A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov

First published:Shkola dlia durakov, 1976 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Phantasmagoric modernism

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: Moscow and a nearby summer cottage settlement

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, (also known as
• Nymphea Alba, and
• Those Who Came, ), a schizophrenic adolescent
• The narrator’s Father, a state prosecutor who dislikes his abnormal son
• The narrator’s Mother, a kind, unimaginative woman who serves as a buffer between father and son
• Pavel Norvegov, (also known as
• Savl, ), the boy’s idolized, eccentric geography teacher
• Veta Acatova, the boy’s biology teacher and imagined beloved
• Arcady Arcadievich Acatov, Veta’s father, a retired entomologist

The Novel

A School for Fools is a fictional autobiographical journey through the mental landscape of a nameless, schizophrenic adolescent, told with the assistance of an author-persona who may be the boy’s older self. Through the kaleidoscopically chaotic prism of the teenager’s schizoid mind, the reader sees incidents reflecting his bizarre perceptions and his attempts to come to terms with the surrounding world.

The boy’s aberration has two primary features: doubling, and the absence of linear time. He perceives himself and several other characters as two distinct but related persons, each with his or her own name. Much of the narrative is either interior dialogue between the two halves of the boy’s mind or interior monologue directed toward unidentified persons. He cannot perceive time, or events in time, in any fixed chronological order. Past, present, and future are random and intermixed. These peculiarities determine the unorthodox form of the novel. There is, in the ordinary sense, no plot. It is replaced by an ever-swirling verbal collage.

The boy’s remembered experiences arise from his relationships with his parents, with residents of their vacation summerhouse community, with his doctor, and with staff members of the “School for Fools” that he attends. His prosecutor father is a caviling misanthrope of the genus Homo soveticus. The boy has spent several periods in a mental institution where he was treated by a Dr. Zauze, who sought to cure him by uniting the two halves of his personality. Allied with Dr. Zauze in the boy’s mind are Perillo, the petty tyrant in charge of the School for Fools, and his deputy, Sheina Trachtenberg, who ominously stalks the school corridors dragging her clubfoot. The threat of being returned to the hospital hangs over his head.

Two other characters, both teachers at the special school, play major roles in the boy’s fantasy life. Like the boy’s family, they own summer cottages near Moscow. The first is Veta Acatova, his biology teacher, whom he loves and fantasizes as his bride. One of the story’s two main, albeit very tenuous, narrative threads is the boy’s imaginary romance with Veta. The second thread involves the boy’s adored geography teacher, the eccentric Pavel (who is also called Savl) Norvegov, who has died at some point in the boy’s school years. Most of the boy’s recalled conversations with him postdate the teacher’s death and are entirely imaginary, as are his conversations with Veta’s father. The two teachers serve as focal points of the disturbed adolescent’s efforts to grasp the fundamental human experiences of sex and death.

Much of the narrative is set within two very long, disjointed, imagined dialogues to which the boy returns again and again. One is with Norvegov, from whom the boy attempts to learn about sex. The other is with Veta Acatova’s father, in which the boy, imagining himself a winter butterfly collector, seeks to apprentice himself to the old entomologist and asks for Veta’s hand in marriage. These imaginary conversations are interspersed with other fantasies, such as the boy’s rendezvous with Veta, and with distorted memories of real events, such as visits to his grandmother’s grave and to his accordion teacher.

The boy’s thought processes and narrative are so chaotic that any outline of events is hazardous. The first chapter, “Nymphea,” opens with the two halves of the boy’s mind arguing over stylistic questions in the description of the summerhouse district: the suburban train station, the pond, the wooded paths. On the train platform the reader meets the barefoot Norvegov, who has died two years earlier but is still very much alive in the boy’s mind. Through this, the reader learns of the boy’s “timelessness” and his inability to grasp the directionality of death. The reader also learns of his selective memory and tendency to lose his identity, to dissolve into objects of natural beauty. Sitting in a rowboat, he picks a white water lily and becomes so engrossed that he merges with it, assuming its Latin name, Nymphea Alba. After numerous digressive episodes, the young hero sets off on a night journey to the summer home of his unsuspecting love, Veta Acatova.

The Veta theme is continued in the “Savl” chapter which, however, focuses on Norvegov and the hated School for Fools, with its trivial regimentation and its deceitful goal of turning its “special” students into good Soviet engineers. The following chapter, “Skeerly,” takes sex as its theme. The boy visits his prospective father-in-law and through the folktale “Skeerly” expresses anxiety over his sexual ignorance. A second imaginary conversation, this one with Savl in the school men’s room, addresses the sexual question somewhat more directly, although Savl (already deceased) is more interested in trying to recall his own fate. “Testament,” the final chapter, tells of Savl’s skeleton, which he has bequeathed to the school biology classroom. Here the reader learns of the geography teacher’s illness, suspension, and death. In the final pages the author-persona steps forward. After discussing a title and the possible inclusion of additional episodes, the author and his hero wander arm in arm down the street to buy more writing paper.

