to live abroad for several years. In other words: one needs to live abroad in order to see himself and his compatriots with the eyes of another. Since in the case of a writer, the experience of physical dislocation becomes entangled with that of linguistic estrangement, this experience has made Shishkin “understand that to write means to create language.” “A writer resurrects dead words,” Shishkin said. The words that we normally take for granted are, as it were, dead, and it’s only when we move away from them—and what better way of moving away than living abroad, in a foreign language?—that we can give them back their freshness.

The discussion continued with a more political topic: Shishkin has recently made public his decision not to represent Russia at this year’s BEA in New York (where Russia is a guest) because he doesn’t want to “be the human face of Putin’s regime.” His decision has created, apparently, a big controversy in Russia. Shishkin ended his comments with a revealing point about Russian culture, in which there has always been a dichotomy between the Tsar and the Poet: “The Poet always wins!”

I bought a copy of his 506-page novel, Maidenhair. As I write this, I am at page 258, and I can honestly say I may not finish it. Let me make this clear: this is a very good novel, and as far as I can tell, the translation does it justice. But it is also a very complex and complicated novel (poor Scott Esposito stated a few times during their discussion that the novel was difficult, and the author interrupted him abruptly with a, “No, it is not difficult!”) and it demands a lot of patience. The novel moves between interviews with Russian and former Soviet citizens who are trying to get political asylum in Switzerland, and the diary of a Russian singer from early 20th century, whose biography the interpreter once considered writing (as Shishkin, the protagonist is an interpreter of Russian origin). Also, in between, we have scenes from the interpreter’s personal life (narrated to a mysterious “Nebuchadnezzasaurus”—a very puzzling character until a minute ago when I read the back cover and discovered that he is the interpreter’s son!). What complicates all these intermingled stories is that the present is sometimes written from the perspective of the past, that is, various characters from the present are presented are characters in a Persian war, so in the end, it’s hard to tell who’s who. But this should not deter you from reading (and finishing) this amazing novel. I have two huge piles of books I have to read in the next few months, and alas, only one life.