Black Milk
And his Muscovites are no better. We meet two of them in Black Milk. Lyovchik and his very pregnant young wife, Poppet, are a pair of would-be sharpies who travel the provinces by train selling Malaysian-made “supertoasters” to the peasant “savages” at each godforsaken stop. Actually, they don’t sell the toasters, they give them away–but the delivery charge is 200 rubles. The villagers snap them up, less for the toast than for the taste of modernity.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sigarev’s rural ideal inverts Chekhov, whose characters accept the quiet life of the provinces only after they’ve given up everything else. But he’s exactly like Chekhov in his comprehension of how language shapes character. Though Chekhov’s people tend to speak Diffidence rather than Bitch, the deep structure is the same for both: a profound sense of not belonging. Of having been cut off from the homeland of one’s own heart. For this reason, the quality of the translation can make or break an American version of Black Milk. Sasha Dugdale’s is fluent, sharp, and appropriately idiomatic while never letting us forget that we’re deep in, well, the interior parts of Russia.
