History's Prisoners
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction History's Prisoners By Brooke Allen Just as the 12th century became known as the Age of Faith, the 20th may well go down in history as the Age of Ideology. In attempting to replace...
...The mind-boggling ideological tyranny in 20th-century Russia was a tragedy, to be sure, but it was also low farce...
...While others bend with the changing political winds, Aglaya remains faithful to her ideals...
...The anger and dissatisfaction among Teddy's once loyal workforce is, as he is aware, very much a product of World War II...
...Perhaps no one has captured the farce with as much brio, irony and pure style as Vladimir Voinovich...
...THE CHARACTERS in Ward Just's new novel, An Unfinished Season (Houghton Mifflin, 251 pp., $24.00), are also trapped blindly within their historical moment: Cold War America...
...he had begun to stoop...
...Like all ideologically oriented people, she is able magically to reconcile contradictory evidence—to know one thing, yet to believe another...
...But George Orwell, who died in 1950 when Josef Stalin was still in power, did not live to know the half of it...
...As a piece of social and historical observation, it is excellent...
...Here, for instance, is Wils observing his immediate elders at the deb balls: "The young marrieds seemed to us always in search of some fantastic grail, eternal youth or the ring of the Nibelungen, the presidency of the bank, the perfect crime, or the ultimate revenge...
...Sports and team play stand high in his scheme of values...
...As the years progress and her idol is never rehabilitated, she sinks into a morass of depression and alcohol.She is disgusted by the easy accommodations made by the new generation, symbolized by her son Marat, who is pursuing a career in government and "had observed that the age of the fanatics was finished...
...Aglaya's confusion is complete when she and some other elderly demonstrators, carried away by idealistic fervor, storm a force of militiamen...
...one critic has described his work, with justice, as "Socialist surrealism...
...Jack Brune, a psychiatrist, and his beautiful daughter Aurora...
...Her fall from grace is contrasted with the simultaneous rise of her neighbor, Mark Semenovich Shubkin...
...The scene in which she is introduced to 1990sstyle political life at a Party rally superbly contrasts the old-style Communist fervor and terror with the new, television- and advertising-driven vote-mongering...
...and when they finished, the telephone in its cradle, they reviewed their notes, all the while caressing the carapace of the machine as if it were a small animal or the skin of a woman...
...And if a historical event happens to have taken place before their very eyes, they see the reason for its occurrence in a temporal coincidence of misunderstandings...
...Their lives seemed to us unimaginably exotic, as if they were a tribe of the Caucasus or South Sea Islanders or French voluptuaries...
...Even the pigeons did not sit on the iron peaked cap...
...A poet and writer, Shubkin has just returned to civilization after years in a Siberian labor camp...
...his conversion to Orthodox Christianity (another scoswo...
...Aglaya's secure world is shaken forever in February 1956, when Nikita S. Khrushchev delivers his secret speech to the 20th Party Congress about Stalin's personality cult...
...And in addition (though this is a mere detail) the statue was never attacked by rust...
...Did they really not believe what they were saying...
...The whole nation had won the War and the whole nation was entitled to a share in the victory...
...Granted, the "Socialism" practiced in the USSR was already pretty surrealistic, indeed Orwellian...
...The iron man's direct gaze instilled in all comers an incomprehensible fear that expanded into icy terror...
...The generations are no better or worse than each other...
...his migration to Israel...
...Stalin is her earthly God...
...The newspaper Wils works for and the underclass who grace its pages represent, to this elite, "the blank rustle of disorder, Genghis Khan and his 10,000 horsemen, foreigners, foreign ideologies, bad breeding, people not from here, people who wanted things that didn't belong to them___" The very rich fear what they find "subversive," and Wils' newspaper is subversive in a big way, highlighting not only the scandals of the upper class but the tragedies of the poor, the black, the disenfranchised...
...When the iron statue is demoted from its pedestal, she has it moved, with some difficulty, into her own apartment...
...Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich had kept silent," she is distraught...
...Noting that "Khrushchev had said it...
...And this applied not only to humans, but also to animals of a lower order...
...The majority think that everything will always be the way it is today...
...Indefatigably industrious, he churns out endless letters to Russian and Western newspapers, writes an influential novel, The Timber Camp, about his experiences in the Gulag, and finally becomes not merely a local but an international celebrity, Dolgov's own pet dissident...
...What is going on at the factory represents the breakdown of team play...
...So does his son Wils, a dangerous portent of the age to come: a secretive individualist, an intellectual who despises team sports and plans to attend the University of Chicago, considered by the likes of his father to be the hotbed of American Socialism...
