by John Updike
Aristocrats in the dashing old style of Pushkin’s Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin no longer exist, but Soviet society has evolved new elites, and Bitov’s hero, Lyova Odoevtsev, belongs to the professorial elite, as well as being a member, through his ancestors, of the nobility. Though Lyova’s sensibility, coupled with the talkative author’s, occupies the entire foreground of this novel, he is not terribly easy to picture, or to love. His face is not described until near the end, and then with cunning indeterminacy:
His facial features were devoid of individuality; although his face was unique in its way and fitted no usual type, still—how should I put it?—even though one of a kind, it was typical and did not wholly belong to itself. An expert might have described these features as regular and large, almost “strong,” but there was something so hopeless and weak in the sudden downward rush of this sculpted mouth and steep chin that it betrayed, within the Slav, the Aryan with his irresolute courage and secret characterlessness—I would have pictured Mitishatyev [another character, the hero’s rival and enemy] thus, rather than Lyova.
Vague as he is, Lyova serves as the focus of three extensive, jumbled episodes: the return from exile and scholarly rehabilitation of his grandfather, the oscillating amorous life he splits among three young women, and the disastrous three days he spends as lone caretaker at Pushkin House while the rest of Leningrad is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. The first and last episodes include long scenes of drunkenness, wonderfully rendered in its colorful, fluctuating fog and torrents of mock-profound discourse; “Vodka is the plot’s myrrh-bearer,” we are told at one point. In the plot, things seem to happen and then unhappen; a lively character called Uncle Dickens dies and is revived at a moment when his assistance would be convenient. Alternative plot possibilities are freely discussed, and sometimes several are pursued. The overall movement is that of a “sluggish dream” lurchingly flowing toward a meaningless denouement: “And here at last is the sum, peak, crescendo-mescendo, apogee, climax, denouement—what else?—the NOTHING; here at last is that critical NOTHING, idol, symbol: a small, smooth, darkly glossy little thing, prolate, fits in the palm of your hands …! now you see it; now you don’t!” The novel not only is difficult but feels to be about difficulty, Russian difficulty. In the U.S.S.R., into which Lyova is born in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and in which he is glimpsed thirty years later, concluding on the banks of the Neva that his life “exists only through error,” nothing is easy or obvious. Family life is difficult, career choices, career politics, love life; what’s more, writing a novel, in this post-Pushkin, post-Stalin, postmodernist world, is difficult, a procedure so tricky and tortuous that the difficulty (I confess) spreads even to writing a review of it.
Within the large and unappetizing inertia of this vodka- and doubt-propelled plot, this “always postponed story,” Bitov contrives a micro-cosmic hyperactivity of phrase, sentence, and image which is, even through the hazy scrim of translation, engagingly vital. Dip in anywhere; small surprises crystallize. “He kept looking at the watch on Karenina’s arm. The watch impressed him: golden and tiny on her wide puffy wrist, it had drowned in the folds and lay there smiling.” “The swollen Leningrad ceiling hung like a heavy, veined belly. Not rain, not snow—a sort of torn sky-flesh was coming down now, and it plastered the wayfarer in an instant, smothering him like the hateful and nauseating mask of a faint.” The novel opens with a startling swoop of authorial rumination:
Somewhere near the end of the novel we have already attempted to describe the clean window, the icy sky gaze, that stared straight and unblinking as the crowds came out to the streets on November 7. Even then, it seemed that this clear sky was no gift, that it must have been extorted by special airplanes. And no gift in the further sense that it would soon have to be paid for.
The sketch of Lyova’s family is surprisingly prickly:
Since the chapter is titled “Father,” we should mention this: it seemed to Lyovushka that he did not love his father.… Father didn’t even seem capable of tousling Lyova’s hair correctly—Lyova would cringe—or taking him on his lap—he always caused his Lyovushka some sort of physical discomfort—Lyovushka would tense up and then be embarrassed by his own embarrassment.
