2003 Russian Booker Prize Nomination
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| "The Crocodile." (2002), Moscow, Russia |
Poland - KROKODYL - WYDAWNICTWO AKADEMICKIE DIALOG | "Krokodill", LR (2008), Estonia |
This is a book about the doomed fate of the twentieth century Russian intelligentsia, at least in its traditional form of existence. It is a story of the horror that takes hold of bookish boys when reality tears apart their paper world. It is a novel about the instability of any fortress, be it socialism, the family or the soul. Like Chekhov’s works, the novel is misanthropic, but also like Chekhov, it is at the same time intelligent and hopeful.
The entire action of The Crocodile takes place against a backdrop of the conversations of a group of people working for a philosophy journal. The Soviet intelligentsia lived its life in a specific and unique atmosphere. Life in the editor’s office was spent in reflecting on scholastic ‘discoveries’, for example, that ‘the way of life under socialism’ and ‘the socialist way of life’ are completely different things that on no account should be confused. And then the working ends and the staff all head off to some watering hole to revel in their lack of responsibilities and while away the time telling jokes. These aging boys at heart, after drinking sufficient alcohol and taking on the roles of Plato, Socrates and Thilebe in an amateur enactment of the philosophical dialogues of antiquity, get too into their roles and stage a grandiose fight over a dispute of interpretation about the problem of good in Plato’s thought. Outside of ancient Greece, where else is such a thing possible?
The novel’s hero is Leopold Fyodorovich Pomadov, a good-natured and not very adaptable bumpkin. Many informal groups of people have at their centre just such a bumpkin with no sense of measure when it comes to the drink but who gives the group plenty of opportunity for amusement at his expense without taking offence. True, someone might look down on him, but nevertheless will still come to him in the end for advice, to discuss the subtleties of this or that formulation, or to ask him to rewrite their article in its entirety.
And sensing their condescending looks, the bumpkin starts to feel the gnaw of inferiority. Others already have their doctorate while he still only has a candidate’s degree. He can’t write for his career and can’t even write unpublished works of his own imagination.
The biggest weakness in his character was no doubt the desire to seem simpler than he is. He was shy of his intellectual superiority, his erudition and education, and he was afraid that his less educated peers, first in school and then in university, would envy him. But his shyness in the end resulted in him being eaten by a real crocodile encountered in the entrance to his own home