Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians

Blastings

Tatyana Tolstaya is an angry woman. She is angry at Gorbachev, she is angry at Yeltsin, she is positively furious with Solzhenitsyn, and she is not too pleased with Putin. The things that have happened to her country over the past hundred years make her blood boil. There are the great calamities, particularly Stalinism and all that it wrought, against which she rails in her essays; but, as with all good writers, it is in the details that she is her most telling. Returning from America to St. Petersburg in 1997, she notices that the metal balconies have disappeared from the building across the street, which had once been so beautiful. Wondering what happened, she is told that one of the balconies had fallen and killed a passerby, and since the city authorities had no money to spend on repairs, they had ordered that the rest of the balconies be torn down.

Balconies, of course, are the least of it. Tolstaya's real fury is reserved for the plight of the Russian people, betrayed over and over again by their so-called leaders, the czars, and the commissars, Lenin and Stalin, and their faceless henchmen who could always be depended upon to inform, to persecute, to tap telephones, to make midnight arrests, to run labor camps, to murder millions. Yet she is candid regarding how such horrors could have happened in her country. Reviewing an updated version of Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, an account of state crimes in the Stalinist years, Tolstaya sketches the process by which in Stalin's time Russian society, "intoxicated by the feeling that everything was allowed," first destroyed all that was "alien" and then, when things to destroy began to run out, turned inward and set to devouring itself. "Without popular support Stalin and his cannibals wouldn't have lasted for long. The executioner's genius expressed itself in his ability to feel and direct the evil forces slumbering in the people."

That was how; the question remains why. Tolstaya despairs of an answer. She recalls her first English teacher, a Russian immigrant who had married an American and, believing in the Communist dream, returned with him to Russia in the 1930s. Both were immediately arrested and sent to prison, where the husband perished. The woman had screamed at the investigator that she was not guilty of anything. His reply was that no one brought before him was guilty of anything. "But why, then?" "Just because," came the answer. Reading this, I recalled the great Czech scholar Eduard Goldstucker telling me that when he was arrested by the secret police in Prague in 1951 he inquired what charge was to be brought against him, to which the reply, accompanied by an ironic smile, was, "That is what you will tell us."

As her surname indicates, Tatyana Tolstaya comes from a literary family. She counts among her forebears not only the great Leo but also Alexei Tolstoy. Her maternal grandfather was a translator of Shakespeare, Dante, and Lope de Vega, and her father was a noted scholar. As Alma Guillermoprieto writes in her introduction to Pushkin's Children, Tolstaya's collection of essays, "the near-sacred family name shielded its members from terror" during the Stalin era, and Tatyana grew up in relative luxury in her parents' book-filled apartment. Still, political paranoia was as thoroughly inculcated in her as in any other child of those dreadful years. In "Lies I Lived," a chilling fragment of memoir at the end of Pushkin's Children, she recalls how when she was eight she was playing outside her home when an old couple approached her and asked the way to the Botanical Gardens. Identifying them as surely belonging to the "enemies" against whom the state was constantly warning its citizens, she promptly sent them off in the wrong direction. As she watched the pair shuffle painfully away, however, enlightenment burst upon her.

I felt an acute surge of shame. Suddenly, in one overwhelming moment — a moment I shall never forget — the truth was revealed to me. This was knowledge that comes in an instant, without words; complete knowledge, clear, indisputable, the kind of moral knowledge that requires no questions or explanations, the kind of knowledge that transforms an ape into a human being.... And at that moment, burning with shame, I swore a silent oath: Never.

In Pushkin's Children, Tolstaya excoriates her fellow countrymen for their "blind, superstitious belief in the spoken, and especially in the written, word." In the title essay, however, a compressed but brilliant account of the effects of the fall of communism on Russian literature and its readers, she observes that after 1989 "the word, which had seemed unique and rare, was published in editions of millions and lost its magical qualities. The reader, elated at first, was eventually overwhelmed and then disappointed.... Everything was lost, everything was desacralized in one fell swoop." One wonders if Pushkin himself has suffered under this process of desacralization, that Pushkin for whom "after his death admiration ... grew and grew until he himself became, for many Russians, God, tsar, and the People, an idol, an icon, holy writ." Tolstaya reveres Pushkin precisely because he stood above the "flat, pragmatic point of view" of the majority of Russian writers before and after him, who saw themselves as oracles and who "used the power of their words to address the most important social and political problems of their day."

In The Slynx, a fiction set in a dystopic future, Pushkin has become the idol of the tribe, "our be all and end all"; carved wooden "pushkins" are set up at doorposts and crossroads, and at the end of the book a tribal elder, condemned to the pyre, is tied aloft to one of these totems as the flames leap under him. In the introduction to Pushkin's Children, Guillermoprieto remarks, with somewhat shaky grammar, that "although Tolstaya comes down squarely on the side of creative freedom, it is as a chronicler of political events that her own words catch fire." This is faint praise for a writer who has produced two previous works of fiction and, simultaneously with Pushkin's Children, her first novel. The books are certainly a pair, each helping to elucidate the other.

