Olga Slavnikova’s “The Man Who Couldn’t Die”

I love the nineteenth-century Russian literary giants, Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov, who wrote exquisite, brilliant fiction and poetry despite censorship and threats of exile. I wish I could equally admire the Soviet writers, but the repressive Soviet regime clamped down too hard. If they wrote at all, they were not published, or were likely to be incarcerated. Better to hang on to your controversial manuscripts, as Buglakov and Pasternak did.

As for post-Soviet literature, I feel more at home. I loved Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s beautifully-written novel, Jacob’s Ladder,  and am enjoying Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die:  The Tale of an Authentic Human Being (2001). 

The premise seems at first morbidly funny. The Kharitonovs, a Russian family without much earning power, depend on a relative’s war pension for survival. And when Alexei Afanasievich Karitonov, the World War II veteran, is paralyzed by a stroke, his wife, Nina Alexandrovna, quits her job to care for him. Nina’s clever daughter, Marina, a freelance journalist who earns a pittance, though she was at the top of her class at the university, decides they must keep her stepfather alive in order to collect his pension.

So the half-mad Marina dictates that her stepfather must never learn of the fall of the Soviet Union.  She edits Pravda for her mother to read aloud to him and splices film scenes on videotape to create fake news about Brezhnev and the continuation of the Soviet Union. 

But this novel is not actually a comedy. The two women suffer, especially Marina, whose slacker husband scarcely works, and whose rage at politics in the workplace is comical but also sucks the joy out of life. Slavnikova portrays her struggles to survive in a toxic workplace and the turmoil of corrupt politics  and elections.

Nina Alexandrovna enjoys her quiet life, but is startled to learn that her husband is suicidal.  He has managed to make a noose, loop it over the bed, move himself to the edge of the bed and attempt to hang himself.  She is grateful that he is sentient, and in a way feels closer. 

Here is an excerpt from the book that reflects the tone.

No one could say for certain whether their playacting was fooling the sick man, of course.  Nina Alexandrovna, at least, thought she picked up a certain agreement, a semblance of approval in the signals emitted by his asymmetrical brain…. The pseudo-events, those spectral parasites, began to take increasing hold over the Kharitonovs, though, and feed on them.  It was like a change in focus that reveals at least two landscapes in one. 

Marion Schwartz, an award-winning translator, deftly spins the complexity of Slavnikova’s design into simple sentences.  There is black humor, but Slavnikova also sympathizes with her characters’ struggles. Nina Alexandrovna feels more connected to her husband after she discovers he is sentient, even though he wishes to die.

i am briefly on hiatus from the book due to the small print.   Next time I’ll go with the e-book, so I can adjust the size of the font.