Liu Wenfei one The beauty of Russian girls is famous all over the world, and a novel about Russian beauties should also be attractive.Indeed, Victor.After Yerofiev's publication, it became popular immediately and was quickly translated into more than 20 foreign languages.Today, more than ten years have passed, and it is still placed prominently in major bookstores in Russia. Scholars cannot fail to mention this work when they talk about contemporary Russian literature.The publication of the novel was seven or eight years earlier than the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Therefore, it can be regarded as a literary classic in the "post-Soviet era"; and the novel's outrageous and random description and narrative attitude make it a People have reason to call it one of the earliest representative works of Russian postmodern literature.

two This is the inner monologue of a Russian beauty. Her monologues are upside down, with joy, anger, sorrow and joy one after another, and the alternation of true love and hysteria, which is often incoherent.However, through these stream-of-consciousness and illogical narratives, we can still get a glimpse of such a general "plot": Irina, a beautiful woman in her twenties.After experiencing two failed marriages, Tarakanova left her hometown in the provinces and came to Moscow to live with her retired grandfather. Because of her youthful beauty, but also because of her exuberant passion and easy-going mentality , she met all kinds of male and female lovers in Moscow, including ambassadors and expatriates, high-ranking cadres and reporters, bosses and friends, musicians and graduate students; Russians, ethnic minorities and foreigners... Later , she and the famous literary activist Vladimir.Sergeyevich (the heroine calls him "Leonardick") met and sincerely fell in love with him, but the latter was still reluctant to marry because of family responsibilities, social influence, etc. During a tryst between the two, the literary activist died due to over-excitement, and the heroine was traced, criticized and condemned for this. At the same time, the heroine learned that she was pregnant with the literary activist's child. She was helpless, she went to the church to be baptized and prayed to God, and she also followed the advice of her friends to run naked on the ancient battlefield to atone for her sins.In the end, the dead Leonardic suddenly appeared at the heroine's residence and wanted to marry her as his wife. On an agreed day, Irina.Tarakanova decided to get married and invited all her lovers and friends to the wedding...

Such a plot itself is not very attractive, and even such a plot does not have a clear and coherent explanation in the novel. Obviously, the author's purpose, or his forte, is not to tell a story .So, where is the uniqueness? three The first is the unique image of the heroine. A beautiful girl came to the city from other provinces and sank under the influence of the social environment and the atmosphere of the times. She had pinned her hopes of family happiness on one man after another, but they failed every time. In the end, she was pregnant and had nothing. She had no choice but to agree to marry a dead man.Such a protagonist and his experience are too easy to remind us of the traditional themes of "little people" and "tragic women" in Russian literature. The abducted stationmaster's daughter Dunia, Maslova who was abandoned in chaos, and Sonia as the embodiment of suffering in the middle... The description of the miserable status of women as a disadvantaged group in an unfair society is a Russian literature. The embodiment of a strong humanitarian spirit and the display of the destruction process of women as the embodiment of beauty endow Russian literature with a certain profound tragic meaning.In the novel, there is also the beauty of being destroyed, as well as the misfortune of women, but for some reason, our attitude towards the heroine may be very contradictory.On the one hand, we may not sympathize with her, because she actively chose a life that we regard as dissolute, and it can be said that her misfortune is purely caused by herself; The incomparably beautiful girl, in the face of her harmless and blameless way of life, do we still have the heart to gloat over her suffering?On the one hand, the sex-obsessed, gay-obsessed, tobacco-drinking heroine seems to have a perpetual complaint about life, with mean words, erratic behavior, and occasional bouts of hysteria, all of which will no doubt It makes people feel that she is a bit annoying; but on the other hand, the heroine seems to be beyond reproach. She loves Moscow and yearns for a happy life. hobby” (Chapter 4), when her lover told her to give her a car, she said: “What I want is not a car, but happiness.” (Chapter 8) She is full of love: "And generally speaking, I still love people vaguely in my heart. If there is any doubt about this, I will feel depressed immediately." (Chapter 7) She is kind: "I don't want to be with anyone People are enemies, and I don’t want to blame anyone.” (Chapter 6) She is even more sincere: Compared with her girlfriends in the novel, she is the least sophisticated and tactful, the least scheming and vulgar, and the most rational and tolerant. get out.This is actually a very cute Russian beauty!Her contradictory character makes us both sympathize and hate us, or in other words, neither makes us sympathize nor hates us.

