1997 Russian Booker Prize nomination
The Fortress is a family saga that at the same time offers a psychological study of the characters. It includes social analysis and the portrayal of life in all its tragic reality that is characteristic of Russian prose. Any human act in this novel is tied to a higher responsibility – the responsibility of destiny.
Kantor himself describes The Fortress as a family novel, that is to say, a story of realistic description, something like a saga (or TV series) bound together by the relations between several generations.
The novel’s events are seen through the eyes of three generations. Bedridden ardent revolutionary Roza Moiseyevna represents the generation of the grandparents (the past). The parents (the present) are represented by the friend of son Ilya, who works for some publication on philosophy. The children (the future) are represented by Roza’s grandson Petya, who is in high school. The action unfolds in October 1983 during the short reign in power of Yury Andropov.
The characters’ lives revolve around Roza Moiseyevna who lies at death’s door but just can’t take the last step. The old woman despotically shapes the fate of her family, not just by robbing those around her of the freedom and private lives but also through all of her lovingly cherished past – through what she treasures most in her life, namely, the construction of the ‘great fortress of socialism’. In her moments of delirium she calls herself ‘the mother of great love’, but love for her husband, children and grandson are no more to her than stages in the construction of the fortress.
During her more lucid moments, Roza Moiseyevna realises that ‘she was never lucky when it came to good deeds’. In her quest for a better and brighter future she destroyed families and destinies. Stirred up by her propaganda, soldiers launched a senseless rebellion and were shot, but in her fading conscience she justifies all these things by the ‘purity of her intention and the strength of her love’. She is the metaphor for Russia’s past: a living corpse at the heart of the family, like the eternally living corpse resting in his mausoleum at the heart of the country. Ilya, her son, realises that, “I have no future, and neither do any of us here. All we’ll do is just talk and think until we croak”. For Petya, the grandson, the fortress means having to build up a solid list of merits and achievements that will protect him like armour from any insult and humiliation. Petya, the youngest in a line of well-off professor’s children, is the living embodiment of the simple idea that the Soviet regime produced people able only to survive and not live. But even Petya does not get to survive – at the end of the book his own classmates suffocate him with a plastic bag. In short, everyone dies.
Chekhov’s heroes knew just such concerns and feelings and spoke the same kind of fine and intelligent words. Ilya’s farcical death as a result of ‘Russian roulette’ harks right back to the line, ‘Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself’ at the end of Chekhov’s The Seagull.