Victor Sonkin
Friday, May 26, 2006. Issue 3419. Page 104.
Salon
Zakhar Prilepin, a young writer from Nizhny Novgorod, a
Chechnya veteran and a member of Eduard Limonov's radical National Bolshevik
Party, has had his second novel, "Sankya," shortlisted for the
prestigious National Bestseller award.
"Sankya" is the village nickname of the novel's hero, otherwise
known as Sasha. Sasha belongs to a fringe political group led by
the charismatic Kostenko, who is in jail on a fabricated firearms
charge. As Kostenko serves out his sentence, his followers --
mostly young, testosterone-pumped men and delicate, ethereal girls
-- wreak havoc in Moscow and stage flashy, though harmless, stunts
in Latvia. Prilepin convincingly shows that such seemingly
senseless actions require real guts, because police often respond
to them violently, sending young offenders to jail or just beating
the living daylights out of them. But the activists' worst
nightmares come true only after one of them, a girl called Yana who
happens to be Kostenko's lover and Sasha's romantic interest,
throws a bag of stale ketchup, pasta and vegetables at Russia's
president. After that, the authorities shed all pretenses of
legality and start killing off the party's leaders one by one.
The novel interweaves three threads. One depicts fights, chases and
showdowns with the police. I have not read anything written with
such vigor in a while; this is really the book's strong point.
Another thread consists of political discussions between Sasha, his
friends and their political antagonists, who are unconvincing and
two-dimensional. The third thread goes into Sasha's roots. And this
is where it gets scary: Sasha's relatives, and by proxy all of
Russia -- for Sasha aspires to be a new national hero -- are
aimless alcoholics, or at best, mute and patient nobodies. Sasha
and his comrades drink a lot, too.
Booze and violence: That just about sums up Sasha and his politics.
Although the author tried to give his hero an ideology, intellect
is not Sasha's strong suit, and the book's "political"
conversations are like most Russian political conversations: dull,
circular and uninformed. Burning down McDonald's is the most
creative thing that Sasha's friends ever do.
Politics aside, it cannot be denied that "Sankya" is the work of a
very confident writer with an eye for detail. But we can't leave
out the politics altogether -- and the fact that Sasha and his
friends are about the only people in Russia who dare to resist the
authorities is perhaps the scariest feature of today's political
landscape.
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