Katherine Brabon

his year’s Vogel Award winner, The Memory Artist is a departure from the kind of Australian themed books that we have become used to with this prize. Recently the award has brought us some really impressive books, novels which have tackled important issues such as Aboriginal dispossession in Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party; Soviet interference in Australian affairs in Document Z by Andrew Croome; and the ethics of following orders in After Darkness by Christine Piper – but all these novels would have been eligible for the Miles Franklin Award too because they have presented Australian life in any of its phases. But The Memory Artist is set entirely in Russia, almost entirely in Moscow and St Petersburg, and the novel explores the process of recovering the memory of Stalinist repression. Brabon has tackled a large canvas for her award-winning novel.

Repression. I have used this entirely inadequate word to summarise decades of Stalin’s violence against his own citizens. Unknown millions died in the wake of collectivisation and the Great Purge which took place in the 1930s. As Stalin consolidated his power, not to be relinquished until his death in 1953, a climate of terror descended. Rivals, dissidents and intellectuals fell to an ever-expanding network of informers, and they disappeared without trace, either to the gulags or to ‘psychiatric’ institutions, or else were shot and buried in mass graves. After Stalin’s death there was a brief period of liberalisation known as The Thaw under Kruschev, but it didn’t last long and in 1964 Brezhnev took power and a repressive cultural policy was restored.

Brabon’s novel begins with the birth of its narrator Pasha in 1964, covers his childhood during the Brezhnev Freeze, and explores the flowering of hope and optimism as Gorbachev introduced economic reforms (perestroika) and new freedoms under ‘openness’ (glasnost). When it’s 1986, Pasha is twenty-four. He thrives in the new atmosphere in Moscow. He goes to street protests on the Arbat (a pedestrianised street in central Moscow); he listens to music that used to be forbidden; he gets to wear jeans; and with his girlfriend Anya he plans to research and write the history of repression. Both he and she have parents who were victims of the Freeze, and Pasha has childhood memories of covert dissident meetings in his mother’s apartment. Now he can tell the story, he thinks.

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