Books+ Winter 2024
I've been reading a lot of non-fiction over the last few months, but I took a break to read this novel last week, and it stuck with me enough that I'm confining myself to one book for this post.
Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich and translated by Richard Lourie
If history rhymes, sometimes it's a dark, ticklish limerick. Voinovich wrote Moscow 2042 in the early 1980s to openly satirize the waning days of the decrepit Soviet empire, but this book remains timeless in its capture of the hilarious animated corpse of what it looks like when ideology of any kind runs amuck. Orwell's 1984 is often the go-to novel for explaining the twisted horrors of authoritarian regimes (the only logical outcome of ideological projects taken in full), and it's a great book, but I recommend reading Voinovich's story at the same time. Say, perhaps now. You will laugh out loud, and it'll feel damn good. Perhaps even cathartic. The plot:
"The year is 1982, just two years before that made famous by Orwell. An exiled Soviet writer discovers that a German travel agency is booking flights through a time warp to a variety of tempting sites and dates in the future. Moscow? The year 2042? How can he resist?"
If the universe's underlying values are truth, beauty, and goodness, as observed in McGilchrist's The Matter With Things, and morality bends on itself, Moscow 2042 is a laughing illustration of what happens when humans attempt goodness without truth, beauty without truth, and beauty without goodness. The residents of Moscow have resorted to selling and eating "secondary matter"--scatological humor, but, trust me, it's funny. The language play will be familiar, yet somehow even more ridiculous than what we've all been through in the last couple of decades. Voinovich spares no love for the raw impulses of human nature--truth with beauty.
Of course, I suspect that you are more likely to find this story funny if you didn't live in the USSR or weren't emotionally invested in the details of its fall; it's hard to laugh at slapstick satires of an all-encompassing experience that destroyed the lives of tens of millions of people. No book can be big enough to capture the full horror of that experience; I imagine Moscow 2042 would feel cheap. But surprisingly, the book has legs that take it beyond its initial publication.
Indeed, I read Moscow 2042 about 20 years ago and I remember liking it, but I didn't understand its power as a general satire of humans separate from its commentary on the last gasp of the USSR. Or the quality of enduring insight. This is an utterly original book. I doubt anyone will ever make it into a movie, but perhaps? Perhaps? Would it be too tender? Make it anyway. There is truth in genuine laughter.