Apocalypse po-russki Two contemporary Russian books and one new sci-fi audio series imagine the end of the world

Galina Yuzefovich, Meduza’s resident literary critic, reviews three post-apocalyptic narratives, including an audio series that is the first of its kind in Russia.

Yana Vagner, To the Lake. AST, Redaktsia Yeleny Shubinoi, 2019.

To the Lake, Yana Vagner’s literary debut, is a cult novel — not in the popular sense but rather in the strictly technical sense of the term. Even today, 10 years after the book was written and almost eight years after it was first published, readers are still writing fanfiction and organizing role-playing games about To the Lake, and a new TV series based on the book just recently hit the airwaves. The novel’s cult status is even more surprising when one considers the fact that its first edition remained the only one available until this summer: it had been many years since the book could be found in print. That is somewhat fitting for a novel that began as a LiveJournal blog where the author published bits and pieces as she completed her initial drafts.

Because the early days of that blog coincided with the 2009 swine flu epidemic, its narrative seemed so realistic that many readers read Vagner’s story as a documentary account of current events (it’s far easier to believe in a world destroyed by a virus than in a zombie apocalypse or even a nuclear war). Nonetheless, the formal coincidence between the plot of the book and our own reality is far from the primary reason for To the Lake’s lasting success. It would be more accurate to say that Vagner managed to capture and record with an eerie precision the feeling of external darkness seeping into the human soul to make a new inseparable, organic whole.

A new flu virus has seized Moscow, and the city has been closed off to contain the epidemic. Gradually, it becomes clear that the quarantine hasn’t worked: the city has fallen to the plague, and Vagner’s central characters — a bourgeois family living peacefully in the suburbs — must escape into the wilderness, away from the cursed capital, with only the barest necessities in hand. They set off as a very motley crew: the protagonist, her husband, her 16-year-old son from a previous marriage, her husband’s intrepid elderly superman of a father, her husband’s ex-wife (who has yet to forgive her more fortunate rival), her husband’s five-year-old son from his first marriage, and three neighbors — a caricature of a New Russian, his beautiful wife, and their three-year-old daughter, who cannot speak. Together, they must overcome a journey of more than a thousand kilometers through completely wild, entirely uninhabited land to reach a tiny cottage on a Karelian lake where they hope to wait out the end of the world.

Any road trip movie that begins in such circumstances would clearly be doomed to turn into a disaster drama extremely quickly, and that’s exactly what happens in To the Lake. As Russia sinks into chaos and turmoil, money loses its value, and basic products like clean water and benzene become the only true guarantee of salvation, the country seems to turn into a kind of arena where Vagner’s characters are forced to overcome their worst fears — and, most importantly, make difficult, often immoral decisions. The race to survive turns into a literal race in which the novel’s primary characters must constantly throw overboard other unfortunate souls who, just like them, are simply trying to save themselves and their loved ones.

No, I’m not talking about murder or, God forbid, cannibalism. The characters don’t become entirely dehumanized. At their core, they remain the people they were before: average, normal, benign. But committing petty theft, looking away from the misfortunes of others, declining to help, deciding to lie, refraining from sharing vital information to gain a slight advantage for themselves — these become everyday habits for our band of survivors. At the same time, the barely noticeable ethical shifts that external hell induces in the protagonist’s interiority spark an invisible flame of searing, explosive jealousy.

Like any cult phenomenon, To the Lake has become wildly overgrown with comments, discussions, and critiques in the course of its online life. Nearly everyone who writes about the novel notes without fail that it strains both believability and objective truth. Its errors range from inaccurate descriptions of a rifle’s firing mechanism to a rate of perfect coincidences much higher than life’s statistical average. That’s all on top of weak dialogues, a frustratingly endless stream of self-reflection on the part of the protagonist, and a disappointing finale that somehow feels both predictable and insufficient. All these things really do work against Vagner. However, her warm, automatic empathy toward her characters and the book’s tendency to induce sharp pangs of “yes, this is all true, this is about me, I would do the same thing” — well, all that isn’t quite enough to cover up the novel’s flaws, but it does shift the reader’s focus toward the discouraging moral of Vagner’s story: if an epidemic breaks out, run away fast, don’t look back, and don’t pity anyone but yourself and your loved ones. Most importantly, don’t put too much stock in the moral laws inscribed inside us: in the darkest moments of the apocalypse, they simply will not work.

Interested? Preview Maria Kozlovskaya Wiltshire’s English translation of To the Lake here or buy it here.

Victor Martinovich, Night. AST, Redaktsia Yeleny Shubinoi, 2019.

In this novel, human civilization comes to an end for reasons far less mundane than Yana Vagner’s epidemic. The Belorusian intellectual, art historian, and fiction writer Victor Martinovich imagines instead that one day, the sun simply doesn’t rise over the earth, and the world is thrown into bitter cold and darkness forever. This event catches the book’s protagonist, known to us only as “Scribe,” in his Minsk apartment, which is stuffed to the gills with books. Scribe is accompanied only by his dog Gerda, who shares his solitude after a breakup. The woman Scribe loves has left the two of them and moved to an unidentified location in Asia. In a postapocalyptic world, it is Scribe’s book collection that becomes his primary source of income. By renting out his stories, he gradually accumulates the local currency: batteries (now known as “zincs”). By local standards, Scribe lives pretty well — or, at least, he stays relatively warm and full. Nevertheless, one fine day (or night — in a world without light, both terms become meaningless), Scribe’s longing for his beloved draws him outside his hometown. Carrying a backpack full of zincs, the loyal Gerda by his side, Scribe sets off, moving eastward toward the literal light at the end of the tunnel.