The Slynx is a difficult work to categorize. The jacket blurb calls it a "rollicking satirical novel," but while it certainly does rollick, and there is a lot of obvious satire, this description seems both inadequate and overblown. The book is set at an uncertain point in the future, a couple of hundred years after "the Blast," when Russia has entered a new Dark Ages. The wheel has been re-invented, mice are the chief source of food and clothing and candle wax, and a dwarf czar called "Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe" is in power. Things could be worse: "after all," a character remarks, "we're in the Neolithic period, and not some savage animal kingdom." The hero of the tale is a young man, Benedikt Karpich, "the late Karp Pudich's son, who was the son of Pud Christoforovich, who was the son of Christopher Matveich, and whose son that Matvei was and where from — we can't remember, it's been lost in the gloom of time."

Benedikt is a vigorous chap, none too bright, remarkable only for a consuming obsession with books; Dostoevsky would have recognized him, and Tolstaya's greatgranduncle would have preached him a sermon. He lives in the town of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk — yes, confusingly named, it would seem, after the undersized czar, or vice versa — around which are "boundless fields, unknown lands. To the north are deep forests, full of storm-felled trees, the branches so twisted you can't get through." In these forests lives the fabled Slynx, which "sits on dark branches and howls a wild, sad howl....If you wander into the forest it jumps on your neck from behind: hop! It grabs your spine in its teeth — crunch — and picks out the main vein with its claw and breaks it. All the reason runs right out of you. If you come back, you're never the same again."

The Blast has created genetic chaos among the people, or Golubchiks — there is a rather perfunctory glossary at the beginning of the book — who display grotesque Consequences: one character has ears under his armpits, another has grown cock's combs all over her body, while Benedikt has, for a time at least, a little tail. The Consequence for some who survived the Blast, the Oldeners, is that they are still alive, centenarians many times over. Nikita Ivanich, the Head Stoker, is an Oldener, and not only is he seemingly immortal, he is also a sort of human dragon who can breathe blasts of flame — a handy knack, as it happens, for his job is to keep the town's stoves lit.

Benedikt marries into the family of Kudeyar Kudeyarich, the chief Saniturion of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk. Kudeyar, his wife, and his daughter Olenka, Benedikt's bride, all have claws on their feet, and incessantly scrape the floors — one of the more grisly leitmotifs of the novel is the little woolly piles of wood shavings that the Kudeyariches leave all over the house. We are not told exactly what a Saniturion does, and it is probably better that we do not know, but Kudeyarich's tasks include winkling illicit books out of the more literate inhabitants of the town. Kudeyarich enlists Benedikt as his lieutenant in this task, supplying him with a useful and deadly double-sided hook meant to be used to snag books and haul them out of their hiding places, but which inevitably ends up gutting more than one resistant book-lover. In the end, Kudeyarich and Benedikt together stage a comical, messy, and murderous coup and set up a farcical people's state, with Kudeyarich as leader and Benedikt the deputy for marine and oceanic defense. The Bright Past has come again.

It is impossible to communicate adequately the richness, the exuberance, and the horrid inventiveness of this book. It must have been a nightmare to translate, and Jamey Gambrell has done a heroic job. Since the Blast, the Russian language has been in a process of decay, and in the translation a kind of Jabberwocky patters throughout the narrative: mushrooms have become marshrooms, worms are worrums, and the Renaissance has deliquesced into runnysauce. Scraps of poetry are strewn through the pages, everything from Lermontov and (of course) Pushkin to Russian nonsense verse and Schiller's "Ode to Joy."

Despite all the energy and all the excitement, however, The Slynx is hard to love. As in most allegorical and futuristic novels, including 1984 and Brave New World, the characters are robbed of substance by the bizarreries amongst which they must move and conduct their fitful lives. We simply do not care enough about these unfortunates, maimed and malformed as they are. Even Benedikt engages neither our full sympathy nor our full reprehension. As for the satire, one is required to be familiar with more than any Westerner could possibly know about the minutiae of Russian history and contemporary Russian life. Consider this exchange:

"You sing so well!" said Nikita Ivanich comfortingly. "Did you study or is it just natural? Does it run in your family?"
"Probably ... Papa was a dentist," sniffed Lev Lvovich one last time. "And on my mother's side I'm from the Kuban."

Yes, one gets the hoary old gag about the dentist — but the Kuban?

Reading The Slynx is rather like finding oneself attending a theatrical performance in a foreign city where one knows the language but simply cannot get the jokes or the slang or the references. There are pages in Tatyana Tolstaya's novel that no doubt will have them splitting their sides in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but they will leave the Western reader glum and stony-faced, wondering what all the laughter is about.

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