The Neverending Story

Endlessly inventive, irrepressible, un-classifiable, Vassily Aksyonov has been the bad boy of Russian literature for nearly four decades, thumbing his nose at good taste and respectability and celebrating freedom by uninhibitedly practicing it. The hero of his newest novel, Sasha Korbach, is the same kind of bad boy, a dissident icon of the Soviet ‘60s, founder of a theater troupe called “The Buffoons,” bard, actor, director, screenwriter and thorn in the side of the cultural authorities. When we meet him at the beginning of this book in the Pan-Am terminal of Kennedy airport, he has been let out of the Soviet Union preparatory to being stripped of his citizenship (this part of the story parallels Aksyonov’s own). It is 1982, and Sasha is 43, an “aging youth, a bald Muscovite, cultivating the dolce stil nuovo beneath a solid layer of obscenities.”

That “new sweet style” means different things at different points in the book and shows not much more coherence than the book itself. For Sasha it appears as a quality of experience, “a premonition of what we helplessly call true love,” “a thirst after inexpressible tenderness.” It is also the theme of a movie he dreams of making--”The Radiance of Beatrice”--about Dante as man and artist. At the same time, the narrator, “Vassily Aksyonov,” treats the term as a synonym for artistic freshness and freedom, Dante’s in the first place. “Our present chronicles,” he tells us, “even if only obliquely, and through a series of mirrors, both ideal and distorting,” are a reflection of this same style, “announced as long ago as the thirteenth century as nuovo and dolce.” But he also claims important Russian forebears in this connection. The book is saturated, not to say clogged, with literary references to them: Pushkin and Gogol, the avant-garde literature of the early 20th century (arrested by the revolution and resumed little by little in the decades following Stalin’s death). As for stylistic freshness and authorial freedom, they are invoked in this book as a matter of going on “however it suits us.” That “going-on” is, Aksyonov points out, fictional reality’s advantage over real reality: “In it, the author gives free rein to his caprices, for the sake of which he even risks his place in ‘serious literature.’ ”

There is no dearth of large themes in the book, many of which take the form of antiphonal riffs by Sasha and his distant relative, the fabulous and omnipotent American billionaire Stanley Korbach, who befriends Sasha and rescues him from obscurity. They spend hours discussing “Dante, Rabelais, Josephus Flavius, Ovid, the Roman Empire, and little Judea”--that is, aesthetics, grotesquerie, the mysteries of Jewishness, exile and barbarian power--not to mention mortality and sex and national character.

Episodes take place in New York, Los Angeles, Maryland, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Tel Aviv, the cosmos and Ochichornia (a state bordering on California, Oregon and Nevada, home of vast ostrich ranches where those bizarre birds are bred, slaughtered and processed). Sasha goes from rags to riches via casual drug dealing in a Westwood parking garage and then via the sponsorship of his plutocratic namesake, whose Soros-like Fund he winds up representing in Moscow at the time of the failed coup (described at length) that elevated Boris Yeltsin to leadership. He regains his celebrity in post-Communist Russia. He gets a theater of his own at Pinkerton University in Washington. He finds ideal love with Stanley Korbach’s stunning archeologist daughter Nora (who runs off for a while to become an astronaut). He loses her. He finds her again. Stanley loses his financial empire. At the end all the principals (and many of the minor players) come together in Israel, where Nora has discovered the preserved body of Zeyev Kor-Beit, 2,000-year-old ancestor of all the Korbachs and a dead ringer for Sasha--thus obscurely resolving the obscure concern with genealogy that has taken up a good deal of space in the book.

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What, finally, do these caprices produce? A text whose chief purpose seems to be to keep itself in business: not to tell a story (we are given only discontinuous episodes) or to explore character or ideas or societies or places (though there is a lot of fragmentary attention to all these things) but simply to keep going. The narration is freewheeling as my dictionary defines that term: “free of restraints or rules in organization, methods, or procedure.” Such freedom was a tonic against the background of Soviet prescriptions and expectations; divorced from that political context it can look dangerously like self-indulgence.

More than once Aksyonov refers to his ideal reader as HEPR (“Highly Esteemed and Perceptive Reader”) and calls him or her his co-author. That seems to be a warning against passive reading; what more it could mean is not exactly clear. There are allusions galore to be decoded, parodies to recognize, cultural and linguistic in-jokes for both Russian and Anglophone readers. But recognition is still a long way from co-authorship. And even recognition will be partial in most cases.

An important formal model in this book is jazz. (The hero’s beloved even produces a son whose middle name is Jazz.) From it, Aksyonov takes improvisation as his creative principle and riffs as structural units. The riffs here are bravura passages that parody or echo or nod to the work of an extraordinary number of writers. Rabelais and Gogol and Mikhail Bakhtin, the 20th century theorist of “carnivalization,” recur most frequently, but readers may sense Thomas Pynchon and Ian Fleming, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie and Andrey Biely and Andrei Bitov lurking as well, along with a ragtag set of conventions borrowed from commedia dell’arte, comic books and television serials.

Sasha, the eternal outsider as artist and part Jew, is an eternal adolescent as well. Chaotic by temperament, buoyed by prodigious amounts of machine-like sex and drinking, he bears his vision of beauty through the noisily chaotic world of this noisily chaotic narrative. “The New Sweet Style” is not quite his story because it is not quite a story at all. Heroically translated by Christopher Morris, it is a good-natured but ultimately wearing torrent of tricks and observations and imaginings on some serious matters, many of them already familiar from Aksyonov’s previous work. Less freedom would have helped. And more editing.