Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novels

228 Pages·2019·1.145 MB·English

by  Yuz Aleshkovsky, Susanne Fusso

NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH AND CAMOUFLAGE
RUSSIAN LIBRARY
The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive
selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works
previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works
of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including
recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising vari-
ety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not
only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction,
and works of mixed or fluid genre.
Editorial Board:
Vsevolod Bagno
Dmitry Bak
Rosamund Bartlett
Caryl Emerson
Peter B. Kaufman
Mark Lipovetsky
Oliver Ready
Stephanie Sandler
(cid:631)(cid:632)(cid:631)
For a list of books in the series, see page 203
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Columbia University Press New York
Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc.,
and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Translation copyright © 2019 Duffield White and Susanne Fusso
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aleshkovskii, IUz, author. | Fusso, Susanne, editor. |
Container of (expression): Aleshkovskii, IUz. Nikolai Nikolaevich.
English (White) | Container of (expression): Aleshkovskii,
IUz. Maskirovka. English (White)
Title: Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage : two novels / Yuz Aleshkovsky ;
translated by Duffield White ; edited by Susanne Fusso.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2019. |
Series: Russian library
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043952 (print) | LCCN 2018047140 (e-book) |
ISBN 9780231548458 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231189668 (cloth : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9780231189675 (pbk.)
Classification: LCC PG3478.L443 (e-book) | LCC PG3478.L443 A2 2019 (print) |
DDC 891.73/44—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043952
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Book design: Lisa Hamm
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction by Susanne Fusso ix
NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH
1
CAMOUFLAGE
99
Notes 187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
he translator and editor would like to thank Yuz Alesh-
kovsky for granting permission to translate these two
ground-breaking novels, and for being constantly avail-
able for clarifications and explanations of context. We have long
enjoyed the supreme privilege of being Yuz’s colleagues and friends,
and we are delighted to have been able to play a role in bringing
these works to the English-speaking readership. We also thank
Irina Aleshkovsky for her invaluable help with questions of trans-
lation and interpretation. We are grateful to Priscilla Meyer, Pro-
fessor of Russian, Emerita, for bringing Yuz and Irina to Wesleyan
and making Aleshkovsky’s work part of our curriculum. Sergei
Bunaev provided helpful answers to translation queries. Thanks to
Yuz for introducing us to his Moscow friends (Andrei Bitov, Olga
Shamborant, Sergei Bocharov, the Fingerovs, the Goreliks, and
the Lebedevs), who helped us understand the pleasures of being
Nikolai Nikolaevich’s original audience. And thanks to William
White for accurately transcribing the translator’s first attempts to
speak Aleshkovsky’s wit in English.
viii \ Acknowledgments
We thank Christine Dunbar of Columbia University Press for
her cheerful encouragement and for her hard work in shepherding
these novels to publication. Oliver Ready, of the Editorial Board
for the Russian Library series, offered detailed comments that
helped us greatly improve the introduction and the translation
itself. Two anonymous readers also provided excellent suggestions
that we have endeavored to incorporate. Allan Berlind, Professor
of Biology, Emeritus, at Wesleyan, read the introduction and notes
with an eye to the discussion of Soviet genetics, and we are grate-
ful for his assistance. All remaining errors are of course our own.
Thanks also to Victoria Smolkin, Associate Professor of History
at Wesleyan, for suggestions on sources about Soviet science. We
would also like to thank Jean Findley, Lisa Hamm, Ben Kolstad,
and Leslie Kriesel for their expert work on the editing, design, and
production of the book.
Wesleyan University has provided generous support in the form
of sabbatical time and research grants. We thank in particular Marc
Eisner, Dean of Social Sciences, and Joyce Jacobsen, Vice President
for Academic Affairs and Provost.
Our students in courses on twentieth-century Russian literature
have reacted enthusiastically to Aleshkovsky’s novels, and to his liv-
ing presence, and we thank them for their responsiveness to this
translation in its earlier versions.
Duffield White would like to thank his wife, Isabel Guy, for her
love and support and for sharing her love of literature. Susanne
Fusso thanks her husband, Joseph M. Siry, Professor of Art History
and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan,
for his love and support and for listening to long disquisitions on the
subtleties of Russian obscenity.
INTRODUCTION
SUSANNE FUSSO
I was a good-time Charlie, an idler, a lazybones, a gambler, a crook,
a hooligan, a scoundrel, a smoker, a street urchin, a bicyclist, a soccer
player, a glutton, although I always helped my mother around the
house, I was rapturously interested in the mystery of procreation
and the relations between the sexes, the organization of the Universe,
the origin of the species of plants and animals and the nature of social
injustices, and I also managed to read the great works of Pushkin,
Dumas, Jules Verne, and Mayne Reid. Perhaps it is precisely for this
reason that I never in my life sold anyone out or betrayed them.
Although of course I managed to perpetrate umpteen little dirty
tricks and peccadillos.
(cid:2)
Yuz Aleshkovsky, “Autobiographical Information”
Y
uz Aleshkovsky was born in Siberia in 1929, the year of
Stalin’s “Great Turn” toward industrialization and col-
lectivization. Raised in Moscow, where he recalls that
he became acquainted with street obscenities much earlier than he
learned about the fairy tales most children read, he endured some
of the key experiences of the Soviet century—wartime evacuation,