The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  THE MAN WHO COULDN’T DIE

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

  Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

  Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

  Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

  City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

  Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France

  Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokur

  Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov, translated by Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy

  Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk

  Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein, translated by Andrew Bromfield

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Бессмертный

  © by Olga Slavnikova

  Agreement by Wiedling Literary Agency

  English translation copyright © 2019 Marian Schwartz

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54641-6

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Slavnikova, Olga, author. | Schwartz, Marian, 1951- translator.

  Title: The man who couldn’t die: the tale of an authentic human being / Olga Slavnikova; translated by Marian Schwartz.

  Other titles: Bessmertnyæi. English

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: Russian library

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018022924 (print) | LCCN 2018027118 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231546416 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231185943 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231185950 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Veterans—Russia (Federation)—Fiction. | Perestroæika—Fiction. | Soviet Union—Politics and government—1985-1991—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG3488.L35 (ebook) | LCC PG3488.L35 B4713 2018 (print) | DDC 891.73/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022924

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Mark Lipovetsky

  The Man Who Couldn’t Die

  INTRODUCTION

  Ressentiment Monsters

  MARK LIPOVETSKY

  I met Olga Slavnikova in 1987 or 1988. Back then we both lived in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg); she worked as an editor at Ural, the local “thick” and respectable literary magazine, and I was publishing my first articles in it. She had just finished a journalism degree at Ural State University (my alma mater too) and was launching her literary career, both as a prose writer (her first novella, A Freshman Girl, was published in 1988) and as a literary critic. We had many common interests—primarily the culture wars that were roaring around us—and quickly recognized each other as like-minded. The circle of young literati to which we belonged was mesmerized by the newly discovered continent of Russian underground and émigré modernist and postmodernist literature—from Vladimir Nabokov to Sasha Sokolov and Venedikt Erofeev—which started to appear in print after decades of censorship and about which we talked all the time.

  This was the peak of perestroika, and Olga was an active participant in the literary innovations of the time. One such innovation was a “special” issue of Ural (1988, no. 1), which published a few pieces of nonconformist prose and avant-gardist poetry along with a radical (for the time) political-economic article. Although it was the latter that brought national recognition to this issue (according to rumors, it was resold on the black market at a vastly inflated price), Ural continued to publish less conventional literature in a “magazine within a magazine” entitled Text, with a belatedly Structuralist chic. Although not entirely independent from Ural’s management, Text published exciting prose and poetry by young and not-so-young writers who would otherwise never have appeared on the pages of any Soviet journal. The novelty of this literature was not political, it was aesthetic—most of the works published in Text not only deviated from Socialist Realism (which nobody took seriously anyway) but also disregarded social realism and the classical realist canon—which in the eyes of readers and the literary establishment was a much greater sin than being anticommunist.

  At that time, however, nobody yet saw Slavnikova as a leader of the new literature from the Urals (or from Ural). This changed drastically after her first major novel, A Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog (1997). Published in Ural, it was included on the short list for the Russian Booker Prize. Furthermore, A Dragonfly became the year’s greatest literary sensation—critics and readers alike noticed the novel and praised it as one of the brightest debuts of our generation. This was the work where Slavnikova found her original style. Valentin Lukianin, a critic and editor-in-chief of Ural in the 1980s and 1990s, aptly writes:

  Everybody knows that a photo of the head belonging to a fly, mosquito, or dragonfly, when taken through a microscope, reveals a horrible and even fantastic monster. But this monster really exists, although we don’t recognize it in a small insect. In the same manner, Slavnikova placed normal and ordinary relations between intimates under a microscopic lens, and through this device, she discovered everyday Russian reality from such an angle that nobody has ever experienced.1

  Slavnikova’s newfound style paradoxically fused the lessons of traditional realism and radical modernism. On the one hand, Slavnikova is attentive to the everyday life of poor and socially marginalized people, especially women. On the other, she enlarges the details of their ordinary existence with such a powerful “microscope” that they turn into surreal symbols, and through this metamorphosis her prose exposes life’s frequently morbid undercurrent. This approach, however, excludes a necessary component of the Russian literary tradition, the writer’s compassion for her characters. Slavnikova is truly mesmerized by her monstrous “everyday people,” but with the fascination of a scientist, she keeps her narrative distance, never allowing readers to identify with any of her characters. Her “coldness” stands for an unblinking analytical position, for an acidic skepticism hostile to any sweet illusions. Such a distancing is critical for all her works, but especially for The Man Who Couldn’t Die.

