‘Literature in modern Russia,’ writes historian Orlando Figes in A People’s Tragedy, his vast chronicle of the Russian Revolutions, ‘was always a surrogate for politics.’ ‘No other literature,’ he adds, ‘gave such prominence to the social novel’.
Indeed, the disciplinary distinction between politico-historical and novelistic narratives, which tends in the West to be regarded as more or less clear-cut, has been interrogated, and made fluid, by writers from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. And yet, if overt reflections on politics and society have often been implanted into literary texts by Russian and Soviet authors, self-consciously apolitical writing, emancipated from questions of ideology or industrial production, also took on a decidedly political character during the Soviet period: the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, for instance, was deemed particularly pernicious by the authorities precisely because of its capacity to break free and rise above contemporary events, prising readers from the grip of paltry Soviet reality and transporting them into a linguistic Elsewhere.
The selection of texts in Calligraphy Lesson, the first anthology of Mikhail Shishkin’s short prose in English translation, straddles the divide between these extremes. Complex and allusive, the title story, which explores a court secretary’s metaphysical escape out of the violence of his world and into the pure domain of letters, graphic signifiers that ‘[clamp] an unraveling world together’, is juxtaposed with autobiographical – and at times overtly politicised – narratives such as “The Half-Belt Overcoat” and “Nabokov’s Inkblot”. Meanwhile, the anthology’s final story, “In a Boat Scratched on a Wall”, takes us beyond fiction and into the realm of the philosophical essay – justifying the back-cover hybrid categorisation of Calligraphy Lesson as ‘Fiction/Creative Nonfiction’. In this respect, the collection stands at the nexus between Shishkin’s novelistic output and his increasingly outspoken forays into the political arena, several of which have been published in the New York Times and the Guardian, among other British and American papers.
