[Skvorecký is a noted Czech-Canadian political novelist. In the following review, he praises The Burn and calls Aksyonov an "epochmaking writer."]

Much of the effect of literary art depends on a kind of inside knowledge, on the reverberations of personal association. We miss a lot even in the thoroughly explicated plays of Shakespeare; and even such relatively simple works as Babbitt certainly appear richer to a Midwestern contemporary of [Sinclair] Lewis than to a high school girl studying American literature in Peking. Still, more than enough remains in a great book like The Canterbury Tales, for instance, to make it a best-seller in Prague in the early 1950s—although that book's appeal for the Czechs lay, admittedly, not just in the work's intrinsic value, but also in its side delights. "The Miller's Tale," unexpurgated because it was a classic, was a rare, juicy morsel for readers starving on a diet of novels in which, if a newlywed Stakhanovite wanted to indicate to her husband that he had brought her into an interesting condition, she had to lead him under a blossoming cherry tree, point out a nestful of newly hatched birds, and blush.

At the beginning of Aksyonov's immensely rich novel, a sexy Muscovite—the females of that cynical city blush only on the pages of prizewinning Soviet novels; in Aksyonov's book they fuck like mad—brings the scientist Aristarkh Apollinarievich Kunitser a glass container swarming with drosophila flies. I wonder how much is lost here on a young American reader who never studied Soviet history. For me the entire stunning inferno of The Burn is embodied in this tiny fruit fly. In the opening pages of the book, it functions like [Marcel] Proust's madeleine. I remember well the article in the Charles University student newspaper in which the author skillfully built up the tension toward his final horror, which came when the door opened to the Laboratory of Genetics where the obscurantist-non-Marxist Professor of Biology Sekla kept his—drosophilae! In Soviet demonology of the late '40s, the drosophila occupied a place second only to Trotsky. To high school students it was the creation of an American Jew, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and Gregory Mendel, a Czech Catholic monk straight out of Matthew Gregory Lewis. After Academician Lysenko's celebrated victory on the biological front, Mendel's statue was duly removed from its pedestal in the Moravian capital of Brno. When, in the '60s, an International Biological Conference was held in that city, it required a long search before the stone likeness of Mendel was found, covered by dust and debris, in somebody's wine cellar. In the minds of the Young Pioneers, the monk merged with the other kike, Morgan, into a bogeyman called Mendelmorgan, ideally suited to put the fear of the party into little boys and untenured professors. That is what Aksyonov's madeleine means for me. But not, I'm afraid, for many Americans. (An American editor removed a drosophila story from the fifth chapter of my own novel Miss Silver's Past; he said it was irrelevant and digressive.)

And many such madeleines are strewn over the surreal and, alas, so real, landscape of this story of five Russian men who share the patronym Apollinarievich, and are really embodiments of the same Aksyonov. Like Apollinaire's celebrated poem, this novel, with its five sons of the poet who "did not respect any fame," is a veritable Zone, very hard to sum up. It is an Old Man River full of rafts. Jims, creaky steamers with dead Paps inside, and lynching parties; a "sweet" Thames bearing empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk hand-kerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends. Toward the end, Kunitser-Sabler-Malkolmov-Kvastishchev-Pantelei-Aksyonov, in one of his/their nightmarish dream-realities, swim in a ghostly stream, "pushing aside old tin cans … used condoms, lumps of matted hair, eggshells, countless nail clippings … rotten vegetables, used toilet paper…." The river, that symbol of life in schoolroom essays, has changed here into a symbol of the Soviet homeland.

Quite often the book resembles a surrealist comedy—minus the irreverence. Apparently one cannot be irreverent in Russia, the graveyard of so many millions of victims of perpetual misrule. Even "hilarious" scenes—like the one featuring the sculptor Kvastishchev and his "model" (a sexually interconnected circle of bodies consisting of himself and two K.G.B. hookers)—are played out against ominous backgrounds. (In this case, a purring Chaika limousine arrives, bearing the dangerous customer Lygher, once a powerful officer in the town of Magadan, the heart of the sinister Kolyma region.) It is a surrealistically complex novel, a book of "many oddities," as the author himself describes it. Those who still think that Soviet writers may have a great subject, but that their methods of shaping it are outdated, should read The Burn at once.

