Vyacheslav Pyetsukh, The New Moscow Philosophy, Trans. by Krystyna A. Steiger, Twisted Spoon Press, 2012.
[ excerpt ]
A communal apartment in late Soviet-era Moscow. An elderly tenant — the daughter of the apartment's original owner — has disappeared after seeing a ghost. Over the course of a weekend the other occupants meet in the kitchen to argue over who is more deserving of the room she has apparently vacated. If the old woman was murdered, each tenant is a suspect since each would have a motive: the "augmentation of living space." As two of the tenants engage in an extended debate over the nature of evil, they take it upon themselves to solve the mystery and nail the culprit, and it becomes clear that the entire tableau is a reprise of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Displaying a sharp wit and a Gogolian sense of the absurd, Pyetsukh visits anew the age-old debate over the relationship between life and art, arguing that in Russia life imitating literature is as true as literature reflecting life, and the novel strikes a perfect balance between the presentation of philosophical arguments and their discussion in humorous dialogue.
A vital work of contemporary Russian prose, The New Moscow Philosophy was immediately translated into many European languages upon its publication in 1989. This is its first English translation.
Parody, translator Krystyna Anna Steiger remarks, is a complex form, and this book, parodic in at least a couple of different ways, bears this out. With its restricted cast of characters—residents of a communal apartment in Moscow in the late 1980s—attempting to get to the bottom of a fellow resident's disappearance and presumed murder, it is an out-and-out lampoon of an Agatha Christie-like mystery. It is, at the same time, an ironic look at Russian literature,
especially Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, of which, we quickly realize, it is a version. Such satire can, even as it pokes fun at texts as venerated as Dostoevsky’s novel, remind us of why such texts are venerated, and can also make the present appear, in comparison, tawdry. Vyacheslav Pyetsukh finds plenty of opportunities to poke fun at the late-glasnost moment (1989) in which he was writing, but the best laughs come at the expense of such hallmarks of nineteenth-century Russian fiction as earnest and endless philosophical discussion. Two of Pyetsukh’s characters can’t stay away from topics like the relationship between literature and life, and between good and evil, and though some of the points these thinkers make are worthy of consideration, Pyetsukh’s tongue is always securely in cheek: assertions such as, "man is a profoundly limited being, one strictly hemmed in by the laws of virtue," or “morality and reason are inseparable,” come from the mouths of the same two buffoons who entertain the notion that the presumed killer they are hunting might be 118 years old. The New Moscow Philosophy is a snarl, delightfully tangled, of philosophy, humor, and humanity; it’s not unlike the lives we live. “Literature,” the narrator reminds us, “is the root of life . . . if not life itself.” - David Cozy
Vyacheslav Pyetsukh's The New
Moscow Philosophy, first published in Russian in 1989, is an interior
novel in two ways: It takes place exclusively within the walls of a
collective flat in Moscow during glasnost, and rather than creating a
cast of distinct characters who act out a gripping story, it is
primarily concerned with investigating and enacting ideas about the
relation between life and literature.
The
narrative unfolds among 14 variously aged inhabitants of a collective
flat in Moscow over the course of a single weekend. It is divided into
four sections: Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The heart of the
story is the disappearance of Pumpianskaya, an old woman who has been
living in the flat longest, which occurs between Friday night and
Saturday morning. The other residents, many of whom are scheming to take
over Pumpianskaya's unexpectedly vacated room, gather to solve the
mystery of her disappearance, which becomes stranger as more facts are
revealed.
But this plot takes a
backseat to the novel's key concerns: the state of Russian society and
the nature of literature as opposed to life. Several characters discuss
the former, and one, Belosvetov, eventually defines "the New Moscow
Philosophy" as "the mission to further moral construction." Literature,
meanwhile, is investigated primarily through narrative asides ("Though
it may seem speculative at first, if not futile, investigating the
relationship between life and what we call literature would be useful at
this point," the narrator declares at the beginning of "Saturday"), and
through ubiquitous allusion.
The New Moscow Philosophy is
something of a mirror to Dostoevsky's classic Crime and Punishment. The
two novels share the disappearance (or murder) of an old woman, and
several characters in The New Moscow Philosophy, as well as the novel's
narrator, reference Crime and Punishment outright, referring to
characters by name, or "the St. Petersburg variant" of this mystery, and
contrasting the layout of the apartment in Dostoevsky's novel with this
one in Moscow.
" 'Oh, for crying out loud!' said Belotsvetov. 'You mean you've never read Crime and Punishment?'
'Well, no, I haven't ... What am I supposed to do about it now - hang myself?!'
'You don't have to hang yourself, but you ought to read Crime and Punishment.' "
This
particular exchange, from late in the novel, allows Pyetsukh's
characters to transcend the limits set by the narrator, as one character
falls outside the sphere of assumed literary knowledge. At the same
time, it exemplifies the importance of Dostoevsky's novel, at least to
the characters as well as the narrator. In highlighting the continued
relevance of the 19th-century novel and in creating what is essentially -
but not merely - a glasnost version of Crime and Punishment, Pyetsukh
investigates the relationship between literature and life while
reflecting it. In the narrator's words:
"...That
scenes from everyday life separated by a century and a half are so
similar invites us to reflect yet again ... What if Ecclesiastes was
right and there really is nothing new under the sun ... What does this
hypothesis imply? First, it's possible that in its origin, that is,
intrinsically, literature is implicated in the very idea of life ...
