Four of novelist Eugene Vodolazkin’s ten novels have now been translated from Russian into English. Each offers a strikingly different setting: the late medieval world of the monk Arseny (Laurus); seven decades of Russia’s turbulent 20th-century straddled by The Aviator’s Innokenty; the self-important academic milieu of budding historian Solovyov (Solovyov and Larionov); and the international, jet-setting lifestyle of guitarist Gleb Yanovsky (Brisbane). And yet each book is unmistakably the work of Vodolazkin, a historian who was born and educated in Soviet Ukraine and trained as a specialist in ancient Russian manuscripts in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia).
In the grand tradition of Russophone letters, Vodolazkin is interested in the “big questions”: the meaning of life, the nature of love, the role of faith, the purpose of art. While Vodolazkin’s professional training as a historian clearly adds depth and richness to his treatment of these themes, a particular pleasure of reading his work is discovering the ways seemingly transient, ephemeral subjects also benefit from his long view of history. Even when Vodolazkin’s subject is not the actual study of history — as it is in Solovyov and Larionov — the broad sweep of time is a recurring theme in his novels, including Brisbane. Brisbane, which was written after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and Ukraine’s Donbas region, also explores questions of belonging and identity, whether innate or adopted. Brisbane’s main characters consciously sift through memory, relentlessly asking themselves what happened, what it means, and who gets to decide. They also concern themselves explicitly with the written word, openly acknowledging the slipperiness and self-serving possibilities inherent in any written text.
Brisbane begins with a chance encounter between world-famous musician Gleb Yanovsky and writer Sergei Nestorov, whose pen name is Nestor. A mysterious physical ailment has begun to afflict Yanovsky’s hands, and the acclaimed guitarist has suddenly come face-to-face with his own mortality. The bulk of the novel, which is named for the distant Australian city that Gleb’s mother Irina imagines to be the embodiment of earthly happiness, chronicles the musician’s growing suspicion that fate is playing an elaborate and unfunny joke on him. But he’s not yet ready to fully reveal either his suspicions or his secrets to Nestor, whom he authorizes to produce yet another biography; earlier biographies of his life, Gleb says, “miss the point somehow. No understanding.” Asked whether he’s referring to musical understanding, Gleb responds, “Human, I’d say. I’d put it like this. There’s no understanding that the musical stems from the human.” In a flashback, he goes further, insisting that art cannot be divorced from the human body: “Thus, sitting in the first row of the parterre, you gratefully hear the ballerinas’ footfall, and you think how good it is that art has a place for the body. That it’s not specters dancing but muscular, sweaty women. Otherwise art would drift off like a helium balloon.” An ominous belief for a musician whose body is failing him.
Nestor quickly becomes part of Gleb’s intimate circle, a sharp-eyed witness to his subject’s personal and professional life. Brisbane’s narrative alternates sections from what appears to be Nestor’s authorized biography with first-person passages from Gleb’s private diary. While only one of these works is apparently intended for an audience, both constitute self-conscious performances. But Vodolazkin is much too good a writer to set these two narrative tracks in neat counterpoint to one another, raising questions in one that are dutifully answered in the other. Rather, he is interested in the individual performance of each text, the interplay of nuance and tone between these adjacent versions of a life, and in the emotional content both texts explore — as well as the gaps both texts leave.
When we first encounter Gleb, at the height of his international fame, he has grown cynical, self-centered, and cold; the novel unfolds in a series of flashbacks that hint at the causes. A sensitive child, Gleb hears music even in everyday sounds, from a falling chestnut’s “muffled pizzicato” to a stick’s “ringing grace-note.” Gleb’s father, Fyodor, long divorced from the boy’s mother, confines his parental role largely to demanding that Gleb be educated in the Ukrainian language and in music. But when Fyodor asks his son to repeat a rhythmic phrase and sing a melody, the boy fails the test. Fyodor then declares: “Gleb, my boy, you weren’t made for music.” The reverberations from this pronouncement echo throughout the novel.
