Learning from Soviet History

...The internalization of Stalinism— that, ultimately, is the horrible tragedy, and its canker infects the Apollinarie-viches 20 years later...

...Book Three, "The Victim's Last Adventure"—"Five in Solitary" presents the real horror of Stalinism most directly and powerfully...

...Much as part of Tolya wants passionately to conform to the "normal" Zhdanov world of basketball, Komsomol and high school romance, part of his adult penta-personality wants with equal fervor to believe that Khrushchev's expose of Stalinism has closed the book of the past, that the Stalinist mentality has been forever replaced by jazz, jeans and asteady stream of Coca-Cola...

...The Apol-linarieviches, emblems of a generation, drown the bile and ashes of the shortlived, highly relative freedom of the late '50s and early' 60s in the mechanical sex and bottomless vodka bottles of the early '70s...

...The Burn By Vassily Aksyonov Translated by Michael Glenny Random House...

...Reviewed by Josephine Woll Author, "Soviet Dissident Literature: A Critical Guide" It is fortuitous that Yuri Trifonov's The Old Man and Vassily Aksyonov's The Burn have appeared in English translation within a few weeks of each other...

...His hero, the elderly Pavel Evgrafevich Letunov, became deeply entangled as a young Bolshevik in the case of a Cossack general, Sergei Kirillovich Migulin, whom the Bolsheviks mistrusted and eventually murdered...

...By contrast, Aksyonov's five-fold personae—not a wholly successful device—anatomize the despair so deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of Russia's brightest...

...the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Cheptsov's re-emergence crush the second...

...These novels therefore marked the culmination of their authors' Soviet careers...

...The Apollinarieviches are the people who think and question—and who in the 1970s were increasingly leaving their homeland...

...He alone among his comrades is not blinded by the "dawn of history" to the twilight of the past...

...The rest are at best normally selfish, at worst amoral opportunists...

...The Old Man was the last of Trifonov's books to come out before his death at age 56 in 1981 (the substantially finished Time and Place was issued posthumously...

...and because both probe the relationship of Soviet past to Soviet present they illuminate one another...

...In looking back, Trifonov confines himself almost exclusively to the Revolution and Civil War...

...The section's teen-age protagonist, Tolya von Steinbock, spent the late 40s there, as did his creator...

...This character is based on Philip Mironov, the subject of Roy Medvedev and Sergei Starikov's 1978 account, Philip Mironov and the Russian Civil War...

...Now, in the Moscow of 1973, the sons and grandsons of such men have lost even that thin veneer of idealism: The end they are scrambling for is the acquisition of a dacha, and the means—lies, bribes, physical and virtual arm-twisting—are accepted as a matter of course...

...Trifonov's sensitive and honest exploration of the revolutionary period honors the best of the Bolsheviks, represented by Letunov's uncle Shura...

...Aksyonov emigrated to the West in 1980, after The Burn, completed five years earlier, was published in Italy...

...As Tolya explains: "Even when a little whiff of rebellion began to ruffle the surface, when we were already giggling over Zoshchenko's banned story about a monkey and were copying Akhmatova's poems in letters to our girl friends, in our heart of hearts, in the very deepest recesses of our soul, we were still convinced that Zhdanov's world was normal and that Zoshchenko's world was abnormal, decadent and shameful...

...Both writers were extraordinarily successful in the Soviet Union: Trifonov's works were consistently published throughout his lifetime, despite their increasing boldness...

...All this was so traumatic that Tolya lives on in the present as five separate characters sharing the same patronymic, Apollinarie-vich...

...An immediate question is why The Burn was rejected by the authorities, and Aksyonov was in effect forced to leave the USSR, while The Old Man received a print run of 200,000 copies from the wholly official publishing house Sovetsky Pisatel...

...Letunov's children and neighbors belong to the educated Soviet urban class...

...528 pp...

...would that Western readers took advantage of the chance to read both...

...In addition, when two of its contributors were expelled from the Writers' Union he resigned in protest...

...Rather, says Aksyonov, "the chief conflict of our time is ideally abbreviated to the scheme ZOSHCHENKO V. ZHDANOV...

...Yet surely no less significant was the fact that the pasts the writers examine, and the present conditions they depict, are sharply, even shockingly, different...

...The arrest of Tolya's mother by the brutal Captain Cheptsov crushes the first idea...

...There are several possible answers, some nonliter-ary: To begin with, Aksyonov was the editor of Metropol, an experimental literary almanac that aroused the ire of the Kremlin and was denied publication...

...Both books, incidentally, would profit from thoughtful introductory essays and more extensive footnoting...

...When I originally read The Old Man in Russian, I marveled at its delicate yet tough-minded investigation of the past-turned-present, and its recognition of how truth can be distorted by ideology or emotion or both...

...Would that Soviet readers had the chance to read Aksyonov's book...

...An idealist committed to creating an equitable society, Shura knows too that individuals must be held responsible for their actions...

...The autobiographical centerpiece of The Burn —Book Two, "Five in Solitary"—goes straight to one of the lowest circles of hell: Magadan, "capital" of the Siberian Gulag...

...Only Trifonov's fleeting allusions to the Stalin years, though, imply other parallels to the past that haunts Letunov...

...The Burn aims higher, and dazzles even where it falls short...

...Trifonov kept aloof from any kind of dissident activity, whatever his personal views may have been...

...Sandwiched between two surrealistic, hallucinatory sections set in the '60s and '70s, respectively—Book One, "The Men's Club...

...Taken together, The Old Man and The Burn encompass the legacy of Soviet history from the Ukraine in 1919 to Siberia in 1947—from the grand vision of the Revolution to the hideously circumscribed one of Stalinism...

...They are trying to acquire better housing and better jobs, along with such status symbols as cars and foreign clothing...

...Fifty years after the Migulin affair, Letunov is obsessed with understanding his own ambiguous role in it, as well as with discovering and making public the truth behind the event...

...He is speaking of the unfettered, piercing vision of the great Soviet satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, pitted against Stalin' s cultural henchman Andrei Zhdanov, ideological strangler of the barest whisper of independent thought...

...That horror is not the purges, camps and "external exiles," or the wholly arbitrary nature of the "law," which can't be bothered to invent a pretext for Tolya's mother's second arrest...

...The author also gives full weight to the era's lies and hypocrisy: the self-servers who masked personal ambition in revolutionary rhetoric, the careerists who perverted the Revolution's goals and employed tactics that poisoned it at the root...

...But their humdrum world is hardly the roller-coaster of fast cars, whores, foreign-currency bars, and drunk tanks ridden by The Burn's intellectual elite...

...18.95...

...Aksyonov, certainly through the early 1970s, was the single most popular writer of the generation that came to maturity under Nikita Khrushchev...

...It pushes what can be said in a Soviet novel to the limits...

...Aksyonov is not so reticent...

...Trifonov's people drink their share of vodka, and Letunov's son carries on simultaneously with his wife, his ex-wife and a couple of mistresses...

...Only the son has the faintest trace of the idealism that motivated his father half a century before, or any understanding of his father's obsession...

...When Tolya's mother, like Aksyonov's, finished a 10-year sentence in 1947, she brought her son east with her but shortly thereafter was rearrested...

...Nonetheless, in English, despite the excellence of Jacqueline Edwards and Mitchell Schneider's translation, the novel seems less ambitious, less daring...

...Although its structure is unbalanced—the overlong chaotic present somewhat overwhelms the still, sad heart of the Magadan story— its power is maintained by a remarkable breadth of imagination and a richness of language, faithfully captured in Michael Glenny's superb translation...