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Russian Fathers, Soviet Sons
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13552 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1988 |
2,406 Words |
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Fernanda Eberstadt
Fernanda Eberstadt writes for Commentary and other periodicals
and is the author of a novel, Low Tide. |
PUSHKIN HOUSE
Andrei Bitov, translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987
371 pp., $22.50
It is a strange fact that by the time Western readers become acquainted with the work of a contemporary Soviet writer, its author has usually either moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, or (as in the tragic cases of Vasily Shukshin and Yuri Trifnov) died.
In Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House, which has just been published in the United States by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, we have the unusual experience of reading a novel whose author is alive and well and currently residing in Moscow.
Andrei Bitov, who was born in Leningrad in 1937 and graduated from the Mining Institute, is renowned as a short-story writer after the Leningrad tradition, which emphasizes a classical purity of style. A collection, Life in Windy Weather, was published here by Ardis in 1986. Pushkin House, which seventeen years after its completion still remains unpublished in the Soviet Union, is Bitov's masterpiece. It is the story of Lyova Odoevstev, the clever, cowardly, charming scion of an aristocratic Leningrad family of literary scholars.
The novel (after Tolstoy's autobiographical Childhood, Adolescence, Youth) is divided into three parts. The first section portrays Lyova's privileged childhood in the forties and early fifties, centering in particular on his rivalry with his father and his fateful encounters with the various
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