The Send-Off: Chronicle of One Night

9 hrs. 58 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Mikhail Ardov

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

Description

For forty-five years, the manuscript of “Wires” lay on the writer’s desk before he finally agreed to publish it. Had this novel appeared at the time—right after it was written, in samizdat or tamizdat—it likely would have found a worthy place alongside Sasha Sokolov’s “School for Fools” and Venedikt Erofeev’s “Moscow—Petushki.” And the author would likely have faced either prison and a psychiatric ward, or forced emigration. The erotic, religious, and social elements of the novel would undoubtedly have been regarded by Soviet authorities as a distortion of socialist reality. Yet in “Wires” what’s interesting is not so much that as the formal novelty: the entire text is a single internal monologue with repeating elements of external speech—Scripture quotations, fragments of poetry and prose, with lyrical and philosophical digressions.

The back-and-forth rhythm of the narration creates an effect of slow motion. The book hasn’t aged at all—if anything, it has “matured” and filled with new meanings.