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Baize-Covered Table with Decanter
The hero of Baize-Covered Table undergoes a searching bureaucratic investigation, that staple of the old Soviet and even older Russian police state. With the naked intensity of personal nightmare, the hero visits and returns to the stark scene of his inquisition: the bare room, the table, the ever-present decanter, and behind the table those recurring phantoms, 'The Party Man,' 'The Young Wolf,' 'The Almost Pretty Woman,' 'The One Who Asks the Questions.'.
- GenresRussia
152 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1995
1 person is currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Vladimir Makanin
77 books14 followersVladimir Semyonovich Makanin is a writer of novels and short stories. He graduated from Moscow State University and worked as a mathematician in the Military Academy until the early 1960s. In 1963 he took a course in scriptwriting, and then worked in the publishing house Sovietskiy Pisatel (The Soviet Writer). Makanin's writing style may be categorized as realist. His forte lies in depicting the psychological impact of everyday life experiences.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir...
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 15, 2017
The real value of a gazeteer of short stories is that you get to follow up on people and writing that you would have missed otherwise. The works that have come out of Glas make that all too plain.
I would never have picked up on Vladimir Makanin without having read the Glas anthology of Russian Booker winners. The excert printed there made me seek out the whole book which has turned out to be probably the greatest piece of contemporary Russian writing I have read. This book, a novelette really as it is not that long and can be read at one sitting, deserves to be far far better known than many others that have made the jump from Cyrillic to English. Put it this way - it is all of Solzhenitsyn compressed into 144 pages. Translated by Arch Tait, the British editor of Glas, I am grateful to Readers International for taking the risk and publishing this in English. It is also readable on googlebooks (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G...)
Makanin comes from Orsk right down on the border with Kazakhstan. Born in 1937 the blurb tells me he was in favour during the Krushchev 'thaw' (1953-64) but fell out of favour till resurrection under perestroika (lets say 1985 shall we). 'Baize Covered Table with Decanter' was written in 1993 and won the Russian Booker that year. The book is set at a crucial period in Russian history, that is post perestroika and pre-breakup of the Soviet Union into the republic states, so a brief 6 year period between 1985 and 1991. The bureaucratic examining committee still rule and the baize-covered table with the decanter becomes the leitmotiv to examine this and preceding periods and shed light on what is to come. In many ways it foresees the collapse of the Soviet. Makanin's protagonist is due to attend a hearing the next day having previously had to attend these inquisitions before and he views the forthcoming meeting as an old man with a heart condition with trepidation through an insomniac night.
Makanin uses his leitmotiv to examine the people that will make up his committee of inquisition. They are all archetypes and he exposes them with their flaws and their consciences and their lives. They have all been there before. Some of them will appear on the wrong side of the table at some point but for now they are safe behind the table and what is more, the table empowers them to do what they cannot ordinarily do. He presents us with The Proletarian Firebrand, The One Who Asks Questions, The Secretarial Type (The One Who Takes Minutes), The Wise Old Man, The Grey Haired Woman in Spectacles, Young Wolf 1 (The Wolf Who is Dangerous), Young Wolf 2 (The Wolf Who is not Dangerous), The Ordinary Looking Woman, The Former Party Man, The Almost Pretty Woman, The Sales Assistant from the Corner Store and the Honest (but Socialised) Intellectual. Makanin KNOWS these people. He reads them and expounds them on paper. They are all of us and we inhabit them too. Can we become them? How much of them is not in us? He minutely garners minutiae of their lives and lays it out. How different are they from the man on the other side of the table and how different are they in fact from us. Where are we? Are we with the man in front of the table or with the Inquisitors?
Through his long night the protagonist has the chance to review all these characters. Who will look to save him? Who will 'put in a good word for him'? What can he do to make the unpleasant passage before the committee any less harmful than his heart can take. And how did they get there and he get to sit in a chair on the wrong side of the Table.
