Oh to write with the pure freedom of Olga Slavnikova! The word that I’ve been using to describe The Man Who Couldn’t Die, Marian Schwartz’s translation of Slavnikova’s 2001 novel Bessmertniy (“The Immortal”) is “dense,” but not in the sense of being difficult or academic or obtuse (a third meaning of dense that circles ouroborically around to meet the former in the archetypical scholar figure with head so far up rectum he can no longer see the sky) but I mean it in the sense that Slavnikova’s book contains so much: not just a generous helping of imaginative similes conveying the demented qualities of District 18 and the half-formed personages who populate it; not just the dark strain of Dostoyevskian wit and Gogolian grotesque which are the inheritance of many modern Russian greats; rather, what lifts this book beyond merely good and up to the eminence of a masterpiece is its thematic density, the hidden life the author reaches for and reveals, however ephemeral and inaccessible. The novel’s ample supply of idiosyncratic characterization and curious symbolism could conceivably support many varied readings and interpretations.

The Man Who Couldn’t Die of the title is Alexei Afanasievich Kharitonov, a veteran and hero of the Great War whose “life had in fact been colossal and, like everything colossal, pointless.” (Slavnikova, as this summary will show, has a gift for the devastating one-liner.) This avatar of Russia’s glorious past, this former army scout who once killed fifteen men with his trusty silk rope, has “turned into a body, into the horizontal content of a high trophy bed,” mute and barely able to move after suffering a stroke fourteen years before our story begins. Now he is tended to by the novel’s two main point of view characters, his wife Nina Alexandrovna and their middle-aged daughter Marina, who are both dependent on the paralyzed man’s military pension since the mother was a housewife with little experience of employment, who had relied on her husband as a breadwinner their whole lives, while Marina, a former good-student-with-a-promising-future, had been passed over in favor of “people who had copied off her during tests, devotedly breathing over her shoulder,” who “had jobs on newspapers generously patronized by the authorities and had even become dapper little bosses.”

That Other Story About Preserving the Cold War

There is a superficial resemblance of some parts of The Man Who Couldn’t Die with the German film Goodbye Lenin! directed by Wolfgang Becker (2003), which came out two years after it. As in that film, an elderly family member – who is super-patriotic and a living embodiment of the Soviet past – becomes incapacitated prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the members of the family who do experience the sudden transition from capitalism to communism are at great pains to conceal this world-shattering event from the elderly person who cannot perceive the drastic changes taken place in the world outside. (Though I agree with Mark Lipotevsky, who says in the introduction to The Russian Library’s translation of the novel that the whole conceit of Russia’s past as a kind of physical immobility is an obvious one that required no plagiarism for two creators to come up with independently; it is not the conceit we should credit, but what each creator does with it, and there is a hell of a lot more to The Man Who Couldn’t Die than this one narrow conceit.)

A significant difference between this book and Goodbye Lenin is that the fear is multiplied for Marina and her mother due to the fact not only that the old man might die from the shock of the new, but that his pension would go away too. Both Marina and the son in Goodbye Lenin therefore hatch plans to preserve an absurdly exaggerated Soviet reality inside their homes, going so far as to put up patriotic décor and fake broadcasts clipped from the Soviet 80s. Slavnikova describes these parallel worlds in terms of inside time and outside time, and emphasizes the stupendous lengths needed to keep these two realities apart. While inside time has to stand completely still (except for the “strange metabolism” it takes on when Marina ostentatiously joins the Communist Party and, with a coworker who is an expert in isolating the male and female elements of Breznev’s voice, is essentially able to create deep-fake simulacra of Communist Party Congresses that never happened,) outside time is continually changing, and an overarching theme of The Man Who Couldn’t Die is that while the distinction between outside and inside time ultimately must collapse, the changes taking place in outside time (and even the full-on commitment to the rat race of the most convinced of its converts, Marina) by no means guarantees a positive result for our characters (or for Putinist Russia.)

Apofeozov vs. Krugal (Or Brezhnev?)

