Odd Jobs (98 page)

The government is not criticized; it scarcely seems to exist, except as a superfluity of regulations and excuses for inertia. Vera, in her capacity as manager, thinks to herself, “If only she had more freedom to act!” Yevtushenko’s yea-saying novel includes a curious document, half obliterated by water and eventually tossed into the fire, which contains among its “Thoughts on Order and Disorder” the apothegm “We have to help the government relax a bit.” In Trifonov’s miasmic world, the murk thickens at the top, whence something sinister emanates, blocking upward movement. Sergei’s balked dissertation concerned the Czar’s secret police, and though the novel never states it, most of its readers could be assumed to know the legend that the young Stalin was, for a time, an agent for this perfidious force. Such dark allusions seem mere muttering, however, compared with I. Grekova’s candid, matter-of-fact glimpses into the Soviet system’s imperfect workings. A professorial bigwig herself, she knows something of how power flows under Communism, and also sees where the system cannot reach and perennial human happiness and misery take their course.

Like Trifonov’s characteristic work, the longer of I. Grekova’s two fictions contains a great deal of flashback and summary. After the death of
Vera’s loving bully of a husband, “The Hotel Manager” runs rather low on suspense, in part because the heroine is unremittingly brave, sunny, and resourceful. Her husband was her only flaw, and though partings and deaths darken her path, it is all natural process, and every loss is redeemed by a gain in freedom. There are too many startlingly real and tender touches (“the rainbow eyelashes of the streetlamps,” “the child’s pillow which smelled of almond soap”) for us to doubt the reality of what we read, but we read on because we care about Vera, and we care about her because the writer so infectiously loves her, with her happy nature, her wide-hipped health, her ability to nurture and improvise. After all lip service has been rendered to the socialist ideals of rational planning and mutual criticism, self-heedless energy is dearest to the Russian heart. Vera, at the age of sixty, does not look long in the mirror. “No use looking and pulling,” her friend Margarita tells her. “Self-criticism for a woman is death. I have never suffered from that.”

Twenty years ago, when this reviewer visited Russia, Vassily Aksyonov was to prose fiction what Yevtushenko and Voznesenky were to poetry—young, daring, a rallying point for those Soviet citizens who craved freedom in the arts. Aksyonov had become famous with a novella,
Ticket to the Stars
(1961), that portrayed Western-influenced urban youths,
stilyagi
, in their authentic idiom and mood. In the decades since, while Yevtushenko adjusted to the post-thaw refreeze that followed Khrushchev’s ouster, Aksyonov—a prodigiously productive writer, for the stage and screen as well as the printed page—increasingly clashed with the authorities. He was a moving spirit in the creation of a literary anthology,
Metropol
, which, when published in 1979 in a tiny edition of one, defied official censorship; when two of his fellow editors were expelled from the country, Aksyonov resigned from the Writers’ Union, and when, in 1980, his domestically unpublishable novel
The Burn
was published in Italy he was himself forced to emigrate.

The Island of Crimea
was written within Russia in 1977–79 and published in its original language by the late Karl Proffer’s Ardis Publications in 1981. It is a prodigious, overpopulated, futuristic fantasy based upon the premise of an island—rather than the actual peninsula—of Crimea that was successfully defended against the Red Armies by the Whites in 1920 and that thereafter developed, somewhat in the manner of Taiwan, into a thriving capitalist democracy, with skyscrapers, superhighways, packed supermarkets and luxury shops, sports-car rallies, a
Yalta beachfront full of sunbathing girls in minimal bikinis, a theme park of artificial mountains, ubiquitous and untrammelled news media, and a multitude of competing political parties. At the time of our story—“late in the present decade or early in the decade to come (depending on when this book comes out)”—our hero, fabulously rich and handsome forty-six-year-old Andrei Arsenievich Luchnikov, son of Arseny Nikolaevich, one of the White Army founders of the Crimean nation, and father of Anton Andreevich, a vagabond saxophonist, has decided in his middle-generation unease to lead, from the podium of his Simferopol newspaper the
Russian Courier
, a campaign for Crimea’s restoration of itself to the Soviet Union, democratic institutions, material prosperity, and all.

