美国国家公共电台 NPR Russia — And Grandma — Defy Expectations In 'A Terrible Country'

 

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

We're spending a lot of time these days thinking about Russia and its relationship to the U.S. The big news yesterday was that indictments¹ against 12 Russian intelligence officers have been brought for conspiring², among other things, to influence the 2016 election. And there will be more news Monday when President Trump³ sits down with Vladimir Putin. So it's fortuitous that Keith Gessen set his new novel in Russia. He was born there and describes a place we can't divine from the headlines.

It's set a decade ago in the middle of the global financial crisis and protests in Moscow. Andrei Kaplan, brought to America as a boy, has spent his entire life studying Russian history and literature and now in the novel he can't find a job. So Andrei decamps to Moscow to look after his 89-year-old grandmother, frail⁴ and living alone in what she calls a terrible country.

KEITH GESSEN: He has this fantasy that if he goes over to Moscow and starts interviewing her, she will produce all these stories about Stalinist Russia, which he can then sort of repackage into an academic article and make his career take off. And of course once he gets there, he's disappointed to find that his grandmother hardly remembers who he is, much less various details about Stalinist Russia.

MONTAGNE: He gets there and what does he find? Because it's been a while since he had visited Moscow.

GESSEN: As an American, or Russian-American who's interested in Russia, he read the news about Russia a lot, and he really expects when he gets there to find this place that is under a terrible dictatorship. People are oppressed. You know, he thinks he's going to show up and possibly get arrested at the airport. And instead, he finds that the country has become quite rich. Everybody is walking around talking on sleek⁵ little cellphones. They also seem to be driving fancy German cars. It's not what he expected.

MONTAGNE: There's a passage where you write about this, the shock, the shock of the change. Why don't you read us a little bit of that?

GESSEN: Sure. And the set up to this is his grandmother who can't remember anything, she remains⁶ very curious about what's happening in Russia, so she's constantly asking Andrei what's the situation? What's the situation in the country? And then he thinks this (reading) what was the situation in the country? It was true I didn't know, but it wasn't true that I had no idea. Everyone in Moscow seemed to drive a black Audi, and there were websites where you could order a prostitute after reading all her customer reviews. Every time I walked into the Coffee Grind and bought the cheapest item on the menu, I was amazed at all the other customers. Where did they come from in this traumatized and wounded country? Some of them were walking over from the KGB building across the street but not all of them. And anyway, this was the cheapest cafe in my grandmother's neighborhood. These people were buying a couple of double espressos and pastries⁷ and sandwiches and being charged $30. The worst part was they didn't even argue. You'd have thought some of them at least would have said what? None of them said it. They handed over the money. They didn't even blink.

MONTAGNE: There's a way in which money - money is practically a character in this novel. A lot of people have it; others, like the grandmother, Andrei's grandmother, barely getting by.

GESSEN: Yeah. And, you know, Andrei leaves this country where he found himself measured all the time by whether or not he had money. That is to say the United States. And he shows up in Russia to find that it's the exact same thing, that Russians have very much adapted these values of thinking that the amount of money you have is a sign of your success and your virtue⁸ and that those people who weren't able to make money in the post-Soviet⁹ period and who are suffering or barely getting by, that they deserve to suffer.

MONTAGNE: Although his grandmother is quite poignant¹⁰ because she's old-school. I mean, she will walk to five stores to get the best price she can possibly get.

GESSEN: Yeah. I mean, the - one of the things that has happened in the Moscow that Andrei discovers is that it has gone through radical¹¹ gentrification and most of the kind of old-school Soviet people, a lot of whom were elderly who were living in the center of the city, have basically been priced out - some of them quite violently. There were a lot of scams in the '90s where kind of elderly people who had prime real estate in Moscow had bad things happen to them. So his grandmother is one of the few kind of holdovers in this part of the city who is from the old days who has very little cash, is basically living off her pension. And she has this kind of Soviet geography that she keeps to where she knows which store has the cheapest cheese, which store has the cheapest butter, which store has the cheapest cucumbers. And Andrei finds this very frustrating¹² because to go on a shopping trip with her takes, you know, at least three times as long as it has to.

