Dreaming in Russian

I read Vladimir Sorokin's "Telluria" and Teffi's "Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints"

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see

Are the dreams made solid—are the dreams made real.

All of the buildings, and all of the cars,

Were once just a dream in somebody’s head

—Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

Creatures, one time when I was in college, a very drunk alumnus slewed over to us, gripped us firmly with his eyes, and commanded us, “Dream!… Desire!” Anyway so we did that, and it went badly, and that’s the plot of Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria too.

Telluria, translated by Max Lawton for the NYRB, is a collage novel about a new drug, which you take by pounding a nail into your head and which (I think) allows you to inhabit your desires so completely that they spill out into reality. It’s a pointillist novel whose images only become clear slowly, if at all. There are giants (biguns, unless biguns are normal-sized people?) and Lilliputians (littluns) and they have unions and politics. The world is post-Russian, and in fact many European nations have splintered into regions like Languedoc and Bavaria and the Republic of Berne. There are centaurs and living, opinionated dildos (the sexual politics of this book are not great tbqh), and grandmothers and moonshiners and peasants. Religious wars are back, baby, they’re good again awoouu (wolf Howl), and one of the most fun microchapters is what I took as a pastiche of 19th-century crusader and chivalry fantasies.

I added Telluria to this fantastic list of surreal fiction from around the world, even though I struggled with Sorokin’s book. The characters almost never recur from chapter to chapter. For people who got into it, I think this feeling of being plunged headfirst into one genre and situation and then yanked out and plunged into another is part of the fun—the world is a puzzle you can piece together, and also an exhilarating, whirlwind tour. For me, it meant that all the people felt flat. In order to understand the world, I kind of had to treat them as representative rather than anomalous, and so they ended up feeling like types rather than characters. I loved some of these typical creatures of the dreamworld, like the woman who left the city behind to hunt along the steppe with her horse and her arrows, and I loved some of the settings, like the Ultra-Stalinist Soviet Republic where everything is dedicated to the state religion of Stalinism. These felt like if I stretched a little further, I would touch something astonishing or furiously satirical—and then the chapter ended.

Abigail Nussbaum gives a much more enthusiastic review, in which she says it’s “clearly interested in genre itself, in how the project of worldbuilding affects the world.” I like that as an idea—and I like the monkey’s-paw element here, like, you take Theodor Herzl’s “If you will it, it is no dream” seriously and the next thing you know you’re in religious wars. (But that would never happen in real life!) But I’m not sure I grasped Telluria’s explorations well enough to either enjoy them, or see the world differently because of them.

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The Villa Villekula on Chicken Feet

I also read the NYRB’s collection of short stories by the Russian fantasist-in-exile Teffi, Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints. And this I truly loved and would recommend to all of you.

The tales selected have a pleasing rhythm that builds and complicates, which is an underappreciated aspect of short-story collections. We start with “Kishmish,” about a girl whom I picture as a kind of Pippi Longstocking, a schemey and piratical child who decides to be a saint. The portrait of Russian Orthodoxy here is so lived-in, easily mixing folklore and sacrament: Orthodox Christianity as the site of our sins and hopes, something we may not understand well but which we all think we live inside. There’s a first-confession story here that I would love to have kids read in Catholic school; it’s amoral, truly embedding itself in the child’s experience rather than attempting to edify.

There are many stories of shapeshifting, which the narration explicitly connects, in the later and more “adult” stories, to shifts in gender and sexuality. The tales dance back and forth in how much the events feel, to me as a reader, like they are supernatural: sometimes I think we’re supposed to believe there was a shapeshifter for real, sometimes I think we’re supposed to suspect that the story’s events have a more mundane explanation, but often the uncertainty is the point. It’s more fun if we stay in that borderland, the land claimed by both reason and miracle, and taunt both sides with our withheld allegiance.

Teffi’s voice comes across vividly: someone who enjoys her pleasures, a chop-licking voice; someone who likes dark woods and childhood memories and the shadows that strike the bathhouse at midnight when the moon goes behind a cloud.

The final tale, “Volya,” is a gorgeous exploration of what our narrator calls an “untranslatable” cousin of freedom: freedom is the condition of citizens, volya is the call of the wild. “To go thither, I know not whither.” To be a runaway, a vagabond, a pilgrim called by the deep woods as much as, if not more than, by the Lord. To travel without a passport.

Teffi’s own writing has this wild and willful quality—lonesome, in the way that a child is lonesome, and chatty the way a wanderer is chatty.

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icymi

I reviewed Carlos Eire’s They Flew, a history of miracles and fakers and witches; and a light and ironic philosophical intervention, which challenges received ideas of rationality and respectable history. Lol I loved this book.

Also reviewed “Bottoms,” which I also loved, and which gave me unexpected cause to reflect on the ferality of mercy.

A Reader Asked

how to chuck a pastry in the dragon’s mouth if you don’t want to tie yourself down to a whole paid subscription. Good question! You can buy one of my books—some of you will be most interested in the explorations of gay Christians’ spiritual lives, while others will go for the addiction-comedy/reality-TV novel or the tragicomedy about the nature of humiliation. Or this is a link to my Amazon wish list, which should allow you to buy me a book without seeing my address. An excellent way to trick me into reading the book you want!

“Dreaming Joseph,” by Andrei Mironov, via Wikimedia Commons