Zwei Einsamkeiten.

Rollberg, Peter

As it happens, both the original Russian title of Vladimir Makanin's novel Odin i odna (1987) and its German version are equally untranslatable into English: Odin and odna are numerals meaning "one [man]" and "one [woman]." Since German does not have full equivalents, the translator, Ingeborg Kolinko, came up with an adroit solution, calling the novel Zwei Einsamkeiten, literally "Two Lonelinesses." A good choice indeed, since the grammatical uniqueness of the Russian title linguistically represents the solitary confinement into which the two central characters of Makanin's story are driven by "the majority." Still, the elegant German solution leaves the question of a similarly fitting English title unanswered (unfortunately and undeservedly, Makanin is one of the leading Russian authors almost completely neglected by U.S. publishers).

Since his debut in 1965, Makanin's preferred narrative space has always been the Russian capital, the time frame usually the present (the 1950s to 1980s), and the milieu that of Soviet petit clerks, rank-and-file people leading normal lives as engineers, administrative officials, or journalists. Zwei Einsamkeiten is no exception to this rule, but that alone says little about the true mystery that lends the novel its narrative legitimacy and esthetic tension: a man and a woman who seem to be made for each other live virtually parallel lives and thus never recognize the other's essence, not even when the narrator, a writer who is befriended with both, introduces them.

Makanin's story can easily be interpreted on the sociopolitical level so customary for the Western understanding of Russian literature: Gennady Goloshchokov (the lonely man) and Ninel Nikolaevna (the lonely woman) had their heyday in the late 1950s, when idealism and a quest for sincerity marked the process of de-Stalinization in Soviet society. They were part of the stubborn few trying to resist the cynical rollback policy after Khrushchev's ouster in 1964; they were the so-called shestidesiatniki - people of the sixties. The futility of their efforts left them in pitiful isolation, as losers who will never admit that their cause was hopeless from the very beginning.

Usually Makanin only hints at the political parameters in which these failing lives evolve; any form of political determinism looks simply ridiculous in his world. What he construes instead is some sort of poetic sociology, capturing societal value shifts of which the people involved are unaware. A minority initiates these shifts, the "majority" follows, and another minority remains behind, left cherishing their values and books to keep them alive. Each in his own way, the male loner and his female counterpart are full of decency, consoling those who suffer and helping the needy. They are taken by surprise when their sacrifices cause little but abuse and ingratitude.

Apart from describing subliminal societal processes, the novel also investigates the inability of two gracefully idealistic human beings to associate with others at all. Their attempts to reach out end in farce or catastrophe, and for this Makanin blames nobody, neither the "majority" nor the characters themselves. Like a scientist, he explores this inexplicable paradox employing different methods. Several text segments (the story is built nonchronologically, like a puzzle) are variations of his underlying theme: solitude on a metaphysical level. These variations appear as experiments producing various answers: social corruption, urban alienation, psychological traumas. Makanin's characters justly despise the new consumerism in their environment, the common philistinism and moral hypocrisy. Makanin, however, rather than taking at face value the lonely observers' claim of superiority, shows their many contradictory facets: Gennady/Ninel's moral purity and self-destruction, their giftedness and infertility, their honesty and self-deceit. Both admittedly live in the realm of their imagination, but at the same time they are perfectly aware of their desperate situation's reality.

On still another level, the narrative deals with the Russian intelligentsia and its obsession with internalized literary cliches that help them retain their hopelessly hope fill attitude. Such leitmotivs as the dream to "entertain one's salon" with intense intellectual discussions or the idea that "everybody is responsible for everything" clearly indicate the origin of these cliches: namely, classical nineteenth-century literature.

Finally, Zwei Einsamkeiten is the story of anonymous urbanites in a huge, eerie world, people who at night stand alone at their window staring at thousands of lit windows outside. Since the two loners are intellectuals, it is easy for them to rationalize their situation. Goloshchokov develops the idea of "the swarm" (not the herd!), to which one either does or does not belong. The swarm moves slowly, protects, assists, and provides the existential warmth that the two protagonists proudly reject and painfully miss. Of course, there was a time when they themselves were among the leaders of the swarm; but that time has passed, the swarm has gradually transformed, and they have failed to transform with it.

The fact that Makanin's troubling story has only now been translated into German - and is still waiting for its translation into English - indicates its complexity, particularly on the level of narration. Makanin's style is often laconic, "cool"; he never allows his narrator to preach. The author's decision to use an achronological structure deprives the reader of the consolation of reaching a final conclusion. The initial question - why is it that Gennady and Ninel experience such a complete failure in their lives? - never loses intensity and gradually becomes almost unbearably painful. Through this structure Makanin also forces us to abandon approaches of simplistic causality: Gennady/Ninel are not lonely "because of something." At the bottom of their loneliness stands the enigma of human life per se.

Thus, Zwei Einsamkeiten is a story without a beginning and without an end, too sober for a generational requiem yet too tragic for a plain analysis. After all, the narrator, although a member of a different generation, never betrays his two separate friends, who sometimes treat him with arrogance. Moreover, if Makanin devotes an entire novel to the enigma of these loners, we may assume that this author feels more for them than plain curiosity. Not anybody, but people with a burning desire for meaning and grace are thrown out of their time; the classical frame of their life is broken, as is the classical frame of narration, and still, the remains of Russian literary heritage with all the tormenting eternal questions are there, alive and well. Maybe it is this sense of the broken frame, together with a loyal inner conservatism, that distinguishes Vladimir Makanin from his literary peers and grants him the position of a true chronicler of the modern human comedy Soviet-style.

Peter Rollberg George Washington University