A-Infos (en) France, Monde Libertaire - History Pages No. 101 The USSR / Russia in Fiction (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

When the humanities and social sciences, or even journalism, cannot 
fully capture reality, literature becomes a way to approach it. ---- In 
an essay on Russian literature, art, and music, the Russian writer, now 
living in Switzerland and a long-time opponent of the Putin regime, 
takes a bold gamble: explaining that artists, broadly defined, possess 
an intuition of the future. He aims to give a general meaning to texts 
he has been publishing for the past ten years, emphasizing that the arts 
in general, and literature in particular, allow for a critique of 
absolutism. He offers a gallery of portraits ranging from Dostoevsky to 
Chekhov, including musicians like Shostakovich, to show that some 
artists have always been critical of power while simultaneously serving 
it. For the author, even when the Russian or Soviet regime attempts to 
subjugate writers and artists, the latter always end up subverting and 
fighting it. In a reflection that leaves the reader perplexed and 
somewhat bewildered, he notes that Kolyma made Shalamov's existence 
possible... In the same vein, his lengthy attempt to define Russian 
literature falls flat. It is its universal character that gives it its 
humanity... One wonders, then, if this otherwise brilliant and often 
incisive novelist wouldn't have been better off continuing to do what he 
does best: novels and articles denouncing the realities of the current 
regime.

Andrei Kurkov offers the continuation, but perhaps not the end, of what 
was intended to be a trilogy (after *The Ear of kyiv* and *The Heart of 
kyiv*): *The kyiv Baths*. Samson Kolechko, now a local police inspector, 
investigates the mysterious disappearance of 28 Red Army soldiers from 
the city's municipal swimming pool after a particularly boozy evening. 
The formula that made the first two volumes so successful is present: 
Ukraine ravaged by civil war, a conflict between Reds, Whites, and 
Greens, and the fleeting shadow of the Makhnovists. Kourkov doesn't 
hesitate to use details and absurd anecdotes to bring his story to life. 
Searching for the missing, the inspector stumbles upon a major 
trafficking operation: caviar. He plunges into the city's underworld, 
quickly realizing the absolute power of the Cheka, the communist 
political police, which enforces the Red Order with an iron fist. 
Sometimes, fiction reflects reality.

This is the case in Antoine Sénanque's latest novel. Drawing on a wealth 
of literature to construct his narrative, the author invents a fictional 
character, Sylla Bach, the adopted daughter of a tanner, a refugee in 
Budapest, who was deported for nine years to Kolyma. There, to survive, 
she went to work for the blatnoi, the camp underworld to whom the NKVD 
entrusted the daily management of the camp, much to the terror of the 
other victims of the concentration camp system. The heroine is hardly 
sympathetic; she served as an instrument of the camp killers, whether 
they were thugs or Chekists. Then, during its partial dismantling, 
solely for the benefit of the thugs, the heroine finds herself in 
Budapest in 1956, in the midst of the uprising. The accounts of the 
camps remain unsettled, giving rise to an investigation revealing how 
the Soviet regime generated...

This long-standing echo continues in contemporary Russian literature. 
For example, Maxim Osipov, who was forced to flee Russia after taking a 
stand against the invasion of Ukraine, depicts the country's decay in 
this collection of four powerful short stories, including an abandoned 
children's hospital. The rise of a neo-nationalism tinged with 
antisemitism and the quest for an eternal Russia-the unfortunate thing, 
one might say, is that this hope is shared by a portion of the 
population who remained, as the latest news suggests, while voices of 
protest are silenced or forced into exile.

Saving the best for last, Sergei Lebedev, after *Men of August* about 
the communist conservatives who attempted to seize power in 1991 and 
*The Beginner* about the Soviet secret services, succeeds in *The White 
Lady* in telescopeing the past and present for the better... in service 
of describing the worst. The story begins in the Donbass in 2014 in a 
coal mine. Five narrators take turns telling the story of the region, 
embodying five different pasts and describing the suffering and reality 
of the region's past, which has been and remains a land of blood where 
bloodthirsty tyrants clash on the backs of the people, from the great 
famine in Ukraine to the great terror and the extermination of the Jews. 
The White Lady reminds us that the past always catches up with 
murderers, even if she cannot punish them.

The White Marble Boat
Mikhail Shishkin
Noir sur Blanc 2025 336 pp. EUR24

The Baths of kyiv
Andrei Kurkov
Liana Levi 2025 382 pp.

Farewell Kolyma
Antoine Sénanque
Grasset 2025 400 pp. EUR23

Luxemburg
Maxime Osipov
Verdier 2025 160 pp. EUR20

The White Lady
Sergei Lebedev
Noir sur Blanc 2025

https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=8682
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