ASEAN-Russia: Foundations and Future Prospects

No Books about Singapore in Russian? Give me a Break! (An Editor’s Note)

296 NO BOOKS ABOUT SINGAPORE IN RUSSIAN? GIVE ME A BREAK! (An Editor’s Note) Victor Sumsky Julia Sherstyuk’s determination to bring Singapore and Russia closer together by providing more “food for soul and stomach” is certainly commendable. Personally, I find 103rd Meridian East to be a highly readable general-interest magazine. Julia’s Buyan restaurant (9/10 Duxton Hill, ) may be recommended as a cozy refuge to spend an evening tasting designer versions of Russian dishes and drinks. What I cannot swallow with equal delight is Julia’s rather sweeping statement on the lack of books about Singapore in Russian. Any Russian who is curious about Singapore’s geography or history, past or present, political trends or economic achievements, will find enough things to read in his (or her) native language — be it academic works or journalistic articles. Efforts to present Singapore and the neighbouring countries to the Russian reading public are by no means a recent phenomenon. For instance, between 1856 and 1869, Morskoy Sbornik (The Nautical Collection) — a St. Petersburg journal established in 1848 to cover naval matters and published until today — carried no less than ten articles dedicated to the sea currents near the port of Singapore and the specifics of navigation in the Straits of Malacca. Readers can check this information in the section on “Malaya and Singapore” of The Bibliography of Southeast Asia (1960).1 All in all, No Books about Singapore in Russian? Give me a Break! 297 this book provides references to 3,752 Russian-language publications about this part of the world that appeared before 1958. Anyone who opens the 1980 sequel to that volume will discover that between 1959 and 1970 there were no less than 67 Russian-language monographs, brochures and articles in academic journals and news magazines about Singapore.2 As for the total number of Soviet publications on Southeast Asia in that period alone, it was 6,965. Among those academic writings in Russian that were published about that time and in the two subsequent decades, I would single out such informative pieces of research as Singapore by Gennady Chufrin (1970), Singapore: Problems of a City-State by Nikolai Kalashnikov (1981), The Political System of Contemporary Singapore by Emma Gurevich (1984), Singapore in the Economy of Southeast Asia by Vitaly Kurzanov (1985), Singapore: A Handbook edited by Gennady Chufrin (1988) and Singapore’s Foreign Policy by Gurevich and Chufrin (1989).3 One more book that was written in the same era deserves a special mention. In 1971, Yuri Savenkov — a speaker of Mandarin and a lover of all things Chinese — came to Singapore as the correspondent of Novosti News Agency (now RIA Novosti). The next six years that he spent in the island republic gave him enough “food for soul” to produce Sketches of Singapore (1982) — a description of clever pragmatism at work by an irrepressible romantic.4 With his penchant for detail, keen interest in culture and the sensitivity of a poet, this author just could not help but admire Singapore’s consistent perfectionism. Looking through the 175 pages of Savenkov’s Sketches (published, by the way, in 30,000 copies) I find no traces of “false statements and misleading facts about the city-state”. Today a translation of that book into English might still be a worthy undertaking for at least two reasons. First, it tells you how Singapore of the 1970s looked like to an intelligent visitor from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Second, the very fact that works like these were fit for print in the USSR is an indication that real life and real people over there were a bit different from the caricatures in James Bond novels and movies. But did the Soviet readers have the chance to learn anything at all about Singapore from Singaporeans themselves — for instance, from masters of modern fiction? Translations of Singaporean literature into Russian were not numerous, but they still were there. First there came Singapore Mosaics (1980) — a book compiled of short stories originally written in Chinese by a dozen different authors.5 In 1989, this was followed by Singapore’s Modern Prose, introducing such popular English language writers as Goh Poh Seng and Catherine Lim to the Soviet public. The core of this collection 298 Victor Sumsky (published, just like Singapore Mosaics, in 50,000 copies) was Goh’s If We Dream Too Long, acclaimed as the first...