Tag: biography

Dmitry Bykov Today

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading Dmitry Bykov’s biography of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. I haven’t finished the book, so I’m not ready to say anything about it. I only want to comment on the author for now.

I wrote about Bykov several times in the past. He’s so talented that I actually buy his books of poetry. His are the only books of poetry I have ever bought in my life not for teaching or research but simply to read. I’m not a poetry person. It’s got to be absolutely out-there poetry for me to buy it.

Bykov is also a talented novelist and biographer with a voluminous output. He’s a real writer. And he can’t go back to Russia or ever get published there again. Imagine for a writer suddenly to lose his entire readership, his linguistic environment, his purpose as a writer. People in the past returned to Stalinist USSR because they couldn’t accept such a loss.

This isn’t an issue of financial necessity. Bykov is famous, he’s been invited to teach at Cornell. This is about not having any readers for his new books. This very long and massively researched biography of Zelensky is an example. People would go to jail in Russia, where Bykov was designated “a foreign agent”, for owning a copy. Jail times for posting something like “I want peace” in Russia have surpassed sentences for rape. A book about Zelensky would be considered treason of the highest order.

Bykov understands that his book won’t be read in Ukraine either because it’s in Russian and he’s from Russia. Nobody wants to hear a Russian perspective on anything. Bykov says it’s as should be, and I respect him for not pouting.

I’ll write about the book once I read it, which will be soon since my reading speed in Russian is stratospheric.

Some Authors Are Stupid

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

You know what I hate? When I’m reading a book, enjoying it, and then the author comes out with a bit of some utter idiocy that I can’t get over. And when I try to get over it, the idiot of the author keeps repeating the idiocy because they probably see it as some crowning achievement.

Here is the most recent example. I started reading a biography of the great Brazilian writer of Jewish-Ukrainian origins, Clarice Lispector. The author of the biography is no genius, but the book was OK, as far as biographies go. And then, for some mysterious reason, the author starts harping on the idea of Lispector’s supposed “strident feminism.” There is not a single example of the “stridency” of Lispector’s feminism given in the book, but the author keeps harping about it.

Lispector’s mother was gang-raped by a mob of soldiers, contracted syphilis during the rape, and died a horrible painful death as a result. The writer grew up in the supremely machista Brazil of the 30ies and the 40ies. She was a woman in a culture and a time that treated women as a heap of trash. Yes, Clarice Lispector was sensitive to violations of women’s rights. Does that give the right to some pathetic semi-literate biography-writer to dismiss her political convictions that he is not even capable of understanding?

In short, Benjamin Moser, the author of Lispector’s biography Why This World should be ashamed of himself. I’m never reading a single word by this silly hater of feminism ever again. And I suggest everybody do the same. A biographer who can’t respect the great writer he tries to discuss deserves to go broke.

Glendinning and Trollope

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I only just discovered Victoria Glendinning who is a brilliant biographer. Her biography of Anthony Trollope is so good that it vindicates the existence of what more often than not is a very boring genre. Glendinning had a very difficult task ahead of her, given that Trollope’s life was quite boring and his very long novels are also not among the most exciting Victorian works. However, Glendinning is so good that she can make even Trollope sound fascinating. I had given up on this author a while ago after I read his The Warden. That novel was the best sleeping aid I could have imagined. One or two sentences were enough to make me fall asleep even when I tried reading them standing up.

After I read Glendinning’s biography of the writer, however, I decided to give Trollope another chance. So now I’m reading The Way We Live Now and it’s actually quite lovely. This is what a good biographer should be like. Most biographers, though, make you dislike the writer whose life they narrate so profoundly that you never want to hear that writer’s name again.

And, of course, one of the best things about Trollope’s books is that they are available for free in the Amazon’s Kindle store. Summer is always hard for me in terms of money (is it just me or is it everybody?), so I decided not to pay for any reading matter until the end of summer.