Before Brezhnev Died (Moldovan Literature)

Before Brezhnev Died (Moldovan Literature)

The time is the twilight of the decrepit Brezhnev regime, the place, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia: the “Latin periphery of empire.” A pensioner seeks justice for his dead wife, crushed by a falling crane--the very symbol of the “construction of socialism”--but comes up against hostility from a cynical system at best indifferent, at worst contemptuous of human life. With a keen, Gogolian eye for the grotesque, often squalid, details of everyday life in the USSR, Iulian Ciocan paints darkly humorous but compassionate portraits of Homo sovieticus, from crusty war veterans and lowly collective farm workers to venal Party bigwigs, as each comes to the disturbing realization that the lofty ideals of Soviet society were lies all along. And for idealistic young pioneer Iulian, the biggest disillusionment of all will be the abrupt revelation of Brezhnev’s mortality. Iulian Ciocan (b. 1968) is a novelist, literary critic, author, and presenter of a long-running Radio Free Europe broadcast about everyday life and current affairs in the Republic of Moldova. His novels include Before Brezhnev Died , The Realm of Sasha Kozak , and In the Morning the Russians Will Arrive , which together form a trilogy of Moldova past, present, and future, and most recently The Queen of Hearts . Alistair Ian Blyth , a native of Sunderland, England, has resided for many years in Bucharest. His previous translations include The Bulgarian Truck by Dumitru Tsepenaeg, The Encounter by Gabriela Adamesteanu, and I'm an Old Commie! by Dan Lungu, all available from Dalkey Archive Press. With a pang of the heart, Olga Leonovna decided to sell the family home she had inherited after the death of her grandparents. After exhausting negotiations, Vladimir Vladimirovich had borrowed a fabulous sum of money from acquaintances, and in the summer of 1967, Iulian’s parents obtained a poky apartment in a building that had just been constructed in the Ryshkanovka district. They had paid half the price of the apartment, with the remaining half to be paid off over the course of ten years, which required them to make Sisyphean efforts, but despite that, they were happy. They were not Party members, public functionaries, Writers of the People, or qualified engineers from Novosibirsk or Omsk for them to have any prospects of ever receiving a free apartment. They knew that by force of circumstances they could succeed only by relying on their own perseverance. In the first few months, during which they slept on a decrepit folding bed in the middle of an empty room thick with the smell of whitewash, it even seemed to them that the apartment was spacious. Doubt as to that began to gnaw away at them on the day when they moved in all their belongings. With a surface area of forty-one square metres, as they had verified countless times, their apartment consisted of a tiny vestibule, a minuscule kitchen, a medium-sized bedroom, an all-purpose room―sitting room, guestroom― and a balcony which over the years was to become a moldy extension of the bookcase. Gradually, the refrigerator, the vacuum-tube television, the beds, the chairs, the armchairs, the cupboards, the bedside tables and the sideboard―most of them purchased on credit―considerably limited their free space, confining their movements. The truth that they did not wish to recognize at first―that the two-room apartment was the most they could achieve, that they would never manage to move into one that was genuinely spacious―irremediably made them captives of a pointless, wearying ritual: At least once every three months, they moved the furniture, trying to hit upon the perfect arrangement that would allow them to salvage two or three extra square metres of essential living space. They debated at great length about whether or not they should put the wardrobe where the bed was and move the bed to where the bedside table was, on which perched the vacuum-tube television set with its abominable picture. Their words would be accompanied by vigorous gesticulation and sometimes they even quarreled. They demolished a thin wall, moved the refrigerator into the vestibule, attempted to convert the balcony into a small room, installing an extra radiator. At the end of it all, they came to the bitter conclusion that the forty-one square metres had not been enlarged a single jot. They had to buy furniture, it was an undiminished requirement, naturally, but at the end of it all they risked ending up in a suffocating birdcage. The lack of space became tyrannical after Aunt Sanya moved in with them. Recently retired, she had been left homeless after the death of her husband, with whom she had not had children. Her deceased husband’s relatives had evicted her, vociferating about how she was supposedly trying to obtain other people’s property by fraudulent means. Aunt Sanya had left, since she wasn’t a fraudster and had genuinely loved her husband. Life’s misfortunes had not embittered her, they had not made