And yet when Lyova at last meets his grandfather, a linguistics scholar who was imprisoned for thirty years and who should by all liberal and sentimental logic be sympathetic, the old man is repulsive, with an elastic face that seems to be of two halves, and a number of eerie mannerisms: “He drank long, delved deeply, choking, sucking in, soaking in, breathing in, sinking in, withdrawing entirely into the mug, he bumbled over it like a bee over a flower, and when he leaned back with a happy sigh Lyova noted with horror that the beer had not actually diminished in the mug—there was as much left as ever.” Lyova initially has trouble distinguishing his grandfather from the old man’s former labor-camp commandant, Koptelov, who has become, in a grotesque bit of perestroika, a crony. Where Lyova expects familial warmth, a young poet, Rudik, has usurped a favorite’s place. As vodka flows, Lyova is roughly teased and mercilessly harangued by his grandfather, who rails against “this affront of rehabilitation. They’re not afraid of me anymore. I’m slag. They threw me out into retirement—I’ve served my time as a prisoner and I’m no good for anything else. That’s how capitalist countries treat workers in textbooks.” At last, Lyova is dismissed into the bitterly cold “failed space” of outer Leningrad, where his sensations mimic the pace of this novel: “He was oddly aware of time flowing through him. It was uneven and seemingly fitful: it dragged, stretched out, thinned like a droplet, forming a little neck—and suddenly broke.”
A real writer’s wheels are spinning, and a fine mind is trying to follow truth’s rapid changes of direction. “Were they [Lyova’s acquaintances] this many at the very beginning, I wonder, and did I, as author, fuse them into one Faina, one Mitishatyev, one … in order to give at least some kind of focus to Lyova’s blurred life? Because the people who affect us are one thing, and their effect on us is quite another; very often the one has no relation to the other, because their effect on us is already ourselves.” The women in Lyova’s triangular romantic life pop free of his obsessive concern with his own feelings only for moments of feverish vision: “Now at last Lyova saw that Albina was beautiful, her lofty neck … that she might be desired and loved, though again, for some reason, not now, but by the remote Lyova who so generously had not loved her, by that Lyova, not this one still sitting beside her, still not leaving, and almost loving her.” Thus we learn that Albina, the unloved, has a long neck. Bitov’s authorial hesitations and apologies have a comic vivacity, often:
In concluding our coverage of this gathering, we must confess that we’ve been somewhat carried away, somewhat too literal about our task, too ready to rise to the bait. This is all vaudeville, and not worth the trouble. Now it’s too late. We have trampled this stretch of prose—the grass will no longer grow on it. We shouldn’t have lost our temper.
As in one of Nabokov’s layered intricacies, the hero begins to realize he inhabits a work of fiction and is allowed to exult in “the cracks in the scenery (wind blowing in) … the general negligence, the hack melodrama, of a dream.” A work so energetically, intelligently self-deconstructive as Pushkin House must of course make literary commissars uneasy, while Communism’s cardboard house shudders and rattles around them. But renewal emerges from disintegration, and Bitov’s loving demolition of the grand Russian tradition forms a new installment in that tradition.
Anatoli Rybakov is a good generation older than Bitov, and his Children of the Arbat is, compared with Pushkin House, an old-fashioned novel—less psychologically and aesthetically dense, more bulky with characters and incidents. Indeed, it would have benefitted from that old-fashioned device, a list of characters in the front, with perhaps an appended brief history of the Soviet Union. It concerns a number of young people who grew up in the Arbat region of Moscow, a bohemia
n quarter west of the Kremlin, and the ways in which their lives intertwine and diverge between the fall of 1933 and December of 1934. In this period, climaxed by the assassination of Sergei Kirov in Leningrad, Stalin is seen as corrupting Lenin’s idealistic revolution with his own paranoia and power lust, and preparing with his Byzantine machinations for the great Party purge and show trials of 1936–38. The novel’s portrait of Stalin, intimate and lengthy, must constitute its central scandal from the standpoint of the Soviet censors, and the principal reason it had to wait for glasnost to see print. To the Western reader, who has long had access to a number of unvarnished biographies of the dictator, as well as the scathing characterization in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, this aspect is less than sensational, though Rybakov’s imagination does pull off some lively strokes—Stalin’s tearful identification of his father, the Georgian cobbler Vissarion Dzhugashvili, with the Charlie Chaplin of City Lights, and the aging tyrant’s gingerly give-and-take with a young Jewish dentist, who succeeds in making Stalin a plastic plate though the dictator insisted he wanted gold. But Stalin’s meditations on how to rule Russia, rewrite history, and eliminate even a shadow of opposition within the Politburo are less valuable—less purely Rybakov’s to provide—than the sketches of ordinary Russian life, in its surprising variety and flavor, during a time of growing oppression and, as nearly everyone but Stalin can see, approaching war with Germany.
