CULTURE

Stephen Shenfield. VIKTORIA TOKAREVA

JRL recently reproduced an interview with the much respected literary critic Alla Latynina that appeared in The Moscow Times (12/21/01) under the heading "Hunting for Russia's Next Dostoevsky." The next Dostoevsky, it seems, is nowhere in sight, and even possible candidates for the title of great writer are few and far between.

As for my favorite contemporary Russian writer, Viktoria Tokareva, she didn't even get a mention. And I've noticed a note of condescension in the response of any Russian with pretensions to being a "cultured" person if I happen to mention my enthusiasm for her.

Why this snobbishness? Perhaps because Tokareva always writes in straightforward colloquial Russian -- a great help to the foreigner struggling to learn the language. Perhaps because her theme is always the everyday life of ordinary people, with none of the "deep" philosophizing of a Dostoevsky or of the surrealistic fantasy that fills the work of Viktor Pelevin (one of the handful of writers whose merits Latynina recognizes). Perhaps simply because she is pigeonholed as a writer of romantic fiction, a genre with very low social status everywhere, read as it is mainly by women -- of lower status even than detective fiction, to which Latynina does devote attention.

I've been reading Tokareva for close on 20 years now, but she's been around for much longer than that. Born in Leningrad, she graduated as a pianist from the Leningrad College of Music -- which explains why many of her stories are about musicians -- and then went to Moscow to study scriptwriting at the State Institute of Cinematography. Her first short story ("Day Without Fibs") appeared in 1964. She is known for her films and TV plays as well as her short stories and novellas, though the latter no less than the former display her talent for vivid dialogue.

While Tokareva never philosophizes at length, her work is rich in perceptive and striking insights into both individual psychology and changing social conditions. She does not push her views about current developments down her reader's throat, but she is nonetheless an extremely socially aware writer. "My theme," she says in a letter to the reader, "is nostalgia [toska] for the ideal... It might seem that love does not depend on the political system, but it turns out that everything is embedded in society, and love is no exception." (1)

Occasionally she even has something interesting to say about high politics or international relations, though she approaches even such subjects from a worm's eye view -- for instance, from the perspective of the terrified soldier who is summoned at dead of night to staff HQ to type the Soviet declaration of war on Japan.

What is especially appealing in Tokareva is the feeling that she conveys as narrator for her characters. She enjoys poking fun at them, but always with gentle irony, never harsh sarcasm. The reader feels the warmth of her sympathy for all her characters -- male and female, cynics as well as naïve idealists -- even as they drive one another to distraction.

Tokareva straddles the late Soviet and the post-Soviet eras. But hers is a consistent voice: a strong continuity of style and attitude bridges the divide. In some inessential respects one period of her work differs from another. Glasnost allowed her to tackle previously sensitive themes. Among other things, it allowed her to write about sex. But there was also something in her early work that she lost in the 1990s. One feature that I particularly appreciated, her use of metaphor drawn from the physical sciences, disappeared -- presumably out of deference to those readers unable to understand it. Her best work, in my opinion, was published at the end of the 1980s in the journal Novyi mir -- after the lifting of censorship but before the onset of commercialization.

It is a great pity that none of the work of Viktoria Tokareva has been published in English translation.

(1) Mozhno i nel'zia (Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 1998), p. 7.