MONTAGNE: The book is funny, laugh out loud sometimes, and yet there's a darkness there. Is that capturing something that is Russian?

GESSEN: I hope so. You know, for me, it's this - whenever I go over there, I have the same reaction as I describe Andrei having in the book, which is I spend all this time reading about what's going on over there and a lot of it is really bad. And then I get there, and people are sitting in coffee shops and, you know, you think, are all these people just kind of living an illusion or, you know, do they have to just go about their lives? And the answer is kind of both, right? I mean, you can't live with a constant sense of how bad things are politically. You do have to go out and get coffee.

MONTAGNE: Keith Gessen - his new novel, set in Russia, is called "A Terrible Country." Thank you very much for joining us.

GESSEN: Thank you so much.

1 indictments   

n.（制度、社会等的）衰败迹象( indictment的名词复数 )；刑事起诉书；公诉书；控告

参考例句：

• A New York jury brought criminal indictments against the founder of the organization. 纽约的一个陪审团对这个组织的创始人提起了多项刑事诉讼。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• These two indictments are self-evident and require no elaboration. 这两条意义自明，无须多说。 来自互联网

2 conspiring   

密谋( conspire的现在分词 )； 搞阴谋； （事件等）巧合； 共同导致

参考例句：

• They were accused of conspiring against the king. 他们被指控阴谋反对国王。
• John Brown and his associates were tried for conspiring to overthrow the slave states. 约翰·布朗和他的合伙者们由于密谋推翻实行奴隶制度的美国各州而被审讯。

3 trump   

n.王牌，法宝；v.打出王牌，吹喇叭

参考例句：

• He was never able to trump up the courage to have a showdown.他始终鼓不起勇气摊牌。
• The coach saved his star player for a trump card.教练保留他的明星选手，作为他的王牌。

4 frail   

adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的

参考例句：

• Mrs. Warner is already 96 and too frail to live by herself.华纳太太已经九十六岁了，身体虚弱，不便独居。
• She lay in bed looking particularly frail.她躺在床上，看上去特别虚弱。

5 sleek   

adj.光滑的，井然有序的；v.使光滑，梳拢

参考例句：

• Women preferred sleek,shiny hair with little decoration.女士们更喜欢略加修饰的光滑闪亮型秀发。
• The horse's coat was sleek and glossy.这匹马全身润泽有光。

6 remains   

n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹

参考例句：

• He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
• The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。

7 pastries   

n.面粉制的糕点

参考例句：

• He gave a dry laugh, then sat down and started on the pastries. 杜新箨说着干笑一声，坐下去就吃点心。 来自子夜部分
• Mike: So many! I like Xijiang raisins, beef jerky, and local pastries. 麦克：太多了。我最喜欢吃新疆葡萄干、牛肉干和风味点心。

8 virtue   

n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力

参考例句：

• He was considered to be a paragon of virtue.他被认为是品德尽善尽美的典范。
• You need to decorate your mind with virtue.你应该用德行美化心灵。

9 Soviet   

adj.苏联的，苏维埃的；n.苏维埃

参考例句：

• Zhukov was a marshal of the former Soviet Union.朱可夫是前苏联的一位元帅。
• Germany began to attack the Soviet Union in 1941.德国在1941年开始进攻苏联。

10 poignant   

adj.令人痛苦的，辛酸的，惨痛的

参考例句：

• His lyrics are as acerbic and poignant as they ever have been.他的歌词一如既往的犀利辛辣。
• It is especially poignant that he died on the day before his wedding.他在婚礼前一天去世了，这尤其令人悲恸。

11 radical   

n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的

参考例句：

• The patient got a radical cure in the hospital.病人在医院得到了根治。
• She is radical in her demands.她的要求十分偏激。

12 frustrating   

adj.产生挫折的，使人沮丧的，令人泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的现在分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧

参考例句：

• It's frustrating to have to wait so long. 要等这么长时间，真令人懊恼。
• It was a demeaning and ultimately frustrating experience. 那是一次有失颜面并且令人沮丧至极的经历。 来自《简明英汉词典》