Guzel Yakhina
Auteur de Zoulheikha ouvre les yeux
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Guzel Yakhina
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1977
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Russia
- Pays (pour la carte)
- Russia
- Lieu de naissance
- Kazan, Tatarstan, Russian Federation, USSR
- Études
- Kazan State Pedagogical University
Moscow Film School (PhD) - Courte biographie
- Родилась и выросла в Казани, окончила факультет иностранных языков и сценарный факультет Московской школы кино. Ее дебютный роман получил премии "Большая книга", "Книга года", "Ясная Поляна" и был переведен на 30 языков.
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
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Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 6
- Membres
- 356
- Popularité
- #67,310
- Évaluation
- 4.1
- Critiques
- 24
- ISBN
- 56
- Langues
- 13
Zuleikha is the debut novel of Russian author Guzel Yakhina and winner of the Russian Big Book Award, the Yasnaya Polyana Award, the Best Prose Work of the Year Award and is shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize (2015). Set in the 1930s in the communist Soviet Union in Kazan, Tatarstan and Siberia, it tells the story of young Muslim Tatar housewife Zuleikha, who is deported to Semruk, a remote settlement on the Angara River in Siberia. The novel is inspired by Yakhina’s grandmother and her memories of being exiled to the Gulag.
The book begins like a Russian Cinderella story with Zuleikha living with her harsh and brutal husband Murtaza and manipulative, spiteful mother-in-law, who could have easily auditioned for the role of Baba Yaga in another tale. This all changes when the Red Army arrives, killing Murtaza and taking Zuleikha away. In the 1930s the Red Army swept through Russia as part of its dekulakization programme, killing and deporting millions of kulaks (prosperous peasants) and redistributing their land. This program was begun in 1917 by Lenin who declared the kulaks to be enemies of the state and began forcibly expropriating their land, and was continued by Stalin who announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" in 1929. Between 1929–1932, the period of the first five-year plan, up to 600,000 kulaks died from hunger, disease and in mass executions.
Zuleikha finds herself on a gruelling six month train journey, not knowing her destination. She travels with an assortment of characters including Volf Karlovich Leib the eccentric doctor, Ikonnikov an artist, and Ignatov the conflicted Commandant. They arrive in remote Siberia and must set up a camp. Despite the hardships Zuleikha finds herself gradually evolving from the timid, superstitious housewife her mother-in-law had dubbed Pitiful Hen, to a strong and powerful hunter and survivor.
This was overall a good read, too long in parts, and somewhat dramatic in others. I wondered if the fact that Zuleikha’s experience of the Gulag was almost an escape from, and improvement on, the hardship of her previous life was somewhat undermining to the true reality of the absolute horror and classicide that occurred. You did however feel the mindless fanaticism of the regime and the hypocrisies inherent. I enjoyed the story of Ikonnikov, exiled for being an artist and part of the intelligentsia, then employed to create “agitational art” to inspire patriotism to the regime. 4 stars for me.… (plus d'informations)