Animaattori

by Andrei Volos, Anton Nikkilä (Translator)

Сочетание реализма, завораживающего достоверностью и психологической глубиной, с элементами фантастики позволяет автору вывести текст на тот уровень, когда читатель, полагающий, что у него перед глазами всего лишь буквы, с оторопью обнаруживает, что давно смотрит в зеркало. Новый роман Андрея Волоса снова доказывает, что (по словам критика М. Ремизовой) традиционный русский герой заложник истории...Волос следует по этому пути, позволяя и заставляя - увидеть то, чего не высмотришь в репортажах и не вычитаешь в газетных строках.

Genres: Russia

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

"Andrei Volos became widely known among Russian readers only after he was awarded the prestigious Italian literary prize “Moscow-Penne” for his series of interrelated stories entitled Khurramabad Trilogy (Хуррамабадскую трилогию) in 1998. (Previous winners of this prize included Valentin Rasputin, Fazil Iskander, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, and Liudmila Ulitskaia). A year later Andrei Volos won an even more prestigious literary prize, the “Anti-Booker.” And he won it on the basis of the manuscript for the then still unpublished novel, Khurramabad. Just a year and a half later Volos published Khurramabad in book form (in 1999 the novel had been published in the journal Novy mir).

Khurramabad takes place in or is linked with Tadjikistan and the fictional city of Khurramabad, whose real-life prototype is Dushanbe. Its protagonist is a man who becomes a stranger in his own country. With the collapse of the USSR this Russian, who has remained in Tadzhikistan, begins to question the meaning of the word “Motherland.” Formerly, his native land included all the broad expanses of the USSR, and Tadzhikistan was his homeland. But now the Tadzhiks do not acknowledge the Russians and hold them responsible for all their problems. And the Russians find it very painful to abandon the land that has given them shelter. Yet he has no choice. But in Russia, too, he is regarded as a stranger. He's a stranger everywhere.

Khurramabad became one of the most readable books of contemporary Russian prose, and in 2001 Andrei Volos was awarded a State Prize of the Russian Federation.

Not long thereafter Volos published his new novel, Real Estate (Nedvizhimost'). It is set in Moscow, and its hero is a realtor who sells apartments, a man given to reflection but with the capacity to adapt to the new circumstances. Choosing such a protagonist allowed the author to construct an unusually dynamic plot, to describe a broad range of vivid psychological types, and to reproduce the feverish tempo of today's Russian life, a milieu that oftentimes seems only a senseless bustle. In this novel Volos has found the golden mean between the “bestseller” with an exciting plot and serious “confessional” literature; in so doing he has created a genuinely contemporary novel that continues the traditions of Russian literature.

Volos himself believes that there are specific echoes of Khurramabad in this novel. Its characters seem to speak different languages and do not manage to connect with each other; or, to put it another way, they are “communicatively challenged.”" (Toronto Slavic Quarterly)

Reviews

[Soncesvet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ytimeltään todella venäläinen ja vaikka sijoittuu kuvittelliseen tulevaisuuteen tai vaihtoehtotodellisuuteen, myös todella aikansa (eli 2000-luvun alun) kuva.

[Jukka Häkkinen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volosin idea lähestyä Tsetsenian sotaa fantasian näkökulmasta on hyvä, mutta kirja ei oikein pysy kasassa, juoni harhailee liikaa votkan juomisessa ja melankolisissa pohdiskeluisssa.

[Tapani Aulu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erikoinen, mutta kiinnostava.