The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Commissariat of Enlightenment, by Ken Kalfus
reviewed by Tim Feeney

Ken Kalfus. The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Ecco, 2003. 295 pp. $24.95.

The years between the deaths of Tolstoy and Lenin were years in which the most artfully successful Russian revolutionaries recognized the emergent technology of the moving picture for its awesome ability to mediate reality. Commissariat’s Nikolai Gribshin (neither hero nor quite antihero) is among the first to grasp “how to assemble facts into something useful . . . facts that are not facts—that are, in fact, lies—until they’re in the service of revolution,” and he carefully uses this knowledge as he maneuvers through the creation of a new Soviet reality. Gribshin eventually comes to serve the postrevolutionary Commissariat of Enlightenment, through which he comes to understand that a canny government will “either starve the masses of meaning or expose them to so much that the sum of it would be unintelligible.” The stark and grimly well-timed parallel between revolutionary Russia and today’s capitalist West is clear, but it’s not a point that Kalfus digs into our ribs: his storytelling is engaging, subtle, and written with a clarity that would border on cautious were it not for his palpable confidence. It’s probably natural for a serious literary writer to comment on the fall of the written word to newer media, but circa 2003 the consequence is that the main and possibly only audience for that writer’s book is comprised chiefly of the few people who noticed that the word had fallen in the first place. Thus Ken Kalfus writes a terrific, bleakly beautiful first novel (following 1998’s Thirst and 1999’s Pu-239, both collections, both great) that will effectively end up choir-preaching to the majority of its audience and go ignored by those most in need of its message. Whether it’s naive to even point this out anymore, let alone fret about it, is another matter.