Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

If you’re interested in the mark that communism, especially its Russian variant, has left on the century, and if you’ve read Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” and Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” on the cataclysmic, all but cosmic aspects of the Russian Revolution, you might want to have a look at the down-to-earth anatomy of everyday Soviet-style intrigue in Yuri Trifonov’s “House on the Embankment” (1976). The plot centers on a denunciation, and because the denouncer is a graduate student and the denounced his advisor (and, to make matters more piquant, his potential father-in-law), the novel may at first glance seem analogous to a David Lodge campus novel. But Trifonov’s tale is a grim one--all the more so because 25 years earlier he had written an archetypal Socialist Realist novel called “Students” in which he depicts the denunciation of a professor as the most natural thing in the world. If you’ve read Solzhenitsyn’s naturalistic account of the Gulag, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” you might want to try Georgi Vladimov’s “Faithful Russian” (1974 in samizdat, but not published officially until the Soviet Union was in its death throes), which views the same labor camp world from the point of view of a guard dog. Clearly allegorical--the Gulag stands for Soviet society ideally regulated, the dog for Soviet man ideally trained--the novel treats issues of obedience and responsibility that go beyond the time and place it evokes so powerfully. Both works are well represented in English by Michael Glenny’s fine translations.