The Burn by Vassily Aksyonov

First published:Ozhog, 1980 (English translation, 1984)

Type of work: Phantasmagoric modernism

Time of work: 1970-1973, with flashbacks

Locale: Moscow and elsewhere

Principal Characters:

• Pantalei Apollinarievich Pantalei, a writer
• Aristarkh Apollinarievich Kunitser, a physicist and space scientist
• Samson Apollinarievich Sabler, a jazz saxophonist
• Radius Apollinarievich Khvastishchev, a sculptor
• Gennady Apollinarievich Malkolmov, a physician
• Tolya von Steinbock, all of the above as a teenager in Magadan, Siberia, during Joseph Stalin’s last years
• Alisa, a young Magadan camp inmate who becomes an amoral Moscow beauty of the 1960’s and 1970’s
• Sanya Gurchenko, a Catholic camp inmate who escapes to the West
• Patrick Thunderjet, an Anglo-American professor and longtime friend of the heroes
• Cheptsov, a retired Stalinist KGB officer who arrested Tolya’s mother and Sanya Gurchenko twenty years earlier

The Novel

The Burn tells the story of the Soviet generation that came of age in the years just after the death of Joseph Stalin. There are five more or less interchangeable heroes—or rather antiheroes—all members of Vassily Aksyonov’s generation, all liberals, all superstars in their professions: Kunitser the physicist, Sabler the musician, Malkolmov the physician, Khvastishchev the sculptor, and Pantalei the writer. The disillusioned heroes have retreated from the successes of the socially concerned, optimistic 1960’s into alcohol, sex, and work. Although the men do not know one another and lead independent lives, they have certain virtually identical and seemingly concurrent parallel experiences. Among them are encounters with an almost-recognized figure from the past who triggers flashbacks to a time when the five protagonists were one person, the teenage Tolya von Steinbock. Moreover, the identity of each of the heroes continuously revolves into that of another at the end of each episode.

On the evening of the novel’s first day, the collective protagonist encounters his old friend Patrick Thunderjet. Their drinking expands into a binge that takes the hero and Thunderjet through a set of riotous experiences ending in a police drunk tank in the Crimea. Too valuable to Soviet society to be written off, the collective hero is sent to a detox hospital, cured, and discharged.

Three years pass. The sobered heroes continue their lives engaged in major creative projects, including a secret satellite project; a miraculous serum, Lymph D; a gigantic marble sculpture of a dinosaur “Humility”; a jazz-rock fusion breakthrough; and the writing of a play, or perhaps The Burnitself. Each of these men has a professional colleague, a close friend from the early 1960’s, when a radiant new future seemed imminent. The old friends have compromised with the renewed conservative government and risen to positions of power and influence. Judas-like, these former friends betray the heroes, who, at the moment of crisis, return to alcohol.

In the shattering finale the collective protagonist, now merged into a single nameless “I” (apparently the adult Tolya von Steinbock), descends into alcoholic madness. Attempts to save him fail because the hero can trust no one. In the last of a series of drunken hallucinations he leaps to his death, believing that he is an astronaut flying to the moon.

There is also a story-behind-the-story told in a series of flashbacks to events twenty years before. Tolya von Steinbock joins his mother in Siberia when she is released from a ten-year sentence toward the end of Stalin’s government. He wants nothing more than to be a model Soviet youth and is vaguely ashamed of his ex-prisoner mother and stepfather, a doctor and Catholic lay priest of German origin. Among a group of new women prisoners being marched through the streets he sees a young Polish-English girl, Alisa, whom he dreams of rescuing. As he daydreams, an ex-prisoner named Sanya Gurchenko offers modest aid to the girl. Tolya becomes friends with Gurchenko, who knows his stepfather. The courage and idealism of the two older men greatly impress him. Tolya’s mother is soon rearrested, as is Sanya. They are interrogated, Sanya brutally, by two political police agents, Cheptsov, and his superior. Sanya later escapes to the West, where he becomes a Catholic theologian.

These events lie deeply buried in the minds of the successful heroes. They do not wish to remember the past with its implications for the future, but it is very much with them. Wherever they go they encounter two old men, cloakroom attendants, drunk-tank aides, and so on, who are faintly familiar. They also yearn for a promiscuous beauty, who moves in Moscow intellectual circles and seems to be the Polish-English Alisa. The heroes are forced to confront both their impotent past and compromised present: a confrontation they cannot face. Unlike Sanya Gurchenko, who actively resisted, they compromised with the system. They fail to rescue Alisa, who has also been corrupted and who, like their friends, betrays them.

