Fazil Iskander

“Have I perhaps idealized a vanishing life? Perhaps.

 A man cannot help ennobling what he loves. We may 

not recognize it, but by 

idealizing a vanishing way

of life, we are presenting a 

bill to the future.”

spans wide geographic and cultural distances and is at the same time close and humanly comprehensible … simple, everyday stories that are  painted in rich and festive southern hues … realities that are strange, but at the same time quite recognizable … 

text that is light-hearted and funny, yet also full of wisdom and sadness. 

All of this is was what the Soviet intelligentsia, fed up with soporific official writings and esoteric dissident texts, wanted from literature. They waited for many years, but not in vain: at the end of the 1950s, a new star shone on the faded literary sky. Fazil Iskander – practically the only writer of quality not banned by censors (although he was certainly not treated very kindly) – offered readers a true literary feast. Iskander was not afraid to seem slightly sentimental and simple-minded, and through his ingenious, apolitical texts, he managed to reach intellectual heights insurmountable by the vast majority of his contemporaries.

Iskander was born on March 6, 1929, and was raised in the Soviet Empire’s southern reaches, in the seaside town of Sukhumi. Half Abkhazian, half Iranian, Iskander latched onto Russian literature, paradoxical as that may seem. Yet his heart has always been in his native Abkhazia, glorified in his numerous stories and short novels, connected by its characters and motifs. For many of Iskander’s admirers, this distant subtropical province has become a synonym for Eden; the mountain village of Chegem, home of Iskander’s favorite character, the trickster, sage and adventurer Sandro, became a stand-in for the Seventh Heaven.

Beautiful and peculiar Abkhazia lent itself rather well to poeticizing. Known since ancient times as Colchis [see “Mapping Russia,” page 48], Abkhazia is the native land of the sorceress Medea and the place where the Argonauts came to fetch The Golden Fleece. 

Even the Soviet regime, which proclaimed Abkhazia an All-Union Health Resort and disfigured the fabulous seaside towns with pompous holiday homes and health centers, could not deprive this land of its unique charm. Real life, with its problems and miracles, began where the pristine beaches for party officials and shock workers ended. Children played in vast yards surrounded by vine-entangled balconies, while aunts, grandmothers and mothers watched from the windows. Men were slow and majestic, spending their days drinking coffee and playing backgammon. People in mountain villages were faithful to ancient customs, grew tobacco, worshiped old gods and kept the fires burning in their hearths. 

Today, the last relics of this wonderful and unique life have been razed by a bloody and senseless war. This tiny paradise is now practically a desert. It has given Iskander’s prose a new significance. It is documentary evidence, a historical source about cultural phenomena that have disappeared forever.

“In my childhood,” Iskander wrote. “I caught fleeting glimpses of the patriarchal village life of Abkhazia and fell in love with it forever. Have I perhaps idealized a vanishing life? Perhaps. A man cannot help ennobling what he loves. We may not recognize it, but by idealizing a vanishing way of life, we are presenting a bill to the future. We are saying, ‘Here is what we are losing; what are you going to give us in exchange?’  Let the future ponder on that, if it is capable of thinking at all.”

The truth is that, while he poeticizes the Abkhazia of his childhood, Iskander is not inclined to idealize it. Descended from a wealthy Abkhazian family (his grandfather owned a brickyard; not a very big one, but quite profitable), that was deprived of its property after the Revolution, Fazil lost his father, Abdul Iskander, early. Abdul had spent most of his life in Abkhazia, but, due to a strange twist of fate, was formally a citizen of Iran. Soon after WWII, he was separated from his family by force and deported (not only Iranians, but also representatives of other “non-native” peoples – Turks, Pontian Greeks and Bulgarians – were deported then). Iskander’s beloved uncle, his mother’s elder brother, on whom Sandro was based, was arrested and disappeared in the slave labor camps of Magadan. 

Fazil Iskander had no reason to view Soviet reality through rose-colored glasses. In fact, in Iskander’s works, ugly Stalinist realities sometimes intrude on happy childhoods and adolescence, acquiring grotesque and humorous features, rather than frightening ones. For example, the beach photographer from the story “Oh, Marat!” cuckolds the all-powerful Lavrenty Beria; in another story, a talent for folk dancing saves Sandro’s life when he accidentally insults a tipsy Father of the People (i.e. Stalin).

Iskander is not only an author of prose, but also a talented poet (he has authored several collections of poetry, the most famous of which are “The Youth of the Sea” and “Green Rain”) and a gifted satirist (his humorous novel, Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, is one of his most well-known works, and, at the height of rapacious capitalism a few years ago, he published a hilarious piece, “The One Who Thinks about Russia and the American”). While he is a Russian writer, Iskander remains primarily a singer of Abkhazia, his native land. He explained his fidelity thus: “A person’s homeland must be proportionate to the area of his vital activity. If his homeland is too big, then his creative energies decline, he feels that there is not enough of him to ‘inhabituate’ the vast expanses of his country. But if he realizes that he must inhabituate only his closest surroundings – his work, family, home, street – then his vast homeland will inhabituate itself, and he will no longer be intimidated by the all too vast spaces. Well, after all, we do not worry about the vast cosmos, do we?”

– Galina Yuzefovich

Iskander’s works which 

have appeared in English

The Gospel According to Chegem, Vintage Books, 1984 

Sandro of Chegem, Jonathan Cape, Thirty Bedford Square London, 1983 and Vintage Books, 1983

The Goatbex Constellation, Ardis, 1975

The Old House under the Cypress Tree, Faber and Faber, 1996

Sandro of Chegem, King Penguin, 1985

Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, Ardis, 1989