Dmitry Bykov’s account of the London Book Fair
27 April 2009
As experience shows, one has more chance of being loved by a woman that you don’t like. ‘Like’ and ‘love’ are basically the same autonyms as ‘talent’ and ‘genius’. A woman who doesn’t like you is not indifferent to you. You’ve hooked her. There’s a very fine line between love and hate. England doesn’t like us. But she loves us.
She sees a warped reflection of herself in us, her main partner in the Big Game, another variation on the imperial tragedy. She remembers our allying in the Second World War, Ivan the Terrible’s fixation on Elizabeth and Churchill’s persisting interest in Stalin. Strictly speaking, we are the only ones who match her in age. America is young, France is frivolous, Germany is bombastic and barrack-like: only England and Russia, countries of exceptional intellectual power, are ritual, etiquettual, reared in a harsh climate, capable of magically uniting their citizens when challenged by outsiders, but irreconcilably fractured within. Furthermore, we are two islands, two countries that define ourselves with ___ fortresses. Only we are very big, and they are very small. But the island of Britain has fervent and ambiguous feelings towards the island of Russia (to be precise, towards the island of Moscow and the Indian provinces that surround it). They are very interested in us. It was not in vain that Lev Losev noted at some point that the peak of mutual interest between Russian and the USA was the cold war. Back then seminars about Russia were packed to the rafters.
This year, the London Book Fair chose India as its celebrated guest, and the Russian benefit performance has been scheduled for 2011. One must suppose that by that time political alienation will have reached its peak, and cultural fixation also. But fashion in Russia. From the outside, they cannot see how inferior and hypocritical the current cold spell is, the reluctance with which all of the participants, willing and unwilling, fulfil their roles. From the outside, everything looks almost real. Moreover, it turned out that Russia was presented in an exceptionally lively way as a non-market based country, spiritual, living in eternal search of the impossible. The crisis has led Europe, in a strange way, to once again search for the answers to eternal questions in Russia. We’ve suddenly got stuck in a dead end, but they’ve already driven out somewhere? Has Russia’s inability to enter into the West suddenly meant that she has been able to escape the financial catastrophe? In general, as Umberto Eco – a guest at the fair, who whipped up the most excitement and who obligingly spoke to your humble servant – foresaw, the survival of the financial collapse as a spiritual renaissance is to be one of the main tendencies in current literature.
In fact, the fair was full of books about the crisis – about half of these were made up of financial detective stories, financial confessions and even financial comedies written by the middle class. Remarkable entrepreneurship. Right in line with Eco’s foresight, all of these books could have the tagline “How I Lost Everything and Found Myself”. But what is truly shocking is that the epicentre of attention has been shifted to the third world or Russia in the search of alternative practices: ok, fine, our social structure sometimes leads us to those very same perturbations that are at the root of the crisis of the majority of Western schools of thought. But what have you got? It’s clear that some people are hoping to see others in an even greater dead end in the hope of confirming good old Churchill’s thought: our way is bad, but the best of a bad bunch. Others sincerely believe that India, Russia and – you never know... – Venezuala might provide them with a third, fifth or tenth way. Russia is the arena for the majority of hits at this fair, or at least for the spiritual phenomenon so often referred to in those hits. The American Jenny Oshner’s novel ‘Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight’ has only just come out and is selling amazingly well. It should be translated, if anyone is brave enough, the ‘Dreambook’ is a journal and a girl’s diary and a dreambook. At first the reader – in any case a Russian reader – is struck by the feeling that he has fallen into a branchy bush, not of cranberries, but of turnips: the heroine, who goes by the name of Tanya, works at the provincial newspaper “Red Star”, the editor corresponds with her through pneumatic tubes, the paper is filled with made-up and ostentatiously absurd remarks from the lives of Chechans and Koryaks, commissioned to maintain chauvinism of great Russia... You soon realise, however, that this woman shortlisted for the Flanner O’Connor prize cannot only write rubbish. The novel turns into a sumptuous and multicoloured Russian dream, absurd, like Russian life and Western propaganda: Russia comes across as a space of endless possibilities. Oshner knows our life inside out, something proved by the exact details and faithfully captured sentiments, it is a life that is ready at any second to turn into a nightmare, or into a gothic fairytale. People busy themselves with strange affairs – Kafkian, useless but fearfully cumbersome. The men are helpless, the women all-powerful, the children all-knowing. A different novel that has become a great hit in Britain is Jonathan Little’s ‘Do-gooder’, that came out in French in 2006. In France it won the Gonkurovsky prize, and is now become a bestseller all over Europe. This thousand-page tome has been christened the new ‘War and Peace’, and not without reason. An American’s novel, written in French whilst he was living in Spain and involved in humanitarian missions around the world, from Afganistan to the Congo, is narrated by a sophisticated intellectual, the barrista, homosexual and musicophile Aooe, who has executed an unequivocal holocaust of the Jewish population in Western Ukraine. The action unfolds in the Soviet Union; conversations about Stalin, Bolsheviks, Jews, the Russian, Polish and Jewish question make up the lion’s share of the dense and sombre narrative, in which even the air smells of death. Aooe proves that, given his position, anyone would have acted in the same way, that anyone is capable of precise and methodical sadism, that no one is guilty, we just live in the worst possible of all worlds. You need intelligence to differentiate Aooe’s voice from Little’s voice, the devil’s logic from the novel’s logic. The fact that this serious, clever and wholly unpleasant novel is being read and discussed across all of Europe, proves better than the speculations of any intellectual the long-overdue necessity of new and radical re-thinkings of the tragedies of the twentieth century. And if the crisis forces us to think long and hard about unanswered questions, then we should be thankful to it, although we’d be better off without a crisis at all.
The range of genre literature has noticeably narrowed. Detective stories are surviving the depression, there are no thrillers (Charles Maklin, author of the great “Guardian”, whom I luckily managed to catch in Edinburgh, explained that it is time to create a new genre – realistic suspense – about what is happening every day, about what surrounds and overwhelms us). The vogue for serious reading has become a global phenomenon. A student at a talk in Waterstone’s Piccadilly called McEwan an intellectual lightweight
