The Soviet Union Is No Joke : SAY CHEESE! <i> by Vassily Aksyonov translated by Antonina W. Bouis (Random House: $19.95; 404 pp.; 0-394-54363-7) </i>

Vassily Aksyonov tells his story of Moscow life of the 1970s as an adventure yarn about a group of dissident photographers who, in spite of KGB schemings, produce an “underground” photography album , “Say Cheese!” and, having failed to publish it officially, smuggle it to the West. In flashbacks between the actions we learn life stories of all the participants of this enterprise, spearheaded by the ringleader of the group, Maxim Ogorodnikov, who walks recklessly through life on a tightrope between his seven ex-wives, his numerous lovers and colleagues, some of whom are KGB informers. His mother’s apartment on Gorky Street is full of old Bolshevik memorabilia. His stepbrother, a Soviet journalist stationed mainly abroad, is also a KGB general assigned to the propaganda department.

The hero’s physical strength and sexual prowess, his reckless determination and the sheer energy he always exudes make him a natural leader among his friends who, brave and honest as they are, cannot match Ogorodnikov’s ability to tackle with the same panache as he does any dangerous confrontation with the authorities. In the course of expanding the official norms of artistic freedom, he makes his way from the basement studios of Moscow’s “underground” to a loft party in New York’s SoHo. As a result of his James-Bondian behavior, he is eventually deprived of all privileges associated with the Soviet elite. That incenses him so much that he braces himself for a head-on collision (in both the symbolic, and the literary sense) with the KGB. Crippled in a car crash masterminded by KGB operators at the end of his life journey, the hero does not lose his sense of moral superiority.

This tragic finale is a logical consequence of the profusion of cars that crops up from every corner of Aksyonov’s book. Each and everyone of them, be it a KGB surveillance vehicle or a friend’s banger, is described by the author with feverish obsessiveness and a loving attention to detail regardless of the appropriateness of the occasion. The same absurdly inappropriate attention is given, say, to the hero’s clothes, especially to those with a foreign trade mark. The scarcity of goods on the shop shelves means that the opportunity to dress decently or to drive a decent car is the only proof that one belongs to that exclusive class of people who have access to the system of distribution of goods that others in the Soviet Union would not get for any amount of money in the world. Such access is granted to those who are either loyal to the party and system, or related to and affiliated with those who have already passed the exams and received the certificate of being ideologically kosher. Thus, the material aspects of Soviet existence, having acquired an ideological dimension, become part of the spiritual life of the country. Aksyonov’s characters with material goods is meant to demonstrate that this corruption of spirit has encompassed the entire country. Nobody’s immune. Everyone is either a scoundrel or an outright murderer and informer. Those who survive are changed beyond recognition. Ogorodnikov’s life story is the epitome of such change.

In the blurb Aksyonov is quoted as saying that the character of Ogorodnikov in “Say cheese!” is a “composite” of various persons he has known, but acknowledges that he “does look like me, just a little.” Intentionally or not, Aksyonov’s protagonist emerges from the novel as a rather unpleasant individual. Having read about Ogorodnikov, the reader might expect that once outside the Soviet Union, in the West, away from the accursed Soviet system, without its apparatchiks and lackeys to blame for his own mistakes, the hero would realize his own personal inadequacies. But no, not yet. With an amazing, motherly loyalty to his creation, Aksyonov is always at hand to provide him with emotional assistance to extricate himself from compromising situations.

The world outside turns out to be no better than the Soviet prison. Paris emigre life is run by the Cold-Warmongers who exploit every remark accidentally uttered by Ogorodnikov to whip up anti-Soviet hysteria. New York swarms with shady publishers and greedy gallery owners anxious to make easy money by capitalizing on the suffering of the Russian intelligentsia. This ignorant mob is manipulated by a sinister Alik Konsky. “Everything in his hands. He’s a universally recognized authority on Russian photography. Didn’t you know that in Moscow? Just imagine, he’s started this snob idea in New York that Russian photography requires translation into Western languages . . . . And if you dare say anywhere that it’s all bull, you immediately become an Eastern Barbarian and are sent off to the second rank.”