The Baize Covered Table and Decanter is indeed the leitmotiv but in a way it is more. For this short novelette is more than the examination of characters and processes. In effect it is also an examination of Guilt and Righteousness. Before the era of the Baize Covered Table came the Era of Cellars, a brute force period where everything was done in the dark and undercover. This was succeeded by and continuous with the Era of Labour Camps. True succession came with the Era of White Coats with it's hypodermic cocktail of Alionka (a Russian chocolate brand but here a cocktail of insulin, phenyl barbitone and urethane), when to be seen as dissident was to be seen as mentally unstable. Why should one oppose the collective will of the Soviet? To do so one must surely be mad and mentally unsound. With perstroika came the foundation of the Baize-Covered Table Era and it's growth to be all encompassing. But the Baize Covered Table is not just a Russian phenomenon from one period. It is everywhere and at all times. It has been succedeed, as is given in the novelette, by the Era of the Telephonic Table, where decisions and conversations are made away from the table and again back in private. This has now been succeeded by the Era of the Conference Call, no longer private, no longer closed, but where future decisions are made en croute by faceless nameless individuals who appear on the end of a telephone line to berate you, harangue you, rarely to praise you and often simply and ultimately to fire you. To give 25 years service and then to be fired by a faceless cacophony of apparatchiks separated from the effects of their actions by Technology. It's not the process of subjugation that changes, just the means of Technology.
This really is a great book. Makanin is a master and the depth of his insight is quite astounding. Get hold of this book and read it.
I would never have picked up on Vladimir Makanin without having read the Glas anthology of Russian Booker winners. The excert printed there made me seek out the whole book which has turned out to be probably the greatest piece of contemporary Russian writing I have read. This book, a novelette really as it is not that long and can be read at one sitting, deserves to be far far better known than many others that have made the jump from Cyrillic to English. Put it this way - it is all of Solzhenitsyn compressed into 144 pages. Translated by Arch Tait, the British editor of Glas, I am grateful to Readers International for taking the risk and publishing this in English. It is also readable on googlebooks (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G...)
Makanin comes from Orsk right down on the border with Kazakhstan. Born in 1937 the blurb tells me he was in favour during the Krushchev 'thaw' (1953-64) but fell out of favour till resurrection under perestroika (lets say 1985 shall we). 'Baize Covered Table with Decanter' was written in 1993 and won the Russian Booker that year. The book is set at a crucial period in Russian history, that is post perestroika and pre-breakup of the Soviet Union into the republic states, so a brief 6 year period between 1985 and 1991. The bureaucratic examining committee still rule and the baize-covered table with the decanter becomes the leitmotiv to examine this and preceding periods and shed light on what is to come. In many ways it foresees the collapse of the Soviet. Makanin's protagonist is due to attend a hearing the next day having previously had to attend these inquisitions before and he views the forthcoming meeting as an old man with a heart condition with trepidation through an insomniac night.
Makanin uses his leitmotiv to examine the people that will make up his committee of inquisition. They are all archetypes and he exposes them with their flaws and their consciences and their lives. They have all been there before. Some of them will appear on the wrong side of the table at some point but for now they are safe behind the table and what is more, the table empowers them to do what they cannot ordinarily do. He presents us with The Proletarian Firebrand, The One Who Asks Questions, The Secretarial Type (The One Who Takes Minutes), The Wise Old Man, The Grey Haired Woman in Spectacles, Young Wolf 1 (The Wolf Who is Dangerous), Young Wolf 2 (The Wolf Who is not Dangerous), The Ordinary Looking Woman, The Former Party Man, The Almost Pretty Woman, The Sales Assistant from the Corner Store and the Honest (but Socialised) Intellectual. Makanin KNOWS these people. He reads them and expounds them on paper. They are all of us and we inhabit them too. Can we become them? How much of them is not in us? He minutely garners minutiae of their lives and lays it out. How different are they from the man on the other side of the table and how different are they in fact from us. Where are we? Are we with the man in front of the table or with the Inquisitors?
Through his long night the protagonist has the chance to review all these characters. Who will look to save him? Who will 'put in a good word for him'? What can he do to make the unpleasant passage before the committee any less harmful than his heart can take. And how did they get there and he get to sit in a chair on the wrong side of the Table.
