Good literature | Terror and appeasement with Valeria Gordeev

Where does immortality go? The people who look after Lenin's preserved body work deep underground at Valeria Gordeev's. Photo: Unsplash/Hennie Stander A widespread fear fantasy today is that AI is getting smarter and people are getting dumber. How do you notice that? For example, the results of IQ tests. They got better throughout the 20th century, but in the 21st century that trend stopped and reversed, noted political scientist James R. Flynn. He saw the reason in the increasing media overstimulation - and the disappearance of sophisticated books.

Unfortunately, the literature gets worse from book fair to book fair because it is shorter, simpler and more uniform. Heinrich Böll meets Instagram: Everything should be immediately understandable, close to everyday life and far from the imagination. Most of the new releases in the big houses are designed to be immediately understandable. Associations and allusions come to the foreground and suppress complex narratives. Many novels, but also non-fiction books, seem like neat collections of notes; you jump from feeling to feeling like from voice message to voice message on your smartphone.

If James Flynn were still alive, you could tell him: There are demanding exceptions, even on the shortlist for the German Book Prize. For example, “The Cicada escapes from its shiny gold shell,” Valeria Gordeev's debut novel, which she worked on for ages. With an excerpt from it she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt in 2023. In it she describes how Konstantin meticulously and delusionally cleans the kitchen in an apartment that is no longer his. His mother Nadja and his sister Lada, who is 17 years younger than him, live there and are currently watching the hospital series "Emergency Room" on television in the living room, which is always about survival or, as Gordeev writes, about "terror and reassurance."

That is also the big theme of this impressive, but never boring novel on over 600 pages, in which Gordeev talks about the two siblings, very cheerfully and precisely formulated, yes, literary shaped - which is particularly noticeable in the banal contemporary German-language literature with its uniform, simple language and its situations with little experience instead of stories. Since Jan Brandt's 900-page hit "Against the World" (about religion, heavy metal and madness in East Frisia) from 2011, there has not been such a brilliant debut novel in this country.

Terror and appeasement: Gordeev deals in a playful way with the major depressive themes from politics and everyday life: war, no money, loneliness and insecurity. Lada and Konstantin came to Germany with their parents from the crumbling Soviet Union. Now Nadja, who comes from Ukraine, works in an institute for mycology and has to answer obscure questions about possible mushroom poisoning on the telephone hotline. If your children want to speak to you, they call there too.

Lada is a film scholar with almost no income, and Konstantin has returned to Moscow to work in a research institute that is involved in the eternal preservation of Lenin's body in Red Square. They both have a Russian oligarch as their godfather: Boris, who dreams of not having to die, but in a different way than poor Lenin, who never wanted to be exhibited in a personality cult. Konstantin's colleagues ironically call his corpse "the youth of today."

Lenin's body is ironically called "The Youth of Today."

Boris left the country, is extremely rich and very stingy. "The most common causes of death in this income group, at least when it comes to unnatural deaths: yacht accidents, crashes on board a private jet, burning up while returning from space." His godchildren are supposed to do small, poorly paid jobs for him. While Lada brings packages whose contents she doesn't know by bus from Ukraine to Berlin, Konstantin is forced to steal specimens and preserved body parts from the research institute for Boris. To do this, he has to descend into the Kafkaesque depths of the institute's archives, which are located under Red Square - all the way down, to the 9th floor underground, which can only be reached with an ancient elevator from which you never know whether you will be able to leave alive again.

The archive is in complete disarray. If Konstantin knocks over one of the shelves, no one will notice. This is similar to Lada's catastrophic living situation in Berlin, where she and her roommate are among the last residents of an apartment building that has been renovated or converted or destroyed for years. Because there are no other affordable apartments left, they live in the middle of a large construction site, with no natural light like Konstantin does when he works underground, because their windows are covered from the outside with advertising banners that smell "as if the street outside was being tarred, sooty-oily-heavy, as if tires and lubricating oil were being heated in a pan."

This is the contrast to the worries that rich people like Boris have about longevity, the symbol of which is the cicada hatching in the title of the novel. Above all, the unsustainable conditions for people without a lot of money are long-lasting, which is confirmed by a Russian laboratory manager for "experimental pharmacology" in Gordeev's case, who was asked in an interview whether death could soon become a "disease that can be cured"? His cryptic answer is that no medical progress will help if society's wealth is used by the "life destruction industry" to burn and kill tens of thousands of people in wars "as long as it serves the interests of the state."

Nevertheless, Gordeev, whose parents came to West Germany from the Soviet Union, brought an end to Russia's neo-imperialist war in Ukraine. There is an unspecified peace when Putin dies - in a plane accident. A circus artist is spectacularly chosen as his successor, who is only twelve years old, but is seen as a reincarnation of the House of Romanov, the old tsarist family, and is then crowned the new tsar. Meanwhile, strange red spots appear on Lenin's body - are they the stigmata of a saint? To investigate this, the Vatican sends an expert in blood miracles to Moscow on a secret mission. Gordeev reports on this in detail, as well as on transporting a second-hand washing machine through Berlin without a car or on a colleague of Konstantin's who regularly distributes pierogi in the office because they helped his mother survive the siege of Leningrad in World War II, which is recounted in detail.

It is a multi-layered book that Gordeev has also provided with minimalist illustrations. They seem like additional gimmicks in the impressive, almost lavishly presented range of topics in this book, in which Gordeev never loses track and often comes up with very funny twists, for example the surprising result of Boris's efforts for immortality shortly before the end of the novel.

A very good book, really. It would be a great novel in the classic sense of Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Jonathan Franzen if Gordeev had developed all of these stories from a single story. That would of course be awesome. For Gordeev, they function as loosely connected literary masterpieces that she serves one after the other, much like a brilliant menu in a restaurant that you won't soon forget.

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