Ringing in the ears, noise in the head, “Russia always”
All of us have been watching since February 24, 2022 before the discovery of the coming barbarism, crimes and lies. In this exceptional situation, it is important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values of humanism, including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky discover about books, recalling meetings, that in the world there remains a place for thought and fiction.
Case, Russian literature of the late 2010s and 2020s, which is remembered, among other things, for the number of dystopias or for the occurrence of episodes with cases typical for dystopias. “Middle Edda” by Dmitry Zakharov, “Antibodies” by Kirill Kutalov, “Pavel Zhang and other river creatures” by Vera Bogdanova and “Center of Gravity” by Alexei Polyarinov, “Post” by Dmitry Glukhovsky – this is not a complete list. These books show the formation, development or collapse of a pronounced totalitarianism in Russia. Most of the authors belong to the generation of thirty – forty years. Why did it happen? Various assumptions can be put forward on this score, but given that the sub-genre of gloomy post-Soviet futurology was invented by Vladimir Voinovich and finalized by Vladimir Sorokin, this will not make much sense. And it seems that there can no longer be any fundamental novelty in the texts, and in general the development is belated, because reality often turns out to be much more anti-utopian than literary warnings. However, the novel “Radio Martyn” by Philip Dzyadko, on the one hand, in this coastal region, on the other hand, keeps apart and rethinks its location.
At a first, casual, glance, significant in the study may be something secondary, especially to a greater extent in identifying works of art. Radio Martin describes Russia, where any non-educational rallies and opinions are prohibited, where there are no non-state media left. There are only official radios: one informational, several entertaining. The informational one is called “Russia Always”. It broadcasts every day in every house, you can’t turn it off, otherwise there will be a fine first, and then a prison. The main character Martyn worked in Russia Always, but because of an unsuccessful story they made a report about the postal service, he was fired. There was a fire in the mail during the report, and Martyn, escaping from the fire, at the same time took with him a container with a letter from a hundred years ago. Further – according to the formula: plunging into the lives of people of the past, the hero gradually begins to critically approach the present.
In addition, Martyn inadvertently looks like an illegal hacker Radio NN, and what he hears makes him curious. The enigmatic founders of this radio, who sometimes invade the air of entertainment centers, are found among the people as “emerald people”. The state, of course, is persecuting them, and after another seizure of entertainment broadcasting in the country, new bans are being seized. For example, without documents, you cannot approach a friend on the street at a distance of less than two meters. Martyn, meanwhile, took up sound engineering in a bar and there he unexpectedly meets representatives of the “emerald people”.
The plot for a dystopia is quite acceptable, but a cool hero-narrator is atypical, emphatically wrong, strange. His first feature is ringing in his ears, a constant ringing in his ears, because of which he is met by a surveillance device and records everyday conversations on a dictaphone, so that later he can listen again and better make out the words. At the same time, Martyn also perceives sensitivity to surrounding sounds, which causes a feeling of a psychedelic tinge, and to the narrator himself – an extraordinary sensitivity to the world and to those around him.
“I people hear sounds that don’t hear much. I am the subtlest instrument, aware of imminent changes that I have not yet discovered. Grandpa called me the canary in the mine. He said: “You are like a canary in an exploded mine. There is no mine, but the canary lives. The sounds of voices merge with extraneous noise, with the operation of the lamp, the movement of water inside the battery, with the internal decoding of someone else’s speech, which I conduct in parallel with this speech.
As you might guess, the motive of hearing and sound in the novel is one of the main ones. He also hints at a society that is constantly stunned by the flow of information, and on the horizon of anomie – the lack of connections between people, even at an emotional level. Studying letters, Martyn not only enters into a dialogue with the past, but also looks for relatives of addresses, communicates with them and restores these ties a little bit.
“Someone cried like Revici. Others silently took the letter and closed the door. But there were those who, like old snipers, rejoiced at the opportunity to talk. And the letter for them was only a pretext.
People really need to be heard, or at least listened to.”
