‘Nabokov’s Inkblot’ is, to my mind, the best story here. The grim, blackly comic description of his father’s funeral more than makes up for the story’s slightly trite conclusion. Shishkin unflinchingly depicts that generation’s despair and alchoholism, a generation of men who drank their lives away after World War Two. In ‘Of Saucepans and Star-Showers’, Shishkin uses his own family history to discuss the reasons why people of his father’s generation clung onto the concept of the USSR. The finest stories in the collection are the ones which we can assume are autobiographical. The stories in this collection serve as a brilliant accompaniment to Shishkin’s novels. The two novels by Shishkin which have previously been translated into English - Maidenhair and The Light and The Dark - are wonderful, idiosyncratic (and sometimes frustrating) pieces, discussing urgent modern issues and timeless literary themes. His writing is fearlessly forward-thinking but also unashamedly influenced by Russian authors such as Tolstoy, Nabokov, Platonov and Kharms. Shishkin is one of modern Russian literature’s ‘heavyweights’. Calligraphy Lesson: Mikhail Shishkin’s Collected Stories
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