Published by Doubleday on March 10, 2020
Good Citizens Need Not Fear is an interlocking collection of wry, subversive stories about people who are living absurd lives in Ukraine. The first five take place while the Soviet Union was intact. The last four are post-breakup. Before the fall, people have money but nothing to spend it on. After the fall, there are fifteen brands of sausage but nobody can afford them.
Bureaucrats are the foil of the Soviet-era “Novostroïka.” Daniil’s building has no heat, but when he complains to the town council, they tell him the building does not exist. Deciding that Daniil is wasting the town’s gas by heating the apartment with a stove, the town turns off the gas. At the canning combine, Daniil pretends to work while the combine pretends to pay him. Daniil must go to extreme lengths to prove that his building exists — and perhaps to prove to himself that his own existence is real.
“Little Rabbit” introduces baby Zaya, who has been abandoned or orphaned and thus taken to the baby house. At five, her quirky nature causes the Commission to label her as a defective part in the Soviet machine, so she is sent to a psychoneurological internat for rehabilitation. Zaya, it turns out, is not so easily contained.
A poet in the Kirovka Cultural Club named Konstantin also earns rehabilitation when he is accused of telling a political joke. Since most of the words in the joke have been redacted from the report, the narrator of “Letter of Apology,” who has been assigned to rehabilitate Konstantin, does not know what the joke might have been. The narrator imagines himself destined for the Honor Guard, but after working with Konstantin and his beguiling wife Milena, the narrator will be lucky to keep his job. This is the most amusing story in the collection.
By the time “Miss USSR” takes place, Konstantin is running the Kirovka Cultural Club. He copies the American idea of holding a beauty pageant, but he is reprimanded for allowing an outlandish Ukranian beauty named Orynko to win on grounds that are suspected to be political. Konstantin is ordered to revoke her title, which he neglects to do. When his superior decides to hold a Miss USSR pageant, Konstantin wants to enter Orynko as Miss Ukraine, but she has been sent away. Konstantin recruits Zaya from the internat to stand as her replacement, leading to a bizarre chain of events that turn Konstantin into a local hero.
Konstantin returns in the post-Soviet story “Lucky Toss.” He has now purchased the apartment next to his own, where he displays a saint, charging pilgrims for the privilege of visiting her. He employs the bureaucrat who tried to rehabilitate him as a guard. The story takes a mystical turn after the guard accidentally breaks the saint’s teeth and then his own. “Lucky Toss” is one of only two stories in the book that didn’t appeal to me.
A couple of stories revolve around bootlegs of western record albums that are pressed into x-rays and thus known as “bone records.” “Bone Music” is set in the Soviet era. Smena has the luxury of living alone in a two-room apartment, but might lose it if she is sent to prison for making bootleg recordings of decadent Western rock ‘n’ roll. The post-Soviet story “Roach Brooch” recalls how a grandfather refused to get a tumor removed because its existence entitled him to a free monthly x-ray of his guitar-shaped pelvis. Bone records are even more valuable as post-Soviet memorabilia that tourists love to acquire. The story is ultimately about grandparents who feel abandoned by their children.
Finally, in the post-Soviet “Homecoming,” Zaya returns to the now shuttered internat. Playing interrogator or torturer or prison guard, she works for a business that recreates the experiences of Ivan Denisovich for tourists. The rather tame experience exposes tourists to an experience less harsh than the lives of the homeless people they see from the internat’s windows — until Zaya elevates their terror. The story, the last in the volume, reunites Zaya with Konstantin and gives the collection a sense of closure.
The least satisfying story, “The Ermine Coat,” features Milena as a seamstress who makes an ermine coat for the child of a wealthy Italian. She hopes to earn a commission that will allow her sister and niece to emigrate to Canada, a dream that the niece undermines.
The tragicomic stories in Good Citizens Need Not Fear illuminate life in Ukraine. I was struck by the similarity of living without freedom (during the Soviet days) and living with unbridled freedom (in the post-Soviet version of the Wild West). They are flip sides of the same coin of misery. The Soviet-era stories have more energy and bite, but the collection as a whole gives the reader a sense of the absurdity that characterized Ukrainian life as the nation transitioned from a Soviet to an independent state.
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