(no subject)

[skygiants]

A year or two ago I stumbled over a copy of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States in a used bookstore and brought it home with me with intent to read at some future time. Last month I ended up having to sit still in our living room out of reach of my phone/current book/etc for cat-related reasons and so pulled the nearest thing off the nearest shelf: the time had apparently come.

And what a weird time it was, is, to be reading this book. The book was published in 2004, the essays commissioned for the project. The essays themselves vary from interesting to funny to overwrought to banal to offensive -- and one can't really be offended even so; it is, of course, always fascinating to see oneself as others see one -- but all of them were written in the early 2000s, in the immediate years following 9/11, and so there is a kind of thread of envy and pity and a little fear running as an undercurrent throughout the whole book: you Americans, you stupid Americans, you thought you were exempt from terrible things happening to you, and what are you going to do now you've realized that they can?

Comments

[eglantiere]

i must confess that's kind of roughly where i'm at, in the year of our lord 2025. but America has always been a shadow figure writ large in soviet/post-soviet/russian mythos, of course.

[eglantiere]

this said, i just opened the link and the quote there from max frai, which is in retrospect deeply hilarious for many convoluted russian sf/f-ish fandom reasons (frai used to be a very influental writer of vaguely magical realism fantasy, who ushered a lot of vaguely cozy magical realism fantasy, who themselves seems to be a genuinely unpleasant person with a delusions of grandeur, and who went completely off the walls bonkers insane in response to covid, in a you-sheeple-wearing-masks-are-killing-the-soul-of-world way). so there's that.

[skygiants]

sajdk;fld thank you extremely for this context, I liked his essay more than many but this Adds Significant Color

[eglantiere]

the juxtaposition between the somber mood your post evoked in me and seeing frai over there sure sent me. but yeah, they're our answer to ann rice (derogatory, because a lot of vivid stuff was really vile).

I wonder what you thought about goralik! now that's the creme de la creme of Russian language contemporary lit, and she's gotten better since then.