Russia's Catch 22 serves up a spicy goulash combining social satire, poetry, science fiction, magical realism, and polemic. Can YOU take it?`
`No I haven’t comrade Major. `
I know I’m Comrade Major.`….
`I didn’t just turn up, Comrade Major, I came at your request -`
`I know I called you, I’m not senile! ` Evdokimov interrupted him loudly. `Do you think we’re all senile in Smersh? Answer me!`
`Not at all, Comrade Major`
`Not at all what?`
`Not at all senile in Smersh Comrade Major`
`How do you know what we’re like in Smersh? Perhaps you’ve been here before?`
This farcical interrogation appears in Living Souls, a state of the nation novel about Russia by Dmitry Bykov – an ebullient figure who has become a public intellectual, one of the last living representatives of the fabled `intellegentsia`, through his poetry and biographies. He will be fifty-two this year, and this novel came out in 2006 (as `ZH.D`) and was translated four years later.
Tomorrow’s world.
However, it is a Russia of an unspecified future. This is a nation which has broken up into two ethnic tribal groups locked in a weary civil war.
There are the quasi-Hitlerian Varangians who consider themselves to be the descendants of the Vikings and the Khazars who are made up of Jews and of Muscovite liberals. Opposed to both of them are a smaller, forgotten lost race who espouse a Tao-like approach to life which worships polarity and cycles.
Having discovered free energy in the form of `phlogiston`, the rest of the world has no need for Russian oil. No longer able to sell it, the Russians convert their black gold into foodstuffs. The government, moreover, has imposed a tax on the use of certain words hence journalists have to invent their own, and homeless people are diagnosed as suffering from `Vasilenko syndrome` and are available to adopted as pets in middle class homes.
Citizen’s tales.
Against this pessimistic backdrop where everything, and religion in particular has been militarised, a number of characters play out their own stories. These are told with great meticulousness and often through intense one to one dialogues.
There is an army general cohabiting with a native from one of the captured villages, a Varangian journalist in love with a Jewess and a young girl accompanying a homeless person. All of their fates are bound up with the fabled village of Degunino, to which they make their way….
Bringing it to the West.
Cathy Porter is a very experienced translator, but when it came to bringing this difficult novel out in English she worked alongside Bykov. They had to jettison some of it, but the gritty yet lyrical evocation of the vastness of old-new Russia remains. Bykov clearly loves the damp forests, dusty cabins and rundown villages of his homeland and that is why he is so critical of it. `You almost have to be Russian to read it`, complained a British reviewer in the Financial Times (April 6th, 2010).
The satire recalls Kafka and Burgess but it was the British poetess Elaine Feinstein who made the most memorable comparison: `A Catch 22 for modern Russia` is how she described it. Indeed, readers Joseph Heller’s rambling comic novel will find the same sense of the absurdity of military life in these pages.
Big Russian read.
Should you get the urge to devour a Big Russian novel then – aside from the obligatory War and Peace –the obvious choices are between Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) which evokes the Bolshevik uprising and its aftermath and Solhenitzyn’s Cancer Ward (1970) which concerns the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras. Living Souls completes the next step by offering a chronicle of modern Russia, or be it through the prism of a dystopia.
I am enough of a glutton for punishment to have read this novel not twice but three times. The first attempt was on a twelve-hour stopover at Frankfurt airport where, with the help of much German Weisbeir, I got a sense of the novels power. The second time I read it more slowly and in dribs and drabs and I was rewarded by getting more of its humour.In the third slog I could savour the different chunks of meat and vegetable in the goulash I was gorging on. Like Russia itself, Living Souls is worth persevering with in the end.
Living Souls by Dmitry Bykov (Translated by Cathy Porter) is published by Alma Books Ltd, UK.