For some people, to be the object of murderous attention is better than getting no attention at all. It is no wonder that neglected American writers have envied their Russian colleagues! As the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam noted, the Russian government cannot be said to neglect the country's writers, since it has murdered so many of them.
Even in the more "vegetarian" period that came after the death of Joseph Stalin, a major novelist like Vassily Aksyonov could find himself hauled before Nikita Khruschev on stage in the Kremlin in front of the assembled Politburo. The angry bear-like premier waved his heavy paws threateningly and roared his displeasure at Mr. Aksyonov's whole generation. It is hard to imagine even Lyndon Johnson doing that to, say, Norman Mailer.
Mr. Aksyonov, born in 1932, belongs to the talented generation of Russian writers associated with "The Thaw," a brief summer of relative leniency that warmed the arts and private life in the late '50s and early '60s. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Sinyavsky and Joseph Brodsky all had a chance to bud and even bloom a bit then, before the bitter ice of tyranny came back.
Starting off as a doctor, Mr. Aksyonov became an exuberantly prolific writer of essays, novels, and plays that were hopefully, charmingly obsessed with youth. In love with travel, women and American jazz, Mr. Aksyonov, who has taught at Goucher College, has been compared to J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac. He became more and more experimental, combining the traditional magic of folklore with the more modern magic of Vladimir Nabokov and John Dos Passos -- but he never abandoned the Tolstoyan lust for the texture and heft of reality. He wore some of the gaudiest plumage of any of the Russian phoenixes of his generation and was considered the head of the Russian avant-garde.
Like many of the beneficiaries of The Thaw, he was eventually forced to leave the Soviet Union -- in his case, in 1980. Renowned for his novels "The Republic of Crimea" and "The Burn," he is now an amiable, all-curious denizen of Washington's Adams-Morgan district, whose multi-ethnic vitality he has praised in his American memoir, "In Search of Melancholy Baby."
Humor and wild grace
Mr. Aksyonov's work, despite its modernist irony, gives off an energetic decency, a rainbow lilt of steady sanity, the dependable light of humane humor and wild grace. But unlike Kerouac and Salinger, Mr. Aksyonov was born in the depths of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. His parents were victims of that terror, and both spent time in prison camps.
His mother, the historian Rugenia Ginsburg, shared her Siberian exile with her young son. In her memoir "Journey Into the Whirlwind," she insists that the ability to recall and recite poetry may have preserved both her soul and her body. Poetry may not, after all, be impractical -- especially when the "law of the jungle" stupidly prevails.
And yet, in a way, Vassily Aksyonov has never been more ruthlessly realistic than in his new, ambitious historical novel "Generations of Winter." Supposedly in the tradition of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina," "Generations of Winter" gives us a richly appalling vision of the years of the most intense Stalinist terror, between 1925 and 1945. Vladimir Lenin had died, and the even more bloodthirsty Stalin was starving any hope that the vitality of early Soviet art and life could survive.
Family life
The novel covers the period of Mr. Aksyonov's early childhood, and there may be a bittersweet picture of his own family in the image of the warmly bourgeois Gradov family, though details differ considerably. The family is headed by a distinguished doctor and his Chopin-playing wife, and their kindly stability is in tragicomic contrast with the roller-coaster romanticism of their poet-daughter Nina, as well as the revolutionary ideals of their sons. And then there is the naive Marxism of Cecilia
Rosenbloom, who marries into the Gradov family.
This period may parallel Mr. Aksyonov's own adult experience of The Thaw and its disillusioning aftermath -- though without the earlier period's genocide.
It may be that "Generations of Winter" is really a diabolic parody of Tolstoy. After all, how could Mr. Aksyonov, the vibrant modernist, write a traditional generational novel, one of many written by Soviet writers in the 20th century -- novels that are often ersatz versions of the more authentically inspired 19th-century tomes? Is Mr. Aksyonov competing with the more bearded, more Tolstoyan, far more conservative Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? Is he driven by moral and artistic desperation to thoroughly botanize upon his family roots?
Assuredly, the novel's narrator strides like a sad but fairly cool conqueror over vast geographical, historical and moral territory. We get almost jokey descriptions of the struggle between grim Stalinists and the more flamboyant Trotskyites.
All ideological camps seem to be represented in the Gradov family itself. We get grisly peeps into the Kronstadt rebellion and the collectivization of agriculture. We get stereotypes of humanity that become more human as the novel progresses. We lunge across the immense Russian continent, from the evil of Stalinist Moscow to the remnants of southern warmth and civility in the Georgian city of Tiflis, where poetry and festival survive for a few moments longer. We get precise, intolerable descriptions of torture, genocide and war. Stalinists and Nazis prove to be comrades in clownish bestiality. At the end of the novel, there is the fairly predictable Russian grasp at the golden straw of religion.
Animals speak
In spite of the sometimes excruciating, sometimes lyrical actuality of the novel, there is something marvelously odd going on. Ancient trees whisper together in benevolent conspiracy, trying to alter historical events for the better. A 400-year-old owl tries to silence a bad poet in the pay of Stalin. A squirrel is the reincarnation of a semi-repentant Lenin who, upon seeing one of the beautiful women of the Gradov family, thinks to himself: ". . . with a woman like that . . . I would not have descended to dictatorship."
An amiable dog aptly named Pythagoras (after the Greek philosopher, who believed in reincarnation) is itself the reincarnation of a victim of earlier Russian tyranny. But this wise old dog is also the soul of the Gradov family, an essentially happy family, a loving refuge in a terrible time. He mystically sustains the Gradovs as "the chief ideologist of such moments of harmony." The sweet telepathy of animals and nature in "Generations of Winter" seems to preserve the human soul in spite of human folly. Reincarnation is a way of mastering or transcending the evil of history. So is humor.
Half the family ends up in prison camps. The family is politically divided, with the parents possessing 19th-century humanist ideals of art and science and the children horribly knocked about the insane winds of 20th-century ideology.
All Gradovs are morally compromised. But their quintessence of harmony and love is real.
Mixing reality with fiction
Equally eerie in this novel is the way fictional characters mix with "real" figures of history, such as the futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov. (It reminds one of the movie "Who Killed Roger Rabbit?" in which cartoons shake hands with human actors -- and that's a compliment.)
The narrator's mind is like the telepathy of the animals and trees, merging almost tenderly with every character and then nobly withdrawing.
Such supernatural incursions into a historical novel suggest the wild, brief push of hope's spirit into the bleak reality of our time. Mr. Aksyonov himself explained it best in an interview. When he was asked whether one should believe in miracles, he answered: "Yes -- the only thing on which it is possible to count is a miracle; there is no other basis for hope."
Mr. Margulies is a poet and a curator who lives in Charlottesville, Va.
Title: "Generations of Winter"
Author: Vassily Aksyonov; translated by John Glad and Christopher Morris
Publisher: Random House
Length, price: 592 pages, $25