Baby Album: Diary of a Late-Bearing Mother Irina Lakshina

Common notebooks of the Soviet type with these diaries, the writer Yelena Katishonok found at a garage sale—by the fence in a box—and they gave them to her for free. Was it really so?.. No wonder the epigraph of the novel is a quotation from “The Tales of Belkin,” where Pushkin likewise “removes” all authorship from himself, putting on the mask of editor and publisher. And just the same, we believe the author, allowing ourselves to be immersed in an intimate, personal text that Irina Lakshina writes in the 1980s in the USSR, in the era of stagnation. Its documentary nature leaves us with not the slightest doubt: we immediately recognize the signs of the time and place—those painfully familiar things you can only feel if you lived in that time, and it has become part of you. And for those who might not understand something, there is an “editor’s” explanation… The diary begins in a maternity ward, where all mothers older than twenty-five are labeled “old-birth” mothers. And it continues over the years—funny at times, sad at others, joyful too, but always very personal and painfully honest. How to buy gifts for loved ones during an era of total shortage, raise two small children (without a smartphone!), managing to work while doing it, and what to cook for lunch when the fridge is empty and there are only four rubles with loose change in your wallet? You can’t do it without humor, irony, a philosophical attitude toward life, and a whole arsenal of small tricks—things vital for raising children (and damn that science called pedagogy and Dr. Spock!). Yelena Katishonok is a writer and poet from Latvia who lives in Boston. In 2006 her first novel “There Once Was an Old Man and an Old Woman” was published, and in 2009 it was included in the short list of one of the most prestigious literary awards, the “Russian Booker.” In 2011 it received the “Yasnaya Polyana” prize in the “21st century” category.