Book Review: Zakhar Prilepin’s 'Sankya'
‘If we ask the elderly to draw’ asks Sankya, ‘will their drawings be as bright as those of children?’ This English translation of Zakhar Prilepin’s Sankya by Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker has been long overdue; and in recent months disturbingly relevant. The novel gained a cult following on its 2006 release, and Prilepin was hailed as the reincarnation of any number of Russian greats, most famously Gorky. Thugs, a critically acclaimed play by Kirill Serebrennikov, is loosely based on the book; and even those in Russia disturbed by Prilepin’s political views – in recent months he has written in favour of Russia’s annexation of Crimea – still consider him a literary genius. Both Medvedev and Putin have read the novel – a fact, which Prilepin attributes simply to the need to ‘know one’s enemy’.
Sasha Tishin (the titular Sankya), is drawn to friends with criminal – rather than strictly political – convictions. Sankya is a member of the Founding Fathers, a radical political organisation known for its violent disorder, and bearing a loose resemblance to the National Bolshevik Party, banned in Russia in 2007, and notorious for its direct action stunts against the government. The Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin and Novorossiya activist Aijo Beness were once counted among its members. Prilepin’s fictional group, with their ‘fucked up flag,’ are no different, led from a basement-cum-bunker in Moscow, in the name of their jailed leader Kostenko. These Founding Fathers are an assembly of the disaffected, driven by a vague sense of injustice and wounded pride, contemptuous of anything, which could be mistaken for ideology; and their leader Kostenko is a variation on the mercurial National Bolshevik leader, writer and poet Eduard Limonov. Kostenko writes grandiose, childish poetry, dividing the world into ‘magnificent’ and ‘monstrous.’ These poems, and Kostenko’s ‘crazy philosophy about Eurasian nomads’ are the cornerstone of the Founders’ work – Limonov, true to form, described Sankya as the book he wished he had written.
Life in modern
Russia is shown as a humiliation, and Sankya – described
by author Ksenia Melnik as ‘Holden Caulfield with a Molotov Cocktail’ –
will set it right. All figures of power are phoneys and cronies – from
the liberal intelligentsia represented by young
university lecturer Bezletov to the faceless, belligerent local
authorities. In
his fight for the motherland, Sankya has little in the way of a family
life. Sankya’s mother is too frightened
to ask about her son’s new friends, and too tired to care. ‘We are
fatherless kids’ reflects Sankya, ‘looking for someone who
wants us as sons.’
All ideology is gone
The Founding Fathers are a party of unquenchable rage. Coherent
political ideology is a cruel joke – their parents toiled in its
name, only to have it dismissed as a lie. For Sankya, effete liberals such as
Bezletov only perpetuate this process – they are people who ‘would have Russians lie down and die every hundred
years […] for a bloodletting.’ For the Founding Fathers
(the name perhaps a dig at the US and Western democratic idealism), if Russia
is to be changed, it must be done on Russian terms. A Russian saying holds that
‘the new is the well-forgotten old’ – in the name of his liberal
opposition politics, Bezletov would ‘squeeze the slave out of
the Russians.’ Bezletov rails against his
colleagues’ corruption and lack of moral scruples, but does not infuriate Sankya
until he laments their lack of ‘common sense.’ Opposition liberalism is
self-flagellation, not dignity.
‘All ideology is gone,’ Sankya tells the university
lecturer. ‘In our time, the new ideologies are instincts! Actions!’
‘Land, honour, victory,
justice’ – none of these require ideology!’ he roars from a hospital bed
after a savage beating.
Far from channelling J.D. Salinger, Sankya reminds me more of the heroes
of the
gritty Russian cinema of the nineties, perhaps Kolya from the cult film Brother, a
boyish loner with an enigmatic smile and
guarded memories from the Chechen War (in which Prilepin also fought).
As in
those uncertain days, an urge for action, for change, for dignity – and
the lack of a coherent myth to justify it – is the key tension in Sankya.
Prilepin’s work is therefore of far more relevance to Russia’s trajectory today than a
conventional political coming-of-age novel – though for readers
unfamiliar with these debates in Russian society, Sankya may appear to be just that.
Their voices hoarse, their throats burning from alcohol, the Founding
Fathers shout for the President to resign – or else. Bezletov believes
the party to be a scarecrow, its ‘else’ manipulated by the powers
that be, into proving their claim that the only alternative rule is no rule at
all – a country ridden by violence, instability, and
far-right political radicalism. This cynical conceit is indeed one echoed by
the Russian leadership – though it has elements of
truth. Contrary to a common claim made in the West, Russians have indeed
questioned themselves. They do not, however, reach the conclusions many wish
them to. That the Russian leadership has far more to fear from ethnic
nationalists than from Moscow liberals is no secret, though it took a
hypothetical Strelkov presidency, for Western
media to be widely alarmed. There are as many Bezlers as Bezletovs, among Russia’s disenfranchised and
disenchanted. The words of an elderly villager show a primal wisdom to Sankya
while he is on the run in decaying rural Russia: ‘The sad thing is not that man is weak but that he is angry in his
weakness. And the more he sees others taking note of his weakness, the angrier
he becomes.’
The disenfranchised generation
Aleksei Navalny, another opposition figure with complex
views for
European admirers, has written an introduction to this new English
translation,
describing Sankya as emblematic of a disenfranchised Russian generation,
too
young to remember the stability of the Soviet years and too aware to
enjoy what
followed them. ‘If you want to feel the raw
nerve of modern Russian life’, he concludes, ‘what you need isn’t Anna
Karenina – what you need is Sankya.’ One commenter dismissed Sankya
in an online review, for its division of
Russian society into ‘classes.’ Slavophile and Westerniser?
The politically passive majority and active minority? Or perhaps the
apathetic – and the pathetic? Sankya and his friends may not be
the superfluous men of classical Russian literature, but they seem
pretty
ineffective. They are activists who activate nothing, and not for want
of
trying. Eight years after the publication of Sankya, Navalny notes,
‘Prilepin […] predicted the patterns of development of radical political groups, and
the government’s strategy in dealing with them.’ They tried to sort out Russia, noted acclaimed
novelist Viktor Pelevin, and Russia sorted them out instead.
I could try – and fail – to write the usual things about the depth, breadth,
width, and worth of the Russian soul, complicate things with concepts such as svoboda (freedom) and volya (will),
but that would hardly do.
Sankya would not allow it. Perhaps Sankya and his thugs hold a bleaker
message – that in an age of political stagnation, meaningful
change is an event, not a gradual process. The Sasha Tishins of this
new generation will
go out in a blaze of glory, lighting up the greyness, in tales of Orange
Revolutions and Black Hundreds. ‘The revolution,’ writes
Prilepin ‘does not come from the top or the bottom – it begins when the
truth thins out…’
