The Commissariat of Enlightenment
by Ken Kalfus
Words Fail
A review by Adrienne Miller
In this glitteringly original first novel, Ken Kalfus, author of the acclaimed story collections Thirst and PU-239, presents an odd and mesmerizing vision of "the supremacy of the image over the word." The year is 1910. Count Leo Tolstoy is dying slowly (so slowly, in fact, that it seems as if the old fellow will never die) in a dark, ghostly, remote town in Russia. How famous is Tolstoy? So famous that the formerly nowhere town of Astapovo becomes a media circus (think Park City, Utah, at Sundance) overrun by a hideous new breed of monster: the blood-lusting celebrity press. A cinematographer named Nikolai Gribshin has been dispatched to cover the death, to bring back a filmic image of the dying (or dead) Tolstoy. So begins Gribshin's "enterprise dedicated to preserving the appearance of life," a theme echoed throughout this idea-obsessed novel. En route to Astapov, Gribshin encounters Professor Vorobev, keeper of an embalmed rat and future mummifier of Lenin, a pince-nez-wearing mad scientist who hopes to embalm Tolstoy. Embalming and movies are both death-abolishing endeavors, and are therefore very modern conceits. In this new century, it becomes clear, the simulacrum will become more important than the real thing. After the revolution, Gribshin changes his identity (his new name: Astapov), and is employed by the Commissariat of Enlightenment (the government's propaganda division) to produce proletariat-improving movies. The novel's Gogolian ending involves a thoughtful embalmed Lenin, who lies quietly throughout the twentieth century, right up through glasnost, bearing silent witness to the great trundling machine of history.
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