Dog and Wolf
The one novel I’ve been dying to read for too long a time is Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf. It was published back in the 80s as the follow-up to his literary miracle, School of Fools, one of the few (if not the only novel) to receive a blurb from Nabokov. The reason why I have never read Between Dog and Wolf (or at least read most of it—I have read parts of it), is because it has never been translated into English. And the reason why it has never been translated into our usually accommodating language is because all translators have determined it to be untranslatable. The novel is not long (about 200 hundred pages), it’s in the Seattle Public Library’s system (Mezhdu Sobakoi i Volkom), and was inspired by this image, The Hunters in the Snow, by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel:
As the painting makes apparent, Sokolov’s novel, which was recently made into a play with almost no words, is all about the dusk—that late time of the day when there’s not enough sunlight for the shepherd to tell the difference between his trusty dog and a deceitful wolf (the expression goes all the way back to Latin).
The compiler of this list rates Between Dog and Wolf as one of the greatest Russian novels of all time—though his list of 50 novels is a bit inconsistent. (He correctly includes all of Bely’s major novels but excludes Sologub’s sublime Petty Devil and Oleshi’s innovative Envy; also he rates Dostoevsky (or Dusty) too highly, and fails to position Gogol’s Dead Souls as the greatest Russian novel. And it’s a sin to place Bitov’s Pushkin House below Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—Solzhenitsyn is not even a real writer, and a much better “thaw period” novel is Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan. Finally, not mentioning The Gift, Nabokov’s last Russian novel, is ridiculous.)
I can only pray that one day I will have the opportunity to read what I believe must be the most twilit novel of the 20th century.
200 hundred pages is a lot of fucking pages.