[In the following brief review, Aksyonov's novel Say Cheese! is lauded as a "well-made, surprisingly fluid" book.]

Conformists are all alike; dissidents are all different—and more original. Andrei Sinyavsky's and Vassily Aksyonov's new novels are striking examples of this literary rule. Say Cheese! by Aksyonov is a very amusing and skillfull work, as it charts the waters of the dissident imagination. Goodnight by Sinyavsky (writing as Abram Tertz) is a strange, haunting mixture of narrative, commentary, and rumination. Both writers live in exile, Sinyavsky in Paris, Aksyonov in Washington, D.C. Sinyavsky spent seven years in a labor camp for having a premature criticism of socialist realism smuggled to the West, using the pseudonym of Abram Tertz. Aksyonov was forced to leave the Soviet Union for "treasonable" writings. Sinyavsky strikes one as the most profound and resourceful Russian writer today; Aksyonov as one of the most intelligent.

Say Cheese! tells the rambling story of Russian people caught in the Kafkaesque web of Soviet bureaucratic constrictions, evading the fatalities of the life dictated from above through irony, doubletalk, and cunning. (One is reminded of Joyce's "silence, exile, and cunning.") In a sense there is no story, only a series of comic incidents as everyone tries to escape from his or her prescribed existence. It is a well-made novel, surprisingly fluid in the agile twists and turns of the narrative and its utter disregard of earlier Soviet literary conventions. It has the free flow of an American-style novel, but it is not a blockbuster. It is a contemporary, not a modern, novel.

The prevailing spirit of Say Cheese! is irreverence, which I suppose is the basic substance of dissidence. In this respect, Say Cheese! reminds one of the eighteenth-century British picaresque novel, set, however, in Stalinized Russia. It turns around the escapades of a group of underground photographers, called Cheesers, who defy the government with unsocialist photography. The main character, an antihero, Max "Ogo" Ogorodnikov, is a sexual and political adventurer who moves from woman to woman, place to place, caper to caper, thumbing his nose at authority, and ending up at a swish party in New York. It is most entertaining, but it raises the question of topically dissident writing. For Gorbachev, in taking Russia at least partly out of its past, has lifted it to a new level of problematic freedoms that tends to make earlier pictures of Russia seem somewhat out of date.

However, the novel does recreate a sense of what appears to be the life of the country, even now in the Gorbachev era. One gets the impression of an interweaving of identities, a whirlpool of spying, infiltrating, snitching, defying the regime, whoring, drinking, evading the secret police. The KGB penetrates every bit of life, sometimes comically, sometimes brutally. The whole is Russia. Everyone is playing cat-and-mouse with everyone else. And it is all drenched in suffering, opportunism, soul-seeking. Looking for sexual recognition, Max has had seven wives and countless women. There are fifty characters moving in and out of the pages of the novel, all making their way through the ambiguities of Soviet existence, puffing themselves up, mocking themselves and each other. And everyone plays his role, somewhere between belonging to and subverting the regime. Aksyonov tells it all with a sharp sardonic eye and ear, as he satirically catches the pieties of the official language. In fact, the novel is a verbal tour de force, chatty, and sprawling verbally over a landscape that seems so unreal to us, and is made both more and less real by Aksyonov's merging of reality with farce.