The Baize Covered Table and Decanter is indeed the leitmotiv but in a way it is more. For this short novelette is more than the examination of characters and processes. In effect it is also an examination of Guilt and Righteousness. Before the era of the Baize Covered Table came the Era of Cellars, a brute force period where everything was done in the dark and undercover. This was succeeded by and continuous with the Era of Labour Camps. True succession came with the Era of White Coats with it's hypodermic cocktail of Alionka (a Russian chocolate brand but here a cocktail of insulin, phenyl barbitone and urethane), when to be seen as dissident was to be seen as mentally unstable. Why should one oppose the collective will of the Soviet? To do so one must surely be mad and mentally unsound. With perstroika came the foundation of the Baize-Covered Table Era and it's growth to be all encompassing. But the Baize Covered Table is not just a Russian phenomenon from one period. It is everywhere and at all times. It has been succedeed, as is given in the novelette, by the Era of the Telephonic Table, where decisions and conversations are made away from the table and again back in private. This has now been succeeded by the Era of the Conference Call, no longer private, no longer closed, but where future decisions are made en croute by faceless nameless individuals who appear on the end of a telephone line to berate you, harangue you, rarely to praise you and often simply and ultimately to fire you. To give 25 years service and then to be fired by a faceless cacophony of apparatchiks separated from the effects of their actions by Technology. It's not the process of subjugation that changes, just the means of Technology.
This really is a great book. Makanin is a master and the depth of his insight is quite astounding. Get hold of this book and read it.
June 17, 2018
The setting of a "baize-covered table with decanter" is one, according to Makanin, that "any Russian would recognize". A reader, like myself, non-Russian, is meanwhile unfamiliar to it, and so it's important to explain fundamental details such as "why?" and "what does this setting mean in the grand scheme of things?" And yet Makanin's novel is intensely intimate, immersing the reader in the situation as if they're already acquainted with the essential points, giving profuse account of character personalities and ideologies, but lacking perspective and insight overall.
The protagonist, an unnamed average-Joe, is brought into an interrogation room and acquainted with a number of figures. The book seeks to communicate the protagonist's impressions to the reader by describing the minutia of everything around him. Thus the book feels very personal, but at the same time very narrow. It lacks the context necessary for the reader to feel any emotional attachment, one way or another. It seeks to evoke the reader's sympathy but it's impossible for the reader to have compassion without adequate knowledge of the situation.
"Why should I feel sympathy for a person being interrogated if they're guilty anyways? And if he's not guilty, why is he afraid to be interrogated? Or rather, why would he be interrogated in such a way if he's not guilty?" These are questions Makanin fails to answer, and for that the book struck me as boring and emotional empty.
The protagonist, an unnamed average-Joe, is brought into an interrogation room and acquainted with a number of figures. The book seeks to communicate the protagonist's impressions to the reader by describing the minutia of everything around him. Thus the book feels very personal, but at the same time very narrow. It lacks the context necessary for the reader to feel any emotional attachment, one way or another. It seeks to evoke the reader's sympathy but it's impossible for the reader to have compassion without adequate knowledge of the situation.
"Why should I feel sympathy for a person being interrogated if they're guilty anyways? And if he's not guilty, why is he afraid to be interrogated? Or rather, why would he be interrogated in such a way if he's not guilty?" These are questions Makanin fails to answer, and for that the book struck me as boring and emotional empty.
May 8, 2017
Структура произведений Владимира Маканина не так проста, каковой она представляется после прочтения. Сперва кажется, автор испытывает читателя, проверяет его на прочность — сможет ли тот понять, в какие степи унесёт фантазия писателя. И если сможет, то сумеет ли переварить предложенный ему текст, и какой интерпретации он будет удостоен. В случае «Стола, покрытого сукном и с графином посередине» всё оказалось неизмеримо сложно. Само название отдаёт уклоном в модернизм. Поэтому читателю требуется задуматься над осмыслением текста самостоятельно, поскольку Маканин излагает, не предлагая объяснений. Кто захочет понять — поймёт, кто не захочет — удостоит произведение того прозвания, коим оно по его мнению является.
(c) Trounin
(c) Trounin
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews