There were satires of life in the Soviet Union back in the New Economic Program days during the mid-1920s before Stalin became the arbiter of art and literature in works by Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog, the posthumously published The Master and Margarita), Ilf and Petrov (The 12 Chairs, later filmed by Mel Brooks), and others. Then it was stamped out.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, Viktor Pelevin has attained some international recognition as a satirist of the Soviet system. I do not find either of the short novels by him that I have read (The Yellow Arrow, Omon Ra) very funny, as Juvenal's Satires still are. They have outrageous premises carried through deadpan, which I guess is more in the tradition of Petronius's constructions in the Satyricon (or Kafka's "Metamorphosis") than the invective and one-liners in Juvenal's Satires.

The premise of Omon Ra is that the unmanned Soviet space flights were not unmanned. While chiding the US for risking the lives of astronauts, Pelevin imagines the Soviet space program as unable to automate voyages in space and therefore secretly had legless cosmonauts inside. Indeed, on the trip to the dark side of the moon told by Omon (that is the name of the riot police, a name chosen by the boy's drunken policeman father; Omon himself chose the code name "Ra" in honor of the ancient Egyptian falcon-god who brought back the sun each morning), each stage of the rocket detaches by means that include the death of a hero sacrificing himself for the glory of the Soviet system. And there are already cosmonaut corpses in the rift the moon vehicle manned by Omon runs across.

The training school is filled with absurdities, including exegesis of some stray remarks by Lenin, and the moon probe includes cans of corned beef from the PRC. (The translation being British, they are "tins.")

The short book (150 pages) has long sentences. Take this instance in Omon recalling why he wanted to join the Soviet space program: "...I understood immediately and closed my eyes: yes, it was true, perhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to those burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here in the land of Soviets, among the vomit, empty bottles, and stench of tobacco smoke, points built here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space, and every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok's brother, and of course Mitiok and I--we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness." And, also in recalling his views before beginning training: ""In my heart, of course, I loathed a state whose silent menace obliged every group of people who came together, even if only for a few seconds, to imitate zealously the vilest and bawdiest individual among them; but since I realized that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience."

After Omon discovers that he is being trained for anonymous death, he abandoned his childish fantasies of Soviet celebrity. My favorite paragraph in the book chronicles the extinction of this dream:

"As a child I often used to imagine an open newspaper, still smelling of fresh ink, with a large portrait of myself right in the center (wearing a helmet and a smile) and the caption: 'Cosmonaut Omon Krivomazov feels just Fine!' It's not easy to understand just why I wanted this so badly. Maybe I was dreaming of living part of my life through other people--the people who would look at this photograph and think about me, and try to imagine what I thought and felt, the inner workings of my soul. Most important of all, perhaps, I wanted to become one of these people myself--to stare at my own face, made up thousands of typographic dots, and wonder what kinds of films this man likes, and who his girlfriend is, and then suddenly remember that this Omon Krivomanov is me. Since then I've changed, gradually and imperceptibly, I've stopped being interested in other people's opinions, since I realized that other people wouldn't be interested in other people's opinions, since I realized that other people wouldn't be interested in me anyway; they wouldn't be thinking about me but about my photograph, and with the same indifference I feel for other people's photographs. So the news that my heroism would remain unknown was no blow to me. The blow was the news I would have to be a hero."

Trying to force reality into false spin was not invented by the administration of the US's 41st president, but was famously exemplified by the "Potemkin villages" (facades of prosperous villages to be glimpsed from a passing train) and in the great satirical novel of the czarist era, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.

In Omon Ra there is also a precedent of fakery with men in bear suits being hunted by visiting dignitaries, including a particularly bloodthirsty Henry Kissinger.

Other than a drugged interrogation of Omon's childhood friend, the book is readable, occasionally rhapsodic, though, alas, the American edition did not alter the Britishisms in Adnrew Bromfield's translation (I have americanized spelling in what I quoted and can figure out "kit" as a verb, but was baffled by "sodden ash-tree keys.")

Pelevin is not Gogol or Bulgakov, but he is an interesting conveyor of black humor, even if what he writes makes one think about dead horses being flogged. I imagine that satirizing Putin's increasingly despotic rule is more dangerous.


© 2006, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended: Yes