Book Review: ‘The Lady of the Mine,’ by Sergei Lebedev

This inertness characterizes the novel. Korol has returned in part so that Marianna can finally account for her secrets, but she’s, well, dead. At another point, a surface-to-air missile takes out a passenger airliner, something that really happened — but the attack is as purposeless here as the tragic original event, other than to remind us that Valet, who surveys the wreckage for valuables, is a degenerate.

In what is surely meant as a climactic conclusion, Zhanna turns into a garishly painted doll for a sexually charged night on the town, behavior for which the previous pages have hardly prepared us. We are even less prepared for the fact that she readily surrenders to one of the other main characters, or that such Beria-like pickups are part of what gets this man going. (Go to the banya and ask someone what I mean by that Beria reference.) The way their encounter ends is as random and meaningless as the rest of it.

I understand — the lack of substance and resolution is the point. In this part of the world, the successive victims — of Imperial Russia, of the Nazis, of the Soviets, of the new fascist Russia — have no justice, and power is never held to account. However, even though the novel omits basic factual knit, it also explains gratuitously. The Russians, we are told, “hadn’t realized it yet, but they had turned into those whom they considered their worst enemy … the Nazis.” Even newspapers don’t bother spelling this kind of stuff out.

The tension between Lebedev’s style and my reading preferences does prompt a useful question: What is fiction for? The literary fashion today seems to be with Lebedev, though it has a long history. “I know there are readers in the world … who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last,” Tristram Shandy lamented in his endless autobiography. Clarity, to say nothing of a chugging plot — i.e., “people you care about and the problem they’re trying to solve,” as a young writer I know put it when she was 7 — is seen as suspect, an imposition of artificial order on an orderless universe. Lebedev is more in line with the lessons of modernism and postmodernism than literary yarn-weavers like yours truly.

We are like the bickering opposition to an amused autocrat, and our schismatic faith is that of an ever-smaller number of readers. But the same is currently true for democracy, maybe. We copy out the sacred manuscripts in our vaults, shining the light each in our way and praying that the world will notice.

THE LADY OF THE MINE | By Sergei Lebedev | Translated by Antonina W. Bouis | New Vessel Press | 227 pp. | Paperback, $17.95