It is Gurchenko who offers the solution. On a trip to Rome the collective hero has an encounter with Gurchenko, now a Jesuit priest, who articulates his philosophy of “the third model.” The basic postulate is that all men, atheist and believer alike, seek God. There are always two models before man: an idea and its comparison. What one must seek is a third model—one which is qualitatively different—through which one may strive to see the face of God. Man approaches it only in moments of intuitive, suprarational creative inspiration. Although many human emotions, such as fear, anger, courage, can be rationally understood, others, the higher emotions such as compassion for one’s neighbor, charity, the urge for justice, are rationally inexplicable. Creativity is similarly transrational. Christianity, precisely because it is concerned with unaccountable human phenomena, offers a basis for moral action. The hero’s final leap is, however, not an act of revelation, but one of despair. The weight of the past is too heavy and his moral complicity too great.

The Characters

The Burn’s five-in-one hero manifests different aspects of Aksyonov himself and his close friends, all members of the new young cultural and scientific elite in the 1960’s. Most central of the generational spokesmen and closest to author Aksyonov is the writer Pantalei, who is caught up in the quest for the once-pure camp victim Alisa, now the beautiful vixen of the Moscow jet set and possible KGB informant. Malkolmov, like Aksyonov, is a doctor. Jazz saxophonist Sabler reflects Aksyonov’s love of American jazz and popular music. Tolya von Steinbock’s background closely parallels that of Aksyonov’s youth. The heroes, although distinct in most respects, are not “real,” individuated protagonists. They are, rather, richly drawn types chosen to convey different aspects of the experiences of a single generation. Their kinship is marked by their shared middle name, “Apollinarievich”; they are the figurative sons of Apollo, the Greek god of the creative arts.

Other characters are also treated as “sets.” Each of the heroes is paired with a villain, a Judas figure. Aksyonov signals their nature by assigning them names that mean “silver” in various languages: Silvester, the jazz man; Zilberansky, the doctor; Argentov, a scientist; Serebro, a sculptor; and Serebryanikov, a writer. The “silver” refers to the thirty pieces of silver Judas received for betraying Christ.

The Burn offers a third, less sharply defined group of characters. These are the Stalinists headed by Lieutenant Colonel Cheptsov. Cheptsov and his henchmen appear throughout the novel in various guises and transformations: as cloakroom or drunk-tank attendants; as roving marauders who plunder Europe in earlier centuries; as a mercenary unit that attacks a United Nations hospital in Katanga; and as the Soviet tank crews that subjugate Prague in 1968. Cheptsov is often identifiable only by his “eyes like small, hot black cherries.”

Perhaps the only characters who are truly individuals as opposed to representatives are the ex-prisoners Sanya Gurchenko and Tolya’s stepfather, who, supported by their religious beliefs, have actively resisted evil. Moral compromise and betrayal are unknown in their world.

Critical Context

The major theme of Aksyonov’s oeuvre is the nature and fate of Russia, a country geographically and politically located between East and West. In the imagination of Aksyonov’s generation, the East is associated with collectivism and despotism; the West with individualism and democracy. Stalin’s tyranny turned Russia into a vast, culturally barren GULag. His perversion of Communist ideology had imposed a stultifying hyperrationalism on the country: Socialist Realism in the arts, atheism in religion, and materialism in philosophy. The Revolution had betrayed its idealistic perpetrators. With the death of Stalin in 1953, the debate over Russia’s destiny was reopened by Aksyonov’s contemporaries. The 1950’s and early 1960’s were a time of exhilarating ferment for young Russian intellectuals. Censorship eased. The official ideal of rigid rationalism was challenged by that of spontaneous creativity and Socialist Realism, by more exciting artistic forms. Some of the young rejected materialist philosophical views for religious belief and idealism. Western popular culture began to penetrate Soviet society. There was strong official resistance to these winds of change. By the mid-1960’s, conservative forces had gained the upper hand. Trials took place; Czechoslovakia and then Afghanistan were invaded. Many disillusioned liberals withdrew into their private worlds, their dream of a new Russia dead. Some, like Aksyonov, emigrated—often with official encouragement. Aksyonov’s works chronicle this period, first from the optimistic perspectives of a generation on the rise confident that a new day had dawned, then growing doubts, and finally compromises and retreat. These events, stages, and themes are mirrored in Aksyonov’s fiction, the saga of a generation.

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