The Prodigal of Leningrad
by daniel taylor
paraclete press, 256 pages, $21.99
There is of course no generic “Russian novel.” Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy; Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky/Tertz; the Strugatsky brothers: all Russian to the core, yet quite various. Still, I know a Russian novel when I see one, and you do too.
The Prodigal of Leningrad is a Russian novel even though its author, Daniel Taylor, is American. Taylor, who taught literature for decades, has written many books, fiction and nonfiction, but his latest is distinctive among them all. It is an exercise in what Hugh Kenner called “mimetic homage”; Taylor has “gone to school” with the Russian masters and made their distinctive trademarks his own.
Many of his chapters begin with a pithy sentence in a manner that reminds me particularly of Solzhenitsyn: “There was only one convincing reason to get out of bed each morning—to get one’s daily bread ration”; “The siege changed thinking for everyone and extinguished it for some”; “You were more likely to be sent to the camps for ideas and attitudes than for deeds, including ones you never entertained.”
The Siege of Leningrad, lasting from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944, was one of Hitler’s great mistakes, for which we can be grateful. The sacrifice demanded of Leningraders (now, of course, the city is St. Petersburg again) is impossible to quantify. Taylor’s narrative jumps back and forth between the period of the siege and earlier times.
One of the principal characters—the most important, apart from the protagonist, Daniil—is Daniil’s grandfather, Fr. Sergius, who enjoyed a prestigious career as a historian and then, in midlife, became an Orthodox priest. Fanatically anti-religious secret police, wanting to send Fr. Sergius to prison camp, pressure Daniil to tell them where they can find his grandfather. Frightened, refusing to face what he is doing, Daniil finally gives in, and many years before the time of the siege, Fr. Sergius has been sent to a labor camp, where he has miraculously survived. (Here “miraculous” is to be taken literally.)
The third major character in the novel is Daniil’s beloved wife, Sophia, who dies in 1938. Not absurdly idealized, but all the more persuasively rendered for that, she is a devout Christian who never gives up hope that Daniil will return to his childhood faith.
The novel’s title refers to Daniil, of course, but not only to him. When the siege begins, he has been working unpaid for some time as a docent at the Hermitage, the great (and unique) art museum that was once Catherine the Great’s private domain, a treasure house of masterpieces.
Most precious to Daniil, we are told, are Rembrandt’s paintings, and among those, above all, The Return of the Prodigal Son. The novel opens with a small reproduction of this masterwork. Like all the treasures of the Hermitage, it is to be carefully packed and sent away for safekeeping, following a plan conceived by the director of the Hermitage, Joseph Orbel.
But once the paintings have been taken by train out of reach of the invading Nazis, the museum will not simply shut down. Rather, Daniil and other docents will still give talks to museumgoers who are willing to use their imagination (as we ourselves must do in reading Taylor’s words). The frames of the paintings have been left intact, hanging in place. And Daniil and his colleagues will describe and analyze the works now visible only to the eyes of the imagination.
When I finished reading The Prodigal of Leningrad, I picked up one of my all-time favorite essays, “The Literary Process in Russia,” by Abram Tertz. The title parodies Soviet jargon; the name “Abram Tertz” was a pseudonym (based on the name of a Jewish criminal in Odessa featured in ballads in the 1920s) used by the dissident Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who wrote this piece in Paris in 1974. Loaded with hyperbole, the entire essay (more than forty pages long) is an act of provocation. Not only does it reject the conventions of “Socialist Realism” as approved by the tsars of Soviet culture; it also implicitly rejects the dissident fiction of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with whom Sinyavsky was fundamentally at odds. “The point has been reached,” Tertz writes, “where we should fear the truth, lest it hang round our necks like an albatross. Let the writer refuse to tell lies, but let him create fiction—and in disregard of any kind of ‘realism.’”
Fortunately, as readers, we are not forced to choose between Solzhenitsyn and Sinyavsky; we can read both. And if The Prodigal of Leningrad is much closer to “the Russian novel” as embodied by the former rather than the latter, there are nonetheless elements of the fantastic in Taylor’s novel, crucial to the whole. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
