A few times in my life I’ve encountered works that stopped me in my tracks and made me say “Wait, you can do that?” I vividly remember my first experiences of Godard, Ezra Pound, Thomas Pynchon; they completely changed my ideas of movies, poetry, and the novel respectively. The last couple of weeks have been like that. I spent a week and a half reading Sasha Sokolov’s first novel, Школа для дураков (1976), translated (not very well) by Carl Proffer the following year as A School for Fools — I personally think it should be just plain School for Fools, but the articulated title has established itself. (The newer, and presumably better, translation by Alexander Boguslawski keeps the same title; according to this review, it has “an expertly researched collection of endnotes,” which convinced me to order it — with a book like this you need all the help you can get, and I like to support New York Review Books, which has a terrific Russian-lit list.) It’s a short novel but a long read. After I finished the book, I started reading up on it and thinking about it, and I’ll set down a few preliminary thoughts here; I expect to keep turning it over in my head for a long time.
I’m not the only one who felt it was something completely new; a lot of the early response included remarks to that effect. Of course it didn’t come out of nowhere; Russian precursors were Gogol, Dostoevsky (The Double, Notes from Underground), Bely (Petersburg), Nabokov (The Defense), late Kataev (the fictionalized memoirs), Aksyonov (Surplussed Barrelware), and Bitov (Life in Windy Weather — Sokolov twice uses the phrase дачная местность ‘dacha district,’ a nod to Bitov’s subtitle), not to mention the great samizdat books of 1970, Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki and Yuz Aleshkovsky’s Nikolai Nikolaevich; obvious foreign parallels are Joyce and Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury). But Sokolov puts the familiar elements of doubling, madness, and sexual obsession together in a way that is entirely his own. I’ll quote a decent description by Ludmilla L. Litus from her “Intertextuality in Škola dlja durakov Revisited: Sokolov, Gogol, and the Others” (Russian Language Journal/Русский язык, Vol. 52, No. 171/173 [Winter-Spring-Fall 1998], pp. 99-140):
To summarize briefly, Škola is a linguistically self-conscious, complex, metafictional text that takes the form of a disjointed pseudo memoir. The narrative does not follow the traditional contiguous linear line of the realistic novel, but, as in verse, it is developed through associations and metaphoric play. […] The one unifying element in this intricate, disconnected narrative is the voice of the narrator and main character who also functions as both the fictional author of the memoir and the student with whom this fictional author discusses life and the writing of the book. […]
Nymphea is the linguistically perceptive, fictional author/student/double narrator who controls and directs the narrative by calling the reader’s attention to specific phrases, passages, and individual words. Words in Škola are important in themselves, as in verse, for their sound quality, rhythm, and even for their visual appearance. To create special effects and to add emphasis, Sokolov manipulates typography; he introduces typographic разрядка [letter spacing] and spells words backward. […]
Škola is a type of sophisticated modern literary pastiche of “other texts” that includes “fragments” from the Bible, poetry and prose, aphorisms, song fragments, tongue-twisters, and examples of children’s counting rhymes – from Russian/Soviet and world literature, history, and culture. Multiple repetitions in the work help set the tone and help create a sense of repeating, often chaotic, reality.
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