The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov | Contemporary Russian Literature at UV http://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/russian/2012/02/27/the-librarian-by-mikha...

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The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Elena Dimov

Mikhail Elizarov was born in 1973 in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine and could hardly remember the Soviet epoch of the generation of his parents and grand-parents. However, in 2007 this young writer wrote a book which would be called the book about the Lost Generation of Soviet people and won the 2008 Russian Booker Prize. The deceptive title of the book The Librarian bore the promise of quiet reading in the evenings. Indeed, The Librarian is the novel about the books, about the mystical powers of the written word. In the beginning, one can hardly expect the strange turbulence which books can create including the violent refusal of the readers of the books by the obscure writer Gromov to recognize the end of the epoch, and an almost Kafkaesque end of The Librarian. The Librarian started with the citation from The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov. And in some sense it is the continuance of the ideas of the great and tragic book by Platonov about the lives spent in vain. Excerpt from the novel The Librarirain: The worker must fully understand that baskets and engines can be made as necessary, but its not possible to simply make a song or a sense of excitement. The song is more valuable than mere things Andrey Platonov

The writer Dmitry Alexandrovich Gromov (1910-1981) lived his final days in complete obscurity. His books completely disappeared in the debris of Lethe, and when political disasters destroyed the Soviet motherland, it appeared as though there was nobody left to remember Gromov. Barely anybody read Gromov. Of course the editors who determined the political loyalty of texts and the critics read it. But it was unlikely for somebody to be worried about and interested in titles like Proletarian,(1951) Fly, Happiness!(1954), Narva, (1965),On the Roads of Labor (1968), The Silver Flat-Water,(1972) or The Calm Grass( 1977). The biography of Gromov went side by side with the development of the socialist fatherland. He finished middle school and pedagogical college and worked as executive secretary in the factory newspapers editorial board. The purges and the repression did not touch Gromov; he quietly endured until June of 41 before he was mobilized. He came as a military journalist to the front. In the winter of 43 Gromovs hands were frostbitten; the left wrist was saved but the right was amputated.

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The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov | Contemporary Russian Literature at UV http://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/russian/2012/02/27/the-librarian-by-mikha... A

So all of Gromovs books were created by the enforced lefthander. After the victory Gromov moved the family from the Tashkent evacuation to Donbas and worked at the city newspapers editorial board until his retirement. Gromov started to write late, as a mature forty-year-old man. He often addressed the theme of the formation of the country, glorified the cotton being of the provincial cities, towns and villages, wrote about mines, factories, the boundless Virgin Soil and harvest battles. The heroes of his books were usually the Chairmen of the Kolkhozes, red directors, soldiers returning from the front, the widows keeping their love and civil courage, the pioneers and Komsomol members strong, cheerful, and ready for heroic labor. Good triumphed with painful regularity: the metallurgic factories were built in record time, the recent student during his sixth month internship at the factory became a skilled specialist, the plant exceeded the plan and accepted the new one, and the grain in the fall flowed by the golden mountains to the Kolkhozs granaries. Evil was reeducated or went to prison. .Although Gromov published more than a half-million books, only several copies survived in the clubs libraries in distant villages, hospitals, ITK, orphanages, or otherwise rotting in the basements between the materials of the partys congresses and serials of Lenins collected works. And yet Gromov had dedicated fans. They scoured the country collecting surviving books, and would do anything for them. In the normal life Gromovs books had the titles about flat waters and grasses. However, Gromovs collectors used significantly different titles the Book of the Power, The Book of Strength, The Book of Rage, The Book of Patience, The Book of Joy, The Book of Memory, The Book of Meaning Copyright Mikhail Elizarov Translated by Elena Dimov Translations of the excerpts from the works by the contemporary writers are used in educational purposes for students of modern Russian literature or for literary criticism only.
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About Elena Dimov Elena Dimov holds a Ph.D. in history from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her specialties include Russian culture and literature. She has also taught Russian Language at UVA. She is currently working on a study of Russian Bard poetry in the late twentieth century and developing the bibliography of current Russian prose and poetry View all posts by Elena Dimov

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