Whether smarting from his father’s disappointment or recovering from a youthful crush on a cellist, Gleb strives to make music as if the stakes were literally life and death. “[T]rue creativity must balance between life and death,” says Fyodor. “It has to see a little beyond the horizon.” Death is a constant in young Gleb’s life; at one point, the teenage Gleb simply renounces music school, he tells his grandfather Mefody, “[b]ecause I’m going to die.” Mefody takes Gleb to consult the local priest. “Music is not eternity,” says the priest. “But it reminds us of eternity — profound music does.” “What is eternity?” Gleb asks. “It is the absence of time,” Mefody conjectures, “which means the absence of death.” “Ultimately it is God,” the priest says. “The One you are seeking.” Gleb goes back to music school.
Once Gleb reaches adulthood, Vodolazkin shows us much less of his protagonist’s interior life, and it’s often hard to know what to make of the character. Gleb speaks about his music as art, but he’s contemptuous of those who consider him a great artist and implies that his performances are con jobs for an unsophisticated audience. He says very little about his feelings beyond music, and it’s unclear whether this is his normal way of being or a state brought on by his illness. His affect is often morose, as if he were at the mercy of forces greater than himself, powerless over his own behavior. During what might — or might not — be a one-night stand, he is asked whether he cheats on his wife often. “I say never, and it’s the truth,” he notes, without elaboration. Even when an ill-advised evening stroll in Kyiv during Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity nearly costs him his life, Gleb maintains a puzzling equanimity: “I’m gripped by apathy,” he comments. “If Mikola shoots me, that will spare me many unpleasant things in general.”
Women tend to float through Vodolazkin’s books in the guise of temptresses, saints, madonnas, and hysterics; some seem to exist solely in relation to the male characters, rather than as fully formed, independent women in their own right. In Brisbane, for example, the young musical prodigy Vera is more the embodiment of Art than a flesh-and-blood girl. Unlike many of Vodolazkin’s male protagonists, Gleb does manage to maintain a successful adult relationship with his wife Katya, but one suspects that inertia deserves a good measure of the credit. Although Katya — whose struggles with infertility and alcoholism are never fully explored — shows flashes of exquisite tenderness and generosity, her motivations also remain largely opaque. She exhibits inexplicable, almost inhuman patience with her husband’s self-absorption, high-handness, and occasional open cruelty.
As if anticipating today’s headlines, Brisbane, first published in Russia in 2018, also explores the fraying of the ties that bind Soviet Russia and Ukraine during Gleb’s youth. Gleb’s father is culturally and linguistically Ukrainian, his mother Russian, a combination that even during Soviet times contributes to marital tension. Vodolakin’s own links to both Russia and Ukraine are evident in passages about the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture, including an extended riff on nouns that change grammatical gender but are otherwise identical in spelling and meaning when a speaker switches from Ukrainian to Russian. Gleb isn’t particularly interested in the Ukrainian part of his life, though; his “Ukrainian-ness” is tied up with and subsumed in his fraught relationship with his father. Early in their collaboration, Nestor asks Gleb whether he considers himself Russian or Ukrainian. Gleb answers, “I could say Russian, of course.” “What’s stopping you?” “Nothing, probably. I just don’t distinguish between those nations very well.” From the vantage point of 2022, Vodolazkin’s choice to portray the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a kind of personal annoyance to Gleb feels like a missed opportunity in the novel. But it also underscores the puzzlement with which many people in Russia to this day view the subject of Ukrainian nationality and identity.
Marian Schwartz, the dean of contemporary American translators of Russian literature, digs gleefully into Vodolazkin’s prose; her translation feels particularly rich in the section of the novel where Gleb’s adventures with a self-made millionaire and aspiring pop singer nicknamed Bergamot take a turn towards slapstick. Schwartz clearly relishes the translation challenge presented by a newspaper that publishes its headlines in palindromes (“Nod off, Obese Boffo Don”), and she’s at her best translating the tricky linguistic “fillers” (“on the contrary,” “as a matter of fact”) that glue ordinary sentences together.
Brisbane is an ambitious novel: a meditation on the nature and staying power of music (and art in general), a love letter to the written word, and a nascent inquiry into whether one can be simultaneously Russian and Ukrainian after the events of 2014. Sometimes it wants to embrace death; others, it aspires to broad comedy. Its final pages contain several shocking revelations that subvert much of what we thought we previously knew. Vodolazkin’s pleasure in skewering convention and received wisdom is evident throughout his novels; if Brisbane on the whole feels less playful than some of his earlier work, that may be as much a measure of the times in which we are reading it as it is of the author’s intentions.
[published by Plough Publishing House on May 3, 2022, 344 pages, $24.95 hardcover]