PUSHKIN HOUSE
Andrei Bitov, translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987
371 pp., $22.50
It is a strange fact that by the time Western readers become acquainted with the work of a contemporary Soviet writer, its author has usually either moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, or (as in the tragic cases of Vasily Shukshin and Yuri Trifnov) died.
In Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House, which has just been published in the United States by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, we have the unusual experience of reading a novel whose author is alive and well and currently residing in Moscow.
Andrei Bitov, who was born in Leningrad in 1937 and graduated from the Mining Institute, is renowned as a short-story writer after the Leningrad tradition, which emphasizes a classical purity of style. A collection, Life in Windy Weather, was published here by Ardis in 1986. Pushkin House, which seventeen years after its completion still remains unpublished in the Soviet Union, is Bitov's masterpiece. It is the story of Lyova Odoevstev, the clever, cowardly, charming scion of an aristocratic Leningrad family of literary scholars.
The novel (after Tolstoy's autobiographical Childhood, Adolescence, Youth) is divided into three parts. The first section portrays Lyova's privileged childhood in the forties and early fifties, centering in particular on his rivalry with his father and his fateful encounters with the various relatives and family friends who are slowly trickling back from Stalin's labor camps. Each of these returnees is at once a stirring if harsh relic of pre-Soviet days and a moral exemplar (rejected by Lyova) of such virtues as loyalty, clear-sightedness, truthfulness, and self-respect.
In this first section's crisis, Lyova learns that his grandfather, Modest Platonovich, who was purged by Stalin and whose school of literary analysis Lyova's father has risen to prominence by denouncing, is in fact alive and back from the camps. The young Lyova has become a glib adept of his grandfather's now-rehabilitated writings. He goes to visit the old man, but finds Modest Platonovich a crude, nasty drunk who delivers to his grandson a searing harangue about the slave-mindedness of Lyova and his generation. Lyova, hungry to curry favor with this eminent stranger, babbles denunciations of his father, to whom Modest Platonovich has refused to speak, but the aged scholar throws the boy out in a rage.
In Bitov's cynically astute windup of the first section, Lyova and his father collaborate, after Modest Platonovich's death, in editing his work for republication, thus acquiring in the relaxed atmosphere of the thaw a reputation for "daring" at the expense of a man who by his living example had brutally exposed son and grandson's moral failings.
The second section of Bitov's novel is devoted to the young Lyova's romantic career: his tormented obsession with the vulgar cheat Faina; his dallyings-on-the-rebound with the worthy Albina, whose hopeless passion for him is cruelly parodied by his own pursuit of Faina; and finally his battle-in-the-soul with his old schoolfriend and rival Mitishatyev, an
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