In our time of the unbroken news cycle and relentless social media, it is hard to resist the attraction of an escape into fin de siecle Russia, particularly when it means following the escapades of State Counsellor Erast Fandorin.
Just a handful of Akunin’s dozen detective novels featuring Fandorin have made it into English (six have been made into movies in Russia), and this one is a very satisfying retreat. All the more so because Akunin is gifted at creating compelling characters, from the unconventional but proper Fandorin, to the Gogolian public servants trying to preserve their hides, to the synesthetic antagonist, Mr. Green, a “cold as steel” terrorist. Indeed, Akunin excels in this novel because he has you rooting both for Fandorin and Green, that each will vanquish the second-raters surrounding them so that the two face can off in an inevitable climax.
But, alas, the novel (published in Russia in 1999) does not provide pure escapism. For at its heart is a battle all too familiar. As voiced by Prince Pozharsky:
“This is not the kind of war in which any rules apply... It is not two European powers who are fighting here... this is the savage, primordial war of order with chaos, the West with the East, Christian chivalry with Mamai’s horde. In this war no peace envoys are dispatched, no conventions are signed, no one is released on his word of honor.”
Indeed, it bears remembering that modern political terrorism first put down roots in Russia, where the anarchist Catechism of Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechayev began to wreak havoc well before the Bolsheviks came along. By their credo, the revolutionary must sacrifice all morality, family, and sense of self: “He is not a revolutionary if he feels compassion for something in this world... Day and might he should only have a single thought, a single aim: pitiless destruction.”
Fandorin’s nemesis in this novel, the elusive Mr. Green, is an exemplary anarchist, bent on destroying all symbols and representatives of state power (the initiating crime of the novel is a daring assassination on board a train). And as the state resorts to increasingly draconian measures to apprehend Green, Fandorin is almost alone in preserving a measure of civility or chivalry, certain that even this war must have some rules, some code of ethics.
And even if Fandorin-esque sympathies win the day in this battle (no spoilers here) we know they will not win the war nor the revolution that lurk just beyond the horizon.
http://amzn.to/2s5K6LA
“Life is so precious, and wasted here so cheaply, so uselessly, so worthlessly.”
The author’s cogent sentence well summarizes his powerful, documentary memoir.
Chistyakov was an unwilling draftee into the Armed Guards unit overseeing the horrors of the BAMLag – a forced labor Gulag to build the Baikal Amur Mainline railway in 1932-1948.
Chistyakov’s diary entries span just a year of service, but their candid, vivid accounts bring an invaluable first-person perspective to the era not seen since perhaps Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. And it is a unique perspective, since the overwhelming majority of memoirs to date are from former prisoners. Chistyakov, as head of a guard battalion, was caught between two immovable stones: the Chekists above insisting on fulfillment of plans, chasing down of escapees, and Stakhanovite work regimes; and the intransigent slaves (prisoners) who were forced to work at inhuman tasks in ungodly conditions.
It takes a toll on Chistyakov, and as the memoir progresses, he is increasingly pessimistic that he will ever return to his beloved Moscow. And indeed he will be swept up in the purges and die at the front in World War II. Beyond that, beyond this honest, gripping memoir, nothing else is know about the single precious life that Chistyakov lived, that was wasted so cheaply.
http://amzn.to/2tJZdre
It would be easy to dismiss as esoteric a book said to be “a parable mythologizing the Russian avant-garde,” by an author who was once called a “grammatical revolutionary and murderer of words.” Just a bit of experimental prose by some Georgian-Russian leftist who associated with Futurists and Dadaists, who invented everythingism and beyonsense, and who later in life designed beautiful books with Picasso and Miro.
But that would be a mistake, for Iliazd’s (birth name Ilia Zdanevich) rediscovered and newly translated work is a gem.
Plot-wise, there may not be much special to draw one to this work (murder, terrorism, a Caucasian adventure, love, betrayal, death), but the point here is not the story line and characters, but the words with which they are created, the subtexts and literary references, the mystical bridging of the human and inhuman.
With a book like this, you can dip in at any point and be carried away by Iliazd’s poetry in prose:
The moon caught fire and dressed the forest in motley. Nothing was audible except the fountain nearby, and you couldn’t have heard anything anyway. Needles gave way to leaves, pitch to the odor of humus.
He had grown up and into his manhood. His dark beard was not distinct from his face, dusty and sunburned. Of his splendid attire, only rags remained. His boots were torn and only his rifle looked new. But there was such valor and magnificence in the whole setup that those in the tavern stood up and doffed their hats.
And yet the imagery and characters draw you unwittingly into the plot, and you find there is something there after all, something so cinematic that even Nabokov is said to have cribbed bits from the work.
In short, there are many levels and layers in this remarkable, short novel. And all of them deserve a close look.
http://amzn.to/2u3ZF2X
Rasputin was the leading writer of the so-called “village prose” movement in the Soviet 1970s, and his work was instrumental in offering Russians and foreigners alike an unfiltered, gritty, sense-filled view of Russian provincial and village life. He grappled with the issues of isolation and development, environmentalism and social mores in stories and novels that are full of real characters and beautiful prose.
With the fall of the USSR, Rasputin stopped writing and turned his attention to politics, serving in the Congress of People’s Deputies and as an adviser to Gorbachev. But politics is a world that few artists can stomach, given their tendency to embrace things like fixed ideals, sincere emotions and Truth.
So Rasputin returned to writing both fiction and nonfiction and this volume is a translation of stories and a novella he wrote in this later period of his life. The pieces have all the same grit, realism and beauty of his earlier works, but now the subject matter is more current and recognizable.
In most of the stories, the characters are coming to grips with the tailings and residue of Soviet era destructiveness – not just to the physical environment (Rasputin being one of Russia’s first and most impassioned environmentalists), but to the souls of its people.
To Rasputin, unfettered and unscrupulous commerce, statism, and rootlessness are the newest scourges on the Russian land, yet the saviors are the same as before: family, community, language, and Orthodoxy. And of course strong women.
http://amzn.to/2tazZoM
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