simply cool

Chegem is an idyllic, Muslim, peasant town in Abkhazia, an autonomous republic on the north coast of the Black Sea. Sandro of Chegem is a tamada (or captain of table) and renowned adventurer and storyteller. Through Sandro's adventures and the doings of the people of Chegem, Iskander spins a series of interwoven tales which wryly, wittily, and satirically compare the incongruities of Soviet life with the simpler values of peasant life. The result is subversive and poignant. The writing is superbly graceful, in the tradition of Middle Eastern storytellers. Iskander has a deep understanding of human nature and a satirist's ability to bring humor from human foibles.

These short stories, like most of Iskander's tales and fables, take place in his beloved home, the Muslim region of Abkhazia near Georgia. They range over a great deal of territory--growing up, going to school, rembrances of eccentric characters from the Abkhazia of Iskander's youth. Like Bulgakov's satires, however, Iskander's stories also have a more political substrata. Several stories subtly aim their arrows at the Soviet regime. In one story, Forbidden Fruit, a boy who snitches on his sister for eating pork is punished for his actions. In another, One Day in Summer, the story a German tourist tells our narrator about his experiences under the Nazis seems a critique of Soviet responses to Stalin. In still another, Old Crooked Arm, an eccentric outwits both his friends and the Soviet state.

These are remarkable fables by one of the greatest Russian writers of our time. I heartilly recommend them. Finally, this is a beautifully produced book by Progress/Raduga, well translated by Robert Dalglish and Kathleen Horujy-Cook

The subject of this satire--a harebrained scheme to boost Soviet agricultural production by creating a hardier breed of goat--may seem dated, but the humor is timeless. Fazil Iskander is a wonderful writer who has never achieved the readership he deserves in the West. His stories are most interesting when they focus on the culture of his native Abkhazia, a former province of the Soviet Republic of Georgia. As Iskander portrays it, Abkhazia was a fairy-tale land where bandits flourished and blood-feuds between rival clans played out in the mountains overlooking the Black Sea, until the Bolveshiks subdued it and imposed their own sterile conformity. Iskander did most of his important writing before Glasnost, when he earned his keep as a member of the Soviet Writers Union, so he disguises his satire of the Soviet system as a wistful nostalgia about the withering of traditional life in the face of modernity. His stories are all the sadder now that Abkhazia has fallen on even harder times following the collapse of the Soviet Union: after a short but bloody war of independence against Georgia in the early 1990's, Abkhazia won de facto autonomy, but has since become a haven for drug lords and marauding bands of Chechen fighters who drift back and forth across its borders. The colorful way of life of the Abkhaz may exist nowhere now but in the fond remembrances of Fazil Iskander.