...his revision of The Timber Camp to give it Christian rather than Socialist themes...
...Mark Semenovich Shubkin was and remains a comical figure: all those ideals and beliefs of his, the way he arrived at them and the way he abandoned them and, most importantly, all the grimacing and gesturing involved looked funny, but at the same time there was something touching about him—his actions were driven by noble impulses and elements of the recklessness that is so highly esteemed in our society...
...And here are the reporters at work in the newsroom: "While they talked they moved their fingers from the keys to the space bar and back again, whether they were typing or not...
...There Aglaya stagnates until, as an old woman in post-Soviet Russia, she is dragooned into the new Communist Party...
...This is an unfortunate psychological reality, and it will continue to handicap the human race...
...And it seems to them that everything can be put back the way it was...
...Voinovich makes better use of his memories, and though his style is far broader than Just's, his scenes and characters are more grounded in truth...
...You played as a team for the team, a philosophy that endured for a lifetime...
...Aglaya asks...
...With Aglaya, Voinovich employs the time-honored device of the naive central character...
...But when it veers into the personal and romantic it falls surprisingly short...
...nevertheless, other false paths are always there to tempt us, as experience daily demonstrates...
...But that is not the way things really are...
...Those who have lived through the shocks and aftershocks of the Age of Ideology are surely disinclined to believe that they could ever repeat such crude blunders...
...In the summer between high school and college, Wils leads something of a triple life, living with his suburban parents, working as a summer intern at a popular newspaper, and spending his nights in evening dress at a series of parties along "the debutante's archipelago from Chicago to Lake Bluff...
...I'll tell you this...
...She is one of those singleminded creatures who are guided by a principle a Voinovich character dubs scoswo: the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook...
...his baptism...
...And on his cap—this was really incredible—two fat, disgusting gray pigeons were billing and cooing...
...The Khrushchev thaw has no such energizing effeet on Aglaya, and neither does Leonid I Brezhnev's freeze...
...throw such a bad light on things, accentuating the negative makes us all feel rotten, as if we're being accused of something...
...His political hero is "the good Roosevelt" (Teddy), his villain is TR's "appalling cousin, the bad Roosevelt, the Socialist Roosevelt...
...For example, younger folks watching Aglaya and the other decrepit Communists demonstrating in the 1990s "felt uncomfortable and pitied these stupid, malicious, helpless and ridiculous old people...
...I won't allow your paper in the house...
...Nineteen-year-old Wilson (Wils) Ravan observes the chaos in the outside world—"The mess in Springfield, the mess in Washington, subversion in Hollywood, corruption in Chicago, stalemate in Korea, unrest generally"— and the chaos at home, where his father Teddy, who runs a profitable printing business, feels himself victimized by the strike at his factory that has upset his well-ordered life...
...Once Wils falls into their orbit, he ceases to be the sharp observer of his particular place and time...
...He too is addicted to a scoswo, but it is of the Marxist-Leninist rather than the Stalinist variety, and he flourishes in the new atmosphere, where "it's all reinstatement of Leninist norms and Socialist legality nowadays...
...you had to be flexible and not be too hasty in adopting one position or another before it had taken shape...
...Unlike most kitschy Soviet icons, it turns out to be eerily realistic...
...But the two remain objects of fascination and desire only for the author: He fails either to make them tangible to us, or to work them into any coherent theme for his novel...
...Things begin to go awry when Wils meets a pair who obsess him: the intense, brooding Dr...
...Aglaya does not possess the talent for compromise displayed by the Party elite, and her career suffers accordingly...
...In the godless post-Soviet world where all idols are fallen, even Stalin has lost the aura of terror that had long defined him and has become a mere cultural artifact...
...Later generations will say they are fools, and yet they will be exactly the same...
...Teddy is a self-made man, a local boy who has elected to stay in his unglamorous Chicago suburb rather than defect to the North Shore...
...It is Aglaya who commissions the monumental cast-iron statue of Stalin that is erected in Dolgov's renamed Square of the Fallen on the occasion of his 70th birthday...
...I don't want the maid to see it...
...Team play was what made America the great country that it was...
...Just has made the mistake, halfway through his novel, of easing away from the particularity of 1950s Chicago into a dreamy romantic neverland...
...his return to Dolgov, which he insists on calling (in contrast to Moscow) the "real" Russia, and his immediate departure when he is reminded just how crude a place it really is...
...As people of the new generations, they thought they were quite different and could never become like them...
