“Boris Stepanovich, thank you…” I stammered.
For the next forty awkward minutes, I made pleasantries, told Aksyonov’s joke about the leaky boat, and elaborated upon some union gossip and intrigue. As I left, Sorokin’s promise continued to reverberate through me. I knew the piece of property to which he referred. A ski trail ran along its edge, there was a fast, clear stream nearby, as well as what Lydia had once identified as a stand of lindens. I paused outside the room for a few moments, allowing my eyes to adjust to the light. The corridor was wide and airy, hosed and scrubbed down every several hours. Clinic 2 was in no way physically similar to the Rostov mansion, yet given the rotating population of the union’s corridor (Medved had died here; so had Yakov Baum), it was virtually another wing of the Secretariat. Sorokin had spent his whole adult life in the union, encased within its protective walls. It was foretold that I too would one day lie in this hospital, perhaps in the same bed that now held Sorokin’s carcass. I was thoroughly a union man.
Eight
Sorokin was eventually sent home for a long convalescence. Meanwhile, Marina’s novel approached like a distantly heard locomotive. And then it arrived and at a publication party in the writers’ union café, I was congratulated for “discovering” her. With an icy glass of whiskey in my right hand and a mentholated Rothmans in my left, I accepted the shower of compliments with the same equanimity as I might have accepted a soft summer rain. As for Anton, although he attended the party and received congratulations for being the first to publish the new author, he was no longer romantically involved with her. I knew that Marina had taken up with and dropped Vadim Andreyev, and had then performed the same indelicate operation upon Afanasy Malinin, who, leaning against the bar for support, his face drawn and his hair in his eyes, now looked much the worse for it.
The novel was well received: “a fresh voice,” “the cry of brave and wise youth,” “a vigorous blow against hypocrisy.” For a television interview, she wore a prim gray dress that luridly accented her figure. The camera caressed her. Marina spoke directly into it, to a cameraman with a hard-on. A nation of readers was stirred.
Marina had inscribed the copy she presented me with a stanza from the nineteenth-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev:
It was an odd, literary inscription to an ordinary, unliterary, anti-literary novel, which I read with growing disbelief. I had read worse, of course, but probably nothing worse that had been so highly praised for no easily visible reason. Contrary to acclamation, her literary voice was stale, her cry foolish, and her stances hypocritical. I counted those who must have been involved in the construction of Marina’s celebrity: not only Anton, but the chief editor of Sovremennik, the editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta and other journals, critics, and television executives. Could they all have participated in this gross sham? How could she be sleeping with so many of them—and not be sleeping with me?
The volume of the praise forced me to reconsider the novel, and to concede that, whatever its (many, fatal) faults, there was at least perhaps something engagé about the book, especially Marina’s satirical portrayal of a certain secondary character, a petty bureaucrat. It was Marina’s good fortune that her book was published just as the press began one of its periodic campaigns against “the bureaucracy,” a charade posited on the fiction that “the bureaucracy,” formless and faceless (save for a few carefully chosen scapegoats), was something independent from the Party. It was “the bureaucracy” that presented the greatest challenge to developing socialism; the Party needed to “redouble its efforts against the bureaucracy.” Although Marina’s novel was not in any way political, she developed a reputation as someone who could be political, a “reformist,” even a literary Young Turk.
Although my own novel was simply one of scores published that year and was intended for an entirely different audience, I sensed that it trailed in her wake. Given my status in the union, my first printing was much higher than Marina’s, but the novel wasn’t reviewed as prominently. Nor was I feted on television. As the weeks passed, several reviews appeared in the papers and literary journals, huffing their disappointment. The grievances conveyed by these reviews were consistent enough to be persuasive.
The gist of the complaints was that my novel, set aboard a Bering Sea icebreaker, was “ill informed” and “not genuine.” Indeed, a literal-minded review in The Baltic Shipman, by an active-duty mechanic, listed all its errors and solecisms, which evoked his compassion for my ignorance about marine diesel engines. It was shamefully clear to this and other critics that I had never set foot aboard an icebreaker.
Yet I never hid the fact that I had no experience at sea and no interest in going to sea. To write The Northern Lights, I had looked in books and talked with sailors in order to obtain a few details, but in the end many of these were discarded or even contradicted for the sake of the story. I was more interested in imagining an all-male community in close quarters in a ferocious climate, in bitter conflict and urgent cooperation, than I was in documenting anything real. I believed that the novel needed not to be genuine, but only plausible, so that any errors would not distract the reader from the main thing, the story.
This method of operation had served me well in my first two novels, set respectively in a Kazakh kolkhoz and in a motorized cavalry unit during the closing months of the Great Patriotic War. When I was an unknown writer, critics were unaware that I lacked firsthand experience of my subjects. Now inflicted with the knowledge that I was a Moscow intellectual, they squawked that they were gravely disturbed.
The most savage of these attacks was launched by Sergei Makarov, whose standing had been recently enhanced by a collection of his travel essays. He took apart my novel like a kebab, and the other idiots followed suit. Although my novel was nonpolitical, Makarov leveled a political charge: to write about workers without having lived among them, or “as far as we can determine” without caring about their “real historic triumphs” over hardship and backwardness, was a form of “literary colonialism.”
The single exception in this campaign was Marina’s long review in Znamya. Noting and, I suppose unavoidably, amplifying the criticism I had received, she absolved me of it. Marina conceded that my “pacing and characterization is weak,” that the plot “holds few surprises,” and that The Northern Lights was “a men’s novel,” but she admired “the vivid portrayal of human frailties and human passion aboard R. Krilov’s ghostly death-ship.” Her strain was apparent in every line. In the end, her condescension made her review the most galling of all that I had received. Everyone knew, of course, that I had been indirectly responsible for getting her work published.
In conversations with friends and in private dialogue with myself, I hotly defended the book, my ire leading me to make some extravagant claims for it, but when I descended to my desk, the arena of my ambitions, selfdoubt coursed through me like a fever. Upon setting out to write the novel, I had been unsure whether I would succeed in believably describing the work of the sailors aboard the icebreakers. Certainly I was not sure of every line, nor of every effect I had hoped to achieve. How could I be? Fiction is a gamble. The thought that I had failed intensified. The sales were very poor. No film was made. The plot at the edge of the woods remained as undeveloped as my critics said my novel’s was.