Guest of the ilb 2003
Victoria Tokarjeva was born in Leningrad in
1937. At the age of 18 she was awarded a diploma as a pianist at
the Leningrad college of music. After marrying a physicist she
moved to Moscow, where she worked as a piano teacher for three
years. She had started writing young and so enrolled to study
screenplay writing at the Moscow film school to escape the life of a
piano teacher. She was awarded her diploma in 1968. Amost
twenty of her scripts have been filmed to date. Victoria
Tokarjeva has twice won first prize at the Moscow international film
festival for her screenplays, and in 1981 she was awarded first prize
at the international documentary film festival.
She published her first short story 'Den‘ bez vranja' (Engl: One Day
without a Lie) in the magazine 'Molodaja gvardija' in 1964 – shortly
before Khrushchev’s resignation and the end of the thaw in Soviet
politics – and was immediately successful. She remained largely
exempt from Soviet censorship despite the fact that her stories, which
mostly revolve around the theme of love, insist on the right to privacy
and intimacy. She had numerous short stories published before
Perestroika and is extremely popular in Russia. In Germany, more
than half of her short stories have been translated, as well as her
only novel „Ptica Scastija“ (t: Lucky fellow).
Tokarjeva’s stories are set in the Russian metropolis. The people
there, whose lives are steeped in everyday banality, occasionally dream
the dream of true love, intensive feelings and a life with a purpose,
fear loneliness, or yearn for life. There is the girl who loves
her piano teacher – but doesn’t dare tell him ('Raraka'); the star
pianist in a midlife crisis ('Ne sotvori'); and the man-eating new
Russian woman who ends up falling in love again ('Pervaja popytka').
Her characters are usually robbed of their illusions in the end,
but gain a tiny piece of wisdom and, at times, even something like
happiness.
Tokarjeva’s film-industry background is evident in her short stories:
images are lined up one after another in simple, unpretentious
language, and the scene is set with a few strokes of the pen. The
figures are enriched with character through their gestures and through
small, everyday actions. Like her idol Chekhov, Tokarjeva
observes life with both great sensitivity and cool distance. She
writes a 'Russian sociology en miniature', typically melancholy, but
with ever-present laconic humour.
© international literature festival berlin | 
