Click the image to find this book on the publisher’s website.
Ukrainian literature is flourishing, even or especially as the war rages. Perhaps this will not surprise you, as whenever we see and hear Ukrainians on our televisions they are lively, articulate, cultured, witty, open to the world and dialogue, which I’m afraid one can’t usually say of their Russian counterparts. The novel The Children of Grad, just published in a translation by Michael Pursglove and Natalia Pniushkova, is the only contemporary Ukrainian novel I have read, but I must say it’s a masterpiece of freshness, realism, psychology, ethical focus, folklore, and even political allegory.
It opens in 1994, three years after Ukraine became independent. Four children between the ages of eleven and fourteen abscond from a boarding school/orphanage basically because it is still a Soviet institution, where they are particularly terrorised by the Communist native Russian-language teacher. They are led by the eldest child, Slavik, to ‘Grad’ (‘The City’), which is to be the Utopia where they will be happy and free from adults. Their journey to Grad involves them in vivid adventures.
So far, so Huckleberry Finn. Grad, however, turns out to be a remote, tumbledown farmstead with no mod cons. The children have to evade detection, they steal from villages, attempt to grow food, fall ill, and argue. One of them is a Crimean Tatar, Akim, who turns to drink when Slavik ‘marries’ his eleven-year-old sister. She becomes pregnant and dies. The narrator is torn between his gang-loyalty to Slavik and his awareness of Christian morality. Akim is accidentally killed in a fight with Slavik. To conceal the death, Slavik burns Grad down with Akim’s corpse in it. Slavik and the narrator, Vitka, then go on the run again, ‘to find our own, real Grad’ as Slavik puts it, but he dies of injury in a snowstorm, after confessing to an earlier murder. The Children of Grad is more Lord of the Flies and Dostoevskii, than Mark Twain.
The novel’s finale, though, is both fine and unromantically hopeful. Towards the end of his time at Grad, the narrator had wanted more and more to go ‘home’, either to the original boarding school (where the headmistress and the beautiful Ukrainian-language teacher Fauna were good people), or to his dysfunctional parents; but he had been too afraid of Slavik to say so. After Slavik’s death, Vitka is saved from suicide by an officer-veteran of the Afghan war, Daddy Misha, who adopts him and gives him a new, happy life. But ‘for many years I dreamed at night of Grad’. When Vitka is over thirty (i.e. in about 2015) he revisits the ruins of Grad. On its wall he scratches his unspoken wish of long ago: ‘I want to go back home’. These are the last words of the novel. Such is its multi-contextuality that ‘home’ could mean his home town, parents who really parent, the Grey Willow Boarding School, his home with Daddy Misha, or a greater Home — Ukraine itself.
This is a gripping, provocative, eviscerating, at times deeply poetic work; a remarkable achievement by Maria Miniailo and the translators that I commend strongly to Calderonia’s followers who wish to know Ukraine.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Captain of the 11
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon, 1912
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
No place like Home
Click the image to find this book on the publisher’s website.
Ukrainian literature is flourishing, even or especially as the war rages. Perhaps this will not surprise you, as whenever we see and hear Ukrainians on our televisions they are lively, articulate, cultured, witty, open to the world and dialogue, which I’m afraid one can’t usually say of their Russian counterparts. The novel The Children of Grad, just published in a translation by Michael Pursglove and Natalia Pniushkova, is the only contemporary Ukrainian novel I have read, but I must say it’s a masterpiece of freshness, realism, psychology, ethical focus, folklore, and even political allegory.
It opens in 1994, three years after Ukraine became independent. Four children between the ages of eleven and fourteen abscond from a boarding school/orphanage basically because it is still a Soviet institution, where they are particularly terrorised by the Communist native Russian-language teacher. They are led by the eldest child, Slavik, to ‘Grad’ (‘The City’), which is to be the Utopia where they will be happy and free from adults. Their journey to Grad involves them in vivid adventures.
So far, so Huckleberry Finn. Grad, however, turns out to be a remote, tumbledown farmstead with no mod cons. The children have to evade detection, they steal from villages, attempt to grow food, fall ill, and argue. One of them is a Crimean Tatar, Akim, who turns to drink when Slavik ‘marries’ his eleven-year-old sister. She becomes pregnant and dies. The narrator is torn between his gang-loyalty to Slavik and his awareness of Christian morality. Akim is accidentally killed in a fight with Slavik. To conceal the death, Slavik burns Grad down with Akim’s corpse in it. Slavik and the narrator, Vitka, then go on the run again, ‘to find our own, real Grad’ as Slavik puts it, but he dies of injury in a snowstorm, after confessing to an earlier murder. The Children of Grad is more Lord of the Flies and Dostoevskii, than Mark Twain.
The novel’s finale, though, is both fine and unromantically hopeful. Towards the end of his time at Grad, the narrator had wanted more and more to go ‘home’, either to the original boarding school (where the headmistress and the beautiful Ukrainian-language teacher Fauna were good people), or to his dysfunctional parents; but he had been too afraid of Slavik to say so. After Slavik’s death, Vitka is saved from suicide by an officer-veteran of the Afghan war, Daddy Misha, who adopts him and gives him a new, happy life. But ‘for many years I dreamed at night of Grad’. When Vitka is over thirty (i.e. in about 2015) he revisits the ruins of Grad. On its wall he scratches his unspoken wish of long ago: ‘I want to go back home’. These are the last words of the novel. Such is its multi-contextuality that ‘home’ could mean his home town, parents who really parent, the Grey Willow Boarding School, his home with Daddy Misha, or a greater Home — Ukraine itself.
This is a gripping, provocative, eviscerating, at times deeply poetic work; a remarkable achievement by Maria Miniailo and the translators that I commend strongly to Calderonia’s followers who wish to know Ukraine.
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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