Plumbing the Soviet Psyche

...This is certainly Trifonov's notion as well, although his canvas is fiction instead of fact...

...to keep order: to ensure . . . that the epochs and the nations didn't get mixed up or change places, that the great men didn't try pushing ahead in the line, didn't quarrel and didn't try to get a ticket to immortality out of turn...

...House on the Embankment, published the following year in Druzhba Narodov, mistakenly labeled a "conservative" journal, is seen as the more public...

...The theme of the past is there, as are her husband' s conflicts with his colleagues, but the focus is personal: Olga can't conceive of another life for herself, can't begin a new life, until she comes to terms with her first one...

...An early novel, Students, which won a Stalin Prize more than 30 years ago, is also available in English in a Soviet edition...

...Glebov is the "individual thread stretching through time" that Sergei, in Another Life, believes to be the key to history...

...it threatens the foundation of his relationship with Olga, a relationship that she, in her pain, romanticizes yet feels—and Trifonov concurs—can only be understood from the inside...

...His thesis adviser is Professor Ganchuk, a Civil War hero who had been an active participant in the literary battles that remained possible in the 1920s...

...How should man behave toward his fellow man...

...the Stalin years...

...They had simply changed places for a time...

...Likenesses there are—but Trifonov (as did Arthur Koestler) insists on the differences as well...

...Unlike Turgenev, who reserved his most inward, emotional subjects for novellas and used the longer genre for treatments of social and historical issues, Trifonov shows a far greater degree of overlap...

...Sometimes ill-informed people would ask: What is the difference between them...

...From about 1968 on, however, he wrote on increasingly touchy matters, in ever more daring ways...

...human frailty and foolishness are as apparent in his characters who do not cave in to pressure as in the ones who do...

...he is free with terms like "petty burgeois faker...

...For the first 15 years of his career Trifonov produced fairly orthodox novels, though even then his brand of psychological realism must have discomfited some of his colleagues...

...he, a historian, is fiercely independent, something of aloner, restless, lacking that gift of knowing how to get along so crucial to advancement in Soviet (or any other) society...

...Well, perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement...

...to her, the historian's job was rather like that of the policeman who was stationed...

...The novellas chosen by Simon and Schuster indicate the range of Trifonov's writing and nicely complement each other...

...This novella made the censors nervous: While almost all of Trifonov's works were published in editions of 100,000, House on the Embankment had a run of 30,000—by Soviet standards, for a writer of Trifonov's popularity, small indeed...

...Sergei's flirtation with parapsychology, coming at the end of his truncated life, is his last attempt to "teaseout" the thread of other lives...

...He is nearly unknown to Western readers: Only three of his novellas have hitherto appeared in English (in a collection entitled The Long Goodbye), and they were published by a press known mostly to specialists in Russian literature, Ardis of Ann Arbor...

...Yet of all the Russian novelists of the past 20 years, Yuri Trifonov is one of the closest to those two eminent forebears...

...What he gives us are people's lives— and that means an inextricable mixture of work, marriage, sex, children, friendship, and the periods involved...

...What those particular times demanded was betrayal...

...But now Simon and Schuster has put two of his last four works together in a single volume, and English readers can judge for themselves if the genealogy rings true...

...The similarities, rather, are to be found in his manipulation of the stuff of everyday existence, and of history, to reveal the inner life of his characters and to answer the questions, "What should men live by...

...But that wasn't so...

...In his post humously published novel, Time and Place, he is more successful with this mixture...

...The climax for Glebov, the moment when he chooses, in Solzhenitsyn's words, to "participate in evil," comes during his graduate studies...

...author, "Soviet Dissident Literature: A Critical Guide" Tolstoy,Turgenev,Trifonov...

...He has no villains or gods...

...But he is less concerned with showing up the limits of Olga's imagination than in peeling back, layer by layer, the palimpsest of two oddly-suited people who live together in happy and unhappy love...

...What is so impressive about Trifonov's handling of this difficult, delicate situation is his ability to display the warts of the victim in the very process of distinguishing between victim and vic-timizer...