So, what is the significance of a literary figure like Irina?We believe that what this image raises is the question of how we should approach beauty.There is such a deafening exclamation in the novel: "When will we learn to value beauty here." (Chapter 1) Irina is beautiful, and a character in the novel once said to her: "You know, apart from beauty, You have nothing!" But the heroine is surprised: "Isn't that enough?" (Chapter 15) Yes, beauty is the most precious thing.However, what beauty brings to the heroine is not happiness, but disaster: "I long to love and be loved, but there are few people worthy of love around me, because there are very few of them." (p. Chapter 5) Therefore, the heroine says: "Sometimes I feel that I am an unfortunate, stupid woman who has been abused by life." (Chapter 2) "So I feel with horror that no one here Can understand me, in this festival of life, I am an outsider." (Chapter 3) A life without beauty is indeed sad, but a society that ignores beauty is undoubtedly even more deformed. wanted to tell us.If beauty does not save the world as Dostoevsky predicted, at least it should bring more embellishment and comfort to our lives.

Four The second is the unique narrative style of the novel. The structure of this novel is very novel. It is like a Rubik's cube, which can combine new pictures at will. It is like a flipping game. You need to be careful and meticulous to interpret before you can continue to stay in this labyrinth of words.It combines many characteristics of stream-of-consciousness novels and French new novels. Its narration is endless and its text is airtight. A sentence often occupies more than half a page, and a paragraph often lasts several pages. The author tries to use this style to express Simulate the messy and complicated psychological feelings of the heroine.In the narration, the roles (personal pronouns) of the subject of the discourse change at will, just like the face-changing in Chinese Sichuan Opera, which is dizzying.The author even completely dissolves the distinction between direct and indirect speech, internal monologue and character dialogue in traditional novels, and in this way creates a compact and dense novel space.

The language of the novel also reflects the author's quickness and wit. Some metaphors in the novel are very vivid, but at the same time they are mischievous and full of mischief.For example: when describing the purity of nature, the author said that it is like "putting on white briefs with lace" (Chapter 8); the heroine once said to the gynecologist: "I am sterile anyway, just Like the Karakum Desert." (Chapter 16) Some people never think about life itself, "they hold meaning as a cow has milk" (Chapter 17); , "hysteria is as beautiful as a fountain" (chapter 24); the inflamed throat of the heroine, "like a flamingo feather" (chapter 20); and after her pregnancy, " The navel bulged out, look, exactly like a third eye" (Chapter 24); the mouth of the villa porter's wife "like a chicken butt", but "she didn't know the ridiculousness of her mouth, and still put Lips are painted bright red" (Chapter 3); and the heroine thinks when she decides to invite everyone to the wedding: "My gift is for the collective, like a letter to the people" (Chapter 24 )

Fives It is regarded as a representative work of Russian postmodernist literature, and its so-called "postmodern" features, in addition to its difficult "qualitative" characters, intentionally deconstructed plot structure, experimental narrative language, and a large number of dreams and In addition to the magical scene, the author's (more precisely, the author's expression through the mouth of the heroine) irony and ridicule attitude is also a very eye-catching aspect.In the eyes of the author, everything, even those that seem sacred, can be the object of ridicule.Real life is of course the object of ridicule.Forced by life, a large number of Russian girls married abroad, and the characters in the book commented: "Oh, the girls will soon be gone, and only some old cows will be left.—The old cows are also leaving. "(Chapter 19) For the rapidly changing Russian society, the author shows more of a calm onlooker. After the rise of religious fashion, Russian women "changed from female members of the Communist Youth League to female teachers. people, for the blood of the ancestors in the veins is stronger than stubborn atheism". (Chapter 17) This is true for the Soviet Union and Russia, but also for other countries and peoples, Kreusa's French dentist husband, American tourists visiting museums in Paris, Japanese businessmen and conductors, and even Dalai Lama.Finch, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Goethe, John.Reed, Arthur.Miller and other foreign celebrities are caricatured in the novel.Depictions of God, priests, baptism and prayer, etc., are also sometimes irreverent.When the heroine talks about her relatives, she calls her grandpa an "old crook", an "old Stakhanov worker" who once completed the workload of 150 black laborers in one day And the root cause of the disease has fallen, and now what I want to do is to drive away the granddaughter who is stuck with him; the mother wants to pretend to be a Jew and immigrate to Israel, with cheap earrings on her ears, and her permed hair "steaming like a locomotive." , After coming to Moscow, he took a bath three times a day and soaked himself "like a damp wall"; his father was a one-eyed man who only knew to drink all day long.When it comes to Russian and Soviet literature, the author's irony is even stronger. In the book, the writers he has ridiculed or alluded to include: Pushkin and Lev.Tolstoy, Gorky, Ah.Tolstoy, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Ilif and Petrov, Ahmadulina, etc.It is said that the "literary activist" Vladimir in the novel.Sergeyevich was also modeled after a famous Soviet writer.In the second chapter, the heroine confesses that she has no literary talent and that it would be nice if there was a writer like Sholokhov to write her story, but now he has become a "drunkard" and Solzhenitsyn is equally troubling because of his insincerity.In another place, Solzhenitsyn was also called "Ryazan rapper".In the second half of the last century, Sholokhov and Solzhenitsyn had a deep grievance over the issue of who was the author. They were also regarded as representatives of the two literary forces, but the author of the The two made the same ridicule, which is also a manifestation of the author's determination to overthrow all literary idols and deconstruct all literary models.

