The Piano Man

Reading novels, good or bad, about the grimy puritanism and murderous paranoia of the Stalinist era in Soviet Russia is rather like being stuck at a party with a man who insists on giving you a blow-by-blow account of his wife’s losing battle with cancer while confined in a mental hospital. You feel natural sympathy, but you wish to God you were anywhere else. As the writer Compton Mackenzie remarked, when asked, toward the end of World War I, if he’d seen D.H. Lawrence’s “Look! We Have Come Through!,” a cycle of love poems addressing the wartime tribulations of Lawrence and his wife Frieda: “I’m very glad they’ve come through, but I don’t see why I should have to look.”

Worse, because of the need for subtle indirection on the part of anti-Stalinist Soviet authors under Soviet censorship (what George Orwell labeled doublethink, and Czeslaw Milosz Ketmanism), a tradition of symbolism and allegory developed in Russian fiction that persisted long after the firing squads and gulags that had necessitated it were (in theory at least) done away with. On top of this, the Western habit, generated by the Cold War, of wildly overpraising any Russian literature attacking the Stalinist regime is likewise still alive and well, at a time when the fall of the Berlin Wall is ancient history and a young generation is beginning to ask, who was this guy Yeltsin anyway?

Andrei Makine immigrated to France from the USSR in 1987, at the age of 30, a year or two before the final collapse of Soviet communism. In a characteristically symbolic gesture of rejection, he writes all his works in French. “Music of a Life” deals with the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the gray misery and poverty of Soviet society (the kind of thing that earned the USSR the reputation of being the only Third World country with a first-strike capacity) and the brutal suppression of artistic individualism. Just to brighten things up, he starts his narrative in April 1941, so that we get a gut-wrenching slice of the German invasion, complete with corpse-littered battlefields.

“Music of a Life” is packed with allegory, involving, among other things, trains and trainstation waiting rooms as a paradigm of the dire condition of Homo sovieticus. It has also been praised to the skies by French critics: The newspaper Le Figaro asserts that “Makine is without doubt the greatest living writer.” It is a tribute to his literary skill, and to the unobtrusive sensitivity of his translator, Geoffrey Strachan, that despite all these strikes against him, Makine succeeds as well as he does. The greatest living writer he isn’t. His narrative bristles with improbabilities, his characterization is at times simpliste almost to the point of caricature, but he does have a remarkable ability for evoking (mostly depressing) moods and scenes; his entire novel is steeped in an atmosphere of dulled fear and hopeless resignation.

His hero, Alexei Berg (probably Jewish, though this isn’t stressed), is a young pianist about to give his first concert in the spring of 1941. His parents are privileged (they own a large car), but two days before the concert he comes home to find them being arrested. He panics, takes the car and flees: first to his professor, who (he sees just in time) is about to turn him in; then to an aunt in the Urals, where the war catches up with them. For reasons unclear, he steals the clothes and identity of a dead soldier, shopping around the battlefield for a near-match (one of the most powerful scenes in the book), serves two years at the front and ends up as a general’s driver.

Back in Moscow he is taken up by the general’s teenage daughter, who--block that irony--wants to teach this simple soldier the piano. His identity revealed (he can’t help playing well), he’s packed off to a gulag for 10 years and to a Siberian labor camp for several more. He tells his story to an anonymous narrator on a train--where else? We leave him as a prematurely old man in Moscow, drifting around on no visible means of support and attending--more irony--a young pianist’s debut concert. Against all odds, this disjunctive tale of a ruined life held me from start to finish. But I still don’t see why I should have to look.

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From ‘Music of a Life’

It took him two days to find his man, his identity donor. His searches in the village devastated by fire had been fruitless. He had come upon several survivors and had to make himself scarce. On the road he found mainly the bodies of women and children or of men who were too old.

At the end of his second day of walking, he went down toward a river, and on the bank, at the entrance to a bridge demolished by shelling, saw a complete battlefield: dozens of soldiers to whom death had lent poses that were sometimes extremely banal, like the one of a body with its legs buckled beneath it, sometimes touching, like that of a young infantryman, his hand outstretched in an orator’s gesture. Hiding in the undergrowth, Alexei waited, listening intently, but could hear no moaning. The evening was still light; the faces of the dead, when he finally dared to approach them, were exposed in defenseless simplicity ...

Far away from the others, his head washed by the current of the stream, lay a soldier. The one he had been looking for. Alexei began to strip him ...