Mostly About Stories

Soul and other stories by Andrei Platonov – A True Soviet Believer?

Andrei Platonov is not well known in either his home country or the West, but he is perhaps the most interesting of the Soviet writers I’ve encountered over the course of this academic year. He was recommended by my favourite Russian professor in the context of a lamentation that so few people read him or wrote on him, for to her mind he was certainly worth the trouble. Since my exam this term is flexible enough to let me write on anybody, so long as I can answer the question, I went and sought Platonov out in the library, to see what I could find.

The Perfect Soviet Writer?

Andrei Platonov was born the son of a railway worker in 1899 near Voronezh. He started work aged 13 as a clerk at an insurance company, and throughout his life he tried many different jobs. When the Russian Revolutions started he began studying electrical engineering at university, then once the Civil War broke out he helped deliver supplies to the troops. As he was a young man there was little reason for him not to support Russia’s new Bolshevik leaders, who claimed to be bringing the recently-created Soviet Union into a new age of technological and cultural vitality. Until 1922 Platonov worked as a journalist as part of the Union of Communist Journalists and wrote some fiction and poems, but he abandoned all this in the wake of the drought and famine of 1921 to work on land reclamation and electrification projects so that such catastrophes could not happen again.

A photograph of Andrei Platonov — Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) had all the makings of a perfect Soviet state writer. But he couldn’t betray the reality he saw before him for a lie.

All this is to say that Platonov was a serious Communist, someone who acted for his beliefs as well as just writing about them. With his humble origins and history of hard work in the service of the state he was on paper the perfect writer for those Soviet authorities who wanted to create a new literature to go alongside their new country. But Platonov’s experience, which made him so acceptable to the Soviets, was a double-edged sword. He saw first hand the results of the New Economic Policy, and the hypocrisy of local Communists, and it left deep marks upon his fiction. For what he presents, time and again in these stories, is the collapse of the idea in the face of reality.

Socialist Realism and the Realistic Soviet Writer

At the time “Soul” and the other seven stories of this collection were written the Soviet Union had, after a period of limited censorship in the 1920s, decided upon the values which every book aiming to be published within the country ought to reflect. These were, broadly put, Pravdivost’, Narodnost’, Klassovost’, Ideinost’ – or, translated, Truthfulness; Accessibility to the common people; Free from class influences and belonging to a classless society; and in accordance with the Party line. Each of these terms is heavily loaded – for one, Truthfulness doesn’t simply mean showing what you see, but rather showing how what you see is in accordance with the development of Communism before our eyes. That is, it is contradictory – if you don’t see reality to be in accordance with this, you must distort reality so that it is. Soviet fiction became, then, as much about shaping reality than displaying it.

In practice, what this meant was optimism, forced or unforced, and settings that focused on the common worker to elevate his or her standing into something akin to heroism. From the ballrooms of 19^th century we enter the city streets, farms, and remote railway villages. Flowers, youth and sunlight were celebrated, as were the new technologies of aviation, electrification, and trains. Heroes became those who, as in a Bildungsroman, moved from unenlightenment into knowledge, but here that knowledge was of a particular sort – it was acceptance and understanding of the fact that the Soviet system was the greatest such system to ever exist. All of this places a great demand on the writer to believe in what he or she was writing – the optimism could not be tempered, if one wished to be published. Support for the Soviets counted for little if it wasn’t matched with purity of optimism.

Platonov and friends

Platonov doesn’t fit well into the categories that a cursory look at Soviet literature tends to result in. Those people who we praise and rank so highly in the West, rightly or wrongly, are those who stood outside of the system and wrote against it. Mikhail Bulgakov, Varlam Shalamov (whose stories I look at here), and Anna Akhmatova are names that immediately come to mind. Or else people who died for their writing, like Osip Mandel’shtam, Daniil Kharms, or Isaac Babel’. We read them, at least in part, because they confirm the simplistic notion that the Soviet Union was a terrible place and gosh darn aren’t we lucky that we didn’t live there, eh? They give us a smug satisfaction, besides their entertainment value.

