A Modern Russian Hero

...The sour, sardonic old man who returns from the camps after the post-Stalin amnesty hardly fits Lyova's fantasy of a kindred soul...

...Reviewed by Josephine Woll Associate professor of Russian literature, Howard University...

...The Humble Horseman" begins with Lyova on duty at the empty Pushkin House over the holiday weekend...

...Jewish—blood...

...The final section of the novel is called "The Humble Horseman'—Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" meets Dostoyevsky's Poor [or Humble] Folk...

...In an effort to protect his vulnerable soul from the unexpected assault of his grandfather's judgment, Lyova tries to ingratiate himself by attacking the man he assumes his grandfather hates—his own father, Modest's son and betrayer...

...That's the true reason I hate you—for my own love, for your betrayal...

...Suddenly, however, the institute is mysteriously teeming with people—including his friend Blank, who considers him a decent and honorable man, and his arch-tempter Mitishatyev, who looms as a nightmare projection of Lyova's worst self (Ivan Karamazov's devil, among other literary forebears) and as an embodiment of the anti-Semitism and xenophobia of the Russian people...

...Pushkin House is more than a pyrotechnic composite of literary quotations, and much more than a puzzling salad of sources (enjoyable though it may be to figure out their relationship to the text...

...Be warned, though: Keeping up is no easy trick...

...Next we see Lyova with his women...

...Trying to please everyone, Lyova finds himself caught in the middle of this antithetical pair...

...In a recent Soviet film, Preserve Me, My Talisman, Pushkin's death-by-duel is reworked in a different way: The pistols turn out to be umbrellas, and the death is transmuted into a drunken stupor...

...in Poor Folk an inhumane society prohibits pure love, profaning it with material considerations, and the aging protagonist is left bereft as the girl he loves is forced lo marry her seducer...

...author, "Soviet Dissident Literature: A Critical Guide" Russian literature is often dubbed "the house of Pushkin," in homage to its first great and perhaps still greatest figure...

...This sends the old man into an apoplectic rage that has the physical force to blast Lyova out of the apartment and into the street...

...He has a lot of fun in his pursuit of a serious aim, and the reader who can keep up with him will be vastly entertained by his cleverness and sly humor...

...Like God's mansion it has many rooms, and Andrei Bitov is entirely at home in all of them...

...and Lyubasha, the woman with whom he is most nearly in emotional balance since neither loves the other...

...Ironically, American readers are being offered the chance to enjoy Bitov's prodigious talent at the same time as their Soviet counterparts: Some 10 years after Bitov wrote his novel, and nine years after it was published (by Ardis Publishers) in Russian in the U.S., its full text is finally going on sale in the Soviet Union...

...But since literature can, if the author chooses, be kinder and more flexible than life, Lyova's inert body is not permanently cold...

...This is more clever in Russian, where bednyi [poor] rhymingly replaces mednyi [bronze...

...Obviously the wish to alter the ending of Pushkin's life goes deep in Russia...

...Born in 1937—theyearof Bitov's birth, the height of the Terror and the 100th anniversary of Pushkin's death —Lyova finished high school in 1953, the year Stalin died...

...In "Bronze Horseman" the statue of Peter the Great comes to life in order to pursue the long-suffering Yevgeny for his defiant fist-shaking...

...I wish other publishers would follow Farrar, Straus & Giroux's example...

...Lyova remains silent when Mitishatyev insults Blank as a man of tainted—i.e...

...Given what we know from Pushkin and Lermontov, and from Bitov himself, it is not surprising that the scene ends in a duel...

...the reader must also contend with the fact that Pushkin House is an ultra-self-conscious postmodernist (as they say) novel, à la Flaubert's Parrot...

...But his attempt at verbal parricide, a nightmarish burst of teenage venom, fails: What his grandfather's experienced ear hears is a plain and simple denunciation...

...His "present" (an arbitrary term: in Pushkin House every moment is equally "now" and "then") climaxes on the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, November 7 and 8, 1967...

...But it is not only the constant allusions to Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy and virtually every other major Russian author, plus a few minor ones, that make for tough going...

...Floating on seas of vodka and scholarly debate, the three quote not only Pushkin's poems—a minor accomplishment for an educated Russian—but the far more recondite obscene remarks contained in his letters...

...It is an intriguing if occasionally irritating novel about the perils of writing a novel, and a serious investigation of how the past and the present impinge on each other...

...Somewhere in Moscow, Andrei Bitov is probably having a quiet chuckle over this improbable coincidence...

...Lyova, too, is pursued by a demon/double, Mitishatyev, who has some sort of mysterious, disquieting relationship with two of the three women...

...For years he has been taught "ready-made behavior, ready-made explanations, ready-made ideals...

...such notes are a tremendous boon to Western readers...

...The shifting love-triangles are more conventionally told than other parts of Pushkin House, though here as well Bitov is perpetually intruding into the narration, commenting on his hero and the women, rearranging the versions and variants that make up "reality...

...In Pushkin House (also the name of a literary institutecum-museum in Leningrad) he plays a kind of literary croquet through the corridors, popping into one room or another to retrieve, gracefully and with total self-confidence, a ball that has rolled under a sofa or behind a closet door...

...Naturally, he is hard put to accommodate this real person into his neat mental constructs...

...Susan Brownsberger helps quite a lot with her fine translation and very useful notes at the end...

...Assuming the despairing voice of the Russian peasantry, the double hurls accusations at Lyova and the liberal intelligentsia he stands for: "What did you want with humanism...

...The disloyalties, jealousy and duels depicted in this section of the novel lie under the weighty hand of Mikhail Lermontov's Hero of Our Time, especially its "Princess Mary" chapter, in which Pechorin juggles two women and fatally shoots his rival and double, Grushnitsky...

...Like most Russian drinking sprees (in literature anyway), this one ends badly...

...In a blur of literary paraphrases Mitishatyev becomes the Grand Inquisitor to Lyova's Jesus, Bazarov to his aristocratic Pavel Kirsanov, Smerdyakov to his Ivan...

...and grandfather Modest Platonovich Odoevtsev, one-time luminary of the philological profession and longtime Gulag inhabitant...

...It consists of a shadowy father and mother...

...Lyova is first shown to us in the context of his family...

...Uncle Mitya, actually a beloved family friend...

...There are three of them: Faina, whom he loves with constancy but for small and unsatisfactory return...

...Why did you slavishly begin to guess our ideas and pretend you were bringing them to us, why did you convince us that we were people, when it's practically impossible to be a person in your sense—perpetuum mobile—you never taught us the art and you've lost it yourselves...

...for years he has learned "to explain everything very competently and logically before thinking...

...The hero may or may not exist, the author's voice is everywhere, and any given piece of text comes in multiple variants on the premise that reality —whether historical or literary—is all a matter of interpretation...

...Both Pushkin's famous poem and Dostoyevsky's early epistolary novel have as their heroes lowly clerks who are helpless against forces of authority...

...unlike Pushkin, he comes back to life, at least in one of the cluster of possible endings...

...No lonely, broken Lear in search of his lost children (and certainly no noble martyr), the elder Odoevtsev is brilliant and harsh, unforgiving of Lyova's pretensions and caustic toward his vanity...

...To the extent that there is a plot it centers on Lyova Odoevtsev, modern Soviet man...

...Albina, who loves him...