![]() ![]() In the beginning of “The Half-Belt Overcoat,” the autobiographical story that opens the book, Shishkin writes, “Suddenly comes the realization that there’s no need to cling on to life, because I am life.” In “The Blind Musician,” by far the strongest story in the collection, this realization seems almost self-evident: the way Shishkin writes encompasses so many feelings, so many glories and lives, that it is easy to see him towering over the universe it is easy to see him as “a saucepan big enough to hold. Shishkin takes these juxtapositions as his theme, and displays every kind of life as well as every kind of Russia he lets us see underneath his own writing to the unmagical, unoriginal everyday. ![]() Mikhail Shishkin’s Calligraphy Lesson, a gathering of essays, short stories, and semiautobiographical digressions, is, as one of the narrators says in “The Blind Musician,” “fragrant with lilac and iodine.” It is made of the grotesque, the disgusting, the prosaically dead right next to the sublime, star-showers, frogs come back to life, love, and God. ![]()
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