Fiction
Horror show
Christopher Booker
The Radiant Future Alexander Zinoviev (Bodley Head pp.288, £7.50) 'The lack of bitter experience of people in the West' Vladimir Bukovsky memorably observed last year 'makes them incapable of imagining tragedy'. I have since had many occasions to recall his comment but rarely has it seemed so apt as last Sunday when I read in the Observer Anthony Burgess's patronisingly dismissive review of this new novel by Alexander Zinoviev. Among other things, Burgess said: 'The impression one gets with so many emigre attacks on the system is that there is nothing left in Russia but the KGB and the self-serving functionaries, along with a shortage of toilet rolls and excess of potato blight. We're getting a lot of the hard-hitting heroic stuff, but not much about the lives of the people.' One reason why the well-fed Mr Burgess may get the impression that people in Russia go on so tiresomely about things like the KGB and food shortages is that, if you actually have to live under the omnipresent surveillance of the KGB and cannot get enough to eat, such things may weigh more heavily with you than they could be expected to with a rich and comfortable Western writer like Mr Burgess. In fact, if Mr Burgess whom I imagine uttering these loftily disdainful remarks by the side of some tax-exile swimming pool — had read The Radiant Future more carefully, he might have found that one reason why it is such a remarkable book is precisely because it does give such a good picture of how many people in Russia live, think and feel even if they are not the 'street sweepers' whose lives, he suggests, a true novelist should be concerned with (out go Dostoievsky Turgenev and Gogol for a start).
I will confess that I did not really get on with Alexander Zinoviev's last book, The Yawning Heights, a huge 900-page compilation of satirical episodes about contemporary Soviet life, even though parts of it were extremely funny, and one could not escape Zinoviev's very sharp intelligence (before his exile to the West in 1978 he had occupied the Chair of Logic at Moscow University, and as one of 11 working class children and a member of the Communist Party could be regarded as one of the brightest ornaments of the Soviet system). But The Radiant Future is quite different. Pace Mr Burgess, it really is a novel, with a story, a cast of well-defined characters, and a tragic denouement. And it gives perhaps the most vivid picture yet to have appeared in the West of life among that fascinating group, the semi-official Moscow intelligentsia.
The story opens with the opening ceremony of one of those huge permanot slogans with which Moscow and other Communist cities are decorated. This one, proclaiming 'LONG LIVE COMMUNISM THE RADIANT FUTURE OF ALL MANKIND', stands where 'the Avenue of Marxism-Leninism' meets 'Cosmonaut Square'; and in the opening four pages --I satirically sending up the hollowness,, absurdity and hypocrisy of the Soviet system not a line is out of place, right down to the 'speech from the representative of the freedom-fighting peoples of Africa'. `Dazzling the whole Square with powerful, flashing white teeth, he said "Tank yo' very .mach", which threw the workers' representatives into a frenzy'.
Among those playing a peripheral part in this farce is the book's unnamed hero, a successful and rising Party ideologue, with many books and articles to his credit, who currently heads the `Department of Theoretical Problems of the Methodology of Scientific Communism' at the MarxistLeninist Institute. And as he journeys home (much to his annoyance, since he does not possess a car, he has to travel with the workers on public transport) the initial broad satire gives way to the story proper.
The narrator lives in a `vast apartment' of five rooms, with his wife Tamurka, with, whom he has a semi-detached marriage. She stays with him, partly for reasons of habit and money, partly because everyone expects that he will shortly become a 'corresponding member of the Academy of Social Sciences', which would give his family 'access to the special food store for the privileged'.Also living in is mother-in-law, a wonderful Soviet equivalent of Giles's' Granny, who spends her time watching ice-hockey on TV and is a dyed-in-the-wool old reactionary (which in Soviet terms means nostalgia for Stalin and contempt for rebellious modern youth). Rebellious modern youth is represented by the narrator's two bright, attractive, teenage children, Sashka and Lenka, the latter being in effect the heroine of the book. They, particularly Lenka, are outwardly conformist to the regime, but at home and among their friends are totally cynical towards everything the regime stands for, constantly cracking (very good) jokes or reciting satirical poems.
