A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  His first rally after the election was in Moscow, and he thought—although he didn’t have Nina to count for him—that it was a bigger crowd than ever. Nine thousand, he figured, maybe ten. Maybe they were angrier, and maybe they were remorseful, and maybe this time they meant business. They yelled slogans. They waved flags and held posters, and some of the posters were of Aleksandr’s own crumpled and two-dimensional face. He cleared his throat to calm them down. He looked out over them, these people, his people, Russians under duress, citizens with objections. It would always be hard to believe the polling data, it would always be hard to believe the electoral returns, when all of these people kept showing up and shouting.

  He pulled the microphone toward him. They quieted down, friends shushing friends, so that they could all hear what he would say. He wanted to say something spectacular. He wanted to say something that would justify all the things that required justification—a countless number, that. He wanted to say something that would strike the perfect balance of rueful cynicism and quiet, enduring hope. He wanted to say that there was no choice but to despair—and then, afterward, there was no choice but to stop despairing. He wanted to say that even if they didn’t see it in this lifetime, somebody would see it in some lifetime. He wanted to say that the historical sweep is a consolation, it has to be a consolation, we have to pretend it’s a consolation until it becomes one. He wanted to say that there is honor in being a small turn in a noble game, even if one doesn’t get to know the outcome. He wanted to say all this, but there was no way to say any of this, and there were notes to consult. He looked down. They were waiting. He looked up again.

  “We have lost this round, my friends,” he said. “We have lost this game, to use a terrible chess metaphor. There was a time when I was a young man that I beat an old favorite just by letting myself imagine that I might.”

  It was a weak comparison, he knew. It took more than imagination.

  “Some of you might remember this,” he said, “although I expect that many of you are far too young. This was when chess was a more central pastime. This was before the Internet.”

  There was light chuckling, though he’d made the joke before.

  “That’s all I ask of you—it’s a modest request, after all, for an old man who has been through a lot. I don’t ask you to believe that we will win. I ask you to imagine that we might.”

  And they were. He knew they were. He could feel them imagining—he could almost hear the collective crackling of their most personal wishes, and some of them were what you might expect: a girl wants her brother to return from Chechnya with his limbs and his sanity; a young man wants to vote in an election that doesn’t make him throw up afterward; an old woman wants to know what happened to her father during the Terror, and she wants a government that will tell her. Maybe some of them have more modest desires. Maybe some of them want to watch Putin handle a hostile press conference. Maybe some of them want to go abroad without being asked what their countrymen have been thinking for the past century or so. Maybe some of them want a satirical comedy program that skewers all of the politicians, makes a gleeful mockery of all of the institutions, every single night.

  “Imagine that we might,” he said.

  He closed his eyes for the briefest moment, and the crowd was quiet and reverential. Their flags caught the wind, and their posters fluttered away, but they didn’t stop them. In that moment, through their united imagining, he could almost see it. And who is to say they were not seeing it, too?

  He spent hours, days, looking for some sign of his correspondence with Irina’s father. He wanted desperately to find it, now more than ever. At the same time, he wanted to prove to himself that he could not. He wanted to prove to himself that he wasn’t careless with a young woman’s last wish—that he wasn’t too absorbed with his own marriage and his own democracy to find the thing that counted. He wanted to know that the thing that counted was not really there. He went through countless stacks of the old pamphlets, the carbon copying bleeding into indecipherable bright blue rivulets. He went through his notes on strategy. He went through his old delivery routes and was surprised that he was ever fool enough to write them down. He found a diary entry about Elizabeta, but he could not give it to her now—not because he was embarrassed (although he was), but because confronting the shakiness of his writing, the exuberance of his love, made him want to weep.

  He found nothing from Irina’s father. He sat for three days straight, scattering the apartment with paper that was as ancient and fragile as an old man’s skin. And then, finally, he told himself that he could stop looking. He told himself that Irina had already found whatever she came for.

  It wasn’t until years later, when he was going through Elizabeta’s things, that Aleksandr would find the letter from Irina’s father. He remembered then Elizabeta’s attempted delivery of it in those weeks before her marriage to Mitya, and he remembered the way he’d rejected it while she stood in the doorway, young and alive and disappearing from him for the first time. He remembered the clawing grief at his chest during those days. He remembered how he’d thought that was the worst thing, and what a thin, marginal sadness it had been, comparatively. And then he sat on the ground, among Elizabeta’s boxes and books, and cried a little and laughed a little and stared a little, bemusedly, at the ceiling. And then, for the first time, he read the letter.

