{"id":389,"date":"2014-11-24T09:54:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T14:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nightowl.owu.edu\/?p=389"},"modified":"2014-11-26T08:50:37","modified_gmt":"2014-11-26T13:50:37","slug":"review-of-sankya-by-zakhar-prilepin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/2014\/11\/24\/review-of-sankya-by-zakhar-prilepin\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of “Sankya” by Zakhar Prilepin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Laughlin<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ivan Turgenev was out for a stroll in Saint Petersburg in 1862 when he saw fires raging in the distance, the result of students calling for educational reform. A few moments later, he was accosted by an acquaintance, who exclaimed, \u201cLook at what your<\/i> Nihilists are doing! They\u2019re burning Petersburg!\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The reference, of course, was to Turgenev\u2019s novel, Fathers and Sons<\/i>, and specifically to Bazarov, the leader of the Nihilists (Turgenev popularized the term through the novel), who advocates razing all of Russia\u2019s institutions as the only way forward. As Bazarov says, \u201c\u2018the most useful thing of all is negation\u2014hence we negate.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The statement could have easily been said by Sasha \u201cSankya\u201d Tishin, the main character of Victor Prilepin\u2019s powerful novel, Sankya,<\/i> recently put out by the Disquiet imprint of Dzanc Books. Sankya is the direct literary descendent of Bazarov, but he\u2019s a Bazarov spawned not from the disenchantment with the aristocratic, European values of the nineteenth century but from the corrupt, capitalist values of contemporary Russia. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey couldn\u2019t take the stage.\u201d The first sentence of the novel says it all. Literally, they, the Founding Fathers, or the activist group to which Sankya belongs, can\u2019t take the stage at the Communist demonstration they\u2019re there to crash. They watch from behind a chain-link fence as \u201cdeeply and irritatingly old\u201d people carry images of Lenin and Stalin, a manifestation of their desire to return to the former glory of the Soviet Union. But the Founding Fathers don\u2019t watch for long. By the end of the chapter, they break through the fence and beat, burn, and destroy everything in their paths. <\/span><\/p>\n

The stage is also a metaphor for Russian society. Sankya is a member of a generation of angry toughs who can\u2019t take the stage in the new order of Russia\u2019s economy, a system dominated by the oligarchs, the powerful few anointed by Putin\u2019s Kremlin. At one point Sankya sums up the situation: \u201cA repulsive, dishonest, and foolish State, which slays the weak and grants freedom to the vile and vulgar\u2014why should one put up with it? What was the point of living in it, every moment betraying itself and each of its citizens?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Prilepin himself served for the \u201cfoolish State.\u201d He was a member of the OMON, a sort of Russian SWAT team designed to control crowds and demonstrations. The OMON is a ubiquitous and pernicious presence throughout the novel. Prilepin also served in the military, where he saw action in Chechnya. Not able to sustain himself financially, he turned to journalism, which later led him to activism and writing fiction. Prilepin has been arrested over one-hundred-and-fifty times. He\u2019s also regarded as one of Russia\u2019s most important contemporary writers. We can thank Mariya Gusev, Jeff Parker, and Alina Ryabovolova for finally bringing him into English in their excellent translation. <\/span><\/p>\n

Like <\/i>Turgenev, Prilepin hits the generational theme hard. But unlike the generations in Fathers and Sons<\/i>, all of whom have unique characteristics and a sense of identity, Prilepin\u2019s generations are either absent or lost. In one poignant scene, Sankya, seeking refuge from the police, returns to his village where his grandparents still live. Symbolically, his grandfather is on his death bed, and \u201cGrandma\u2019s chatter jumped from one topic to another, but the theme remained the same: everything has died, and there\u2019s nothing left.\u201d The generation of the grandparents is literally dying out. They are both out-of-touch and full of anguish.<\/span><\/p>\n

The generation of Sanky\u2019s parents is also gone. In the same scene, \u201cGrandma quietly spoke about her sons\u2014she had three of them\u2014Sasha\u2019s father and two of his uncles\u2026 All three of them had died.\u201d They are part of the larger problem of a generation killing themselves. \u201cThat story goes like this: In the last years of the previous regime, the peasants had finally put some meat on their bones and saved a bit of cash\u2026 And at that particular moment all the village kids suddenly desired to abandon their bicycles and climb aboard motorcycles. Not only would you never see any traffic cops in the village, the entire local precinct was actually gone for six months at a time. So everyone rode drunk. They crashed horrifically, smashing themselves to pulps, flying, ejected by the force\u2026 exploding their stupid heads against trees and fences\u2026 young girls crashed, too.\u201d Sankya remembers as a child seeing \u201cwomen in black mourning kerchiefs\u2026 All of them had lost their sons in wrecks.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

So this is Prilepin\u2019s Russia: a dying, out-of-touch generation of grandparents; a lost generation, in the truest sense of that term, of parents; and then Sankya\u2019s generation, with no way forward in society, a generation of superfluous men and women whose only recourse is to violence and destruction. <\/span><\/p>\n

Despite their actions, we still care about them. Their situation is bleak. The society in which they live offers nothing. What would you do? Russia has, of course, been on the world stage lately with the annexation of Crimea, the Olympics, and Putin\u2019s antics in Ukraine. But what\u2019s actually happening over there? If you want a firm\u2014and stark\u2014answer, you should turn to Prilepin\u2019s Sankya<\/i>, as no other book to come out of Putin\u2019s Russia has given us so much of what we don\u2019t usually see.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\nReview of Sankya <\/i>by Zakhar Prilepin, pub. Dzanc Books, translation by Jeff Parker <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Laughlin   Ivan Turgenev was out for a stroll in Saint Petersburg in 1862 when he saw fires raging in the distance, the result of students calling for educational reform. A few moments later, he was accosted by an acquaintance, who exclaimed, \u201cLook at what your Nihilists are doing! They\u2019re burning Petersburg!\u201d The reference, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":540,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-written-by"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/540"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}