YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: LITERATURE: PORTUGUESE

PORTUGUESE: Brazil. New fiction published in Brazil during 1995 included O xang de Baker Street, a novel by the eminent comic and cultural commentator J Soares. The work was set in 1886, with Sarah Bernhardt bringing the British detective to aid Emperor Pedro II in solving a series of crimes. Truly comic detective fiction, the novel highlighted figures, traditions, and events of the last years of the empire. Luiz Vilela published a polemical short novel, Te amo sobre todas as coisas, which included explicit sex scenes. Ana Miranda dealt with the life of the Brazilian "poet of death," Augusto dos Anjos, in her historical novel A ltima quimera; the novel was narrated through the thoughts and opinions of the deceased writer's friends. Anjos' complete poetry was published in an edition organized by the critic Alexei Bueno. The critic and novelist Silviano Santiago published Cheiro forte, his first volume of poetry since the late 1950s. Theatre activity in Brazil was intense during 1995. A play based on the poetry of Ana Cristina Csar's A teus ps ran for most of the year. In Prola, Mauro Rasi once again turned to family themes: his childhood in the interior of So Paulo. Aderbal Freire Filho's Ao terceiro dia dealt with the depressing life of the early 20th-century novelist Lima Barreto in the form of a tragicomedy. Miguel Falabella was active as dramatist, director, and actor. Antnio Callado's A revolta da cachaa, published in 1983 and describing a 17th-century rebellion in Rio against the Portuguese crown's imposition of wine over the native cachaa, was finally staged. Also of note was Vincius Vianna's narration of his strained relationship with his father, the playwright Oduvaldo Vianna Filho (Vianinha), in Esta ave estranha e escura. Other important cultural events of the year included Nlida Pin's first volume of memoirs; a study of the cultural impact of Antnio Cndido's literary criticism; Darcy Ribeiro's A gestao do Brasil, the new volume in his ongoing study of Brazilian civilization; and Hermano Vianna's O mistrio do samba, which insisted that the development of the samba was, in fact, a cooperative effort between elite and popular musicians. Jorge Amado was awarded the Cames Prize for 1995. (IRWIN STERN) RUSSIAN In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Russian literary scene in 1995 was dominated by works that looked to the past. Several new titles reflected the country's struggle with the legacy of war and with communist rule. Mikhail Kurayev's semiautobiographical novel Blokada ("Blockade"), about the siege of Leningrad, represented a whole series of works that depicted the horrors of the Stalinist era. Sergey Bondlevsky's autobiographical work Trepanatsiya cherepa ("The Trepanation of the Skull"), analyzing the generation of the 1920s, reflected the trend toward historical and personal introspection. Vasily Aksyonov published Negativ polozhitelnogo geroya ("A Negative of a Positive Hero"), a series of 12 short stories with lyrical interludes that takes place in Moscow and the U.S. in the past and in the present. Noteworthy works of fiction in a more contemporary vein included Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's Tayna doma ("The Secret of the House"), Lyudmila Ulitskaya's Bednye rodstvenniki ("Poor Relatives"), Aleksandr Melikhov's Gorbatye atlanty ("Hunchbacked Atlantis"), and Daniil Granin's Begstvo v Rossiyu ("Escape to Russia"). Absorbed with Russia's past, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published several new short stories. "Ego," for example, was thematically related to Krasnoe koleso ("The Red Wheel"), and "Na krayakh" ("Far Away") continued the theme of peasant insurrections in Tambov. Treated principally as a news maker rather than a writer, Solzhenitsyn was followed more closely by journalists than by literary critics. In addition, the writer's silence about the war in Chechnya added to the controversy surrounding his political views. The need to revisit the past was also reflected in the Russian Booker Prize nominations. Only 3 of the 36 writers nominated ended up on the shortlist, and the choices showed the judges' preference for traditional and realistic prose. On the shortlist were Georgy Vladimov's General i yego armiya ("A General and His Army"), a novel about the war on the Eastern Front and a voice in the ongoing Russian debate over the historical roles played by Generals Georgy Zhukov and Andrey Vlasov in World War II; Oleg Pavlov's literary debut, Kazyonnaya skazka ("An Official Tale"), a novel about a unit guarding prisoners in the depths of Kazakhstan that, in both realistic and grotesque terms, presented the horrors and absurdities of contemporary Russian