Why Luchnikov would want to do this dreadful thing, and why his movement (called the Common Fate League, or SOS) eventually captivates ninety percent of the voting Crimeans, forms the novel’s central mystery and problem. A Westerner, clearly, is reading this book from the wrong end. For all its explosive inventiveness and muffled passion,
The Island of Crimea
seems strained, stretched-out, and emotionally opaque. As I read it, I was awkwardly conscious of allusions I was missing, from puns and pointed caricatures on up to the entire ambience, the bias of the satire. The novel, Pynchonesque in its gag names, multiplying conspiracies, and mechanical interconnections, wears an unremitting grimace; but what is being grimaced at? Crimea as an epitome of Western enterprise and decadence is plausible enough; Aksyonov has done his travelling, including a visiting lectureship at U.C.L.A. in 1975. He has also read his Ian Fleming, and the Bond tales are evoked specifically at least three times and generally in the souped-up environment of fast cars, underground cloverleafs, wigwam-shaped glass penthouses, instantly compliant young women, and armadas of bad guys. Yet satire of the West’s “hysterical materialism” is not the point; the author clearly loves the idea of Crimea, “the idea of a miniature, tinselly Russia” and its “carnival of freedom.” The novel’s heroine, Tatyana, whose demanding roles include those of television broadcaster, Soviet sports hero’s wife, Luchnikov’s mistress, KGB spy, and Yalta hooker, does entertain some dire thoughts about “the capitalist jungle where the very air is pornographic” and yearns to get back from Crimea to “a world where you can’t get anything you need and everybody’s afraid of everything, the real world.” But the island of capitalist unreality, a festive blend of southern
California, Hong Kong, and Oz, inspires affection in most everybody, including Soviet officialdom. For this novel to have earned its breadth and complexity, one convinced Communist should have been represented; but all the Soviets are cheerful thugs or secret Crimeans, as baffled by Luchnikov’s betrayal of his homeland as the reader is. Kuzenkov, a Kremlin higher-up, calls the Common Fate League “that sadomasochistic Idea, that snobbish guilt gone berserk!”

Some clues to “Looch” ’s state of mind are offered. When visits by Crimeans to the motherland became possible, “a few of them did try to understand and immerse themselves in Soviet life, and the first was Andryushka Luchnikov.” Many visits later, arriving from Paris, he still immerses himself:

He seeks out the shabby back streets that give him “a deceptive sense of the normalcy, sanity, sagacity of Russian life.” After a three-day binge in the city, “he had lost so much weight that his jacket hung on him as if on a hanger. He felt great pity for the poor lost Moscow souls he met; he identified with them wholly. He was quite fond of himself as he was now: thin and full of pity.” Hiding in the remote countryside, in the company of “foul-mouthed peasants,” Luchnikov goes down on his knees in the mud and makes “a large, slow cross.” Crosses multiply as the book heaves toward its apocalyptic end, and like a refugee from farthest Dostoevsky Luchnikov preaches to a crowd of Crimeans about his proposed “daring yet noble attempt to share the fate of two hundred and fifty million of our brethren who, through decades of gloom and untold suffering, relieved by only an occasional glimmer of hope, have carried on the unique moral and mystic mission of Mother Russia and the nations that
have chosen to follow her path.” This is not so much the voice of Luchnikov as a voice within him. His other voice says to Russia, “Your economy’s falling apart, your politics are a pack of lies, your ideology’s at a dead end.” Luchnikov’s contradictions and disagreeable slipperiness stem, I think, from his embodiment of ambiguity, of the ambiguous feelings of the author, who while writing this work was ever more imminently facing the prospect of exile.

