An Inelegant Potpourri: Fun With Genres for the n+1th time

Nancy Drew mysteries – along with A Wrinkle in Time – were some of my favorite books as a kid and I suspect they’re at the root of my continuing love for books that are commonly considered genre fiction. I’ve written before about my enjoyment of detective novels, science fiction, eighteenth-century Russian sentimentalism, and, yes, even socialist realism and am likely to write more on those topics in the coming months. That’s partly because last winter I bought an assortment of Russian genre fiction that, for better or worse, I set aside because of work-related reading. I’m now slowly working my way through that bin of my book cart, where there are, of course, some new additions. Here are some brief notes on a retro detective novel and a work of Soviet science fiction, plus a bonus book that was written in English.

I don’t often use the word “preposterous” to describe anything at all but I’ve found myself saying and writing it recently because it fits Alexander Belyaev’s Продавец воздуха (The Seller/Vendor of Air or The Air Seller in a translation by a certain Maria K.) so perfectly. The brief plot summary: meteorologist Klimenko and a local guide named Nikola are investigating odd changes in the weather in Yakutia but (suddenly!) are held against their will in a strange underground compound where a megalomaniac and proud capitalist named Mr. Bailey is condensing air with the intent to sell. Klimenko is pressed into service in a lab, where he fancies a young Swedish woman whose scientist father is a key part of the operation. Two mild spoilers: Klimenko doesn’t like being held captive and tries to escape and, yes, the Red Army saves the day in this novel from 1929! And the ultracold temperatures needed for the condensed air are put to, hm, interesting use. I had a million questions about practical issues like how this compound could have even been engineered and built (permafrost is only one concern) not to mention the plausibility of this one facility, which doesn’t sound very large, having such an impact on the climate that it affects atmospheric pressure and causes deaths. Maybe all that preposterousness is why I kept reading? That and the fact that there’s an odd genre blend – science fiction with an environmental twist and, in a sense, socialist realism – aptly sums up The Air Seller’s odd effects, though it did require me to suspend a lot of disbelief. Wikipedia has a plot summary with more details, including a big old spoiler on the modes of death for two important characters. I’m sure there will be more Belyaev on the way: I was finally able to find a copy of Amphibian Man.

Anton Chizh’s Опасная фамилия (A Dangerous Family/Surname) is also a peculiar blend of genres: it’s contemporary fiction, a retro detective novel set in 1897, but it’s also an homage, even (almost?) an alternate literary history sequel to none other than Anna Karenina. I bought the book because it was the earliest of Chizh’s Rodion Vanzarov series that I could buy. I didn’t read the description so imagine my surprise when I saw the cover illustration with a locomotive, a woman, and a portrait of Tolstoy... And then opened the book and found Karenins and Stiva Obolonsky in the first pages. The fun here is that Chizh picks up with Tolstoy’s characters twenty years after Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and investigator Vanzarov meets Serge Karenin, a suspect in the murder of his own father. And then Vanzarov starts having doubts about certain aspects of Anna Karenina’s death. Maybe I’m a mean person but I took great glee in finding that Levin’s not very popular. (And oof, poor Dolly and Kitty!) Chizh tosses in many subplots and includes the ballet business, railroad matters (!), country houses, and loads of St. Petersburg sites and atmosphere, adding up to lots of fun.

Since we’re on the topic of Anna Karenina and since there seem to be enough derivatives of the original Anna Karenina to claim there’s a genre of sorts, I’ll also add a quick note on Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K., which I read last year. Reyn transfers the basics of Tolstoy’s plot to modern-day New York City, where Anna K. is married to a Russian-Jewish businessman. An early chapter called “The Great Russian Soul” felt almost eerily familiar and the book feels very much of its time and places thanks to mentions of (random page here) things like Borodinsky bread, Boris Akunin’s mystery novels, and Okudzhava’s music. Somehow – perhaps (maybe even probably) because What Happened looks so much at identity and cross-cultural matters? – Reyn works all sorts of New York and Russian details into the novel without making them feel gratuitous. Even better, though I knew how the book would end, how it had to end, it still got me. Reyn combines comedy and tragedy to good effect throughout.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual.