Second, it's possible that rather than merely being a crafty reflection
of life, literature is the imprinted idea of life itself ..."
In
this hypothesis, which is elaborated more lyrically in the novel's
final paragraphs, the narrator argues that rather than simply reflecting
life, literature is life. So this meta-textual novel of glasnost is
aware of its place, entwined in literary and social history. Finally,
the novel is a vessel for literary and philosophical ideas, which
ultimately seem more important than the story itself.
The
New Moscow Philosophy's weakness is its lack of vivid characters. It is
not a good sign that a list of dramatis personae included at the
beginning of the novel is necessary, especially at points in the
narrative where there is a clear attempt to increase the suspense among
characters.
With the
exception of a few idiosyncrasies - Borisovich's preserved fruit
collection, for example - Pyetsukh's characters are simply names and
foils for ideas, although the novel seems an attempt to balance the
elements of a mystery and a philosophical treatise.
But
no matter; the last 10 lines of The New Moscow Philosophy - in which
the literary inquiry crescendos - are worth the price of admission.
Pyetsukh's ideas about literature and life are profound, and this
entertaining novel enacts, rather than simply imparts them. Readers
seeking fascinating characters will be disappointed. Those seeking
fascinating ideas will not. -
Stephan DelbosThe New Moscow Philosophy is the kind of droll satire that I really enjoy. It’s an overt parody of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but fortunately (since I read that too long ago to remember the details) the author Vyacheslav Pyetsukh has constructed his novel so that anyone can enjoy his dark humour, whether they’ve read or can identify the allusions to Dostoyevsky, or not.
The novel is set in late Soviet-era Moscow, in Apartment 12 where numerous people are crammed into a space which was once home to just one family, of whom the elderly Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya is now the sole surviving remnant. After what Russians call the Imperialist War (i.e. World War 1) ‘at the time of the so-called consolidation of the Moscow gentry and bourgeoisie’, the apartment was subdivided by soviet decree and the Pumpianskaya family ended up with only the dining-room. The rest of the apartment became home to a disparate group of people, who now form an uneasy kind of extended family, bound together by the intimacies of daily living at the same address and – over the years – a shared history of life under the Soviets.
This arrangement allows for an interesting miscellany of characters. Belotsvetov and Chinarikov are the ‘intellectuals’: they engage in deep-and-pseudo meaningful conversations about almost anything but especially about the state of the nation and its relationship with literature. Fonervyakin is the eccentric whose collection of preserved fruits threatens to take over his room. Yulka Gulova is a divorcée with two children called Lyubov and Pyotr, and there is also a granny called Anna Kapitonova and her grandson Dmitry Nachalov. This younger generation do the usual irritating things that offspring do and provide opportunities to create discord, inconvenience and complaints. Then there is an aspiring writer called Valenchiik and his pregnant wife Vera; Vostryakova the building superintendent; and Vanya, the locksmith who turns up to break into Alexandra Pumpianskaya’s room when she goes missing.
Because Alexandra Pumpianskaya is regular in her habits and has been housebound for many years, her absence had been noticed straight away. When the residents meet to discuss the mystery of her disappearance it transpires that someone has seen a ghost, that there was a mysterious phone call, that a threatening letter has been received, and – when the room is eventually opened, that there is a photograph missing from her wall and it seems that she had gone out, something she hasn’t done for ages. But suspicions of foul play also give rise to the inevitable question of what to do with Pumpianskaya’s room if she has been murdered. The extra space would be welcome for any of the residents, all of whom have eyed it off and are lobbying for it to be assigned to them. All of whom stand to benefit, therefore, from the old lady’s death.
Belotsvetov and Chinarikov lack confidence in Rybkin the district inspector who responds to their call for police assistance, and so these two assign themselves the task of solving what they feel sure is a dastardly crime. Together they bumble around amassing clues of one sort or another and dream up all kinds of bizarre scenarios to explain the old lady’s disappearance. In between times they discuss philosophy, the dreadful state of Moscow society that neglects its elderly citizens and so on. While this neglect tends to be a universal concern in large cities where the elderly often lack care and support, the setting in Soviet society in the Glasnost period is a poignant foreshadowing of the social dislocation that seems to have taken place in the new Russia, a subject explored in Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy where the savages turned out to be people, not wild dogs.
The ‘new’ Moscow philosophy that Belotsvetov and Chinarikov explore centres around Dostoyevsky’s novel and the relationship between life and art, and this is where my new-found knowledge about the significance of 19th century Russian authors became useful. During the 19th century under a succession of autocratic rulers, dissent and demands for long-overdue reform were effectively suppressed. But the great novelists – Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky – were able to use literature to critique social and economic problems, and get away with it. This explains the high esteem in which these authors were held during the Soviet period and why Belotsvetov and Chinarikov explore in their discussions the importance of literature and its relevance to contemporary everyday life.
Literature is the root of life, so to speak, if not life itself, only slightly displaced along the x-axis, and consequently it should come as no surprise that in Russia where life goes literature follows, but also that where literature goes life follows, that Russians not only write what they live but in part live what they write, that literature has such spiritual authority here.
This is a terrific book, extremely interesting and also relevant to anyone trying to understand the adjustment Russians have had to make in a short period of democracy. It was Stu from Winston’s Dad who brought it to my attention – thanks, Stu! - Lisa Hill
Before the pogroms and turbulence of Soviet Russia, the tenement buildings of Moscow were impressive, to say the least. Heavily fortified with guilt cornices, columns standing-guard at the entrances; each building was a lesson in defending ones honour through conspicuous wealth.
