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some morgue with a toe tag, or has simply faded away with time, written in cheap ink. Not that there’s anything so awful about that. My God, what makes him any better than me or even you, that we should have regrets? Because there has yet to be a case, even the longest and most convoluted, at the end of which, when all was said and done, a pen did not place a period.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
    Like much of Mikhail Shishkin’s writing, “Calligraphy Lesson” is highly allusive and attentive to the formal qualities of a story both inventively told and steeped in Russian atmospherics.
    The reader will want to be aware of two issues in particular.
    First, what the English reader may not realize—but the Russian will pick up instantly—is that the various women’s names refer to characters from Russian classics: Sofia Pavlovna from Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit ; Tatiana Dmitrievna from Pushkin’s long poem Evgeny Onegin ; Nastasia Filippovna from Dostoevsky’s Idiot ; Anna Arkadievna from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina ; and Larochka (Lara) from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
    Second, the passage describing the calligraphy of a specific Russian wordposed what was for me an unprecedented dilemma arising from the fact that in it Shishkin describes each letter as an object, yet the word’s lexical meaning remains important.
    The Russian word is colloquial, inappropriate for a court of law. Uttered by the defendant, this authentically felt word adds conviction and force to her statement. When the judge repeats it, he reinforces its power, but it’s almost as if he’s put quotes around it, so far is it from a judge’s usual level of discourse. The narrator embeds the intense emotion the word has acquired in this context into his painstaking description of how each letter is to be written, but for him the act of writing is simultaneously a kind of self-protection. By focusing on the physical act of writing he is able to distance himself from the extreme human misery he witnesses over and over.
    How could I convey the section’s brilliant emotion but also truly translate it for the English reader? Should I or shouldn’t I rewrite the passage to reflect the English cursive of the word’s translation? It’s a legitimate choice: the French translator decided to recast the passage to describe the word’s French translation;I decided to do both. I translated and reproduced the Russian word. In the pre-digital era, when Cyrillic characters were technically difficult to reproduce and so were rarely included in translations, I might have been inclined (or forced) to go the other way. Thanks to modern technology and to the fact that Shishkin’s description was based on the letters’ visual characteristics, which English readers could see and appreciate for themselves, I did not have to forgo Shishkin’s tour de force (although I could not recreate his double-entendre: “on a stick” is a euphemism for the Russian expression “shit on a stick,” that is, something or someone utterly repulsive, worthless, or despicable).
    Translating Shishkin means maintaining his virtuosic tension between complex detail and deeply felt emotion.
    Marian Schwartz

The Blind Musician

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    How odd it felt to ring this doorbell while holding the cherished key tight in my pocket. To see again on the coatrack in the entryway her tasteless coat with the mother of pearl buttons. To walk through the rooms with all their brazen mirrors acting all innocent. To inhale the medicine smell that had once been completely aired out. To make as if I didn’t know where the cotton balls were kept. To bear her stranger’s hands holding the same lidded Chinese mug I’d fed him tea in like a little boy.
    Zhenya, 6 my sweet Zhenya, I really think I’m better. I don’t get dizzy anymore. I slept last night. True, I had an awful dream: I’d grown a beard. I