Sasha, Stalin and the Gorbachovshchina

T.J. Binyon

• Children of the Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov, translated by Harold Shukman
  Hutchinson, 688 pp, £12.95, August 1988, ISBN 0 09 173742 7
• Pushkin House by Andrei Bitov, translated by Susan Brownsberger
  Weidenfeld, 371 pp, £12.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 297 79316 0
• The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Sally Laird
  Readers International, 198 pp, £9.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 930523 44 X
• Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich, translated by Richard Lourie
  Cape, 424 pp, £11.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 224 02532 5
• The Mushroom-Picker by Zinovy Zinik, translated by Michael Glenny
  Heinemann, 282 pp, £11.95, January 1988, ISBN 0 434 89735 3
• Chekago by Natalya Lowndes
  Hodder, 384 pp, £12.95, January 1988, ISBN 0 340 41060 4

On returning from Munich to St Petersburg in the spring of 1837, the poet Tyutchev, as well known for his wit as for his verse, told a friend that he was suffering not so much from Heimweh as Herausweh; and, a little later, hearing that D’Anthès, Pushkin’s opponent in the fatal duel earlier that year, had been sentenced for his part in the affair to perpetual banishment from Russia, seized the opportunity for a mot by announcing that he would immediately go off and kill Zhukovsky – then, after Pushkin, the most famous poet in Russia. Yet Tyutchev’s verse, highly esteemed by Lenin and, according to Erenburg’s testimony, more popular with the Red Army soldier during the Great Patriotic War than the work of any other writer (excluding that of Erenburg himself), expresses a very different view of Russia. He is, moreover, the author of the famous quatrain which succinctly formulates that semi-mystical, annoyingly unanswerable view of Russia’s unique quality, her difference from all other nations: