Oleg Pavlov's military service in Russia in the late 1980s ended on a psychiatric ward. He went on to write several novels based on his time as a prison guard on the Kazakh steppe and won the Russian Booker prize. Now in his mid-40s, Pavlov is an eccentric, bearded bear of a man still living in Moscow where he was born.
Pavlov is revered by some as a philosophical genius whose books capture the essence of Russia and dismissed by others as a drunken grumbler. His powerfully intimate, quasi-autobiographical 1997 novel The Matiushin Case, now in English, charts the experiences of an impressionable conscript gradually dehumanised by army life.
The action takes place mostly in a central Asian outpost of the declining Soviet empire. Young Matiushin, clearly the author's fictional alter ego, is a prison-camp guard, but he is as much a victim of the system as the convicts are. The title's "case" is both the crime Matiushin eventually commits and, perhaps, in medical terms, his deteriorating mental state. Powerlessness, uncertainty and lack of sleep become forms of psychological torture and a violent denouement begins to seem inevitable.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is Pavlov's most profound literary influence. When Pavlov read The Gulag Archipelago, he recognised the setting of his own military service, and the details of prison life in The Matiushin Case owe an obvious debt to it. Pavlov even worked as Solzhenitsyn's secretary in the 1990s and wrote a non-fiction book about 20th-century Russian culture, incorporating letters given to him by Solzhenitsyn.
On the first page, the protagonist's father is abandoned in a graveyard as a baby "like a little corpse", setting the scene for a brutal story. Matiushin is born three pages later and his first memory is "his mother's howl ringing out in the dark and echoing house". His childhood is marked by alcohol, domestic violence and "a thrilling fear, contaminated with love".
There are early glimpses of a sweeter life, with jars of cherry compote and homemade borscht. When Matiushin is conscripted, the narrative, which switches briefly into the first person, grows even darker and more claustrophobic. He has symbolically spilled the compote and peered into the "bleak, colourless abyss" of vodka. His experience of the army is a savage and senseless litany of stinking latrines, illegal moonshine and suppurating feet.
Vividly painful scenes are counterbalanced by a dream-like sense of detachment. There are recurrent images of drowning and sinking, mist and fog. Matiushin feels he is "underwater, where everything was murky and green … " Matiushin lives, as Pavlov has, in the borderlands of insanity. The novel is as much about Matiushin's interior landscape as the world around him. In one stream of consciousness during a train journey, he loses track of time and place, imagining it is midnight in the morning and that they are at sea.
The barbed-wire-ringed "zone" is alive to Matiushin, "painfully casting off its old skin" or stabbing him with its unblinking eyes. The idea of zona is one that resonates through recent Russian literature, from the Strugatsky Brothers' Roadside Picnic, where aliens have landed in six zones, to Hamid Ismailov's novella The Dead Lake, where the zone is a contaminated nuclear test site. In each case, it becomes a menacing presence. A fellow soldier tells Matiushin to slow down: "The zone doesn't like those that move too fast, it punishes them."
Imagery is Pavlov's element, whether it's daybreak, hatching "out of the soft top of this night's head", or the soldiers spreading rumour through the camp as if "dragging a dead cat by the tail". He often describes humans as animals; Matiushin's fellow soldiers, sometimes "herded" or "swarming", are variously wolves, cockroaches, frogs or fledglings.
This novel is the second part of a loosely connected trilogy, known collectively as Tales of the Last Days. The first part, Captain of the Steppe, was published last year and the English translation of the final part, which won the Russian Booker in 2002, is forthcoming. Captain of the Steppe recalls satirical Gogol or Platonov, while The Matiushin Case seems more Dostoevskian, echoing the tortured psychology of Crime and Punishment.
Andrew Bromfield, best known for his translations of Boris Akunin's historical whodunnits, has translated Pavlov's spiralling madness as lucidly as possible. He manages to clarify cultural references without resorting to footnotes. When Matiushin refuses to drink out of a light-blue mug (light blue is Russian slang for gay), Bromfield glosses it as "the poofy blue one".
The jury that awarded Pavlov the 2012 Solzhenitsyn prize commended his "confessional prose, imbued with poetic power and compassion". Pavlov's style is more accessible than the cerebral postmodernism of many of his contemporaries. He is not a fan of modern Russian literature, describing himself as a man from a different era. His novel is a timeless quest for existential meaning and deals with the horror of Russian history through the microcosm of an individual's journey into hell. This is the source of the novel's power and its frustration for the reader. We are trapped in the camp with Matiushin and must suffer with him to the end.
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