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What Is to Be Undone?
| Article
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20604 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
3,407 Words |
| Author
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Aleksandar Petrov
Aleksandar Petrov is a visiting scholar of Russian and Slavic
literature at the University of Pittsburgh and is author of
lady in an Empty Dress (a book of poetry, 1991) and numerous
books in Slavic literary studies. |
ZAKOLDOVANNAYA STRANA
(The enchanted country)
Vyacheslav Pyetsukh
Moscow: Znamia (Banner Magazine),
1992, 2, 67-117
This very short novel, Zakoldovannaya strana by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh (P'et-sookh), born in 1946, is unique insofar as no other novel in the rich history of Russian literature contains a history of Russia from the very beginning until an October day of 1983, the date on which the action of the novel, takes place. Furthermore, the narrator, whose name and patronymic (Vyacheslav Alekseyevich) are identical to those of the real author, engages in a conversation in which he recalls the history of Russia as well as world history--only the main events, of course, beginning with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, the symbolic passage of man from the natural world into the nightmare of history.
The conversation takes place around a kitchen table and is a kind of discussion of Russia and its history: past, present, and prospects for the future. The manner in which this history is told--succinctly and with a great deal of humor--as well as the way it is interpreted, the conversation itself as well as the circumstances in which it takes place: all these add to the value of the novel, which most certainly deserves to be read. And not only once.
Why is history the hero of a contemporary Russian novel? And hwy in a novel by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh? The author himself offers an answer to the second, easier question in the introduction to his collection of stories and short novels entitled I and the Rest (Moscow, 1990):
The job I had in the pre-literary period of my life was that of teaching children world and national history. I really enjoyed teaching history and most probably I would have been a history teacher even today had they not expelled me from the school because I had begun writing literature; those were dark times, dissidents were raging so people were afraid of ideological sabotage. They thought: "Only the Devil knows what this guy is writing and it might well be something ideologically extreme."
Pyetsukh was not producing any "ideologically extreme" writings and, except for losing his teaching position, he had no problems either as a child or later as an adult and writer. He likes to say that he had always felt like "a favorite of fate,
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