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Harbin Moths, a novel by Andrei Ivanov (2013)
Rights sold: Estonia - VARRAK, Russia - AST
Winner of the 2014 NOS Literature Award
Andrei Ivanov’s ‘Harbin Moths’ is a bewitching novel about Russians living in Estonia in the period between the World Wars, and about their resting point, Tallinn, or Revel as it was known Russian-style. The central character, artist and art photographer Boris Rebrov is a refugee who as a seventeen year old retreated with Yudenich’s North-western Army from Russia to Estonia. On the journey – somewhere in Estonia’s border regions – his parents and little sister die from typhus, the memory of which haunts him. As a photographer Rebrov tries to capture places of former happiness which have been forever lost, he projects his lost hometown of St. Petersburg on to Tallinn, and at the same time catches, as if intentionally, moments which weren’t intended to last - dreams not the truth; spaces and light, not people.
The novel deals in general terms with that period of Estonian history, and the community of Russians who fled there as a result of the October Revolution, who lived in a kind of no-man’s land, in a peculiar parallel reality, which nevertheless overflowed with action, ideas and émigrés; Russian businessmen, speculators, smugglers, actors, artists, politicians, writers, journalists. In the context of the Estonian republic’s fragile independence, this was a time of historical limbo, when people wandered in a strange and still unknown country and physical space. Those two spaces – the Estonian republic and the peculiarly alienated parallel reality – rarely coincided.
Rebrov receives letters from Harbin, Manchuria, from a community of stateless Russians who are members of a Russian fascist party, whose ideas are just as absurd and destructive as the ghostly lilac-coloured moths flying out of the book and leaflet boxes. Rebrov’s companions, with whom he has intermittent contact, could also call themselves moths, searching through suffering for fame or oblivion, flapping in a blaze of ideas or in a cocaine haze.
When war breaks out again the artist leaves Estonia for Sweden with a new identity.
Rebrov is both a refugee and an internal exile who asks the question ‘what is really man’s destiny? A spider’s web woven into a many-layered pattern, and the more relatives and friends a person has, the closer he is bound in and the more surely he stands; I have no one at all; sometimes it seems as if I don’t even exist.’ In the novel this same theme of human fate is woven into history’s remorseless twists and turns.
A sense of what is happening in the surrounding world is given through a view of Rebrov’s inner world, and in places through his diary: in the highly powerful combination of the encounters he has, his reflections, the blaze of creativity, the pain of loss, and the letters he receives and poems he reads. Against the historical background the novel contains a strong allusion to the present day and a wide, universal, generalisation on the refugee, whenever or wherever he may be. A thread which runs through the novel is a particular question about injustice.
In this novel the reader is captivated by a disturbed, despairing, oppressive, grotesquely displaced reality, and the language in turn creates a magical world.
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Don Domino (The Zero Train), a novel by Yuri Buida (1994)
Rights are handled on behalf of Editions Gallimard
Rights sold: China - Thinkingdom Media Group, France – Gallimard, Germany - AUFBAU, Italy - ATMOSPHERE LIBRI, Norway – Aschehoug, Russia - EKSMO, Spain – Automatica, Turkey – Dogan, UK/US – Dedalus (as The Zero Train)
Russian Booker prize nominee
The action in this novel takes place in a remote train station in the far reaches of Russia. It relates the life of the inhabitants who watch each night the passing of a train bound for some mysterious destination... A lot of comparisons have been made to try to capture the essence of this short novel – Kafkaesque, Beckett with trains, you get the picture. And whilst these may be true to a degree, it is only a small degree. Buida has his own voice and his own approach. Indeed, like all good writers he has subverted everything without once straying from a path which anyone can follow. Most importantly, he has taken what many term Socialist Realism and used it to cast a blisteringly clear light on Stalinist Russia. That this would call to mind both Kafka and Beckett (and many more beside) is inevitable.
If that is his style, his subject is both simple and infinitely expressive, with a life beyond the episodic tale. A railway line is built along which travels the Zero Train. At intervals along the track there are stations and sidings, workshops, and all the life that is lived by those who maintain all these facilities. We are given glimpses into the long, bleak, and brutal life of one such place. It encapsulates the Stalinist era, but it also lays wide open the human condition. Those who arrive at the beginning, young, with hope, are ground down through the years. Those that survive are little more than that. Survivors. Their lives have been devoted to the Zero Train, the purpose of which is a mystery. When the train goes, they must go as well. The whole book is a surreal tour de force. It sounds grim, and the realism spares no sensibilities, but at the same time it is a poetic work, and a paean to those whose whole lives were lived with the heel of the boot on their faces."The Zero Train is an imaginative exploration of Soviet history that stands on its own literary achievements. Oliver Ready's translation conveys with a sure hand the power and grace of Buida's supple prose. His style is at once lyrical and shocking. The norms of Socialist Realism -- prominent in the cultural hinterland that such translations expose to our view -- are manipulated with an angry bravado in this violent elegy for Ivan Ardabyev." - Times Literary Supplement
"The Zero Train by Yuri Buida is the most remarkable book I've read this year." - Helen Dunmore, The Observer (25/11/2001)
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