Those writers who truly gave themselves over to Socialist Realism, and its dream, are mostly forgotten. In Russia, a few of them are still struggling on in school syllabi. Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, or Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, are pretty much the only ones I can think of people I know having read. Vladimir Mayakovsky is remembered more for his poetry before the Revolution than after it. And Maxim Gorky is perhaps better known for what he did as a political activist than for what he wrote. The good writers, we like to say, died, left, or wrote in secret.

But then there is Andrei Platonov. Though he was friends with Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, the centre of the web of writers and intellectuals who were not in support of the state, Platonov never abandoned the beliefs that the Revolutions in his youth had brought to life in him. But what his fiction displays is the divided impulse between the belief in Communism, and the belief in the importance of Truth, of showing what actually was taking place in the countryside, and how there was suffering yet in the utopia-come-early the Soviets had created. He tried to publish, again and again, and unlike the first group of writers above, he succeeded from time to time. Yes, he was usually forced to make amendments, and yes, it did happen that a few of his works were simply too radical to see the light of day, but the very fact of publication shows that he was unique among the Soviet writers. He had his own Truth, and it was not as far from the Soviet dream as we might want to say.

Soul and other stories

“Soul”and the other stories of this collection were written in the late 1930s, with the exception of the final story, “The Return”, which was written in 1946. Though they vary in setting and theme, they are all tied together by Platonov’s concern with the idea of the Revolution. That is, the hope of a new and better world.

“Soul”

“Soul”, the title story, is the longest, taking up almost half of the book. Set in the deserts and drylands of Soviet Central Asia, it follows the return of Nazar Chagataev to his homeland. He belongs to the Dzhan nation, whose name means “soul”. They are an itinerant, nomadic group who he had been sent away from by his mother so that he might receive an education in Moscow. His task as he comes home is to bring Communism to this people, but the simplicity of the statement distorts the nebulous nature of the job itself. The people are scattered, and it is only through constant searching that Chagataev is able to locate a few of them, including his own mother. The nation is spiritually broken, after hundreds of years of cruelty and starvation, and no longer wishes to live. Platonov painfully describes the way that men and women had to keep reminding themselves to breathe, lest they drift away by accident.

Chagataev’s goal is only on the surface to bring Communism to his people – more crucially it is to return a sense of life’s purpose and happiness to them. Thus begins a journey to gather together his old acquaintances and teach them to move on from scavenging into living full lives, eating well and living in houses. Platonov describes in detail the starvation of the characters, the constant recourse to the barest of grass soups, and the way they are forced to suck the blood out of each and every animal they meet. Platonov’s world, much like Varlam Shalamov’s, is one of survival at all costs. Animals are given a special place in it, but it seems not to be because they are human-like, but more because the humans have entered such a fallen state that the differences between them are scarcely marked. Chagataev’s own mother scarcely remembers him, and many of the people are struggling with deformities, or have gone mute.

Photo of the desert in Central Asia around the Aral Sea. — The desert of Central Asia where Chagataev finds himself is far less bountiful in “Soul” than in the photograph here.

At one level Platonov’s story is about Chagataev’s struggle to recreate civilization, but Platonov’s stories always work beyond their surface level as well. Soul is no different. Chagataev becomes over the course of the work a father to his nation, just as Stalin was styled in the Soviet Union. His successes – and his failures – become implicitly a critique of the man himself, and his own nation-building process. There is another Communist in the story, a man sent to the Dzhan people a few months before Chagataev was. This man is dangerous and cruel, and the relationship between the two educated men in their remote wilderness reminds me more than a little of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, another work that asks whether the civilizing mission is ultimately worthwhile.

The Other Stories

“Among Animals and Plants” is another story where the layering is important. On one level it is about a railway worker in the remote forests of the north who is hoping to go and work in a nearby village, and listen to music and educate himself. On another, familiar to any reader at the time but now revealed (at least to me) only by the lengthy introduction and notes to the edition, the work is about the slave labour existent under the Gulag system. The village where the worker wants to be is so cultured precisely because it is full of educated prisoners. But there are plenty of other hints in the work that all is not as it seems. The sounds of whimpering in the forest, or considerations about punishment as the worker’s mind wanders off, all take on a bleaker tone once the reader is aware of the second level of meaning. This was a story Platonov struggled to get published.

