Addendum to a Photo Album

by Vladislav Otroshenko, Lisa Hayden (Translator)

Overview

"Addendum to a Photo Album" is the saga of the births, deaths, and disappearances within the eccentric Mandrykin family. Following patriarch Malach, a Cossack captain, his wife Annushka, and his many sons all born with sideburns, the novel details their fraught relationships, particularly when sitting for family photographs. Vladislav Otroshenko's flowing sentences and rich metaphorical language describe characters whose concerns embrace the heroic, the metaphysical, and the mundane, as they fulfill their duties as Cossack warriors and family members. Otroshenko draws on his upbringing in Novocherkassk, a city on the Don River, creating a world and a book inhabited with absurdity, filial love, and unusual facial hair.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564781253
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	03/10/2014
Series:	Russian Literature Series
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Vladislav Otroshenko is a Russian novelist, essayist, and a scriptwriter. Born in Novocherkassk, the old capital for the Don Cossacks Army Region, Otroshenko graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University and is a member of Word Association of Writers PEN-Club.

Dalkey Archive Press

Editorial Reviews

2014-12-16
A hallucinatory novella about an enormous Cossack family endlessly at odds with one other.Linguistically intriguing but hard to follow, this work by Russian writer Otroshenko is an absurdist comedy about the ties that bind a family together, the nebulous relationships between fathers and sons, and the ghosts we capture in family photographs. The book has been carefully translated by Hayden, who contributes an introduction and an interview with the author and even reads the audio version. The story concerns a large Cossack family living under the thumb of Soviet Russia sometime in the early part of the 20th century. Malach Mandrykin is nominally the patriarch, although the question of paternity is one of the central plot points. When Malach marches off to fight in World War I, his wife, Annushka, has an affair with a mysterious, flamboyant figure known only as the Greek—"an incomparable artiste, a fabulously rich man, the owner of three circuses in China, and a sorcerer and seer besides." From this union is born "Uncle Semyon," who grows up to be a strange, cranky bloke with fabulously ornate side whiskers who is prone to uttering loquacious speeches and the occasional prophecy. Much of the humor and drama of watching this clan of misfits unfold during the taking of the annual family portrait. Otroshenko is clearly playing with identity and point of view, admitting to Hayden in an introductory interview that not only is the narrator unreliable—"a mirage-like figure"—but also that it's impossible to tell whether the story is being told by a nephew to this impossible number of uncles, by Uncle Semyon himself or by our mysterious Greek. Readers who enjoy the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy in Russian literature may be intrigued, but others are likely to be simply confused. A deeply strange novel that reads like a Chekhov play inspired by the comedy stylings of Monty Python.

Kirkus Reviews