Month: August 2023

Book: Dmitry Glukhovsky “Outpost”

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I hesitated for a long time before picking up this book, because I have mixed feelings about Dmitry Glukhovsky, shaped by his Metro series. On the one hand, it’s genuinely a very interesting concept and execution; on the other, while I liked the first novel, Metro 2033, the second—and especially the third—mostly surprised me, and even disappointed me.

And even though I’d heard plenty of feedback about Outpost, I only got around to it after the war with Ukraine began, when almost everyone started saying that Glukhovsky had “seen it all coming” back then. That’s when I got genuinely curious: what exactly was it that Dmitry Glukhovsky supposedly predicted?

The novel opens by showing us a small settlement near a bridge across the Volga, by what used to be Yaroslavl. And now this is the very border of the state. Because at some point, a war broke out in the country, the mutiny was put down, but everything beyond the Volga can no longer be called inhabitable land, since some kind of weapon made it unfit for life. And the people at the outpost on the border are tasked with watching this single route into the cursed lands—just in case, so that no kind of nastiness crawls out of there.

And the lion’s share of the first volume is taken up by a description of life in this settlement—the remnants of all of Yaroslavl, where, judging by the description, only a few dozen residents are left alive, scraping by, somehow living, and even raising children. But the way this everyday grind is described, in my opinion, is drawn out too much. The plot moves very slowly, and all these abundant domestic details feel depressing at first.

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Book: Maxim Katz “The History of the New Russia”

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Russian history—past, present, and future—is being discussed a lot right now, and in completely different terms. I’m also interested in how exactly we all ended up at the point we’re at now. Boris Akunin wrote an entire series about the history of the Russian state from ancient times all the way up to 1917. Alexander Yanov tried to make sense of the history of the ‘Russian Idea‘. And the blogger and politician Maxim Katz constantly discusses current events, projecting them into the future, while still keeping historical realities in mind.

You can feel differently about Maxim Katz, but he’s definitely a pretty interesting storyteller. I respect his opinion, even though he’s often overly wordy, suffers from heavy self-repetition in his blog, but at the very least he tries to be objective and not lean too hard into emotions (which, for example, I’m very far from always managing).

Recently, Maxim released a book, The History of the New Russia, in which he laid out his view of how the Russian Federation developed starting from the late Soviet Union.

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Book: Robert A. Heinlein “Orphans of the Sky”

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Well, since we’re on a classics streak, after the Soviet Those Who Survive it’s time to talk about Robert A/ Heinlein’s novel Orphans of the Sky.

Originally, the book was written as two separate parts, published independently as novellas in Astounding Science Fiction magazine back in 1941: Universe and Common Sense. Only twenty years later, in 1963, were the two novellas published together as a single work under the title Orphans of the Sky. Russian readers know the book as Stepsons of the Universe, as it was rendered as Stepsons by its first Russian translator, Yuri Zarakhovich.

For Soviet readers, the novel was first published in Zarakhovich’s translation in 1977 (incidentally, the year I was born), serialized across five issues of Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) magazine. I don’t know the exact reason, but for that magazine publication Zarakhovich produced an abridged translation. Nevertheless, it was this version that became the canonical one for many years and continued to be reprinted right up until 2003. Only in 2003 did a complete Russian translation of the novel appear, by Elena Belyaeva and Alexander Mityushkin. Neither of them were professional translators, yet their work still received an award. In addition to restoring the full text, they also slightly revised some terminology that had become “familiar” over decades of reprints of Zarakhovich’s version.

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