Back to Moscow

Guillermo Erades

Scribner, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

IT’S the turn of the millennium, around the time Yeltsin gave way to Putin, and Martin is a Western PhD student in Moscow. He’s studying Russian Literature, but he’s lying to his tutor when he claims to have a deep and abiding love of Russian authors sparked off by Pushkin. In reality, having a Russian girlfriend in Amsterdam was what got him intrigued by the Mysterious Russian Soul.

All the same, he does have a good idea for his thesis: studying the way women have been depicted in Russian literature, and what these portrayals tell us about cultural attitudes towards the feminine. Martin’s second bright idea is to get a more rounded picture by combining book-learning with field work, which basically involves getting to know Russian women and learning how they think. This is more or less an excuse for Martin to go out clubbing every night and sleep with as many women as possible, subsequently jotting down how they remind him of characters by Bulgakov or Chekhov.

During his stay, Moscow changes around him. The oligarchs are taking charge. There’s much talk about Russia losing its soul now that the certainties of communism are gone, with nothing to take their place. Martin and his friends are finding that the “dyevs” (the young women in the clubs) are becoming harder to impress now that there’s more money about, confirming their theory that Russian women regard choosing a man as “a material pursuit”.

That’s just the kind of shallow judgement we’ve come to expect of Martin, as we know by now that he’s a serial seducer who confuses familiarity with understanding. His on-off girlfriend Lena accuses him of being heartless, which is a fair assessment of the man we’ve seen. Someone who showed so little genuine concern for their needs wouldn’t impress Western women much either. But there are cultural reasons for the tension between them, too. The Russian word for compassion translates as something like “shared suffering” – it’s more than just making sympathetic noises, the way a Westerner like Martin would understand it. He simply isn’t prepared for the profundity of Russian fatalism, or that their attachment to melancholy is the sign of a cultural distrust of “superficial joy”. A superficial guy himself, it takes him a long time to see that the lesson of Anna Karenina (“life is not about happiness – it’s about meaning”) is more than just a literary conceit, but a way of life that can’t be understood unless it’s fully embraced and engaged.

After the 350-page mark, one might feel that Erades has been too ambitious with his debut novel, and that this somewhat drawn-out work could have done with a little trimming. But some of the best works of fiction only really reveal their true nature at the end, and his conclusion makes the whole journey seem worthwhile. Once we can look back and see where it’s been leading, Back To Moscow leaves behind it a far greater sense of accomplishment than seemed possible at the outset.