The faster-paced of the two main plotlines concerns Marina’s struggle to advance in the corrupt political environment of District 18, which Mark Lipotevsky says could potentially represent an urban district in a provincial town in the Urals, where Slavnikova hails from – or any similar place in Russia. It is a place where hope and magical thinking spring eternal – first in communistic, and then blindly capitalistic form – and the struggle to wrest the careening masses toward one delusion or the other forms a significant backdrop to the plot. When Marina is fired from her job at District 18’s local Studio A station by a “fat, angry” scion of nepotism named Kukharsky, whose uncle, a Mitt Romney-ish “thoroughbred of a man” named Apofeozov is now running to represent District 18, Marina attaches herself to the opposing campaign of the hapless retired actor Krugal and Marina’s mentor, the Ph.d.-trained political Svengali Shishkin, purposing to, as she explains to her mother, “join battle for her place in the sun, a battle every self-respecting person [in this post-Soviet, capitalist present] ought to wage.”

But the fight will be by no means easy. From their colossal propensity for grift – “through his nephews Apofeozov had stolen more than seven hundred thousand American dollars,” though the actual amount numbers in the millions and is unknown even to the candidate due to his poor facility with math – to the nepotism of Kukharsky’s owing his position to his uncle and Kukharsky’s Trumpian way of firing Marina in the most humiliating way possible, to the two comical Fruman-and-Parnas-sian bagmen in the form of two other nephews “who repudiated each other nearly to the point of refusing to believe in each other’s existence” and “turned out to be like the two reels of a tape recorder with the tape running between them and broadcasting a recorded text,” the Apofeozovs represent a new breed of corruption which feels eerily like what we have now in our Trumpist/Putinist present. Despite his clownish criminality, however, Apofeozov represents the wild hope and delusions of the new capitalist order, with the reality television showmanship of a Trump: “His double-breasted suits fit superbly, and his amber, slightly prominent eyes gazed out so penetratingly that TV viewers lost their sense of the materiality of the television and screen that separated them from the politician.” His campaign – “pumped with money like fully inflated biceps” – can leverage superior media reach:

Five of his videos were playing continuously on every TV channel channel. … No matter what paper you picked up, it was plastered with a portrait of Apofeozov, like a hundred-ruble bill; there was an unprecedented concentration of Apofeozov in the air.

Later in novel, a giant picture of Apofeozov is unfurled over the side of a building, and Apofeozov is continually represented as a kind of embodiment of capitalism, “the embodiment of the realest reality,” a New World god who represents a force quite opposite to the Old God of communism that Marina seeks to prop up at home and then later in District 18 as a whole. As Slavnikova puts it explicitly:

Apofeozov’s chief opponent in the true elections … was, of course, not Krugal but Leonid Ilich Brezhnev. … Brezhnev undoubtedly lived on in the collective consciousness of District 18 voters, who were still wearing their Soviet-era coats. Not that they’d admit it, but they continued to carry around this image, worn to holes here and there, but made to measure for them and still connecting them to the wide world more reliably than nutritious Snickers bars and American Terminator movies.

Apofeozov’s appeal is not so hard for us to understand in an era of Trump and evangelical pastors touting a self-justifying “prosperity gospel.” The appeal is not about who the candidate is morally, but who they are in terms of their lifestyle – who doesn’t want a suburban “ogre’s castle in a fairytale” to call home? The people of District 18 see the fabulous lifestyle of Apofeozov and, even if they do not think, “I could one day be as rich,” at the very least the image of luxury fills them with powerful aspirational impulses. This “optimism epidemic set off by Apofeozov’s life-affirming persona” is satirized to a sublimity worthy of David Lynch with the appearance of Mr. Kutznetsov, a medical huckster selling immortality in fantastical public appearances at District 18’s battered old Soviet venue, the Progress Cinema. But Marina’s mentor, Professor Shishkin, sees that his candidate (Krugal) – having “insinuated himself into a battle between forces he didn’t understand, forces perhaps even mystical” – will likely lose the election unless the battle is entered to wrest the soul of District 18’s voters back from the cult of deluxe new world capitalism represented by Apofeozov.

Professor Shishkin’s Plan

In response to Apofeozov’s advantages in money and imagecraft, his mastery of the New Gods of wealth and opulence, Professor Shishkin devises a plan to get the populace on his side. His scheme seems ingenious – “an idea as sudden as a win at roulette” – but it is too clever by half: instead of directly bribing voters or plying them with vodka, the Krugal campaign would instead “hire” large numbers of people in the district to work as “canvassers.” Initially, the plan seems unlikely to work as Marina rides off into the night with her co-worker Lyodochka, and on their first attempt to distribute flyers have a frightful run-in with a knife-wielding “shapeless man wearing a long, unbuttoned leather coat and some kind of crazy hat with earflaps that looked like work gloves sculpted directly on his head.” They drop the flyers and turn and flee, and in one of the grim foreshadowings Slavnikova provides the reader, Lyudochka says:

“I hate him. I hate him!” the trembling Lyudochka whispered … and Marina guessed that this wasn’t about the guy with the knife or even the driver doing who knew what with the plump-cheeked bookkeeper but about the professor himself. Looking sideways at Lyudochka (eyes like stars, a smear under her nose), Marina thought maybe she would take her on as her secretary.

