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06.12.07
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Screaming To Be Heard
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By Dmitry Babich
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Alexander Ilychevsky’s Matisse Wins the Russian Booker Prize
As Asar Eppel, the chairman of the Russian Booker Prize jury, announced this year’s winner of the prestigious award for the best work in fiction, he deliberately spoke very slowly, enjoying the flashes of a swarm of photographers and cameramen around him. When he at last pronounced the winner’s name – Alexander Ilychevsky – he added, addressing the journalists: “Praise and glorify him!” Meanwhile, a group of several young people, obviously paying little attention to the media frenzy around the 37-year-old winner, continued to distribute the fliers of the Student Booker, an alternative fiction prize in which the winners are chosen by the students of the language faculties of several Russian universities.
“It is a little pity that young people rarely make it to the short list of the Russian Booker prize,” said Zhanna Golenko, a literary critic the for Voprosy Literatury (Problems of Fiction) monthly magazine, who specializes in the works of the young writers. “This year’s finalists were also mostly in their 40s or 50s. Ilychevsky was just the youngest of them.”
Golenko and her colleagues stress that this critique is not directed against Ilychevsky himself, whose novel “Matisse” is an excellent work of fiction. The fact that the young are underrepresented among the finalists of the country’s most prestigious literary award, reveals a certain “cultural gap” between young writers and their more mature counterparts, which is especially worrisome at a moment when the tradition of the literary process is reviving itself in Russia.
“The literary process is a community of readers, writers and literary critics who follow the trends in fiction and spread its influence beyond a narrow circle of writers’ friends,” Ilychevsky said at the ceremony. “As a writer, I need the literary process, which in Russia was traditionally supported by the so-called thick magazines. I owe my success as a writer to Novy Mir, one of these magazines.”
Born in 1970, Ilychevsky belongs to the “border generation,” which experienced life under the Soviet regime only to see these established lifestyles and values crumble in the new Russian reality of the 1990s. Many critics position him in the reviving literary process as “the oldest among the young” rather than “the youngest among the old.” In a way, his prize-winning novel artistically explains the cultural misunderstanding among Russia’s old and young literary communities.
The action of Ilychevsky’s novel is set in the 1990s. It describes the life of homeless and displaced people, but its meaning goes far beyond reflecting the everyday lives of Russia’s poor. The novel grows into a metaphor for Russia as a homeless nation, groping in the dark, unable to find meaning in the new life as the old one ended. Korolyov, the novel’s protagonist, is a former specialist in mathematical physics, who, after taking a series of odd jobs with Russia’s uncultured oligarchs and insurance companies, suddenly finds himself homeless – physically and spiritually.
“What happened to the Motherland was a total and sudden stop, like a sudden stop of a moving train… The locomotive was already lying at the bottom of the abyss, while the other cars of the huge train were still falling, accelerating themselves by the inertia of the free fall, in the vain hope of avoiding the crash by a strong push forward… Something happened to the very metaphysics of the old environment. It did not just fall apart and become empty. It somehow crammed itself inside Korolyov. There was no more Motherland outside. But there was Motherland inside. It hurt.”
Someone might attribute this to the “phantom pains of a deceased empire,” but it is interesting to note that Denis Gutsko’s novel Russian Speaker, which won the 2005 Russian Booker Prize, was also about the tragic destiny of the people who failed to adapt to life after the collapse of the Soviet Union, mostly ethnic Russians who had to flee the former Soviet republics after 1991. And although Gutsko’s novel is certainly inferior to Ilychevsky’s artistically, the trend is easy to see.
“In a way, Ilychevsky’s novel explains why many young writers in their 20s and early 30s often view life in a tragic light without making tragedy out of it,” says Olga Slavnikova, Booker’s laureate of 2006 and one of the organizers of the Debut award for young writers. “One of our award’s young contestants described in his novel the slow death of a city without water and electricity. He did it so calmly and meticulously that it made a much more horrifying impression than a description of a nuclear war. The young are used to living in a world where everything is possible, including a sudden disappearance of all utility services.”
There is, however, a very important thing that is not possible in this world of the young – the feeling of being heard and understood.
“Very often one can hear the young people being called “the voiceless generation,” said Golenko. “This is not true. They are not even speaking, they are yelling for fear of not being heard. Go to any department of modern prose in a big bookstore and you will see dozens of books written by the young with lots of exclamation marks.”
To give some examples, Sergei Shargunov, 27, wrote a novel called “Hurrah!” At the same time, “Who Am I?!” is the central question of Nick Lukhminsky’s “Memoirs of a 20 Year Old.”
In the estimation of these critics, the generation is not voiceless. The world is deaf. And worse, this world has become deaf because of the level of noise. This problem of deafness is not new for fiction, but deafness in the midst of noise is something frightening and less romantic than even, say, Jack London’s “white silence.” In the novel “The Joy Harbor” by Andrei Dmitriyev, who was also on the short list for this year’s Russian Booker, the main character, Stremukhin, another sensitive member of the intelligentsia, similar in some ways to Ilychevsky’s Korolyov, ponders noise in the following way:
“What would happen to you if suddenly all stereos, CD players and earphones fell silent? Would you feel bored? No. Would you feel scared? Not immediately, no. First you will feel empty. And then in this emptiness, a bit boring in the first minutes, as if from nowhere, like particles of dust in sunshine rays, you will feel them – not even thoughts or feelings, but rather presentiments, forebodings of unexplainable anxiety… A clock will strike and in that emptiness a kind of face will form itself from dust. You will recognize it as the face of a boor whom you failed to stand up to; then as a sad side-view of the crooked shoulder of a friend whom you gave a cold shoulder. You hear the sound of a fly hitting against the wallpaper – this is the thought of a debt that you forgot to return or of a dentist, whom you just can’t decide to visit.”
It is this kind of deafness that pushes modern Russian writers to give voice to the voiceless – the homeless, the lonely, the outcasts. In Dmitriyev’s novel, Stremukhin almost becomes a victim of a gang of schemers, who try to lure him to a resort outside Moscow – the Joy Harbor – in order to force him sign documents selling his apartment. One more mistake, and Stremukhin could become one of Ilychevsky’s homeless characters.
“I did not know until I was in the middle of work over my novel whether my characters would survive,” said Ilychevsky at the awards ceremony. “When I saw that they were avoiding death, I was sincerely happy for them.”
“I understand these words as symbolic,” said Sergei Filatov, the former head of the administration of former President Boris Yeltsin’s and currently the president of the Foundation for Intellectual Programs, which supports young writers. “After the 1990s, when Russian fiction fell silent because it was just unable to grasp the avalanche of new phenomena, we are witnessing a certain revival. Russian fiction is not dead.” |
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