The Babylon Library Publishing House published the book “The Legend of Karagay. A Novel in 40 Obituaries.” Its author is Mikhail Kaluzhsky, writer, playwright and journalist. This is a very unusual novel in form, reminiscent of the practices of the Moscow Conceptualists: in fact, as stated on the cover, it consists of forty obituaries. Most of them revolve around one person, the composer Mikhail Arnautov. Literary critic Alex Mesrobov is convinced: Although at first glance this is a formal game with the languages \u200b\u200bof different media – right, left, liberal – in the end the story becomes truly emotional and powerful.
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“Main Soviet posthumous composer Shostakovich” – this unofficial title was achieved during his lifetime by Mikhail Arnautov (1918-2010), the fictional hero of the novel. His most important achievement was the opera The Legend of Karagay, inspired by the folklore of the Toichi people, also a fictional indigenous people of Siberia. The opera was never shown in the theater: it was banned in 1968. This event was a turning point not only for the composer and his entourage, but also for all Soviet art. But the reader does not know until the last minute what exactly happened then.
The most original thing about Mikhail Kaluzhsky’s book is its format: forty obituaries dated to different years, from 1953 to 2020. Almost all of them were written in memory of Arnautov, and a few more – about his loved ones and people who crossed paths with him in one way or another. The novel ends with a transcript of the podcast dedicated to the composer.
The style of these obituaries shows the influence of those who at one time dismantled the language of Soviet power, ideology, and even everyday Soviet discourse. Kalugsky uses a similar technique, but he works mainly with the languages of modern politicized societies – Russian and Western.
The impersonal obituary of Arnautov, signed by the Union of Composers of Russia, is full of dry and bureaucratic facts. Allegedly, the materials published in the newspaper Frankfurter Morgenpost (real German Publications), written according to all the rules of Western media: it is a dramatic biographical novel with an emphasis on politics. In liberal online media, the composer is criticized for accepting Stalin awards and generally compromising with the Soviet regime. In a conservative Russian magazine, the author blames liberals for appropriating Arnautov for themselves. In the leftist media, the deceased is accused of imperialism. In some intellectual publications, they allude to his homosexuality. In his Facebook obituary, the author recalls how he once had lunch with Arnautov at the Mayak Foundation in Moscow. And so on.
An important nuance of Kalogski’s language game is the terminology chosen by authors with different political views. Arnautov’s biography contains the following fact: after World War II, he went on an ethnographic trip, which he admired, and wrote a poem that became the introduction to a future scandalous opera. But where exactly did he go? The Union of Composers of Russia and a conservative journalist write this to Central Asia. And Western journalists and liberal Russian-language media – what about Central?
There are many such discoveries in the text that help Kalugsky to find the necessary distance and speak without tension about a very sensitive issue – the colonization of Siberia.
Arnautov, a typical Moscow intellectual, left unexpectedly for Siberia in 1964. There he headed the music department and continued to work with “folk music materials.” Under the influence of Siberian folklore, he created his only opera, The Legend of Karagay – the same opera that was subsequently banned. As it turned out in the end, it was banned precisely because people with different political views speak different languages. The reason was the denunciation of a local chauvinist, who believed that Arnautov was “falsifying the history of the development of Siberia” and belittling the role of “Russian pioneers who mastered the vast wilderness and added Siberia to Mother Russia.”
However, the composer suffered almost no harm from this conviction. But other people, primarily loyal enthusiasts of Siberia, and among them were both Russians and indigenous residents, both ordinary employees and professional researchers – yes, they suffered. Their fates have changed radically.
Nowadays, in the 2000s and 2000s, they are again trying to cancel Arnautov – but for the opposite reason: activists believe that he viewed Siberia, indigenous peoples and their musical traditions from a colonial position.
At the end of the novel, and importantly, the little man finally gets a voice, who, in essence, turns out to be the main victim in this whole story. He partly managed to restore justice by telling the truth about the ban on the opera, the informant, and Arnautov himself.
The unavoidable question is why did Kalogsky choose this particular form? In addition to a collection of facts, an obituary is a subjective interpretation of the deceased’s profession, dressed in distinctive speech structures that depend on the author’s worldview. When reading obituaries (and even working on them), you often find yourself feeling like there’s nothing left to say. An obituary or full biography is far from the same as life or fate. One may wonder how this gap can be bridged?
Kalogsky offers us a time-tested method – irony. It is the same paradox that the French writer and literary critic Anatole France once described as the final stage of disillusionment. Reconstructing this obituary forty times in a row, as if rehearsing the same death forty times, Kalugsky slowly gradually changes the mood of the text – from the comic to the tragic.
When we finally get to the last obituary and learn the truth about the past, we no longer read only about facts from the biography of the composer Arnautov. We are now witnesses to his moral choice and political compromises, his life and destiny, as well as a small collective tragedy. A tragedy, unknown until almost recently, occurred in a town abandoned due to the ban of the opera “The Legend of Karagay”.
And here the reader has no doubt: despite the strange experiments with form, this was the most realistic and deeply emotional novel.
Alex Mesrobov