Content area
Full text
Victor Erofeyev. Russian Beauty. Andrew Reynolds, tr. New York. Viking. 1993 ((C) 1992). vi + 343 pages. $22.
Written "for the desk drawer" during the final years of the Brezhnev regime (1980-82), Victor Erofeyev's Russian Beauty would have created quite an uproar in the USSR and the West if it had appeared at that time in a Soviet or tamizdat volume. Instead, its Russian publication came only in 1990 and went virtually unnoticed. In the very same year Erofeyev (b. 1947; not to be confused with Venedikt Erofeyev, author of Moscow to the End of the Line; see WLT 55:2, p. 338), a critic of some stature in Russia, called upon Soviet writers to turn away from "the socially linear literature of resistance in its liberal and dissident hypostases," to abandon the "mission that literature was obliged to take upon itself in the period of the closed state," and to embrace "the playful element in art." Russian Beauty can be seen as an illustration of his concept of the playful in "postutopian" Russian letters.
The stream of consciousness of the novel's heroine, Irina Vladimirovna Tarakanova (the surname is chosen to evoke the wanton eighteenth-century adventuress and pretender to the Russian throne), twists and fractures the reality about her, exposing a tortured, indeed sick mind. The astute reader will discern a simple plot in the debris of the heroine's narration. Erofeyev's "Russian beauty" is a noble nymphomaniac who unwittingly has looked for love in "all the wrong places." Although her trips to the abortionist have been many, she rejoices in becoming...