...It is a surrealistic and Orwellian truth, but it has the confident ring of authenticity...
...Voinovich's newest novel, Monumental Propaganda (Knopf, 365 pp., $25.00), tells the sorry tale through the life of one of the last true believers: Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since 1933, veteran of the Great Patriotic War, and longtime district Party secretary in the provincial town of Dolgov until she was "'gobbled up' by more predatory comrades...
...On the North Shore Wils finds the elemental fear that his father has begun to expose that summer to be everywhere evident, a sharp odor in the air...
...The brilliantly realized Shubkin, who owes much to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is Voinovich's masterstroke, and like all first-rate characters he enjoys his author's real affection: "Of course...
...Continually harassed by the authorities from the mid-1970s, he emigrated to West Germany in 1980...
...Were they all really lying...
...His 40-year career has produced much fine fiction, including his famously absurd novel of the Soviet War effort, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin...
...He knew that something had changed with the winning of the War and the unquiet peace that followed...
...their beliefs, mistakes and behavior depend on the historical and personal circumstances in which they grow up...
...Jack Brune is so mysterious he ends by escaping the reader altogether...
...The Ravans are emblematic of a society in transition...
...After much local debate, he wins back his prime spot in Stalin Square over several other culturally and historically significant contenders for it: Marshal Zhukov, Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Pyotr Stolypin, and Tsar Nicholas II...
...Paradoxically, historical fiction seems to be not only more real but more pertinent—more universal—when it remains firmly rooted in its own period...
...Brune's very profession sets him radically apart from Wils' father, to whom psychiatry "was a shabby profession one step removed from voodoo.' Aurora is experienced, sophisticated, mysterious...
...Furthermore, the positions that acolytes of one or another political ideology were required to assume too often turned out to be infinitely more ridiculous than any of those commanded in earlier times by religious authorities...
...Teddy is a member, in short, of the "greatest generation" currently being celebrated with self-congratulatory American fervor...
...An Unfinished Season is Ward Just's 14th novel, and technically he has reached a level of very high professionalism...
...It is a fear not only of social revolution but of mere egalitarianism...
...Although he never deviates from his flippant, ingenuous narrative tone, Voinovich sneaks in some challenging philosophical propositions...
...But just as Wils divides his life into different parts, so has the author divided his novel, with disappointing results...
...Looking one of them in the face, she is bereft of the formulaic political categories that have previously sustained her: "On the one hand, these seemed like our very own Soviet, Russian lads, the same kind she'd gone into the attack with against a detested enemy, but on the other hand they were the detested enemy, prepared to join battle with her when the order came...
...the statue is taken from Aglaya and restored to its pedestal in the interests not of politics but of history...
...As one Junior Leaguer tells Wils angrily, "The stories...
...Voinovich is clearly a disciple of Gogol, yet his voice is completely individual and remarkably attractive...
...He is at ease with the English language, and achieves the right descriptive touches...
...she loses her job and, eventually, her Party membership...
...What transpired during the post-Stalin era, the endless series of tap dances and about-faces that the Communist Party faithful were forced to execute, became more Orwellian every year...
...A depressing thought, but doubtless true...
...Shubkin's career follows lines that those of us who lived through the last 40 years might have been able to predict: his apotheosis in the West...
...Mikoyan had supported him...
...he becomes simply the mooning lover, never the most interesting of subjects...
...Stalin is suddenly a nonperson, his new status reflected in the iron statue: "His glance was sad, his stance had shifted, as though somehow (but it was impossible...
...a common effort leading always to success...
...As far as the author has been able to observe in the course of his life," Voinovich's narrator remarks, "most people, even the most educated, have neither any awareness nor any understanding of the fact that they exist in history...
...It doesn't take a prophet to predict that people will be blinded again, and more than once, by false teachings, will yield to the temptation of endowing certain individuals with superhuman qualities and glorify them, raise them up on a pedestal, and then cast them back down again...
...In attempting to replace religion, though, ideology reproduced all of its ills—violence, bigotry, intolerance—without developing a single one of its compensatory qualities—great art, great music, community solidarity, or the healing properties of prayer and contemplation...
...Just takes this commotion in the air and shows how it could affect an individual family...
...He knew this from conversations with his friends at the club, and listening to the men on the floor talking about their new Ford coupe or the Johnson outboard they had their eye on___Commotion was in the air, both grievance and a new sense of destination...
...I watched them a moment, absorbed in their utter concentration, birds building nests one twig at a time...
...I don't understand—when were these people being sincere, now or then...
Vol. 87 • July 2004 • No. 4
