Skunk: A Life (Glas: New Russian Writing): No. 15 - Softcover

Peter Aleshkovsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 5717200331 ISBN 13: 9785717200332

Publisher: Glas, 2000

Synopsis

Skunk: a Life is part of the search for values in the post-Soviet moral vacuum. This is a curiously Russian Bildungsroman. The setting is the Russian North, where authentic Russian moral values are believed still to survive in remote places.,br.,br. Skunk is the nickname of a boy born out of wedlock to an alcoholic eighteen-year-old girl.

Malcolm Bradbury writes: " Peter Aleshkovsky is a prolific and highly talented Russian writer, with a powerful sense of the disorders and conflicts of his society and a desire to penetrate it to its roots. The central character of Skunk is an extraordinary figure, whose childish experiences of life in the Russia north are degraded and criminal, and who yet has a half-perverted instinct for moral and religious values which makes his life into a quest.

The book takes him through the stages of a hopeless growing up, but a vision of something else a mystical awareness of nature, a desire for community brings him through cruelty, violence and sin towards a very Russian kind of redemption. Aleshkovsky writes with a vision of his society and its vacancies, yet through the life and journeys of Skunk he shows the traces of a greater and older society, a Russia that has long compelled the imagination where nature is an overwhelming fact of life, animals and rocks have strange powers, where the Old Believers survive, like some priests show the usual human corruptions, but sometimes reach beyond degradation to a certain blessed innocence. The story starts naturalistically, grimly, but Aleshkovsky has a gift of myth and symbol, and a deep sense of place and culture and their meaning. Here is a very strong and exciting voice in the lively world of contemporary Russian fiction."

About this title

Review:

"Aleshkovsky's is an important voice... in contemporary Russian fiction. He makes use of Gogolean satire, the folk tale, the chronicle, and even the saint's life. Throughout the novel he steers a steady course between sentimentality and cynicism, and maintains a creative tension between custom and circumstance, typicality and eccentricity." --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Peter Aleshkovsky, born in 1957 in Moscow, is an archaeologist and historian by training. He spent many years travelling the length and breadth of Northern Russia and was involved in the restoration of the renowned monasteries in Novgorod, Pskov, Solovki and Vologda. He is mainly known for his Stargorod cycle which includes 30 narratives, largely of anecdotal nature, the short novel Seagull, abounding in ethnographic detail (nominated for the Booker Russian Novel Prize in 1992), and Skunk: a Life. He has also written a novel about the 18th-century reformist poet Trediakovsky, nominated for the Booker Prize in 1995.

About this edition

• Publisher: Glas
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 5717200331
• ISBN 13: 9785717200332
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192