The secret to understanding this mad masterpiece lies in it’s setting.
The Sixth International Moscow Book Fair, which ran from 8th September for a week in 1982 was a more relaxed occasion than previous ones had been. It was opened by Mikhail Gorbachev and drew the co-operation of some 103 countries.
Of course, writings which `contradicted Soviet law` were still conspicuous by their absence from the shelves. It was just a little to early for Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago whose rehabilitation would come later in December in the form of the publication of excerpts from the novel in the press.
Another disappointment was the disallowance of Sasha Sokolov’s work. His A School for Fools had already been graced with critical acclaim from the Western literati. Also, this novel did not seem to contain the usual aspects which made it a target for cancellation. There was no obvious iconoclasm, it did not dwell on sex nor violence, was not grotesque and was about as apolitical as any novel could be. What it was, though, was Modernist.
A School for Fools was Sasha Sokolov’s first novel. It went straight to samizdat format before seeing print in Michigan, America in 1976. It has remained in print since then and has appeared in many languages.
The praise heaped on it comes from select quarters. `One of the finest 20th Century Russian novels` is not an untypical example of such praise and this comes from Harvey Pekar who is known for the American Splendor comic but was also an art critic. (Quoted on the dust jacket of my edition of the novel)
Talented malcontent.
The living author’s – Aleksandr Vsevolodovitch Sokolov’s -own biography seems as theatrical as anything that could be cooked up in fiction. He was born in 1943 in Canada, the son of a deputy military attaché of the Soviet Union. He was two when his family was obliged to return to the Soviet Union under suspicion of espionage.
Sokolov did study journalism for five years at Moscow State University but otherwise the picture is that of something of a misfit who could not settle. He worked at odd jobs like being a morgue attendant while mingling with literary salons (including an Avant Garde group called itself SMOG). He made a doomed attempt to flee his country and only escaped a longer prison sentence than the one he got thanks to his father’s standing.
It was while he was making ends meet as a gamekeeper in Tver that he finished A School for Fools in the mid-seventies. Its stylistic experimentation made it anathema to mainstream Soviet literature and so Sokolov took the now familiar route of getting the thing sent out of the country in secret. It wound up in the hands of Carl Proffer, an American in Michigan on a mission to publish novels unpublishable in the Soviet Union. Proffer brought it out on Ardis, his own publishing house.
This was Sokolov’s lucky year because, owing to pressure from public opinion abroad, that was also the year when he was granted to leave the Soviet Union. He now spends his time between Vermont and Canada. However, in one of the few interviews he has granted, he did undertake a visit to the Soviet Union in 1989, telling reporters how much he missed his native country’s everyday speech patterns and so on.
Tale told by an idiot.
The puzzler of a novel is dedicated to `a feeble-minded boy…my pal and my neighbor`.
Indeed, the narrator constitutes psychologically abnormal boy who attends a special educational establishment for those such as himself. The two sides of his split personality bicker with each other while finding themselves at odds with linear time. The freewheeling stream-of-consciousness style brought to bear on the narrative – Sokolov calls it `proezia` -quite befits such a narrator. It also guarantees a bumpy ride to those not familiar with the Modernist excursions of Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner. At times I am also reminded much of the lyricism of the beat poets of the American `fifties.
A School for Fools, with its stretched-out sentences and forbidding paragraphs, lacks a conventional plot but there are plenty of events within. The unnamed `student so-and-so` lives with his parents, clashes with his father, has a one-sided affair with one of his teachers, meets a mad inventor, goes on bike-rides, visits his grandmother’s grave with his mother…and all the while contemplating this world through the prism of a unique mind.
Yet this is not a bleak novel. In fact, we can find a certain exuberance in Sokolov’s passion for minutia. Here, for example, is a description of a humble post office:
`And you followed her through a long hallway lit by lightbulbs without shades and smelling of real post office wax, glue, paper, twine, ink, stearin ,casein, overripe pears, honey, squeaking shoes, crème brulee, cheap comfort, smoked vobla, bamboo shoots, rat droppings, and the tears of the office manager` (p-126-127).
There are moments of high comedy too. In an interlude called Stories from the Veranda, a series of more or less `normal` vignettes, a man waiting in a queue to buy milk sees an elderly woman fall to the ground:
`I would have helped her for sure, but my hands were full: in one hand I had a cigarette and in the other matches` (p-69).
In search of the theme.
It is Sokolov’s clear preoccupation with words and how they sound that many critics have seen as the crux of this novel. Sokolov is very attentive to lexis and to the Russian language in particular (indeed some of his later novels are deemed untranslatable from Russian). However, for all its formal playfulness A School for Fools is no Finnegan’s Wake. It is about something.
A more sociopolitical reading of the novel would see it as one which is on the side of the outcasts and thumbing its nose at authority and conformity. If you recall the role of psychiatry in the Soviet Union of the seventies, this approach gains extra resonance. This view of it might explain why the likes of Pekar responded so warmly to the novel, after all, he too was a poet of the failure and outsider.
There is, nevertheless, an aspect of this masterpiece that critics seem to have overlooked. It is a regional one.
Location.
I finished this novel after a few failed attempts. Its lack of an obvious narrative hook was off putting to me. The handrail that I was able to hold onto, that made me able to relate to it, was the location of the events – the world of A School for Fools. The pages exude an overwhelming sense of topographical location, that of the outskirts of a Soviet city. Every other sentence oozes the melancholic and somehow timeless land of ponds and rivers and their dragonflies and frogs, dachas and run-down schools, train stations and post offices, meandering paths and bicycles;
`The whistling of the shunting locomotives, like a cuckoo, sings at dawn a shepherd’s pipe, flute, cornet a piston, crying of a child, doodeledey. I wake up, sit on the bed, look at my bare legs and then look out of the window. I see the bridge, it is completely empty, it is illuminated by green mercury lamps and the lampposts have swan necks` (p-129).
This special atmosphere will be recognisable to you if you have spent any time in a (post) Soviet provinces. If you have not, A School for Fools will give you a vivid taste of it.
All quotations are from:
Sokolov, Sasha A School for Fools (Translated by Alexander Boguslawski) (New York Review of Books, New York, 2015).