Tag Archives: Russian

33. Omon Ra, by Victor Pelevin

20 Aug

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The dateline at the end of Omon Ra, by Victor Pelevin, reads “—Moscow, 1992” which is enough to make a person familiar with recent Russian history break out in full-body chills. Moscow, 1992. Russian society was fully in the throes of perestroika, chaos, collapse and regeneration. The story in the West has always been that this was a wonderful flowering of democracy, but for many Russians it was a period of lawlessness, hunger, total uncertainty, and the end of everything they’d been asked to believe. Pelevin is a cult figure, the most important Russian writer to emerge from the era. He was 30 years old at the time he wrote Omon Ra, living at a time and in a city of almost unimaginable upheaval. Chills.

The book—which is a masterpiece, I can’t believe I’d never read it—is about a Russian boy in the Soviet Union who dreams of being a cosmonaut, but in Pelevin’s hands it’s dreams themselves that will be under interrogation. Is there any reality to them? For main character Omon (a strange name, itself chosen because of a dream), things are determined not by the outer reality, but by the inner.

As a little boy, for example, Omon realizes that he can be a pilot because he sees some pilots on television and:

“…was struck with a sudden thought…that if I’d just been able to glance at the screen and see the world from the cabin where the two fliers in fur-lined jackets were sitting, then there was nothing to prevent me from getting into this or any other cabin without the help of the television, because flight is no more than a set of sensations, the most important of which I’d already learned to fake, sitting in the attic of the winged hut with the red stars, staring at the enlistment office wall that was where the sky should be, and making quiet droning noises with my mouth.”

He goes on:

“That means, I thought, I can look out from inside myself like looking out of a plane, it doesn’t really matter at all where you look out from, what matters is what you see…”

Of course, latent in the book is the era in which it was written: The channel, as it were, that Russians had been looking at, had just been changed. Are you staring at the enlistment office wall or at the sky? What skills might you need to survive when the two become interchangeable? Pelevin takes a fatalistic approach to the question. Omon reflects:

There’s obviously some strange correspondence between the general outline of a life and that stream of petty events which a person is constantly involved in and regards as insignificant. I can now see quite clearly that the course of my own life was already set, determined before I had even begun to think seriously about the way I wanted it to turn out. I was even given a glimpse of it in simplified form. Perhaps it was an echo of the future. Or perhaps those things which we take for echoes of the future are actually its seeds, falling into the soil of life at the very moment which in distant retrospect comes to seem like an echo out of the future.

He goes to flight school. Nothing is as it seems, in ways too brilliant for me to spoil in this review. Omon’s journey could be called a blistering indictment of the Soviet Union—or at least a profoundly disturbing one, since this is a world in which men’s legs are broken to fit the planes instead of the planes being built to fit the men. But there’s a strain of dry humor or meditative detachment throughout, that says that the author knows you can’t  blister something which was never really there.

I wish I could comment on the book’s end without giving away its punch. I’ll just say it is now officially my favorite closing strategy since Infinite Jest, and references another Russian classic, Moscow—Petushki.

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15. USSR: Diary of a Perestroika Kid, by Vladimir Kozlov

8 Apr

USSR Diary of a Perestroika Kid

I took a gulp of lemonade, put down the glass, and took some cucumbers with sour cream from the salad dish. These were the first cucumbers of the year.

By the time I read the above quote about eating cucumbers, I was starting to wonder if anything, ever, was going to happen in USSR, Vladimir Kozlov’s exquisitely detailed but not exactly plotty autobiographical novel about an ordinary boy growing up in the late days of the Soviet Union.

