Kangaroo by Yuz Aleshkovsky

First published:Kenguru, 1981 (English translation, 1986)

Type of work: Satire

Time of work: 1949-1956

Locale: Moscow, Yalta, Munich, and an unnamed labor camp

Principal Characters:

• Fan Fanych, an international gangster
• Kidalla, a KGB investigator
• Josef Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• Chernyshevsky, a labor camp prisoner and a Party loyalist

The Novel

Kangaroo begins with a fatal phone call in 1949. Fan Fanych, alias “Etcetera,” crook extraordinaire, has been living and working both in jail and out on time borrowed from the MVD (KGB). When he hears the phone ring, he realizes that he is finally being called to account. Kidalla, the KGB investigator in charge of monitoring Fan’s activities, likes to keep tabs on the technological front and offers him a choice of computer-generated crimes. Fan discards various assassination attempts, Pan-Armenian plots, counterfeit bank note schemes, and a production of The Brothers Karamazov at the Central Theater of the Red Army. The option which attracts his attention is the bizarre case of Gemma the kangaroo, or, in official parlance, the “case of the vicious rape and murder of the aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on the night of July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905.” It is not surprising that this is the case which Kidalla has already chosen for him. They proceed to negotiate the conditions for Fan taking the fall: Fan’s terms include foreign newspapers in his cell, current films, and women.

Fan, as agreed, finds himself in a cozy private cell with potted geraniums and a private tutor. Professor Bolensky, age seventy-nine, has arrived to prepare Fan for his role as a violator of kangaroos, but the two are soon distracted by a parade of nubile young “stewardesses” and “waitresses”—KGB trainees seeking to pass their exams in “Obtaining Information During Foreplay with Enemies of the People.” In the month that they spend together in the cell, Fan learns his lessons in kangaroo physiology and the Professor learns his in sex and female psychology. In the process, the Professor falls in love with a six-foot-six basketball player, and she with him, and so bids a fond and grateful farewell to Fan.

More machinations follow, in the course of which Fan is reconditioned as a male kangaroo and meets “Kooler,” the inventor of the computer. Drugged, Fan passes out and awakens in a courtroom at his own trial. He, along with the rest of the spectators, is stunned by a film documenting the entire crime: pathetic shots of the murdered Gemma and the baby kangaroo in her pouch, of the sleeping watchman and the hordes of Muscovites combing the nearby woods in search of clues, of Gemma’s funeral escort replete with Australian and Soviet flags, and of Fan Fanych’s final desperate escape attempt inside an East German cow. The audience is alternately outraged and tearful, and so is Fan Fanych, especially since he is beginning to believe that it is he himself on the big screen. Only when the surrogate sneezes (something Fan never does) does Fan realize that he has been replaced.

Fan’s death sentence is never carried out, and he undergoes another experiment, a tinkering with his sense of time. That too fails, and he is led away—to be shot, he thinks. Instead, he finds himself in the back of a truck, dressed like a convict and headed for a labor camp. In the camp he encounters chief guard Dziuba, who claims to have shot 1,937 men in honor of the year 1937, and a gaggle of Old Bolsheviks—true believers who periodically dispatch their plans, resolutions, and suggestions to Vyacheslav Molotov or Lazar Kaganovich in the hope of vindication and who eagerly question Fan on “the enthusiasm of the masses and the international situation.” Fan takes a break from this “human zoo” of camp life to tell his invisible audience of one, Kolya, about his encounters with Adolf Hitler’s wallet and Josef Stalin’s feet. After a miserable decade or so of killing rats, the loyal comrades are set free, one by one. Only Chernyshevsky, their spokesman, and Fan are left. They while away the time by playing cards; Fan loses everything to Chernyshevsky (his bread ration until the KGB’s fiftieth anniversary and his soul until Stalin’s one hundredth) but survives—Chernyshevsky, too, is taken away.

