The Russian twentieth-century short story: a critical companion

Abstract

Lyudmila Parts, ed. Russian Twentieth Century Short Story: A Critical Companion. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2010.359 pp. $49.00, cloth. $24.95, paper.As Lyudmila Parts reminds us in her brief but informative introduction, the Russian short story has always been most prominent in times of transition, acting as harbinger of social and political change and serving as catalyst for literary innovation and evolution. short story, according to Parts, has always been a form that responds with immediacy to the sensibilities of its (p. xvii), whether we are talking about the rise of the genre in the early nineteenth when it marked shift from poetry to prose; Chekhov's stories at the turn of the twentieth which reasserted the importance of the short story at time of political and cultural crisis; or the stories of Vasilii Shukshin in the 1960s and Tatiana Tolstaia and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in the 1980s, which reinvigorated the genre in the post-Thaw period and glasnost'. Parts's collection aims to acquaint the reader with some of the most illuminating critical articles treating the short stories that best represent the genre in twentieth-century Russian literature (p. xiii). As such, it seeks to fill gap in critical attention accorded the modern Russian short story.Of the eighteen chapters, only five appear for the first time in this volume. others are reprints of works that have appeared previously. Taken on an individual basis, all of the contributions offer provocative analyses of individual stories by Chekhov (The Darling), Bunin (Gentle Breath), Babel (Pan Apolek, My First Goose), Zoshchenko (The Electrician), Olesha (Liompa), Nabokov (Spring in Fialta), Pasternak (Childhood of Luvers), Platonov (The River Potudan), Kharms (The Old Woman), Shalamov (Condensed Milk), Tertz (Pkhentz), Shukshin (Cutting Them Down to Size), Tolstaia (The Poet and the Muse), Petrushevskaia (The Lady with the Dogs), Pietsukh (The Central-Ermolaevo War), Erofeev (The Parakeet), Bitov (Pushkin's Photograph), and Pelevin (Nika). Some of these articles are definitive treatments of their topic. Lev Vygotsky's analysis of Bunin's Gentle Breath is classic essay on the short story form and the psychology of the creative process. Aleksander Zholkovsky provides an impressive and exhaustive analysis of the linguistic, cultural, biographical, and intertextual aspects of Zoshchenko's The Electrician. Eric Naiman's reading of sexuality and utopia in Platonov is one of the best concise treatments of the writer I have read. Catharine Nepomnyashchy's treatment of criminality in Tertz's Pkhents is superb example of textual, biographical, and cultural analysis. Diane Nemec Ignashev's reading of Cutting Them Down to Size remains the finest succinct treatment of the salient features of Shukshin's artistic program to date. Equally authoritative and notable is Mark Lipovetsky's analysis of postmodem themes in Pietsukh and Erofeev.There is no denying the quality of these and the other articles of the collection, which, according to Parts, all address the major aesthetic and thematic concerns of the short story genre in the twentieth century, in particular language, childhood, and memory (p. xxiv). Unfortunately, despite these last three common themes, the anthology taken as whole still reads more like collection of individual articles and less like an in-depth look at the Russian short story genre in the twentieth century. …