It oscillates continually between reality and fantasy; its point of view migrates through several minds, the minds mingle, then the minds separate—in short, it is a fireworks of modernistic techniques. Both rough and tender, like the blues, it is full of hate and in the next moment brimming with love. And love is pornographically physical, yet a bliss of the soul. I don't remember many love scenes in literature that can match the final lovemaking of the Victim (all the main characters merge together in the last section of the novel) and the dream/real girl Alisa, the wife of a prominent member of the New Class, but also a poor Polish prisoner-girl who once tries to commit suicide by biting off the neck of a cologne bottle.

All this "deliberate confusion," however, does not betray the author, free at last from both political and aesthetic censorship, who wants to show off his mastery of the tools now at his disposal. A survivor of Stalin's and Brezhnev's deliberate confusion is trying here—and trying with success—to tell the truth about his terrible life. He brings to mind the quintessential evocations of the medieval sense of hell, the works of Hieronymus Bosch, whose paintings, with their amazing proto-surrealism, use a very similar technique.

In the heart of the confusion is a simple, archetypical Soviet story. It is the story of Tolya Bokov, the half-Jewish son of a "Trotskyite man and a Bukharinite woman" who, at the age of 5, after the arrest of both parents, is sent to an orphanage for "children of enemies of the people." Ten years later the boy's mother is released, but ordered to stay in Magadan in "internal exile." The boy is permitted to join her, only to witness her rearrest a short time later, when Stalin commands that all who have served their sentences, and are now relatively "free" as internal exiles, be sent back to the camps on the same charges for which they were incarcerated years ago.

In the purgatory of Magadan the boy sees many other examples of Marxist re-education. One sticks in his mind forever. Bringing food for his imprisoned mother, he accidentally sees an event straight out of Auschwitz. The interrogator, Captain Cheptsov, asks a tortured prisoner "kindly": "Have they been beating you, Sanya?" "Yes, they have, citizen Captain," whispers the young man in pain. "And did they beat you like this?" asks Cheptsov and jabs his elbow into the prisoner's right eye. Sanya's eyeball is instantaneously suffused with blood. At that moment the boy is spotted and, with a mighty kick, Cheptsov sends him flying, so that the precious bottle of milk in the boy's bundle, destined for his mother, breaks into smithereens.

The boy grows up to become the five incarnations of Aksyonov—I believe this is essentially an autobiographical story. Captain Cheptsov ages into a mean old-age pensioner who supplements his income by working as an informer/cloakroom attendant in a hard-currency bar. At this point the two meet again. Cheptsov has caught his daughter typing up leaflets for a dissident organization. He beats her up and, his erotic/sadistic passions aroused, he rapes her. Then he departs for the K.G.B. headquarters to "do his duty," i.e., to rat on the girl. Unfortunately (that is, fortunately), he meets two drunkards, and under the impact of their sarcasm, but also under the load of his gnawing memories, he attempts suicide by ramming his head against a radiator. In the emergency room he is saved by Tolya Bokov—in his incarnation as the famous surgeon Malkolmov—who injects into his veins the mysterious substance Lymph-D, distilled from the "lacerated souls" of his Russian patients. Cheptsov comes to life, to appear in another surreal scene on the TV screens in Tolya's native village, from which he admonishes the collective farmers: "Repent of violence, cruelty, cowardice and lies! Repent, you cohorts of steel and you sportsmen heroes of the Munich Olymp—" whereupon he flows "arms and legs spread-eagled like a sky diver into the depths of the television set." Thus the simple, archetypal backbone of a complex story, set in the black cosmos of the Soviet Marxist state.

The story meanders among visions, evocations, vignettes, nightmares—among all those madeleines. Closest to my heart, naturally, is the saxophone which belongs to Samson Apollinarievitch Sabler, a Soviet jazzman. "You'll have affairs, little Samsik," says a lovely promiscuous lady of real virtue after she frees Samson of the burden of male virginity, "only don't give up your sax!" The beloved instrument, a source of joy and truth, eventually becomes a weapon. With it Samsik cuts open the forehead of the leader of the Komsomol vigilantes who raided a concert of his band. He is then beaten up by the SA-like thugs. After he comes to, he searches desperately for his horn. He finds it. His sax is "lying alongside him, with a little drop of the enemy's blood still stuck to its bell. Proud sax, golden weapon!"