  In the aftermath of the election, the world briefly takes an interest. Aleksandr is flown out to the States to explain everything on television. (This happened every so often—whenever there was an event that demanded translation by an English-speaking capitalist who could talk about enormously complicated political upheaval in terms easily recognizable by any high school civics student.) He rides in a limousine through the frenetic city; he watches the hallucinatory lights of Times Square. The taxi drivers all ask him where he is from, and then he asks them where they are from. He can go whole days in New York that feel as though nobody is a native—the city is a spaceship, and everyone in it is a refugee from some dying planet (second world, third world, middle America). The hysteria of the lights, the flagrancy of the money, the stridency of the music—there is an energy that could remind him of Moscow. On MSNBC, he is asked what he thinks of the future of Russia. “We are not looking to win elections,” he says. “We are looking to have elections.” For a foreign policy blog, he is asked whether Russia is ready for democracy. Might not years of repression, might not the sheer size, might eons of the systematic subversion of civil society—might all that leave the country unprepared for a democratic system? Each time Aleksandr says no, he points to North Korea and South Korea, he points to East Germany and West Germany. People aren’t born with a template for government; there is not an indisposition for democracy encoded on a human being’s DNA; there’s not a love for authoritarian abuse entangled in a nation’s soul. There are only individuals, and then there are the governments that serve or disserve them. Democracy is the least bad form of government, he says. It maximizes the liberty of the individual, and in this world—in this uncertain, claustrophobic, ever shrinking world, but really, in any world—is that not the highest good? Is there anything more important than writing what you think, and saying what you think, and walking along a river at night unsupervised? Maybe he doesn’t say that last part. And one day in Russia, he says. One day in Russia, too.

  But sometimes, sometimes—if he’s honest with himself, which he’s working at, because who else can you expect to be honest with you?—he wonders. He really wonders.

  He is asked to participate in a debate at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and he stays in a green triangle of a hotel above the water (duller, he thinks, less sleek and dramatic than his Neva). He spends the day in the colorful jumble of Cambridge. In Harvard Square, he watches the chessmen at their amateurish, faltering games and remembers that Irina played one of them. He did not know her well, and he did not know her for long, and it is not for her or for
her country that he continues. And yet he thinks about her short life, and her unwillingness to spend the entirety of it as a spectator, and he knows that there is something to learn from that, if only he has the patience.

  He turns toward the Charles and feels the uncomplicated joy of existing out in the world, where he probably won’t be found by all the people who are looking. He can believe sometimes that this is actually what Irina came to Russia to find. He can believe sometimes that this is actually a worthy endeavor.

  Walking along the river, he is struck again by the nearness of the future. It’s just beyond his vision, but it’s there. He knows it is. Its presence follows him—along the green Charles, back to Boston’s underwhelming airport, up into the star-pocked sky and over the sea. He skims the oil-black Atlantic, the twinkling beacons of continental Europe. The future is with him, he thinks—at least as much as the past and all the people who live there. He can sense it, like the sketchy suggestion of an undiscovered country emerging from the mist, or the shape of an endgame materializing somewhere deep in his psyche. Below him, the lights of Petersburg shine like that future—cold and improbable and galaxy-bright, but closer with every moment of descent.

  Maybe he will see it one day. Maybe he will not. It’s a big country. But, if you’re lucky, it’s a long life.

  To Richard du Bois, who knew how to love life;

  And to Carolyn du Bois, who knows how to live it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was made possible by the generous support of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Thanks to all of my brilliant colleagues, in particular intrepid early readers Adam Krause, Chris Leslie-Hynan, and Keija Kaarina Parssinen. Thanks to all of my incredible teachers, especially Sandy Warren at the Smith College Campus School; Lisa Levchuk and Peter Gunn at the Williston Northampton School; Alan Lebowitz and Michael Downing at Tufts University; Ethan Canin, Sam Chang, Charlie D’Ambrosio, Elizabeth McCracken, Jim McPherson, and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and Elizabeth Tallent, Adam Johnson, Tobias Wolff, and John L’Heureux at Stanford. Many thanks also to Connie Brothers, Deb West, Jan Zenisek, Christina Ablaza, and Mary Popek, all of whom have endured a staggering number of confused emails from me over the years.

  I am immensely grateful to my terrific editor, David Ebershoff, and my heroic agent, Henry Dunow, who have offered me astounding insight, generosity, and patience. Thanks also to everybody at Random House, including Evan Camfield, Susan Kamil, Jynne Martin, Maria Braeckel, Avideh Bashirrad, Erika Greber, Tom Nevins, Annette Trial-O’Neil, Richard Callison, and Clare Swanson.

  Thanks to Lauren Albertini, Kimberly Bastin, Prerna Bhardwaj, Dave Byron, Jennifer Cantelmi, Katie Chase, Kate Egelhofer, Bev and Emily Fletcher, Morgan Gliedman, Cassie Jeremie, Keetje Kuipers, Matt Lavin, Aislinn O’Keefe, Ilana Panich-Linsman, Justin Race, Kate Sachs, Maggie Shipstead, Luke Snyder, Becca Sripada, Patrice Taddonio, Brian Tuttle, Jeff Van Dreason, and Kirstin Valdez Quade. I feel lucky every day to know you.

  Thanks to my tremendous family, the most stubbornly resilient people I have ever known. Thanks to my amazing friends, who are an endless source of hilarity and joy. And thanks to Justin Perry, who is the central wonder of my life.

