The novelist a hero, the hero a novelist
Francis King
PARTINGS by Leonid Borodin, translated by David Floyd
Collins Harvill, £10.95
At the International PEN Congress in Lugano last May, a French delegate refer- red to the dissident Russian writer Irina Ratushinskaya as 'cette grande ecrivaine'. Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn's biog- rapher, then politely corrected him. Irina Ratushinskaya was a young woman who had written some good poems and who had shown remarkable courage. But to call her a 'great writer' was to do neither the cause of literature nor her a service.
In the West, we are too ready to accept the twin equations that a great Soviet writer equals a dissident writer and that a dissident Soviet writer equals a great wri- ter. Neither is correct as an absolute. Great, good, mediocre and bad writers have been dissidents, just as great, good, mediocre and bad writers have managed to accommodate themselves, however un- comfortably, within the regime. One must acknowledge this while at the same time insisting that the fact that a dissident writer is mediocre or bad is no excuse for not exerting oneself as much on his behalf as for one who is great or good.
Leonid Borodin, now aged 49 — who, as a result of a new and welcome policy of clemency in the Soviet Union, has just been released, his health dangerously im- paired, from his second term in a labour camp — is, if not a great, then an undeniably good novelist. But of his merits, readers in the Soviet Union have, to date, had scant opportunity to form any judgment. The three books that he wrote between his two sentences, during the decade 1973-83, were all banned. That we can now read his Partings in David Floyd's admirable translation is due to the uniden- tified individual who courageously smug- gled it out of the Soviet Union and to the emigre writer George Vladimov who first 'pulled it into shape' (his phrase) and then published it in the first two issues of his Russian émigré literary magazine Grani.
The book at once poses a puzzle. Since it is written in the first person and since so many of the characters bear resemblances, surely not fortuitous, to real-life people in the Soviet Union, there is a temptation to Identify the protagonist, Gennadi, a writer, with Borodin himself. Gennadi criticises and even mocks the dissidents — of whom his estranged sister, eventually imprisoned, is one — on a number of counts. They are Out of touch with their fellow countrymen, whose patriotism far exceeds their desire for freedoms that, in any case, they suspect of being illusory; they are all too often guilty of exhibitionism and self-indulgence; their tactics have been childishly inept. The key passage, summing up Gennadi's atti- tude, is one near the close of the book, in which he opts for 'a life of comfort' — 'the very word comfort has such a pleasant, warm sound, like a favourite pair of slippers.' In the last century, he declares, he would have been the kind of low- ranking civil servant, content with his 'sweet, quiet wife and a household of much-loved children,' at whom Chekhov so often mocked for a docile acceptance of a humdrum fate. (The Chekhovs of Tsarist literature, in Gennadi's weird judgment, 'destroyed Russia; the revolutionaries did no more than make an airborne landing on the ruins'). It is such a character, accom- modating himself as comfortably as he can in a regime that he regards as certainly not ideal but probably as good as anyone can Let's see. The day Kennedy was shot? I was doing six months. hope for, that Gennadi wishes to be.
If one succumbs to the temptation of here identifying writer with protagonist, then one is forced to see the book as a middle-aged man's recantation of all those ideals for which he fought so valiantly and suffered so cruelly. But as George Vladi- mov points out in an excellent introduction to Partings — mysteriously not used in this edition — such an identification would be wholly wrong. After all, Borodin's be- haviour after the writing of Partings — his refusal to plead guilty to the charges
against him, his calm acceptance of the terrible sentence of a 15-year term — shows him as in no way a man so broken in spririt that all he wants, like his small- spirited Gennadi, is 'a place in the sun'.
What Borodin has tried to do in this
novel is to put himself inside the sort of writer who decides that firstly he lacks both
the will and the heroism to sacrifice his personal happiness to freedoms that only generations in the distant future may en- joy, and secondly that for the ordinary people of his country such freedoms are far less important than the ability to live in cocrifort and peace. Here is neither a bad man nor a stupid man. Most people, making the best of what is on offer, are like him. It is Borodin himself, not his Genna- di, who is the exception both in the Soviet Union and in the world at large.
The book contains a love plot of a kind. While doing field work for a museum in Siberia — Borodin's own 'field work' in Siberia has, of course, consisted of forced labour — Gennadi has an affair with Tosya, daughter of a local priest. Tosya, mistily idealised in a book in which all the Moscow characters are delineated with unsparing sharpness, is already betrothed to her father's deacon, who accepts her probable jilting of him with fatalistic melancholy. But Gennadi has a problem: in Moscow there is his former girl-friend, Irina, pregnant with a child possibly his.
When he returns to Moscow, it is therefore with the twin intentions of breaking off his relationship with Irina and of earning enough money to set up home in Moscow with Tosya., Since, in his personal life as in his political one, Gennadi is a man who inevitably looks for easy solutions, he dithers in his attempts to choose firstly between the two women and secondly between the intellectual excitement of Moscow and the spiritual peace of Siberia. When he finally opts for Irina and Mos- cow, the reader knows his easy solution to be the wrong one. But Gennadi himself does not know that. Probably he never will know it.
Despite one's intermittent irritation with so unheroic a hero, his story is always fascinating. But even more fascinating are the political arguments, all conducted with the highest seriousness, however light- hearted the mockery of the characters engaged in them.
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