• ISBN 978 0 7206 255 4
  • Fiction
  • Hardback
  • £15.95
  • 220pp
  • Available

 

 

Madonna From Russia

Yuri Druzhnikov

Translated from Russian by Thomas Moore

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Madonna from Russia is the story of Lily Bourbon, a beautiful, mysterious Russian woman and her different husbands. When we first meet her, she is about to turn ninety-six – the same age as the twentieth century. Newly arrived from the provinces, the young Lily becomes a prostitute working the streets of Petrograd. Soon she is recruited by the Bolsheviks to a higher category of working woman to service the Communist elite. At the age of twenty-three she makes a fortuitous marriage to Andrei Bourbon, poet, Futurist and artistic colleague of Malevich, Mayakovsky, Burliuk and others. One day Bourbon takes some of Lily’s poems to the official children’s newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda. With the aid of an airbrushed and suitably ‘revolutionary’ biography, her poems are published as children’s books. Andrei Bourbon disappears in the purges and Lily becomes poet laureate and an ideal symbol of the Soviet era. After further marriages and the eventual collapse of the dictatorship, Lily manages to escape Russia for the USA where she marries a naive American communist to start all over again . . .

A contemporary picaresque novel, Madonna from Russia is fiction with Druzhnikov’s unique combination of satire, humour and documentary twist.

Yuri Druzhnikov’s books have sold in their hundreds of thousands in Eastern Europe. Madonna from Russia is in its third Russian edition and was nominated for the ‘Russian National Bestseller’ prize in 2002.

'Continuing the literary traditions of such prolific Russian authors as Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Druzhnikov's sublime work mirrors Soviet corruption in its engaging prose. It is the tale of prostitute Lily's engaging rise to poet laureate status while her husband Andreï becomes a victim of the purges and the consequences that this produces. Satire shrouded within an unbelievable narrative and this allegorical novel is a transcendent allegorical epic' - Big Issue



‘You have to sympathise with Yuri Druzhnikov, émigré Russian writer, who is now a professor at the University of California, who must inevitably feel he has to leapfrog that other Russian émigré writer and teacher of Russian literature, Nabokov. Blacklisted for some years in the Soviet Union, the story goes, Druzhnikov was refused publication in the 60s by the literary journal Novy Mir because the editor believed he had fufilled his "trouble quota" by including Solzhenitsyn. In the 70s Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky largely sated the western appetite for Soviet dissidence and samizdat writing.
By the time the authorities booted Druzhnikov out in 1987, there was a glut of Russian writers living in the west, and even the experience of the "Helsinki" émigrés finding their feet in exile had been masterfully portrayed by Edward Limonov and translated into English. (At least in the Soviet Union, Limonov lamented, his poetry had been read: by the KGB.) . . . Essentially, Druzhnikov's trick has been to turn Nabokov on his head and write Granny Lolita - the 96-year-old Lily still has the power to cause craziness in many men. Lily is the star of the novel and, since she is so monstrously selfish and manipulative, strangely admirable. For those unfamiliar with Druzhnikov, his 2002 novel Angels on the Head of a Pin might be a better introduction to his work. Despite Druzhnikov being a proselytiser for the "micronovel", that novel is a massive 600-page dissection of Soviet society, carried out via the figure of a newspaper editor and candidate for the Central Committee who has a heart attack. The writing is at times reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn - indeed, he has a guest role - but Druzhnikov has a lot more humour (well, he missed the gulag) and even offers a whiff of magical realism.’ – Tibor Fischer, Guardian

YURI DRUZHNIKOV is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction. Blacklisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first edition of this novel sold a quarter of a million copies and was deemed one of the ten best Russian novels of the century at the 1999 Warsaw Conference. In 2001 the author was put forward by Poland for the Nobel prize. He emigrated to the USA in 1987 and now teaches at the University of California at Davis.