Happily, much of these architectural details have survived the years, albeit the majority require immediate restoration. The insides, however, have changed dramatically. Pre-revolution the reception rooms were a-buzz with a constant flow of people: the maids and cooks muscle-weary from their chores, the smells changing with each task – sometimes pleasant but often not – always the option, though, of retreating to privacy and solitude in the many upper rooms.
Such extravagance of space and industry is not an option in post-Soviet Russia.
Vyacheslav Pyetsukh makes the claustrophobic post-Soviet atmosphere quite literal, as several families now occupy the space where formerly there was one. To describe the families as vying for calm and space in the remodelled tenement would be a comical description – they fight and desperately argue each day over the most basic of necessities – yet, Pyetsukh makes it comical.
Each room contains a ‘family’; some families are made of a grandmother, daughter, husband and children. Another ‘family’ is a cranky old gentleman who cares for a store of pickling jars as if they were an expectant wife. He covers them with his mattress and counts them everyone morning and night.
Waking early doesn’t help ease the strain. Tenants find the communal latrine occupied by a precocious child pretending to read the newspaper. It doesn’t help that the child is asleep and the newspaper upside down, but they dare not disturb his morning ablutions.
Pyetsukh makes eye-watering poverty bearable. His characters and the scenes he sets are fundamentally enjoyable despite the circumstances, absurdity is common, and carefully developed throughout is an abundance of pathos and a care in showing lightness even during the darkest times.
It also helps that this is a murder mystery, in the campest, most delicious way.
Space is tight, disagreements are a daily occurrence, and added to this melting pot is the disappearance of the landlady – the catalyst that turns an otherwise argumentative bunch into suspected murderers. All are implicated in her vanishing as every tenant stands to gain from the ballot for her room.
Two protagonists – would-be Holmes and Watson, if not for the fact that they are also tenants – raise an eyebrow to the situation and attempt to unravel the mystery, out of boredom as much as anything else.
Their gallows-humour is verdant, helping Nikita Ivanovich Belotsvetov and Vasily Chinarikov to steal the show in this thin but by no means short book. Their dialogue is fiery and rapacious, as well as filled with the exegesis and experimentation you would expect from Russian writing.
The equivalent is an Agatha Christie novel where the room is filled with all the guests of a party and one of them must be the killer – plus they all have long names, big beards and say samovar a lot.
Although the dialogue can be winding and the poverty feels anachronistic at times, there is as much to be said about Pyetsukh’s ingenuity as there was for Dostoyevsky’s in writing Crime and Punishment, on which Pyetsukh’s is loosely based.
Even without this comparison, there are dramatic parallels to be drawn between The New Moscow Philosophy and the great titles of Russian literature. His humour is traditional, but thrilling and foreboding in ways that Dostoyevsky and Gogol may have found difficult. A grain of wheat is a sorry affair, a child’s sticky hand is a weapon; such images are not naturally drawn but fall completely in synch with Pyetsukh’s scenarios.
Any Cop?: Happy is the reader who grasps the sorrow of this book as gravy for the meaty humour. With that recipe, Pyetsukh’s future popularity can be certified. - Charles J Haynes
What is most striking about The New Moscow Philosophy is that, despite its title, it offers not so much a novel vision but rather reinforces an established one: this is a story that in large part feels timeless, and could be set (with only the most minor variations) in the Russia of almost any time over the past hundred and fifty years. In part this is due to how the book is rooted in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a text (and an influence) that it parodies, but many of its other elements also reinforce that.
The New Moscow Philosophy is set in the waning years of the Soviet Union; published in 1989, its characters already acknowledge: "The times are such that democracy and glasnost decide everything". The setting and circumstances, however, could be from any Soviet novel from decades earlier, as the action centers around the repeatedly sub-divided Apartment 12 in a "great building at the corner of Petroverigsky Lane", where a variety of tenants uncomfortably share what was once a grand private domicile. It now houses several different families and individuals, and they all complain about having too little room.
One of the tenants is Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya, an old woman, and her sudden disappearance ("into thin air") drives the plot -- with possible motives that might have driven some to a desperate act all too obvious:
The lot of them can hardly wait for her room to be vacated, and for the sake of that little room they're capable of saying anything. They'd bury Pumpianskaya alive if given half a chance.
The action, which takes place over four days, from a Friday to Monday, follows both their concerns and attempts to find out what became of the old lady and their maneuvering for the room; the mundanely domestic -- everyday life in the crowded apartment -- also contrasts with more ethereal concerns, including a good deal of serious (amateur) philosophizing. The odd circumstances surrounding Pumpianskaya's death also allows for a variety of speculation that includes the metaphysical -- after all: "There's no evidence of a crime, not even of an incident" (which, of course, turns The New Moscow Philosophy into a sort of anti-Crime and Punishment (since the crime and incident in that story was very real from the start)).
Pyetsukh also firmly roots the novel in the literary: there are those constant echoes of Crime and Punishment, as well as as references -- direct and indirect -- to other Russian and Soviet literature and history (with endnotes helping readers to understand some of these). And just as Crime and Punishment is, in many respects, timeless, so to The New Moscow Philosophy tries to be similarly universal.