army life; and Yevgeny Fyodorov's account of his time in the Stalinist Gulag, entitled Ilyada Zheni Vasyaeva ("The Odyssey"). The prize went to Vladimov's General i yego armiya. The so-called little Booker was established to honour the journal considered to have done the most to promote Russian literature in any of the countries of the former Soviet Union other than the Russian Federation itself. The 1995 award went to Rodnik (Riga, Latvia). The Pushkin Prize for poetry was awarded to Semen Lipkin for his life's work, which included fiction, historical prose, poetry, and translations of Eastern literature. Noteworthy new collections of poetry included Joseph Brodsky's Peresechyonnaya mestnost ("Broken Country"), reflecting on the multitude of places the poet had lived; Inna Bliznetsova's Zhizn ognya ("The Life of a Fire"); and Vladlen Gavrilchik's Izdeliya dukha ("The Goods of the Spirit"). Gadaniye po knige ("Fortune Telling by the Book"), a collection by the esteemed poet Andrey Voznesensky, was criticized by some for what was considered its lack of genuine poetry. Known for the use of videos in his poetry, Voznesensky this time had a pair of dice supplied with the book so that the reader might throw them to determine the page and poetic line corresponding to his or her fortune, somewhat like the I Ching. A return to the past was also reflected in biography and criticism. The reading public expressed interest in many newly published memoirs: diaries by Mikhail Prishvin and Yury Nagibin, Varlam Shalamov's Iz zapisnykh knizhek ("Pages from the Notebooks"), and Dmitry Likhachev's Vospominaniya ("Memoirs"). The first Russian biography of Vladimir Nabokov, Mir i dar Vladimira Nabokova ("The World and the Gift of Vladimir Nabokov"), was published by Boris Nosik. In criticism, Yevgeny Yevtushenko stirred controversy with his anthology of 20th-century Russian poetry, Strofy veka ("The Verses of the Century"). Vernutsya v Rossiyu stikhami ("Returning to Russia in Verse") was an anthology of Russian migr poetry of the first and second wave, together with biographies and with commentaries by Vadim Kreyd. An almanac, Rubezh ("Border"), published in Vladivostok, provided an overview of Russian migr literature in China before World War II. (EDWARD J. CZERWINSKI; AGNIESZKA PERLINSKA) SPANISH A surprising number of established Spanish novelists, all men, wrought fictions in 1995 through first-person female narrators who transcended or merely endured the tedium of their existence. Fernando Delgado won the Planeta Prize with La mirada del otro, an erotically charged story of obsessive marital jealousy told by a woman well placed in the Madrid business establishment of the 1980s. In Telepena de Celia Cecilia Villalobo, lvaro Pombo offered a compelling monologue by a shy middle-aged widow as she pondered herself on a videotaped television interview speaking about her famous departed husband. Jos Mara Guelbenzu's El sentimiento explored the crisscrossing destinies of a bored housewife and her husband's predatory female business partner. A prostitute in Javier Tomeo's El crimen del cine Oriente coarsely recounted her foredoomed attempt to escape solitude and squalor through honest love; and a Sevillian aristocrat, faced with the collapse of her family, remade her life through rediscovered sensuality, personal sacrifice, and high adventure in Ms all del jardn, Antonio Gala's runaway best-seller. Julin Ros voiced a more purely literary fascination for women in Amores que atan o Belles Lettres, a cryptically encoded gallery--from A (Marcel Proust's Albertine) to Z (Raymond Queneau's Zazie)--of unnamed fictional heroines fondly remembered by a jilted narrator whose one true love, all along, was literature itself. Readers expecting a commentary on Ros' Larva cycle appreciated the author's lbum de Babel, an illustrated multilingual punhouse of polysemous compositions. Ana Rossetti's new poetry (Punto umbro) and fiction (Mentiras de papel) were well received, as was Fanny Rubio's complex narrative La casa del halcn. In Ardor guerrero, Antonio Muoz Molina offered a grotesquely comic and morally troubling depiction of army life, based on the author's experiences as a bewildered recruit, and Juan Madrid prowled the capital's roughest neighbourhoods in Cuentas pendientes and Crnicas del Madrid oscuro. Gonzalo Torrente Ballester published a new novel, La boda de Chon Recalde, and in Diario de un jubilado Miguel Delibes eased an autobiographical character from two earlier novels into retirement. The Obras completas of Spain's most distinguished dramatist, Antonio Buero Vallejo, appeared in a two-volume set. In December the Cervantes Prize, the top award in Hispanic letters worldwide, went to the Spanish novelist Camilo Jos Cela. (ROGER L. UTT)