  Almost all of Slavnikova’s subsequent novels would gain recognition and win literary pr
izes—the new style discovered in A Dragonfly proved flexible enough to absorb diverse themes and stories, all invariably associated with contemporary Russia. Her subsequent novel, Alone in the Mirror (1999), written while she still lived in Ekaterinburg, appeared in the prestigious Moscow journal Novyi Mir and won its award for the best publication of the year; her slightly dystopian 2017 (2006, translated into English by Marian Schwartz in 2012), which Slavnikova wrote after her move from Ekaterinburg to Moscow, received the Russian Booker Prize. Two of her latest novels—Light-Headed (2010, translated into English by Andrew Bromfield in 2015) and Long Jump (2018)—were both short-listed for the largest Russian literary prize, The Big Book, and the latter still has a chance to win it. The only exception is the novel that you are holding in your hands, The Man Who Couldn’t Die (or The Deathless in Russian), which first appeared in 2001, in the Moscow magazine October. Although it didn’t win any major literary awards, many critics consider it Slavnikova’s best and most accomplished work of literature—her true masterpiece.

  Furthermore, The Man Who Couldn’t Die has a cloud of a scandal around it—and what could be better? Slavnikova claimed that the authors of the famous German film Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) plagiarized her plot. Both works juxtapose dramatic scenes of early postsocialist transition with the figure of an immobile elderly person—the paralyzed grandfather, a former wartime scout, in Slavnikova’s novel, and the comatose mother, a former Party activist, in Wolfgang Becker‘s film. In both works, relatives try to protect their weak-hearted elders from the shock of the revolution and its consequences by maintaining the illusion that things are the same as before in the USSR and GDR, respectively. To support this illusion, both Slavnikova’s and Becker’s characters produce fake newsreels for home TV.

  Frankly, I don’t share Slavnikova’s concerns: I believe that the metaphor juxtaposing physical immobility and being stuck in the past and/or awakening in a different country was too obvious to anybody living through the postsocialist transition not to become a common trope. Furthermore, the radical differences between The Man Who Couldn’t Die and Good Bye, Lenin! are much more significant than their similarities. The latter is full of optimism and excitement around the long-awaited revolution, which is why the film became so popular worldwide, while Slavnikova’s novel tangibly delivers a sense of bitter disappointment—of what Nietzsche called ressentiment—in the fruits of the same revolution.

  The concept of ressentiment—inferiority and weakness compensated for through hostility toward others, be it the authorities, immigrants, liberals, or Americans—has been frequently used to describe the situation in post-Soviet Russia. In the words of the philosopher and cultural historian Mikhail Iampolsky,

  The peculiarity of the Russian situation lies in the fact that the entire society, from Putin to the last pawn, in an equal degree bears a sense of ressentiment. For Putin, ressentiment stems from the lack of acknowledgment for Russia and him personally as equal and respectable players in the world arena; for the pawn, it stems from a sense of helplessness before police, government officials, judges, and bandits. I think that the ressentiment-based fantasies of those in power at a certain point came into resonance with the ressentiment-based fantasies of ordinary people. And the world began to transform. The Ukrainian affair appeared to be a noble war against imaginary fascists. Russia’s isolation—its re-establishment in the rank of superpower and the plummeting of the economy—the growth of wealth and happiness.2

  Slavnikova wrote her novel in the very beginning of the Putin era, in 2000–2001, but the atmosphere of ressentiment that she captures allows us to detect seeds of the future resonance between “ordinary people” and post-Soviet authorities. The novel’s plot develops along two parallel lines. One follows the meager life of a family fully dependent on the pension of its patriarch—the paralyzed and bedridden Alexei Afanasievich. The other traces the semilegal and outright illegal schemes and tricks accompanying elections in a small industrial town—probably somewhere in the Urals, but, actually, anywhere in Russia. As is clear from today’s perspective, these two plotlines diagnose two major sources of social malaise indicative of post-Soviet ressentiment: nostalgia for the Soviet past and popular revulsion toward democracy and democratic procedures.

  Marina, the stepdaughter of the bedridden veteran and a journalist trying to win herself a place among the new power elite, connects both plotlines within the novel. But this link is almost mechanical; Slavnikova’s rich metaphors and leitmotifs establish much deeper connections between these two dimensions of the story.

