Vassily AksyonovRezensionen

Although I suppose I already knew this, it becomes very clear while reading this book that the communist regime did not only promote the proletariat, it obliterated, as best it could, the intelligentsia. In doing so it eliminated those whose work was of the highest caliber, who were masters and virtuosos of their art, whatever that art happened to be. What a great loss for Russia.
I didn't finish. It was too bogged down, too many names, too dismal, and my life is too short. I have, however, put it back onto the tbr shelf rather than in the get rid of pile. It isn't a bad book, but possibly just not the right one for me right now.

Todo empieza en 1925, en la dacha de los Grádov. El padre, Boris Nikítovich, es un brillante cirujano y un maestro respetado; la madre, de origen georgiano, se consagra a su casa, a sus hijos y al piano; el hijo mayor, Nikita, es un joven oficial superior del Ejército Rojo, su hermano Kiril, es un bolchevique, es un amante de la Revolución y del Partido; y su pequeña hermana Nina, una joven poeta de enorme belleza. Lenin ha muerto y el Partido está dividido entre los seguidores de Stalin y los miembros de la oposición liderada por Trotski. Los Grádov se verán implicados, a su pesar, en la Revolución y esto marcará el comienzo de un largo proceso de transformación que abarcará sometiendo a todos los miembros de la familia.

1925-1953, la famille Gradov sous trois générations pendant l’ère stalinienne. Dans la capitale, sur les champs de bataille ou au goulag, ils sont médecins, poète, peintre ou général, ils adhèrent au régime en place, l’utilisent ou le subissent. Un roman fleuve (plus de 1600 pages) historique et romanesque, non exempt de longueurs ou de passages difficiles pour qui n’est pas bien au courant des pensées et faits historiques, mais qui emporte le lecteur tel un ”Guerre et Paix” du 20e siècle.½

1925-1953, la famille Gradov sous trois générations pendant l’ère stalinienne. Dans la capitale, sur les champs de bataille ou au goulag, ils sont médecins, poète, peintre ou général, ils adhèrent au régime en place, l’utilisent ou le subissent. Un roman fleuve (plus de 1600 pages) historique et romanesque, non exempt de longueurs ou de passages difficiles pour qui n’est pas bien au courant des pensées et faits historiques, mais qui emporte le lecteur tel un ”Guerre et Paix” du 20e siècle.

Great idea, terrible outcome. Pseudo-intellectual pretensions. I expected so much more from this book. Not a single plausible, or at lease semi-believable, female character.

An uneven trilogy of historical fiction that covers lots of Soviet history through one family. I disliked a lot of Aksyonov's techniques -- particularly his invocations of "War and Peace," which he clearly wants readers to compare his books with -- but I finished all three books. A friend had the same reaction.

The subplots weaken in the second half of the trilogy, but the books and, oddly, the rather cardboardy characters, are still very memorable, particularly in their ability to show how the Soviet regime perverted its message and its people. "Moscow Saga" isn't literature that will last, but it can be quite absorbing.

Sent to limbo after about 100 chaotic and repetitive pages.

In the fall of 1925, eight years after the Revolution, Moscow appeared to be returning to a certain sense of normality, at least the veneer was there. The NEP had allowed a partial reversion to private ownership and there were those who believed there would be a return to capitalism. However, beneath the surface, change was coming. The difficulty was that everything was secret, so no one knew which direction to choose. As Karl Radek had said, "The Party can't seem to get out of the habit of working underground."

The Gradov family was one that had survived intact and thought themselves well suited to continue to flourish. The head of the family was one of the best surgeons in Moscow. His wife was a talented pianist from Georgia. His elder son Nikita was a Brigade Commander and his second son Kirill was a theoretical revolutionary. Daughter Nina was a university student who fancied herself a proletarian. The family home was a dacha straight out of nineteenth century Russian literature. However, readers know what the family cannot and so the reader wonders "How could such a family survive unscathed through the whirlwind to come?"

Aksyonov leads the reader slowly into the wreck, perhaps sensing some resistance. Dr Gradov was summoned to a consultation on the health of Mikhail Frunze, the Commissar for Defense. Frunze had devised a plan for military reform. Unfortunately for him, it involved reducing the Army by over half a million men and getting rid of political commissars; not a plan likely to be approved by the new regime. The Party decided on an operation to treat Frunze's ulcer, against the advice of doctors such as Gradov. Frunze died on the operating table. Gradov's dossier grew larger.