The Characters

The nameless narrator-protagonist invariably refers to himself as “we,” and the two halves of his mind are in constant dialogue with each other. The main voice is that of his free fantasy, his delusions; the other, lesser voice, is that of rationality, which constantly intrudes, hectors, corrects, and accuses the first voice of trivial and fundamental fabrications. The rational voice asserts that Dr. Zauze has charged him with following the other personality and merging with him. Only in this way can the boy become normal. The price of normality is, however, submission to the repressive rules of society’s institutions. The boy prefers the freedom of madness.

There are hints that the narrator’s madness is feigned, or perhaps later cured. Chapter 2, “Now, Stories Written on the Veranda,” contains twelve realistic mini-stories which deal with people mentioned en passant in the"deranged” portions of the text. These are apparently written by the hero, now in his twenties. The occasional intrusion of an author-persona to whom the boy tells his story also hints that the hero’s schizophrenia may have been feigned. The ambiguity is intentional on the part of author Sasha Sokolov, who, like his hero, has little interest in an inevitably constricting reality.

The novel’s characters, who flicker in and out of the boy’s fantasized recollections, are aligned with the two halves of his personality. One group represents the repressive forces of society that constrain the freedom and creativity of the individual. These include the boy’s prosecutor-father, Dr. Zauze, the psychiatrist, and Perillo and Sheina Trachtenberg, the school officials. All are creatures of the city. The positive characters, Norvegov and the Acatovs, are all associated with nature and the summer settlement in the Moscow countryside. They are the characters of spontaneity and freedom. It is Norvegov who counsels the boy to “live in the wind.”

Most of the characters are “doubles” who exist in two variants, although they are not always easily identifiable. Pavel, who is also Savl, that is, Paul/Saul, takes his dual name from the iconoclastic biblical figure. A more obscure pairing is Veta’s scientist father, Arcady Acatov, who appears in many scenes as Leonardo da Vinci, the scientist and artist. Mikheev, the elderly postman whose beard streams behind him as he rides his bicycle, is also the seventeenth century writer Silvestr Medvedev, and, perhaps, the legendary “Sender of the Wind.” The villainess, Sheina Trachtenberg, often appears as the witch Tinbergen. Each of these “doubles,” projections of the boy’s schizophrenia, is a complex blending of elements from life and the boy’s imagination.

Critical Context

A School for Fools, Sokolov’s first novel, was written in the Soviet Union but published only after his emigration in 1975. Hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as “an enchanting, tragic, and touching book,” it was an immediate critical success. Sokolov’s subsequent novels, Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom (1980; between dog and wolf) and Palisandriya (1985; astrophobia), have established him as a major figure in Russian letters.

Socialist Realism, the simpleminded, didactic literary dogma imposed by Joseph Stalin in the 1930’s, had succeeded in all but destroying Russian literature by the time of the dictator’s death in 1953. Both the great nineteenth century tradition of critical realism, associated with Leo Tolstoy, and the glittering modernist tradition, associated with Andrey Bely, had nearly died out. With Stalin’s death, Russian literature began to resume its earlier traditions, particularly that of critical realism, typified by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The modernist tradition was reinaugurated by Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz), whose 1956 samizdat essay On Socialist Realism called for an avant-garde, “phantasmagoric art.” The revived modernist tradition, however, fared less well in the U.S.S.R. than its older rival, and almost all intellectually pro-vocative and stylistically innovative prose remained either underground oremigre. Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools is, along with his other writings, among the most brilliant responses to Sinyavsky’s modernist imperative.

Bibliography

Boguslawski, Alexander. “Sokolov’s A School for Fools: An Escape from Socialist Realism,” in Slavic and East European Journal. XXVII (1983), pp. 91-97.

Canadian-American Slavic Studies. XXI (Fall, 1987). Special Sokolov issue.

Johnson, D. Barton. “A Structural Analysis of Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools: A Paradigmatic Novel,” in Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and Experiment in the Postwar Period, 1980. Edited by Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman.

Karriker, Alexandra. “Double Vision: Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools,” in World Literature Today. LIII (Autumn, 1979), pp. 610-614.

Moody, Fred. “Madness and the Pattern of Freedom in Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools,” in Russian Literature Triquarterly. XVI (1979), pp. 7-32.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. LXXXII (September, 1977), p. 41.

Newsweek. Review. XC (July 11, 1977), p. 75.