A Utopia Built on Blood

...A Utopia Built on Blood_ The Radiant Future Bv Ale\ande> Zinoviev Random House 298 pp $13 95 Reviewed by Josephine Woll Assistant projessoi of Russian Liteiatuie, Howard University Alexander Zinoviev's first novel, The }awnmg Heights, was hailed throughout the West as a masterpiece, a storehouse of satire attacking e\ erv facet ot Soviet li te as w ell as a multi-leveled exploration ot the author s philosophical ideas in an opulence of linguistic styles The tact is however, that because ol its inordinate length and complexity very lew Westerners besides the clitics actually read it The same tale should not belall Zinoviev's second hook...

...The Radiant I untie W here 77k' )ti\\'iiinv Hemhls was a daunting /<>-man a i L /, w ilh celebrities like Sol/he-iiilsyn and Nei/vcsinv designated as Scribbler and Dauber, The Radiant Future is shorter, far more familiar in its fictional form, well-translated into accessible English, and replete with recognizably human characters To be sure, knowledge of the Soviet Union helps, if only with credibility For much of the humor of this book?and parts of it are extremely funny—resides simply in its wholly accurate presentation of Soviet reality, vignettes that the uninitiated may find hard to believe One such scene is the paper chase On the excited tip-off of the narrator's wife, the entire family rushes out, to return triumphant with rolls of toilet paper strung like leis on their necks and arms, while passers-by, instead of evincing surprise, merely squeeze them for their magical source Similarly exact is the narrator's description of Soviet pensioners, a category as distant from retirees" as the Russian peasant is from the Nebraska farmer The narrator also has a telling explanation of Russian "visitality"?that is, the almost obsessive socializing of Russians in one another s homes What accounts for the prevalance of this activity in an otherwise inhospitable country, he asks rhetorically His answer is a consideration ot the alternatives no tolerable movies, no tickets to the few satisfactory plays, nothing in print worth reading, and the cafes hav e no food, long lines, high prices, terrible service, plus earlv closing times In short, nothing else to do Zinoviev delicately uses his scalpel to tickle our ribs, but he also manipulates it with great precision to dissect the grimmer aspects of Soviet life His nameless narrator, a man in his mid-50s, is a professor ot philosophy (as was Zinoviev himself), head ot the Department ot Theoretical Problems ol the Methodology of Scientific Communism Living with his vvite, inothei-in-law and two childien in a large Moscow apartment the piolcssoi is a pnv ilegcd intellectual whosedtivtng professional mibition is to be elect eel cot responding member o! the Vadcmv ot Sciences 1'aitlv he is draw n by thepei ks(aear, cash, ilccssio special tooel stoics) paitlv hegciiuinciv thinks that trom such a base he i. in aecomphshgood Although on ment alone his chances of election are not bad, he is threatened by the rising tide of conservatism that imperils the reformism of the 1960s He is a liberal in the special Soviet post-1956 sense of the word "We did what we could, what was within our strength to do," he says "The fact that our strength was limited is another matter But that was not our fault " On the surface, fair enough It would seem that he is a relatively upright man, honest by his own lights, willing to compromise not only to survive and accrue rewards but also to help others and promote a climate of greater intellectual freedom The narrator's voice, however, is not the only one we hear He is surrounded by a discordant chorus that argues with him, tests him, contradicts him, and ultimately unmasks him The chorus includes his children, Sashka and Lenka, who receive As in historical materialism and in the history of the Communist Party without believing a single word of what they are officially fed Lenka, 16 or 17, brings home satiric poems mocking the powers that be, Sashka, slightly older, is so disgusted by the lies and corruption around him that he is nearly ready to jeopardize his (material) future by running of f to work on the Trans-Siberian Railway Both kids are a mixture of idealism and cynical awareness of the rules of the game, Soviet style Their father, hard put to answer their discomfiting questions, fears for them at the same time that he is proud of their integrity Other voices emerge in the Dive, a place frequented by people who go by their first names or by no names at all Safely anonymous, these men freely express their contempt, skepticism and mistrust of their entire existence Edik, a lawyer, feels that Marxism, created by geniuses, has become "the incarnation of mediocrity for the mediocre,' and that Soviet society persecutes those capable of better A man named Rebrov forecasts a division of humanity into masters and slaves, with the servile and self-hatmg Russian people slated for the latter category The most fundamental criticism is levelled by Nameless, who challenges the very grounds of the narrator's career Marxism is not a science at all, he announces, and the terms that "theoreticians" of Marxism like the narrator apply to Soviet society are wrong because they bear no relation to reality In this charge Nameless is joined by the mam voice of opposition in the novel, Anton Zimin, the narrator's Dop-pelganger Anton served nearly 12 years in the slave labor camps for writing a poem attacking Stalin He has now written a book about Marxism, as the narrator learns when the KGB calls him in for an evaluation of the manuscript and advice on how to handle it Zinoviev, whose own dissertation on Marxism ran into official roadblocks, devotes a good portion of The Radiant Future to the polemic between Anton and the narrator Anton seeks to expose the "nonscientific"natureof Marxism, and the narrator weakly defends it Anton analyzes Soviet society from a basis of fact, the narrator from what Anton calls "abstract guesswork and pious wishes " Anton sees Communism not as some radiant future Soviet society aspires to, but the actual conditions of current (and past) Soviet society, the narrator, forced to agree with many of Anton's criticisms, still insists that an ideal is necessary Their argument provides Zinoviev's book (and all his writings) with its central thesis, elaborated in various episodes, details and occasionally repetitious verbal debates It is a thesis we have come across before in Pasternak, in Solzhemtsyn and mutatis mutandis, in Dostoevsky Indeed, during one of the disputes at the Dive, Nameless addresses the point in terms that could come from Ivan Karamazov "Even if one day you managed to build the Radiant Edifice of Commumst Society, in the form of paradise on earth, I will not accept it because it will have been built on the blood of victims, on falsehood and oppression Out of elementary decency I would not go into such an edifice, I would prefer to stay among the victims A victim is forgiven all his sins To be a victim means to start becoming a man ' The trouble is, there is right on the narrator's side, too The liberals did accomplish something Khrushchev was better than Stalin, the Soviet Union today is more free than it was 30 years ago (though less than it was in the '60s) Sashka declares, "this last, stinking period of our history is justified if only by the fact that it has produced remarkable people, like Solzhemtsyn, Sakhar-ov, and others, who have brought a faint light into many of our little minds " Yet it is equally true that without liberals like Alexander Tvardovsky (the editor of Novy Mir who won the right to publish Solzhemtsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), the faint light would never have reached those little minds Solzhemtsyn, in The First Circle, has a character say that the most precious thing in the world is "not to participate in injustices They are stronger than you They have existed in the past and they will exist in the future But let them not come about through you " Anton would agree Nevertheless, the same Anton warns Sashka, who has outspoken discussions with friends, to "behave intelligently to avoid getting crushed at the very outset " But one man's "intelligent" behavior is another man's collaboration, one man's compromise another's denunciation Where is the line to be drawn9 This issue, reverberating well beyond the confines of The Radiant Future, is explored by Zinoviev with much greater shading and complexity than a brief review can suggest The author makes it clear that for the narrator, the other voices in his life comprise an influence he is loath to admit even exists namely, his conscience And the contradiction between the narrator's pragmatic methods of survival and that irritating, intractable conscience is shockingly resolved at the end of the book What Zinoviev presents in The Radiant Future is, first, the kind of factual repor-tagethatAnton wants and we need, and second, the moral dilemma that confronts anyone with the honesty, stomach and strength to face those facts squarely It is a frightening, enlightening combination...