A Captive of the Caucasus - Hardcover

Bitov, Andrei

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374118833 ISBN 13: 9780374118839

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1992

Synopsis

Russians visit the Caucasus with a sense of homecoming, Andrei Bitov--one of the Soviet Union's most gifted stylists--has remarked. They find there a world familiar from the moral and philosophic landscapes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy. In Lessons of Armenia, the first of the two personal memoirs that constitute this book, Bitov explores the way Pushkin's "confines of boundless Russia" seem never to be truly escapable. Though held in thrall by Armenia, a captive of the Caucasus, Bitov the traveler is a captive, however alienated, of his homeland, too.
Bitov's works characteristically proceed from and comment on one another, and the realization of captivity leads to a different journey; the second account, Choosing a Location, an entertaining impressionistic record of his travels in Soviet Georgia, is Bitov's quest for his own place and time. Compellingly conceived and spectacularly crafted, A Captive of the Caucasus is an intellectually spirited inquiry into the persistent idea of homeland and the individual's identity, cultural and creative.
When Lessons of Armenia first appeared in the Soviet Union in 1969, censors deleted its subtitle, "Journey Out of Russia," and made numerous small cuts. This translation restores all the deletions. Choosing a Location could not be published in the Soviet Union.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

From Kirkus Reviews:

This is the third Bitov book to reach us in Susan Brownsberger's exemplary translation (the novel Life in Windy Weather and short-story collection Pushkin House)--and just how shaggy and exhilarating an encyclopedia of Russian literature Bitov is becomes more and more manifest: He's like an anti-Nabokov. The Caucasian regions have been a staple locale of Russian classics since Pushkin: Tolstoy, Lermontov, Mandelstam--all of them found in the foreignness of the Caucasus the place out of time that ratified their artistic intuitions that writing renders both space and time suspect, that it is an activity that doesn't quite belong to either. On the face of it, Bitov is writing a ravished account of Armenian and Georgian integrities and natural beauties (such as the hewn-from-a-rock-face Armenian church, Geghard); as travel writing, the book has a subjective, swoony/goony quality that's appealing. But the literary echoes, and the very phenomenology of being in one place and not another, quickly develop into an argument for the writer as traveler even when sitting in his chair at his desk--without any real idea of what he's encountering, nor the absolute command of language to describe it. This sense of mysterious, giddy provisionality is both very Russian and deliciously individual in Bitov. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0374118833
• ISBN 13: 9780374118839
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 323