[In the following brief review, Aksyonov's use of satire in The Island of Crimea is compared to the satirical elements found in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.]

A classic joke current among Russian dissidents runs, "What is the difference between Communism and capitalism? Answer: Capitalism is the exploitation of some individuals by other individuals. Communism is just the opposite." Vassily Aksyonov's new novel, The Island of Crimea, draws a sharp cultural distinction between the two "isms" by creating a geographic fantasy in which the Crimean peninsula is no longer part of the Soviet Union but is instead an island, distinct from the Soviet mainland and economic system, reminiscent of Hong Kong's relation to mainland China.

Although this is the first of his novels to be translated and published in the United States, Aksyonov is a well-known and widely read if officially unpopular Russian writer. More fortunate than his parents, who suffered persecution and exile (Aksyonov's mother, Eugenia Ginsburg, has written a justly celebrated account of the family ordeal), Aksyonov managed to leave Moscow for the United States five years ago after battling Soviet censors and physical intimidation.

The Island of Crimea provides an interesting example of fiction that has gained popularity among the Russian reading public in proportion to how much it has offended the government. The central character, for example, is far too freewheeling to fit the Soviet mold; Crimean-raised Andrei Arsenievich Luchnikov is a television personality and race car driver with an Oxford education, wealth, expertise in karate and celebrity status as a writer, and he mingles just as easily with high-living Parisians or his son's hippy friends as he does with Russian generals.

Luchnikov has become involved with the Common Fate League, whose goal is Russian revitalization through reunification of Crimea with Russia. The Soviet Government, though committed to a policy of swallowing the island, nervously balks at the unforeseen consequences of this Crimean tonic. Personal policy struggles dominate Luchnikov's own affairs as with one hand he attempts to separate the woman he loves from her mainland husband while with the other he tries to restore generational equilibrium with his disaffected son and with his White Russian father, one of a group of restless, permanent exiles on Crimea. Keeping in motion all of these involvements plus dealing with an assortment of international characters sometimes strains Aksyonov's talents. Perhaps he most succeeds in presenting a fascinating variety of cultural views, a sense of the varied texture of Russian cultural attitudes ranging from immobilized military bureaucrats whose minds are locked into a revolutionary past to the utterly detached free spirits who definitely rejoice in crisscrossing borders for sport.

The basis for these tensions derives from Aksyonov's fantasy Crimea, which operates much as Swift's islands do in contriving opportunities for satiric juxtaposition. And like Swift's, Aksyonov's satire cuts both ways. Even if at first it seems to, the bleakness of Soviet culture does not make a utopia of Crimea and the West. To idealize Western values would involve a mechanical response and would be to ignore the way in which the seeming perfection of a sharply contrasting freedom and dazzling material prosperity too often result in an obsession with consumption—just as the glittering exquisiteness of Lilliputian scale gradually yields to a vision of the tiny islanders' pettiness and pride. Yet, the freedom of the West, which includes the freedom to appreciate the present in light of a cultural past not limited to 1917, offers spiritual possibilities that Luchnikov senses even in such a simple act as walking in old sections of Paris and "enjoying the feel of the priceless medieval cobblestones through his shoes."

Despite flaws in character and momentum (and dialogue, where once or twice characters sound uncomfortably close to those "wild and crazy guys" formerly of Saturday evening television), Aksyonov succeeds in structuring layers of conflict and resolution. What the novel lacks in humor, it makes up for in brilliant, hallucinatory passages sometimes recalling that Russian master of hallucinatory comic fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov. Yet if Aksyonov's fiction does not accept a mechanical operation of the spirit, neither does it invite a prostration of spirit before comic absurdity. Instead, in depicting both public and private realms, his novel holds to the possibilities of hope and reconciliation in an affirmation of spirit.