The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar - by Yury Tynyanov (Paperback)

About the Book

"A novel by Yury Tynyanov, a leading figure of the Russian formalist school, describes the final year in the life of Alexander Griboedov, the author of the comedy Woe from Wit. As ambassador to Persia, Griboedov was savagely murdered in Tehran in 1829 in an attack on the Russian embassy. The novel is not only one of the central texts of Russian formalist literary production but also a brilliant meditation on the nature of historical and poetic consciousness and on literary creation. It is a complex and fascinating work on the nature of the relationship among individual memory, historical fact, and the literary imagination. The result is a hybrid text, containing elements of literary biography, the psychological existential novel, and the spy novel, and a deeply personal, almost confessional work about the relationship of the writer to his generation and the state. Written in 1927 and 1928, almost a century after the events it depicts, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar bridges two watershed periods between revolution and reaction. At a time when the Soviet regime was becoming increasingly restrictive of freedom of expression and conscience, Tynyanov examined themes of disillusionment, betrayal, unrealized potential, and wasted talent. Unabashedly intellectual yet full of intrigue and suspense, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is one of the great historical novels of Russian modernism"--

Book Synopsis

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, a novel by Yury Tynyanov, one of the leading figures of the Russian formalist school, describes the final year in the life of Alexander Griboedov, the author of the comedy Woe from Wit. As ambassador to Persia, Griboedov was murdered in 1829 by a Tehrani mob during the sacking of the Russian embassy.

One of the central texts of Russian formalist literary production, the novel is a brilliant meditation on the nature of historical and poetic consciousness and of artistic creation. It is a complex and fascinating work that explores the relationships among individual memory, historical fact, and the literary imagination. The result is a hybrid text, containing elements of various genres--historical, biographical, existential, and adventure novels--and a deeply personal, almost confessional testament to the writer's relationship to his generation and the state. Completed in 1927, almost a century after the events it depicts, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar marks the watershed between revolution and reaction. At a time when the Soviet regime was becoming increasingly restrictive of freedom of expression and conscience, Tynyanov grappled with the themes of disillusionment, betrayal, and unrealized potential. Unabashedly intellectual yet filled with intrigue and suspense, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar is a great historical novel of Russian modernism.

Review Quotes

[This] crisp new English translation of this dazzling and erudite novel by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush . . . underscores Tynyanov's signal achievement . . . Readers with an interest in Russian history and literature, or a more general interest in how the Great Game was played in the 19th century, will likely find The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar riveting.-- "The Wilson Quarterly"

Another fine rendition...with a splendid introduction by Angela Brintlinger and helpful supplementary material identifying people and allusions unfamiliar to the nonspecialist. A brilliant thinker and a splendid writer, Tynyanov deserves to be better known.-- "New York Review of Books"

Using meticulous research to fuel his imagination, [Tynyanov] endowed his characters with emotional lives rarely found in archives. The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, first published in 1928, is a fine specimen of this technique . . . The text is full of fragmentary hints, deftly preserved in all their ambiguity by the translators, Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, who leave the reader to decode the author's messages.-- "Los Angeles Review Books"

The well-known formalist literary scholar Yury Tynyanov was a master of form. In bracing prose style, his novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar dives deeply into the life of the Russian poet Alexander Griboedov and Russian cultural and political history. This translation by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush brings the reader every unexpected turn of Griboedov's life and thoughts.--Sibelan Forrester, translator of Vladimir Propp's The Russian Folktale

Together with Shklovsky and Jakobson, Tynyanov was the face of Russian formalism--the premier student of Romanticism. His historical novels draw on the extensive wealth of archival materials he acquired as a critic. Tynyanov's novel is a must-read!--Peter Steiner, author of Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics

Tynyanov's novel transforms the life of writer-diplomat Alexander Griboedov into the death of the author as such, dispersed discursively even as he is dismembered physically, through bureaucratic manipulation, high-society intrigue, diplomatic complicity, and social oblivion. This book recasts the familiar story of the martyred Russian writer, anticipating by a century the fate of Soviet intellectuals whose life and work would be subsumed by the state.--Harsha Ram, author of The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

About the Author

Yury Tynyanov (1894-1943) was an influential literary historian, critic, translator, and theoretician of the cinema. He was a leading member of the formalist school of literary theory before achieving renown as a writer of historical fiction. His works include two other literary biographical novels, on Pushkin and Küchelbecker, as well as several shorter works of historical fiction.

Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush previously translated Tynyanov's Young Pushkin: A Novel (2007).