The children of the Arbat are called Sasha, Yuri, Lena, Nina, Max, Vadim, Vika, and Varya. Varya, Nina’s sister, is seventeen; the rest are in their early twenties. Most are members of the Young Communist League, the Komsomol, and their friendly little world is shaken when the school’s Komsomol secretary, Sasha, is arrested and sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia. The reasons are obscure. He is headstrong and outspoken but an ardent Communist; just before his arrest, he successfully appealed his expulsion from the Transport Institute because of some satiric verses in the student “wall newspaper.” It turns out he is condemned because, during this fracas, he had some casual but subversive conversation with Krivoruchko, a minor school functionary in disgrace with the Party. Krivoruchko had merely said, in passing, that “this is a chef [Stalin] who likes to make peppery dishes”; Sasha declines to recall this remark for his NKVD interrogator. Though Lena’s father, the Old Bolshevik Budyagin, and Sasha’s uncle, Mark Ryazanov, a rising Party official who directs a Siberian steel plant dear to Stalin’s heart, separately intervene, their intervention does not deflect Sasha’s fate; both Budyagin and Mark, the novel makes clear in its proliferating dark hints, are in precarious shape themselves, Kremlin-wise. The subtleties of Party organization are not easy to follow, nor are the names easy to keep straight, but a sense of tightening control, pervasive spying, and irrationality descending from on high is conveyed so well that we feel relieved and even exhilarated when Sasha reaches the underpopulated hinterland of the Angara River, between Kansk and Bratsk.
The arrangements of exile are rather informal in these remote riverside villages within the immense taiga, among primitive peasants, and men and women already outlawed allow themselves a relative freedom of speech. The author, who suffered such an exile, evokes the summer atmosphere of Siberia’s rough Eden with the tenderness of remembrance. Sexual deprivation was not necessarily among the exile’s hardships: Sasha begins by admiring “the very beautiful, stately Siberian girls with light brown hair, strong bodies, and strong legs,” enjoys an episode with a barefoot girl, Lukeshka, who emanates “a scent of the river and new-mown hay,” and ends up sharing a bed, in his assigned village of Mozgova, with the local schoolteacher, a petite and passionate Tatar called Zida. The novel’s central theme, if one can be identified, is Sasha’s moral education: he arrives, amid the system’s outcasts and low-priority citizens, at the conclusion that “human feeling has not been killed in people and it never will be.”
Meanwhile, back in Moscow, people are coping. Sasha’s mother copes by getting a job folding linens in a laundry, and becomes, after a docile life, independent and outspokenly anti-Communist. Yuri makes love to Lena, gets her pregnant, induces an abortion by pouring boiling mustard water around her feet, and joins the NKVD. He discovers that one of his jobs is to “run” Vika, who in the course of her promiscuous, glamorous life in cafés and art circles has become an informer, sleeping with foreigners and relaying tidbits about them to Yuri in a weekly assignation that Lena jealously confuses with a sexual kind. Varya, young as she is, falls into another ring of the Soviet underworld, taking up with a billiard player, shady operator, and big spender called Kostya, and becoming his common-law wife in what was Sasha’s old room. She finally frees herself of him and finds a measure of peace and redemption in that officially endorsed panacea, work. She gets a job as a draftsman, and the stolid prose approaches the lyrical:
She laid the drawing that was to be copied on her board, covered it with a pale blue linen sheet, and pinned them both down with thumbtacks. She then wiped a thin film of machine oil over the surface … in order to make the tracing linen transparent, allowing the drawing to come through clearly and preventing the ink from running.… Lyova and Rina were full of admiration for her ability, if ink did spill, to remove it with a razor blade without leaving a mark. And to their amazement she could draw a freehand curve with a fine pen.
