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His melancholic realism really wears you down
A pair of novellas chronicling the spiritual failures and bitter concessions required of the post-war Soviet citizenry. Thoughtful in its depiction of the the tortured motivations of its subjects, intricately written, excellent all around. Really good stuff.
Introduction, by Ellendea Proffer & Ronald Meyer--The Exchange--The Long Goodbye--Games at Dusk--A Short Stay in the Torture ChamberNotes
I have no idea which "other" stories this edition contains, I'm just listing all the "Moscow novels" by Yuri Trifonov I've read:1) "The Exchange" is what Chekhov would write if he would live 109 years. Universal story, for all ages and nations and countries: he has a wife and she's beautiful and clever, he is soft and intelligent, she's good with him. but very aggresive and morally ambivalent when there's a goal to achieve (new apartment, new job, etc). She's much stronger then him. She doesn't
The opening of Yury Trifonov’s The Long Goodbye describes to us a place where beautiful lilac bushes used to grow two decades earlier but which have since been replaced by a grey eight-storey apartment. Thus the novella’s narrative of a long-drawn out disappearance – the end of an era, the loss of familiar settings, the vanishing of persons, the fading of feelings – is foreshadowed.We are presented with a situation where two lovers who, while still having feelings for each other, are gradually f...
Yury Trifonov (1925-1981) was a mainstream Soviet writer whose work grew increasingly subversive during the 1960s and 70s. Remarkably, a celebrated novella like “The Exchange” walked a surgically fine line that kept him from being banned or censored as a dissident. Trifonov seems to have accomplished this by focusing on the moral dilemmas and frustrations of his characters, whose limitations make them appear less victims of an oppressive state than flawed and sometimes foolish careerists oblivio...
tons of historical digressions, explanations, intricate four-way conversations with the traditional sixteen forms of address, lavish descriptions of tiny gardens and crumbling soviet shorelines, and helpful advice for young bachelors and old fogies living in squalor and crippling muscovite depression. really good, even better the second or third time around.
It's a kind of story, I think Russian, which I expected. "The long goodbye" is the longest one and bored me to death! but I really like it.
One of the best books about Moscow: has the rythm, thoughts, even taste and smell of the daily life in Moscow