  Each of the three central characters in The Man Who Couldn’t Die has their own web of leitmotifs; taken together, they manifest the existential, rather than the political or psychological, “taste” of the post-Soviet nineties. Nina Alexandrovna, Marina’s mother and Alexei’s wife, is shell-shocked by life under capitalism and perceives everything outside the walls of her home as a chaotic confusion of phantoms and chimeras. She lives as if sleepwalking, and even the people she sees on the street look “blurred and slightly translucent.” Although her daughter, Marina, is much savvier about the new ways, she also perceives people as being “like shapeless specters.” Despite all her futile efforts to gain a stable and decently paid position as a journalist, she remains alienated from reality. The metaphors surrounding her variegate the motif of the void: “She was surrounded by a strange, lifeless emptiness”; “The world around her was surprisingly empty”; “ ‘There definitely isn’t going to be any money today. Beyond that, I don’t know,’ Marina said in a raspy, muffled voice into the nearest microphone, feeling an emptiness behind her”; “The emptiness before her was infinite, and she could only wade into it further and overcome the familiar resistance of a dimension without qualities”; etc.

  Lost in the fog of ressentiment-bound nonreality, Nina and Marina join efforts to create—ostensibly for the paralyzed Alexei but in fact for themselves—a comforting illusion of Soviet “stability,” of things remaining unchanged forever under the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev (whose tenure in power exceeded Stalin’s but was shorter than Putin’s). Despite its obvious cheesiness (“It’s a prop right out of a Hollywood movie about Soviet life”), this home spectacle has a tangible effect on its participants. Alexei acquires a visible similarity to Brezhnev, growing into a symbol of the past era himself: “It turned out that Alexei Afanasievich had always been the creator and center of Soviet reality, which he’d managed to hold onto a little longer; and now this reality, squeezed to the size of their standard-issue living space, retained its permanence, inasmuch as its pillar had not disappeared.” The force of her stepfather’s “encapsulated time” helps Marina realize that nostalgia for the predictable monotony of Brezhnev’s Stagnation has already emerged as a powerful and wildly popular political force among the post-Soviet “electorate”: “Apofeozov’s chief opponent in the true elections…was, of course, not Krugal but Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.” Furthermore, while trying to strengthen her loyalty to the election campaign, Marina “voluntarily made herself the heart of the paralyzed era, the heroine of a Soviet film; in retrospect, she almost came to love the Young Communists and her fictional Party membership.”

  The novel’s subtitle is a reference to a famous Socialist Realist novella from 1946 about a wartime pilot who continues to fly despite losing both legs to amputation after a battle injury. Marian Schwartz has translated this phrase as “The Tale of an Authentic Human Being” rather than “A Tale of the Real Man.” I can understand her choice—the epithet “authentic” (dopodlinnyi) and its derivatives frequently appear in the Russian original of the novel in association with the paralyzed veteran. Even Brezhnev’s portrait becomes more authentic in his proximity: “the general secretary, whose death had here been reversed and whose longevity had become a natural feature that only kept increasing, had somehow borrowed an authenticity from Alexei Afanasievich that Brezhnev himself had never possessed.”

  Seemingly resonating with her characters, Slavnikova does n
ot spare the satirical details in her depiction of post-Soviet public life—and especially of the elections—as a parade of clumsy simulacra. In a particularly hilarious scene, a charlatan named Professor Kuznetsov runs a “healing” séance in support of an election candidate. (I have a strong suspicion that Slavnikova wrote this scene “from nature”—a certain Kuznetsov enjoyed incredible popularity in the Ekaterinburg of the 1990s for selling various torture devices, such as clusters of small but very sharp plastic nails intended for standing or even lying upon—promising to heal all ailments and pains.) However, despite its “factographic” nature, this episode reads like a paraphrase of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous séance of black magic from The Master and Margarita: the same barrage of lies and illusions, the same willingness of the audience to accept any phantasm for truth. Slavnikova’s explanation of the impact of these illusions is different, but the tone she adopts in this section is recognizably Bulgakov’s:

  Professor Kuznetsov’s experiments (his female patients, after spending time with him in the hotel, returned covered in gooseflesh, as if they’d been rolled in semolina, and for a while would express themselves exclusively in verse) promised each person not only longevity and an extended youth but in essence the rescinding of their past life. Each could now start over, from childhood if they liked, which is what happened with many.

  Unsurprisingly, against the background of post-Soviet political chimeras and childish phantasms, the Soviet past starts looking more real, more trustworthy than the current reality. But this is what people want to see, this is exactly how the optics of ressentiment works. Slavnikova’s text goes beyond this optical illusion. She tries to expose the nature of this “authenticity.”

  What is so authentic about Alexei Afanasievich? His wartime past? It is embodied in the image of the noose made of strong silk rope with which he strangled a large number of German soldiers during his night raids. He carries this noose around his neck like a cross and never washes it, so that “the scout had a raw red stripe on the back of his neck, where the filthy noose rubbed his spine…In damp weather, Alexei Afanasievich would itch terribly from that crude mark forever after.” Alexei preserves the skill of re-creating his deadly noose out of any string as the last reflex of his paralyzed body.