Valentin Katayev (or Kataev)

So, I've just started exploring the work of Kataev and so far have been entranced by The Grass of Oblivion. However it seems he wrote another memoir called My Emerald Crown - does anyone know if this has been translated because I'm struggling to find anything about it online.

It's actually My Diamond Crown (Almazny moi venets), and no, it doesn't appear to have been translated. Might be just as well, though, because it enraged almost everyone when it was published (in 1977); there's a good description of the controversy here, if Google Books will let you see the page:
https://books.google.com/books?id=PF8lzCov4YkC&pg=PA112#v=onepage&q&...

He "depicts the literary world of the 1920s so that it appears he was the most important person on the scene" and portrays everyone else in an unflattering, and often mendacious, light. There's an argument to be made that it was a deliberate provocation, an attempt to get people to think in less clichéd ways about the period (compare Sinyavsky's Strolls with Pushkin, which also enraged people), but it's probably not the first place to go for more Kataev. I'd suggest trying A White Sail Gleams, The Embezzlers or Time, Forward!.

Wow! Thanks for the link - that's a damning piece! I think therefore I'll stick to his fictions for a while. I've been reading a few of his short early satires and they're effective; plus The Embezzlers has arrived and I have that and Time, Forward! Difficult to know how to form an opinion about him now....!

I finally read The Embezzlers and enjoyed it greatly; I wrote about it here:
http://languagehat.com/the-embezzlers/

Having expressed doubt about Kataev in 2015, I went on to read The Embezzlers in early 2016 and loved it (and noted the amount of alcohol involved....!) :D

I wrote about it here:

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/madcap-highjinks-and-pl...

A delightful review, thanks for linking it! And yes, the drinking: I've been noticing that every Russian novel I've read recently (The Brothers Karamazov, The Embezzlers, now Definitely Maybe) has featured massive drinking parties where people get so hammered they do things they regret.

Thank you! Yes, so many Russian books seem to feature drinking- not surprising, I suppose, from the land of vodka.... 🤣🤣🤣

I've enjoyed and reviewed a number of Kataev books since this thread went dormant; unfortunately, I only made a few posts about them:
http://languagehat.com/discovering-real-poetry/
http://languagehat.com/a-reading-in-odessa/
http://languagehat.com/katayevs-white-sail/
But all of his memoirs are worth reading.

I read Time, Forward! in my Soviet literature class at Yale, along with another Five Year Plan novel, Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, and loved it.

You might be interested in my post about Cement:
https://languagehat.com/cement/