Early on Pyetsukh suggests:
What's important is something else: namely, that in all probability literature is the root of life, so to speak, if not life itself, only slightly displaced along the x-axis, and consequently it should come as no surprise that in Russia where life goes literature follows, but also that where literature goes life follows, that Russians not only write what they live but in part live what they write, that literature has such spiritual authority here
This, surely, is the 'Moscow philosophy' that Pyetsukh means to demonstrate with his story -- and he pulls it off quite well. Steeped in literature, The New Moscow Philosophy seems in all ways typically Russian (still with a strong Soviet slant), from its possible-murder mystery -- light-hearted but melancholy -- to the heavy layers of inescapable past that all the characters must deal with. It is a household tale yet includes extensive philosophical exposition, a mix of the everyday and the eternal with, in both cases, a distinctly Russian flair.
Amusing and even touching, The New Moscow Philosophy does feel slightly dated in a post-Soviet world; still, it's more than a relic, and one can both admire and enjoy its cleverness.
- M.A.Orthofer
‘The meaning of life is purely a Russian fabrication. We fabricated it for the very same reason the Asians fabricated Buddhism: presumably from want of life’s basic necessities.’Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s THE NEW MOSCOW PHILOSOPHY reads like an anthology of short stories from Russia’s finest writers of prose. A companion to Gogol, Turgenev and Ivan Bunin, the myths and legends of this vast land seep into the novel, mordantly intertwined with the contemporary politics of the late-Soviet period – when the novel was originally written. Published by Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press, this is the novel’s first English edition, arriving over twenty years since its original Russian publication in 1989. Fortunately, the English reader, perhaps gaining from the wait, has the benefit of historical hindsight to inform their read of this darkly humorous, philosophically sophisticated ‘whodunit’ mystery.
Faintly echoing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the novel begins with a heightening sense of suspicion over the disappearance, and possible murder, of a landlady – Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya. Set in Apartment 12 of a decaying building, found in a Moscow suburb, Pumpianskaya’s tenants and neighbours have disliked her ‘since time immemorial and always oppressed her in whatever way possible’. Having lived in her dwelling for many years, there are suspicions surrounding her former bourgeois heritage, as well as her continued Tsarist sympathies: once, in reference to Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, she called the monarch ‘His Majesty’.
Never leaving the confines of the building - we are trapped with the thirteen characters (mercifully listed at the start) that appear within the book’s densely crowded pages. Offering the reader a chance to observe a microcosm of Soviet society in the era of Glasnost, one listens in as conversations concerning personal beliefs and existential theories mingle with irreverent discussions about the Russian-character, as well as dealing with increasingly paranoid suspicions over the death of Pumpianskaya. And it is here, through the narrative of the murder mystery, that Pyetsukh, an ever present narrator, adds his own footnotes and insights to the proceedings. This makes THE NEW MOSCOW PHILOSOPHY a mixture of fiction, philosophy, political commentary, as well as literary criticism, all within a relatively short 186 pages.
Spread across four days, Friday to Monday, the subtle detective story introduces us to Pumpianskaya’s fellow residents and tenants in Apartment 12. Such a tightly packed space breeds an atmosphere of animosity, where everyone knows each other’s business and habits. A rivalry develops over Pumpainskaya’s room, the largest and most sought-after. The days pass, and with appearance of the local police – in the form of Inspector Rybkin – speculation grows as to what happened, with numerous theories presented. Despite the narrative seeming secondary to the philosophical discourse, the most entertaining parts of the novel can be found in the conversations of the residents, often voicing their amusing and subversive views.
“Hello, boys!” suddenly rang out a voice behind them, and the posse turned round.
It was Lev Borisovich Fondervyakin standing in the middle of the kitchen, wrapped in a striped sheet.Much has been written about this novel being a Crime and Punishment parody. Whilst present and palpable, it is not the driving force of the story as many have suggested it is. More honestly, Pyetsukh presents a discourse on the importance of literature in Russian life, one that encompasses the ideas of many authors and thinkers. Common themes emerge: the inability of Russian to embrace a cultural ‘Europeaness’, and the relationship between good and evil.
“What’ve you all crowded in here to peep at so late?”
At these words Fondervyakin playfully bowed his head, and his bald patch began to shine like a newly minted five-kopeck coin. No one answered him.
“Here’s what I think,” Fondervyakin began to say. “None of this is as simple as it might seem at first glance. Most likely there’s some age old story here: collaboration with the Nazis, or even a link to a foreign spy mission now liquidating its agents…”
“Shame on you, you old coot,” responded Chinarikov. “What are you going on about – it’s beyond comprehension! Next you’ll be saying Pumpianskaya had connections to the spirit world!”
“You bet I will! It’s no coincidence that Yulka Golova saw a ghost!”
For example: ”Good and evil exist, I would say even coexist, in the same way as fire and water, heaven and earth, man and woman…If there were no evil, there would be no struggle or movement, which is to say – life.” However, it is the fractured metaphysical relationship between fiction and human existence that interests Pyetsukh the most:
‘….compared to literature, life is much more mottled, incoherent, variable, details, tedious….perhaps literature is indeed life, in other words, the ideal it its construction, the standard for all weights and measures, while so-called life comprises a sketch, avenues of approach, a blank, and in the most felicitous situations – a version. More than anything it looks as if literature, word of honour, is the fair copy and life a rough copy, and not even the most useful.’
The grandiosity of Pyetsukh’s aim is achieved by maintaining a tone of self-deprecation throughout, mocking his own aspirations and philosophizing - an example, perhaps, of his own hesitation towards the changing political atmosphere at the time. In an age were ideologies affected the very basic mechanics of everyday life for millions, the apprehensions of the THE NEW MOSCOW PHILOSOPHY towards ideas can be understood – this is also where the spirit of dark, often hilarious satirical humour, creeps into the book.