It should be pointed out that, first of all, the ironic attitude reflected is completely different from the traditional style of Russian literature. Russian literature does not lack critical attitude and fighting spirit, from Radishev's "Travel Notes" to Herzen's "The Alarm", from the radical revolutionary democratic aesthetics of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, to Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Profound criticism of realist literary creation, Russian literature has always faced reality, but such an attitude of calm detachment and fierce irony, casual and very mean ridicule reflected in the portrait is rare; secondly, Such a sarcastic attitude seems to have become the mainstream emotion in Russian literature, and has become a literary fashion. When facing the problems of reality and history, as well as cultural and literary traditions, there seems to be more and more Writers take this attitude.According to people's analysis, it is the value confusion that emerged after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the post-modern trend of thought in the West, and the hesitant mentality at the turn of the century, which jointly gave birth to this remarkable emotional feature in the new Russian literature. One of the works of attitude.

six A nonchalant and unscrupulous attitude towards sex, swear words and even pornography seems to be a kind of "postmodern".Needless to say, this attitude was one of the main reasons for the original sensation, which was once said to be a "pornographic story".However, we believe that it is a serious literary work, not an "obscene novel", because: 1. The description of sex in the book is not an end but a means. The purpose of those sex scenes and descriptions of sexual psychology is to reveal the delicate and delicate A profound psychological journey; 2. Most of the sexual descriptions in the book are narrated by the heroine in the first person, so there is no vulgar taste of hunting and playing with the male gaze in the previous sex literature; 3. As for the book Those dirty words and puns that cannot be found in the latest Russian dictionary are not dazzling because of the calmness shown by their users, because they are reflected in the whole novel and the literary concept of the author. The pursuit of linguistic equality and written democracy is closely linked.

seven Finally, let's meet the author of this book. Victor.Yerofiev was born in a diplomat family in Moscow in 1947. He lived with his parents in Paris as a child. He graduated from the Department of Language and Literature of Moscow University in 1970, and later became a graduate student of the Institute of World Literature of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1973, he published a research article on Sartre in the Soviet "Literary Issues" magazine, which began to attract people's attention; in 1975, he completed the defense of his associate doctoral thesis, the title of which was "Dostoev Ski and French Existentialism, a treatise that was later published in the United States as a separate volume. In 1979, Yerofiev participated in the editorial activities of the underground literary journal "Metropolis", and was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers for this reason. His works were deprived of the right to publish their works for a long time, and the ban was not lifted until 1988. In 1989, he published the article "Remembrance of Soviet Literature", which gave a "review and reflection" of more negation than affirmation, more ridicule than praise, of the history of more than 70 years of Soviet literature, which stirred up thousands of layers in the literary world at that time. Waves; followed by another hit in 1990, which was hailed as "the first international bestseller published in Russia".In addition, he also wrote the novel "Doomsday Judgment" (1996) and a large number of short stories. In 1996, a publishing house in Moscow published his three-volume collection of novels.

In today's Russian literary world, Yerofiev is famous for his quick thinking and sharp views. He lectures in universities in European and American countries all the year round, which also objectively expands the influence of his literary works, whether in Russia or abroad. Or abroad, people often talk about his thesis "Remembrance of Soviet Literature" mentioned above, talk about the preface he wrote for Sologub's "Despicable Demon", and talk about his His collection of essays on literature and philosophy "In a Labyrinth of Damn Questions" is fond of talking about his short story "Life with an Idiot" which has been adapted into plays and films successively, and his editor-in-chief The short story collection "Russian Evil Flower", but, so far, in the minds of most readers, the name "Victor. Eight The stream-of-consciousness style of writing in this work, as well as the extensive use of slang, idioms and even swear words in the work, have made its translation a very heavy task. Any errors or inappropriateness in the translation are welcome to correct.Thanks to Michael, University of Oxford, UK.Dr. Michael Nicholson provided me with an English translation for reference.