Encounters with Lise and Other Stories

Erscheinungsjahr 2005
ISBN: 978-0-8101-1972-7
Verlag: Northwestern University Press

Buch, Englisch, 160 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 131 mm x 204 mm, Gewicht: 214 g

Reihe: European Classics

In 1994 Russian writer Victor Erofeyev proclaimed Leonid Dobychin ""one of the main heroes of twentieth-century Russian literature."" Obscure for many years, Dobychin is now celebrated as a modernist master. His short stories are hailed as a sort of Soviet version of Joyce's Dubliners - subtle and tightly constructed miniatures linked by recurring themes and full of ironic juxtaposition, context, allusion, and style. This collection includes all of the stories published in Dobychin's lifetime, plus two stories that remained unpublished until the late 1980s. For Dobychin, early Soviet society was an absurdist wonderland. He was not anti-Soviet but trans-Soviet, practicing realism but looking at reality from jarring angles. A typical day for a Dobychin hero includes participation in character-building sports, witnessing a parade, attending a funeral and memorial to fallen communists - and finally reflecting at the end of the day that he almost met a pretty young sick-nurse. Dobychin's stories reveal a Brave New World where idealism rubs shoulders with heartless ambition and political denunciation, and ubiquitous acronyms and revolutionary cliches maul the language.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dobychin, Leonid

Borden, Richard C.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Borden, Richard C.

Über Autor(innen)

Leonid Dobychin was born in Dvinsk (today's Daugavpils), Latvia, in 1894. For most of his life he lived in provincial towns and eked out a living as a statistician. In early 1936, shortly after the publication of his novel The Town of N, Dobychin was attacked by the Leningrad Writers' Union. He disappeared the next day and was never seen again. The Town of N was published in English by Northwestern University Press in 1998. Richard C. Borden is the author of The Art of Writing Badly: Valentin Kataev's Mauvism and the Rebirth of Russian Modernism (1999) and co-translator of Dobychin's The Town of N (1998), both published by Northwestern University Press. Natalia Belova is also co-translator of Dobychin's The Town of N.