"Who Are You?": Novellas from Vladimir Makanin and Elizaveta Alexandrova-Zorina

I’ve always loved medium-length fiction—long stories, novellas, and short novels, though I may be too loose with the labels—and hold a special affection for Russian books containing works of fiction of varying lengths. I read novellas from two such collections this summer and was interested to find some basic plot and thematic similarities—man leaves city of residence, ends up in other place, has relationship(s) with woman, numerous questions about society and identity arise—that pushed me to write about the two novellas in one post. They are Vladimir Makanin’s На первом дыхании (At First Breath) and Elizaveta Alexandrova-Zorina’s Развилка (The Fork in the Road).

At First Breath has been adapted for film and the main contours of the plot summary on Wikipedia are just close enough to the novella that I won’t bother rehashing beyond saying that a man, Oleg, returns to Moscow to win back his beloved, who’s now married another man. Book-Oleg, however, isn’t really wanted anywhere so he spends his nights all over the place, including at Kursk train station, a favorite spot in Venedikt Yerofeev’s Москва-Петушки (Moscow to the End of the Line, in H. William Tjalsma’s translation), plus, I hasten to add, Oleg not only rents out his relatives’ apartment to gypsies, he sells their possessions, too.

At First Breath’s plot feels relatively familiar, quite probably because I’ve read a fair number of Makanin’s other books, including his (much, much longer) Underground or A Hero of Our Time (previous post), in which another first-person narrator wanders from place to place raising questions about identity and society. Oleg wonders as he wanders, too, since he’s in a world where he feels nobody needs him, some amorphous “they” is/are always to blame, and he tells Galya, his beloved, that he’s going to save the world. Her response is, “Знаю. Знаю.” (“I know. I know.”) In a paragraph I labeled “love,” Oleg says he knows nothing about tacky/banal luxury (that being “пошлая роскошь”) but is accustomed to finding freedom in the steppes, a sense of Time on trains, and at least a bathroom in Moscow. What, really, does a person need? That’s what I almost always seem to love about Makanin’s earlier works: a sense of wondering, wandering, tragedy, and comedy about an individual that rises to something larger, something more universal. At First Breath feels like it might have even been a sketch of sorts for Underground; I checked Wikipedia and found that they came out 1995 and 1998, respectively.

Alexandrova-Zorina’s more recent Fork in the Road offers up a reverse scenario: Bagramov, a Muscovite, is driving to a distant town on business and gets stuck, literally, psychologically, and metaphysically, in a blizzard, and the last sign he sees says “Яма” (“Pit”), something he sees as a bad omen. Indeed! He ends up in the pits. This novella reads like the result of Vladimir Propp’s work morphing into Fairy Tale Transformations for Failure, where there’s never any chance of anything resembling a happy ending.

Nothing goes well for Bagramov. Our anti-hero loves telling the hapless people around him that he’s got plenty of money to get himself out of the mess he’s driven into but nobody knows their location (!) so when he calls Moscow he doesn’t know where to ask the operator to send help. His housing with Vasilisa (this is a very marked name but she’s not a beautiful fairytale princess) is infested with mice (there are some grisly scenes), another woman in town claims her husband is in Moscow but he’s dead, and there are even (OMG) shades of the Log Lady. Fork in the Road is filled with the familiar tropes of drinking, the decay of infrastructure, and societal breakdown, and Bagramov is thwarted, even violently, each time he attempts to climb out of the pit. The ending, with a sort of search party, is pretty predictable but it fits the novella perfectly by allowing an additional and literal examination of identity—questions of “who are you/am I?” have been sounding since the beginning—as well as reinforcements of opposites like city/rural, rich/poor, and cultured/uncultured. This is dark, sad stuff but several things differentiate Fork in the Road from the чернуха (dark realism) that was so (un?)popular five or ten years ago: a peculiar sense of suspense (I initially rooted for Bagramov to get the hell out of town even if he had to walk, though I knew the story wouldn’t go anywhere if he did), the feeling of a dark fairytale or at least a morality story, and a fitting absurdity that arises from those first two factors. Maybe ignorance really is bliss? I don’t know how many times I said “this is so strange” as I read Fork in the Road, and that’s a “strange” that covers a lot of meanings and emotions.

Disclaimers: The usual. I once translated a story by Elizaveta Alexandrova-Zorina for Чтение.

Up next: More from the heavy “write about” shelf: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. (I’m still waiting for the sequel!), and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And Vladimir Danikhnov’s weird Lullaby, a Booker finalist about serial killings that has shades of Platonov. And Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия, literally Savely’s Days, a novel about a cat that feels especially lovely after these novellas and Lullaby. After Savely, I’ll need to pounce (finally!) on my Big Book reading.