Pushkin's Children: Writings on Russia and Russians
The Slynx
Tatyana Tolstaya
(Houghton Mifflin)

The dissolution of the Soviet Union has lifted the veil from that country for outside observers, but it doesn't mean that its features have become in any way more recognizable. Brushing the cobwebs of the Cold War from their eyes, most Americans still can't quite make sense of the expressions sweeping across the face of the new Russia—it simply has morphed too quickly from friendliness to hostility and back again, from free-market economy to crime-boss driven chaos, from manic optimism to brute nationalism to Communist nostalgia. How could anyone comprehend it?

Readers of certain American periodicals, however, found a guide through this thicket of information in the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya, whose essays over the turbulent decade of the 1990s offered a wry, insider's commentary on her native land. With deep roots in the Russian intelligentsia (her great-granduncle was Leo Tolstoy, her grandfather the Stalinist-era novelist Alexei Tolstoy), and an extended stay in America (she spent the decade teaching at Princeton and Skidmore before returning to Moscow in 2000), Tolstaya seemed uniquely suited to explain the complexities of Russia and the Russian character to the West.

Now collected in one volume, the essays—mostly reviews of books on Russia—cover everything from the absurdities of the post-Soviet economy to the snow in St. Petersberg, and include along the way her views on Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Russian writers from the 19th-century Alexander Pushkin to the 20th-century Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Tolstaya, however, treats the review form liberally, to say the least. At times she scarcely mentions the book at all, treating it instead as an occasion for a free-ranging essay on the same topic. For example, after quickly dispatching psychologist Gail Sheehy's biography of Mikhail Gorbachev for its many errors and simplistic assumptions, she launches into her own extended analysis of Gorbachev's rise and fall.

Because the book is arranged chronologically, the reader gets to see the shifts in Tolstaya's thinking over the decade. In the early essays, Gorbachev figures less as a reformer than an inept apparatchik promoted from within to save a dying system—his twin cards of perestroika and glasnost, she points out, had been shuffled around in the Russian political deck since the 1850s. By the mid-1990s, however, faced with Yeltsin's excesses, Gorbachev achieves a retrospective sheen.

Tolstaya writes for the most part with a sprightly detachment, yet she is capable of both inflamed passion and wonderfully pungent metaphors. Nobel Prize-winner Solzhenitsyn's pronouncements on Russia's future display "the rigid calculation of a shrewd peasant who won't give a piece of bread to a beggar because he needs every crust for his hogs." Similarly, the Soviet Union abandoned Eastern Europe simply because "it was what we call a 'suitcase with no handle': hard to carry, though a shame to leave behind."

And speaking of Russian authors' self-imposed burden of addressing dire social issues, Tolstaya traces it to "the way Russians perceive Russian life: as a constant, unending Lisbon earthquake."

It's ironic, then, given her respect for Pushkin for having slipped that burden of crippling social responsibility, that she assumes it herself in her most recent novel. Where the essays reveal a woman surveying the fog and confusion of Russian life from some mountaintop of crisp rationality, The Slynx is a descent into the depths. A dark allegory with flashes of humor, it describes a society reduced by nuclear apocalypse to an elemental level, much as if after an earthquake, in fact.

Primitive humans, deformed by radiation, are ruled over by a brutal bureaucracy, and only a small population of blast survivors retains any knowledge of Russian culture.

The book follows a simple scribe, Benedikt, as he ascends from copying remnants of ancient books to becoming a leading member of the bureaucracy. Things seem to grow brighter when he discovers the vast troves of pre-Apocalypse literature—in part, the novel is a hymn to the joys of reading—but it soon becomes apparent that without knowledge of their cultural context, even the greatest books don't educate. Benedikt can't distinguish between Pushkin and children's nonsense rhymes, and in his lust for more books, he becomes as brutal as any other bureaucrat.

As with her short-story collection On the Golden Porch, Tolstaya writes what might be called Slavic magic realism—the fantastical is ever-present, but usually with disastrous effects, and her gift for the voices of malicious children, elderly on the brink of senility, and characters of limited intelligence suggests a rather grim view of Russian society.

At the same time, the face she shows in her essays suggests that it might not be all that hopeless, after all.

© Edward Batchelder
(from The Tennessean)