If the figure of Ogorodnikov “just a little” resembles Aksyonov, the portrait of Konsky is undeniably that of the poet Josef Brodsky. In principle, there is nothing wrong in such direct borrowings from life--and Brodsky’s life story is already a part of Russian history, open for everyone to borrow, free of charge--but Aksyonov’s assault would have been understandable and expedient had he meant to debunk this westernized Nobel Prize laureate. Regrettably, though, Aksyonov uses a distorted version of someone else’s life story to exonerate his own hero of existential crises that are not dissimilar to those suffered by the author. For that purpose, for example, Aksyonov makes his hero a victim of a conspiracy, orchestrated by Konsky and “his groupies” and not without KGB help, aimed to discredit Ogorodnikov artistically and to provoke him into an act of defection.

There is a lot of wishful thinking here. I wouldn’t have touched upon the subject had the autobiographical and semi-documentary nature of this novel not been openly publicized in the blurb: “In 1979 Vassily Aksyonov spearheaded the effort to create Metropol , the first uncensored album of Soviet literature. He was forced to emigrate the following year when his satirical novel, ‘The Burn,’ was published in the West.”

In real life, Aksyonov was accused by some of his comrades-in-arms of using “Metropol” as a publicity springboard--to jump over the Iron Curtain and land safely in the West. In “Say Cheese!” his photographic double is flying abroad, not to defect but to show the world that he is smart enough to outdo even the KGB operators. Disillusioned with the West, he returns to Moscow to face the music. It is his brother, a corrupt Soviet journalist and KGB man who defects to the West, while our hero is doomed to remain crippled in his motherland--again an allusion to a life story of a Russian novelist Andrej Bitov and his journalist brother Oleg.

In order to liberate his novelistic spirit and imagination, Aksyonov employs a number of devices, the main one of which is to present Soviet literature and the life of the Moscow literati, thinly disguised as that of the photography world. It works perfectly well as a witty metaphor at the beginning but slowly the parable becomes repetitive and over-strained. When Ogorodnikov arrives in New York, he discovers that, under the influence of the gifted manipulator, Konsky, in all major publishing houses our negatives are treated with this idiotic translating developer, a mixture of potash and chili sauce.”

Ironically, that remark about “idiotic translating developer” becomes a self-parody when applied to Aksyonov’s novel itself. Every portrait in this action-packed “photo-album” is treated with “a mixture of potash and chili sauce,” to blur the resemblance to a living prototype. Even Moscow geography and the names of the streets are slightly distorted to fit the style of an allegory, to distance the reader from the genre of memoirs into which the author is constantly slipping. Fortunately or not, these aspects of the novel will be lost on the American reader, who will also be relieved of the task of coping with the horribly outdated jargon, a brat-pack lingo of 1960s Moscow, spluttered out on every page with the generosity of a child with a bottle of ketchup (or chili sauce?). What remains is Aksyonov’s nostalgia for the sense of camaraderie, with much boozing and swearing, being adored by aging girlfriends and hated by the Party mob.

The hero’s pseudo-populist, folksy, bad guy’s artificial manner of speech was employed in the 1960s by Aksyonov and his mates with the aim of distancing themselves from the vulgar crowd as well as from the newspeak of officialdom--of which, in fact, they were the most privileged part. That is, probably, the real tragedy behind Aksyonov’s attempt here to extricate himself from the rest of the Soviet literary Establishment and to set the record straight. The “Metropol” enterprise was, in fact, not “the first uncensored album of Soviet literature,” as described in the blurb, but indeed the first abortive mission to reform the literary Establishment from the inside, by official means. It is the intimacy of the inside information about the establishment that makes Aksyonov’s account so remarkable. It is an emotional description of a bureaucratic mechanism in which Aksyonov was a prominent cog. The heroic deeds that Ogorodnikov and his lads commit on the pages of the novel say more about the harshness and stupidity of the Soviet officialdom (thoroughly exposed many times before) than about the tragic character of their predicament. Their tragedy is that they think they’ve become martyrs of the spiritual liberation of the nation, while in fact they’ve simply lost the privileges associated with their social position.