Böcker utgivna av Vladislav Zhukov

In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His pristine settings are once again living presences described with the touch of a 'psychologist of nature', to quote one of his admirers, the poet Andrei Voznesensky. This was a region whose inhabitants as late as the second half of the 20th century were still largely unaffected by the complexities of modernity, folk for whom the great world was the primordial one of their surroundings: an immediately-sensed universe extending from the near, and at first glance ordinary, outwards to the heavens of the northern lights and the very stars. It is or was until recently still possible beside such places as the White Sea and its adjacent forests and tundra to daily observe country people living in that sort of integration with nature, accepting without question the ocean, the land, and the seasons as the determining power in their lives, and be hardly aware of any other; it was certainly possible a generation ago in Kazakov's time, even in a nation which for years had been frenetically industrialising and whose relation with its environment was relentlessly exploitative. But in the cities as well, including that modernising hothouse which was the Soviet Union's Moscow, some sense of that unity with nature still lingers in these stories, and not merely because references to climate are inescapable in Russian writing. Kazakov saw no opposition between urbanised, technologically evolving humans and the rest of the universe that we call 'natural'. An intercity bus or elektrichka or silver-bellied aeroplane was to him as remarkable, but not more so, as any outgrowths produced by other organisms or by inorganic matter. If his tales of hunting on land and whaling in arctic waters predominate, if they have defined his milieu and established his reputation, it was because to his retrospective imagination those were in his time, and perhaps still are in ours, clear if departing instances of that integration, that give-and-take in nature, that sharing in an immemorial cycle of life and of death that itself sustains life again in its turn.

The two volumes comprise 38 short stories and travel sketches describing Russians and parts of the Soviet Union which up to Kazakov's time (he died in 1982) had been almost untouched by that country's 20th century upheavals. The majority of his settings are the coast and forests adjoining the White Sea, peopled by hunters, fishermen, buoy-keepers, ancient peasants, children in the most halcyon moment of their youth, and among his memorable actors are not excluded even an occasional soulful dog or bear. Through the eyes of this new array of 'Russian originals' we return to forgotten ways of perceiving the world around us, of appreciating the essential miracle of our surroundings, the universe extending from the immediate and almost microscopic grain of sand or flower, out to the infinitudes of which we are a part. The sense of the two books is topical and universal: the degree of man's involvement in the harmony and natural processes of the world is an essential measure of his moral dignity. (That such natural processes included hunting, for instance, is a challenging thought in our environmentally-ideological and conservation-focused times.) In the classic style of the Russian short story Kazakov's narratives move at a leisurely pace and often end apparently inconclusively, but they never fail to induce a deeply reflective mood. A few of his tales do have an urban setting, but even those are suffused with a pastoral quality, contributed to by the inescapable presence of the seasonal and climactic envelopment of man's works; and too by nature's mind-borne continuities: for example, a suburban boy repeatedly imagining and remembering episodes in some once-glimpsed corner of Russia's backwoods. Such recollections, and more immediate contemplations of nature in his other stories, return and return like wistful sighs among the meanders of Kazakov's uncomplicated plots.

The setting for his collection of eighteen stories by Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was the Adriatic seaport of Pescara and its hinterland in the Italian region of Abruzzo, the author depicting events and personalities from the time of his youth, but also drawing from bygone incidents that were yet memorable in the area's folk history. Pescara may not have had the cachet of celebrated cities such as Venice or Florence, but sympathetically and wryly revealed here by the pen of one of Italy's great writers it lives and breathes with a vitality probably best compared to that of James Joyce's 'dear dirty Dublin'. Indeed Joyce, who admired D'Annunzio, may well have been inspired by the Italian's cameos of small-town life, his parade of saints, voluptuaries and reprobates, their repressions, obsessions, individual dissolutions, collective explosions of anarchy, and their aptness for bizarre behavior that extended from the catatonic to the manic. D'Annunzio came to recognize just how exotic his native region was after he had left it for Rome, where he worked for some years as a journalist and essay writer in the employ of various literary magazines. His Abruzzo articles, and especially those in which he records examples of extraordinary devotional behavior (akin to what Mark Twain was witnessing at that time on the banks of the Ganges), became the basis of the stories in this collection. D'Annunzio was a published poet at the age of sixteen, and his verse has never been absent from the Western Canon since. Something of his painterly style, the layered brushwork of his descriptions, the gorgeous romantic renderings of rural scenes and the moods of the sea, his celebrations of sensuality, his aesthete's fascination with all the possible bodily conditions, from the virginal-voluptuous to the decayed and moribund (he has been hailed as 'the body's poet'), will amaze and delight the reader even in the blandest and most dictionary-dependent translation. The present one is no such, however. Vladislav Zhukov is an experienced translator who has rendered works from four languages into English, including a substantial book of poetry, three volumes of short stories, and a novel (all available on Amazon.com). His knowledge of Italian is that of someone who acquired the language while living in Italy during his youth.