From that point onward, Martinovich’s novel features a full-blown parade of literary allusions and associations that flit in and out of view nearly as fast as the settings Scribe encounters during his wanderings through the darkness. At first, the narrator hints openly that the story before us is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” Not only does the name of Scribe’s four-legged companion point in that direction, but the evildoers he meets along his way immediately soften their hearts as soon as he tells them his story just as the Prince, the Princess, and the Little Robber Girl do for Andersen’s little girl Gerda. However, Andersen gradually gives way to Dante journeying through hell toward Beatrice. Dante, in turn, is replaced with Carlos Castaneda, and Castaneda’s mystical hallucinosis gives way to motifs from chivalric novels, with their emphasis on the trials of the hero. Even then, the trials themselves are reminiscent of the Book of Job. To repent for his sins and earn the right to meet his beloved (and to understand the metaphysical significance of the catastrophe that has enveloped the world), Scribe must lose, bit by bit, everything that is dear to him. Even where it is impossible to put one’s finger on Martinovich’s sources, the reflexive feeling that this text is always a duplicate remains. The book is a somewhat pretentions, premeditated play on the entire literary canon at once.

That sophistication does not always work in the novel’s favor. As it clings to the illusions so dear to its author’s heart, the narrative sputters and slows to a stop. Meanwhile, Martinovich reveals uninteresting but structurally essential details to the reader with obvious reluctance and only when absolutely necessary. For example, Scribe’s demierge, his omnipotent, omniscient companion, an offbeat hybrid of Gandalf and Don Juan—appears only on page 300 out of 480, when the narrative is clearly winding toward a dead end, and nothing until then foreshadows his appearance or even his existence. The artificiality and distance calibrated into the entire narrative prevent it from drawing readers in emotionally: We’re not afraid for Scribe. We don’t freeze and starve alongside him, and we don’t mourn his losses. The glass wall between the reader and the protagonist stands undamaged throughout the book.

However, with a bit of effort, if we let go of our genre-based stereotypes and stop expecting dynamism, emotion, and drive from this book, Victor Martinovich’s Night clearly has its merits. Its charming deadpan irony, its precise and wide-ranging stylistic play, and its ingenious complexity may be unexpected, but they are a perfectly acceptable alternative to the horror, hope, and excitement we are accustomed to expect from a post-apocalyptic novel.

Interested? Buy Martinovich’s novel Paranoia in Diane Nemec Ignashev’s English translation here.

Dmitry Glukhovsky, Post. StoryTel, 2019.

Among the three narratives reviewed here, Dmitry Glukhovsky’s new audio series Post most closely matches the traditional conception of a classic post-apocalyptic tale. That’s hardly surprising: It was Glukhovsky’s debut cycle of apocalyptic novels, Metro, that turned him from a novelty to a literary superstar. However, in comparison to Metro, Post is inarguably a step forward and a tad bit to the side. This time, a deftly told, predictably frightening story about the world after the end of the world serves as an expressive and unpleasantly transparent metaphor for the problems Russia faces today. It’s not exactly a new approach — the postapocalyptic novel is a genre known for its gestures toward the contemporary. What makes this series a rarity is the fact that Glukhovsky manages to preserve an ideal balance between shots of excitement and hints of allegory.

The plot of the series begins in what was the Russian city of Yaroslavl and is now a border settlement called Post. There, the now-resurrected Muscovite Empire ends and an unexplored barrens that stretches all the way to Vladivostok begins. The border of this new Russian ecumene is the Volga River, though it now carries a fatally toxic green acid instead of water. This is where the residents of Post, about a hundred souls from the elderly to the very young, live and stand guard. What they stand guard for isn’t clear: Nobody has appeared on the bridge crossing the Volga for many years, and while Post’s residents continue to take shifts watching the railroad tracks leading away from their home, none of them are particularly fervent in their efforts to defend the Muscovite state’s borders. Moscow itself is far away, and communication with its leaders is sporadic; meanwhile, the land across the river doesn’t seem to present any particular danger. What does worry the villagers on the banks of the Volga are shortages of tinned meat, relations with a nearby Chinese collective farm, and the unremitting but ominously fragile boredom of village life.

Everything changes when, in the span of two days, two important events shake the village. First, a division of Cossacks, led by an ataman, arrives from Moscow. They are preparing for an expedition across the river: The newly thriving capital has decided to conquer Russia’s former territories once again. Then, for the first time in many years, somebody crosses the bridge into Post. That person, Daniil, is a deaf, emaciated priest. He prophesizes the death of God and warns Post’s residents of a new apocalypse, a disaster immeasurably more horrific than the one the world has already survived. Daniil’s arrival and the departure of the Cossacks to the other side of the river set off a chain of dramatic events that force the narrative’s vivid, realistic, and highly recognizable central characters to take on the role of heroic warriors fighting the hordes of Hell while delving ever deeper into the question of how Russia and the world were destroyed in the first place.

At first, Moscow fits into that tortured world as the gem of the earth, a mighty benefactor and protector, a metropolis so rich and flourishing that it even has streetlamps (an unthinkable luxury in Post). However, the city transforms in the course of the book into a frightening kraken, a sinful and therefore doomed growth on the body of a massive, suffering country. That trajectory reveals a direct analogy with present-day Russian politics that only a very naïve listener could fail to find.

An audio series is not exactly a book, and it is also a relatively new product for Russian readers (or rather, listeners). Given those obstacles, Post comes across as a dynamic, well-constructed novel adapted perfectly for the ear rather than the eye, an ideal introduction to a new literary form. The author’s own marvelous reading of the story provides an extra bonus. It transforms the series into a full-fledged audio show, revealing Dmitry Glukhovsky in the new and unexpected guise of a talented actor.

Interested? Search for Natasha Randall’s and Andrew Bromfield’s translations of Glukhovsky’s Metro series and keep an eye out for new translations by Marian Schwartz.