The Light and the Dark

by Mikhail Shishkin, Andrew Bromfield

Overview

The only author to win all three major Russian literary prizes (including the Russian Booker Prize), Mikhail Shishkin is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Russian literary figures. The Guardian said of Shishkin's writing: "richly textured and innovative. . . arguably Russia's greatest living novelist."

The Wall Street Journal raved that "Shishkin has created a bewitching potion of reality and fantasy, of history and fable, and of lonely need and joyful consolation. An exquisite novel... His sovereignty is over the invisible and the timeless. Mr. Shishkin traces this sad story with great beauty and finesse."

In The Light and the Dark Shishkin has created an evocative love story of two young lovers, Vladimir, a solider flighting the Boxer Rebellion, and Alexandra. Known fondly to each other as Vovka and Sashka, the two young lovers sustain their love by writing passionate letters to each other.

But as their correspondence continues, it becomes clear that the couple's separation is chronological as well as geographical—that their extraordinary romance is actually created out of, as well as kept alive by, their yearning epistolary exchange, which defies not only space but time. With this contrapuntal literary testament to the delirious, transcendent power of love, Mikhail Shishkin—the most celebrated Russian author of his generation—has created a masterpiece of modern fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623650469
Publisher:	Mobius
Publication date:	01/07/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

AUTHOR Mikhail Shishkin was born in Moscow in 1961. Today, he is one of the most acclaimed Russian writers and the only author to have won all three major Russian literary prizes. Shishkin shares his time between Moscow, Berlin, and Switzerland.

TRANSLATOR
Andrew Bromfield has translated into English many notable Russian authors, including Boris Akunin, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and many more. He is a founding editor of Glas, a Russian literary journal.

Read an Excerpt

Probably, in order to become real, you have to exist, not in your own awareness, which is so uncertain and subject to the influence of sleep, for instance, when even you don’t know if you’re alive or not, but in the awareness of another person. And not just any person, but one for whom it is important to know that you exist. You know that I exist. And here, where everything is topsyturvy, that makes me real.

When I was still a child I avoided death by a miracle—I got up at night to go to the toilet and the book shelves collapsed onto the bed.

But I only started thinking seriously about my own death for the first time at school in a zoology lesson. We had an old teacher, an invalid, and he warned us to put a tablet from his pocket in his mouth if he ever fell unconscious. We put the tablet in, but it didn’t help.

He always used to wipe his glasses with his tie.

At first he taught us botany and I took such a liking to him that I was always collecting herbariums, but later I decided to become an ornithologist, like him.

It was very funny the way he used to lament the disappearance of various plants and birds.

He stands there at the blackboard and shouts at us, as if we’re to blame for something.

"Where’s the shady crocus? Where’s the weak sedge? Where’s the caldesia? And the summer snowflake? And Dubyansky’s cornflower? Well, say something, will you? And the birds? Where are the birds? Where’s Steller’s sea eagle? Where’s the bearded vulture-eagle? Where’s the glossy ibis? I’m asking you! And the crested ibis! And the marbled teal! And the shikra! Where’s the shikra?"

And when he asked this, he himself looked like some sort of bird with ruffled feathers. All the teachers had nicknames, and he was called Shikra.

Editorial Reviews

After being separated by war, a pair of lovers dream about their brief time together in Shishkin’s striking but sometimes confusing novel. Vladimir and Alexandra, known to each other respectively as Vovka and Sashenka, fell in love during a summer spent together in the countryside as teenagers. Now they write to each other recounting their days and reminiscing about the past. Both work as medics: Sashenka at home, monitoring a troubled couple, and Vovka in the army, on a campaign to China to help quell the Boxer Rebellion. He attempts to remain human in the face of war, often looking back to the town where he and Sashenka met or the books they used to share. Vovka and Sashenka narrate their histories apart as vivid snippets of memories, even as Shishkin reveals that, somehow, the two lovers live in different eras, with Sashenka inhabiting a time closer to our own than to Vovka’s. Despite this disorienting foray into mysticism, their tales cohere into a portrait of Russians growing up too soon, enlisted in causes not their own, exemplified by Sashenka’s belief in a second, disobedient self who lives out the dreams she can’t. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Shishkin writes with an admirable clarity and economy that not only brings each character's story to vivid life, but creates a melancholy tone. The book is full of echoes and allusions, for instance to Gogol and Shakespeare, not as if the author is playing literary games to amuse himself but completely naturally, as if these characters live with their culture the way real people actually do... The Light and the Dark is an immersive reading experience that lingers in the mind long after closing the book. If at first it seems loosely plotted and full of diversions, with a direct sentimentality usually avoided in literary novels, in the end it has an authenticity born out of a voice that is both natural and lyrical."—Michel Basilieres, The Toronto Star