Rybakov’s prose, though rather too journalistically quick on its feet to be called plodding, comes across as colorless and rarely gets off the ground (whereas Bitov’s rarely touches the ground). Little, Brown reportedly hoped for another best-selling Doctor Zhivago, but there is in Children of the Arbat nothing of Pasternak’s poetry and magical sweep of vision and coincidence. Both novels under review, in fact, induce sensations of claustrophobia: in Bitov’s we are caught inside a human head, and in Rybakov’s inside a totalitarian state. But Rybakov does show some modernist daring in the shape of the book: big as it is, it feels like a fragment, a ragged thick slice of life. Almost all the questions raised by its multitudinous soap opera are left unanswered. Will Sasha some day return to Moscow, or will he accumulate ever longer terms of exile with his rambunctious free spirit? Will Varya find happiness away from her drawing board as well as at it? Will Vika succeed in disentangling herself from the NKVD and make a go of her marriage with an unnamed famous architect? Why won’t Zida tell Sasha why she has come to this wild taiga? What will lovelorn Lena do now that Yuri is posted to Leningrad? What will happen to Mark Ryazanov, who thinks he still enjoys Stalin’s favor? Who knows? Only Kirov, who is assassinated, has his story rounded out; and Stalin’s has been rounded out by history. A number of the children of the Arbat, introduced with considerable ceremony, do a single turn and then retire to the wings, waiting perhaps for the next act, or the next opera. Can this drastically unresolved large novel be the mere first installment of a giant roman-fleuve cascading in rough parallel to the author’s own eventful life? It is, Rybakov declared in a Time interview last year; he plans two more installments of his saga, bringing the reader up through World War II, in which the author, rehabilitated after a stretch in Siberia, served as a much-decorated tank commander.
But Children of the Arbat—whose American publisher gives no hint of anything less than a complete novel—doesn’t even tell us how Sasha survives his first Siberian winter. On the public level, a climax of sorts is reached in Kirov’s assassination, which will set off the historical purges to come. On the private level, things stay up in the air. For all its wealth of characters, the novel feels light and thin. It lacks the increased gravity of history rounding a curve. It dares to enter Stalin’s head, but it cannot climb outside of Stalin’s heritage, and conceives happiness in the traditional Russian way, as something filched from the state—a kind of spiritual sneaking, a defiant privacy and individual freedom. “The state had always seemed to Sasha so all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-pervasive. In fact, it wasn’t so. You could avoid the state.” Might the state itself change for the better? This question lies well beyond the horizon of
this novel, and we scan the daily newspapers for the answer.
* Also published, in 1980, by Taplinger, and reprinted by Fawcett Books, as translated by H. W. Tjalsma, with the title Moscow to the End of the Line.
† After this review appeared in The New Yorker, I heard from a living witness to these distant events—Dr. V. S. Yanovsky, of Rego Park, New York. He wrote, “In the midthirties, the Paris (Russian) Union of Writers and Poets elected a literary collegium to organize publications by subscription. Two men constituted this collegium: V. S. Yanovsky (the writer of this letter) and Yuri Felsen (soon to be killed by the Germans). We published three books: ‘The Other Love,’ by Yanovsky, ‘Letters on Lermontov,’ by Yuri Felsen, and ‘Novel with Cocaine.’ The latter had been sent to Nicholas Otsup, editor of our leading magazine ‘Chisla’ (Numbers). The author, resident of Constantinople, signed himself Levi. Otsup wrote him that he would like to publish an excerpt (!) of Cocaine and suggested that the author’s name be changed to Ageyev, to which the latter agreed. Eventually, we offered to publish Mr. Levi’s novel in our series. In connection with the publication—in 1937, I believe—of Roman s Kokainom, Felsen and I exchanged several letters with Levi in Turkey.… One day, Levi sent his passport to Otsup with the request that someone prolong it at the Uruguayan consulate in Paris. He could not do it personally in Turkey. The fact was that Mr. Levi, a Russian refugee, had escaped from Berlin to Turkey on an Uruguayan passport. There were many such fantastic stories which poor humans had to face in those days (and which good Americans couldn’t believe). Otsup, of course, understood, and he entrusted a leading poet of our émigré group, Lydia Chervinskaya, with the mission. She was the last person to be trusted with such a mission: running from one café to another, she somehow, somewhere forgot or lost her handbag with the precious passport inside. She told me this herself, in tears. Her parents lived in Constantinople and she saw Levi when she visited them. She is one of the few old-timers still alive in Paris and has also testified to this effect.”