The book’s protagonist, Igor, a seventh-grade boy, is moving through the ordinary, depressed, small events of childhood in the Belorussian town of Mogilev. His is a world in which, “Signs of a crumbling society were everywhere, but childhood forged on, largely structured around the daily schedule of school and activities such as clubs, sports, Pioneers and Komsomol (the mandatory youth and teenage communist organizations),”  one of the book’s introductory writers explains. Another introductory writer mentions that Kozlov’s other fictional works are usually about “the quick, intuitive, and often misguided adjustments that ordinary Soviet people were forced to make on the spot in order to survive in their rapidly changing surroundings, even as they remained rooted in their small, customary ‘Soviet’ worlds…”.

That understanding, I think, is crucial to reading this book, which is about what life was like just before the cataclysmic change occurred—the book’s project is to establish that small, customary world, with great tenderness. A little boy drinking lemonade and eating cucumbers with sour cream, not understanding anything, is the essential counterpart to what’s occurring elsewhere in the scene: The adults are discussing the appointment of a new Soviet premier—Mikhail Gorbachev. And even they don’t understand what it will mean. One says, “‘It doesn’t matter who they appointed, everything will stay the same.'” Hindsight is hilarious.

With this project in mind, the child’s unimaginative viewpoint, which does not see the larger picture, is a brilliant POV from which to catalog the last days of the empire.

And what Igor does see—the smaller picture—of model cars, brands of jeans, first crushes, dads who drink too much, and bootlegged Western music is entertaining too. The narration had a habit of hopscotching from scene to scene, so I wasn’t always sure where, exactly, we were. Was the grandma’s house in a village, or in Mogilev proper? Does Igor’s friend Kolya live in the same building? How did they meet again? But the scenes themselves were so beautifully rendered that I was along for the ride.

An old woman in a quilted jacket was leaving the bus stop with her net bag. There was a red and blue carton of milk and a round loaf of black bread in the bag.

I know just what that looks like! I’m glad someone has written a tribute to it.

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8. Writing from a front row seat at a mass murder: The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov

11 Feb

Andrei Platonov is one of the giants of Russian literature, a writer from the revolutionary period who passionately believed in communist ideals but was critical of party leadership, and whose work was suppressed. Between 1918 to 1921 as a young man from the city of Voronezh in Central Russia he published poetry and essays in venues like Red Countryside and Smithy, a union magazine for metal-workers. (Amazing publication titles, from the modern perspective.) He achieved much local success and was a director of the Voronezh Union of Proletarian Writers in 1920. However, after living through the famine of 1921, in which the political disturbances of early Bolshevik Russia combined with a severe drought killed six million people,  Platonov said that he “could no longer be occupied with a contemplative activity like literature,” and applied his technical abilities to infrastructure, spending the next several years on building dams, draining ponds and building a hydroelectric plant.

Kotlovan, or The Foundation Pit was published only in part in 1931 and is Platonov’s story of the de-kulakization of 1929, when Stalin ordered millions of prosperous peasants to be murdered or exiled to facilitate the formation of collective farms. According to the Afterword of my NYRB edition of The Foundation Pit, Platonov and Vassily Grossman were the only two contemporary writers to write about the purge, and “Platonov’s account is firsthand. No other Soviet writer of his generation had a better understanding of the life of the peasantry in the 1920s.”

The Foundation Pit‘s characters represent the different types playing their part in the de-kulakization of a village near a generic small town, where workers are building a utopian housing project. There’s Chiklin, a strong, hard-working proletarian man who represents the communist ideal; Prushevsky, a technocrat with no enthusiasm for how things are turning out; Kozlov, a weak, spiteful man using the new order to cause trouble; Zhachev, who believes in the new government’s ideals at the same time as he exploits them for personal gain; Nastya, a little girl who is the dream of the communist future; and finally Voshchev, a thoughtful worker-drifter trying to understand the meaning of what he sees around him, who probably represents the author.

A “foundation pit” could be the beginning of a great new structure or it could be a journey  down into hell, a movement in exactly the wrong direction, and it’s fairly clear from the beginning that the latter is the meaning Platonov wishes to emphasize. The ecstatic, strange, wonderful part for the contemporary reader is that he chooses to do that primarily through the manipulation of language. His Russian is half-technical, half-broken, as if it’s being spoken by an alien, or as if it’s deliberately hiding meaning in the crevasses of syntax, where the censors could not follow.

