Neither Oceans nor Seas

Alekhin’s stories tend to come together into a single text, the way drops of mercury strive to form a poisonous puddle. To have a collected edition of his works on one’s bookshelf will one day mean possessing at least one human life sensually and precisely recorded. There is nothing in common with Proust here; Alekhin is a polar, prickly planet. He is pathologically unable to lie. He senses that, as a writer, he ought to be able to, but he keeps breaking back toward the truth. This is the synchronous voice of hero and author, one that will cease to exist if it does not lay bare its conscience. Alekhin’s reader is his Last Judgment. Anything contrived is ridiculed, the skin torn off. Hence such an acute, tragic perception of reality, the experience of contemporary Russian everyday life as Purgatory.