Works
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, his works were no longer published in the new post-Soviet states. Finding himself in a difficult position, he even said that he would emigrate to the United States. However, through Chinghiz Aitmatov, he met with Swiss publisher Lucien Leitess who signed a contract to publish Rytkheu’s works in German, and who would go on to become his literary agent. Rytkheu’s works were introduced to readers in France, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, and other countries. Тhe German editions of his books have sold more than 250,000 copies and Swiss publisher Unionsverlag has published them in other European languages, as well. The situation in Russia, however, was quite the opposite since the time his book Путешествие в молодости was published in 1991. Since the turn of the millennium, the Governor of Chukotka Roman Abramovich has sponsored the distribution of a small run of Rytkeu’s works in Russia, approximately one a year, all of which are issued only in Chukotka. The first of these books was a new work called In the Mirror of Forgetfulness (В зеркале забвения).
Rytkheu’s works have been translated into numerous languages, including several national languages of the former USSR. In addition, the composer Eduard Artemyev set Rytkheu’s poems to music in the 1985 vocal-instrumental suite The Warmth of the Earth (Тепло Земли).
Only a few of his works have been translated into English, including his A Dream in Polar Fog (Russian: Сон в начале тумана), originally published in 1970, which was published by Archipelago Books in 2005.
Colin Thubron summarized his career as follows:
For his earlier books, there are those who never forgave him. His slavish pursuit of the Party line and open repudiation of his people’s traditions are embarrassingly manifest in works that celebrate the (nonexistent) transformation of his native Chukotka into a Soviet paradigm. ... But by the late 1970s, as the slow literary thaw continued, he started to write differently. Perhaps influenced by the derevenshchiki, the “village writers” who turned for their values to the unspoiled countryside, he began to extol precisely the Chukchi oral culture that he had once repudiated.
Read more about this topic: Yuri Rytkheu
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.”
—Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846)
“Piety practised in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendour of beneficence.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)