Underground, or A Hero of Our Time

Vladimir Makanin comes to the reader for the first time with a big novel, risky and promising in its very name. Even the sound of the hero’s “name”—Petrovich—brings to mind Lermontov’s officer: a brilliantly guessed type, whom other Russian writers also didn’t miss, placing their hero now on Oblomov’s couch, then in the underground, then “down in the gutter.”

For Makanin’s novel hero, the underground (“dorm life,” “psychiatric ward”) is not only a way of living, but a way of thinking. Petrovich is homeless, without household comforts; even with censorship absent, he doesn’t try to get his works published. And “our time”? A human anthill, a whirlpool of events: “new Russians” and “new poor,” rallies, post-Soviet offices, crime—a panorama of a churned-up life, in which the hero with enviable persistence defends his “self.”