Sheepskin Coat and An Absolutely Happy Village

by Boris Vakhtin, Robert Dessalx, Michael Ulman

Two of Vakhtin’s best works are presented in this collection. The Sheepskin Coat first appeared in Metropol, an unofficial literary almanac of uncensored literature, which caused a scandal when it was published in the West in 1979. In this story of an entrenched bureaucrat, whose lust for a beautiful poet and a sheepskin coat leads to his downfall, Vakhtin creates a modern-day version of Nikolai Gogol’s famous story The Overcoat Vakhtin also directs his satire at a corrupt and pretentious privileged class and is especially caustic about censorship in the arts.
An Absolutely Happy Village depicts a different world. Set in the provinces on the eve of World War II, this moving novella tells of the love of two villagers, Polina and Mikheyev, and reflects Vakhtin’s humor, love of nature and affirmation of life.

Genres: Russia

180 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1979

About the author

In his lifetime Boris Vakhtin (1930-1981), son of thewriter Vera Panora, was known in the USSR mainly to an inner circle of writers and literary people in Leningrad. By profession a sinologist and translator of Chinese literature, he was also a member of an unofficial group of writers called “Urbanites” and a great defender of a free Russian literature during a period of oppression. His career as a writer was not untypical for
Soviet literature of the 1960s and 70s – he wrote a lot but was unable to be published except in the underground press where his work circulated widely.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheepskin Coat is somewhere between The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol and The Trial by Franz Kafka. It is a murderous satire of bureaucracy and soulless negligence of any human individuality in the totalitarian society.

“Here you are still young, yet you don’t know,” said Philharmon Ivanovich, remembering his sheepskin coat, “that the only thing that can untangle anything is love.”
“Were you christened?” asked the poetess Liza.
“My father stood guard over my cradle with a rifle in his hands,” he answered, “so as to prevent the enactment of that vile ritual. But his vigilance slipped, his mother-in-law got him drunk, kidnapped me and defiled me, as he explained it. What they named me I don’t know…”
“My God,” said the poetess Liza. “How ridiculous people were.”
And Philharmon Ivanovich did not take offense but smiled to himself with his disarming smile because he remembered how his father always used to say:
“I never let go of my unbending optimism, even when the barrel of a gun was pointing at me as I stood before the firing-squad, and I often stood before the firing-squad.”

An Absolutely Happy Village is a tinged with light irony lyrical tale of country life – sadness, wartime, hardships but love and kindness in the end prevail.

The right bank sloped gently, as right banks are supposed to do, while the left bank sloped steeply and the sand martins burrowed into it, to build their nests – you could stick your arm into one of the holes up to your elbow and still not reach the nest, just as you can’t reach out and touch the moon shining golden in the river in the evenings, when the sound of songs of an amorous nature carries across from the gardens, dark as a deep, still pond, and the river flows on busily, with no time to love the village more than she loves it already, no leisure to love it more, and I bathe in this river which hurries past, and she loves me coolly and tenderly, caresses my neck, my stomach and ankles, loving me to the extent I deserve, for I’m not big either when I’m in the river or in general.

Everything around may seem hopeless and miserable but in spite of anything life must go on and it goes on.