These eleven short stories continue Lebedev’s explorations of history, memory, evil, and survival, glowing with his mysterious, mystical imaginings. Antonina Bouis’s beautiful translation makes me wish I read Russian to better appreciate how she chose the perfect word “crackling” to evoke the rags of charred and torn flesh and skin of dead soldiers on a train. Or Lebedev’s sense of an eerily derelict barn, “filled up with emptiness, thick, fermented to the point that it was no longer emptiness but the presence of absence.”
Objects – often buildings – are powerful presences, trapping various men (the characters are overwhelmingly male) in their histories from which they cannot escape: a judge is haunted by a stray dog who birthed puppies under the porch of his childhood home; an obsolete carved ivory holder for calling cards; the strange resident of (or, more properly, under) a cluster of dachas; a red typewriter used to spew propaganda across the bordering Socialist Republics; commandants of the Kremlin and Lubyanka and Stalin’s own dacha still imprisoned by the shadows of the places even after The Boss is gone; the book never written by a disgraced writer; the manager of an isolated train station; a carefully secured embassy undermined by the existence of a plaza, a religious group, and a song. I confess to utter bewilderment at some of the stories, but the magnetism of Lebedev’s language and imagery (his experience as a geologist shows here, with rocks and mountains imbued with meaning and sometimes menace) kept me reading.
I’m glad Lebedev lives in Berlin now. Even as he writes with a focus on the Soviet era, his evocations of a nation gone horribly wrong surely put him at risk in today’s Russia, as we watch history repeating itself. A powerful voice and magnificent writer.
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