“He was prepared for one vast bomb site, the smoky remains of a series of trumped-up trials and expulsions.… Instead he found an uncanny gaiety: loft parties all over town, amateur theatricals in private flats, concerts at scientific institutes and outlying clubs … poetry readings by the young and struggling, meetings of the Metropol group, all-night philosophy discussions over tea, samizdat discoveries, basement exhibits.…” Luchnikov, arriving from Crimea, is the vehicle of perception but the world perceived is Aksyonov’s, down to the Metropol group—the vital, busy, “semiunderground” world of Moscow artists. “He was amazed to find so many new deviations from the ideal citizen.… Yet here they were, living proof that life went on.” This is Russia as the working writer experiences it, a mixed bag but alive and actual. Luchnikov’s scheme of reintegrating Crimea with the U.S.S.R. makes sense only as a metaphor for Aksyonov’s wish to remain part of a nation that is inexorably rejecting him. He will lose his language, his cultural frame of reference, and the audience that understands his frame of reference; and Russia will lose one more bright spirit. Without knowing it, Russia needs him. The dissident has not only a desire but a duty to stay. In
The Island of Crimea
, Vitaly Gangut, the film director, who seems closer to being the author’s alter ego than the playboy magnate Luchnikov, knows that “even the ever so slightly nonconformist film at home was worth more to the cause than ten or twenty Paris-based dissident journals,” and Dim Shebeko, the jazz-rock bandleader, has refused offers from America because “Russia needs Russians playing here in Russia.” And, it is true, figures like Solzhenitsyn and Sinyavsky, as long as they stayed in the Soviet Union, were heroes on a global scale; outside it, they became just a few additional decibels in the West’s cacophonous Tower of Babel.

I have never met a Russian, here or there, loyal functionary or indignant expatriate, who did not think Russia was the most interesting subject in the world. On the lip of the Grand Canyon, in the midst of
Manhattan, they will wrap themselves in Russianness, and take in nothing. In Paris, Luchnikov, seeing newspaper headlines about cosmonauts and Sakharov, thinks proudly, “Yet one way or another, Russia—decayed, demoralized Russia—continued to give the world its headlines.” Baxter, a rich American, is made to complain, “The only thing anybody talks about any more is the goddamn Russian question.” “I want to be Russian, and I don’t care if they send us to Siberia,” Luchnikov cries. A reflexive chauvinism is part of the Russian genius; the land, the language, and (in a non-political sense) the way of life imprint themselves indelibly. All four of these books, with their differing tones and degrees of persuasiveness, take warmth from the rub between Russian self-love and Russian reservations, stated or implied, about the presiding system. Yet, indisputably, the distrusted if not loathed system has sprung from the cherished land, and is part of it.
The Island of Crimea
’s Kuzenkov, the most sophisticated and sympathetic of Soviet officials, confronted with a snide opinion of Stalin, reflects that “only someone completely foreign to our way of life … would deal so basely with our history, with a man whose name for generations of Soviets has meant victory, order, power. And if it has meant violence and even obscurantism as well, then at least they were majestic and grandiose.”

People will always hearken to any system that offers to give suffering a meaning, even at the cost of deepening that suffering. Luchnikov, bored and depressed in his tinselly little capitalist paradise, likes himself thin and full of pity, and longs for Siberia, if that is what it takes to give his soul value. And a sense of immaterial value, of life as intrinsically vicissitudinous but worth suffering, animates all these instances of fiction; there is nothing in them, even in Trifonov at his weariest, of a death wish, of any cultural equivalent to Werther’s widely imitated suicide or the skulls that bloomed generations later on the caps of the SS. A life-loving trait, rather, informs the resilient characters of Soviet fiction, even where, as in
Wild Berries
, their presentation seems coarse or ingenuous; this same trait, it may not be too fanciful to extrapolate, has helped make the Soviets, for these forty years of ragged truce, tolerable partners in power.

N
OVEL WITH
C
OCAINE
, by M. Ageyev, translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim. 204 pp. Dutton, 1984.

K
ANGAROO
, by Yuz Aleshkovsky, translated from the Russian by Tamara Glenny. 278 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.