Prague Night (Пражская ночь)
by Pavel Pepperstein
Synopsis
The prose of the writer and artist Pavel Pepperstein is marked by its rare combination of clear style and bizarre logic.
Pepperstein’s lead characters are, as a rule, not so much characters, as forces or symbols; thus, in Prague Night this ‘seemly and unremarkable’ man is Ilya Korolenko. Ilya describes himself like this: “By my calling I am a poet, I occasionally put a few words together, revel in their magic, in the their absurd sorcery; I am one of the few who still maintain that once sacred flame, which recently flared like a forest fire, but has now turned into the flow of the last cigarette of a dying giant.” What is more, he is the great-grandson of the writer Korolenko who wrote Children of the Underground. In addition to his poetic mission, Korolenko has another calling — the mission of the all-seeing angel who can literally kill with a look. In other words, Korolenko is a hired killer, arrived in Prague solely to wipe out the oligarch Orlov.
After a brief trip round Prague, enlivened by interpolated stories, Korolenko finds his victim in Saint Vitus’ Cathedral, famous for having been built over a period of nearly six hundred years, from the 14th century to the 20th. Pepperstein emphasises this image of the constantly renovated cathedral — when it is visited by his characters it is once again closed for restoration and can only be visited using a special key. Having dealt with Orlov, Korolenko heads to a conference about the Prague Spring and 1968 — the official reason for his trip - and on the road he falls into conversation with another character with a birdlike surname (Orlov comes from the word ‘eagle’). This person, an artist, draws his portrait. After the conference Korolenko ends up at an evening reception at the house of an American billionaire which serves as a gateway into Walpurgis Night. The main features of this short novel are fantasy, sensitivity and an artistic sensibility.