Family Saga Is No 'War and Peace'

A Russian novelist who was recently commissioned to write a sequel to "War and Peace" insisted on his anonymity being strictly guarded. "People will throw stones at my window if it ever gets out that I am the writer," the timorous author is said to have remarked to his publisher. Russian writers stepping openly or covertly into the ring with the great Lev Tolstoy must tread carefully; there are idolaters watching.


Vassily Aksyonov's American publishers have not shied away from comparing "Generations of Winter," Aksyonov's immense new historical epic novel, with "War and Peace." And Aksyonov himself acknowledges that he has opened himself up to attacks from the critics in the preface to "War and Jail," Part Two of the novel. By beginning with an epigraph from "War and Peace" he knows that he will be deemed pretentious. But in daring to tackle the same theme in his historical fiction as the "national genius" -- namely exploring the role that the individual can play in the making of history -- he will be judged to be impudent in the extreme.


However, courage is something that Aksyonov no doubt acquired in the long hard years of his childhood. The son of historian Eugenia Ginsberg, who so memorably wrote about her experiences in Stalin's gulags in "Journey into the Whirlwind," Aksyonov spent his formative years in Magadan, Siberia, in order to be near his mother.


He came to prominence as an author in his own right during the years of the Krushchev thaw. However, in 1980, after resigning from the Soviet Writer's Union for his involvement in the publication of an illegal, uncensored anthology of Russian prose, and following the foreign publication of his celebrated satirical novel, "The Burn," Aksyonov emigrated to America.


"Generations of Winter" is on a different scale from Aksyonov's previous work. And one has the impression that it is his first novel to be targeted directly at the American reader. The novel opens in 1925 and traces the fortunes, or more precisely the misfortunes, of three generations of the Gradov family through the next 20 years. As the family tries to maintain its unity and harmony in their beautiful dacha in Silver Forest, where a heavenly Indian summer always seems to prevail, the chaotic events of the outside world keep making their presence felt.


Boris Gradov, the patriarch of the family, is too eminent a doctor to avoid being drawn into politics. Forced to attend Regimental Commander Frunze on his sick-bed, at the height of the power-struggle for succession after Lenin's death, he is only saved from having to take part in a murderous operation by the sensitivity of one of his colleagues. But it is in the administering of an emergency enema to Stalin -- a scene which Aksyonov, a doctor by training, describes with grotesque relish -- that his career really takes off.


None of Gradov's three children remain untouched by political events. Nikita, who proved his loyalty to the Bolsheviks at a high moral cost during the civil war, as well as Kirill, his doctrinaire Marxist younger brother, are both sent to Siberia on trumped-up charges of sedition. Veronika, Nikita's beautiful wife, becomes a camp prostitute. And even though Nina, the irresistible Gradov daughter, is not confined to the gulag, she is drawn into politics by a number of her insalubrious lovers. Nina eventually gives voice to the dreams of her generation by writing sentimentally patriotic war songs.


Although the novel draws on a huge cast of historical characters, most of whom amble in and out of the narrative in stereotyped cameo roles, the action is scarcely credible. Relying on coincidence and contrived melodrama as shamelessly as any blockbusting saga, the novel sandwiches human misery with scenes of sordid humor, rank sentimentality, or peculiar flights of fantasy, billed as intermissions, which draw heavily on reincarnation. For all Aksynov's direct experience of life in Siberia, even the gulag section of the novel fails to strike a note of originality.


It is hard to know whether the author has been ill-served by his two translators, or must shoulder the blame entirely for the unsatisfactory assortment of styles in the novel. However, the tone shifts with bewildering rapidity from smug authorial asides in the third person ("if we were to succumb to the temptation to romanticize our story"), to heavy-handed irony, and then on to B-movie dialogue or passages of kitsch descriptiveness. "Everything had passed, everything had been washed away and thundered off like the purest spring water into the pianissimo of a dark, blue night." It seems unlikely then that "Generations of Winter," or the post-war stage of the Grada family saga which Aksyonov is currently writing, will take their place among the great Russian historical novels. But if the reader turns to the novel expecting the stuff that mini-series are made of, rather than to scale the heights of great Russian literature, then they will not be disappointed. Aksyonov may not be a Tolstoy, but he knows how to tell a story well.





"Generations of Winter," by Vassily Aksyonov, translated by John Glad and Christopher Morris, Random House, 592 pages, $25.