Author:

Nationality: Russian / Language: Russian

Levkin, a prose writer and translator from English and Latvian, was born in Riga in 1954. He studied in the mathematics department of Moscow University. Levkin has worked as editor on a number of Latvian newspapers and journals. As a journalist, he has published articles on international topics in Latvian periodicals. At present, he lives and works in Moscow, where he is involved in Internet projects on politics and culture. His prose works have been published in many journals: Rodnik, Kommentarii, Ural, Selskaya molodezh, Iunost, Novaya Iunost, Sumerki, Chernovik, E, Russkii razjezd, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, Teatralnaya zhizn, Daugava. Several of his stories have been translated into English and German and included in anthologies of contemporary Russian prose.

Published works (in Russian):

Death, the Silver Beast. Riga: Text, 1993. 32 pages.

Little Tschaad. Novaya Iunost, no. 3 (1998). 56 pages.

Reviews

There are "writers of time" and "writers of space." There aren't any others at all. The others aren't writers. Levkin is without any doubt a writer of space, his writing itself the product of geography...Levkin's geography is Europe, Central Europe, the Central European provinces. I would trace his literary genealogy to Bruno Schulz and assign him Igor Klekh as a cousin. As with Schulz, Levkin's text grows of its own accord and spreads like a neglected garden at the close of summer...Levkin is an authentic nominalist. Universal ideas don't exist for him; nor, it seems, do situations. Of course it isn't short stories and novellas that he writes, but treatises. The treatise is chiefly a medieval genre. Levkin is chiefly (this really is his chief plus) a medieval author.

Kirill Kobrin, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no 28.

Title on offer:

Ancient Mathematics
Short stories. Riga: Liesman, 1986. 208 p.

Summary of the plot:

This collection of stories by Andrei Levkin, whom critics consider one of the most impressive practitioners of Russian postmodernism, is prefaced with an epigraph from Julio Cortazar: "Eight plus eight = sixteen plus the one who is doing the adding." This strange formula fits the prose of this Riga writer to a tee . His stories center on seemingly simple things, as simple as two plus two. But "the one who is doing the adding" is always inside them, the one who regards these clear, simple things and reveals their nature anew, the nature of the world and people around us. This is not by chance - in his preface the author explains his approach to the reality he describes:

"The world around us is not the same for different people or for the same person at different times. In the course of a day we pass dissimilar worlds through ourselves: the world of home, the world of work, the world of public transportation, shops, conversations. We pass as it were through variously organized environments where perhaps even physical constants do not coincide, the speed of sound, the light spectrum - not to mention the different ways these environments are understood by a man's neighbors."

It is these different worlds that Andrei Levkin scrutinizes by leading his heroes through "different environments." And as a result, these simple and seemingly uncomplicated stories - about a man who "was as lonely as a toothbrush," about the student Rybin and his fleeting love, about the "boring" Pershin and his romantic escapades - go beyond their plots. The reader enters a special narrative space that accommodates "animate" things and inanimate people who've been turned into functions (as in a family, one does the laundry, another takes out the trash). A narrative space in which we read that "snow [is] a form of quiet" and "snow is a cloud that has fallen so low that it lies scattered on the sidewalk," in which there are dreams and illuminations; a space whose presence alone makes it impossible to correspond to the traditional forms of short fiction and literary expression. The author attempts to find new, organic forms for expressing the multi-dimensionality of the world around us by devising a specific language for each "environment," a language sensitive to changes in its "physical constants." This new genre has no name - how can we apply the usual literary categories to this original, non-traditional prose concerned with painfully familiar yet elusive things? Borrowing from the lexicon of cinema, we might call Levkin's prose a "close-up panorama."

Sample text:

(Excerpts from Ancient Mathematics)

What is night?

A convention. Several hours in the day are called by this name. A convention. In June, eleven o'clock never is night. The absence of light? When it's dark, is that night? But in December seven o'clock is already evening. When people sleep, is that night? No, it's people who should sleep at night.

So night is merely the time of day when public transportation doesn't run.

Except for taxis.

It appears that things are nearly the same with all the other nouns.

It was night.

If we back away a bit and take a detached view, then we cannot say that the earth revolves. On the contrary: it stands quite firmly, like a monument, and on its surface the oceans and continents move smoothly like images of moving objects on the retina of a motionless eye....

And descending lower and lower, as the biologist discovers life in a drop of water under a microscope, descending lower and lower, the eye began to make out little lights, flames. Discrete points at first, growing, expanding, they break up into separate fractions, the moving lights of airplanes begin to sketch in the sky, and the cities are a phosphoric rash, the glimmer in a black earthenware plate. It is glassily and dazzlingly cold from up here - and lower and lower, and lines of light are already visible - the streets, and patches of light - the squares and warehouse yards. The streets are deserted and you can see that already no one is driving along them; only way over there is a police cruiser with its light flashing. The buses and streetcars are no longer running. That means you'll have to take a taxi from the airport, that means it's already night.

And descending in this way, it was easy to imagine that the world allows itself to be described by enumeration, and once you've enumerated everything, you'll have created it anew, as if it's necessary to create it anew, and even so what would be the best approach to take?

And slowly descending, it became clear that god - if he exists - isn't in the heavens, and if he's there, then he doesn't have anything to do with us because from up there people cannot be seen. What can be seen is the rectangle of the shoulders with the circle of the head in the middle, an elongated rectangle the size of a cat.

And already, through the gathering cloud cover, you can see the potholes in the asphalt and it's clear that of the nearly two hundred inhabitants of the five-storey apartment block only Vova Pershin isn't asleep.

From up above, only the sleeping and the dead are visible, only the lovers and the sick.

("Rough Draft," pp. 142-145)

Excerpts translated from the Russian by Thomas Campbell

© 1998 Copyright International Agency - Corina

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