So the cataclysm began for the Gradov family and for the country. Collectivization, purges, army reorganization, more purges, show trials and still more purges. On and on it went, a revolving door of favour:

In the textbooks of Soviet history schoolchildren, under the supervision of their teachers, smeared ink thickly over the names and pictures of the old heroes, now become enemies. The next year the textbooks were handed down to younger students, and no one remembered the names that had vanished into the inky night. No shortage of heroes was felt, though. Life went on giving birth to a new hero almost every week.

Nikita and Kirill wound up in different camps for different reasons. The doctor and his wife struggled on. Her Georgian connections proved both useful and problematic.

Aksyonov relieves the oppression with a device he calls Intermissions. In these, plants and animals are revealed as reincarnations of characters from the Russian past. The family dog emerges as Prince Andrei. A ficus and geranium argue heatedly. Other Intermissions quote snippets from the western press, suggesting that all is not transparent in its reporting either.

From Time magazine July 7, 1941
The Finns are unhappy that Russian phosphorus rounds incinerated the forest around Khanko Lake, in which they loved to relax in the summer...

The reality is never far off though, as Aksyonov details his characters' lives in the camps and prisons, including a chilling description of the latest in execution chambers, circa 1938. Characters from history such as Frunze appear often.

Years of horror take the reader to October 1941, when desperate times called for truly desperate measures. General Zhukov went before Molotov, Kaganovich, Beria, Voroshilov, Krushchev and others to convince them that in order to stop the German advance, the army would need among other things, to ...sharply and immediately increase the complement of upper- and middle-level officer cadres. I request that this be reported to Comrade Stalin immediately.

The higher-ups immediately understood what Zhukov had in mind and suddenly found themselves engrossed in their folders and documents...

For what Zhukov had in mind was the release of such officers from their scattered camps, those at least for whom there were still records.

War and Jail make up Volume II of this novel. Aksyonov has used a quote from War and Peace, The human mind cannot grasp the absolute continuity of motion, as an epigraph for this second half of the novel, in which there is no rest until the book ends with the end of WWII. The novel's ending leaves scope for a sequel, but that did not happen.

Blurbs on this edition almost all referenced War and Peace as a comparator for this novel, but I think Dr Zhivago seems more apt. There is a sense of futility and beaten down acceptance here which is absent in Tolstoy. Aksyonov's mother was Yevgenia Ginzburg. She and his father Pavel Akysonov were both sent to camps for Trotskyite connections when Vassily was only five. He eventually wound up in an orphanage as a child of "enemies of the people" before eventually being reunited with his parents. This gave his writing an experience and desperation Tolstoy could not have known.

Aksyonov himself was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1980 after he left for the US. He regained it in the Gorbachev era. He seems to have official sanction for now, with a Russian literary award in 1994, and the production of a Russian TV miniseries of Generations of Winter in 2004. Aksyonov died in Moscow in 2009.

I really wanted to like this book and expected that I would – fat histories of generations of the same family usually appeal to me and I’m very interested in the Soviet period. It went by quickly and the writing was fairly smooth, but a bunch of little issues continued and became bigger and more annoying until they almost overwhelmed the positive qualities of the book, and by page 400 of 600 or so, I was a bit reluctant to pick it up. In a “Such bad food, and the portions were so small!” comment, my copy, by Vintage, had only the first two books of the trilogy and I’m pretty torn about whether I want to read the third – would like it to find out what happens, but there were so many irritations.

The story follows the liberal, well-off Gradov family from the 1920’s, when the NEP (a limited return to capitalism after the war communism of the Revolution) was taking effect through the brutal collectivization of the peasants and the Great Terror in the 30’s and ending after World War II. Generous and talented father Boris is one of the best doctors in the Soviet Union and Mary is a cultured wife and mother, loving and supportive if somewhat nagging. Eldest son Nikita is married to the beautiful Veronika and rising fast as an officer in the military, having participated in several decisive battles in the revolution. Kirill, the second son, is a dour true believer Bolshevik, and Nina, the baby and only daughter, is a free-spirited Trotskyite poet. The story is fairly engrossing, but some issues appeared early on and never stopped.

