The Burn

The Burn by Vassily Aksynov is an outstanding literary achievement. The Burn tells the story of the children of the revolution, raised on Soviet Ideology and the disillusionment that followed the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Its protagonists are five talented, sophisticated, cynical and albeit hopeful denizens of Moscow: a famous jazz saxophonist who is the idol of the city's rebellious youth; a melancholy romantic writer; a scientist disturbed by the militaristic use to which his discoveries are being appropriated; a doctor searching for the mysterious substance that is the source of life; and a sculptor od scandalous works. Frustrated by hopes for freedom in all its guises, the novel is infatuated by the profuse and copious draughts of alcohol and the salacious yet sensually sublime sexual experiences. Each of the five disenchanted souls share a common middle name and the acquaintance with Tolya von Steinbock. Each representing an aspect of Tolya: with particular reference to his childhood, spent in the work camps of Siberia where his mother was a political prisoner (this fact an autobiographical anecdote reminisced with poignancy and humor by Aksynov). Wildly inventive, obscene, outrageous, surreal and verging on the perilous hold of a numb infatuation with the detritus that overstates the omniscient social strictures, this novel is eloquently rendered by Michael Glenny in a tortured assiduosly immanent prose, acid in its disdain for conventions and melodious in its evocations of the protagonists' insolent wanderings. The novel marked a new era for Russian letters, one which returned its critical sphere to the realms of Dostoevsky and Bulgakov, where the individual is buffetted by normative quandaries that insinuate upon his personhood while forging its very structure of feeling. The language and the narrative composition is of extraordinary beauty, treading the contours of A Dreiser with the inpertinence of a Henry Miller. This outstanding expression of the Soviet experience goes beyond the semantic sway of time and place and retrieves the overwhelming affects the madhouse of the ideological intimations between the individual and the social order annotates as it fashions an irreverent and blasphemous fantasia of indolence and contempt. Even if you are not into Russian literature this is a novel that will entertain and provoke as much as it offers insights into the art of novel writing more broadly speaking.

Thomas Pynchon is the first writer that springs to mind after reading the first few pages of The Burn. Then slowly you discover that this incredibly eclectic panoply resonates with Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, J.P.Donleavy, John Barth, Ken Kesey, Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow. The Burn is undoubtedly the first truly serious effort by a major contemporary Russian classic to transcend the constraints of culture topologies and hermeneutics pushing the translator's job into the realm of the impossible. Should it be "translation proper", or "transmutation", or "partial tranformation" or some symbiotic balance between the three? To what extent the attainment of this serendipity could be enhanced by total immersion and participant observation? A simple example. In the first chapter of The Master and Margarita thirsty Berlioz accompanied by the poet approach a kiosk and are offered a lukewarm fruit lemonade. So far so good. Then Bulgakov writes: suddenly both were overwhelmed by the smell of a barbershop(translation is mine). Images and associations of what barbershop does it invoke? Downtown Moscow beauty parlors and saloons today are redolent with Estee Lauder and Ralph Lauren, so what does the reference really connote, could it be just skipped as something of marginal significance or even complete irrelevance? Indeed, the barbershops with cheap cologne that smelled like fruit lemonade have long been gone, but I still remember the tonsorial establishments of the early fifties and that provides an olfactory input to supplement and augment the semantics. This builds a springboard for free association whose crazy kaleidoscope takes me on a journey down the memory lane, and bingo, here I am ensconced in a chair in a barbershop that smells like Bulgakov's lemonade. The Burn is undoubtedly, a colossal enterprise,it's cerebral, witty, hilarious, extraordinarily elegant and scandalously bawdy, a seminal book by all standards. I have yet to read its English translation by the impeccable Michael Glenny to compare notes, so to speak. However I have a strong suspicion that no matter how brilliant the translation, only a reader possessing the highest level of cross-cultural literacy could make a connection. Which brings me to another interesting point, Conrad and Nabokov both wrote in English. Nabokov once made an interesting comment in an interview, he said(this is not a quote, just a paraphrase) that he could write a perfect description of a sunset or a crawling insect, however the problems arose if he were to ask directions to the nearest convenience store. The proverbial barbershop again!

While few fictional books stand the weather of time (in this case, the Cold War, its thawing before then warming into something entirely new), Vasily Aksyonov's "The Burn" has manaaged to, and I expect will always, endure. The author, whose mother was the famous and very courageous Elena Ginsburg who wrote of her prison experiences ("Journey into the Whirlwind"), was trained as a medical doctor and had merged into literary circles, encountering virtually everyone from Steinbeck to the Metropol before being personally exiled by Brehznev. In short, he is a Giant, a prospective for the Nobel. This book long considered his magnus opus, chronicles a group of friends, their experiences in the former Soviet Union and combines jazz, science, politics and very large questions. Astonishingly, it has most often been compared to Pynchon's "V" and, as such, the author writes in a very western and post-modern manner; if Gogol had endured the Cold War and completed his "Dead Souls" series this might be something of what it would appear. This book soared as a bombshell upon its release (its own screaming across the sky heard far), and should be immediately acquired by anyone interested in Russian literature.