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A PARTIAL HISTORY OF LOST CAUSES

  Jennifer DuBois

  A CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER DUBOIS

  Random House Reader’s Circle: A Partial History of Lost Causes is very much a testament to will and courage, in part because it explores the dark depths of illness with such nuance. What prompted you to write a novel that pivoted on Huntington’s disease?

  Jennifer duBois: My father became ill with Alzheimer’s disease when I was twelve, so I grew up against the backdrop of some rather dark questions about the relationship between cognition and personal identity—as well as a lot of questions about what you do and how you live when you’re in a situation that you know will have a bad outcome. I was interested in writing about a character grappling with similar questions. I chose to write about Huntington’s because certain features of the disease—its relatively early onset, and the way that testing can predict not only whether you’ll get the disease but roughly when—made it particularly dramatically compelling.

  RHRC: The book is also is a fascinating peek into the world of chess. What inspired you to incorporate chess, both as a narrative engine and as a tool of metaphor?

  JD: I was always casually interested in chess, and reading about Garry Kasparov drew me to the idea of writing about a chess champion turned political dissident—I just thought that sounded like a fascinating character arc. And then chess wound up threading through the book on a lot of other levels beyond plot. For one thing, it provided a vocabulary for the book’s political and philosophical concerns. And structurally, chess emerged as a sort of overarching conceit—the alternating chapters feel a bit like a chess game (Aleksandr moves, Irina moves), and the ending, in particular, has a certain chess logic to it.

  RHRC: Time functions very differently for Irina and Aleksandr within the novel. Aleksandr’s storyline takes place over thirty years, whereas we see Irina in the span of only two years. How did you come to arrange their chronology in this way?

  JD: Because of Irina’s diagnosis, I wanted Irina to move through time more slowly. Her journey, at least initially, is a bit subtler than Aleksandr’s—she’s grappling with mortality, with trying to find meaning and beauty in a finite time span. And as Aleksandr begins to confront those same challenges, time starts to move more slowly for him, too, until the two characters are moving through the novel together side by side.

  RHRC: For all their differences in age and background, Irina and Aleksandr form a strong and unconventional friendship. How do you perceive of their relationship?

  JD: They’re united in part by their mutual fear. But because their circumstances are different, they have different things to teach and learn from each other. Meeting Aleksandr challenges Irina’s solipsism; her diagnosis has long been an excuse for fatalism and apathy. Aleksandr’s campaign draws her out of herself, and forces her to entirely reframe her ideas about what is, and isn’t, worth doing. And meeting Irina shows Aleksandr the liberating flip side of doom. He takes so many precautions for his own safety that he winds up feeling trapped, and he sees that Irina’s situation has been in some ways freeing for her. And in the end, it’s exactly that paradoxical freedom that lets Irina be useful.

  RHRC: Did you find one of the characters easier to write than the other?

  JD: Irina’s voice came pretty naturally for me, so she was probably the easier character to write. And although both characters grow up over the course of the novel, Aleksandr’s journey is much longer and more externally dramatic—he goes from idealist to pragmatist to pragmatic idealist, he goes from prodigy to champion to someone whose best successes are long behind him, he goes from romantic to mercenary to cynic. So following a character through such massive changes, while trying to maintain a certain continuity in his personality, was challenging.

  RHRC: In the scene of Irina’s father’s funeral, you write: “Jonathan regarded everything—the coffin, the grave, the green Astroturf laid out to conceal the exposed dirt—with the expression of a spectator.” Jonathan cannot see the world as Irina sees it, and her relationship with him is particularly heartbreaking. How did you conceive of him, and where do you think he fits in the notion of a lost cause?

  JD: Irina knows that any relationship she could have with Jonathan would be cut short by her disease, so she decides to cut it even shorter, on her own terms. In a way she knows this is cruel and childish and maybe a little vain—she really doesn’t want Jonathan to watch her lose her mind. But it’s also selfless on a certain level, because she knows that Jonathan doesn’t really understand what he’d be signing up for. Irina has failed to invest fully in anything her whole life because of the specter of Huntington’s. Jonathan is the last lost cause that she runs away from; when she reaches Russia, she
finds a lost cause to fight for and embrace. And Irina abandoning Jonathan is also the novel abandoning Jonathan, because I liked the idea of writing a female character whose journey doesn’t pivot on romantic love. What Irina needs at the end of the day turns out to be a lot more complicated than a relationship.

  RHRC: A Partial History of Lost Causes is so completely submersed in the politics and history of the Soviet era. What kind of research did you undertake to write the novel?

  JD: I read a ton of nonfiction—from political analyses to cultural histories to travelogues to chess narratives to the posthumously published diary of Anna Politkovskaya. I also read as much Russian literature as I could, both classic and contemporary, in order to try to find little setting details to use. Everything else I Googled. I tried to get things right, but I was more concerned with telling an interesting story, and sometimes I made a conscious decision to let something be slightly wrong.

  RHRC: The novel has a captivating cast of secondary and tertiary characters. Is there one you most identify with? Or most admire?