Fan is freed shortly thereafter. Confused and hungover, he wakes up to a different world—one that is not, however, different enough. Stalin is dead but not out of the mausoleum yet. Slogans still overhang the streets. Fan returns to his communal apartment, falls in love, and goes to the KGB headquarters to find out what is happening. Kidalla, supposedly, is no longer there. Fan has been falsely accused and is scheduled to be rehabilitated and sent to the writers’ colony at Peredelkino to serve as a consultant on labor camp life for those authors unfortunate enough to miss out on this fashionable form of exile. Puzzled, he refuses, and returns to the scene of his supposed “crime.” He demonstrates the truth of his third eye, developed in the labor camp to hunt rats, to the same old drunken watchman and discovers that although Gemma really was murdered, she has been replaced by her baby. An eccentric Australian millionaire has left Fan a fortune for executing kangaroos, but the state takes most of it, and Fan and his drinking buddy Kolya are left with a piddling sum, which they use to drink to life and to tell Fan’s story.

The Characters

The hero of Kangaroo is a thief, a pickpocket, and occasionally a liar. His is also—with the exception of his invisible listener Kolya, and Josef Stalin’s right foot—the only truly honest voice in the book. That Fan’s monologue constitutes the book makes no difference, because in Kangaroo Yuz Aleshkovsky is not experimenting with reliable versus unreliable narrators or with point of view. The reader is not expected to delve into the whys and wherefores of Fan’s (or Stalin’s) criminal behavior. Fan Fanych, grown and full-blown, is to be taken at his word—at face value, however grotesque that face might be.

In a sense, word is more important than face, because Aleshkovsky’s characters, like Fyodor Dostoevski’s, begin with a voice and end with a body. Physical description is not particularly important, although physicality itself is. Fan’s language itself identifies him as a member in good standing of the criminal underworld, a world with its own laws and its own language—both of which stand in complete opposition to “socialist legality” and authority. In this case (all meanings apply here), his opposite number is Kidalla, the almost anonymous KGB agent who protects him for years in order to charge him with the crime of the century: kangaroo rape. Kidalla himself has no personality; he seems anonymous because his largest part in the narrative is as an outside force, a disembodied voice through the intercom in Fan’s cell. Even face-to-face meetings provide no physical description. Ironically, though, Kidalla comes closer to speaking Fan’s language than do the other major characters: He may be rotten to the core, but at least he has no illusions about international justice and the uses of force.

Not so Chernyshevsky, Fan’s barracksmate and spokesman for the Old Bolsheviks in the camp. In this phantasmagoric world, he is both the nineteenth century radical critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky and a walking composite of the revolutionary Party elite purged by Stalin in the 1930’s. A creature of ideology and dogma, he garbles his slogans and garbles his mind: “Doesn’t the Central Committee understand that revisionism has to be crushed at birth? Say, Citizen Jailer, did you send Kaganovich our scheme for infiltrating the ranks of the U.S. Republican Party and the British Conservative Party?” When he plays cards with Fan and wins away all of the latter’s food ration, he distracts his opponent by constantly humming the “Internationale.” His words have no relation to anything outside their own sterile constructs, so when the rules dictate that he stop playing cards with Fan he does so, with no thought that Fan is about to starve to death and needs a chance to win his own life back.

Aleshkovsky deals with Stalin in a different way. First, word and action conspire to expose the old conspirator: As Fan watches from his cellar hideout in the Livadia palace, Stalin arrives. There is an old shoemaker in the palace courtyard, a Muslim who seems to resemble Stalin’s father. Interested and sympathetic at first, Stalin is carried away by his own paranoid cliches, and he orders the man’s arrest. That action in itself might contribute to the myth of Stalin’s character as mysterious, arbitrary, and all-powerful, but Aleshkovsky proceeds to demystify the Great Man in the best tradition of Russian literature: Like Nikolai Gogol before him, he renders a world—here a man—ridiculous by reducing him to his component parts. Where Gogol divided polite Petersburg society into waists and mustaches sauntering down Nevsky Prospect, or chronicled a correspondence between two dogs, or separated a would-be snob and his oversized nose, Aleshkovsky puts Stalin’s best foot forward. Stalin’s right foot begins to object, criticize, and swear like a trooper. It mocks him, threatens, pleads—even plays footsie with Franklin Roosevelt under the Yalta conference table.

