Dmitry Bakin. Reasons for Living.
Terras, Victor
Andrew Bromfield, tr. Byron Lindsey, foreword London. Granta. 2002.
xiv + 143 pages. 10 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1-86207-526-3
IN REASONS FOR LIVING, Dmitry Gennadiyevich (his real name and
patronymic) Bakin (a pseudonym) is introduced by Byron Lindsey, an
American Slavist, who interviewed him at the writer's residence in
1996. He does not give Bakin's real name but reports that the
writer was born in southern Russia in 1964, that he has lived in Moscow
since he was seven, had a public-school education, and served in the
Soviet Army Medical Corps from 1984 to 1986. Also, one learns that he
had no higher education and was still working as a driver to support his
family. He prefers his fellow drivers not to know him as a writer, and
fellow writers, with very few exceptions, not to know him at all.
Lindsey's interview reveals a detail that appears to provide a key
to Bakin's oeuvre. He does attempt to develop links with Russian
writers (Gogol, Chekhov, Pilniak, Bely), but to no avail, except perhaps
with Andrei Platonov, whose social background was similar to
Bakin's. As we hear that Bakin brings up Faulkner frequently in
conversation, however, we realize that this explains a great deal.
Bakin's tendency to mythicize a loner's struggle in an
alien world goes against anything known in Russian literature, and the
struggle is motivated by strange and hyper-dimensional emotions. Only
one story, "Hare's Eye," presents a recognizable Soviet
reality, the ugly reality of life in the Soviet Army. In all the
stories, the conflict is of a kind that would seem to be atypical of
contemporary Russia; one is reminded of Faulkner. "The Root and
Goal" is the tale of two brothers who hate each other so strongly
the story must end in a murder. In "Country of Origin," the
hero, a small man, identifies with a boar-hunting ancestor, a giant,
whose skill he has inherited and practices by shooting mice. The object
of his wife's burning love, this small man is ice cold and spreads
cold and decay around himself. "The Surveyor" depicts a cruel
patriarch who rules a huge family with an iron hand. He is bitterly
disappointed by the collapse of Soviet power.
In Bakin's male world, the few women who show up are as
wayward and unpredictable as the men. Bakin's third-person
narrators cannot help revealing their characters' emotions as if
they were their own. In the process, Bakin uses overstatement, fanciful
metaphors, and frequent repetition to make his point. For example:
"The craving of his blood for glory and the craving of his mind for
solitude together with his savage, ferocious methods of quashing the
slightest ripple of insubordination effectively excluded the possibility
of lies even being conceived in his presence." It is his style that
gives away Bakin's amateur quality, for it is the way in which
ordinary people express their ideas.
Victor Terras
Brown University
