The Russian Dead: A Collection of Stories
Date
2014-01-02
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MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa
Abstract
The Russian Dead, by Resa Alboher is a collection of thematically interwoven fiction and nonfiction using fictional techniques set mainly in Russia during the Yeltsin years, but moving back and forth in time, place and memory. This work, through its numerous characters and narrators (including the author herself) and by its style –fragmentary and meandering—is a philosophical exploration of the nature and quality, substance and tone of death, change, stagnation, transition, unity, and fragmentation, and raises the question of whether it is possible to create a work of art about the collapse of the Soviet Union (or indeed of any collapse) that doesn’t reflect that fragmentary nature in its very style. Thus this work is a story told in fragments, and the question of the artistic merit of the fragmentary itself is raised, and the characters who wander through this collection, both real and fictional, living and dead, wonder if anything in their lives can ever feel whole again, and this worried question reverberates in the book’s style and tone. We see characters who have died and yet their lives go on after death pretty much as before, and death bringing no resolution becomes a metaphor for all changes political and otherwise. The work is divided into three sections: “Gogol Was a Realist,” “The Fragmentary,” and “The Russian Dead,” and is as much a meditation on the themes in the works of Gogol as it is on anything else.
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Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich, 1809-1852, Russia, Soviet Union, Memory, Fragmentation, Death