Sergej Lebedev’s new novel “The Perfect Poison” – Culture

It’s not a beautiful death, more like a model. A stab in the neck, a pain in the temples, the accelerated breath. Then the swollen neck no longer allows for a cry for help, just a rattle that the guests of the restaurant mistake for the sound of a drunk. Coma.

After four days, the defected KGB officer Wyrin, one of countless victims of toxic substances in Sergei Lebedev’s novel “The Perfect Poison”, dies. People perish as a result of contaminated Pinot Gris or prepared prayer chains, in human experiments or in laboratory accidents. Mostly Russia is the culprit, formerly the Soviet Union, although of course Germany also has a huge number of poisoned people on its conscience. After steel and gunpowder, poison is the weapon of choice, the most secretive mercenary for modern conflicts. And if you add that fear is the best poison, as it is said at one point, because people produce it themselves, so to speak, then it should stay that way for a while.

Chemist Kalitin succeeds in the masterpiece: a poison that kills unnoticed

Sergei Lebedev doesn’t even have to mention the name of Vladimir Putin. One thinks of Litvinenko, Skripal, Navalny anyway. In this book, Russia is not a country or a system, but a nightmarish, hopeless, and in the religious sense damned “state of mind”. Two opponents approach each other, one more terrifying than the other. The obsessed, amoral chemist Kalitin is as passionate about death as physicians are about life. Since his childhood he lived on the “island”, a secret refuge for scientists, which for him was “sanctuary, prison, altar and testing ground” in equal measure. After years of tireless research, he achieved the masterpiece, a poison that kills unnoticed. Death is filthy, Kalitin knows that, it leaves clues, natural traces. To outsmart this law means to defeat nature, being, creation itself. The name of the preparation is “Debutant”.

And now this Kalitin is supposed to die because of the “debutante”. Because he too left the collapsing Soviet Union after he got caught in an intrigue. On his heels is a man who has just as few scruples as he does, but also no refinement whatsoever. Lieutenant Colonel Scherschnjow tortures everyone who is to be tortured, at best feels a certain professional shame in the event of errors. The death of the ex-KGB agent Wyrin put the trail on Kalitin, so Scherschnjow travels to eastern Germany with a colleague, with a vial of “Debutant” in his luggage. But Kalitin also smuggled out a bottle of his best product. Lebedev loves such symmetries. Almost all important motifs appear twice, everything is related to everything, meshes like the teeth of a gear. This creates an airless, impenetrable tightness. There is no way out, no outside.

The only shining light is Trawniczek, an East German village pastor who gave popular sermons at the turn of the century and was therefore also poisoned. He survived but was disfigured. His face remained scaly like a lizard’s. With Lebedev the miracles still beat the mind.

The men are on each other’s heels, each knowing what the other is doing

In return, one has not read such original descriptions of bondage for a long time, necessarily mostly from inside the apparatus. “Why couldn’t they just bury people in those years? Why had they carried out investigations, described papers, considered formalities, when they knew that everything was a lie? Why this procedure?” Asks Kalitin and realizes: “The executors For the sake of it. It was a grab hold for them so that they wouldn’t go mad and refuse to obey. “

The unleashed bureaucracy with its meaningless operations, the ritual writing of reports, the waste of resources was not an effect of the dictatorship, but its purpose: “It was precisely in this sifting through of insubstantial ore that total power manifested itself.” Inevitably, the hunters are therefore also hunted. While Scherschnjow and his colleague follow a cumbersome route at the request of their superiors, repeatedly held up by unusual train compartments, a failure of the booking system, basic niggles of reality, they watch each other. Each will write a report about the other, they both know that. They habitually control not only what they say but also what they think.

Sometimes Lebedev takes it a little far with the darkening of the world, because whether the tap really rattles “like in agony” is the question. But it doesn’t get any smaller. This is his fifth novel; his previous books also revolve around Russia’s past, the Stalin era, and German-Russian history. Lebedev is a geologist, he has worked in the vastness of Russia, examined rocks, sedimented time. Historians do nothing else.

But “The Perfect Poison” is more than a historical novel and despite all the tension and the corresponding ingredients, it is also not an agent thriller. The real confrontation does not take place between the poisoner and his persecutor; Lebedev is concerned with nothing more and nothing less than a struggle between good and evil. Evil is powerful and reproduces itself in a “chain reaction”, a “tautology”. Trawniczek, the disfigured pastor, describes it as a “heap of rotting fruit gnawed by black worms”, a caricature of paradise. But the good is never far away. Kalitin works and experiments in a former chapel. Insight and conversion are conceivable at any time.

Sergei Lebedev brought a mystically charged tone to young Russian literature. An inkling of Russian sense of mission, of Russia as the scene of final questions of faith, appears. That would be something out of date if the overcoming of bondage weren’t so urgently topical.