New Fiction and Lenin's History

The Line

By Olga Grushina

(Putnam, April 2010), $25.95

Olga Grushina’s second novel is a masterpiece of storytelling. She transports us to what seems Soviet Russia of the 1950s, or a few decades after “the Change.” News is leaked that an émigré composer will be returning for a single, special engagement concert (a literary riff on Igor Stravinsky’s 1962 return). And a ticket line forms in which people wait through an entire year, slowly forming a community of hopeful sojourners, their lives, secrets and passions intertwining as the experience of expectation leads to unexpected revelations.

Aside from the wonderful plot and deeply drawn characters, there is a richness in Grushina’s writing that contains all the senses. We feel the damp cold of her winter evenings, smell the thick soup reducing in the close kitchen, hear the murmur of passing conversations, see the church shadows falling on her characters, taste the crumbly canapes at a secure embassy party. This is a novel to be read slowly, her descriptive power savored: “the low, furry-clawed sounds resumed shuffling up and down invisible stairs like clumsy circus bears...”; “the strengthening wind began to throw heavy hours back and forth like smudged, icy snowballs...”

In the end, the line draws the characters out of themselves. It has, as one of the protagonists reflects, taken them apart, piece by piece, “then put them back together again; but the order of the pieces was subtly different, or else they fit together in a different, looser way, with spaces left between them for air, or light, or music, or perhaps something else altogether, something ineffable that made him feel more alive.”

Exactly what a good novel should do for a reader.

2017

By Olga Slavnikova

(Overlook, March 2010), $26.95

Krylov is a young and extremely talented gem cutter who is obsessed by transparency, with the luminous quality of rubies and other precious stones. He is also obsessed by the mysterious Tanya, with whom he has a prolonged, bizarre affair founded on exceptional uncertainties, and who — he fantasizes — will help him (as soon as he has enough money) escape the prison that is his life.

But this is the centenary of the October Revolution, and reality and fantasy, past and future, hopes and hazards, are getting hard to separate. This is a Russia of the future, where the country’s harsh realities, ecological disasters and criminality have become amplified with time. Krylov, who just wants to slough off his violent, criminal exoskeleton, finds instead that his life is getting increasingly complicated, that the noose is tightening and there may be no way out.

2017 is a novel of ideas in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, yet set in the mineral- and myth-rich Urals. Slavnikova’s prose is dauntingly dense in the first third of the novel, and it is difficult to slog through her layering of back stories, but the payoff is well worth it. Marian Schwartz’s translation is opulent and lucid, belying the countless linguistic knots she had to unravel in order to birth this dense Booker-winning novel into English. In short, a gem.

Conspirator

By Helen Rappaport

(Basic Books, March 2010), $27.95

The period of Lenin’s life when he wandered Europe, impoverished and isolated, prior to the 1917 revolution is recounted in fascinating detail in this new book by the author of The Last Days of the Romanovs.

One might think it tells us little to learn how Lenin disliked British food (but loved the buttered muffins), how he and Trotsky attended and participated in public debates in London, or how Lenin bullied fellow expat revolutionaries, but personalities drive history and Lenin had a monstrously huge one. This volume contributes immensely to our understanding of how Lenin forged his cadre, his leadership style and the worldview that all came to be so brutally reflected in the oppressive state he founded.