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What Revolutions Don't Change
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11247 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
2,165 Words |
| Author
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Dragan Milivojevic
Dragan Milivojevic is professor of Russian language and
literature at the University of Oklahoma. |
LINII SUD'BY ILI SUNDUCHOK MILASHEVICHA
(Lines of Fate; or, Milashevich's Trunk)
Mark Kharitonov
Moscow: Druzhba Narodov, 1992
163 pp.
The star of Muscovite writer Mark Kharitonov has been long in coming. He captured the 1992 Booker Prize for Russian literature, the first such award of its kind, which struck Russian literary insiders as nothing short of miraculous. The paper Komersant carried the headline "Unknown Writer Becomes Famous" and asked why the jury had opted for a writer who was neither young (Kharitonov was born in 1937) nor well known. His only claim to fame rested on the publication of a fantastic novella about Gogol, which flashed on the literary horizon in 1974, then disappeared.
His own disappearance from the tawdry Brezhnev-and-perestroika literary scene was voluntary. Just like the hero of his novel, Milashevich, Kharitonov would have been content to remain unknown and forgotten and to write only for himself. Events beyond his control decided otherwise.
In Linii sud'by ili sunduchok Milashevicha (Lines of fate), Kharitonov weaves a rich tapestry of Russian life during the revolutionary period of the early twentieth century. His postmodern style, still quite unfamiliar to Russian readers, is evidenced by complex, overlapping time spans and frequent and detailed digressions by the narrator. Most of the narrative is composed of diary entries and scholarly commentaries by a professor at a provincial university, Anton Lizavin, who is writing a dissertation about an obscure writer, Simeon Milashevich, who had given up his literary career in St. Petersburg for a life of isolation and contemplation in a remote and boring provincial town. There is no explanation of Milashevich's reason for doing so.
In the provincial archive, while collecting documents for his dissertation, Lizavin finds a small trunk stuffed with Milashevich's manuscripts. His life is completely changed by this discovery. As he sorts and orders the notes, most of which are brief fragments written on the wrappers of candy once produced by a local factory, Lizavin enters into the strange fate of the forgotten writer and philosopher. Lizavin's dissertation work and life turn out to be mysteriously connected with the subject of his investigation, and their common lines of fate extend from Milashevich's yellowed, nineteenth-century papers to the Soviet reality of the 1970s.
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