Catch-22 meets The Brothers Karamazov in the last great satire of the Soviet Era
The Great Patriotic War is stumbling to a close, but a new darkness has fallen over Soviet Russia. And for a disparate, disconnected clutch of wanderers - many thousands of miles apart but linked by a common goal - four parallel journeys are just beginning.
Gorych and his driver, rolling through water, sand and snow on an empty petrol tank; the occupant of a black airship, looking down benevolently as he floats above his Fatherland; young Andrey, who leaves his religious community in search of a new life; and Kharitonov, who trudges from the Sea of Japan to Leningrad, carrying a fuse that, when lit, could blow all and sundry to smithereens.
Written in the final years of Communism, The Bickford Fuse is a satirical epic of the Soviet soul, exploring the origins and dead-ends of the Russian mentality from the end of World War Two to the Union's collapse. Blending allegory and fable with real events, and as deliriously absurd as anything Kurkov has written, it is both an elegy for lost years and a song of hope for a future not yet set in stone.
The Bickford FuseWhenever I hear a book described as ‘of its time’ it seems to less than subtle put down: ‘it worked then, but not now….’; ‘it made sense in a place and time, but that’s long gone….’ The Bickford Fuse is utterly of its time, and more so about its time. Writing in the final years of the Soviet Union, Kurkov took the opportunity to explore the essence of the Russian soul. It works, well.
It’s a common theme in Russian literature – think Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol, or less obviously because less well know, there’s Lydia Chukovskaya – while historians have grappled with the question time and again (it’s a recurrent theme for conservatives such as Orlando Figes). Satire comes to mind less obviously when we (or I) think of Russian literature, except Bulgakov – although many of the classics might also work as satire – unless the absurdism of Andrei Platonov fits the bill. Yet, here we have a late Soviet satire on the Russian soul – unpicking what keeps Russians going: the of and about its time is not hard to spot.
Kurkov build four distinct stories of absurdity, of persistence in the face of rationality. In the final stages of the Great Patriotic War (as it’s known in the former Soviet Union) Kharitonov’s armaments barge breaks down and finally runs aground in the Sea of Japan – so he heads out to find someone by walking west, towards Leningrad (as it was). Elsewhere, a community of Old Believers is down to its last few – a man and his sons, but the youngest wants to explore the world, so heads out. Two men, Gorych and a driver, with a search light on the back of their lorry, head away from their home town. And all the while a senior Party official drifts in an airship to carry the message to the world.
The stories might take place in the same time, but any announcements of time suggest that it is concurrently different days, months, years between 1946 and the mid 1950s in different cities and regions. The narratives might meet up, but if they do the action is always off-stage and never do our four central figures encounter each other. And being as it’s an explosives barge, Kharitonov traces his path by unrolling a Bickford Fuse – from the Sea of Japan endlessly….
Along the way they meet soldiers fighting an unknown enemy in an unknown war; partisan factions feuding with each other, musicians in detention, a soldier on an endless mission to deliver radios to the nation and more.
Absurd it might be, but it all weaves together into one giant shaggy dog story – a ridiculous set of circumstances through which our characters and many whom they meet persist. And that’s the whole point. A late Soviet novel of persistence, of carrying on because that’s what we do – a novel of and about its time, and fabulously, enjoyably, ridiculously frustrating for it, like much of Kurkov’s body of work. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction There is a lot going on in this novel. The reader is introduced to a world they think they may know, if dimly, which becomes distorted and twisted through a surreal fog. It is a collection of journeys through the Soviet Union taking in a gulag for musicians, a macabre memorial orchard, a Monotown fabricating straitjackets, a bell that sounds without a clapper, a monument to all the dead and a truck that keeps running without fuel, amongst many other trials and deviations. Characters appear, struggle and die without ceremony. The normal sustenance of life becomes unnecessary, nothing behaves as it perhaps should. Radio broadcasts ring out across and through time. A Bickford fuse trails behind one of the main protagonists, who is closely pursued by a rat.
