Solovyov and Larionov (Соловьев и Ларионов)
by Evgeny Vodolazkin
Synopsis
Solovyov is born into provincial obscurity in a railway halt far from urban civilisation, where he becomes a devotee of the tiny local library. At sixteen he sets of to St Petersburg to study history at university. His topic is handed to him: the story of one General Larionov. This unpromising task soon intrigues the young scholar, even obsesses him: this is no ordinary General. Not only did he fight for the monarchist Whites during the Civil War, he did so with bloody distinction: so how did he manage to live unharmed to distinguished old age in the Soviet Union, on a Soviet pension, cutting an imposing figure on the Yalta beaches and leaving behind a son and a volume of memoirs? Larionov’s survival is the mystery at the heart of this gripping novel.
The budding young historian sets off to Crimea to look for some lost pages from the General’s diary. Along the way he finds many things he did not expect, not least the charming Zoya, who works at Yalta’s Chekhov Museum. Solovyov’s adventures combine the twists and turns of a great detective novel—after all what is a researcher if not Philip Marlowe with footnotes?—with a sense of the absurd and a blistering send-up of academia, both in the narrated action, such as the hilarious goings on at the conference ‘General Larionov as Text’, and in the meta-textual games which Vodolazkin delights in.
The book’s wry humour and compelling mystery make this best-seller a rare commodity – a truly intelligent page-turner. This heady concoction is underpinned not only by real philosophical depth, but by a link with reality: the novel is dedicated to the academic-author’s grandfather, a one-time member of the White Army who not only survived the aftermath of the war, but, by remaining suitably vague, managed to win some prestige as a veteran of the Civil War.