Pushkin House

Pushkin House

hardcover. Condición: Very Good in Dustjacket. Estado de la sobrecubierta: Very Good. First Edition. New York. 1987. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Printing. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374239347. Translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger. 384 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Cynthia Krupat. keywords: Europe Russia Literature Translated World Literature. DESCRIPTION - The protagonist of Pushkin House, Lyova Odoevtsev, is a representative man of his time and place. Born, like his creator, in 1937 in Leningrad on the anniversary of the city's founding, he graduates from secondary school in 1953, the year of Stalin's death. The facts of Lyova's everyday life closely mirror the daily experience of an average Russian; but his life story, as Andrei Bitov tells it, has many levels and many facets, for Pushkin House, one of the most significant Russian novels to appear in the West in recent years, is also both a running commentary on Russian history and an ex- amination and critique of the Russian literary tradition. This melding of life and literature will remind Western readers of certain aspects of Proust and Joyce, just as other facets of Bitov's creation recall his great Russian precursors, especially Vladimir Nabokov. Bitov's major work to date is a tour de force of immense learning, artfulness, and daring (though issued in Russian in the United States in 1978, it could not be published in its entirety in his native country until this year). Yet, as the translator, Susan Brownsberger, writes in her note on the book, Pushkin House is not an academic tour of literary history, nor even a sentimental odyssey through the living literature in quest of meaning in present-day Soviet life. It is a double of life itself. To read this book is to experience the wild paradoxes lived by a contemporary Soviet intellectual, paradoxes which are shared, in varying degree, by all thinking citizens of the modern world. inventory #9062. Nº de ref. del artículo: z9062

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