Perhaps the two most well-known stories here are “The River Potudan” and “The Return.” Both of them deal with a homecoming – the first, after the Civil War, and the second, after the Second World War. The act of returning home is hugely significant. Through going back to our homes after time away we always encounter that sudden jolt of disassociation as we find that our memory and the reality are not entirely in line with one another. In “The River Potudan” Platonov shows how Nikita Firsov, after time spent fighting in the war, deals with the difficulty of reconstruction at home. Though he finds himself a wife, a hard working young lady, their marriage is unhappy and unconsummated. It is also marked by the death of her young friend, a girl who was studying hard for a new life in the Soviet world. As is the case elsewhere, it seems that the people who suffer most are those believe in the Soviet ideals the most.

Eventually, Firsov flees his home out of shame and starts to live in another village, doing menial tasks to support himself. It is only when he meets his father unexpectedly at the market that he considers going home, all the more so when the man tells him that his wife has attempted suicide by drowning herself in the river of the title. Firsov does return home, and together with his wife they succeed in forming a more successful, consummated, marriage than there had been before. But the conclusion is hopeful, optimistic more because of Firsov lowers his utopian expectations of the world than because these revolutionary hopes were met. The new world will take a long time to make.

“The Return” is similar to “The River Potudan”. Here, a soldier returns to his wife after a long absence. After spending time flirting with a girl from a nearby village he leaves the train they were both on to walk home. There he finds wife and his two children much as before. But the children reveal, unintentionally, that their mother has sought the comfort and protection of other men while their father was away. Caring little for hypocrisy, the father brutally insults his wife, before being reprimanded by his own son, a boy who has totally absorbed the teachings of the CPSU. Angry at his reception at home, the father leaves the next morning, hoping to find the girl from before. But as the train is departing his town he sees his two children running after him and his conscience takes control of him, making him jump from his carriage down to them.

In both stories Communism, and belief more broadly, are revealed to be of little use. In “The River Potudan” it is guilt that makes Firsov return to his wife, not ideals, just as in “The Return” the man’s son’s Communist ideas are worthless in convincing him to stay. If anything, the son is shown as a ridiculous figure, unable to understand his parents’ quarrel even as he thinks he understands the statutes of the CPSU. No, what makes the man return home for the second time in “The Return” is the realization that he must move beyond his own pride. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Judgements and Conclusions

Platonov writes in a simple way, but his concerns are serious. Ultimately, they are about the spiritual future of humankind under the Soviet system, indeed about whether spirituality will survive at all. Using clever allusions and vast learning he is able to keep the reader on their toes and constantly challenged. But that’s not to say these stories are perfect. In fact, there were a lot of times when I found myself struggling to keep going. Like his contemporary, Isaac Babel, Platonov is an intellectual writer at heart, and just as with Babel I found myself unsatisfied by the stories themselves, once their animating ideas had been scraped out of them. Platonov doesn’t really write with urgency, leaving many moments of action or climax a little unconvincing. In a sense he’s, disappointly, more enjoyable as someone to write essays on, or to think about, than to actually read.

Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is another writer who, like Platonov, deals with the complex cultural and spiritual consequences of the Revolution. But that doesn’t always make for compelling stories. My review of Babel’s Red Army Cavalry is here.

But he is worth reading. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s important to read him. Platonov is a key representative of the middle ground between writers who were against the state, and those who functioned as part of it by following closely the demands of Socialist Realism. He widens our awareness of Soviet literary culture from the stereotypes we’re so used to in the West. But there again, I’m almost recommending him as education rather than pleasure. There is pleasure to be had, and most of these stories do work as stories, and some of them are even good as stories. But I can only recommend the collection with these warnings, lest a reader expect to be gripped by the stories in any way other than an intellectual one.

Isaac Babel is another challenging, ambiguous, and highly intellectual chronicler and interpreter of the Soviet Union’s early days – my review of his Red Army Cavalry is here. Alternatively, compliment Platonov’s ambiguous portrayal of Soviet life with Varlam Shalamov’s bleaker tales of the Gulag here.

