FORSAKEN SUBURB: Sokolov’s `A School for Fools`. – Generation P: Edward Crabtree’s blog.

The secret to understanding this mad masterpiece lies in it’s setting.

The Sixth International Moscow Book Fair, which ran from 8^th September for a week in   1982 was a more relaxed occasion than previous ones had been. It was opened by Mikhail Gorbachev and drew the co-operation of some 103 countries.

Of course, writings which `contradicted Soviet law` were still conspicuous by their absence from the shelves. It was just a little to early for Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago whose rehabilitation would come later in December in the form of the publication of excerpts from the novel in the press.

Another
disappointment was the disallowance of Sasha Sokolov’s work. His A School
for Fools had already been graced with critical acclaim from the Western
literati. Also, this novel did not seem to contain the usual aspects which made
it a target for cancellation. There was no obvious iconoclasm, it did not dwell
on sex nor violence, was not grotesque and was about as apolitical as any novel
could be. What it was, though, was Modernist.

A School for Fools was Sasha Sokolov’s first novel. It went straight to samizdat format before seeing print in Michigan, America in 1976. It has remained in print since then and has appeared in many languages.

The praise
heaped on it comes from select quarters. `One of the finest 20<sup>th</sup>
Century Russian novels` is not an untypical example of such praise and this
comes from Harvey Pekar who is known for the American Splendor comic but
was also an art critic. (Quoted on the dust jacket of my edition of the novel)

Talented
malcontent.

The living
author’s – Aleksandr Vsevolodovitch Sokolov’s -own biography seems as
theatrical as anything that could be cooked up in fiction. He was born in 1943
in Canada, the son of a deputy military attaché of the Soviet Union. He was two
when his family was obliged to return to the Soviet Union under suspicion of
espionage.

Sokolov did study journalism for five years at Moscow State University but otherwise the picture is that of something of a misfit who could not settle. He worked at odd jobs like being a morgue attendant while mingling with literary salons (including an Avant Garde group called itself SMOG). He made a doomed attempt to flee his country and only escaped a longer prison sentence than the one he got thanks to his father’s standing.

It was while
he was making ends meet as a gamekeeper in Tver that he finished A School
for Fools in the mid-seventies. Its stylistic experimentation made it
anathema to mainstream Soviet literature and so Sokolov took the now familiar
route of getting the thing sent out of the country in secret. It wound up in
the hands of Carl Proffer, an American in Michigan on a mission to publish
novels unpublishable in the Soviet Union. Proffer brought it out on Ardis, his
own publishing house.

This was Sokolov’s lucky year because, owing to pressure from public opinion abroad, that was also the year when he was granted to leave the Soviet Union. He now spends his time between Vermont and Canada. However, in one of the few interviews he has granted, he did undertake a visit to the Soviet Union in 1989, telling reporters how much he missed his native country’s everyday speech patterns and so on.

Tale told
by an idiot.

The puzzler
of a novel is dedicated to `a feeble-minded boy…my pal and my neighbor`.

Indeed, the
narrator constitutes psychologically abnormal boy who attends a special
educational establishment for those such as himself. The two sides of his split
personality bicker with each other while finding themselves at odds with linear
time. The freewheeling stream-of-consciousness style brought to bear on the
narrative – Sokolov calls it `proezia` -quite befits such a narrator. It also
guarantees a bumpy ride to those not familiar with the Modernist excursions of
Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner. At times I am also reminded much of the lyricism of
the beat poets of the American `fifties.

A School
for Fools, with its stretched-out
sentences and forbidding paragraphs, lacks a conventional plot but there are plenty
of events within. The unnamed `student so-and-so` lives with his parents,
clashes with his father, has a one-sided affair with one of his teachers, meets
a mad inventor, goes on bike-rides, visits his grandmother’s grave with his
mother…and all the while contemplating this world through the prism of a unique
mind.

Yet this is
not a bleak novel. In fact, we can find a certain exuberance in Sokolov’s
passion for minutia. Here, for example, is a description of a humble post
office:

`And you
followed her through a long hallway lit by lightbulbs without shades and
smelling of real post office wax, glue, paper, twine, ink, stearin ,casein,
overripe pears, honey, squeaking shoes, crème brulee, cheap comfort, smoked
vobla, bamboo shoots, rat droppings, and the tears of the office manager`
(p-126-127).

There are
moments of high comedy too. In an interlude called Stories from the Veranda,
a series of more or less `normal` vignettes, a man waiting in a queue to
buy milk sees an elderly woman fall to the ground:

`I would
have helped her for sure, but my hands were full: in one hand I had a cigarette
and in the other matches` (p-69).

In search
of the theme.

It is
Sokolov’s clear preoccupation with words and how they sound that many critics
have seen as the crux of this novel. Sokolov is very attentive to lexis and to
the Russian language in particular (indeed some of his later novels are deemed
untranslatable from Russian). However, for all its formal playfulness A
School for Fools is no Finnegan’s Wake. It is about
something.

A more
sociopolitical reading of the novel would see it as one which is on the side of
the outcasts and thumbing its nose at authority and conformity. If you recall
the role of psychiatry in the Soviet Union of the seventies, this approach
gains extra resonance. This view of it might explain why the likes of Pekar
responded so warmly to the novel, after all, he too was a poet of the failure
and outsider.

There is,
nevertheless, an aspect of this masterpiece that critics seem to have
overlooked. It is a regional one.

Location.

I finished
this novel after a few failed attempts. Its lack of an obvious narrative hook
was off putting to me. The handrail that I was able to hold onto, that made me
able to relate to it, was the location of the events – the world of A School
for Fools. The pages exude an overwhelming sense of topographical
location, that of the outskirts of a Soviet city. Every other sentence oozes
the melancholic and somehow timeless land of ponds and rivers and their
dragonflies and frogs, dachas and run-down schools, train stations and post
offices, meandering paths and bicycles;

`The
whistling of the shunting locomotives, like a cuckoo, sings at dawn a
shepherd’s pipe, flute, cornet a piston, crying of a child, doodeledey. I wake
up, sit on the bed, look at my bare legs and then look out of the window. I see
the bridge, it is completely empty, it is illuminated by green mercury lamps
and the lampposts have swan necks` (p-129).

This special
atmosphere will be recognisable to you if you have spent any time in a (post)
Soviet provinces. If you have not, A School for Fools will give you a
vivid taste of it.

All
quotations are from:

Sokolov,
Sasha A School for Fools (Translated by Alexander Boguslawski) (New York
Review of Books, New York, 2015).

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