Marina, who has just been fired from her job by a corrupt boss, and who is reposing her confidence in Shishkin’s promise that she will get her job back if they win the election – the same Shishkin who has come up with a hackneyed scheme to pay people to vote for Krugal – this is the Marina who feels just powerful enough to dispose of Lyudochka’s fortune by deciding “maybe” she would take her on as a secretary; having already been punched down upon, Marina has internalized the logic of punching down. She decides to have the bookkeeper and driver written up at the office for abandoning them, which demonstrates the blind faith she places in the institution (Krugal’s campaign) which gives her illusory power.

The next day, however, Marina is surprised to find people lining up in front of the campaign office, entire families pouring out of the cars. Whole droves of the desperate populace of District 18 have answered the call to become “canvassers,” lured not by any especial enthusiasm for the candidate Krugal, but because “once they’d sorted out the hundred ‘instructions,’ the population came to believe, as they did in God, that the Krugal campaign was handing out free money.” The invisible voter has appeared, and in numbers so overwhelming as to make it seem farcical that Shishkin’s promise to pay all the canvassers after the election could ever actually been accomplished. It begins to dawn on Marina that the same political handler who makes unfulfillable promises to the voters could very well have made the same sort of promises to her; but for the time being, these are just passing feelings, and Marina blocks them out of her mind.

Slavnikova casts the district’s “optimism epidemic” (engendered first by Apofeozov’s dapper image, then by the promise of free money given by the Krugal campaign) in monstrous, grotesque terms, and even provides comically developed avatars for the purpose of bringing these delusions to life. Whereas Kutznetsov is the avatar of capitalist hucksterism and snake oil salesmanship, the avatar of old world hucksterism is the wonderfully described Klumba – KLUMBA! – a heartless bureaucrat at the beginning of the book, checking to making the old man Alexei Afanasievich is still alive and the Kharitonovs aren’t cheating on their benefits, and at that early stage a full-fledged supporter of Apofeozov’s; by novel’s end, Klumba undergoes a delicious transformation which demonstrates the submerged commonalities between the niggardly bureaucrat and the revanchist activist defending people’s entitlements. Through Klumba’s amusing story arc Slavnikova shows how the transition from communism to capitalism – and the spate of sudden opportunism it unleashes – is capable of transforming just about anyone in society in drastic ways.

“Seryozha”/“Klimov” and Marina’s Transformation

As we have seen, Marina is hardly the exception to this. While Apofeozov is represented as “the true predator who had loomed up like Godzilla over District 18’s primitive urban landscape,” Slavnikova drops a number of hints that battling the forces of predatory capitalism is having an not-so-salutatory effect on Marina, transforming her (oddly) into something like what she is fighting against. The transformation is first noticed by Marina’s in-some-ways paradoxically perceptive mother, Nina Alexandrovna.

Unlike Marina’s more epic struggle working within the forces of the new political order, Nina Alexandrovna – who finds the new world completely bewildering – has a more modest ambition to find out how it could be possible to live without her husband even as the outside world encroaches on the Kharitonovs’ formerly stable home life. While Marina’s lived experience is permeated by the news and the heated political “battle” she has undertaken, which makes her seem outwardly more savvy than her mother, the elderly Nina Alexandrovna has a way of feeling more ineffably, in terms of qualities and presences, her mood shifting like a weather vane to signal portentous changes in the atmosphere. In the first of many masterly juxtapositions, Slavnikova interpolates the mother’s observations on the transformations taking place in her daughter after Marina loses her job and plots her next moves:

That evening, Marina was a dreadful sight—especially to Nina Alexandrovna, who hadn’t dared touch her daughter in a long time and didn’t know what her hair—dyed so many times, now just bits of yellowish chaff remaining from what used to be chicken fluff—felt like now.

[…]

Marina had a lot on her plate. Now she would come home in various cars that cautiously pulled up to the front door closer to twelve o’clock, and something truly reptilian appeared in her grin. She paid no attention at all to her husband, whether present or absent, while strangely, as Apofeozov’s enemy, she became alluringly pretty.

