On a Field Azure

Alekseĭ Remizov

Greenwood Press, 1975 - Fiction - 125 pages

The story of the upbringing and development of a young girl, Olya, -- a charming portrait with deft touches of characterization but told by no means in the conventional style of the realistic novel. This is a loving story of life on a provincial estate, very simply written in a folkloric style. On a field azure was to prove but the first part of a trilogy (the other two being Destiny and the Face of fire, and all three were finally published in one volume as Olya (1927)).

Contents

• Section 1: 1
• Section 2: 7
• Section 3: 30

About the author

A very prolific writer, artist, and calligrapher, Remizov was a paradoxical figure, well known for his love of the grotesque and the comic, in both life and literature. While influenced by symbolism, he maintained a quite personal style in his writing, which over the years moved from realism, albeit with modernist tendencies (as in the novels The Pond and The Clock, both published in 1908), into an indefinable fictional world of dreams and fantasy. He was fascinated by ethnography and history, particularly Russian, and many of his works are reworkings of medieval and folk texts. A superb stylist, his ornamental prose influenced such writers as Prishvin, Zamyatin, and Pilnyak. An emigre since the 1920s, Remizov was almost totally ignored in the Soviet Union for decades, but in the Gorbachev period, several collections of his writings were issued. Translations have been appearing for a long time in the West, though these include but a small fraction of his prodigious output. For a translator, Remizov's language---rooted deeply in idiom, dialect, and folkloric or literary allusion---presents a major challenge. Rendering a substantial body of his texts into an English---adequate both semantically and stylistically---is still a task for the future, though the volume by Sona Aronian is a good start.

Bibliographic information

• Title: On a Field Azure; Volume 6 of Russian literature library
• Author: Alekseĭ Remizov
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Greenwood Press, 1975
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Jul 22, 2010
• ISBN: 0837183871, 9780837183879
• Length: 125 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary