STANISLAW BARANCZAK
63
witness for the prosecution in his show trial in 1919 and admitting the
"possibility" that he had been part of an anti-Communist conspiracy.
These two lines of the plot, the contemporary and the retro–
spective, constitute the novel. But Trifonov's art lies in his subtle
way of making them seemingly independent from each other (Pavel
is not interested in the intrigues concerning the cottage, just as his
neighbors and family are not interested in his Civil War memories)
while at the same time suggesting their deeper, ethical affinity. It is
significant that even Pavel, who seems to stand morally a little bit
above the thoroughly corrupt and materialistic younger generation,
never realizes the individual guilt that lay in his act of betrayal. In
the final analysis, he too turns out to have been contaminated by the
germ of moral nihilism which had spawned the bloody immoralism
of the Revolution as well as the greedy immoralism of the average
Soviet citizen in modern times. Trifonov, with all his dislike for
overt moralistic instruction and black-and-white divisions, is a
moralist in the sense that, for him, acts of evil are never isolated. On
the contrary, they are always rife with consequences - including
those that come to the surface of social life generations later. One of
the characters in his novel expresses that idea by realizing that "life
was a system in which everything, in some mysterious way and ac–
cording to some higher plan, was interlaced." This concept of the
interdependence of various components of reality is reflected in Tri–
fonov's superb narrative technique (well rendered in Jacqueline Ed–
wards's and Mitchell Schneider's finely crafted translation). As I
have mentioned, he found his own solution to the dilemma of con–
temporary realism: in his novels, he worked out a highly complex
system of shifting viewpoints and the protagonists' indirect self–
characterization, thanks to which realistic depiction is preserved
without the overbearing presence of an authoritative, omniscient
narrator.
The Old Man,
a nearly perfect example of such technique;
is a triumph of both the moralist and the artist.
Alas, this cannot possibly be said about another apparently
realistic work, which copes with the same dilemma only to fail in
both an ethical and aesthetic sense. At the outset, Sergei Dovlatov's
The Zone
(Alfred A. Knopf) seems to offer a unique perspective- it
deals with the theme of Soviet prison camps, seen, however, not
from the usual viewpoint of an inmate but from that of a camp
guard. (The author, born in Russia in 1941 and an American
emigre since 1978, was, as a young man, drafted into the army and
sent to serve as a guard in a camp for criminal offenders.) This con-
