An America thoroughly fed up with both politics and political correctness slogs through a surreally dirty, bizarre, and finally insane election season—and, when the dust settles, finds itself in the grip of Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.
No, this is not a tinfoil-hatted take on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and its alleged Russian connections. It is a satire very loosely based on the 2000 election and called “How Putin Became President of the USA”—the title story in a 2005 book of “new Russian fairy-tales,” or political fables, by one of post-Soviet Russia’s preeminent writers and public intellectuals, Dmitry Bykov.
Today, with the Trump/Russia scandal clearly here for the long haul, Bykov’s fable has an eerie relevance—especially since American political life has lately taken on unnervingly Russian hues of profound cynicism, absurdity, and gallows humor. With his knack for exposing the absurdities of modern Russian life, Bykov is the Russian writer for our time.
Once, Russian literary idols with a political bent could find some fame in the United States. A half-century ago, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the cautiously semi-dissident Soviet poet who died earlier this year, hobnobbed with the likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg, and William Styron and headlined a performance in the theater at Madison Square Garden. Bykov, a figure of somewhat comparable moral ambiguity, has lectured on Russian literature at some top American schools, most recently UCLA—but outside of Russian immigrant communities and departments of Slavic studies, he remains nearly unknown in the United States.
This is partly due to the decline of literary culture—in America but also in Russia, where Bykov is well known but not a Yevtushenko-level pop star—and partly to the fading of Russia from America’s radar, at least until recently. It also has to do with the nature of Bykov’s oeuvre. All literature gets somewhat lost in translation, but much of Bykov’s writing is particularly Russia-specific. Some of his most widely read works are satirical poems on current events—essentially, columns in verse—that are Russia-focused, riff on classic Russian poetry, and abound in Russian cultural references (with some Western ones, from Shakespeare to Beavis and Butt-Head, thrown in). When Bykov’s 2006 epic novel JD was published in England in 2010 as Living Souls, a Financial Times critic declared it “utterly baffling” to non-Russians—though allowing for its appeal to a “determined reader.” And yet one such reader, British writer Steve Finbow, called the novel a masterpiece of “satire and magic realism rolled into one,” invoking Tolstoy, Martin Amis, and Gabriel García Márquez for comparison.
Bykov, who turns 50 in December, has a “How does he do it?” kind of résumé. He has penned 23 novels and short-story collections, 16 books of poetry, several plays, 4 biographies (including a nearly 1,000-page tome on Boris Pasternak), and several collections of essays. He is a prolific pundit in the independent Russian press and the surviving pockets of dissent on Russia’s radio and cable television, and an equally prolific public speaker and lecturer. He also teaches literature courses for high school students, which he has sometimes described as his most important job.
Living Souls is Bykov’s flawed but brilliant magnum opus. (The original Russian title has many possible meanings; Bykov’s stated preference is “living souls,” alluding to Gogol’s 1842 epic Dead Souls.) Like the Putin-in-America fable, the novel has an oddly prescient feel, depicting a somewhat futuristic world in which old paradigms are crumbling.
In the future depicted in Living Souls, a newly discovered combustible substance has made fossil fuels obsolete, and Russia with them. Now the world’s forgotten poor relation, it is torn by a chronic, farcically senseless civil war between two groups: Varangians (Vikings), who champion authoritarian traditionalism, faith, and militarism, and Khazars (a medieval Turkic people believed by some to be related to European Jews), who stand for secular liberalism, reason, and commerce.
Bykov’s grand concept is that these twin invaders have vied for control of Russia for centuries, keeping it trapped in a cycle of tyranny and thaw, revolution and reaction. (The true natives are mostly assimilated and oblivious to their ancient roots; many have an affliction that turns them into childlike, helpless drifters known as vaski—“Joes” in Cathy Porter’s translation, a close equivalent but also a somewhat jarring Americanism.) Since Bykov’s shrewd Khazars are clearly Jews while the brutish Varangians are the mass of Russians, the novel has been branded both Russophobic and anti-Semitic—charges that Bykov, who has a partly Jewish background, has only half-jokingly confirmed.
The sprawling plot includes a Varangian-Khazar double agent who is really a native seeking out others of his race; an adolescent girl’s travels with a wise, gentle elderly “Joe” she has befriended; and two star-crossed couples—a Varangian officer of native blood and a fiery Khazar fighter, a cynical provincial governor and a native shamaness—one of whom may have a child whose birth is prophesied either to end the world or to break the circle of Russian history. There are also two mysterious villages that may represent Life and Death.
Living Souls sometimes verges on cliché, especially in its portrayal of the natives’ peaceful, nature-loving ways. But it is also full of wonderfully inventive material, from darkly funny social satire—such as the “Salvation Plan” inviting people to adopt “Joes” as human pets—to fantasy steeped in fairytale and folklore. Porter’s translation is a mixed bag, but then, the book is a translator’s nightmare, given its poetry and wordplay, including the “native” dialect that gives new meanings to many Russian words. It is a challenging read, but for those interested in the intellectual landscape of 21st-century Russia, a rewarding one. (A less daunting sample of Bykov’s prose in English, a creepy supernatural/sci-fi short story titled “Mozharovo,” can be found in the 2012 anthology Read Russia!)
Bykov’s political poems, or poetical political columns, which can show him at his most brilliant and versatile, are almost all untranslatable. A rare exception is a recent one called “Ritual.” Occasioned by the infamous rumor of Donald Trump hiring Moscow prostitutes to defile a hotel bed where President Obama had slept, the poem (here in my own translation) gives this unsavory subject the unexpected twist of a reflection on Russian politics: “Yes, we have drunkenness, and crime, and need, / and vast dysfunction in our justice system— / but peaceful power transfer’s guaranteed / once the preceding ruler has been pissed on.” Noting that “there’s never been in Russia a regime / that wasn’t pissed on when its time was up,” Bykov concludes by predicting the same fate for the current regime—with “no shortage here of whores” for the task.
Like Russia itself, Bykov is full of paradox. While he belongs to the liberal opposition, he has a habit of saying things that rattle fellow dissidents—for instance, that Russia’s Communist revolution deserves some admiration as a grand idealistic project, or that the Stalin era had more integrity and character than the late-Soviet and post-Soviet years, with their flabby corruption and cynicism. Some of this is épater les bourgeois—Bykov likes to repeat a reader’s remark that he sees it as his life’s work to “run into a church screaming that God doesn’t exist”—but the contrarianism also reflects a genuine ambivalence.
The same ambivalence pervades Bykov’s attitude toward the West: While he paints a dark and grotesque picture of Russian life and scorns nationalist claims to superior Russian spirit-uality, some of his comments reflect a view of America and the West in general as dominated by dull, pragmatic ration-alism in contrast to Russia’s inspired madness. Yet some of his more recent writings, such as “Ritual,” hint at a convergence of the absurd. At a poetry reading at a Russian-American club in New Jersey in January, Bykov was asked if he would have voted for Trump or Hillary Clinton if he were an American citizen. He quipped, “I would have asked for political asylum in Russia, where we are relieved of such choices.”
On a few recent occasions, Bykov has also hinted that he might settle in the United States if the climate in Russia grows too repressive. Who knows? Perhaps someday, Bykov will give us a great semi-fantastic, satirical Russian-American epic novel.
Cathy Young is a columnist for Newsday and a contributing editor to Reason.