With an excellent translation by Krystyna Anna Steiger, this story presents a Russia grappling with the reawakening mysticism of its past traditions and a pragmatic realism instilled through over sixty years of Soviet domination. Fortunately, Pyetsukh has weaved this into a humorous, insightful, easy-to-follow novel, which overall offers an immensely enjoyable and educating read.
VYACHESLAV PYETSUKH
Born November 18, 1946 in Moscow, Vyacheslav Alekseyevich Pyetsukh is a prolific writer of both fiction and essays. Having taught high-school history and Russian for more than a decade, he embarked on a successful career as one of Russia’s most published contemporary authors, quickly becaming a major figure of the late-Soviet period and thereafter. He has published fifteen collected editions of his work, and both his essays and short stories appear regularly in leading Russian journals.
Often meta-literary, his writing has been placed in the context of 1990s Russian postmodernism alongside such writers as Tatiana Tolstaya, Victor Erofeyev, and Evgeny Popov, and as a public intellectual he has often been compared to the likes of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In English, his work has appeared in The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing (edited by Erofeyev) and a number of journals. A short story, “Me and the Sea,” won the 1999 Emily Clark Balch Prize of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Pyetsukh was awarded the prestigious Pushkin Prize in 2007, and received a National Ecological Award in 2009, for his “creative contribution” to promoting environmental issues in Russia, and a 2010 Triumph Award for excellence in the arts and literature.
Pyetsukh and his wife Irina, an art dealer specializing in avant-garde painting, divide their time between Moscow and a village in the Tverskaya region.- Richard Jackson
The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh, translated in many languages since its publication in 1989, has finally been translated into English this year by Krystyna Anna Steiger. As Steiger notes, this is a gentle parody of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but even if the reader is unfamiliar with that book, The New Moscow Philosophy is easy reading and full of insights into literature—particularly the Russian reverence for it. The book offers a mystery story and a debate, often humorous, over good and evil. And the reader may have heard of the competition for apartments in Moscow, which is at the heart of this book.
A product of glasnost, a period in Soviet history of artistic freedom, this novel, as Steiger explains, pokes fun in its characters of this era “that stirs up complex emotions and attitudes, ranging from anticipation of the future to nostalgia for the past, and even for the present, the late-Soviet status quo.” This sounds sometimes like old people complaining about the loss of values in a more open society.
Though Dostoevsky’s masterpiece is parodied, it is only because the crime, ultimately revealed, is watered down so much from that in Crime and Punishment, and the punishment similarly ludicrously reduced. Pyetsukh is infusing humor into his “homage to Dostoevsky’s classic and the classical Russian literary tradition as a symbiosis of literature and life.”
For the reader perhaps intimidated by Russian literature, the book has provided help. There is a list of all the characters’ names in the beginning, and for all the allusions to Crime and Punishment and other historical and literary facts, there are explanations at the back. Also the evolving mystery and solution unfold in this short novel over only four consecutive days, forming the book’s sections. The mystery is that an elderly occupant in the one of the apartments has disappeared. The day before her disappearance, the other residents confronted her about when she would die and leave the apartment to one of them. She was healthy but also somewhat disliked because as the descendant of the original owner, she was officious over the others.
Alongside this mystery, there are two sets of discussions. The framework is an unnamed narrator, calling Russian literature “evangelical literature,” since Russians take literature very seriously—as fact:
In Russia, there’s positively nothing to be ashamed of when in certain romantic instances, we nod and glance back at those figures we hold sacred in the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Chekov, for they are not figments of the imagination, but the true saints of Russian life, having existed in actual fact as exemplars, worthy of imitation in how they suffered and reasoned, for the whole point is that all of it happened.
As proof of literature’s factual nature, Pyetsukh gives us the history of Apartment 12, its occupants through the years—“facts” that do figure later in the mystery—and a floor plan of the apartment to follow for the “crime” being committed.
The other insightful discussion comes from two of the inhabitants who take it upon themselves, in sometimes bumbling fashion, to solve the crime. One is a pharmacist, and the other is the caretaker and resident philosopher.
One of the children in the adjacent apartment puts muck on a doorknob and that “crime” starts off the discussion of good and evil, whether evil exists in animals, and that it does make a human “a two-fold creature”:
This is understandable, not least because man and mankind have been endowed with the potential for everything. I can pick up a stray kitten on the street today and steal a broom from my neighbor tomorrow, because the vast majority of people are neither good nor evil in absolute terms, but not-so-good and not-so-evil at the same time.
The reader will agree with the translator about the “utter absence of pretentiousness despite the elevated topics it examines and presents for our consideration.” Steiger does manage one of her challenges—to capture a savvy narrator’s irony and humor in his consideration of “the nature of the literary text, the intricate relationship between literature and life … in forming the psyche of the average Russian reader.”
She’s less successful in “creating natural-sounding dialogue between characters ranging in age from six to sixty plus, in discussions ranging from the official and the philosophical to the prosaic, from the heated to the sullen, from the impassioned to the indignant.” (The children certainly don’t sound young.) But in spite of that fault, this novel provides insight into a particular era in Soviet history, and humor besides. - Olive Mullet
An old relic of the Tsarist regime – Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya – disappears from a Moscow communal apartment in what turn out to be the dying days of the Soviet Union, while her neighbors scheme over who gets the newly available square meters. A detective appears on the scene, as does an acquisitive, chess-playing locksmith and a certain Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin seemingly conjured up out of the pages of Crime and Punishment. A horrible crime might have occurred, but then again maybe not.