1.) There’s a serious Forrest Gump feel in the way the characters interact with history. Bulgakov and Mandelstam pop up at parties. Boris treats Stalin when no one else can do it, and he is involved in the shady death and cover up of a (real-life) military officer - an affair that splits Nikita and his friend Vuinovich apart. (As competent military officers, they regularly scorn the amateur Klim Voroshilov, a Stalin crony.) Mary is Georgian so there are scenes in Tblisi where their duplicitous cousin hangs out with Lavrenty Beria and later comes with him to Moscow (where he would eventually become the hated and feared head of the NKVD). Later, Nikita seems to singlehandedly save Moscow and he’s almost portrayed as the most important and competent general (he’s willing to argue with Stalin when even Zhukov is suggesting he go along with the program, his fate is similar to that of Rokossovsky and Nikita is regularly mentioned in connection with him, but he has more to do than Rokossovksy {Konstantin Rokossovsky was a marshal arrested during the purges – he was badly beaten during interrogation, losing multiple teeth, and is sort of the go-to example for “military officer later released who had to work with his oppressors”}). Kirill sees the brutal communal farm collectivization up close. I kept thinking that maybe someone would be at the Katyn massacre for the WWII sections – didn’t happen, but then it gets a mention and there’s a Polish section that goes in a predictable way (it’s Nikita vs. everyone else).

2.) It almost felt like the book was written by an American or British author, as opposed to Aksyonov, who was Russian, born in 1932, and the son of one of the best-known Gulag memoirists, Evgenia Ginzburg. Many of the references feel obvious, not quite correct, or something that makes sense with the hindsight of the present. (For example – the characters don’t like the current Soviet literature, but are excited by translations of Hemingway, Joyce and Proust – rather obvious “good” Western authors; a physicist refers to exciting work being done by Einstein, Bohr…..and Oppenheimer {I’m not sure if he’d even know Oppenheimer at that period, and it felt too foreshadow-y}; some characters go to see WWII-era German movies, noting stars such as….Leni Riefenstahl???? I didn’t even know she’d been an actress, but looked it up – she hadn’t been in anything for several years before the war and was directing. It really seemed like a case of Nazi movies = Riefenstahl). It’s clear that the good characters are associated with Western liberalism and culture. There’s even an American reporter as a POV character at the opening of the book. Some of the slang feels very American, although that could be the translation.

3.) I was very sick of reading about how beautiful Nina and Veronika were and how many men were lining up to be in love with them. As it kept happening, it got more ridiculous and laughable. At the beginning, Nina has a group of men orbiting around her who are all in love with her. Veronika, though married, also has many admirers. Even as the years pass, the author is careful to note multiple times that they were both still very beautiful. There are some men who remain in love with the women for years, even after marrying other people, and there are other men who fall in love with them at first sight. There’s even this – Kirill marries a very unattractive woman (whose unattractiveness and bad hygiene is mentioned as much as Nina and Veronika’s beauty) and when he is away from her, while masturbating, “Kirill never had visions of his wife but rather of a slim, dark-complexioned girl who resembled his sister, if she wasn’t actually her.”

4.) In general, the characters were rather one note with a lot of Mary Sue-ism for the Gradov family members and a slightly squicky stereotyping for other characters. The Gradovs are generally all intelligent and sympathetic, and even the bad things they do are cases of them having no good choices, plus they feel really bad about it. Mary doesn’t have that much to do – she is a stereotypical housewife/stay at home mom, who is loving and caring, but usually nagging and worrying. (Like the other “good” characters, she has Western tastes – her Chopin playing is a family touchstone.) However, Boris, Nina, and Nikita seem to be the best at whatever they do. Boris is the best doctor in the Soviet Union. Nikita may as well be the best military officer, for all that is shown. Nina, besides having binders full of men after her, frequently gets her poems published (I didn’t really like any of the ones that were shown, but very likely could be the translation) and ends up writing a much-loved and popular song on a lark. Kirill, at first, is rather unsympathetic – he’s the family killjoy and also a bit of a poser, but then he has an epiphany and realizes the other Gradovs are right. (In fact, there are several character epiphanies, where they realize the Soviet system is all wrong.)

