Living Souls by Dmitry Bykov; trans. by Cathy Porter

In 2006, Dmitry Bykov won Russia’s Big Book Prize. “By Western standards it was an odd literary event,” the New York Times reported. “The billionaire oligarchs not only financed the prize, they were members of the new literary academy, or jury, that picked among the 14 finalists. The jury included writers like Eduard Radzinsky, the co-chair of the jury; Alyona Doletskaya, the editor of Russian Vogue; and business leaders like Viktor Vekselberg, the oil and metals tycoon who bought Malcolm Forbes’s Fabergé egg collection.” If accounts like these give Anglophone readers a sense of the bizarre relationship between Russia’s oligarchy and intelligentsia, that relationship is explored and extrapolated to nightmarish proportions in Bykov’s dystopic vision, Living Souls.

Living Souls imagines a Russia a decade or two hence torn by civil war between two main groups. The Varangians, who claim to be of Nordic/Aryan extraction, officially hold power. Their right wing Nazi-influenced politics edges into a Mason-like pseudo-religion where specious racial theories abound. Khazars are a southern group of intellectual liberals and Jews self-righteously claiming Russia as theirs by birthright without being self-critical enough to realize when they too take on the role of oppressor. Finally there are the “real” natives, “Wolves.” Deeply oppressed, unintegrated, and largely not recognized as a group at all, they live in rural enclaves, or as drifters in more populous areas.

Bykov’s novel follows four couples as they make their way through the war-torn land toward a pair of cities that represent the dualistic creation-destruction division significant to the Wolf religion. Consciously or unconsciously, while constantly refuting the caustic racial and political theories of the Varangian and Khazar camps, the characters fulfill the expectations of Wolf prophesy.

In Bykov’s vision of the future, Russia’s economy has deteriorated largely due to the world economy’s shift away from oil to a newly discovered substance (not found in Russia) called phlogiston, rendering the country forgotten and isolated, left to destroy itself with its own unchecked internal feuds. That’s phlogiston, the “fire-like element” whose existence was posited in 1667 by Johann Joachim Becher.

The book is rife with these references, sufficient unto themselves for the purposes of the story, but heavy with their own external history. Even the novel’s most basic categories betray Bykov’s unease with the stability of identity and naming. Both the term “Varangian” and “Khazar” are disputed today — It’s uncertain whether Varangians were Vikings, or if it was just a general term for 9th and 10th century seafaring folk. Today Khazars have largely disappeared as a culturally distinct people. However, a bunk conjecture popularized in the 20‘s claimed that Ashkenazi (central European) Jews were actually descended from Khazars (invalidating Jewish claims to Palestine as descendants of the Israelites). The theory was propagated in the US following World War II by a series of crackpot professors, eccentric millionaires, clueless novelists, and hate groups. In the 70’s and 80’s it enjoyed a renaissance in the USSR with the support of historian Lev Gumilev.

This is only a taste of how explosive Bykov’s terms can be–these appropriations of shifting real-world denominations reveal how rich the novel is in historical consciousness, but they also beg the question of how much information we need. He doesn’t elucidate, for example, the Khazar-Ashkenazi theory in the novel, and you could read the entirety without knowing you’d missed anything, but if you know of it, the outside knowledge rubs uneasily against the contours of the story, demanding your vigilance.

The book’s own internal mythology is sprawling in itself, as we learn each group’s history in minute detail. The effect is intriguing and boring by turns, and my guess is that this book will be beloved of anyone who adores model train sets, intolerable for some, and intriguing for the rest of us. The effect of being immersed in a very complete world is captivating, and I do believe that it makes Bykov’s social criticisms all the stronger; the novel has the texture of a real history. Admittedly, nine or ten pages of exposition by a fictional Khazar scholar on the history of his people (when even within the context of the book his version of their history is illegitimate) probably exceeds the limits of reasonably interesting narrative, but I was captivated by the verisimilitude of the overwhelming, contradictory, and always-self-serving and therefore never trustworthy accounts that poured from the mouths of Bykov’s characters.

In reviews, Living Souls has been widely criticized for being messy and long-winded. And it is, but being neat and concise has never made a book dear to my heart. Living Souls is challenging and interesting. It needs to be messy. Indeed, my main beef with the novel is not in its editing but in its plot structure.

Initially, Living Souls is darkly funny (actually, emphasize dark over funny; so funnily dark), operating largely on a Catch-22–1984 doublethink axis, as military bureaucracy violates the basic tenets of logic, sanity, and morality. Indeed, the sum total of the various groups’ rhetoric and in-fighting is the complete physical and spiritual entropy of the country: “just as any physical matter, even a stool, can be distilled into moonshine, any spiritual matter can be distilled into a pogrom.” It’s a devastating critique of Russian culture, of relations between ethno-political groups, and of human society in general.

But Living Souls loses its social-critical drive by turning to a mythical eschatology to propel its plot. The book’s original logic rejected all philosophies and rhetorics as equally invalid. When it embraces the tarted-up Manichaeism that is the Wolf mythology, it’s hard not to feel that the book’s critical momentum was wasted for the sake of closure. I tired much more quickly of the rambling folkloric spiral the book slips into than of its over-imagined political universe, though I admit the change in tone allows Bykov some lovely lyrical passages that would have been untenable had they come earlier.

Living Souls’ original Russian title, Zh.D. (a slur-name for Jews and possibly a reference to the novel’s two important towns, Zhadrunovo and Degunino), was deemed too inflammatory for English publication–it would be something like “The Yds.” I’m a little baffled at why Living Souls (the subtitle is even A Poem) was selected as the English title, since Dead Souls is such a different novel. Perhaps the tightest comparison might be in the humor arising from the characters’ unconscious cultural mannerisms, particularly a certain inappropriate sexual energy that creeps into homosocial relationships. But is that enough to justify the title?

I sense a much more natural relationship between Living Souls and Doctor Zhivago–Bykov won that Big Book Prize for his 2005 biography of Pasternak (as yet unavailable in English). Both novels concern couples trying to be together despite being surrounded by military atrocities perpetrated by all camps, though Zhivago’s mysticism is destroyed by the Bolshevik and White Army horrors he witnesses, whereas mysticism offers the only (and inevitable) escape for the couples in Living Souls. Who knows, if their plots are inverse, maybe Zh.D. is an inverse abbreviation for Doctor Zhivago too.

As is evident after only a short synopsis, Living Souls has a complex relationship with Jewishness. What saves it from being particularly anti-Jewish is that every organized and identifiable cultural group in the book is despicable. So the book is anti-Jewish in as far as it’s anti-Nazi, anti-conservative, anti-Russian, anti-liberal, anti-everyone. (Well, except anti-Wolf; those people have the answer. See my complaint above.) When it emerges that none of the groups are ethnically pure, any particular blame is further muddled. As one Khazar intellectual explains, “You’re my brother not because we’re both born in the same place, as your crude countrymen would have it, but because we share the same moral outlook, and that’s stronger than blood.” Of course this very argument could have been spewed from the mouths of any of the ideologues in any of the fractured camps in this book. What matters is its self-righteousness and hypocrisy, especially considering that the groups are locked in a perpetual zero-sum conflict.

So Bykov’s book is messy and it’s long, but it’s also provocative and interesting. Would it have benefited from more editing? Considering that its editor was probably at least in part responsible for the name shift to Living Souls (making it indisputably less provocative), I’m going to say that the book would not have benefited from more of the same.

Reviewed by Amanda DeMarco

Living Souls by Dmitry Bykov; trans. by Cathy Porter
Alma Books, 2010
Cloth, 640 pp, £17.99
ISBN: 9781846880988