...the translations by Michael Glenny are faithful to the tone of the original texts, if occasionally more forthright (particularly in sexual language) than any Soviet writer could possibly be...

...Reviewed by Josephine Woll Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, Howard University...

...Anyone who still wonders how Stalinism could have happened need only read House on the Embankment to find out...

...Nevertheless, as Glebov sees clearly enough: "The whole point was that [Ganchuk] was an absolutely honest and decent man, and to attack him implied an attack, as it were, on the very standard of decency itself, because Dorodnov was one thing and Nikolai Vasilievich Ganchuk was something else...

...Sergei believes that "the individual is the thread stretching through time, the supersensitive nerve of history that can be teased out and separated—and from which one can then learn a great deal...

...Not that Trifonov judges presumptuously, or is unmindful of what the stakes were...

...Their professions reflect their differences: Olga is a materialist, and death means to her the end of a conglomeration of molecules, irreconcilable with life...

...And despite Trifonov's saying at one point that "the times were to blame," we are left with no doubt that Glebov's compliance, unwilling as it may have been, demands judgment...

...By the time of his death in 1981, he had pushed the frontiers of his art and concerns so far that Westerners (and probably Russians, too) puzzled over his being allowed to publish...

...She, a biologist, is practical and conventional...

...Both of them were flourishing their swords, the only difference was that one was now showing signs of flagging, and the other one had only recently been given his sword...

...To some extent such distinctions are artificial in Trifonov's case...

...Ganchuk is dictatorial and self-righteous...

...Nevertheless, in Another Life the refracting lens is a grieving widow's attempt to survive her loss by reviewing in her mind the life she and her husband shared...

...Therefore to attack one, it might seem, was equivalent to attacking the other, too...

...She cannot understand the pursuit of history: "Olga had a mental image of history as a vast, endless sequence in which epochs, nations, great men, kings, generals and revolutionaries stood in line one behind the other...

...they were birds of a feather...

...he mixes a third person and omniscient narrator with an occasional (and intrusive) firstperson voice...

...Ganchuk's daughter Sonya is Glebov's lover (she is, incidentally, a Dostoyevskian Sonya, overwhelmed by pity for everyone, innocent, insulted, and injured...

...the clash between idealism, integrity and honor, and pragmatism, opportunism and compromise...

...The house of the title refers to an enormous apartment building in Moscow where big shots lived in the 1930s...

...Of the two novellas, Another Life, published in the leading literary journal Novy Mir in 1975, is deemed the more private...

...Through him Trifonov lays bare an epoch...

...Born in 1925, Trifonov was the son of an Old Bolshevik killed during the 1930's purges, and a mother who spent years in the slave labor camps...

...he regrets that when he had the chance in the 1920s he did not get rid of the man who now has the power to persecute him...

...Less poetic in his prose style and exhibiting none of Turgenev's feeling for nature, Trifonov also is much less didactic than Tolstoy...

...Like many of Trifonov's marriages or couplings, Olga's passionate and turbulent union with Sergei was a bonding between two very different people...

...In the vicious era of the late 1940s, Ganchuk is selected for destruction and Glebov is invited—ordered—to participate in the beheading...

...In House on the Embankment the author tries a slightly different approach, to give both the outside and the inside view...

...No wonder...

...It is a treatment of one man, Vadim Glebov, who in 1972 is prominent and successful, but whose past—in 1937, as a child living next door to the house on the embankment, and in 1947-48, as a graduate student in a literary institute—reveals a pattern of acquiescence to the exigencies of the times...

...The two men made different movements, like swimmers in a river: one did the crawl, another did the breast-stroke The reader is reminded of the three incarnations in Darkness at Noon: Ru-bashov as Party Past, Ivanov as Party Present, and Gletkin as Party Future...

...As he pursued his craft, he inched steadily toward dealing honestly with the major subjects for a Russian of his generation and background: the evolution from Leninist Russia to Stalinist Russia...