There are a few characters who are just bad – rather predictably, they are all spies and NKVD members (besides Stalin and co, but that goes without saying). Besides the Gradovs, there are a few other perfect characters, and they are all in the same mode – liberal, Western-influenced men who are the best ever at their thing. Then there are some characters who are…well, good when it comes down to it, and they do care about the Gradovs, but they just aren’t as sympathetic as them. Veronika’s looks are part of her stereotypical character as a shallow, materialistic woman. She’s really concerned with clothes, things, and men being in love with her. She does love Nikita, and is mostly depicted as not at fault for all the bad things that happen to her, but her character stays the same for the whole book. Cecilia, Kirill’s wife, is the opposite – a true believer Communist intellectual, who – since she is an intellectual – is also described as unfeminine, ugly, with poor hygiene, who makes an embarrassing mother. Also, whenever she was there, there were usually references to her being Jewish. This happened with the few other Jewish characters as well. It was part of a slightly uncomfortable, two-faced attitude that seemed to be from the author – “Anti-Semitism is bad, but these Jewish characters are really Jewish, with all these Jewish characteristics!” A lot of the other female characters are pretty stereotypical as well – one who is a passive sex object, a femme fatale, throwaway rape victims. The few characters who have peasant backgrounds are also less sympathetic than the Gradovs – one is one of the evil characters, another is rather anti-Semitic and does considerably worse things (although he gets an epiphany scene as well).

5.)Weird chapters about animals and plants. Although there are occasional references to War and Peace, the author seems to want to distinguish the book from the 19th century format, so adds some modernism in the form of quick quotes from newspapers. Okay, that’s fine. But then there are chapters from animal and plant POVs, sometimes they are reincarnated characters – Lenin is reincarnated as a squirrel. At best, this doesn’t add anything, but at worst, it comes off as ridiculous and puzzling.

I didn't hate the book, but was torn about whether it was more good than bad or more bad than good. The period it is set is interesting, and for the most part the writing flowed well, but I'd have a hard time recommending it.

Esta novela nos sitúa en los años cincuenta, poco antes de la muerte de Stalin, y nos traza al lienzo de una época, de un "tiempo irrazonable".

It was tough to get into this book, and at about the 100 page point I considered stopping altogether, thinking that in my review I would have to speculate on the amount of vodka Aksenov consumed in writing it. However, I kept at it, and let go of trying to pin things down and fully understand everything I was reading, and let it flow instead. At around page 200 I was glad I did, because a framework started to emerge through the haze, and because the book was so insightful into Soviet life under Stalin and in the generations which followed.

Written in 1980, near the end of the Soviet Union, Aksenov provides a glimpse into some of the horrors of Magadan, one of Stalin’s prison camps that that he and his mother had been exiled to in real life, and his cynicism with the realities of Moscow in the present. At the same time, however, it also reflects his optimism in the Russian people (the “enigmatic Russian soul with an innate potential reserve of goodness”), and a glimpse into change for the future. It’s a unique voice, and Aksenov writes in an ambitious, fantastic way – references to Russian history and the West abound, and the style is one of the beat poets, Joseph Heller, or Thomas Pynchon. The plot is nonlinear, and large portions of it are dream sequences, or perhaps not, depending on your interpretation.

My take on what it’s “about”: a young boy named Tolya von Steinbeck sees his mother arrested and taken to the Magadan, a part of the Dalstroy organization of forced labor which existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin from 1932-1953. The events of his childhood are traumatic and include torture and rape. He grows up not only prone to abusing alcohol, but with mental health problems. He spawns five alter egos in his mind – a laser scientist, sculptor, writer, surgeon, and saxophone player, all with the same patronymic as his, Apollinarievich. He (and they), struggle against repression in the Soviet Union of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, and Soviet aggression in Czechoslovakia in 1968. There two “beady eyes” of the prison officer and sadist Chepstov are a recurring theme, and represent the constant feeling of surveillance and a reminder of the cruelty of the Soviet government.