Of all their father's friends, the one the children like best is Anton, who once served 12 years in the camps for a satirical poem about Stalin (he had been betrayed by an Army friend to whom he showed the poem), Anton is writing a philosophical book, which he hopes to get published in the West, showing how the horrendous realities of Soviet life are not some dreadful aberration, but are the 'scientifically inevitable' product of Communist theory.
There are a number of other well-drawn characters, notably some of the narrator's professional colleagues at the Institute, and also a group of Muscovite acquaintances whom the narrator meets when he goes drinking in a 'dive'. If they spend a good deal of time discussing in a highly intelligent way just why there should be such a glaring discrepancy between the boasts of the ideology and the hideous, drab, corrupt, inefficient 'Soviet reality', this is not, as Mr Burgess seems to think, because Professor Zinoviev is unpardonably misusing the form of the novel to put across 'dialecfics'. It is because the whole point of the incredible thing which has happened to Russia is that it has all been done in the name of a Theory, and intelligent people in Moscow do spend a lot of time discussing just why the whole thing has ended up in such a colossal tragic-farce. Mr Burgess may have other things on his mind, such as which vintage of Burgundy to have with his lunch, but if you live under a totalitarian ideology which claims to explain the whole of human existence by `scientific laws', it is inevitable that you will spend a good deal of time threshing over why that ideology has so blatantly failed.
As I say, there is a plot to Professor Zinoviev's book (counter-pointed by satir ical descriptions of what happens to the great Slogan, as it falls down, is repaired, rusts away, is taken over by whores, drunks and currency fiddlers). There are a good many fascinating incidental details of Soviet life: insights, for instance, into the way the KGB tries to get everyone to spy or inform Spectator everyone else; of the c7ctsoseo g 4 i April cr he 8t keep on delegations to the West t v 1t9 o y (a great privilege to be chosen for one, which may be withdrawn right up to the moment your plane leaves the runway). And there is the visit to Moscow by the narrator's brother from the Volga Region:
'What's your meeting about, if it isn't a secret?' I said.
'It is a secret. A secret for idiots. It's always the same subject: there's nothing to eat, no prospect of anything turning up • 111 other words, we'll live like pigs, and it'll get worse .
'Do people ask you why?'
'They do. We lie, and talk about crop failures,' Gradually the various strands of the story, such as the narrator's attempt outwardly to compromise with an ideology he really has no more time for ' than anyone else, work towards their eventual dreadful climax (and here I must warn that I am going to `give away' the ending the last time I did this I got into terrible trouble with some Spectator readers, who seemed to think that everY novel is a 'whodunnit'). The narrator fails 10 get his coveted `correspondent membership', because, infected by Anton, he has come under suspicion of the Mnst heinous ideological crime of all, which is genuinely trying `to understand Commun.' ism'. His life falls apart, he is sacked from the Institute, his wife and mistress lea‘T him, he loses the apartment. Worst of all, his daughter Lenka commits suicide, because she discovers that the 'friend' who had betrayed Anton all those years before was her own father. He has lost everything, including his 'soul', and at the end of the book we see him, rather like Winston Smith at the end of 1984, a broken outcast, tugging a little cart round Moscow full of his meaningless books. The whole point about this novel, as Burgess and his ilk will never perceive, is that it conveys some small measure of the real tragedy that the Soviet Union reInf sents. The regime attempts to treo' everybody to become part of the collective, and brings every conceivable pressure op people to sell their souls, to betray that friends, to serve this utterly meaningless' empty Theory. As always in such a devil's kingdom, the only ones who thrive are the amoral, the egotists, the self-seekers though even for them there is alwaysscone price to be paid. But some cannot be broken, because there is an irreducible spirit of truth and love within them which cannot be compromised. Some,like Lenka, however joyfully eyflic. al she may be about the collective absurdity of the regime, when confronted with something as directly disillusioning as thet personal moral failure of her father, eann° take it. Others, such as Zinoviev, try to bear, witness to that personal, eternal truth, an' risk losing everything. It must be pretty sickening to be foreed out to the West, having battled for such,a,. truth, only to find a society in which peoP'' like Anthony Burgess are held up as writers to be admired.
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