Photo of Platonov comes from Maria Andreevna Platonova; Photo of Maxim Gorky is in the public domain; Photo of the desert by Dmitriy A. Pitirimov is also in the public domain; Photo of Isaac Babel is also in the public domain

The Day of Judgement by Salvatore Satta – Old Dreams

Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement is a wonderful book, as warm and pleasant as the hills and valleys of Sardinia it takes as its setting. More than that, it is a classic, without a shadow of a doubt. I enjoyed last week’s Satantango more, but as much as I loved it, it is a book destined for people who read, more than people who live. If I go around the country homes of my friends the books that I find there will not be by Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett, but rather Austen, Hardy, and Kipling. These latter group are no better or worse than the first, but they bring with them a prose that is simple, clear, and a vehicle for their books’ plots, instead of anything deliberately striving to be more. They are not, in a primary sense, experimenters. And one day, perhaps, they may be joined on their shelves by Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement too.

A Classic, for Better or Worse

Pots and pots of ink have dried up in trying to explain what a literary classic is. With The Day of Judgement I simply had a feeling, as I was reading, of something ineffable, indescribable. It had, I would say, a certain bearing about itself. The book is not long, but it carries itself like an elder statesman. This may be in part because Salvatore Satta started writing it when he was almost seventy, after a long career as a jurist. There is no sense of rushing or urgency about the pages, no matter what the author himself felt as he was writing them. It is a book of anecdotes, of spilling digressions, written by an old man about his home. And – and this is what is so rare in our times, when modernism, modern science, and worst of all the horrors of the Second World War, broke that particularly Victorian self-assurance that let us preach what we believed without self-question – it has the gravitas and casual wisdom of someone who has lived, and wishes to share their experience with others. Whether you like him or not, it reminds me of Steinbeck at his best.

Salvatore Satta (1902-1975) was a jurist of note during his life. When he began writing *The Day of Judgement* he was almost seventy. It is the fruit of a lifetime’s worth of wisdom and love.

Chronicle of a Town

To call this a novel is wrong. It is more a chronicle than a novel, or perhaps a story in Benjamin’s sense. Its heart is the town of Nuoro, in central Sardinia, and Don Sebastiano Sanna Carboni, a nobleman who lives and works there. For a period of perhaps twenty years his life and the life of his village is followed and recounted by the narrator, an older man trying to remember and record his past. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect, place, or person from among the village’s seven thousand. We meet schoolteachers, priests, swindlers, shepherds, and learn about making wine, or about the potential origins of the village, or the design of the houses. Moments such as electrification of street lamps, or the first arrival of radical political ideas, are recounted with tenderness and honesty. But as the book progresses, and the world itself “progresses”, there come about ever more challenges to this once so isolated mountain village, and its way of life.

A “Truth” to Challenge – the Themes

Through the way that the old man recounts his “truth” The Day of Judgement further gains the regalia of a true classic. Because of its structure, with each chapter detailing a different event, or the struggles of a different man or woman, there is an extraordinary thematic variety within these pages. The conflicts between husbands and wives, between fathers and sons, between nobles and the lower orders, between conservatives and socialists, between individuals and the state, between the church and the common man, between teachers and students, are all described. Each side is given its say, and in such a way that I can already sense that this is one of those books which like a seed grow with time and the experiences of their readers. One day I may well support the fathers, instead of the sons, even if today that is not entirely the case. The “truth” of the narrator doesn’t mean a domineering world view, but rather a series of suggestions and opinions which can be challenged or accepted, but are not meant by any stretch of the imagination to be absolute.

Progress – What Good is it?

Part of this comes from the fundamental tension at the heart of the book – between the desire for progress and the inherent conservatism of humankind. I don’t think Satta himself truly knew where he lay in this battle – and this is part of the book’s greatness. Though the narrator himself at one point says that “there is nothing I detest so much as the past”, the evidence of the book tells a different story. The “Day of Judgement” of the book’s title refers not only to the fate of humankind before God in some strands of Christian theology, but also to the role of the writer here. Satta’s narrator admits that he is reviving the dead of his own past and history, from the early twentieth century and a little before, and making them give an account for themselves before the reader. And we are supposed to judge for ourselves whether these men and women, living in the village, have lived their lives badly or well. The narrator can only show us who they were – the rest is up to us.

