They really existed, the philosopher ships. When the Bolsheviks began not only to liquidate the defeated class enemies en masse, but also to shoot yesterday’s deserving comrades-in-arms and tomorrow’s potential opponents in unison, at least five such ships left Russia in 1922.
A state over which the paranoia of a permanent conspiracy was imposed had the paradoxical generosity of deporting a few hundred privileged persecuted people to freedom. Renowned scientists, artists and doctors were transported out of the country on the ships that left Odessa or Sevastopol. This was done on Lenin’s orders and was declared by Trotsky to be a “humanitarian act” that gave life to people who would sooner or later have become traitors and would have had to be executed.
Michael Köhlmeier has added another to these ships, an elegant steam turbine ship that could accommodate 2,000 passengers, but which only a dozen perplexed people boarded in St. Petersburg. They neither know why they are being expelled nor whether they might be killed on the way to the prescribed exile. The purpose of the trip, unknown to them, is to deliver another passenger on the high seas in the Gulf of Finland; Severely handicapped by several strokes, lonely, unrecognized, the man who is responsible for the revolution turning into terror that cost hundreds of thousands of lives under Stalin, his docile student and later mortal enemy, is against his will on his own deck would: Lenin.
Whatever Michael Köhlmeier takes up, it becomes a story. He also addresses narrative several times in the novel “The Philosopher’s Ship”, which is narrow by his standards and which relies on a framework of meticulously researched facts and all kinds of fiction. It should be added that the reality itself, from which the furious narrative work is based, has bizarre, almost unbelievable features, while most of its fictional elements are by no means fantastic.
Michael Köhlmeier, born in 1949 in Vorarlberg, where he also lives.
(Photo: Peter-Andreas Hassiepen/Hanser)
The novel’s narrator, whose biography differs only slightly from that of the author, is introduced as a writer famous for his cunning game of truth and invention. “That’s why people often don’t believe you when you write the truth and believe you when you cheat.”
The person who says this is Anouk Perleman-Jacob, an architect who was born in Russia, became world famous in America and now lives in Austria, and who, for her hundredth birthday, chose the writer from Vorarlberg to tell what is not in her official biographies. And there are many stories that are true, but seem as if they were made up, precisely because the reality of civil war, revolutionary enthusiasm, bureaucratic excess, hunger, despotism, violence itself seems like a monstrous delusion: “And if no one believes it , all the better. But it should be told.” Because telling stories is a saving act. Michael Köhlmeier is convinced of this. And the architect relies on this, a fictional character whose individual biographical details are reminiscent of the legendary Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.
The external framework: The old woman, who has difficulty hearing and seeing, likes to drink beer and smoke, summons the author to her house in Vienna’s posh Döbling district and, over the course of several days, tells him depressing, deadly sad, highly funny, scandalous stories from her life. The narrator records it on his cell phone and describes what he later writes as a “report.” A large part of the novel consists of the architect’s oral stories, which the author of the report reproduces under quotation marks.
This could go wrong if Köhlmeier stylized the lively old woman’s direct speech too much for rhetorical originality, and could be exhausting if, conversely, he agrammatically followed the stream of her associations for 200 pages. Köhlmeier wisely guarded himself against both and allowed his protagonist to use a narrative language that was close to oral but artistic. Sometimes the listener interrupts the architect, asks questions, sometimes they engage in amusing verbal battles, and in some chapters the reporter turns to the research he undertakes between meetings.
In the densely woven web of fact and fiction, the panorama of a revolution whose ideals were betrayed by its authoritarian strategists and the oppressive inside view of a society that is under the rule of fear emerges. The revolutionaries find themselves surrounded by enemies and conspirators who they also suspect are in their own ranks, and soon no one among the population even knows whether they are dealing with an enemy of the state or an informer.
“Paranoia begets paranoia,” which is why Ms. Perlman-Jacob once states: “You can’t imagine what it’s like when everything that happens can be interpreted in at least two ways…that it could all be a set-up . But we don’t know for what purpose or what goal…” Young poets are being executed in rows, mostly enthusiastic Bolsheviks, in whose avant-garde poems the secret police suspect encoded counter-revolutionary messages.
Anouk is 14 when she lands on the “philosopher’s ship” with her parents – her father is a professor of architecture, her mother is an ornithologist, both Bolsheviks. There she will be the only one to discover Lenin, recognize him and visit him every night; the secret meetings between the girl and the stammering, paralyzed revolutionary leader whom Stalin will ultimately dump into the sea are a macabre narrative masterpiece.
The architect’s further life is outlined in a broad arc, which takes her from Berlin to Paris, to the USA and to Vienna. Köhlmeier interprets the obsession of the rulers and the oppressed alike, that everything in the world has to do with conspiracies and that behind every coincidence there is calculation and evil intention, entirely from the time described; But references to our society with its tendency towards conspiracy ideologies emerge as if by themselves. And as far as the homelessness of the Russian exiles is concerned, one of them says, as if for today: “We come to a country whose language we don’t understand, we meet people who don’t want us, who mistrust us, who blame us give in to everything that is not good in their life…”
“The Philosopher’s Ship” is an exciting, clever novel told with great formal skill. And Köhlmeier wouldn’t be Köhlmeier if he didn’t also offer a wealth of strange, ambiguous characters that authors who are less generous with their ideas and characters would have saved for further books.
Michael Köhlmeier: The Philosopher’s Ship. Novel. Hanser Verlag, Munich 2024, 221 pages, 24 euros.