Nina Alexandrovna is also cognizant, on some level, of the total dysfunctionality of the marriage between Marina and her son-in-law Seryozha Klimov, a thirty-three year old, “already practically bald” man who “looked strangely like an anatomical plaster cast, a kind of popular-science example of man in general.” We may read Seryozha as Slavnikova’s humorous portrait of the archetype of the useless Russian male, who “hadn’t been able to put his two incomplete degrees to any use, though, and worked as a guard at a parking lot one day out of three, always returning with the fresh, though no stronger than usual, smell of alcohol.” (The joke being that there is nothing particularly exceptional about his uselessness.) But the mother’s way of seeing this dysfunctional marriage is very different from Marina’s, a point Slavnikova most dramatically makes by having the son-in-law be described as “Seryozha” whenever Nina Alexandrovna is sympathetically observing his haggard appearance or feeding him breakfast, and always having him referred to as “Klimov” whenever Marina is pondering the ghost-like ways they seem to slide past each of other and scarcely acknowledge each other’s existence; though notably, Klimov is first referred to as an “anesthetized shade” when Marina is caustically criticizing him for doing housework, and is first referred to as just Klimov in the context of his being a “skeptic” of Marina’s scheme to separate inside and outside time within the Kharitonov’s apartment. At this early stage we are also told he once had a “wildly lucrative (despite the sewer smells) video store at the train station,” and in this sentence he is referred to as just Seryozha, indicating perhaps that it is Nina Alexandrovna who is thinking of this and bringing to mind a time when Seryozha Klimov was not so useless after all; and as critical readers we may further ponder if Slavnikova does not use the Nina Alexandrovna’s superficially naïve secondary perspective throughout the book to call attention to blind spots in Marina’s single-minded engagement with the new order, to make us wonder if Klimov is not simply (and over-determinedly) considered useless, but is also neglected by a wife who cannot not truly see him.

When Marina finally throws Klimov out of their home, Marina walks the streets outside past high-end clothing stores and thinks of her mentor Professor Shishkov, who started giving her personal compliments when the fight with Apofeozov seemed to make her more determined and at the same time more physically attractive early on, and who she now thinks of as wearing a “Hugo Boss jacket,” these are the thoughts that lead Marina to conclude that she  “couldn’t shake the physical sensation that nothing was worth anything now.” In her emptiness, she feels as if “she might as well gnaw on a wet, stringy branch, say, or bite off a crumbled corner of the crackly brown Khrushchev-era apartment building that all the candidates had promised to raze. Crazy thoughts like that amused Marina. She felt like a toothy predator from a Hollywood movie capable of devouring steel, stone, and concrete.” In the course of fighting the monster that is Apofeozov, Marina is in her turn becoming a kind of monster. She had reposed her ideals in Shishkin; and the indications keep building over the course of the book that these hopes are terribly misplaced. Upon my first reading of The Man Who Couldn’t Die, it was initially Marina’s story that struck me; but I have increasingly come to appreciate Nina Alexandrovna’s more subtle ways of knowing and perceiving, and the artful way Olga Slavnikova uses the third person limited perspective to create dramatic irony while narrating the mother’s point of view. One of the most stunning episodes of such irony involves a lengthy but exceptionally eerie chapter where Nina Alexandrovna attempts to visit a certain nephew who the family had been receiving money from, and who Marina knows (though she concealed it from her mother) has been dead for years, murdered in a very colorful way by his psychotic, drug-addled girlfriend.

Nina Alexandrovna Does Battle With Death (and Wins?)

But the solidest column (or, as we shall see, the blackest pit) at the center of Nina Alexandrovna’s existence has long been the stolid unchanging presence of Alexei Afanasievich, who seems important beyond just his pension for this ineluctable authenticity which Slavnikova repeatedly refers to throughout the book. Marian Schwartz translates the subtitle of the book as “The Tale of an Authentic Human Being,” apparently in reference to these wide references to the paralyzed man’s authenticity, but Mark Lipovetsky writes in his introduction that it is more straightforwardly a reference to The Tale of a Real Man, a Socialist Realist novella from 1946 about an intrepid pilot who continues to fly through World War II despite losing both legs. Like that unwavering pilot, Alexei Afanasievich is also a symbol of heroism and stability – until he isn’t. A most terrible catastrophe occurs for Nina Alexandrovna’s worldview when she discovers that her husband is using the last bit of mobility he has left to doggedly try to kill himself, slowly trying to work the silk rope he used to use to kill the enemies of Russia to try to effect his own demise. Extraordinarily, Alexei Afanasievich’s disposition to die causes Nina Alexandrovna to reexamine her entire world afresh. She pities him, but in a detached way:

