[In the following review, Wood discusses several plays included in Aksyonov's collection Quest for an Island.]

The cold war appears to have ended not in a thaw but in a world of thin ice. Détente itself is perhaps inseparable from suspicion, and in an uncertain world dissidents are almost impossible to hold in any sort of steady focus. Heroes abroad, rebels at home, scapegoats, martyrs, traitors, criminals, they qualify for a whole range of prominent roles. The one role they can't have, sadly, is the one they most seek: that of the person who refuses all the overwritten scripts on offer. What if a dissident were to become a hero at home, for example, as Vassily Aksyonov imagines in one of his earlier novels, The Island of Crimea? "Who was the true hero of today's Russia, who was braver—the cosmonaut or the dissident? A childish question, perhaps, but worthy of serious consideration." The dissident as patriot: even in a state of détente such a picture is not intelligible to pursuers of un-Russian or un-American activities.

"We Russians are known for our imagination," a character ironically says in the same novel. He means that much party propaganda is just fantasy, but also that Russians are capable of imagining what reality makes little promise of. Mr. Aksyonov himself is a dramatic case in point. He was born in 1932, the son of the writer and dissident Eugenia Ginzburg, with whom he lived for some time in internal exile in Siberia. He became a doctor, a novelist and playwright, worked for the publication of hitherto banned writings (by himself and others) in an anthology called "Metropol," and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980. His other novels include The Burn and In Search of Melancholy Baby.

The four stories and two plays in Quest for an Island are carefully dated, and the dates themselves tell a story of disappointment and loss. A story called "Looking for Climatic Asylum" is marked January 1980, Moscow, and complains playfully about Russian weather. "The climate of our capital city is poor. I hope I'm not giving away a state secret by saying that Moscow's climate is none too good." An American visitor says he doesn't understand how people live there, and the narrator "naturally," as he says, takes this as "a political jape." It isn't. Asked if the climate really is any better in Copenhagen, the American says he doesn't see how people can live there either. Where can people live? California, where else? The narrator thinks of going abroad. "To capitalist foreign countries?" his wife asks warily. "Well," he mumbles, "warm foreign countries." In a dream he arrives in California and is made welcome by a policeman:

"'You're seeking political asylum, I take it.'

"'No sir, climatic.'

"'From Copenhagen, eh?'

"'No, but you're close. Moscow.'

"'Okay, go to the right.' He pointed, explaining 'Political asylum to the left, climatic to the right.'"

Awake again, and off to work, the narrator feels his Moscow world change; children play, moods lighten, memory colors the drab city.

"Suddenly I understood what it was. On that day, in the midst of winter, the scent of spring had broken through…. No, I simply couldn't live without the expectation of spring. There lies the sole, yet powerful charm of our wretched climate: expectation."

The last sentence is barbed, but the touch is light, and we shouldn't read this story as a heavy political jape after all. But perhaps the lightness itself is political, or what certain politics won't permit. The next story in this volume is dated May 1981, Santa Monica.

The other works in this collection are earlier (1967, 1977–78, and two from 1979), and reflect European travels as well as returns to Russia. "The Destruction of Pompeii" mischievously confuses the Roman and Russian empires, and projects a decaying world which is visited and renewed by the attentions of a scorching volcano, a second Pompeii. Quest for an Island is a sort of comic retake of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice": Leopold Bar, "the most important essayist alive in Europe today," holidays in Corsica, "an island of little brave men and big cowardly dogs." Bar is the enemy of irony and smiles ("irony charts a path to capitulation"), and thus a reverse image of Mr. Aksyonov himself, who sees in irony whatever salvation there is.

Of the two plays, "The Four Temperaments" is a mock-Expressionist romp in which the angel of death is conducting an experiment in human progress, hampered by a shabby eagle with likable, unprogressive qualities, and by the fact that the script has the set falling down around him all the time, because there aren't enough hooks and nails and clamps to hold it up.

The other play, "The Heron," is (among other things) a parody of Chekhov, in which three sisters, two reformed intellectuals, a diplomat, an athlete, an informer, a manager and a couple of peasants grope for the lost meaning of life. They are situated near the Polish border, and some of them long for Warsaw as the Prozorov sisters long for Moscow.

All are tormented by the cry of a heron, who is also a Polish seamstress (no timid naturalism here). The heron, and the diffuse aspiration she comes to represent, redeem the characters and transfigure them, but since the set includes a rifle, and since Chekhov says a rifle hanging on the wall in the first act must go off in the last, the heron is shot. A dramatic rule becomes a brilliant metaphor not for destiny but for a spineless submission to rules. The heron bequeaths an egg, however, which both tempts and parodies our optimism, our need for uplifting endings. The last question (and the last line of the play) is, "Is there anything really left?" The date here is 1979, Peredelkino.

It is obviously impossible to judge Aksyonov's tone in translation, but from this collection, the work of several translators, we can guess at its sprightly irreverence; the cosmopolitan allusions and the shape of many of the jokes and similes must have traveled pretty directly from the Russian. Figures of speech keep becoming literal, for instance, as they constantly do with the Marx Brothers. A man is said to have lost touch with his native soil, and his son, a champion high jumper, says he has lost touch with the soil too: "two-and-a-half meters." Leopold Bar looks up at the empty night sky and thinks there is no God, then realizes that there is something there. Not God, as it happens, but "a dark gray, nearly black dirigible … hanging there before the dawn … asking no questions, giving no answers."

Mr. Aksyonov's irony is at its trickiest and most characteristic in his description of two "suspicious" characters in "The Heron." One is suspicious because he has jeans and long hair and a monocle, the other because his performance as a "crystal-pure" Soviet worker is so impeccable. Both are former intellectuals trying to live down their disorderly, scribbling past, their interest in jazz and poetry and the West and the like; and the grace and pathos in the gag comes from the shift in the meaning of "suspicious." The first character looks suspicious to official opinion (and maybe to others too, for other reasons: is he an informer?); the second is suspicious because his very acceptability to official opinion argues a life of self-suppression and distortion. A dissident is someone who protests all subjection to such antics, against the institutions that trade on our fear and fatigue and greed.

The most affecting piece in this book is the latest, the one written in Santa Monica. "The Hollow Herring" recounts with all the breezy allusive wit Aksyonov commands ("Can you think of a profession that is farther from faith than that of a Soviet basketball trainer?") the religious awakening of a basketball coach. Secretly christened as a child, he feels the old faith return to him, and in a scene which recalls, say, Philip Roth's story The Conversion of the Jews, crosses himself live on Russian television, and so do the team members, the team doctor, the second trainer and the masseur. Mr. Aksyonov relishes and underscores the reversals: Marxism-Leninism has become a religion in Russia, and so old or alien religions are now a form of atheism. But they are an atheism of the heart, Mr. Aksyonov seems to suggest; they respect the tenacity of the past and the plurality of the present.

Here as elsewhere, Vassily Aksyonov mourns the loss of what he calls "enchantment": "It must be that it's impossible to live without being enchanted by life," one of his protagonists says. If this is true, it's equally true in California and Copenhagen and Moscow. The sadder truth is that the unenchanted life, if not worth living, is nevertheless lived all over the place. What ought to be impossible is the imagination's acceptance of that fact.