Nostalgia for a World now Lost

A plaintive nostalgia pervades the book. A longing for a world which was only Nuoro, or at least a world which ended at the sea. Nuoro is a place, for Don Sebastiano, “where there was room for everyone” and the way that the book goes through each of the characters and professions, the very nature of the book’s ordered structure, formally reflects a stability and certainty about life and one’s place in it. Yet there is also an occasional lyricism too, notably in chapter V’s lavish description of making bread, which has “all the solemnity of a ritual”, and then later on when discussing “the pagan mystery” of the vineyard. Here the prose itself takes on the same magical quality of its subject matter, and it’s hard not to want to be there yourself, hard at work on the fields or kneading dough.

Picture of houses in Nuoro — Nuoro today. Perhaps not that much has changed, after all

Through work there comes a sense of community and continuity. People visit each other, sit and play cards together or simply chat in a way that is alien to much of the modern world with its hustle and bustle. It is from a time before time, before precision. It is a stasis of a positive sort, which is differentiated from the present most strikingly by the hope of parents that their children will live (as Don Sebastiano hopes) just the same life as their parents – that they may be just as lucky in having such a good life, instead of eternally striving after a better one. It ties in with the religious argument in the work – that we should see the blessedness of our own lives, rather than in their potentiality.

The Sympathy of a Great Soul

It is his unbounded sympathy, too, that shows Satta as an earnest writer. He cares for all of his characters, from the grimiest urchins to the nobles like Don Sebastiano. It means that whenever progress seems almost inevitable, he is always willing to show kindness towards those it does not benefit, such as the canons who are forbidden to ring the church bells for the beginning of school by a new arrival from outside of the town. The cessation of the bells is one of the saddest moments of the book, because it represents a huge loss of pride and self-respect for the canons. With the ending of the bells’ song, there is also a hidden but no less important loss for the townsfolk of a part of their identity, and when we are told that “the bell rope hung sadly above Ziu Longu’s bench, like the rope after a hanging”, it’s hard not to think that the image is supposed to call to mind the small death inside their souls too.

What Does Modernity Mean?

What modernity means is a loss of the sanctity of the world, a loss of music, a loss of community. It means problems, for “Problems, of whatever kind, arise when the simple, humble certainties of life begin to fail”. Alongside the loss of the bells, another poignant image of the end of street lighting in the village. Before the introduction of electricity, a man would go around lighting the oil lamps, one by one. Behind him, we are told, would follow the town’s children, playing a game between them of trying to catch as many of the spent matches as possible. It is a stupid, childish game, but what it means is community.

Electrification “was destiny itself” but that hardly stops it from being a force for the destruction of the sacred past. The narrator once again deploys a characteristically reticent phrase for when the lights first turn on all at once: for the town “in some mysterious way felt that it had entered history”. It is up to us, again, to decide whether history means good or ill. But it’s hard to avoid the ominous note that creeps into the prose. “The north wind had risen, and the bulbs hanging in their shades in the Corso began to sway sadly, light and shadow, shadow and light, making the night-time nervous. This had not happened with the oil lamps”.

Tragedy of the Present: the Invention of Politics

With modernity also comes politics. Sardinia, on the periphery of Italy, has never been historically important, and Nuoro, at its centre, even less so. But one day, the narrator says, the younger generation started reading Avanti!, a radical socialist paper, and politics arrived in the village. The old certainties of life – that people stayed in their social positions and jobs, that there was a kind of harmony between all walks of life – suddenly begin to be questioned. People, told of inequality, begin to believe in it, and conflicts that had not even been conceivable a hundred years earlier, now take pride of place. Whether they are rightly motivated or not is less important here than the fact that they undermine the conservative feeling of the world as organised and correct as it is. They suggest change where hitherto it wouldn’t even have been a concept.

Politics is all well and good in theory, but in practice something else happens. The movement is co-opted by a certain Don Ricciotti, a man who feels that Don Sebastiano has done him wrong by buying Riccioti’s father’s house at auction when the latter was dealing with bankruptcy. Using his talent for giving speeches Ricciotti is able to gain a sizable support base in the town, just as elections are coming up. He hopes to use the power of office to force Don Sebastiano to return to him the house that he considers his by right. In these speeches, Don Sebastiano is targeted by name as one of the swindlers who is oppressing the poor, hardworking citizens of Nuoro, though there is no evidence elsewhere in the book that this is the case. The story serves as a grave indictment of the dangers of populism, wherever it may be found, and it is only by luck and hard work that ultimately Ricciotti’s efforts are thwarted. Perhaps what Satta wants to say here is that the world would be better off without politics, and the manipulation and deceit that seemingly has to come with it.

