A series of letters between a man at war and a woman on the Russian homefront provide the narrative for a literary masterpiece that interweaves the fantastical with the all too real
Mikhail Shishkin is arguably Russia's greatest living novelist and the only writer so far to win all three major Russian book prizes. He recently refused to take part in an official delegation to an American book fair on the grounds that he did not want to represent a country where "power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime". The kind of contemporary literature in Russia that wins awards often favours postmodern style over plot and Shishkin's work is no exception, but his writing is richly textured and innovative and his themes are universal: love and death, pain and happiness, war and peace. This partly explains why the UK publishers have called his latest novel The Light and the Dark. The Russian title, Pismovnik, is less Tolstoyan and means something like "Letter-book".
The Light and the Dark, translated by Andrew Bromfield, is, superficially, a series of letters between a man and a woman. The man, Vovka, Volodya or Volodenka, is fighting a distant, brutal war; the woman, Sasha or Sashenka, writes from the home front. Her engaging tales of childhood, love and work give the novel what narrative drive it has, a series of poignant snapshots of life in a Soviet city that are anything but random.
Vovka's letters also recall the past, but often he is mired in the unignorable present, involving soldiers of many nationalities marching through drought, disease and bloodshed in northern China. One of Shishkin's recurrent themes is the endlessness of conflict: "There will always be war for tomorrow." The letters, variously tender and brutal, are subtly interlinked through shared imagery and allusions.
Sasha's life involves the trams and aerodromes of the later 20th century, but Vovka's gruesome military accounts suggest the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Towards the end, he rephrases Hamlet – "The time will be back in joint when we meet again and I put my head on your knees" – and she refers to scientific discoveries about the unstable nature of time, "heaped up like thick porridge". Their impossible separation becomes a metaphor for human loneliness, but also for interconnectedness.
Shishkin's writing is both philosophically ambitious and sensually specific, evoking the rain on a dacha roof, the smell of blossoming lime trees, or the stink of human corpses. Vovka (invoking Gogol) wants to cut off his nose and send it home, while Sasha divides herself into an embattled first person, who stands at the tram stop with her eyes shut, and her stronger sister, who sees the "furry hoarfrost" and the "rasping sparks".
These alternative perspectives are threaded through the narrative; both sets of letters converge on the legends of Prester John, the mythical, eastern king. His fantastical kingdom of "mute cicadas and imperishable people" was part of the medieval tradition of a mirror in which the whole world was reflected. Shishkin's novels are an extension of this tradition; The Light and the Dark, like his previous novel Maidenhair, is about everything.
Maidenhair (Open Letter, £12.99) appeared late last year in Marian Schwartz's translation. The protagonist, like the author, is an interpreter for the Swiss immigration authorities. (Shishkin moved to Zurich in 1995, but currently lives in Berlin.) Maidenhair opens with a reference to Xenophon, which the interpreter is reading during his breaks, and then plunges into a series of interviews with asylum seekers, often from Chechnya, recounting horrors. "I lived in an orphanage since I was 10. Our director raped me."
Both questions and answers morph into a series of evocative monologues, interspersed with letters to the interpreter's son and extracts from the diaries of a Russian singer. Maidenhair is another great novel in which the interlocking narratives fuse and fragment. In one story, a prisoner scratches a boat on the wall until one day he steps into it and sails away, leaving the cell empty. Art can change and restore reality: "A question mark or exclamation point has the power to turn a sentence around, or a destiny."
Pages without paragraphs catalogue the minutiae of personal recollections, the details of life that mean nothing and everything. The "maidenhair" of the title is a fern that grows wild among the Roman ruins the interpreter visits with his wife. This delicate, green weed "grew here before your Eternal city and will grow here after".
The interpreter's teacher tells him: "You're mixing everything up … The ancient Greeks are one [thing], the Chechens another", but in Shishkin's tale, they become aspects of shared human experience, in which "whoever can be happy right now, should". Shishkin says he was influenced by Chekhov's sense of humanity and learned from Tolstoy "not to be afraid of being naive".
Both novels attempt to represent multifaceted reality, and there is sometimes an unbearable intensity as the metaphors sprout and writhe. The breathlessness of Maidenhair becomes, in The Light and the Dark, a more measured brilliance; the urgency of Shishkin's mission is undimmed. "Unless life is transformed into words, there will be nothing."
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