Aside from the difficulty of getting into the book, my only knock against it is that it seemed misogynistic to me. There is a steady stream of commentary about women’s bodies and descriptions of “whores” associated with many (most?) of the female characters in the book. I’m all for the sex (ahem) but there is a cheapness and immaturity in the many varieties that appear througout that is off putting. And at its worst, it has a father raping his daughter, and the daughter immediately having a couple of orgasms in the process (please…). The father justifies it to the girl by revealing to her that he’s actually not her biological father, but ughhhh. There’s also a father who lusts after his daughter’s body and gets sexual pleasure out of spanking her, hoping she’ll have a D on her report card so that he’ll have a reason to. Maybe it’s brazenly honest in the sense that it happens, and those are small segments of a giant, ambitious book, so I don’t judge the whole because of these incest scenes per se, but wonder if a woman would dislike the book for its overall attitude towards women, and pass that along as a caution.

Quotes:
On fashion in Russia (in my experience, still true!):
“She wears Italian shoes at sixty rubles a pair, and yet only makes eighty rubles a month. The riddle of these little lab assistants. A monthly salary of eighty, but they can buy shoes at sixty. One of the great mysteries in Moscow.”

On the world of poets:
“Then we admitted that it was this world, the world of calm little loners, the world of the poets, that was the true world, and that the other one, huge and juicy as a swollen blister, was false, ephemeral, and already reeking of decay.”

On the ‘split world’ under communism:
“The mob followed them into the middle of Red Square, but stopped there. This marked the beginning of the zone of influence emanating from the sacred buildings of the Kremlin, and to enter this zone with thoughts of commerce on one’s mind would have been sacrilege. Even the children in the mob knew the difference between GUM on one side of the square and the Kremlin on the other.”

And:
“When returning home, for instance, from Japan via Poland after a three-month voyage in foreign seas you suddenly saw the crosses of the Kremlin merging in unnatural but somehow unbreakable union with the symbols of atheism, and you were seized by a spasm of patriotism, for you were looking at the lips and nipples of your Motherland, which still, despite a dreary coating of propagandist stucco, gave off the smell of milk.”

On Russian (and American) idealism:
“All you Russians have this barbaric, profoundly provincial feeling about your country. You’re always pretending to be some sort of shield for Europe, always droning on about the same old messianic idea. It’s all nonsense! There’s no such thing as the ‘mysterious Slav soul,’ just as there’s nothing left of the ‘great American dream’ in today’s world either. There are just two monstrous octopuses, two gigantic bags of half-dead protoplasm, which can only react to external stimuli in two ways: by contradiction or by absorption. And it finds absorption, of course, much more pleasant than contraction.”

On Russia vs. Europe; this after the author says that “it is characteristic of any serious Russian book to tackle serious problems”:
“In Europe there are frivolous democracies with mild climates, where an intellectual spends his life flitting from a dentist’s drill to the wheel of a Citroen, from a computer to an espresso bar, from the conductor’s podium to a woman’s bed, and where literature is something almost as refined, witty, and useful as a silver dish of oysters laid out on brown seaweed and garnished with cracked ice.
Russia, with its six-month winter, its tsarism, Marxism, and Stalinism, is not like that. What we like is some heavy, masochistic problem, which we can prod with a tired, exhausted, not very clean but very honest finger. That is what we really need, and it is not our fault.
Not our fault? Really? But who let the genie out of the bottle, who cut themselves off from the people, who groveled before the people, who grew fat on the backs of the people, who let the Tatars into the city, invited the Varangians to come and rule over them, licked the boots of Europe, isolated themselves from Europe, struggled madly against the government, submitted obediently to dim-witted dictators? We did all that – we, the Russian intelligentsia.”

And this:
“It’s always like that in Russia. Even the most mediocre modernist in the arts, an admirer of everything in the West, who damns everything home-grown, is secretly convinced in his heart of hearts that the world’s greatest talent will emerge from Russia, and it only has to be nurtured for it to burst forth and astonish the whole world no less than the first atomic mushroom cloud or ballistic missile.”

