Sasha Sokolov is a Russian literary voice celebrated for his unconventional mastery of language, a style he terms "proeziia," existing between prose and poetry. His work is characterized by a playful engagement with rhythm, sound, and association, making him a significant figure in 20th-century Russian literature. Sokolov's distinctive linguistic experimentation and deep exploration of the Russian language define his unique and challenging literary output. Readers can expect a deeply inventive narrative experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional literary forms.
Exploring the realms of art, literature, and culture, this collection of essays by Sasha Sokolov delves into his profound insights and reflections as one of Russia's most significant contemporary novelists. Through thought-provoking discussions, Sokolov examines the intricacies of writing and the impact of culture on artistic expression, offering readers a deep understanding of his creative philosophy.
Sasha Sokolov is one of few writers to have been praised by Vladimir Nabokov, who called his first novel, A School for Fools, "an enchanting, tragic, and touching book." Sokolov's second novel, Between Dog and Wolf, written in 1980, has long intimidated translators because of its complex puns, rhymes, and neologisms. Language rather than plot motivates the story--the novel is often compared to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake--and time, characters, and death all prove unstable. The one constant is the Russian landscape, where the Volga is a more-crossable River Styx, especially when it freezes in winter. Sokolov's fiction has hugely influenced contemporary Russian writers. Now, thanks to Alexander Boguslawski's bold and superb translation, English readers can access what many consider to be his best work.
By turns lyrical and philosophical, witty and baffling, A School for Fools confounds all expectations of the novel. Here we find not one reliable narrator but two “unreliable” narrators: the young man who is a student at the “school for fools” and his double. What begins as a reverie (with frequent interruptions) comes to seem a sort of fairy-tale quest not for gold or marriage but for self-knowledge. The currents of consciousness running through the novel are passionate and profound. Memories of childhood summers at the dacha are contemporaneous with the present, the dead are alive, and the beloved is present in the wind. Here is a tale either of madness or of the life of the imagination in conversation with reason, straining at the limits of language; in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, “an enchanting, tragic, and touching book.”