Mostly melodrama

I've read two books in the last little while. One is Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of short stories that mostly fits into his general vein, so I won't say too much about that. The other is Keys to Happiness, a Russian Silver Age novel by Anastasya Verbitskaya, which is book two for the Russian Reading Challenge. This book was a serendipitous $1 find at Dutton's some time ago, and I bought it mainly because its title was the genesis for Laura Engelstein's The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. The latter book was an extremely useful source for my undergraduate thesis, so when I saw the original, I grabbed it.

Fortunately, this translation is abridged, and at just under 300 pages is somewhere around 1/3 of the original serialized novel. The translators, both academics, felt that the novel could be a little repetitive, and so chopped it down to the essence. To which I say thank god, because I know I couldn't have made it through an extra 800 pages of the same. KTH was a sensation, full of free love and revolutionary ideals and art and anti-semitism, and I don't even know what else. It's quite a product of its time.

Manya, our heroine, has "eyes like stars" and more dancing ability than Isadora Duncan, and captivates a series of archetypal men. She is capricious as all get out, and never has one emotion when she can have five instead. Keeping up with her is exhausting. I'm not going to even try to recount the plot, but suffice it to say it is quite the early 20th-century telenovela.

So while the book itself isn't all that fantastic, it's got a lot of historical value. Its huge popularity is a reflection of the changing values of the period, where some men and women threw off the social mores regarding love and sex. Most did not, but they lived vicariously through such vibrant characters as Manya.

cross-posted at Russian Reading Challenge