Here’s the first paragraph:

On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life, Voshchev was made redundant from the small machine factory where he obtained the means for his own existence. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from production on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.

Platnov could say On his thirtieth birthday which is what “the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life” means. He could use worked for “obtained the means for his own existence.” There’s no need to say that the strength is “in him”. A person being fired for “thoughtfulness,” a quality that’s supposed to be good, is odd and is put forth in a slightly mixed construction with “tempo.” Can a person even be thoughtful “amid” a tempo? The paragraph is bewildering, carefully planned, and brilliantly introduces Platonov’s main theme of progress or movement (that tempo of labor) that is senseless or cancelled out.

At first I thought the book was satire. Voshchev, drinking in a depressing bar after his dismissal, goes over to the window “to take note of the beginning of night,” hears a brass band “pining; getting nowhere” and then sits:

“…down by the window, in order to observe the tender darkness of night, listen to various sad sounds, and feel the torment of a heart surrounded by hard and stony bones.”

That bit about the heart is purplish… until you know that themes of hearts surrounded by bones—i.e., life already gripped by death—run throughout the book. A clenched heart jumps into a man’s “cramped” throat before he dies. A man is hit in the heart and dies with a cracking of bones. The language seems like it might be purple until you remember that Platonov was writing from a front-row seat at a mass-murder.

And then all claim to satire falls away. Here’s a character sleeping:

Kozlov was barefoot and sleeping with his mouth open; his throat was gurgling as if the air of breath were passing through dark heavy blood; and out of his half-open, pale eyes were emerging occasional tears—from a dream or some unknown yearning.

It’s creepy, terrible, dehumanized, and not at all funny.

Here’s another one, for my collection of disturbing passages about horses:

“Are you alive, dear breadwinner?”

The horse was dozing in her stall, having lowered her sensitive head forever; one of her eyes was feebly closed, but she did not have enough strength for the other and so it was left looking into the dark. The shed had grown cold without equine breath and snow had begun to fall inside, settling on the mare’s head and not melting. Her master blew out his match, embraced the horse’s neck, and stood there in his orphanhood, smelling in memory the mare’s sweat as when they were ploughing.

“So you’ve died have you? Well don’t worry—soon I’ll croak too. It’ll be quiet for us.”

Not seeing the man, a dog came into the shed and sniffed at the horse’s hind leg. It then growled and sank its teeth into her flesh, and tore itself out some beef. The horse’s two eyes shone white in the darkness—she was now looking through them both—and she moved her legs a step forward, not yet forgetting to live because of the pain.

“Maybe you’ll enter the collective farm? Go ahead then, but I’ll wait,” said the master of the yard.

This is a great passage for its gothic horror, and also a relevant one to the collectivization process, since the peasants en masse killed and ate their animals rather than let them be collectivized. In this case, the horse seems to have died on its own, but even that natural process has been disturbed—disturbance of natural processes is another major theme of the work, along with displacement of ideas and qualities into nature. The horse comes to life again, if only to feel pain.

The foundation pit gets deeper. Construction does not progress. The kulaks are put onto a raft in the winter and sent to their deaths. Eventually the poor souls who were taken onto the collective farm go to the foundation pit and dig as if they are digging their own grave, a reading which the odd, wonderful syntax equally allows for:

The collective farm was following him and, without stopping, was digging the earth; all the poor and middle peasants [i.e. those not killed as kulaks] were working with such zeal of life as if they were seeking to save themselves forever in the abyss of the foundation pit.

“Save themselves forever” could mean salvation, or it could mean storage for a corpse. I think Platonov means the latter.

On a last weird note, there’s a Platonov festival in Voronezh in the summers that looks kind of cool.

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