Fiction
Translation Grant Programme
Published in Italian with a grant from Litrix.de.
Airy impromptu. Katerina Poladjan tells of life in the late Soviet Union
Have we landed on a theater stage? During the performance of a Chekhov play? A sleeping-car attendant, Ippolit Ivanovich, receives his neighbor, the nurse Varvara Mikhailovna, with perfect gallantry, and she lets him court her as if she were a countess. The couple is reveling in a secret affair – not on a Russian country estate but in a Soviet communal apartment, in the middle of a sprawling city. Katerina Poladjan, born in 1971 in Moscow and resident in Germany since the late seventies, sets her impeccably composed novel “Upheaval” in the space of a single day: March 11, 1985. In this way time and place are intensely intertwined. An overcrowded communal apartment provides the story’s main setting. The Gorbachev era has begun, though her small group of protagonists is scarcely aware of this. All the same, change in the air. Her figures seem stuck in a time warp: one era is coming to an end while a new one is looming on the horizon without yet being palpable. Vavara’s granddaughter, twenty-year-old Yanka, is working her night shift at a lightbulb factory somewhere well east of Moscow when she learns that the Soviet leader has died. Her foreman holds up a radio blasting Chopin’s funeral march – the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet is not even mentioned by name, a gesture that speaks volumes about the relationship of the people to the powers that be. The state is a diffuse, invisible quantity that determines everything and is just as inescapable as the air we breathe.
Poladjan succeeds in conjuring up one vivid, emblematic scene after another. There’s the engineer’s assistant Matvey Alexandrovich who complains about the kitchen table belonging to Yanka’s family, which happens to be an inch longer than it should be according to code. Or Yanka’s mother, Maria Nikolayevna, who later, in the deserted ethnological museum where she works, moves from the ground floor with its stuffed mammoth to the room with the lemmings prancing around an elk. Or the way people stand in line outside a store without even knowing what’s for sale there.
The novel’s perspectivist composition, tempo changes, inner monologues and graphic comparisons – the air is “thin, a thread, a sharp, nasty shard” – are highly musical and masterfully executed, as are the dialogues. Ippolit, Varvara and the remaining cast, with the notable exception of Yanka, speak to each other in the well-mannered and polished tones of a Chekhov play. Everyone uses the formal address and refers to the others as “my dears,” people are told to “enter” when the room is a cramped 65 square feet. The contrast between lofty speech and squalid apartment is comic in its effect. Language has a protective function for these characters. A person capable of speaking so eloquently is defending his or her autonomy and refuses to speak with the usual political platitudes, drawing instead from a hallowed literary tradition. With echoes of the Russian classics, Poladjan recalls Giulia Corsalini’s highly successful novel “The Chekhov Reader,” originally published in Italian in 2018. Corsalini’s Ukrainian heroine, having come to Italy to work in a nursing home, recounts her life and fate in the style of Chekhov, providing the reader with an unexpected glimpse of this apparently simple woman. Poladjan also pays tribute to Turgenev, Gogol and Bulgakov, inventing a surreal vignette in their honor: a professor living in the communal apartment catapults himself straight through the roof and into the sky on a chair attached to elastic bands and springs.
The events in the novel, sketched by the author as if in passing, come to a head for each of the characters. And the ending of “Upheaval” is almost futuristic, as once again the fantastic spills over into the story. Yanka comes across an unnoticed door in the communal apartment, behind which a vast landscape opens up. The young woman slips into an unfamiliar state. Katerina Poladjan proves masterful at getting into the minds and hearts of her characters. She succeeds in creating a little glimmering alphabet of emotions in the late Soviet Union. “Upheaval” resembles an airy impromptu whose melodies linger on.
Translated by John Reddick
By Maike Albath
Maike Albath is a literary critic and journalist for the radio stations Deutschlandfunk and DeutschlandRadioKultur. She also writes for the newspapers Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Her books “Der Geist von Turin” (2010) and “Rom, Träume “(2013) were published by Berenberg Verlag.
