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Reviewing\u00a0The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin for The Guardian, 7 June 2018<\/a><\/p>\n I<\/span><\/span>nnokenty Petrovich Platonov, who lived through the\u00a0Russian Revolution<\/a>\u00a0of 1917, has awoken, a hale and\u00a0hearty thirtysomething, in a\u00a0present-day hospital bed. Innokenty\u2019s struggle \u2013 a\u00a0long and compelling one, delivered with apparent leisureliness by the Ukrainian-born novelist Eugene Vodolazkin in a translation by Lisa Hayden \u2013 is to overcome his confusion, and connect his tragic past life to his uncertain present one over the gulf of years.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been here before. Think Tarkovsky\u2019s 1975 film\u00a0Mirror<\/em><\/a>: a man\u2019s life assembled out of jigsaw fragments that more or less resist narrative until the final minutes. Or think\u00a0Proust<\/a>. In\u00a0The Aviator<\/em>, an old translation of\u00a0Defoe\u2019sRobinson Crusoe<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>replaces Marcel\u2019s madeleine dipped in tea: \u201cWith each line,\u201d Innokenty explains, \u201ceverything that accompanied the book in my time gone by was resurrected: my grandmother\u2019s cough, the clank of a knife that fell\u00a0in the kitchen … the scent of\u00a0something fried, and the\u00a0smoke of my father\u2019s cigarette.\u201d<\/p>\n So far, so orthodox. But Vodolazkin\u2019s grip on this narrative is iron-tight, and what we take at first to be Innokenty\u2019s pathology \u2013 or the working out of a\u00a0literary method \u2013 turns out to be something much more important: a moral stand, of sorts. Innokenty knows, in a bitter and visceral fashion, that history is\u00a0merely a theory abstracted from the experiences of\u00a0individuals. So he chooses to care about the little things, the overlooked things, \u201csounds, smells, and manners of expression, gesticulation, and motion\u201d. These are the things that actually make up a life; these are the true universals.<\/p>\n A journalist interviews the celebrity time-traveller: \u201cI keep trying to draw you out on historical topics and you keep talking about sounds and about smells.\u201d He\u2019s right: \u201cA historical view makes everyone into hostages of great societal events,\u201d Innokenty observes. \u201cI see things differently, though: exactly the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n Innokenty has skin in this game: shortly before he\u00a0was transported to the future, the Bolsheviks, history\u2019s true believers, threw him into the first and worst of the labour camps. \u201cThose who created the\u00a0Solovetsky hell\u00a0<\/a>had deprived people of what was human,\u201d Innokenty says, \u201cbut Robinson [Crusoe], after all, did the opposite: he humanised all the nature surrounding him, making it a continuation of himself. They destroyed every memory of civilisation but he created civilisation from nothing. From memory.\u201d Inspired by his favourite book from childhood, Innokenty attempts a similar feat.<\/p>\n He discovers his old, unconsummated love still lives, hopelessly aged and now with dementia. He visits her, looks after her. He washes her, touching her for the first time; her granddaughter Nastya assists. He falls in love with Nastya, and navigates the taboos around their relationship with admirable delicacy and self-awareness. But Nastya is as much a child of her time as he is of his. They will love each other, but can never really bond, not because Nastya is a trivial person, but because she belongs to a trivial time, \u201ca\u00a0generation of lawyers and economists\u201d. Modern faces are \u201cnervous in some way\u201d, Innokenty observes, \u201cmean, an expression of \u2018don\u2019t touch me!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Innokenty is the ultimate internal exile:\u00a0Turgenev<\/a>\u2019s ineffectual intellectual, played at an odd, more sympathetic speed. He is no more equipped to resist the blandishments of Zheltkov (the novel\u2019s stand-in for\u00a0Vladimir Putin<\/a>), or the PR department of a frozen food company, than he was to resist the Soviet secret police. Innokenty\u2019s attitude drives Geiger \u2013 his doctor, champion and friend \u2013 to distraction: how can this former prisoner of an Arctic labour camp possibly claim that \u201cpunishment for unknown reasons does not exist\u201d?<\/p>\n Innokenty\u2019s self-sacrificial piety provides his broken-backed life with a distinctly unmodern kind of meaning, and it\u2019s one that leaves him hideously exposed. But we\u2019re never in any doubt that his is a richer, kinder worldview than any available to Nastya. Innokenty\u2019s bourgeois, liberal, pre-Bolshevik anguish over what constitutes right action is a surprisingly successful fulcrum on which to balance a book. And we should expect nothing less from an author whose previous novel,\u00a0Laurus<\/em><\/a>, was a barnstorming thriller about medieval virtue.<\/p>\n All that remains, I suppose, is to explain how this bourgeois \u201cformer person\u201d comes to be alive in our own time, puzzling over the cult of celebrity, post-industrial consumerism and the internet. But why spoil the MacGuffin? Let\u2019s just say, for now, that Innokenty has been preserved. \u201cI did not even begin to question Geiger about the reasons, since that was not especially interesting,\u201d he writes in his sprawling, revelatory journal. \u201cKnowing the peculiarities of our country, it is simpler to be surprised that anything is preserved at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewing\u00a0The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin for The Guardian, 7 June 2018 Innokenty Petrovich Platonov, who lived through the\u00a0Russian Revolution\u00a0of 1917, has awoken, a hale and\u00a0hearty thirtysomething, in a\u00a0present-day hospital bed. Innokenty\u2019s struggle \u2013 a\u00a0long and compelling one, delivered with apparent … Continue reading