On food (I thought this was funny but ate far better over there):
“…we bought some food at the market and sat down cross-legged under the glass wall of the supermarket to enjoy our aristocratic breakfast. We spiked the beer with pepper vodka and orange liqueur. Between drinks we ate pieces of a strange, soapy, deep-water fish and Roquefort cheese, that putrid, shit-tasting dropout from the otherwise wholesome but dull family of Soviet cheeses, and little ‘hunter’ sausages, stuffed with the revolting lard used by the Consumers’ Union, and semiprocessed kidneys made from Indian poultry, and strawberry mousse made of Rumanian oil.”

Lastly on a memorable night:
“That night was a very special night in my life, a night like a beacon. After such a night you could go into the wastes of Siberia, you could even go to prison, but the glow of that night would continue to brighten your life for a long time.”

And on the other hand:
“What are they worth, those blurred, faded nights, days, and evenings of ours? What indeed are our blurred, faded memories worth at all? What price our whole past life? And did it ever happen at all if we remember so little about it?”½

And I thought this was just some book about stilyagi. Oh sure, jazz is an intermittent theme, and more importantly a stylistic touchstone--grunting jazz, howling jazz, stripped of its stifling mythology and infusing the many textual repetitions and elaborations and doublings-back as well as the bloody poetry with which Aksyonov represents the wordless horn solos of Samsik Apollinarievich Sabler. All our protigoni are Apollinarieviches--the scientist Kunitser, the writer Pantelei, the sculptor Khvastishchev, and the surgeon and mystic Malkolmov--all bestriding colossi--except one, the author-analogue Tolya (multiply execrated, jew and bourgeois and german and sissy and dreamer and camp-rat, raised like Aksyonov by a mom in the gulag)--but the secret is that all these Apollonians are corroding and all their arts, like Samsik's jazz, are just the efflorescence of desperation, the sound that escapes a human being squeezed to death.

Sounds grim? Not at all! Where Aksyonov convinces me most of his genius is where I compare him to whom I take to be his nearest capitalist analogue, Thomas Pynchon--if Pynchon's thing was drinking till he was fucking till he was laughing till he was weeping rather than wearing a bag on his head, he could take part in a radiator vodka threesome with Aksyonov and Dylan Thomas. Nobody will ever say Soviet Russians didn't know how to have fun in unpromising circumstances after reading this. I like the jokes refracted: the "those who write on bathroom walls / roll their shit in little balls" ditty that I know from Kurt Vonnegut shows up here like a weird little piece of home; mercenaries drinking "methylated and piss" ( you dilute it so it doesn't kill you) and roaring around the early pages like a sketch comedy bit jumping its rails and going oh so very right; the scene after that where everyone's a fake identity or a KGB agent trying to figure out if everyone else is speaking a code or a joke or what and what the punchline is. This book is funny.

Poetry with lines like "beloved academician, shall I never, never taste your rod?" is funny. Slapstick with armoured vehicles is always funny. Let's go back to the mercenaries for a minute: at first I thought I was gonna interpret them in this boring mythemic way as like Warren Zevon characters, but I think for Aksyonov they're more than that--the mercenary ethic is the most available counterstance to the shitmix of totalitarian fear, the Marxist promise of a better world, and the sick certainty of a mundane, wasted life that reduces more than one character in this book to tears of despair at their failure to decolonize themselves from the need to help build what they all know is a lie. That is Aksyonov at his most sincere, I think.

But the mercenaries are like a tonic for that--supersoldier tough, in it for themselves only, and rolling around the world (and through time? Did the dust clear on a scene from the Thirty' Years' War somewhere in there?) kicking the shit out of everybody. When Kunitser, or is it Pantelei and the very Pynchonian American Patrick Thunderjet encounter them in Katanga and in a weird kind of transubstantiation, take their souls or whatever, it's sort of a torch that gets passed: from here on in what we're gonna see is the efforts of a bunch of careening geniuses to do what they want and make the fuckers pay. I've gotten used to thinking of the elevation of neoliberal self-actualization to a moral eschatology the preserve of only a few ex-Ostbloc lights who aren't implicated in the selfish the way we are: Vaclav Havel, Bulgakov. Perhaps Aksyonov belongs in that crowd, but if so, my god, he brings an extra-grimy brand of ostraenie to maintain an inch of breathing room between himself and coca-cola. He makes Moscow before the Brezhnev crackdown seem like the most out-of-control hipster artist alcoholic killer party of all. Dream of Europe. Punch you in the kidney.

