Where the law of preposterousness trumps all

Reading Pieter Waterdrinker’s The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street: A Russian Adventure for the Times, 29 January 2022

On 16 June 1936 the author and Bolshevik sympathiser Andre Gide left France for 9-week trip to the Soviet Union. In Soviet Russia, he was offered every comfort — an experience he found extremely unsettling. “Are these really the men who made the Revolution?” he asked, in his book Afterthoughts. “No; they are the men who profit by it. They may be members of the Party — there is nothing communist in their hearts.”

Parisian intellectuals immediately piled in on this turncoat, this viper: Romain Rolland called Gide’s reporting “astonishingly poor, superficial, puerile and contradictory”.

It is possible to misread The Long Song, Pieter Waterdrinker’s memoir of Russia and its revolutions, in the same way, and lay the same charges at his door. How do you write about a place like St Petersburg (where “although the law of chance may be predominant as a rule, the law of preposterousness trumps all”), how do you anatomise the superficiality, puerility and contradiction of Russian civic culture, without exhibiting the same qualities yourself? How do you explore a sewer without getting covered in….? Well, you get the idea.

Waterdrinker is a novelist best known for the farcical and exuberant The German Wedding (2009). Poubelle, published in 2016, is a dizzying state-of-nations novel rooted in the war in east Ukraine. Waterdrinker’s gift for savage comedy, and his war correspondent’s eye, have few contemporary equivalents. Reading Paul Evans’s impressively brutal translation of The Long Song, I was put in mind, not of any contemporary, but of Wyndham Lewis, a between-the-wars writer so contrarian and violent and hilarious, English letters have spent the 60-odd years since his death trying to bury him.

Waterdrinker complains that he’s been receiving similar mistreatment from the cognoscenti in his native Netherlands. And let’s be frank: there’s nothing more inconvenient, nothing more irritating, than a leftist who calls out socialism.

Be that as it may, The Long Song has already sold over 100,000 copies across mainland Europe. After twenty-odd years of trying, Waterdrinker is an overnight success.

What is this book, exactly? A synthesis of Waterdrinker’s irascible personality and colourful career? A non-fiction novel? A deconstructed political memoir?

Pieter Waterdrinker, who calls a spade a bloody shovel, calls it “… a personal book about the Russian Revolution of 1917. You buffed up your own life with a little patina, borrowed an abundance of what others had written, with liberal citations, made up a bit if need be, and mixed it all together like the ingredients of a thick, hearty soup, et voilá: it was as if the book had written itself.”

Waterdrinker interleaves his early biography (sucked into, and unceremoniously spat out of, the goldrush accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s) with the history of revolutions in Russia. He concentrates particularly on the people (including Valdimir Lenin, “the bastard that started it all”) who either resided or worked on Tchaikovsky Street (named after the revolutionary, not the composer) where Waterdrinker and his wife Julia and their three cats once lived.

“One of our neighbours… was standing on the landing in a blue-and-white striped sailor’s top, hacking up an antique sideboard with an axe,” the author reminisces. “‘No, not Mama’s dresser…’ the man imitated his wife’s voice out of key. ‘But why not, you slut!’ The axe-head fell again, the splinters and brass fittings flying every which way.”

And this, bear in mind, is the couple’s isle of calm; the place from which Waterdrinker looks back on his early life, before he became a writer. It’s a tale dominated by a series of increasingly dubious business dealings, starting in 1988 with a scheme to smuggle bibles into Leningrad and ending in 1990 when he was strongly urged to transport a container of French wine to Kazan each month “in exchange for an unlimited supply of tender Tatar beauties to work as dancers in the Amsterdam nightlife circuit”. After a spell in the Netherlands, the couple returned to Russia in 1996.

There are moments of sybaritic delight, as when the young would-be writer bathes with his wife-to-be (a teacher who has lived in poverty and squalor for years) in a bathtub of Soviet champagne. There are moments of horror, as when the author’s business associates are hung from trees to freeze to death; or are, more straightforwardly, shot. There are unforgettable grotesques: the half-mad elderly Madam Pokrovskaya, who has eluded the tragedy of a life spent in St Petersburg by entirely abandoning her sense of time; young Waterdrinker’s grinning business partner Swindleman, so hollow, he rattles. In the end (but not so soon as to spoil the book) a sort of tinnitus sets in. The apartment on Tchaikovsky Street is itself lost to redevelopers in the end, and the book ends in clouds of plaster dust and the thudding of drills.

The Long Song draws parallels between the revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is, to Waterdrinker’s mind, the same revolution, which is to say, the same orgy of resentment, hate and nihilism, fomented by psychopaths, and barely contained — drab decades at a time — by self-serving bureaucrats and secret policemen.

Waterdrinker sees a continuum of moral annihilation stretching from the czars to the present. He concludes that Russian political culture runs on hatred, and its revolutions are, far from being attempts at treatment, merely symptoms of an ineradicable malaise. Waterdrinker prefers witness over analysis, because he’s a sometime war correspondent, and eye-witness is his metier; and anyway, how are you supposed to “analyse” moments like the one recorded by Philip Jordan, a Missouri-born African-American and assistant to the US ambassador, when “in a house not far from the embassy, [the Red Guards] murdered a little girl, twelve bayonets stuck into her body”? The Long Song’s abiding emblem is a description, not of the taking of the Winter Palace, but of the taking of the Winter Palace’s wine cellar, some eight months later: “scenes of tableaux worthy of Dante, in which men up to their ankles in wine shot at each other, the blood of the dead and the wounded mixing with the alcohol.”

The Long Song contributes to a tradition that’s recognised for its literary merit (think Bunin, think Zamyatin) but which tends to get saddled with the “contrarian” label — not least because much of the Left establishment still pays lip-service to the Bolshevik idea. (Consider how Orwell was treated by his contemporaries — or Christopher Hitchens, for that matter.)

Waterdrinker is too much the literary werewolf to change many made-up minds. But, given Russia’s current expansionist posturings, we’d be well to give him audience. Listen, if not to him, then to the dairist who once shared his street, Zinaida Hippius, who watched this horrorshow the first time around: “If a country can exist in Europe in the twentieth century where there’s such phenomenal and previously unwitnessed slavery, and Europe doesn’t understand that or else accepts it, then Europe must meet its downfall.”