I have read most of Kurkov's available translated work and really enjoyed everything else I have read by him. I thought this one worked incredibly well in places. Sometimes this book feels like a collection of short stories, dubiously held together by a length of Bickford fuse. Some of the stories, which almost stand alone, I found really gripping, yet the glue holding them together left me unconvinced. I'm not sure if something might have been lost in translation but I was not entirely satisfied with this book. Still well worth reading though and I should probably give it another go. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction In his introduction to The Bickford Fuse (which is translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk), Andrey Kurkov remarks that there “are nations with great, complex histories, nations that have seen much blood and many tragedies, nations that are so hopelessly bound by their histories that they cannot move forward into the future, or even into a normal ‘present’.” Of course, the country that Kurkov has in mind here is Russia. At the time of writing the introduction to the English-language edition of the book he was speaking of the Russia of Vladimir Putin, but at the time of writing the book he was thinking of the Russia of Boris Yeltsin and, more remotely, the Russia of Nikita Khrushchev.
What do these different eras of “modern” Russian life have in common? Well, according to Kurkov, they are all characterised by the apparent political desire to tear the country away from its Soviet past being blocked by “Soviet man.” Kurkov holds that Khrushchev’s and Yeltsin’s attempts to modernise the nation were thwarted by this “Soviet man,” who now appears to support the government of Vladimir Putin, but only to the extent that Putin’s vision of the future of Russia ties with the desire to return the country to its mythical past, “which the Russian people have learned to regard with a kind of religious pride.” With The Bickford Fuse, Kurkov sets out to explore the psychology of “Soviet man,” who is neither good nor bad, but simply Soviet.
Kurkov’s principal example of “Soviet man” is junior seaman Vasily Kharitonov, who begins the novel shipwrecked on Russia’s eastern coast. The Great Patriotic War is drawing to a close and Kharitonov is stuck sharing a beleaguered naval barge with his commanding officer and former friend, Fedya Gritsak, as well as tons of dynamite and miles of safety fuses. It is not a living situation that Kharitonov finds easy, nor does he truly understand Gritsak’s determination to continue following military regulations and protecting the barge’s deadly cargo.
“Kharitonov had spent all five years pondering one and the same thing: He kept trying to explain to himself how and why Fedya Gritsak, Fedya, with whom he’d grown up, with whom he’d gone fishing in their native lake, Lacha, had changed so much — as Kharitonov’s grandfather had once changed, when he’d learned that God was the opium of the masses and that the winter church was a good set of bricks for building fishermen’s stoves.”
Despite initially appearing to have a rather rebellious and questioning nature, at least when compared to his staunchly Soviet companion, when Kharitonov suddenly finds himself alone on the barge and without orders to follow, he doesn’t take the logical step of running away as far and as fast as he possibly can. Instead, he primes the dynamite in the barge’s hold, attaches a fuse to it, ties the other end of the miles-long fuse round his waist, and sets out on a trek across Russia. His vague intention is to make his way toward Leningrad and the sense of order offered by rules and regulations. If he meets any comrades on his journey, he will tell them of the barge’s cargo and allow them to follow the trailing fuse back to it; if he meets enemies he will blow up the dynamite.
Kharitonov’s odyssey is not the only epic journey described in the book, since The Bickford Fuse also chronicles the exploits of several other examples of “Soviet man” who are determinedly plodding onward with their tasks despite having very little real sense of purpose. There is the nameless driver and his passenger, Gorych, who are travelling through the night in a truck carrying a searchlight in the hope of spotting, well, something as war rages all around them. The truck is as much a character as the two men, which nicely echoes their automaton-like pursuance of their goal.
“At half past two in the morning the city was roused from its light slumber. The engine of a big black truck started in one of the tumbledown courtyards. Then the truck turned on its lights and rode out into the street. The city blinked, lighting one of its windows, and watched it go. It knew that truck. That truck wished it no harm.”
Kurkov’s novels always contain a healthy dose of the absurd, and in The Bickford Fuse the examples of Kharitonov and the truck dwellers highlight his ability to break from reality in such a way that is oddly plausible and yet clearly demonstrates the absurdity of the situations his characters find themselves in. Just as Kharitonov is able to walk thousands of miles across Russia unspooling a never-ending fuse as he goes, so the truck (and its occupants) spends the entire book rolling down a geographically impossible slope after having run out of petrol.
