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.
(an update I ought to buy [so the book doesn't make me sneeze]!)
