The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Povesti Poslednikh Dnei (Tales of Recent Days), by Oleg Pavlov
reviewed by Susan Anne Brown

Untitled document

Oleg Pavlov. Povesti Poslednikh Dnei (Tales of Recent Days). Tsentropoligraf, Russia, 2001. No price given.

Oleg Pavlov is one of the most gifted exemplars of what has been dubbed the “renaissance in Russian literature.” Like all of the great Russian writers, he eschews overt social and political commentary, approaching his subject matter with the satirical, darkly comic panache of a contemporary Gogol. Kazennaya Ckazka (A Barracks Tale) is the first in a compilation of short novels entitled Povesti Poslednikh Dnei. Kazennaya Ckazka is set during the last years of the crumbling Soviet Union in a remote and neglected outpost of the Empire. Its subject is that of the fate of men faced with the deprivations, cruelties, and absurdities of army life—men striving to retain a sense of their own dignity and humanity in a system crushingly indifferent to even the most basic of human needs. Resistance to that indifference comes from the novel’s unlikely hero, Captain Khabarov, a man determined to ensure that his soldiers don’t go hungry. The enterprising Captain Khabarov has hit on the idea of cultivating a potato crop on army land, thus keeping the wolf from the camp door. This act of defiance attracts the attention of the novel’s scheming antihero, who confiscates and dumps the entire crop, thus leaving Khabarov and his soldiers marooned with dwindling rations. The stalwart Captain embarks on a futile journey to retrieve the potatoes—a journey into the venal and selfless nature of humans.

Karagandinskii Devyatina (A Ninth-Day Wake at Karaganda) is perhaps the most surreal of Pavlov’s novels, set in a landscape almost lunar in its desolation. The title refers to the Orthodox wake on the ninth day after a person’s death, in this case that of a young soldier. The novel begins with the swirling approach of winter in the town of Karaganda. Private Alexei Mikhailovich Kholmogorov has just demobilized and has been asked by a mouse-phobic doctor to perform one last task before leaving Karaganda: he is to collect the body of the soldier on the ninth day after his death and expedite it home. As Alexei goes about this lugubrious business, events take an increasingly fantastical, comic, and harrowing turn, leading to Alexei’s imprisonment and the dwindling hope of his ever leaving Karaganda. The characters are exposed both to an arbitrary and cruel military bureaucracy and to the pitiless indifference of the natural environment, embodied in the novel by an infestation of hungry mice.

Karagandinskii Devyatina and Kazennaya Ckazka are reminiscent of Catch-22 in their evocation of the absurdity of army life. Pavlov’s sense of the grotesque and his black humor serve to shore up the painful pathos that permeates all of his work. The author conveys the sense that the characters are buried alive in the hostile reaches of the steppes. The poignancy comes from the characters steeling themselves to survive, however nobly or ignobly, in this soul-destroying environment.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Povesti Poslednikh Dnei (Tales of Recent Days), by Oleg Pavlov reviewed by Susan Anne Brown Untitled document Oleg Pavlov. Povesti Poslednikh Dnei (Tales of Recent Days). Tsentropoligraf, Russia, 2001. No price given. Oleg Pavlov is one of the most gifted exemplars of what has been dubbed the “renaissance in Russian literature.” Like all of the great Russian writers, he eschews overt social and political commentary, approaching his subject matter with the satirical, darkly comic panache of a contemporary Gogol. Kazennaya Ckazka (A Barracks Tale) is the first in a compilation of short novels entitled Povesti Poslednikh Dnei. Kazennaya Ckazka is set during the last years of the crumbling Soviet Union in a remote and neglected outpost of the Empire. Its subject is that of the fate of men faced with the deprivations, cruelties, and absurdities of army life—men striving to retain a sense of their own dignity and humanity in a system crushingly indifferent to even the most basic of human needs. Resistance to that indifference comes from the novel’s unlikely hero, Captain Khabarov, a man determined to ensure that his soldiers don’t go hungry. The enterprising Captain Khabarov has hit on the idea of cultivating a potato crop on army land, thus keeping the wolf from the camp door. This act of defiance attracts the attention of the novel’s scheming antihero, who confiscates and dumps the entire crop, thus leaving Khabarov and his soldiers marooned with dwindling rations. The stalwart Captain embarks on a futile journey to retrieve the potatoes—a journey into the venal and selfless nature of humans. Karagandinskii Devyatina (A Ninth-Day Wake at Karaganda) is perhaps the most surreal of Pavlov’s novels, set in a landscape almost lunar in its desolation. The title refers to the Orthodox wake on the ninth day after a person’s death, in this case that of a young soldier. The novel begins with the swirling approach of winter in the town of Karaganda. Private Alexei Mikhailovich Kholmogorov has just demobilized and has been asked by a mouse-phobic doctor to perform one last task before leaving Karaganda: he is to collect the body of the soldier on the ninth day after his death and expedite it home. As Alexei goes about this lugubrious business, events take an increasingly fantastical, comic, and harrowing turn, leading to Alexei’s imprisonment and the dwindling hope of his ever leaving Karaganda. The characters are exposed both to an arbitrary and cruel military bureaucracy and to the pitiless indifference of the natural environment, embodied in the novel by an infestation of hungry mice. Karagandinskii Devyatina and Kazennaya Ckazka are reminiscent of Catch-22 in their evocation of the absurdity of army life. Pavlov’s sense of the grotesque and his black humor serve to shore up the painful pathos that permeates all of his work. The author conveys the sense that the characters are buried alive in the hostile reaches of the steppes. The poignancy comes from the characters steeling themselves to survive, however nobly or ignobly, in this soul-destroying environment.

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