Equally odd are the exploits of the other Soviet travellers who are trudging across the pages of The Bickford Fuse. Also hoofing it across Russia are Andrey, a young man who has spent his life living with his father and brothers in an abandoned monastery but who is forced to leave after the family finally successfully builds a wooden “humming” bell, and Kortetsky, a one-legged propagandist who is touring the country and constructing miniature radios to spread the Soviet word to the masses. Finally, uncontrollably drifting across the sky above all the others, is the sole occupant of a black airship, a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Khrushchev.
All these journeys serve to highlight the vastness of Russia as well as the strength and longevity of the Soviet ideology. The characters have to contend with collective trauma (most poignantly exemplified by an orchard, in which every tree represents a dead political prisoner) and the almost total erosion of individualism and the ability to question. “Soviet man” doesn’t seem able to break away from the patterns of the past, but can he really be blamed for that? There’s a lot of darkness to the story, both literal (as the truck travels for months, perhaps even years, without encountering daylight) and metaphorical, for example, when a boatload of enemy soldiers attempt to surrender to Gritsak and Kharitonov, Gritsak throws a grenade at them and the pair soon have body parts raining down on them.
Yet, as will likely prove unsurprising to those who have read Kurkov’s other books, most notably Death and the Penguin and A Matter of Death and Life, there is a whole lot of (dark) humour in The Bickford Fuse, too. From the straitjacket factory to the runaway train to the “mulag” (that is, a gulag for musicians), there is much to find funny in the dream-like, almost otherworldly oddness that the various characters encounter. The Bickford Fuse is satire at its finest: sharp, irreverent, timeless, and willing to talk about things that are more frequently left unsaid. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction This is the fourth of this mad bastard's books that I've read in the last twelve months and I've said before that this bugger must write in a haze of methamphetamine, wodka and magic mushrooms. The premise for each book has been totally outlandish but the execution has been uniformly brilliant with this one, a satire on the bound to fail post-WWI Soviet Union making me put it down, shake my head and go and stare off the deck with a cup of tea for a while.
I'm glad I took a chance on a writer outside my usual domain, making up for the growing disappointment in my other absurdist hope, Tibor Fischer. Kurkov's books often cripple me with laughter, make me feel lucky to be alive and constantly leave me in wonder that we've made it as far as we have as a species when we really don't deserve to. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction A strange book, but probably describes the mind of The Russian Man quite well. After several generations worth of false state propaganda first citizens of the Soviet Union, and later of Russia, seems totally brainwashed, disillusioned and mostly in lack of a total inability to think or act o their own behalf. Depressing, but explains a lot why it is that a big part of the Russian population seems to support the war against Ukraine. The willingness to blow up the whole world if true Communism can't be achieved echoes disturbingly with the fear we have today that this is exactly what Putin might consider. Well, he has in fact told us so much Who would like to live in a world without a Great Russia?.
If you are new to Andrey Kurkov I suggest you start with some of his later books, for example Grey Bees, which is more accessible. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction
Eventually decided after leaving it half-finished on the side for a month or so that I just can’t bring myself to care what happens. Yes it’s very mystical and poetic and mysterious and allusive and la la la and it’s very nicely written but ... Kurkov just isn’t holding me any more. And I know that it’s an early work, and it took him years, and I feel kinda bad about that - but not bad enough to keep pushing on. It’s not just a Kurkov-period thing, either - after loving the penguins and the President and the General and the Matter of Death and Life, I battled through the early gecko one, then the really recent milkman one was a real struggle, and now this, and honestly I just can’t face it. It’s pretty and oblique and still waters run deep and on and on, but I just can’t make myself care about the story or any of the characters. They seem to be only representatives of trains of thought or history anyway so they’re not going to be too upset. I dig abstract and I dig conceptual - Pelevin’s Yellow Arrow being a case in point - but I do need some kind of drive to keep picking the thing up and this just isn’t giving me it. A really long piece of fuse? Nope. Of course I realise that’s probably another subtle metaphor, even apart from the obvious ones, but I’m just not motivated to follow it. Maybe one day when I’m completely at leisure I’ll pick it up again and get to the end, hopefully to achieve some moment of clarity or even just enjoyment, but for now: you are released, Bickford. See you later. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction Among the most beautiful translations of contemporary prose I've ever read. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction KURKOW, Andrej: „Die Welt des Herrn Bickford“, Innsbruck Wien 2017
Das neueste Buch von Andrej Kurkow ist nur neu was das Erscheinungsdatum sagt. Es war einer seiner ersten Romane und ich denke auch sein bester. Auch der Autor sieht das so. „Für mich ist es das wichtigste und wertvollste Werk.“ (Seite 6) Vier Jahre hat er daran geschrieben.
