Merry-Making in Old Russia and Other Stories

All Russian literature may have come (as Dostoyevski claimed) out from under Nikolai Gogol's Overcoat. But there is Gogolian and then there is Gogolian, and these 15 brilliant stories of the Soviet Union's final days belong in the second category: hilarious, gloomy, absurd. Drinking, getting beaten up and dying are the ubiquitous practices of the ordinary characters in this latest installment of Northwestern's Writers from an Unbound Europe series. The first line of the title story (""This really weird suicide story ended badly for one old man"") describes an all-too-common fate. In another story, a quiet, unassuming apparatchik drinks himself to death after his wife leaves him; in a third, an inebriated farmer gets into trouble with the police after cheating on his third wife. These very short works, ably translated, often begin with some laughably horrible result, then flash back to explain how the catastrophe occurred. Popov fits easily into the Russian and Soviet tragicomic tradition: his triumph in these matter-of-fact tales lies in his ability to point out the absurdities in late-Soviet reality while making the absurd seem real. (Aug.)