Andrei Volos. Hurramabad.

Mozur, Joseph P., Jr.

Arch Tait, tr. Mc, scow. Glas (Ivan Dee, distr.). 2001. 240 pages. $14.95 ISBN 5-7172-0056-0 / 1-56663-373-7

DESPITE PREDICTIONS THAT Russian realism was destined to give up the ghost in post-Soviet Russian literature, it continues to prosper simply because Russian readers seem to have an all-enduring need for verisimilitude and the bitter truth in turbulent times. Andrei Volos's Hurramabad, short-listed for this year's Russian State Prize for Literature, is a collection of short narratives, realistically chronicling the plight of Russians remaining in Tajikistan after the demise of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of ethnic strife in the republic.

Andrei Volos (b. 1955) grew up and went to school in Soviet Tajikistan. His family roots in the, republic reach back into the early 1920s. After civil war erupted in the 1990s, and Tajiks began to settle "old scores" with their former Russian masters, Volos and his family left their home in the capital city, Dushanbe, and returned to Russia. The city is depicted ironically in Volos's work as Hurramabad, a name symbolizing a mythical place of serenity and happiness. As a geophysicist by profession, Volos has traveled extensively throughout Central Asia and possesses an intimate knowledge of the social, political, and ethnic dynamics that characterize the region.

Of the seven stories included in the English translation of Hurramabad (the Russian original contains thirteen), three deal with the theme of the exodus of Russians from Tajikistan, two depict their hopeless struggle to remain, and one chronicles the fate of a group of journalists captured when they get lost in the chaos of rapidly changing allegiances. The introductory story, which portrays a young man's ascent to a hillside graveyard with his aged grandmother, sets the general mood. Truly, such austere realism hammers home to the reader the fragility of life at times of anthropogenic calamities.

One of the most powerful stories in the volume is "A Local Man," which relates the desperate efforts of a Russian chemical engineer, Makushin, to become more Tajik than the Tajiks just to be able to stay in the country he loves so much. First, Makushin leaves his Russian wife and marries a Tajik. Then he adopts Tajik customs and dress, and even learns to speak the local language as welt as the natives. Still, the Tajiks reject him, and Makushin faces insurmountable obstacles in finding a job at Tajik-controlled research institutes. Eventually he gives up and hires on as a baker's assistant in a pie shop, where with time the customers no longer recognize him as Russian. When ethnic unrest breaks out in rite city, Makushin is picked up by an armed patrol and made to utter a Tajik nursery rhyme to prove his ethnicity. Makushin pronounces the rhyme in perfect Tajik and in keeping with the local dialect. Unfortunately, the patrol turns out to be from an opposing ethnic clan. He is mistaken for a local and killed. Ironically, Makushin dies with the realization that his dream of being accepted as a local man has finally come true.

Mistaken identity is a motif in the story "Sammy" as well. A Russian woman in war-torn Hurramabad, tenaciously refusing to emigrate despite the obvious, befriends a poisonous viper in her kitchen that appears from time to time from a crack in the floor. She foolishly thinks the snake is a good-luck-bringing grass snake, an idea she derives from her mother's romanticized memories of Russia. She calls the pet Sammy, nurtures it, and refuses to believe a Russian neighbor who tells her the truth about the snake when he sees it. Only on a short visit to Russia does she finally realize the danger she has confronted for so long. She finds a picture of her "pet" in an old encyclopedia and at the same time suddenly faces up to the need to emigrate to Russia. Upon her return to Hurramabad to sell her house, she discovers the snake lying dead on her kitchen floor, just as her own cherished illusions about a happy life in Tajikistan expired forever during her trip to Russia.

"First on the List" parades before the reader the inane motives of people caught up in the murderous ethnic warfare. A warlord fighting Islamic fundamentalists recalls all the atrocities of the bloody civil war. When a group of journalists ends up by mistake in an area under his control, he sees himself forced to use them as hostages and bargaining chips in his negotiations with a rival warlord. He demands that a helicopter return several of his captured men or he will begin killing the hostages. When no helicopter arrives due to inclement weather, the Russian journalist Ivanchev is chosen for execution--his name just happens to be the first on the list of hostages. Not knowing what his ultimate fate will be, Ivanchev meditates on the human condition as he is being led away: how silly war is when everything and everyone on the planet was "hurtling through the lifeless cosmos, flying headlong into darkness ... turning into a mere bright point of light, now no longer bright, now an infinitesimal glimmer."

The fate of Russians living in the so-called "near abroad" has been on the minds of many in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union. That alone makes Hurramabad highly topical and helps explain its nomination for a State Prize. Thousands of Russians have left Central Asia because of war, discrimination, the fear of ethnic cleansing, or rampant criminality, the latter being the theme of the story "A House by the River." Volos knows his subject firsthand, and he brings that insight to bear in succinct narratives, laden with understatement in the style of Ernest Hemingway. Hurramabad is also pervaded by an implicit nostalgia, an imperceptible yearning for some elusive harmony or "friendship of peoples" from the Soviet past. Yet the title of his collection of stories suggests that Volos knows all too well that such ideas have long become the stuff of myth and legend.

Arch Tait's translation is quite readable. Some American readers might find an occasional use of British slang to be jarring, but the translation certainly captures Volos's terse style well. Hurramabad is a must for anyone interested in Central Asia and the social dynamics of its newly independent states. Recent events in Afghanistan have brought Tajikistan to center stage and make knowledge about that region of the world all the more pertinent.

Joseph P. Mozur Jr.
University of South Alabama