New Hope for Russian Literature
LOURIE, RICHARD
New Hope for Russian Literature The Slynx By Tatyana Tolstaya Translated from the Russian byJameyGambrell Houghton Mifflin. 288 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Richard Lourie Author, "The...
...Or maybe Russians who had been creating and consuming masterpiece after masterpiece for 200 years were simply tired of reading and writing and wanted to try something else for a change-like making a bundle...
...Whatever the cause, the Russian 1990s will not go down in the history of their literature as one of the more incandescent decades...
...Reviewed by Richard Lourie Author, "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin," "Sakharov: A Biography" RUSSIA is in the odd position of being a 10-year-old country with a thousand years of history...
...Some people, myself included, hoped and expected that the fall of the Soviet Union would release a little renaissance's worth of pent-up creativity, but that was not to be...
...The principal staple is mice...
...The action takes place in Moscow, some 200 years after the Blast, which was clearly nuclear because a good portion of the population has mutated, some more grotesquely than others...
...We adopt all the scientific achievements: the yoke, the sun clock...
...As demonstrated in her short stories, Tolstaya likes to mix the lyric and the daily...
...The Oldeners, for example, "don't get any older...
...Of course, it might just be a fine work of fiction in itself, no mean achievement...
...The common people get theirs from the warehouse, while those who are well-off enjoy considerably better fare: "Baked mice, poached mice, mice in sauce...
...The main pastimes are drinking, brawling, stealing, and reading...
...And he now has some inchoate sense of something more, better, higher, "what we are all looking for-the white bird, the main book, the road to the sea...
...Or maybe it's because geniuses tend to appear randomly and in clumps, perhaps to give each other, the loneliest of creatures, the consolation of company...
...In the meantime he has lost the love of his wife to the antiSemitic Degenerator...
...Marinated mouse tails, mouse-eye caviar...
...dressed in black, their symbol was the dog's head and the broom, to sniff out treachery and sweep it away...
...Tolstaya's premises-an obliterating explosion, the passage of two centuries-allow her to create a world of fable, always a pleasure because it liberates the imagination from most of the strictures of form and of reality...
...They live and live and they don't die from old age...
...Nails...
...The outside world barely exists, except for the Chechens, a source of danger to post-Blast Muscovy but also a source of tales about the steppe that teems with mythic beasts like the deadly, maddening Slynx...
...Some of them are very illtempered indeed...
...It's the perennial Russian collective identity crisis-who are we...
...There is even something like a secret police-how can there be a Russia without a secret police...
...Some people have "Consequences": "Some have got hands that look like they broke out in green flour, like they'd been rolling in greencorn, some have gills, another might have a cock's comb or something else...
...To complete the social picture there are any number of scriveners copying manuscripts, serfs galore, and the Degenerators, mutants who are half human and half beast of burden...
...We obey the Decrees...
...Ivan the Terrible invented the first one in the middle 1500s...
...Or, to put the question another way, what are the absolutely essential elements of Russia that recur regardless of the course the country takes...
...It emerges when, after exchanging insult and invective, he, Nikita the Slavophile and Lev the Jewish dissident join in song: "It's hard to stay mad when you're singing: If you open your mouth the wrong way, you'll ruin the song...
...We are not told whether the Blast was the result of international hostilities or whether the Russians managed it on their own...
...Not all Consequences are so grotesque...
...And sometimes there aren't any Consequences, except when they get old a pimple will sprout from the eye, or their private parts will grow a beard down to the shins...
...They do die from other things once in a while, though...
...Tolstaya's answer to that question is by turns gruesome and comical, but never flattering...
...But this is not merely an artistic enterprise, it is also a philosophical inquiry: How much can you take from Russia without losing it in the process...
...The Russians of the future have, of course, a horrible social system, a mixture of tsarism, Communism and the traditional collectivism of old "wooden" Russia...
...At last, after all the darkness and travail, he has learned to question...
...Their faces look human, but their bodies are all furry and they run on all fours...
...A dim and lusty scribe, Benedikt has no Consequences"His belly button was where it should be, right smack in the middle...
...Benedikt becomes an obsessive reader, but as Nikita tellshim: "You don'treally know how to read, books are of no use to you...
...You will be aware that you are missing some parts, others will fly past unperceived...
...But what you will get is fresh, fantastical, morosely hilarious, and-very Russian-compassionately cruel...
...With a felt boot on each leg...
...Among them is Lev Lvovich, a Jewish dissident who can't wait for the fax machine to be invented again, and his constant companion in intellectual argument, Nikita Ivanich, who takes the more Slavophile position...
...Mice are also a medium of exchange...
...Now Tatyana Tolstaya has written a brave and ambitious novel that might very well signal the revival as a 21 st-century event...
...In Tolstaya's futuristic fable, the secret police are called the Saniturions, drive around masked in red sleighs, and are armed with hooks to confiscate books and snatch people with various "Illnesses" such as Free thinking...
...As the novel ends, the last words from Benedikt are interrogatives...
...There aren't many Oldeners left...
...Or nostrils will pop out on their knees...
...You haven't learned the alphabet of life...
...they take you away and treat you, and after treatment people don't come back...
...No one ever comes back...
...But in the midst of his own degeneration, something has also been awakened in him...
...At one point, in an effort to embrace the people and effect social change, Lev and Nikita invite a Degenerator into their hut...
...Here she can both imagine a world and furnish it with all the little details herself...
...Maybe Russian writers had grown so used to outwitting censors that they were stymied by the formlessness of freedom...
...A plant called rusht can be both smoked and drunk...
...But then he has the misfortune to fall in love and marry Olenka, whose father is head of the Saniturions and has a house full of books...
...An anti-Semite and a nationalist, he proves unredeemable...
...I hope for a spiritual renaissance," says Nikita...
...Basically, he is happy and does not feel in the least backward: "Why are we backward...
...The ruler is a maniacal, tyrannical dwarf who attributes all the great poetry of the past to himself, written in the intervals when he is not issuing decree after decree...
...You must, however, know something about Russia, have some feel for its culture, for this book to work for you...
...When he begins attacking the name of Andrei Sakharov, they throw him out...
...Samizdat is what we need," replies Lev...
...In Russia that's something like progress, something like a happy ending...
...One character shopping for something to read thinks: "The poetry was worth a mouse and a half, maximum, and they get 12...
...He did, it turns out, have a small tail that he had amputated when he began courting seriously, a decision he regrets for a while: "You could always tell from your tail what mood you were in...
...And all of the above is the setting for the tale Tolstaya tells of a wonderfully unsympathetic hero named Benedikt who only gets worse as things progress...
...needless to say there is much of both...
...They're just empty page-turning, a collection of letters...
...The novel has been creatively translated, except for some unfortunate Americanisms ("whack them upside the head," "sleazeball...
...Benedikt also becomes a Saniturion and takes part in the assassination of the current tyrant, who is immediately replaced by the next...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
