Play Blues.

Mozur, Joseph P. Jr.

First appearing as Igraem bliuz in 1983 in the Paris

emigre tamizdat network, Play Blues represents a budding young author's nostalgic portrayal of his neudachnik (loser) father. Set in St. Petersburg during the 1960s and 1970s, the novel catapults today's readers back to a time when the city bore the curious name of Leningrad and music itself was hostage to the caprice of government authorities. But the young author, his father, and friends successfully ignore the cultural taboos. They never speak of the invisible barriers yet seem to accept them as just one of a number of life's challenges to be overcome.

The father, a war veteran and talented saxophonist, walks away from a comfortable orchestra position when his son (the author) is born. At the same time he begins to devote his life passionately to spontaneity and feeling, expressed foremost in his infatuation with blues and jazz. Such a reaction to the regimentation of social life everywhere around him, however, proves destructive for the saxophonist's family. As his parents struggle through separation and divorce, the young author leaves the home, occupying one temporarily vacated apartment after another in St. Petersburg, and even takes up residence in the city's airport until fatigue from lack of sleep compels him to seek greater stability in life.

That stability he eventually finds in his writing. It allows him to structure his life and weave together reality and fiction to a point where the two become indistinguishable. He comes to love unconditionally a father he constructs and ennobles in his mind. His father, a man who squanders the meager family budget on wine, women, song, and reckless gambling at soccer games, is thus transformed from a loser into a proud and wise counselor, a man with unbroken dignity despite the persistent blows of an all-too-outrageous fortune -- a tragicomic Miniver Cheevy in reverse, born too early to savor the cultural liberation of the perestroika years.

The author's father cautions him not to trust words, which can justify anything, but rather to listen to the music of life, the tragedy of eternal harmony. When he learns of his son's desire to become a writer, he tells him to find his own note in the composition of life and remarks that in their time just being honest is tantamount to a great display of personal courage. Nevertheless, the rock and roll which the author's father plays in St. Petersburg restaurants is possible only because his band deceptively labels it "fast foxtrot."

Play Blues gives the reader a tangible sense of life in Russia's western capital at a time when such names as Louis Armstrong, Ted Jones, Mel Louis, and Ella Fitzgerald were uttered by the Russian cultural elite like whispers in a church pew, as incantations of the different and alluring world beyond the pale of official Soviet culture. The novel closes with die death of the saxophonist and the birth of an author, strikingly similar to his father, yet with his own personality. Galperin's author is a master of the narrative, weaving events in and out of chronological time and improvising variation after variation of the same soul-haunting blues melody.

Born in 1947, Yuri Galperin began his literary career in Leningrad in the late 1960s. In 1975 the authorities banned publication of his work, and in 1979 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he resides today. His translator, Therese Rollier, has done an admirable job of capturing Galperin's lyrical style in the German. Play Blues is a good read and will be savored by all who question today the resilience of Russian literature.