Lonely In Ossetia
Humorless laughter; an academic sense of tragedy. Alan Cherchesov's first novel, Requiem for the Living-whose sequel A Wreath on the Grave of the Wind was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize-translated for the first time into English, is something like an attempt at the other side of Lermontov's Hero of Our Time. "Something like" because it is a specimen of indeterminate storytelling, a collection of incongruous parts.
From the perspective of a village in Ossetia (a land split north and south between Russia and Georgia), a narrator-grandson reflects on the lost world of his father and grandfather, through the collective memory of their neighbor-cum-tragic hero, Alone. Predictably "cunning," misanthropic and pathetically drunk, Alone turns the tables on a horse heist his relatives concoct, then retires to the village to live on his own as a child. There he outwits everyone and everything, suffers symbolic adversity, and sets up shop as a forward-looking intermediary between the Russian "fort" and the "aul." But like the rest of Cherchesov's characters, Alone appears as a metaphysical conceit, a type: caricature. The Russians as well as the Ossetians are placeholders in a dialectical play of pride and fate as forced as it is dull.
Ponderously enthusiastic German reviews on the back cover emphasize the book's exoticism, but we're on very familiar ground: quaint pronouncements by blind patriarchs, the easily won awe of the tradition-bound community, the studied heroism of the modest victor. After villagers nearly beat the 10-year-old Alone to death, we're not surprised that "no sooner had they approached him-this filthy little body on the black earth-than they all froze. For he was already back on his feet, and what's more, he was again walking homewards, heavily but evenly, expansively and unbowed, like a buffalo under plough." This is the sense of wonder diluted from magical realism à la Garcia Marquez: everything is amazing and enchanted, and happens suddenly for the very first time.
And like 100 Years of Solitude, this book is meant to show that "perhaps it is not stories that grow out of Time, but Time that grows out of stories." Fine. But the novel accomplishes less the creation of time than the conjuring of monotony, which is the captivity of timelessness. Cherchesov's formal emphasis on continuity is accomplished through a single text that is not subdivided but is in a constant process of breaking and rejoining, though it comes nowhere near the subtlety or subversion of Bernhard's paragraph-long books. The plot mirrors this flux in the feverish circularity of the characters' departing and returning. But all of this is told, not shown. Cherchesov's declamations fall flat because only a provisional tension is set up before all is explained: We are not shown why Alone is hated but are repeatedly told: "Loneliness had clamped itself to him like a vice. He had been corrupted by it. And there's no pitying the corrupt."
Assimilated truisms, trite personifications, and half-hearted epiphanies: The story engages in a directionless cycle of incomprehension and understanding, adversity and victory. "It occurred to me then that he who sees most wins most." In 19th-century Ossetia or generally, everywhere? Heavy words like death, cunning, loneliness, are mere signifiers wrapped in anecdotes that accumulate and vanish but do not amount. Requiem is a kind of saccharine assimilation of the stock categories of Chekhov and Turgenev, without the ethnographic particularity of Sholom Aleichem, the precision of Babel or the economized morality of Leskov's parables. In the last pages the Christian idea of salvation rears its puerile head in an unmistakable transposition of the Epilogue to Crime and Punishment.
The threat empire poses to tradition is the only serious question struggling to emerge from the text. Even as they sneer at Russia's language and culture, the Ossetians stand bewildered at their European incorporation. The Russian shopkeeper with whom the narrator and Alone do business is the obvious symbol of the impending future: self-concern, manipulation. But the ambivalent relation of the story to this vlast begs comparisons to the author as an Ossetian writing in Russian. What does Cherchesov intend, or feel for that matter, writing from the subject perspective in the language of subjection? Is this a coincidence tangential to the fact of the book, or an irony?
Requiem is not Ossetian storytelling but Russian romanticism in the guise of Ossetian storytelling: it may be set in Ossetia but is not of there. Though boring in its own way, a book like John Berger's Pig Earth deliberately shatters romantic views of village life. Berger's story "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol" is tighter, more engaging and humorous; and as a story of an outcast loner in a traditional village gripped by an unwelcome transition to modernity, achieves the kind of poetic wonder Cherchesov seems to be striving for.
Also, in a novel where all stares are fierce and people know only sorrow and fury-where endless negotiations over horses, schemes and strategy sessions amount to the mechanical rather than the alchemical synthesis of village time-a wooden translation ("That'll be the last time. There will be no more of that.") doesn't help. Stare for a while at the cover: It's more evocative than what lies inside.