Up Next: Books by Dmitry Danilov and Kirill Ryabov, which both balance comic relief and serious incidents. And Leonid Yuzefovich’s The Philhellene. And, eventually, more genre fiction, with a historical novel about the Moscow plague riot in 1771.

Mad Scientists & Talking Heads: Belyaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head

Alexander Belyaev’s Голова профессора Доуэля (known as Professor Dowell’s Head in Antonina W. Bouis’s English translation) made for some perfect retro – it was written in 1925 – reading during this bizarre pandemic summer. In my last post, I wrote in my “Up Next” section that my reading preference is “the odder the better right about now” so a book about live, talking heads separated from their bodies was just the thing.

Eek!

And so. Professor Dowell’s Head focuses on two mad scientists. The mad scientist in the title, professor Dowell, is mad because he’s angry at his former colleague, professor Kern. Kern is a mad scientist who fits neatly into this wonderfully concise stock character definition on Wikipedia. Kern’s “unusual or unsettling personality traits” emerge right at the start of the novel, when he hires a young medical professional, Marie Laurent, to work in his Paris lab. He asks her if she can keep quiet. Kern then accuses beautiful women of having double the usual female deficiencies (like, oh, chattiness) and wants to know if Laurent’s nerves are in order.

It’s clear from the start that Marie will need strong nerves to work with Kern: she’s quickly shown a lab where a live human head is installed on a stand. That head belongs to none other than Dowell, who will soon tell Laurent how his head ended up in Kern’s lab. Professional, professorial jealousy, not to mention crime, comes into this, revealing some of Kern’s “unusual or unsettling personality traits” that fit with mad scientistdom. Laurent’s nerves do indeed suffer from what she learns, particularly since she’s far more sympathetic to mad-angry Dowell than mad-insane Kern. Kern will find and install two more heads in his lab, even attaching one to a body he finds at the morgue. Other characters (including professor Dowell’s son and one of his friends) enter the novel, too, though I’ll skip the details to prevent spoilage for future readers.

Professor Dowell’s Head combines science fiction and adventure, and is enough of a classic that it’s noted in A History of Russian Literature, which mentions that the book involves one of Belyaev’s “plots in which the human subject gains immortality and forfeits the body.” I certainly can’t argue with that and shudder a bit on a ninety-degree day as I confess that this is something I think about. Belyaev’s characters and plot turns are straightforward but he sets them up for maximum effect, establishing dualities – two scientists, mind and flesh, ethical and unethical behavior – so his characters can contemplate questions about what it means to be human.

Reading Professor Dowell’s Head during these pandemic months felt particularly striking. That’s likely because I’m so content with home-based social distancing, something some people apparently find about as appealing as preserving severed heads in a lab. I can’t say I’d want that fate myself, but I’m not at all bored at home, though of course all of me is still here. There are books to read, cats and humans to feed, vegetables to harvest, and hundreds of pages to translate. Dowell may not be especially happy in Kern’s lab but he’s far better off than the other two heads, who aren’t nearly as suited as Dowell to an existence that’s completely about the mind, not the body. Professor Dowell’s Head is relatively easy reading with a fairly quick-moving plot that’s appropriately peculiar for our odd times. Professor Dowell’s Head isn’t nearly as masterful as, say, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, which is also dated 1925, also involves strange medical experimentation, and is (so far) my favorite Bulgakov. Even so, Professor Dowell’s Head is a solid page-turning novel that readers (including young adults) might enjoy discussing during this pandemic summer – both the novel and the pandemic raise plenty of questions about life and science.

Up next: Potpourri! Or maybe something else?

Disclaimers and disclosures: Only that translator Nina Bouis is a wonderful friend and colleague. I didn’t realize until writing this post that she translated the book!