Vollmann’s cast includes a series of fictional characters who stand for the many anonymous people caught up in Europe’s grinding machinery, as well as assorted historical figures such as Hitler and Stalin, the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the German lieutenant-general Friedrich Paulus. An extended section on this last figure, as he tries to hold onto Stalingrad, is a chilling tale of grim compliance. Vollmann details the military movements that bring Stalingrad under German control and then the Soviets’ ruthless siege of the city; the effects are suspenseful, baleful, and horrific, but outdone by his rendering of Paulus’s interior conflicts along the way. The general is bitter at his colleagues’ advancements and anxious about his wife’s estimation of his professional stature; he’s also quietly frantic about the diminishing odds of success on the battlefield but pinioned there by his obedience to Hitler’s command that Stalingrad must be held, no matter the cost. It’s painful to dwell in Paulus’s deteriorating psyche as he receives report after report of German losses and Soviet advances and still resists entreaties from his officers to retreat. Indeed, Paulus maintains an outward show of fascist conviction, even when receiving escalating bad news from subordinates:
Herr Lieutenant-General, Sixty-fifth Soviet Army has sliced open our flank!
He opened his silver cigarette-case and told them: Keep calm, please.
But, Herr Lieutenant-General, we’re being pushed back over here!
Said Paulus: Against all your objections I speak two words: Adolf Hitler.
By describing the desperation and hysteria of Paulus’s interior state before and after he rigidly speaks those all-conquering “two words” within the context of a failing military campaign, Vollmann exposes the absurdly single-minded logic of German totalitarianism, its staggering destructiveness, and the private ruin it brings to its devotees.
Vollmann adapts this method to the novel’s representation of Soviet life, particularly through the experiences of Dmitri Shostakovich. We first meet Shostakovich as a brash young composer, maddening to his wiser companions in his lack of concern for what fickle Stalin and his many stooges will make of his music and then of him and his family. When Shostakovich begins to grasp the consequences of official approval and disapproval, however, he grows frantic to curry favour by writing music to party taste but remains ambivalent about having to compromise his art. Matching an unpredictable system to an unstable man, Vollmann reveals the impossibility of individual fidelity to the Soviet cause. The accompanying uncertainty prevents him from resolving his predicament through the straightforward if difficult sacrifice of his art for his private life, or his private life for his art, and in time the composer becomes a paranoid drunk, “who’d forgotten nearly everything except how to be most vigilantly afraid.”
Until, that is, Stalin decides to send him to New York, as a showpiece of Soviet civilization (“all his works had been un-banned four days before”). After a hollow performance to an adoring crowd, Shostakovich puts on a oneman show trial, “[reading] out denunciations upon command . . . [attacking] among others a certain D. D. Shostakovich, who’d committed various errors. His mouth grew dry, and he could not finish the speech. A pleasant male voice completed it for him.” Vollmann makes Shostakovich into an everyman of the Soviet experiment; enduring its voracious control of both life and art, he is divided against himself, his work reduced to self-preserving calculations and his days fraught with the knowledge that someone is always watching to make sure that he agrees that life has become better, comrades; life is more joyful.
Europe Central explores the human cost exacted when power endures for so long under false pretenses, but it stops short of reflecting the latter-day consequences of Communism’s decline, as summed up by the Polish dissident Adam Michnik: “The worst thing about Communism is what comes after.” This bitter observation would be an appropriate epigraph for Absurdistan, the latest effort from the critically lauded Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart. The novel concerns the misadventures of Misha Vainberg, a shockingly obese, rapping Russian émigré trapped in the nether regions of the former Soviet Union after his late father’s criminal activities bar him from returning to the United States. While trying to overcome this bureaucratic barrier to his lush New York lifestyle and ghetto-fine girlfriend, he becomes immersed in the craven world of Russian gangster life, breakaway-republic politics, and the American militaryindustrial complex. These elements bang together in the volatile, religiously divided, oil-soaked nation of Absurdistan, and Shteyngart’s protagonist and his rendering of contemporary life in the outer regions of Eurasia are of a piece: scatological, excessive, coarse, and free-spending.
As such, the material is certainly wry, but cheaply so, like an extended riff on recent-history-as-farce. One chapter describes local prostitutes beguiling American defence contractors in broken English at a luxurious Hyatt that rises amid the rubble and hellfire of some unfathomably complex and gruesome civil strife; the underlying assumption of crass injustice is too assured to be lively beyond the immediate tragicomedy of the scene. Complete with Dick Cheney jokes and clever Halliburton wordplay, not to mention lists of the American corporate logos that festoon a place permanently stuck between the First and Third Worlds, the novel in fact provides a grinning confirmation of our armchair dissenters’ worries about the decadence of twentyfirst- century living. Of course, we’re supposed to regard things like a “Holocaust for Kidz” theme-park proposal as the depressing reduction of history to amoral commodity, but Shteyngart’s refusal to pull back from Misha’s own casual indifference toward this situation means that the novel’s hyperactive irony dulls its critiques. We’re left with a large-scale caricature that provides easy laughter about Western life advancing along the brink: “The particular world of the Park Hyatt Svanï City floated around me — buffalo wings drumming against whiskey bottles, floral duvet covers suffused in cnn’s lunar glow, and in the distance the people, threadbare and heat-stricken, playing out their imponderable dramas.”
The dark stories and histories of the prior century, crashing into more recent folly and tragedy, tempt us to avoid fully recognizing burdens both old and new, whether through concerted sarcasm, as in Shteyngart, or pacifying nostalgia, as in Gaddis. But that’s why Judt’s and Vollmann’s books, with their willingness to reflect and engage these burdens to the fullest possible extent, are so crucial. Whether through the fever dream of a rumbling historical novel or through the comprehensive education of an encyclopedic history, Europe Central and Postwar give us the opportunity to fix our imaginations and critical faculties on the twentieth century’s core event — European civilization’s irreparable ruin. Encountering history from both within and without provides a painful reminder of the present’s abusing and disabusing relationship to the past — because what once was can always be again.
Comments