Deep melancholy. This is the strongest feeling that overwhelms you from the very first page of Katerina Poladjan’s novel “Music of the Future”. How can it be that everything hopeful and open in the Russian present has already evaporated? There just seemed to be a future, just now there were signs of a turning point.
Poladjan’s characters are stuck in a time fold: an epoch is coming to an end, while something new is indicated but has not yet begun. The writer, born in Moscow in 1971 and living in Germany since the late 1970s, sets her perfectly composed novel on a single day, March 11, 1985, and creates a special interpenetration of time and space.
It is the beginning of the Gorbachev era, of which your multi-headed ensemble of heroes has no idea. It’s still in the air. While working the night shift in a lightbulb factory somewhere far east of Moscow, 20-year-old Janka learns that the Supreme Soviet has died when the foreman holds up a radio playing Chopin’s funeral march. This gesture alone sums up the relationship to power: the name of the head of the State Council does not come up. The state is a diffuse, invisible entity that determines everything, just as inevitably as the air we breathe.
Katerina Poladjan has lived in Germany since 1979. “Zukunftsmusik” is her fourth novel.
(Photo: Carsten Koall/picture alliance/dpa)
Again and again Poladjan succeeds in creating impressive scenes that become emblematic: How the engineer’s assistant Matvej Alexandrowitsch at home in the Kommunalka, the main setting of “Music of the Future”, complains about the kitchen table belonging to Janka, her mother Maria Nikolaevna and the grandmother Varvara Mikhailovna because it was three centimeters too big is long and thus infringes the regulations. Or how, a short time later, Maria moves from the ground floor with the stuffed mammoth to the room with the lemmings, which swarm around an elk, in her orphaned natural history and ethnology museum, where she works.
Or how people stand in a long line at a store without knowing what is on sale there. As if on a revolving stage, the author presents this and that section of reality, and the three women Varvara, Maria and Janka alternately move into the foreground, each with their own story and deeply alien to each other. In addition, there are Janka’s little daughter Kroschka, as well as said Matvej, vacillating between automatic fulfillment of duty and a strong affection for Maria, and Ippolit Ivanovich, a train conductor who, surprisingly and unnoticed by everyone, has an affair with grandmother Varvara.
Highly musical and virtuoso is not only the perspective design with tempo changes, inner monologues and pictorial comparisons – the air is “a sharp, nasty shard” – but also the dialogue. All the characters, with the exception of Janka, talk to each other as well-mannered and polished as in a Chekhov story. There is talk everywhere of the “dearest one” and “my loved ones”, Siezen is part of it, someone should “enter”, although it is a six-square-meter hermitage. The gap between the chosen language and the crowded, run-down apartment has a comical effect.
Katerina Poladjan: Music of the future. Novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2022. 192 pages, 22 euros.
At the same time, language has a protective function for the protagonists: Anyone who knows how to formulate things so elegantly defends their autonomy, refuses to use political phrases and instead refers to the reverberation room of literary tradition. Allusions to Turgenev, Gogol and Bulgakov resonate again and again, in whose honor Poladjan invents a surreal vignette: a Kommunalka comrade, a professor, catapults himself through the roof directly into the sky with a rocking chair on elastic bands and spirals.
The events, which reach a climax for everyone, seem casually dabbed on. Janka wants to give a concert in the kitchen that evening, a Kwartirnik. Matvej has to witness a fatal accident in the human centrifuge in his scientific institute, which breaks something in him. Maria discovers buried longings. And Warwara celebrates her dalliance with the conductor in the next room as if she were a princess.
The final twist of “Music of the Future” is actually drunk with the future: something fantastic spills over into the novel again. Janka comes across an unnoticed door in the overcrowded Kommunalka, behind which a vast landscape opens up. The young woman gets into an unusual mental state and feels like “a convalescent”. Similar to in her last novel “Here are lions” Katerina Poladjan also shows in “Music of the Future” how brilliantly she understands the introspection of her characters and their emotional ties. She succeeds in creating a small, shimmering alphabet of feelings in the late Soviet Union.