Book Review

Lizka and Her Men

By Alexander Ikonnikov

Published by Serpent's Tail

Alexander Ikonnikov’s first novel (and the first of his works to be translated into English), is the short but very snappy tale of Lizka, a young woman muddling through both her personal emotional turmoil and the mayhem of the contemporary Russian state.

Totalling a brief 155 pages, it nonetheless covers a considerable amount of ground, through perestroika to the final collapse of the USSR, and from Lizka’s childhood, through affairs with alcoholic con artists and rising political stars, to the end of her marriage to a tram driver.

The small town of Lopukhov is the setting for the whirlwind opening chapter, which dashes off the history of Lizka’s grandmother and mother (and their men) before sketching Lizka’s childhood and adolescence. Lizka’s early passion for a young man is extinguished by his callousness and her burgeoning popularity destroyed by his bragging, and she flees, exchanging the town she has outgrown for ‘the city of G’.

Eagerly anticipating her new life, away from the ‘wretched, provincial’ town of her youth, she is quickly disappointed in love once again, but discovers warm and supportive friendship in the gloomy, cramped quarters of a student hostel.

Having grasped the opportunity to become a nurse mainly as an escape route, Lizka’s romantic entanglements form, if not the focus of her life, then certainly the structure of it. Under the patronage of Victor Mikhailovich, the young politician, she forgets her old attitudes and enjoys the privileges this partnership brings her.

Later, when she has left Victor for her soon-to-be husband Artur, she joins him as a tram driver, and this career leads her to cross paths with the men who will try to take Artur’s place as her marriage crumbles – or, to be more exact, throws them quite literally into her path.

Yet as much as the novel is about her men, it’s also about her women. As such, there are some delightfully likeable characters – the quick-witted and practical Nina, who charges to Lizka’s rescue on more than one occasion, is one of the standouts here – to go alongside the gallery of rogues, charmers and borderline psychopaths that romance the heroine.

In her longing for fulfilment, there’s something of the Madame Bovary about Lizka, but her fate isn’t so dreadful, nor her capacity for self-deception quite so great. Her last (as far as we know) liaison is with a poet, which Emma Bovary would have gloried in, but Lizka is more circumspect by this point – a fact acknowledged by her lover, who believes passionately in their union but suspects that one day she may simply disappear from his life.

Lizka’s noncommittal attitude and the poet’s sense of impermanence could probably be interpreted as a comment on the growing chaos of the new Russia, but Ikonnikov isn’t quite so obvious. There’s a careful, if faint, line of continuation drawn between Lizka and her female forebears that suggests she’s simply learnt the lessons of the past.

Whether her conclusions are correct or not isn’t really the point – both a whistle-stop tour of post-Soviet Russian society and a personal tale of passions fulfilled and thwarted, this sharp and funny novel eschews explanation in favour of evocation, and it’s all the better for it.

Reviewed by Rosa Anderson, Booktrust Literature Promotions Coordinator

Translator: Andrew Bromfield