Aside from any extended punning on left and right deviations (charges during the purge trials), the whole episode with Stalin’s foot is part of Aleshkovsky’s discussion of human nature. Stalin, although tempted at least at some points to listen to what his body is telling him (“My foot is giving me trouble”), finally ignores it and retreats into dogma, just like his victim, Chernyshevsky.

This, then, is what makes Fan the unlikely hero of the tale: A crook, a thief, and a liar, he is what he is out of self-interest, not ideology. That may not be particularly good, but it is at least better and more natural than the alternative. His multiple aliases and identities, aside from marking him as a criminal, also make him a kind of perverse Soviet Everyman. He cons the system as best he can, not so much for profit as for survival, and his instinct for life encompasses an understanding of others’ survival, too. What makes him a true character—never mind good—is his consistent mercy and compassion for his fellow creatures, whether they be human or animal. “Human suffering,” Fan says, “is no better by a single tear or scream or faint thana butterfly’s or a cow’s or an eagle’s or a rat’s. That’s the only thing I’m sure of.”

Critical Context

Before he left the Soviet Union in 1978, Yuz Aleshkovsky was known officially as a children’s writer and unofficially as the author of scurrilously funny (therefore subversive) songs. At least one of those songs has become part of national folklore, witness to Aleshkovsky’s ear for the spoken language: Of all the ears inside and outside the Soviet Union, his is probably the one closest to the ground.

His novels and stories belong to the narrative tradition called skaz, which is an untranslatable term for the type of yarn told in the first person by an unself-conscious narrator whose language draws at least as much attention to the teller as to the tale. That language may be dialect, it may be slang, or it may be purely idiosyncratic. Its effect may be satiric, but its objects is itself, and it can carry the reader far beyond what passes for a plot. His satire mocks not only a social system but also the human folly that produced it.

Like Dostoevski’s Underground Man, Aleshkovsky’s protagonists carry on a monologue which is really a dialogue with themselves or some other, invisible audience. Those protagonists may already be schizophrenic, as in the psychiatric ward of Sinen’kii skromnyi platochek (1982; modest blue kerchief) or the interrogation rooms of Ruka (1980; the hand), or may become that way by living a massive lie, as in Kamufliazh (1980; camouflage). They may be singled out for extraordinary adventures because of some prodigious physical trait: Nikolai Nikolaevich, the hero of a novella by the same name (1980) is chosen as chief donor for a sperm bank; Sergei Ivanovich, the hero of Bloshinoe tango (1986; a tango for fleas), wields a phenomenal sense of smell.

Whatever their other and numerous sins may be, they all share both physical and spiritual intuition. This raunchy crop of thieves and derelicts has a clear sense of good and evil, although, in proper Dostoevskian fashion, that sense does not always rule their actions. They are all men in extremis, at the end of their rope—or someone else’s. This moral finality takes Aleshkovsky’s work beyond social satire to philosophy, and then faith. Seen by some as a purveyor of bad jokes and worse taste, he is one of the most serious moralists of twentieth century Russian literature; he bellies up to the bar with Job, and what the rest of the customers hear is, as Joseph Brodsky puts it, the sound of “Jeremiah—laughing.”

Bibliography

Brown, Edward J. “Truth Through Obscenity,” in Russian Literature Since the Revolution, 1982.

Meyer, Priscilla. “Skaz in the Work of Juz Aleskovskij,” in Slavic and East European Journal. XXVIII (Winter, 1984), pp. 455-461.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. XCI (April 27, 1986), p. 9.

The New Yorker. Review. LXII (April 28, 1986), p. 120.