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:
“Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)