Only kill advisedly!

From the nineteenth-century fables of Gogol and Leskov to the modernist works of Bulgakov and Platonov, few national literatures possess as rich a vein of fabulism as Russia’s. Despite the Stalin regime’s attempts to promote a partisan and proletarian socialist realism, not even the nomenklatura found such works appealing. (In TheHouse of Government, published in 2017, Yuri Slezkine showed how the leading Soviet officials of the day preferred the classic literature of bourgeois countries.) In more recent decades writers such as Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin have offered absurd, grotesque, postmodern satires of Soviet society: in Sorokin’s Blue Lard (see TLS, June 28, 2024), there is an infamous sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev.

The work of Sergei Lebedev is similarly concerned with the legacy of the Soviet era. His most recent collection of short stories, A Present Past, which appeared in Russian in 2022 and has now been ably translated by Antonina W. Bouis, opens with a brief preface arguing that a “mystical folklore” emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union to “describe the tragedy” and “make the evil past real”, and that this creative wellspring was “born of a silent conscience”. The “ghosts” of this lore are as “real as the ignored knowledge of crimes and the refusal to accept real responsibility”. Such a direct statement of meaning and intent is unusual in a collection of short stories, and while some readers (and reviewers) might welcome the impetus to find coherence in a selection produced over such a long period, others might find the signposting a little hectoring.

The stories mostly explore the notion of the return of the repressed, on both an individual and a societal level. In “The Barn”, a man seeks, for mysterious reasons, to guard the empty building in which he once enabled a mass killing of Jews; in “Judge Stomakov”, the title character, who has allowed members of the NKVD to be exonerated for the killings of Polish officers, suddenly recalls a murder of puppies during his childhood. While Lebedev’s political messaging is commendable, it is not always subtle. In “The Night Is Bright Tonight” the commandant of the Kremlin, after a somewhat protracted explanation of his fascination with a scarab beetle acquired in Egypt, witnesses the return of the dead from the Gulag. This same pattern is repeated, with diminishing returns, in the setting of the Lubyanka prison, then in Stalin’s former dacha, where a strange wind is seen “blowing backward, into the past, into the region of loss”. There is an earnestness to these tales, and a clear authorial desire to mete out justice to one-dimensional characters, at odds with the acerbically satirical yet sometimes ambiguous work of Russia’s great fabulists. There are, however, more delicate, oblique moments. In “Titan”, perhaps the most interesting story in the collection, the McGuffin is a novel by an exiled writer that turns out to exist only in the form of archived records composed by the security forces.

If Lebedev’s work argues that contemporary Russia is permeated by the cross-generational trauma of war, purges and the Gulag, the dystopian oeuvre of Antoine Volodine – the primary pseudonym of a multifariously named French-Russian writer – forecasts the cumulative effect of successive waves of political and ecological catastrophe in futures where “the worst of barbarous human or subhuman history had been reached and even surpassed”, as Volodine writes in Mevlido’s Dreams. First published in French in 2007, and nimbly translated by Gina M. Stamm, this novel begins with a scene that at first seems to be from the Soviet era: after a speech on “proletarian morality”, Mevlido, a middle-aged policeman, bashes his superior on the head with a brick during the latter’s “self-criticism”. But the crimes to which his superior confesses are trivial or absurd – “theft of toilet paper”; “the aborted preparation of a series of attacks on the moon” – and he promptly resumes his post. This, we soon learn, is the empty ritual of a world 300 years in the future, when most of the planet has been so devastated by war and ethnic cleansing that there is virtually no meaningful political struggle.

The novel takes place in a partially ruined East Asian city where the dark slums smell of “pre-insurrectional despair and mass graves” and are populated by mutant birds and Bolshevik beggars shouting nonsensical slogans. Stamm does a wonderful job of rendering these: “ONLY KILL ADVISEDLY!”; “PUT YOUR LAST BLOOD IN A BAG!”; “SCREAM AT THE MOON WITH THE LOST!”. Mevlido is a double agent, more loyal to the ghetto denizens he is supposed to monitor than to the surveillance state. He assists Sonia Wolguelane, a vigilante assassin of former genocidaires and warlords (generally now working in the mafia or wealth management) who mocks “the old long-term programs upon which we grafted some vestiges of revolutionary logic”. She is depicted as an avatar of pure revenge, but does not represent hope: “after her there would be nothing more”. While Mevlido is haunted by the memory of his dead wife, he is involved with a mentally ill woman, also in mourning, named Maleeya.

Unknown even to himself, Mevlido is also a triple agent, the reincarnated representative of shadowy entities known as the Organs, who exist in another dimension. Their mission is not to save the “detestable species” that is humanity, now in its “extinction phase”, but to make “the long phase of coming agony less atrocious”. Only in dreams does Mevlido glimpse fragments of his mission, and his past life; in the main narrative there is a pervasive sense that reality is indeterminate, not entirely to be trusted, a distorted version of an oneiric truth. This ontological uncertainty extends to gender – a group of passengers is described as “all men, or at least male, or at least mostly not female” – and species boundaries: Sonia sometimes appears as a young woman, sometimes as a bird. As in many other novels by Volodine, such as Radiant Terminus (2017), the boundary between life and death is both porous and indeterminate, with many characters existing in a liminal state of concertina-ed time that corresponds to the Tibetan idea of the bardo. The bardo is also used by Volodine as a structuring principle: the narrative is split into seven parts, each composed of seven sections, recalling the forty-nine days in which the deceased walk through the bardo. This principle determines Volodine’s wider project, which will, he says, consist of forty-nine novels. (The forty-seventh has just been published in French.)

Strangeness aside, Mevlido’s Dreams is highly readable, its clear, calm prose even supplemented by bullet points. This matter-of-factness in the face of the horrible and absurd may signal either resignation or acceptance. The fall of the Soviet Union was hailed as “the end of history”, but, when applied to Antoine Volodine’s work, this is no triumphalist boast; rather, it is a sober judgement (and anyway, it is only the end of human history: according to the Organs, spiders shall inherit the Earth). What, asks the author, can anyone do in the face of such an end? The answer is to try to preserve the capacity for compassion and empathy. Mevlido’s relationship with Maleeya is by no means a great love story, but the two are able to care for each other. At the end of the novel Mevlido enters the dream of his dead wife and, even though she does not know he is there, “at least there’s this: the two of us, in the solitude, together”.

Nick Holdstock is the author of China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, terror and the Chinese state, 2015, and the novel Quarantine, 2022

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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