A Soviet sweep of drama, dream and history

Jerome CHARYN’S dream life must be exceptionally rich. Author of nearly 40 books -- from knowledgeable police novels to picaresque tales of the Bronx, nymphomaniacs and Pinocchio; nonfiction books documenting his fascination with the movies, Broadway and pingpong; memoirs of his immigrant Jewish family; and distinguished short fiction and essays -- he now rewards his readers with “The Green Lantern,” subtitled “A Romance of Stalinist Russia.”

The novel comprises a swift progression of plottings, connivings, double-crosses, death by execution, death by revenge, suicides, ardent yearning, malevolent and other kinds of lust, all circling around a bizarre but inspired Moscow production of Shakespeare’s climactic tragedy “King Lear,” starring an illiterate nonactor playing the doomed king with Stalin on the scene as a stalwartly tearful critic and murderer.

Yet, like the best dreams, this story carries trackable burdens from history: the secret police, prisons and plotters, Maxim Gorky’s poisoning, the tragic fates of the great writers Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, the reverberations of both corruption and righteous madness that underlay the ideals of Soviet Communism. To treat the Soviet experience as a kind of hopeless romance turns out to provide a fresh perspective on a long-running tragedy. (Much borscht, blini, salty cucumbers and midnight pleasure are consumed along the way.)

Many of the grotesque events depicted here concerning “the mousetrap on Strangler’s Lane” (an off-the-mainstream theater in Moscow) and its actors are documented in historical records. Surely this “King Lear” is an imaginary masterpiece, but I’m sorry I wasn’t there for the performance.

Gradually the play is revealed as a perspective on the actual ruler of the Soviet Disunion. Of course, Stalin’s daughter was not a faithful Cordelia; Stalin did not howl his griefs on the heath -- he arranged for others to howl their pains in his place. He was a lover of theater and literature, at least in his own opinion, which according to himself and everyone around him was infallible.

In order to join his condemned beloved, the hulking Ivanushka begs Stalin to be sent to the gulag. In Soviet history, this happened. Love fills the interstices of the struggle to survive in nightmare times. A pining lovesick writer, both a prisoner and a secret police officer, is also a treasurer of the eternal values of art. A mime is a Chekist informer. Stalin’s wife killed herself because, as Charyn writes, “she believed in the Revolution and he believed in himself.” We know that a passing observation -- “The State owns the facts” -- is backed up by the madnesses of Soviet science, genetics, culture and the talent for extracting heartfelt confessions to imaginary crimes.

In this novel, the ‘60s tradition of black humor evolves into what could be named Red humor. Of course, this is not new in the Russian experience; Gogol, Bulgakov and an exile like Nabokov created despairing absurdities that apply to the world, not just Russia.

Like them, Charyn also knows that “the old love game went on and on and on,” a simple statement in a book of rococo and burlesque that can pierce the heart of a reader. One of the ways to live with the memory of tragic times is to laugh if you can. Charyn can.

Herbert Gold is the author of, among others, the novels “Fathers” and “A Girl of Forty” and the nonfiction book “Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth.”