Dreams and Haunting Grotesques
GIBIAN, GEORGE
Dreams and Haunting Grotesques The Sky Above Hell and Other Stories By Yuri Mamleyev Translated by H. W. Tjalmsa Taplinger. 160pp. $7.95. Reviewed by George Gibian Professor of Russian...
...And more: Can events that would be disgusting in real life be turned into eloquently artistic creations...
...The townsfolk who have talked with him may have guessed from his pronounced Russian accent that he is a recent Soviet emigre...
...They are such potent stuff, in fact, that one no doubt should liken them to vodka...
...Uncanny emotional surprises emerge from the text, creating coherencies that jar, even as we recognize their validity...
...In the 1960s, Andrei Siniavsky, another former Moscow resident, now living in Paris, wrote that our age needs phantasmagoric writing instead of official Socialist Realism, and Mamleyev's surreal narratives more than fulfills this prescription...
...Mamleyev's works derive from the Russian literary tradition of the absurd: Nikolai Gogol and the little-known Leningrad writer of the 1930s, Daniil Kharms, who once said that there are only two really serious matters in life, humor and saintliness...
...If Mamleyev will not appeal toevery-one, he is certain to set any reader wondering what it is that makes grotesquer-ies so compelling for authors who have lived in Central and Eastern Europe and in the USSR...
...The humor grows out of startling dialogues and actions, and juxtapositions of incongruities...
...There is also a reincarnation of Spinoza, a voyeuristic spirit watching what is being done around its former body, and a nurse spitting into a patient's tumorous throat...
...Mamleyev, who is known to Russian readers worldwide, is the author of many short stories as well as several novels...
...Yet these stories, for all their brutality and shock, are also very funny...
...Reviewed by George Gibian Professor of Russian Literature, Cornell University Yuri Mamleyev, a self-effacing, quiet, middle-aged man with a strikingly rugged face, has been living in upstate New York for several years...
...He continues to write in Russian for emigre newspapers, journals and anthologies, mainly in Europe...
...But because of his modesty, probably few have discovered that five years ago he was the center of a prominent circle of writers in Moscow's underground literary life...
...Conventional sequences are torn apart...
...Indeed, The Sky Above Hell, the first selection of his work to be translated into English, includes only a fraction of his output to date...
...Translations of his stories into French, German and Italian have been published or are in preparation, and he was the most prominently featured prose writer in Appollon, a Russian anthology produced in Paris...
...His yarns are bizarre and grotesque, reminiscent in form and substance of dreams, or rather nightmares, peopled by characters who perform horrible deeds and utter haunting words...
...Readers should be warned: The eight fictions in this volume will not be everybody's cup of tea...
...To be sure, there is rape, masturbation, copulation, the killing of a child by a truck, and sodomy of various kinds...
...The appalling incidents Mamleyev recounts might give the impression of a depressing naturalism...
...Quite apart from what he is saying about our historical epoch, is he hinting at dim occult forces beyond the scope of the human intellect's unaided perceptions...
...About as far as it is possible to be from the facile, optimistic, socially conscious efforts the Union of Writers used to favor in the USSR, The Sky Above Hell is unlike most of Western writing, too...
...At their best, however, Mamleyev's stories suggest arresting meanings that are not quickly forgotten...
...It will be interesting to watch the reception of these original, comic, frightening stories in the English-speaking world...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 23