The letters in the text are real. Cited infections, they evoke a strong, documentary epistolary presence – about an officer who went through the First World War; about the Agreement serving time in Solovki; about an Austrian cadet prisoner of war who ended up in Tomsk; and further. The novel as a whole is composed in three cumulative manners, as if divided into three different “waves”, which intersect in meaning and plot, but can be perceived separately. One “wave” – letters of ancient times, the second – the narrator’s lyrical memories of his youth spent in the nineties – zero movements. The main, chronologically third line is the story of the meeting of the adult Martyn with the “emerald people”, the story of his protest against the dictatorship. The “adulthood” of the hero, however, is nominal. Martyn is deliberately infantile, in a good sense in words, which seems to be emphasized by the epigraphs from the work of the neo-primitivist artist Mikhail Larionov “The Seasons”.
The third “wave” is especially rich in quotations, sometimes the characters speak in verse for a long time. Natural disasters happen. “Radio Martin” leaves the dystopian genre already at the level of style, albeit endless allusions, thanks to the presence of biblical and Shakespearean names, as well as discussions about the old French “Roman about the Fox” side by side with Internet memes, songs by Tsoi and Led Zeppelin. The characters – and probably the author of the book along with them – gather together, accumulate in their heads the entire world culture in order to oppose it to the total machine. It looks spectacular, despite the fact that it is not called overcomplicated. Divided into four parts and many small chapters, it is dynamic, moreover, straightforward in places.
But if the stylistic directness, often developing into pathos, organically suits the “forty-year-old Peter Pan” Martyn, then the transience of the plot twists in the development of bewilderment is obvious. Firstly, the love line is dotted, not that it played an important role and therefore unconvincing, although it improved the beautiful reception with the narrator’s expenses to the reader. Secondly, no matter how naive Martyn is, the scene with blurting out the secrets of the “emerald people” still seems too strange. Instead, let’s say, the sudden duplicity of one of the events familiar in the novel is deliberately suspicious character. Its functionality – whether underdeveloped, or simply trivial – is difficult to justify the character of the “banality of evil” or lifelikeness. Nevertheless, the ending of the book, on the contrary, is unexpected, the pattern meets together and throws the reader out of the dystopian genre in the space of a fabulous epic.
the ascent was more than justified: it suffices to recall other features of the main theme. Martyn is not just “hearing disabled”. He is puny, almost headless, and has a curved, long nose. Martyn also lives with the old woman Tamara, who is considered a witch-herbalist. The echo with Gauf’s fairy tale “Dwarf Nose” suggests itself immediately, and the characters of the novel directly explore and joke about this similarity. Martyn constantly thinks of himself as a hero of a fairy tale, and fairy tale (including those related to the world described in the novel) motives are gradually expanding. In the end, they replace dystopia, literally absorb it. Philip Dzyadko’s book can be described as the story of the victory of a fairy tale over the gloomy reality of dictatorship, a disinterested play of the imagination over selfish lies and hypocrisy. In a special sense, a fairy tale is everything light and fictitious, funny, culturally creative and seemingly insignificant, everything that Marxists call a “superstructure” – a revolt against brute political power and supports the top. “Radio Martyn” up to certain moments is read as an ode to the word and dream, as a shamanistic conspiracy of reality by art. At times, such a literary ritual, not at all a dystopian intimidation-warning, but in a broad sense, a therapeutic text about the victory of culture over the original, willy-nilly, you believe.
However, the most important one nuance. Some critics align “Radio Martyn” with the work of Boris Vian, and at the level of the general style there are indeed features. If we talk about the content, then the issue arises not even with Zamyatin, Orwell or Kafka, but with Nabokov’s Invitation to Execution. Only in the novel by Philip Dzyadko the ending is arranged in a somewhat opposite way. Nabokov’s hero finally realizes the fabulous toy of a repressive society, its unviable absurdity – and therefore gives birth. Martyn, on the contrary, meets a fairy tale, that is, a toy-fantastic creature, to fight a repressive society, in a discovery that, alas, there is no doubt. The transformation of the hero also happens due to magic, and it is even impossible to say for sure whether his features-imperfections of the received witchcraft were not. So the book’s prognosis cannot be considered an exclusively optimistic heroine: they are saved by a miracle, and the question involuntarily arises, was this miracle really a haze, a dream, delirium from despair? As a result of this multi-layered and for the most part fascinating, rich in vivid details and historical circumstances, the novel causes the question “how to live under neo-totalitarian tyranny?” gives an alarmingly ambiguous answer. After all, it can be interpreted in Hamlet’s way: “Sleep and dream.”