Lives in Transit: A Collection of Recent Russian Women's Writing

Although the 35 poems (by six poets) are unremarkable, the 23 stories in this anthology are astonishing for their lyrical imagery and wordplay, and for the breadth of their collective scope. There are stories about frustrated geologists, about cobblers with undying affections and about young women seeking elusive knowledge of love. In Nina Sadur's ``Wicked Girls,'' an unnamed narrator solves (or claims to solve) the riddle of a friend's box of reappearing chocolates. Galina Shcherbakova's ``Uncle Khlor and Koriakin,'' which teeters precariously between the treacly and the moving, tells of a widower who comes to share his stepdaughter with her biological father. Liudmila Ulitskaia's ``Gulia''--about an elderly woman who seduces a younger man--is served by the gracious formality of its prose. Even the surreal is represented, in Marina Tsvetaeva's ``Life Insurance,'' a playful tale of a Russian emigre family in France who receive a remarkable visit from an insurance salesman. Although there are several standout poems, including Olesia Nikolaeva's ``The Shade,'' a stark rant that takes shots against the former Communist regime (``Behind every scribe, I sense the monstrous machine''), the verse here is not graced, as the fiction generally is, by equal parts of lyricism and zeal. Still, this is, overall, a sparkling collection--and that despite the editor's puzzling working definition of the word ``recent'': some of the pieces date from the late 1960s or early '70s, and one (Tsvetaeva's) was written in 1934. Footnotes. (Aug.)