Picture of Landscape by Nuoro — The countryside around Nuoro. Much may be lost, but the landscape so beautifully evoked by Satta still remains almost untouched.

The Problems of the Past I – Woman’s Place

Yet for all this uncertainty, for all this scepticism towards the various changes in his own life, the narrator cannot turn his back on the future, and neither does he blind us to the acute problems of the past. Perhaps the most fully fleshed out character, and the most tragic, of the story is Don Sebastiano’s wife, Donna Vincenza. She is described as intelligent, but the society that she is in massively restricts her freedoms: she’s barely even allowed outside of her own house. The chapters centring on her life are filled with gloom and despair, and she is repeatedly described as “trapped”. The lives of the other women are no better. Those who engage in prostitution, for example, are forced to go to another village to give birth or otherwise deal with illegitimate offspring. The implications reveal a misery and disquiet underlying the apparent peace of the past. It is a man’s peace only.

Problems of the Past II – the Dark Side of Stasis

And it is not only the women who suffer here. The darker side of stasis is sometimes revealed when The Day of Judgement touches upon poverty. The book is not critical of poverty per se, and certainly not overly critical about the rigid social classes found within Nuoro which likely perpetuate it, but there are moments when the beautiful, structured façade of Sardinian life in the book suddenly shows its cracks. The moment that struck me most strongly was one of morbid horror. Near the end of the book the summer’s weather becomes unnaturally violent with strong winds and as a result a plague sets in among the fields of the countryside. The lands of almost everybody are left severely damaged – everybody’s lands except those of Don Sebastiano, that is.

When he goes to inspect his fields he meets the peasants who have been looking after them, and they are eager to explain to him why they are undamaged. But to his dismay and disgust they reveal that it is all due to a crucified dog and left hanging on the door of their hut. Don Sebastiano is left speechless and full of rage. The superstitions which at other times make for proof of the magic of the past are now transformed into something monstrous and unnerving. When the peasants then mention a problem with the peasants of the neighbouring farm, Don Sebastiano tells them to sort it out among themselves. And they do, with an axe in the dead of night. The book reminds us that for all the good things that have undoubtedly been lost with progress and time, much has been gained too. The end to the mindless violence, black superstition, and the rise of modern medicine are all things to be rightly praised.

Conclusion – The Judgement

Salvatore Satta did not finish The Day of Judgement, but the ending is in no way abrupt – instead, it finishes on an elegiac note that ties the whole work together. The chronicler could well have reckoned up every single soul of Nuoro’s then seven thousand, and no doubt would have, had they lived that long, but we should be grateful for all the pages that we have. It is a beautiful, lovely, and kind book that stands to my mind for everything the best literature can be. It is exciting, hopeful, and timeless. Read it again and again. I know I will.

For more about the ambiguous development of modernity in rural communities, have a look at my thoughts on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Picture of Salvatore Satta is in the public domain

Picture of Nuoro houses by Max.oppo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Picture of Landscape around Nuoro also by Max.oppo

Satantango Review – False Hopes and False Prophets

I finished Satantango, by the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai (in George Szirtes’ superb translation), yesterday and am still reeling from the experience. Really, I had been reeling from the first pages onwards. This is the best book, the most exciting book, the most challenging book, that I have read in a long time. The only book by a living author I can compare it to without understating my admiration would be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both works are bleak and challenging meditations on apocalypse, on the state of humanity at the very edge of collapse. But even to compare it to Blood Meridian detracts from Satantango’s own unique and demonic magic. I’ve really read nothing like it before. It creates, in form and structure and plot, a completely new world.

So far Satantango is most famous for its 7ish hour film adaptation by Béla Tarr – naturally enough, since the translation was only published in 2012. I myself haven’t seen the film though – I actually came across the book and its author while browsing in Waterstones for something by Kazantzakis (my review of Zorba the Greek is here) and the really nice editions of Krasznahorkai’s works elsewhere in the “K” section caught my eye. From that I drew near enough for my short-sighted self to be able to see the titles, and I was immediately excited by The Melancholy of Resistance, and read the first page since I had time to spare. The prose, with its winding sentences and no paragraph breaks, put me off – especially since the book was already four hundred or so pages long. I put the book back, noted the author’s name, and bought myself Zorba the Greek as I had planned.

