Going to town and other stories

Houghton Mifflin, 1964-01-01. Hardcover. Acceptable/Acceptable. Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press, 1964. Hardcover, 325 pp. Stated First Printing. Compiled and translated by Gabriella Azrael. Acceptable in acceptable dust jacket. Grey cloth covered boards with white design on front and white lettering on spine. Damp-staining to back cover with some bubbling to the fabric. Scuffing, fading and light soiling to edges of covers as well. Binding tight. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked. Dust jacket has several 1" or less nicks and tears to edges and a few small holes near edges as well. Damp-staining to paper over back cover and light to moderate overall scuffing, aging and soiling. NOT price clipped Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From jacket flap] Going to Town affords a fresh, honest, moving insight into a world the West knows little about. It is a portrait of life on the collective farms and city streets, in the factories and the vast forests of contemporary Russia. Its stories are in the great tradition of Russian literature. From Chekhov and other masters Kazakov has inherited a deep sense of pessimism about the human condition along with a mystic reverence for the individual. He is the prose counterpart to the poet Yevtushenko, and resembles him also in being, at the moment, persona non grata in his homeland for his unorthodox presentation of Soviet society. What American readers will recognize as a technique not unlike Sherwood Anderson's in Winesburg, Ohio came as a shock in the Russian atmosphere of literary puritanism and political dogma. The characters in these stories include the lonely, the frightened, the outcast, the bitter, the foolish. The author knows the renegade, but his talent ranges much further afield. All his characters are whole men who move in the universal complexity of their good and bad qualities. He knows the ecstasy of love and the bitterness of parting. He knows the awkwardness of adolescence and the sharp contrast between youth and old age. He writes them with honesty and understanding and lyricism in the great classic tradition. [From New York Times review, Jan 12, 1964] PERHAPS the most revealing fact about good fiction in Russia today is that it is almost exclusively confined to the short story. Younger writers, like the 36-year-old Yuri Kazakov, look upon the novel as a "Stalinist" form, whose conventions thwart their strivings for expression. . . The most promising exponent of this new tendency in Soviet fiction is Yuri Kazakov, whose work is represented in Gabrella Azrael's excellent translation and selection. Here Kazakov has not only flouted every convention of Soviet literature; he has assailed the great myth of Soviet society which exalts the joys of "collective" living. His preoccupations and sympathies lie with the outcasts, the renegades, the lost souls of the collective. Among his heroes are drunkards, vagabonds, ugly and abandoned women, and, in one of his finest stories, "Adam and Eve," an abstract painter whose rejection by society ultimately alienates him from all of human life... Other Kazakov stories celebrate love between men and women, parents and children, and, perhaps most compellingly, man's love of nature. . . Kazakov's work has that singular quality of innocence which has somehow been preserved in Russian literature from Tolstoy through Pasternak into the present day.