The paralyzed man’s material world, which had been stripped of any detail and reduced to large, schematic objects, the only ones accessible to his manipulations, reminded her of the letters on a child’s building blocks, or the top line on the eye chart; and the large font in which this destiny was written evoked her respect and a superstitious fear. Nina Alexandrovna sometimes thought of her Alexei Afanasievich as an overly ambitious pretender to the throne, a shadow general secretary of the Communist Party. […] Nina Alexandrovna couldn’t imagine how the paralyzed man, who couldn’t bring a spoonful of kasha to his open mouth, might wrench his own death from the world around him. There are many things even a healthy man has trouble doing for himself—a haircut, say, or a foot massage—let alone commit suicide!

But this detachment from death, this rational consideration allows Nina Alexandrovna to question the world as she previously had taken it to be, an inquiry reaching into the most sublime frontiers of human experience, the very thoughtness of thought, the thingness of things:

Now, watching Alexei Afanasievich through the keen diopters of her dozing trance, Nina Alexandrovna understood deep down that an unnatural death, be it murder or suicide, was all about physical objects. You couldn’t do away with yourself without a tool. Virtually anything could be used to kill someone, after which it remained here, as innocent as ever and undiminished. Meanwhile, the everyday objects in this room (muffled by dispassionate philosophical dust) contained very little death; their shapes were too smooth, their corners too wooden; their harmless dullness could drive anyone to despair.

This prompts Nina Alexandrovna to consider her own attempts at suicide over the years, her husband’s emotional abuse, and Nina Alexandrovna realizes that her husband has in fact been holding her in stasis all these years, that the fear of his death has been more devastating than would be its actually. She sees Death in the form of a romantic rival, vying for her husband:

He was already a failed product of death, a defective good from whom death had taken a step back without dispensing with the continuity of life in his illuminated consciousness. […] Death seemed to be seemed to be lying in bed with him like his lawful wife.

With this realization, Nina Alexandrovna, in her own mind, seems as if she will (metaphorically) be able to triumph over the fear of Alexei Afanasievich’s death, to recognize that the man who couldn’t die would die, and that might be okay. She comes to the empowering recognition:

Nina Alexandrovna simply couldn’t tell where the boundary lay where reality came to an abrupt halt. At some point, the future, which she had always used pictures from the past to imagine, ceased to communicate with this past. There was some disconnect or defect here, as there can be defects in glass—needles of moisture, like veins running through a perforated landscape. No matter how Nina Alexandrovna strained her inner vision, though, she had no sense of how long she had before she reached that spectral line. In essence, she, too, like her husband, was attempting the impossible. Whereas an ordinary person backs into the future with his unprotected back, keeping a more or less intelligible past in front of him, Nina Alexandrovna wanted to turn around and follow the guiding crystal ball—and plunge into the unknown face first.

And again, near the novel’s denouement:

That different time—that ideal stagnation, when a natural ending was impossible by definition—had become a trap, and Alexei Afanasievich could now go only by betraying his wife with his death, which he had taken, like a woman, into his cold bed. Because Alexei Afanasievich himself preferred the other’s eternal company, Nina Alexandrovna, who now spent her time in the kitchen scraping dished under the hot faucet, which smelled like a foul mouth, suffered such attacks of jealousy that the fist under her shoulder blade was a joke by comparison. More than anything in the world, Nina Alexandrovna would have liked right now to see her rival face-to-face and see whether she was that pretty. She didn’t realize just how blasphemous and dangerous her thoughts were. […] Had Nina Alexandrovna been offered the chance to died that minute and see the fateful hooded lady and reclaim her husband, who had been summoning that lady for so long and at such incredible effort, Nina Alexandrovna would have agreed.

However much Nina Alexandrovna would like to let go of the past, however much she should like to give up the struggle with her rival Death and go on living, such a battle is not easily won. That Olga Slavnikova so vividly dramatizes these existential questions and offers so much to ponder in so small a scope of action is yet another sign that The Man Who Couldn’t Die, beyond its author’s prodigious wit and the contemporary political resonance of Marina’s story arc, is a masterpiece that will have lasting relevance.