Without posturing, though--most of the violence in the book is clumsy tension release, makes its proponents look goofy. The real violence and hatred come out in the sex and the longing. There was that thing going around from the Good Men Project or whatever about how men are hounds because they get taught that sex is the only way they can be physically tender, touch and be touched. I dunno if that's true in general, but it's certainly true for the Russians in this book. Everybody's got a little Tolya somewhere inside--just about the only redemption to be found comes from the single ever-shifting ever-squirming fountain-of-blood-in-the-shape-of-a-girl that goes by Masha with the perfect midriff and Nina with the jutting goat-breasts and Alisa with the lines of mortality in her neck. Inter alia. Wanting to be saved by loving, and loving by fucking, unites the fresh youth and the cynic intellectuals and the hockey thugs Alik and Kim and the monstrous Stalinist holdover Cheptsov. When that doesn't work, occasionally Jesus flits in incongruously only to let himself out a minute later, but mostly there is booze. The one scene where political revolution gets a look in as a source of meaning is one of the most awkward and sad in the book.

So I guess I think this is about the failure of dreams and how each of those dreams dissected turns out to have been just the dream of having a life worth the ticket. And what we get instead: "I'll tell you about the thought that didn't want to lie and the tongue that told lies about the thought." "A new shattering form of jazz that would rock both America and Poland back on their heels." You cringe with sincerity and sympathy. But lest it get all too downtrodden, there is a last epilogic flight on the town, one that starts out in a kind of weird stilted afterlifey version of Paris with cutout Hemingway and then takes off into Margarita-on-her-broomstick territory, only with less joy and more plain relief. A weirding wording way and and a frantic need for there to be something inimitably beautiful waiting for you if you run or write or blow or drink long enough, and the inkling that it won't dull the existential pain quite enough. This book is full of goddamn fucking heroes for trying though.

One of my all-time favorites

The back cover boasts that this is the best Russian novel since 'War and Peace'. I must dispute this simply because the Russians have produced so many other good novels since then. Nevertheless, this is a grand work.

This is a big sweeping novel, with generations of a Russian family interposed on a backdrop of the turbulent years of the early Russian Revolution all the way up to the mass slaughter of WW2 and fall of 1945, in triumph and fear and exhausted victory. It is something of a cross between 'Doctor Zhivago', 'August 1914', and 'Life and Fate'.

My book seemed almost incomplete at the end. I learned this was because only two volumes of a trilogy were translated for this edition. A bitter disappointment. I yearn for more.

An exemplary book, and a vastly underrated one. 4.5 stars.

Le avventure di 3 ragazzi e una ragazza che vanno a lavorare lontano da casa, la ribellione verso il sistema che li vorrebbe studenti o impiegati nell'edificazione del comunismo. Non mi lascia particolari emozioni.

Le avventure di 3 ragazzi e una ragazza che vanno a lavorare lontano da casa, la ribellione verso il sistema che li vorrebbe studenti o impiegati nell'edificazione del comunismo. Non mi lascia particolari emozioni.

Le avventure di 3 ragazzi e una ragazza che vanno a lavorare lontano da casa, la ribellione verso il sistema che li vorrebbe studenti o impiegati nell'edificazione del comunismo. Non mi lascia particolari emozioni.

Le avventure di 3 ragazzi e una ragazza che vanno a lavorare lontano da casa, la ribellione verso il sistema che li vorrebbe studenti o impiegati nell'edificazione del comunismo. Non mi lascia particolari emozioni.

