Icy Russian Fiction
By BENJAMIN LYTAL | January 31, 2007
In Russia, where so much has changed in recent decades, the role of fiction would seem to have changed too. It is no surprise that A Public Space, one of the most rewarding and most engaged journals to appear in recent years, devoted a section of its second number to Russian fiction and poetry. The journal took its name from an interview Aleksander Hemon gave with BOMB magazine, in which Mr. Hemon noted that literature represented not the truth, but a public space in which the truth could be negotiated. "A Public Space," has, in two issues, not only created a forum for foreign work, but presented that work as apposite to our own.
The second issue of A Public Space proved that Russian literature consists of more than gonzo reactions to late-breaking capitalism. Indeed, the best writing coming from Russia may have strong roots in writing from the Soviet years. Natasha Randall, who edited the section, includes various writers from the first half of the 20th century who influenced current Russian writing.
Stories by Olga Zondberg, born in 1972, resemble the instructionladen fiction of Ben Marcus and the organizational fantasies of a flash mob. In "All Cities Are Now Identical," Ms. Zondberg offers an international collage of contemporary cities: "In each there is a Chinatown, a McDonald's, an IKEA." And in "On Public Grounds," not to be confused with the journal in which it appears, she uses the word "postindustrial" so inexactly as to suggest a deep complicit understanding with an audience of eager cultural observers. Here she describes a snack bar:
. . . there, each day, at the same exact time, at the same exact table, sits a group that changes very little, so postindustrial in itself, and their voices are tender and agitated, like sole survivors . . .
Despite the sharp contemporaneity of this work, Ms. Zondberg claims influences from the 1920s and 30s, including the Soviet-era writer Andrei Platonov, also represented here. A selection from his novel "The Macedonian Offer," about an envoy from Alexander the Great to an ancient tsar, whose mind suffers from a "thickening mineral power," suggests a fictional practice both vivid and allegorical, both visionary and political.
In her introduction to Issue No.2, Ms. Randall alludes to a different tradition, that of "humdrum Russian literary realism (Soviet realism forces workers and industry on you; current realism forces ‘shocking' stories of sex, drugs, and rock and roll)." This is the gonzo tradition that, lately, has made itself available for mockery to the likes of D.B.C. Pierre, whose "Ludmilla's broken English" quickly found the limits of such fiction.
"Ice" (New York Review Books, 321 pages, $23.95) by Vladimir Sorokin appears at first to belong to this secondary tradition. Although beautifully published with a muted Gerhard Richter iceberg on its cover, the novel within runs like a cheap action movie. On the first page, Mr. Sorokin establishes the postindustrial scene:
The new warehouse of Mosregionteletrust.
A dark blue Lincoln Navigator drove into the building. Stopped. The headlights illuminated: a concrete floor, brick walls, boxes of transformers, reels of underground cable, a diesel compressor, sacks of cement, a barrel of tar, broken wheelbarrows, three milk cartons, a scrap heap, cigarette butts, a dead rat, and two piles of dried excrement.
Mr. Sorokin's terse — icy — prose will carry the reader a long way, though the immediate action of the novel discourages. From the Navigator emerge three toughs and two captives; the captives are strung up and beaten with ice hammers. The ice activates the voice of their hearts, which literally speaks through the broken breastbones of the elect. This cult, which Mr. Sorokin paints as likable, in comparision with the squalid "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" lifestyles of the cult's recruits, turns out, in the novel's second part, to have been in cahoots with the Nazis and to plan to destroy the world.
Mr. Sorokin's backstory sounds provocative, but its implications lead nowhere. The ice could be Ice-Nine or a "mysterious toxic event" or the Incandenza film in David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," but Mr. Sorokin's world isn't one to care about which way it ends. In a trick that could have been borrowed from David Mitchell, Parts III and IV take wholly new narrative views, recounting the commodification of the cult in consumer testimonials and then telling a brief story about a little boy playing with ice. Advertised as a major novel from Russia, "Ice" seems either lame or impenetrable, considerably more impenetrable than Ms. Zondberg's far less realistic fictions.