However, the Komsomol Sturm-Abteilung Führer is not the only enemy whose head is smitten with this particular madeleine. Another is a fascistoid mercenary in Africa whose armored carrier has been showering machine-gun bullets on a jungle hospital. The two identical uses of the saxophone thus introduce the inevitable question about the identical nature, and therefore identical accompanying phenomena, of totalitarian regimes, right and left—if, indeed, the old distinction from the days of the National Assembly in Paris still applies to modern dictatorships.

The identity is suggested mostly by images—for instance, of a brutal store manageress, a typical product of a society where all authority is firmly vested in those firmly vested in authority, who reminds the hero of "… the cloak-room attendant in the bar … [of] Theodore the mercenary in Katanga"; the "cloakroom attendant," of course, is the sadist interrogator Cheptsov. A few times the hint is direct: "… our brothers in class, the German Nazis." But such outspokenness is rare and marginal. After having been made witness to the spectral march of women convicts through the permafrost landscape of Siberia, to the vision of the camp bosses entertained by prisoner-actors doing endless time in hopeless Madagan, or to the lot of the "lucky" twenty-fivers in the uranium mines on the Chukchi Peninsula, where one year counts as five but the prisoners' life expectancy is six months—after such and similar scenes from hell, the thoughtful reader will inevitably find himself, without the help of straightforward comparisons, facing Nathanael West's question: "The problem as to why against Fascism and why not against Communism disturbs my sleep." I wish it would disturb the sleep of many in North America.

Can anyone dare to expect a graduate of the world of Magadan to embrace revolution? "Evolution, revolution, pollution" goes the stream of consciousness in Kvastishchev's head, and thinking about his "pal Patrick Thunderjet," an American in Moscow, he cannot remember whether Thunderjet is "professor of Kremlinology … or criminology." He decides that there is really no difference. Elsewhere, meditating on Lenin's famous slogan "Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country," the writer Pantelei says to himself: "In that case, what's missing? Surely we have long since electrified the whole country, haven't we?" And in another scene, discussing the West with the Kremlicriminologist, he observes: "A few years back the only people I took seriously were those scatty flower children, but now even they have degenerated into revolutionaries; in other words, they've become an organized gang."

But are lackluster attitudes toward the revolution and the revolutionaries in the Soviet Union limited to the degenerate sons of Trotskyite fathers and Bukharinite mothers who were admittedly rehabilitated but (observe the totalitarian logic) "the fruit never falls far from the tree"? Hardly. When the American Kremlicriminologist, in need of cash after a drunken bout, sells his shoes to a man standing in line for a shipment of shoes that is rumored to be due for delivery at the GUM department store opposite the Kremlin, this is what happens:

… the line disintegrated, turned into a mob, and surrounded the two extraterrestrial visitors with footwear to sell…. The mob waved its arms, shouted something, like at some spontaneous meeting in the days of the First Russian Revolution.

In the context of contemporary Russian literature, Vassily Aksyonov is not just an important writer; he is an epochmaking writer. We who were there, and some American scholars, know what he is talking about when, in an imaginary conversation with Hemingway, the hero of The Burn tells Papa: "Ernest! 'Your Cat in the Rain' changed my whole life. Thank you for the overkill." That confrontation with the American virtuoso of the literary dialogue led to Aksyonov's first novel, A Ticket to the Stars, with its rich evocations of the speech of Moscow's "guys and dolls" of the early '60s, the time of hope. These youngsters who rediscovered jazz and modern Russian poetry, who courageously spoke up in defense of democracy and demonstrated for freedom—these instinctive swallows of the Russian Spring were truly "Aksyonov's generation."

But all that is gone now.

In the damp winter of 1966, Moscow put two … lads from one of our houses on trial. Then four more. Then more, singly, in pairs, in whole batches. They demoted our professors, fired our theater directors, closed our cafés…. The epoch of Lenin's centennial began. The Neanderthal features of that old Pravda hawk Yurii Zhukov dominated the television screen … the disintegration began.

Afterward came the "fraternal help for the Czech enemies" and "everybody stopped blabbering…. Today's young people," muses Pantelei, "would regard … demonstrations as impossible. Some of them imagined that such things had only happened before the Revolution."

Paradise of bourgeois democracy lost. The hopeful Moscow of the '60s has changed into "a sullen, tight-lipped city, equipped with the last word in word filters and jamming devices." A major tragedy for Russia. A dangerous tragedy for the world.