Any attempt to describe what takes place in Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s recently translated 1989 novel will fall well short of the descriptions offered by the characters themselves, most especially by the loquacious, utopian-minded pharmacologist Nikita Ivanovich Belotsvetov, who bursts out at one point saying:
“Here’s what I think: some incredible, Mephistophilean sort of story has emerged, one that is out of sync with our times and ways. Such stories were conceivable in the age of the Barbarian Invasions, or in the Bulgakovian twenties, but they’re not possible today, they’re as out of place as the Wars of the Roses…”
The pharmacologist turns out to be wrong. These Mephistophilean sort of stories are as common in the era of Glasnost as they were during Dostoevsky’s days. This repetition is one of the main themes running through the book and plays a role in Pyetsukh’s by turns satirical and serious attempts at defining the nature and purpose of literature and its relation to life. And if you want to witness the interlinked relation between literature and life then a communal apartment in Moscow is a good place to look, as Russians are a people who “not only write what they live but in part live what they write.”
Beneath the wordy tirades so reminiscent of the 19th century Russian novels that keep getting mentioned throughout the New Moscow Philosophy, Pyetsukh deftly plays with other serious issues as well; in fact some of the same big issues taken on by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, such as whether people are inherently good or evil and whether man is nature’s ultimate goal. Determining what is satire and what ideas deserve more serious consideration is as difficult as it is probably unnecessary in reading this storehouse of ironic wisdom.
When Belotsvetov is not trying to solve the mystery of Pumpianskaya’s disappearance he engages in extremely involved philosophical conversations on the nature of evil with the building’s womanizing, well-read caretaker and veteran of the Afghan war, Vasily Chinarikov (who presumably unlike the majority of Moscow caretakers, has a large photograph of Ernest Hemingway on his wall, a picture which will play a significant role in the mystery’s resolution). Belotsvetov even manages to unite his profession and passion in a plan to eradicate evil through medication.
Besides the comically dizzy intellectual heights these conversations reach they also take place in hilariously inappropriate situations. One debate occurs while the pair are clearing ice from a sidewalk, their back and forth over the goings-on in Apartment 12 and the transformation of good and evil in the Soviet Union briefly being interrupted by the stares of two puzzled passersby and a stray dog:
“The trio of onlookers had their reasons, by the way. Like it or not, you come to a halt when you encounter a couple of guys armed with yard implements who, instead of clearing ice from the pavement are waving their arms like madmen and expounding at the top of their lungs on pills for evildoers.”
Not every writer or generation of writers is granted that perfect metaphorical space in which to set their novels. Melville and Conrad found it aboard ships. Isolated manor houses have been used effectively but are problematic for most writers in lacking originality and being generally very expensive.
One of the silver linings of the horrendous housing situation in the Soviet Union was in giving literature the communal apartment, what are described by the novel’s aspiring writer Genrikh Ivanovich Valenchik as “universities of newly structured human relations. Bitter universities to be sure,, but they’ve left us more than kitchen brawls and kerosene-tainted cabbage soups …”
Carrying on an illustrious tradition found in Bulgakov’s sinister Apartment Number 50 on Sadovaya as well as Communal Apartment Number 3, known as the “the Rookery,” where Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender briefly takes up residence (until it burns down), Apartment Number 12 becomes a world in itself, a microcosm of Russia and human life. - literalab.com/
Outwardly a mystery story, The New Moscow Philosophy is concerned with the relationship between literature and life. Within the meta-textual story, the narrator’s argument that literature does not merely reflect life but is life takes place in a series of digressions like this:
That scenes from everyday life separated by a century and a half are so similar invites us to reflect yet again. What if Ecclesiastes was right and there really is nothing new under the sun [...] What does this hypothesis imply? First, it’s possible that in its origin, that is, intrinsically, literature is implicated in the very idea of life [...] Second, it’s possible that rather than merely being a crafty reflection of life, literature is the imprinted idea of life itself [...]
Setting the story in a communal apartment in Moscow, during the Mikhail Gorbachev period of glasnost, allows Vyacheslav Pyetsukh to reminisce about communal living: “[...] communal apartments were universities of newly structured human relations.”
Pyetsukh brings together thirteen principal characters, mostly resident in the communal apartment. Parodying Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, an old lady disappears, possibly murdered, many of the residents are implicated by this apparent crime, each seeking the “augmentation of living space.” Two tenants take it upon themselves to solve the mystery, all the while debating the nature of evil and morality.
The narrative, though entertaining, occasionally feels secondary, a structure to facilitate Pyetsukh’s philosophical discourse, but the line of argument he pursues is sufficiently perceptive and fascinating to drive the novel forward. A brilliant book, possibly the best I have read so far in 2011. -
Time's Flow Stemmed
Vyacheslav Pyetsuka is a Russian writer ,he is a trained historian ,he taught russian and world history until the avant grade nature of his fiction lead to him losing his job ,he has since published numerous books in Russia ,and has had a number of his short stories translated ,notably in the new russian writing collection from Penguin .This book came out in Russia in 1989 and is new from Twisted spoon the czech based publisher .
