Russian Beauty: A Novel - Hardcover

Victor Erofeyev; Andrew Reynolds

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670836060 ISBN 13: 9780670836062

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1993

Synopsis

Beautiful and utterly insightful, heroine Irina Tarakanova relates the story of the sexual odyssey that takes her from passionate flings with the father of her unborn child to caring lesbian affairs with her best friend. 15,000 first printing. $10,000 ad/promo.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

From Kirkus Reviews:

This supernova monologue is the story of Irina (Ira) Tarakanova--Moscow muse, lover of countless men and also a few women, singer of a long song of despair and humor and satire and Russianness. As the story commences, she is both pregnant and newly baptized, the mixture of which leads her away from her normal penchant for abortion. Who the father is, or might claim to be, is awfully hard to know. Ira sleeps with an Armenian concert pianist, a Latin American ambassador, any number of short-term lovers, and, most prominent of all, Vladimir Sergeyevich, a famous Socialist-Realist writer, a state icon, an artist who's never done the brave or right thing, a very old man--who dies in Ira's arms during sex. To fornicate with cowardice seems Ira's destiny--and as you ride the swells of this Rabelaisian novel (terrifically translated by Reynolds), you are laughing one minute and horrified the next (Ira's work collective holds a tribunal about her--during which a whole spectrum of Soviet-relativity-style betrayal is exhibited; her accusers fall over themselves afterward to assure her of their bravery in not saying worse about her!). Meanwhile, the story accommodates reportage (wonderful pictures of the time-lag found in the Russian countryside, the boys all wearing Beatle haircuts), philosophy, pornography (Ira models for a magazine wearing widow's weeds), and spiritual exorcism. It is a dynamo--and Erofeyev (who, together with Aksyonov, edited a dissident-writings collection, Metropol, in 1983) puts himself directly into the rank of Aksyonov, Bitov, Tolstaya--the best of the Russian writers working now. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0670836060
• ISBN 13: 9780670836062
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 343