A very uneven and difficult at times book -- like pretty much all of Aksyonov's work, even his most widely recognized best, it's still deeply enjoyable and memorable as an experience. It grew on me the second time around. Yes, as much as I was racing to get the dark and outright weird Part II done and over with, a week after I finished it I found myself missing the ironic and playful Part I. So I started listening to it a second time, and my rating went up by a full star. Yes, full disclosure: I am listening to the audiobook version, in Russian. The narrator is fairly brilliant compared to some of the other Russian narrators I have heard.½

This travelogue/memoir starts out strong and hits a wall around page 120. From then on, the book sinks into discussions (rants?) about feminism, racism, and other sentiments. Written in the first person, Aksyonov refers to his initial trip to the US, it's effect on his Soviet citizenship and work, and walks the reader through his emigration to the US. Traveling with his wife, the first hundred pages paint a funny and real picture of America, how Americans consider Russians everywhere from a Texas diner to a Washington DC dinner party. There are great stories and jabs at Communism. Written before the fall of Communism, and when the Soviet State still existing, the references to the State are easily ignored as the truths are timeless. Only slightly narcissistic, the author is happy to poke fun at himself at other times. A wonderful work before it groans away from interesting stories and into fluff.½

Van Vasily Aksenov las ik in 1998 de roman Московская сага, die in het Nederlands verscheen onder de titel Generaties van de winter. Van die roman was ik erg onder de indruk. Toen ik afgelopen januari dit boek in een boekhandel in Moskou zag liggen, heb ik dan ook geen moment geaarzeld of ik dit boek zou kopen.

Lees verder op deze pagina van mijn boekenblog.½

Well written and entertaining book about a family going through the perils of Post revolution Russia. With wit and pathos Mr. Aksyonov creates a vivid portrait of those times.

My second Aksyonov, having read the excellent The Burn a couple of years ago. I wasn't quite so excited about The Island of Crimea, but it was still a very good read.

The book plays with the idea that the Crimea (here and island, not a peninsula) resisted the Bolsheviks in 1917, and has become an outpost of democracy for Russian people. There is an analogy to Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. The story follows the Crimean political elite, who identify themselves as Russians and are pushing for stronger ties, even reunification, with the USSR. Aksyonov uses this device to examine the interactions between the political forces at work in the USSR (and on his semi-fictional island), such as socialism, nationalism and capitalism. His focus is on Luchnikov, a powerful media magnate, pushing for stronger bonds with Moscow, as he confronts intrigues both at home, and in Moscow.

The Island of Crimea is awash with Aksyonov's trademark satirical bite. The story borders on the absurd in many places, but still produces a fairly stern examination of the forces for political and social change in the USSR. There were perhaps an overabundance of pointless sex, and a few too many narrative threads for a relatively short book, but its main thrusts still hit home. Indeed the relative silliness of some of the book makes the emotional lows even more painful, as Aksyonov (mostly) successfully treads a fine line between farce and satire. It was a fairly unique take on 1970s Soviet socialism, and worth a read for that alone. Aksyonov is a writer who I have planned to read again for a long while, and The Island of Crimea certainly didn't disappoint.

An epic novel revolving around the fictional Gradov family and set in the times before during and after the second world war in Soviet Russia. The patriarch of the family one Boris Gradov is a renowned surgeon--the rest of the family includes his wife Mary, his two sons Nikita--an apolitical high ranking army officer married to the beautiful Veronika--and the very adamant communist Kirill. They also have one daughter--a free spirit would be poetess Nina.
Generations of Winter is meant to be a kind of a snapshot of what life was like under the Stalin dictatorship as the various members of the family are faced with arrest, imprisonment and humiliation and then war--the family more or less maintaining a solidarity and dignity despite numerous crises. Aksyonov is particularly effective in showing the pernicious effect of the 'organs'--the states internal security system in controling every aspect of social life outside of the family structure. In this respect though the Gradov's come off almost as some kind of special case--granted more than the usual leeway mostly because of the outstanding abilities of Boris and Nikita.

To go further--it's extremely well plotted and concieved. Tolstoyan in scope--like many of the best Russian epics--comparable in a way to Dr. Zhivago or to Rybakov's books--Children of the Arbat or Fear. For readers who like that kind of writing and who like to read about Russia you won't go wrong with this one.½

I see a couple of other readers gave this book good star ratings, but I'm afraid it hasn't worked for me. I think I get it: the often phantasmagoric accountings of the lives of intellectuals and others within the stultifying world of Soviet socialism; the pulse of life that one saw in the avenues taken to relieve the frustrations of a system that at best discouraged innovation or non-conformity, and at worst crushed it; the ironies and the cynicism that were required to live within the system but not be part of, or surrender to, it; the mean, nasty, brutish lives that many led. But it quickly became too much of a sameness for me.