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U.R. Bowie
DISAMBIGUATIONS: THREE NOVELLAS ON RUSSIAN THEMES
U.R. Bowie holds a Ph.D. in Russian
literature. The three tales included here are written in English, but make no
mistake: they are firmly in the tradition of Russian literature. In fact, the
great Nikolai Gogol, with what the critic Mirsky once called “his volcano of imaginative creativeness,”
blows through all three works, both in body and spirit.
The first novella, Exhumation, features Gogol in the flesh (and then out of it).
Beginning with scenes from the writer’s life in the nineteenth century, it goes
on to describe the macabre little festivities on the summer day in 1931 that Nikolai
Gogol, along with some of his closest friends, was dug up at the Danilov
Monastery in Moscow. When they opened the coffin they discovered that the skull
was missing. Nikolai Gogol’s head had been stolen.
The second novella, Disambiguation, is set in the United States, but the theme, once
more, is Gogolian in its skewed intricacy. A man who may or may not be insane,
who may or may not be Lee Harvey Oswald (still alive fifty years later) appears
on a Philadelphia talk show, where he discusses the ambiguations and
disambiguations of the spy world, and of the Russian mind— and, by extension,
the labyrinthine thing that is anyone’s life on earth.
The longest, and most purely Russian of
the three works is the last, The
Leningrad Symphony. Set entirely in the city of St. Petersburg, on one day
in October of 1999, it is structured something like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. While Shostakovich’s
famous Seventh Symphony (The Leningrad) plays in the background score, the
reader listens to the music and follows a wide variety of characters about the
city: a government official on his way to being murdered in a hit killing, his
driver, his secretary, his bodyguard, a twelve-year-old boy skipping school
that day, an elderly man who spends all his time researching a painting at the
Russian Museum, a scatter-brained pilgrim woman, in town to visit the shrine of
St. Petersburg’s most famous holy fool, and a variety of other characters.
The
Leningrad Symphony
is a hymn of praise to the resplendent city of St. Petersburg, to its
Pushkinian harmonious brilliance and to its Dostoevskian bleakness and sleaze.
But, then again, this whole collection sings of that glorious thing that is
Russian culture. It even throws in for good measure bits and pieces of the
Cyrillic alphabet. While acknowledging the complexity of a thousand bloody
years of Russian history, while describing with confidence the Russian
propensity to hold two contradictory positions at the same time, U.R. Bowie
gives us a totally convincing, and even loving, look at the enigma inside a
conundrum inside a puzzle that is Russia and the Russian mindset.