Once I had finished that, though, I went to the college library and gave Krasznahorkai a second chance. The only book there was Satantango, so I no longer had a say in the matter. I took it home with me for this Easter break.

Picture of László Krasznahorkai — László Krasznahorkai (b. 1954) has a rather devilishly mysterious look about him, and his *Satantango* is devilishly good too, even if its world is bleak.

Introduction – An Easter Story

As luck, or fate, or something else entirely would have it, Satantango is something of an Easter work. It begins, at least, with a resurrection. News of the return of two men, Irimiás and his helper Petrina, who were thought dead for over a year, interrupts the bickering over money going on between two men living in the small “Estate” where much of Satantango’s action takes place. These two resurrected men (the second chapter is entitled “We are resurrected”) have a reputation for their skill and adeptness in making money, and the bickerers decide to try to track them down, and in doing so see if they could make themselves some cash for their troubles. The other chapters of the first half of the book flit between the different major characters of the village, from the doctor to the schoolmaster, the local prostitutes to the barman, and detail their own reactions to the news. Gradually, they all converge upon the bar, the central location of the Estate, and there they begin to drink and dance, while they await the arrival of the man, Irimiás, who they all take to be their saviour.

The World and its Inhabitants

Krasznahorkai does an excellent job creating the tense atmosphere of a tiny village. In the first half of the book, characters of each chapter rarely meet those of other chapters, but through a process of endlessly layering more and more references to their names and personalities, Satantango gives the impression of a living, breathing community, so that when we do finally meet a given character, we’ve already heard all the gossip, and meet them as we would an old friend or enemy. There’s Mrs Halics, the most religious of the townsfolk, but a hypocrite at heart; Mrs Schmidt, promiscuous towards half the village but longing most of all for another night with Irimiás; and Futaki, the gloomy, melancholic sceptic with a limp. And many other characters, in both senses of the word, besides.

These people, trapped in an Estate whose owners are nowhere to be found, whose machinery no longer works, and whose business and industry has long-since departed, are in desperate need of some kind of salvation. Hopeless schemes for making money or getting away are made and fail by the second. In the first chapter alone Futaki and another man decide to betray a third, but only because Futaki caught the first man before he could betray him instead. Mrs Schmidt’s infidelity to her husband is only one of the many betrayals of a people who quite literally live in the mud. A recurring image in Satantango is the slaughterhouse, where people are merely meat. The first part of the book is in many ways a catalogue of the seven deadly sins of a fallen people: very few people here have any kind of positivity or goodness about them, for better or worse, which can add to the heaviness and challenge of reading through.

Style – Mud on the Page

But the main challenge when it comes to reading is that like The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango is written in what I take to be Krasznahorkai’s signature style. There are no paragraph breaks, and sentences are long, intricate things. At first it was hard to read, but then I grew used to it. The whole book has a flowing, heavy quality to it, like mud. The decay and purification of the environment that the characters live in – nobody cleans, and cockroaches and other insects are constantly waging war for new territory – is marked by a similar decay in the prose. We sense that sentiment, expressed by Beckett at the end of The Unnamable, that “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, in the way that the only thing that seems to be carrying on the prose is the way that the character haven’t died yet and that somewhere, misplaced though it may be, they have their hope.

It is difficult to tell where their hope should be placed, if indeed it should be placed anywhere. The novel has a strange, unnerving, supernatural side to it. It begins with bells, ringing even though there are no churches nearby, and that stop as suddenly as they start. But it is only some characters who seem to be able to hear them, which adds another layer of confusion. Elsewhere, in the bar, invisible spiders cover everything in cobwebs at a miraculous speed. And then, in the second part, Irimiás himself sees something that he cannot possibly explain rationally, try as he might. The novel’s chapter titles only add to the confusion, with part II’s chapter IV being titled “Heavenly Vision? Hallucination?” – nothing is given to us as a certainty.

Irimiás – The prophet the townsfolk need… or the one they deserve?