"Shishkin's prodigious erudition, lapidary phrasing and penchant for generic play are conspicuous components of his art... These charactersitics do indeed ally him with Nabokov, as he does have faith in the written word... And yet, unlike Nabokov, Joyce and many of their postmodern acolytes, Shishkin is unabashedly and unironically sentimental."—Boris Dralyuk, Times Literary Supplement

"There is a lyrical, poetic quality to much of Shishkin's writing... This is certainly the most complicated, protean book I've ever reviewed and one jammed with cultural allusions and ideas."—Tibor Fischer, Standpoint Magazine

"Whatever the secret of the time scheme, and however magic-realist or metaphysical it might be, it contributes to the book's powerful treatment of love and the vividness of being alive, underscored by the reality of ever-present morality—Shishkin is a writer with a compelling sense of the skull beneath the skin."—Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

"With an epistolary novel, Mikhail Shishkin demonstrates that he is heir to Tolstoy, Pasternak and Grossman. Mr. Shishkin has created a bewitching potion of reality and fantasy, of history and fable, and of lonely need and joyful consolation. An exquisite novel... His sovereignty is over the invisible and the timeless. Mr. Shishkin traces this sad story with great beauty and finesse."—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

PRAISE FOR THE LIGHT AND THE DARK

"Often sings with powerfully estranged, original observations... minutiae and grand philosophy collide on every page."—Boris Fishman, The New York Times Book Review

"Mikhail Shishkin is a contemporary Russian novelist whose style is remarkably solid and consistent across his oeuvre. His works could have been written any time between today and the late 19th century—and this is especially true when there are no obvious historical markers. In this epistolary novel, the love letters exchanged by Volodya and Sasha have to...—


"Mikhail Shishkin is the Ian McEwan of Russia. A prize-winning writer who enjoys stunning commercial and critical success, he's also a literary celebrity in a country that still knows how to celebrate its author-heroes. His latest novel, The Light and the Dark, in its brilliant translation, is striking proof that great Russian literature didn't die with Dostoevsky. The prose is lapidary, the evocation of history and the present razor-sharp. A wonderful book: it is filled with wonder."—Monocle Magazine

"Shishkin is arguably Russia's greatest living novelist... his writing is richly textured and innovative and his themes are universal: love and death, pain and happiness, war and peace.... Shishkin's writing is both philosophically ambitious and sensually specific, evoking the rain on a dacha roof, the smell of blossoming lime trees, or the stink of human corpses."—Phoebe Taplin, The Guardian

From the Publisher

2013-09-15
This novel by acclaimed Russian author Shishkin is an experimental work about two young lovers kept forever apart. The voices of the lovers alternate throughout the novel; usually Vovka or Sashka will begin with an endearment, but these are monologues, not letters--neither responds to the other. Think of them as ships that pass in the night, again and again. Once, they spent some time together in a Russian dacha. That's the extent of our knowledge of them as a couple, for Shishkin conceals as much as he reveals. Nor do readers know when this is happening, until they reach the only historical marker: the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Vovka decides at the outset to "choose myself a war." He is assigned a position at staff headquarters, writing death notices to next of kin. As the army arrives in the Far East, there are some magic realist elements: an island that's a fish, people with dog heads. Indeed, the whole conflict in China has an otherworldly tinge, with seven Western nations allied against the anti-Christian Chinese peasantry. The high death toll, though, is uncomfortably real. Sashka's monologues concentrate on domestic matters: her marriage to a painter, her complicated relationship to his ex-wife and daughter, her attendance as a nurse on her mother, dying of cancer. In the constant tension between the life force and death, the scales are weighted toward death. Yet, in a significant moment, Sashka encounters a burning bush, an obvious Biblical allusion, and understands that she and Vovka "are already husband and wife." Outside of time, no doubt. It is also significant that the novel finds Vovka meeting Prester John, the Christian king of medieval legend whose territory the army had crossed en route to China and who will, maybe, effect the lovers' reunion. Shishkin expects his readers to do some serious decoding; whether it's worth the effort is an open question.

Kirkus Reviews