Comments on: A Spanking Detail

By: Mija

Mija — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 20:29:41 +0000

What did I say? Amazing, Haron.

Thanks to you and t’Larien. And whatever the reasons for it, I think it’s a lovely and sexy cover. :)

By: SpankBoss

SpankBoss — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 14:52:52 +0000

Haron, thanks ever so much to you and t’Larien. My money’s on the “Boris Vallejo” theory, now. I half suspected as much, but it’s good to have expert confirmation.

By: Haron

Haron — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:09:48 +0000

You can tell when a real academic is on the trail :)
Quoting the conversation with the learned t’Larien (translated from Russian):

“None of the following stories have anything like THAT in them:
Very Good The Story Of A Hero (M. Gorky)
Arkhip (A. Tolstoy)
Mamai (E. Zamyatin)
The Desert Of Toub-Koy (V. Ivanov)
In The Basement (I. Babel)
A Point Of View (M. Zoshchenko)
Nervous People (M. Zoshchenko)
The Cherry Stone (I. Olesha)
The Fate Of A Man (M. Sholokhov)

I suspect that the rest – Biely, Pasternak, Prishvin – have nothing, either.
(Biely’s primary perversion – Oedipus complex, which overshadows everything else; Pasternak and Prishvin as a rule wrote about other things.)

Perhaps, the cover is meant to portray Soviet cruelties on the whole. Or this is something like random Boris Vallejo covers on fantasy books. [Meant to signal the genre without necessarily having anything to do with the plot. - trans.]

Shame, that.”

So there you have it: enjoy the cover, but the text doesn’t necessarily deliver on the promise…

By: SpankBoss

SpankBoss — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:16:38 +0000

Now I don’t feel so bad about failing to recall any spankings in my ill-remembered undergraduate dabblings. Looking forward to hearing what y’all come up with!

By: Haron

Haron — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 11:31:57 +0000

A little update: my clever friend t’Larien, who has a PhD in Russian Lit, has taken this book cover as a personal challenge. He says that some of the short stories listed in the table of contents haven’t been in print since the 1920s!

The editor who put together this anthology must have been looking really hard for that one OTK scene.