Find out but don't believe
John Bayley
THE FACULTY OF USELESS KNOWLEDGE by Yury Dombrovsky, translated by Alan Myers Harvill, £15.99, pp. 533 Time: 1937. Following the death of Kirov, the boss of Leningrad, in highly suspicious circumstances, Stalin has seized the opportunity to launch his reign of terror against party and Soviet officials and intellectuals, soon to become known as the Yezhovschina. Yezhov has replaced the liquidated OGPU chief Yagoda, and the OGPU itself has been reborn as a new and humane organ of socialist legality, the NKVD, in response to the Leader's desire for open government, accountable to all, democratically supervised, and still of course in perennial demand by idealistic socialists in all parts of the world. It is not long before Yezhov is liquidated in his turn and Beria takes over as one of Stalin's old- boy network, and a fellow-Georgian. The NKVD and the new socialist legality contin- ued to flourish.
Meanwhile in Alma-Ata, capital of the far-off Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, the ambitious young NKVD chief Yakov Neiman begins to dream of glorifying the organisation and himself by means of a spectacular show trial, to rival those taking place in Moscow. In the idyllic country out- side the capital a team of archaeologists, led by our novel's hero and main character, Georgi Zybin, have discovered in an ancient grave site a gold diadem of exquisite workmanship, which then unaccountably disappears. Simple unsocial- ist theft, but it gives Neiman his chance. Zybin and his assistant are arrested, and the familiar Alice in Wonderland of 'legalis- tic' interrogation begins. Meanwhile Father Andrey, a socially dubious element, is completing his life work on the trial of Christ, based on the theory that there was a second unknown betrayer among the disciples, and that Judas was only the front man. Christian theology itself must have become infected with the current Soviet phobia about treachery and its ramifica- tions.
Familiar stuff? — perhaps over-familiar? Russian novelists are naturally still fixated on the horrors of their immediate past. But like most of his great predecessors and contemporaries, like Solzhenitsyn or Bulgakov, Yury Dumbrovsky uses the novel as the natural vehicle for a historian and philosopher, truth-teller and sage. His first was a weighty study of Derzhavin, poet, soldier and confidant of Catherine the Great, a remarkable figure of his age, whose passion for 'truth' and for the great- ness of Russia's future, seemed to intellec- tuals of the Lenin era to look forward to their own times. For that reason Dom- brovsky's novel was not only tolerated but approved of by the Soviet establishment, although its author was in trouble for other reasons and had been given the compara- tively mild sentence of exile to Alma-Ata. Here he carried on as writer and journalist until the climax of the terror, when, in circumstances not so different from that of the hero of The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, he was arrested again and sent to a Siberian gulag, then to the most dread- ed camp site of all, that gold-mining wilder- ness furthest east about which Vaarlam Shalamov was to write his mordant and memorable Kolyma Tales.
Paralysed in both legs, Dombrovsky had the rare luck to be invalided out, and before achieving rehabilitation at the time of the Khruschev thaw found himself back again in Alma-Ata, where over a 12-year period he composed his longest and most ambitious novel. Its great interest is in its subtle study of the Russian need for `belief, and its contrasting implication that corporate belief in any form is apt to lead to disaster, especially in Russia. 'Why do you need belief?' a character exclaims, in a most un-Russian style, and quotes a com- ment out of Seneca's tragedies suggesting that silence is all the belief a wise man needs. The Revolution demands not only total acceptance but the nausea of endless affirmation; while the friend and ally of silence is the 'Faculty of Useless Knowledge' to which an intellectual, writer or archaeologist, should properly be dedicated.
That phrase is coined by the interrogator Neiman to mock Zybin during endless pre- confessional charades, reminiscent of the game of dialogue played out by victim and accuser in Koestler's Darkness at Noon. (Koestler, however, did not allow his hero to abandon belief in 'the shining future': nor could he as progressive author quite bring himself to do so either.) But if useless knowledge is all sensible men need to keep them happy, why bother with the belief that invariably leads to every sort of hypocrisy and tyranny, unreality and pretence? Clio, muse of history, is indifferent to all ideals; but through Dombrovsky's pen, as through Tolstoy's, she notes down the incongruity, the pathos and the sickening ironies attending those who think history must be on their side. 'We behave strictly according to the law', his prosecutor assures Zybin, getting out 'the freshly gleaming form' which will consign him to an indefinite sentence. 'His surname had been written on it in a rounded, almost schoolgirl, hand by some young secretary, some mother's loving daughter.'
Dombrovsky is not Tolstoy, of course, and his novel, impressive as it is, suffers from the same blight of over-familiarity and deja vu incurred a few years ago by Zinoviev's satiric block-buster, The Yawn- ing Heights. (`Yawning' rather than 'shin- ing': a Russian pun.) It is the greatness of Russian novels to be spacious and leisurely — shiroka — and it is not often one wishes a good one shorter than it is; but the undoubted fascination and the sensuous intelligence of this book must also be said to lead to a degree of self-indulgence and fixation. Negativism is a stranger to the Russian novel, and hardly a welcome one. After the mindless and dutiful avalanche of novels celebrating the Patriotic War and the Soviet achievement, we now have them doing just the opposite.
Dombrovsky is a stylist. His translator can hardly be expected to follow, though he does a decent job. Unfortunate, though, that he feels compelled to render the com- mon Russian adverb veseli — gaily — as `blithely', an arch and altogether unsuitable word. Must gaiety now mean only one thing?
Previous page
