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A memory journey through twentieth century Russia


 

Innokenty awakes in a private hospital room without his memory. His attended by a single doctor and a single nurse without change. He has no memory neither of why he is hospitalized nor of his wider life. He is a man without history.

With time and caring attention, his memory returns - fragments float up at first mainly of childhood. A train journey, a summer dacha, aspects of his parents care, a party where an elderly admiral counsels him to, 'Go Intrepidly' in exploring the host's house. Memories of the good, the particular, moments in time but seemingly not of time, suspended in presence.

As his time in hospital proceeds, with the doctor giving only the most sparse of prompts, other memories will surface of more complex times, then more difficult and finally plain, simple degrading horror.

For Innokenty comes of age in post-Revolutionary Russia, he finds himself, with his mother, sharing an apartment with a professor and his daughter and a worker at the local sausage factory. The worker denounces the professor who is arrested and shot, the worker is themselves killed in mysterious circumstances and Innokenty is in turn arrested, snatched away from Anastasia, the professor's daughter, with whom he is in love in a beautiful, mutually chaste, affair and sent to the Solovoki Islands, the first of the Gulags. 

The surprise comes when Innokenty discovers that he has awakened in 1999! There is a 75-year absence to be accounted for. Suffice it say that Nikolai Fyodorov's vision of the scientific resurrection of the dead has (very partially) been realized. Innokenty is alive and well and ready to take up the strands of his life in a body still in its late twenties.

In the course of his new life, he finds himself a celebrity, in a relationship with Anastasia's granddaughter, and in spite of his swift, agile learning curve, betwixt two worlds.

Thus does Eugene Vodolazkin's novel, 'The Aviator' unfold and in it, he explores multiple themes, a number of which are carried over from his first novel, 'Laurus' set in medieval Russia.   https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2017/04/redeeming-through-time.html

There is the question of multiple identities - who are we if we inhabit different roles, places, in this case, periods of time? The obsessive - in Laurus it was the search for redemption, in the Aviator the recovery of love in a new key. The relationship between facts and knowledge. Facts require framing and framing implies a value structure that enables you to evaluate them but from where do those values come to which the implicit answer in both books is as a gift from the transcendent ordering that is God.  And of time and eternity - what does time mean, what is its value, why are we, as immortal beings, subjected to it? What is there to uniquely discover in this descent or insertion? And, finally, why do we believe that the memories of trauma are more operative, important than the memories of goodness and grace; and, if 'history' is trauma writ large, why do we imagine that it is important, overshadowing the minute particulars of graced good? 

These themes come beautifully embedded in the character and life of Innokenty and of Anastasia (both grandmother and especially granddaughter) and Geiger (the doctor) and of all three of the times lived through. The time of childhood and pre-Revolutionary Russia, the time of the Bolshevik coup (and it is described as such by Vodolazkin) and the beginning of the Terror, and of the 1990s in Russia, that I remember so well, of democratic first steps and confusions, economic opportunities and destitutions and the brash arrival of consumerism unleashed! All vividly described in sparse, economical gifted prose.

For those interested in Russia and its twentieth-century journey, in novels of ideas carried by real, identifiable, and lovable characters and books of light (to use a description of the Scottish writer, Neil M. Gunn) that leave you hopeful and illumined even as you have passed at times through the worst descents humans inflict upon each other, this is undoubtedly a book for you. It leaves good memory, as defined by Innokenty himself, in its wake.






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