The novel is set over course of a weekend and we follow it from friday to monday as the members of a collective household in Moscow gather and discuss what happened to the old women that had a flat in the building and who will get the space that is now free she isn’t there any more this book has echo’s of crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky ,like that book there is a large cast of people involved in the story telling process fourteen in all .The book is like a russian doll it becomes more and more as we move along we find out that the disappearance of Alexandra Sergeyevena Pumpianskaya (don’t you just love that name ) may have more too it than first thought ,hence the echo to C&P was this a murder ,well we never know this isn’t a crime book it is a book about russian life ,art and philosophy as the tenants talk we see the previous hundred year of russian life and art mention in snippets.
Though it may seem speculative at first if not futile, investigating the relationship between life and what we call literature would be useful at this point .The relationship in question is extremely abtrusive undertaking, but is tempting to try nonetheless .First it’s tempting to ascertain to what degree literature is a game and to what a book of fates , a textbook of life .
The opening of the second part “saturday”
Now this book is a must for any Russian lit fan ,as follows of this blog know I m russian lit light my self but slowly working on this ,so I found this a book that sent me rushing to google at times to find out about this and that as I went a long ,so it gave me more of a passion to discover more russian Literature old and new and any book that makes you do that is always worth picking up .I think the other echo with C&P is the time when C&P was written Russia was a land of uncertain futures and this book in 1989 is the same this is just the time the new age of russia was happening .We also see how important space and station can be in a large city as the people in the building argue over this vacant space .all this and a lengthy discourse between two of them on the nature of what is evil .I must say the translator Krystyna Anna Steiger ,has manage to keep together what is a complex and mutlilayered book ,still hugely readable in English . - Winstonsdad's Blog
One Friday evening, sometime in the late 1980s, in mid-March in Moscow, an old woman goes missing. Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya is the oldest resident among the eleven occupants of Apartment 12 and, technically, the remaining family member of the once-lavish apartment’s original owners. Pumpianskaya’s disappearance, itself precluded by a clever metafictional musing on literature and its relationship to everyday life, opens Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s excellent The New Moscow Philosophy.
As soon as the tongue-in-cheek narrator of the novel dispatches of old Pumpianskaya, although not without first situating her literary disappearance next to none other than a certain pawnbroker’s death by a young Raskolnikov, said narrator can then leisurely entertain the reader with an exhaustive description of the ten other apartment mates, a meticulous history of the previous occupants, and the geography and topography of the apartment itself. In this way, the first chapter of The New Moscow Philosophy manages to amass a tumble of details about twentieth century Russia while setting a tone of literary reverence mixed with a kindly irreverence to the ordinary individuals mucking their way forward in Russian society.
Apartment 12 is a mini-sampling of middle-class Moscow in the late 1980s: a writer and his pregnant wife, an aging bachelor with a fondness for preserved fruits, a divorced woman and her two children, a grandmother living with her grandson, a middle-aged pharmacologist and the building’s caretaker. Most of these characters are in some way comical—flawed and bumbling specimens of humanity—although the last two, pharmacologist Belotsvetov and caretaker Chinarikov, become a focal point for the novel’s heart. Pyetsukh sets them up in a series of lengthy conversations in which they debate whether humans are innately good or innately bad.
“Evil is elemental, like a tsunami or an earthquake, so everyday reasoning tells you that all you need is to work out the appropriate attitude toward it, as with a tsunami or an earthquake, or with anything elemental.”
“I can’t agree with that, and here’s the reason why: evil is very simple—so simple, Vasya, it’s a wonder nearly everyone doesn’t commit it! The reality is that not even close to everyone commits it, certainly not the majority, and not even close to the minority, but rather an insignificant minority. This means evil doesn’t coexist on equal terms with its opposites—good and the void—in other words, it’s unnatural, illicit!”
These heartfelt conversations run alongside what is otherwise a subtle and somewhat farcical detective story. Once it becomes clear that Pumpianskaya is missing, Belotsvetov and Chinarikov, with the help of Inspector Rybkin (who, apropos to his government position, doesn’t do much), set out to discover what has happened. That “what has happened?” isn’t just about the small world of their apartment but about Russian society at this particular juncture in its history—when the country is still working through Gorbachev’s Glasnost policies and what they would ultimately bring.
There is a wonderful layering of thematic project in this novel, deftly smoothed together by the chatty omniscient narrator. Beyond the meaning of the actual events which transpire in the apartment and Chinarikov and Belotsvetov’s philosophical examinations, the novel spends many a word on an intertextual reckoning of the complicated bond between life and literature:
That any attempt, no matter how feeble, no matter how documentary, to reconstruct reality by using the tools of literary discourse inevitably turns reality into its opposite, that is, into literature, should give pause for thought. This being the case the relationships we are looking for must be strictly obligate, perhaps even fated.
Here is another interesting observation: compared to literature, life is much more mottled, incoherent, variable, detailed, tedious. What follows is a bizarre suggestion: perhaps literature is indeed life, in other words, the ideal of its construction, the standard for all weights and measures, while so-called life comprises a sketch, avenues of approach, a blank, and in the most felicitous situations—a version. More than anything it looks as if literature, word of honour, is the fair copy and life a rough copy, and not even the most useful.
This passage (along with another on the very last page of the novel in which Pyetsukh polishes the idea even further) proclaims with unabashed joy that literature and life have become equal sources of human memory, of human thought. To a convinced reader, this is nothing extraordinary except for the thrill of the thought being written down and thus sanctioned. That a fictional conversation between Raskolnikov and Sonia might carry as much truth, or better yet, a greater, more perfect truth, than one between a real-live Russian student and his impoverished prostitute sweetheart is something all committed bibliophiles believe with something as powerful as religious faith. In literature, life is refined, perfected, distilled.