Ein Märchen für Erwachsene; viel Phantasie hinter der viel Wahrheit, Realität und Kritik steht.
Ein Schiff strandet während des Krieges an der Ostküste der Sowjetunion. Der Matrose des Schiffs, das mit Sprengstoff beladen ist wandert quer durch das riesige Land und erlebt unreale Dinge, deren Hintergrund aber real ist. Die Figuren des Romans träumen immer wieder dazwischen, wobei der Traum auch wieder reale Dinge behandelt.
Der Held des Buches kommt im Westen in Leningrad an, wird für zwei Jahre ins Gefängnis geworfen und dann anerkennend freigelassen. Die Geschichte endet am Hafen der Stadt. Aus einem großen Atomschiff werden Menschen verschiedenster Berufsgruppen und Maschinen feierlich entladen. Einer Arche Noah gleich werden die wichtigsten Einrichtungen der Sowjetunion an Land gebracht bevor das Wasser stieg und auch der Matrose, der den langen Weg hinter sich hatte kann nur mehr schwimmen. Ein Double von ihm ist aber am Schiff und überlebt so.
400 Seiten Wunderwelt mit versteckter Gesellschaftskritik. Das zentrale Anliegen Kukows war es, mit diesem Buch den „Sowjetmenschen“ zu beschreiben, ohne ihn aber zu bewerten. Weder positiv noch negativ.
Hier nur einige schöne Formulierungen:
„… denn ein Gespräch im Dunkeln war wie ein Telefonat, bei dem zwei Personen sprachen und unzählige lauschten.“ (Seite 23)
„Er fand, dass Stille auf dieser Welt überflüssig war. Wahrscheinlich hat es sie schon gegeben, bevor Gott die Welt erschuf.“ (Seite 80)
„Wenn du einem Schössling das Sonnenlicht nimmst und ihn in den Schatten setzt, geht er ein. Er kehrt in die Erde zurück. Wie alles Lebendige in die Erde zurückkehrt, wenn es ausgebrannt und erschöpft ist.“ (Seite 81)
„Die Aprikosenkerne, die die Wärme der Erde spürten, schwollen an und füllten sich mit Saft für das zukünftige Leben.“ (Seite 387)
Als er mit einem zweiten Mann eine Hütte aus Kisten voll mit Sprengstoff baut reagiert er auf den Einwand „Aber das kann explodieren!“ mit dem Satz „Macht nichts, explodieren kann alles, auch die Erde hier. Die Menschen pfeifen drauf, sie leben trotzdem.“ (Seite 391)
Detective, Contemporary, Fiction Historical Russian satire makes me sleepy. Some of it was enjoyable. I wasn't the right audience. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction I’m not sure I know entirely what happened in this book, but I don’t think it matters. I truly went on a journey while reading this, one where I was constantly asking questions only to have them never answered while reading. It wasn’t until days or weeks had passed that I started finding my answers. This book deserves to be read more than once, although I still think the answers will arrive days later. The Bickford Fuse will clearly stay with me for the rest of my life. Kurkov is both a genius and a poet. Detective, Contemporary, Fiction
Andrey Kurkov Ñ 6 Review
