Odd Jobs (102 page)

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:

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 bohemian 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:

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.