The character Irimiás, the resurrected one, inevitably forms the centre of any discussion of hope in the novel. It is he who, like a spider, literally brings together all of the major characters into the bar as if stuck in his web, and then disperses them as the novel goes on. He is a strange figure. Many characters see him as their saviour, and there are further parallels with Jesus too. He has two personal followers, Petrina and a boy, Sanyi, who go with him everywhere and do as he says. Petrina even confuses “Evangelical” with “evangelist” when describing himself. Yet if he is a god or even a kind of Christian, he is a strange one. When he speaks, it is rarely to espouse a Christian viewpoint. At the beginning of part II he gives a long speech, exhorting the townsfolk to repent and do better, but their response, privately, is just to assume he is joking. When he encounters the supernatural in part II he dismisses it, and God too, as unreal. His views are more likely a bleak nihilism of the sort he shows when alone with his closest followers, dismissing all hope and everything else: “we are trapped forever. We’re properly doomed. It’s best not to try either, best not believe your eyes.” Indeed, his nihilism is so great that he dismisses his senses rather than believe something. “We think we’re breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks.” And yet, he leads the townsfolk out into a wilderness; he gives them, all the same, a hope; he helps them. It’s hard to say why that might be. Harder still to know what to think when there are hints, in the background, of him stockpiling arms and munitions. He remains, even after finishing Satantango, an enigma.

Part of the reason that he is not closer to a traditional view of Jesus is that it seems a traditional Jesus is far from what the townsfolk, Mrs Halics excepted, actually want. Ultimately, it seems like almost all of their problems are due to money, or rather its absence. The girls who are forced into prostitution, are after money to pay for their mother, who refuses to work. The early scheming and betrayal of Futaki and Schmidt that takes place in the first chapter all hinges on trying to get enough money to escape. The barman obsesses about money too. And in this vein Irimiás, who is famous at least partially for being able to make money anywhere, also has his place. It is he who is hated by the barman precisely for his past debts (before his “death” Irimiás drank a huge amount without paying). That is to say, of all the characters, Irimiás is immune to money – he alone doesn’t need to pay it. He, indeed, has somehow transcended it.

The Politics of Negligence

There is also a political angle to the work. Published originally in Hungary in 1985, Krasznahorkai himself said that it was a miracle it made it past the censor given the political content of the work . But the politics of the text is not immediately apparent. These people, after all, are locked off in their Estate, and apart from their names there’s little indication that the work takes place in Hungary at all. But politics comes in as soon as we start asking questions. Why has the Estate fallen into decay? Because state support for the machinery needed for local industry has dried up. The cultural centre has also lost its funding and is in a state of disrepair. There is no longer a school for the headmaster to teach at. The depression and desperation of the citizens is an implicit critique on the system that has left them in this state – not of authoritarianism as bad and negligent governance in general. Anywhere where people are left behind, whether it be rural Hungary or my own native North-West Scotland, might see itself reflected in these pages. And in this context, Irimiás’ hints of weapons buying take on a more sinister note. It may well be that what the man is planning is revolution.

The ending of Satantango only complicates matters. I shan’t spoil it here, but it is one of those endings which makes the entirety of the material up to that point take on a new light, but not in a way that cheapens it. I was left sitting there, overpowered by the implications, for long after I’d closed the book at last. It’s rare that an ending does that to me. And I think when I eventually go back and read the book again, there will be a lot of new things for me to discover.

Conclusion

I loved Satantango because for me, it was one of those books that reveal our conceptions of what literature can and can’t do are limited, and show us the way forward. I feel like others must have felt when Kafka first emerged from Prague into the rest of the world and reshaped a world’s literature. Well, maybe Krasznahorkai isn’t that good – after only one novel it’s too early for me to say – but he certainly has already had a real and tangible effect on me. Satantango showed me a way of writing about serious things seriously, in a way that wasn’t preachy or boringly ironical. It may well be bleak, but it is also terribly, awesomely, sincere. And sincerity never hurts the message.

For more doom and gloom, check out my reviews of Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, or Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag. If, on the other hand, you’re in need of some cheeriness and affirmation, my review of Zorba the Greek is here.

Photo of László Krasznahorkai by Lenke Szilágyi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]