Despite the seriousness of Pyetsukh’s idea, The New Moscow Philosophy is refreshingly comical. The book’s mock-historical narrative tone is self-aware enough to both embrace and poke fun at its grand aspirations. The mystery of Pumpianskaya’s death is resolved to satisfying conclusion, as are the solemn ethical investigations of the many residents of Apartment 12.
With The New Moscow Philosophy, Twisted Spoon Press and Krystyna Anna Steiger have introduced a significant new voice to the English-reading public. Pyetsukh has a vast oeuvre available in Russian, let’s hope there are more translations to follow.-
An elderly woman disappears from her communal apartment in Moscow one day in Spring. The other occupants immediately try to lay claim to her flat - in fact some have had their eye on it for a while which leads to the possibility that someone may have murdered her for it. When the police seem disinclined to take any action, two of the tenants decide to investigate themselves.
The whole story is presented as a 'real life' alternative working of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, with many asides on the nature of art, the similarities and differences between literature and reality, and the importance of literature in the lives of average Russians. In between there's an intriguing whodunnit as the two tenants investigate ghostly sightings, death threats cut from a children's book and disappearing photographs.
It's an enjoyable enough without, but I think that anyone who's read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment will appreciate The New Moscow Philosophy more. It's a long, long while since I read Crime and Punishment and I'm sure I missed some of the nuances here. As a total Jane Austen fan, I can watch Bride and Prejudice, the Bollywood re-make of Pride and Prejudice and pick up all the references to the original - I'm sure that sort of in-depth knowledge of Crime and Punishment would have added to my appreciation of The New Moscow Philosophy.
I've been reading a lot of translated fiction over the past few months and feel that here it was not of the quality I've found elsewhere. While doubtless retaining a sense of 'foreignness' is sometimes a good thing, I felt constantly reminded of it, particularly in the translation of idioms. - Maryom
“. . . an important historical work of fiction. Like the works of Solzhenitsyn, The New Moscow Philosophy exposes the commonplace as evidence of the sickness of the society in which it exists. . . . a fine example of all that is good in the best of Russian literature.”
First published in 1989, The New Moscow Philosophy was quickly translated into French, German, and Spanish. It proved a hit, and firmly established Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s credentials as yet another essential Russian author.
In this first English translation we, too, get to experience the sharp characterization and typical Russian wit that the Europeans have been able to enjoy for over 20 years.
The New Moscow Philosophy takes place in a communal apartment in late Soviet-era Moscow. The apartment has been in the family of Alexandra Sergeyevna for years. More recently though, she has occupied but one small room, while the remainder has slowly filled with an assortment of different tenants. When Alexandra one day disappears from the apartment—having first been frightened by what appeared to be a ghost—the remaining tenants enter into protracted negotiations over who should be allowed her room, and what has happened to her anyway.
What follows has all the ingredients of the classic Russian novel. In fact The New Moscow Philosophy is a very clear and freely acknowledged parody of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. But perhaps parody is the wrong word. A parody usually exists to poke fun at the original, and this is very much not the case in The New Moscow Philosophy. In fact the author regularly refers with admiration to Dostoyevsky’s famous work; so let’s call it an homage. Mr. Pyetsukh’s novel uses Crime and Punishment as the heroic sunlit backdrop for his deliberately watered-down version. In this way he is drawing attention to the state of Soviet-era Russia and the slow dissolution of its once ferocious ideology.
The author, Vyacheslav Pyetsukh, spent many years teaching high-school history before becoming a victim of Soviet officialdom. In 1982 he came to the attention of the powers that be over the publication of several of his works, and was forced to resign. Despite never having considered a career as a professional writer, he soon published his first novel and has since won a number of prestigious awards, including the Pushkin Prize. He and his wife continue to live in a small village outside of Moscow.
While the Russians have a long and proud history of subversive literature, this is an atypical example. The story is relatively straightforward, the characters regular folk. But make no mistake, this book takes the commonplace and turns it to the service of the dissident. The absurdity of life in Russia at a time when Soviet control was in its death throes, and Glasnost was on its way, is laid bare. As such this is an important historical work of fiction. Like the works of Solzhenitsyn, The New Moscow Philosophy exposes the commonplace as evidence of the sickness of the society in which it exists.
What’s more, The New Moscow Philosophy is a great read in its own right. The writing is clear and clean, the characters are well realized, there is a lucid linear plot, and the story resolves appropriately. Yet there is more. Like all of the best Russian novels, you are compelled to keep on reading. You want to know what will happen next, even if what happens next isn’t really all that exciting in and of itself. It’s like being a fly on the wall, a social voyeur: You want to see how these people live. You want to know more. . . .
Also, like many of the greats, author Pyetsukh includes extended passages of philosophical discussion, thinly disguised as fiction. His characters discuss the nature of good and evil, and the narrator—Mr. Pyetsukh himself, one suspects—discourses on the historical relationship between literature and the Russian collective social consciousness. These detours are both a fascinating insight into the developing mood of the times and a direct indicator of the tenor of the novel itself.
There is a huge amount to like about The New Moscow Philosophy. It is a fine example of all that is good in the best of Russian literature. It is, on the surface, a nice simple mystery story. Yet not far beneath lurks the subversive, questioning, dissatisfied social commentary that characterizes much of Russia’s literary heritage.- Phil Constable
