BOOK NOTES: Summer reading

A crime story and social satire set in the post-Soviet milieu

by Oksana Zakydalsky

The authors of two novels published this year, one British, the other American, have some things in common. Both authors have "day jobs" and for both these are debut novels. Marina Lewycka, author of "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," is a lecturer in media and public affairs at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK while Alexander Motyl, author of "Whiskey Priest," is a professor of political science at Rutgers University - Newark, as well as a painter. (In the space of three days, April 14-16, Prof. Motyl delivered a paper at the Association for the Study of Nationalities Conference at Columbia, had a presentation of his book and opened an exhibit of his paintings at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York).

Both novels have contemporary Ukrainian themes. Ms. Lewycka's book deals with the attempts of a bombshell from Ternopil to get residence status in Britain by marrying an elderly widower, while "Whiskey Priest" is set in the sordid milieu of former KGB spies-turned-hit men for the mafia, money laundering, grant money embezzlement and the international sex trade.

"Whiskey Priest," by Alexander J. Motyl. New York: Universe Inc., 2005. 143 pp.

Although having a good smattering of social satire as well, the genre of Alexander Motyl's novel is the hard-hitting crime story, more specifically, the pulp fiction novels of Spillane and Chandler, albeit set in the sordid post-Soviet milieu and imbued with the professor's inside track on its academic moochers.

"Whiskey Priest" opens in Vienna - the border town on the front lines of the Cold War (a war whose echo runs through the story). Several mentions of a "fetish for the color orange" place the story sometime in 2004. The reader is immediately plunged into a violent scenario as, one by one, three American academics attending an international conference are violently dispatched: one dies in a cable car accident, the second falls off a ferris wheel and the third is stabbed with a stiletto. They are part of a quartet of academics involved in a $10 million, partly USAID-funded project on building civil society.

Due to a stroke of luck, the fourth academic and leader of the group - Igor Bazarov - escapes a similar fate and becomes a fugitive from the killer. He is an American citizen, a Russian national born in Odesa who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s by marrying a Jew. To escape his pursuer, he flees from Vienna to Kyiv then to Lviv, on the way relying on help from a network of former colleagues and friends from his Soviet days.

The perpetrator of the murders is one Anatoly Filatov, currently a member of the Russian FSB, at the same time carrying out orders of the Russian mafia. Formerly a KGB killer who specialized in assassinations, he is the "whiskey priest" of the title. As the author explains, this is a priest who has lost his faith but still continues with the rituals. "I fill the chalice with whiskey because I know that the wine will never become God's blood. I drink from it because the ritual continues. And I drink from it, still, eagerly and thirstily, because the ritual is all there is, because nothing else exists," says Filatov.

He pursues Bazarov from Vienna to Kyiv to Lviv, relying on his former KGB network, commenting on what has not really changed in Ukraine since Soviet times. "My country was the Soviet Union. I am a Soviet man with no home." Filatov joined the KGB to fight enemies of communism - "they won, we lost, I am a whiskey priest and a hit man for the mafia - killing used to be a sacramental rite. Now it is my only hold on life. It makes this life bearable, tolerable and indeed possible. At the same time, killing has become pointless," he says.

The third main character is one Jane Sweet, Mickey Spillane fan and cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, who is given the job of investigating the murder of the three Americans. American-born, neé Ivanka Svit, she is the daughter of post-war émigrés to the U.S., steeped in the refugee history of her family, who escapes the community into a diplomatic career. She remembers her parents and grandmother always talking about "the war" - her parents and baba spoke only of life back home, continued to live in a world that no longer existed and referred to their Long Island neighbors as "foreigners."

Jane has the opportunity to actually see the world they left behind but it is, of course, not that world at all. Her feelings of ambiguity regarding her homeland stay with her continuously "... their memories are not mine, but I have memories of their memories. Does that make this place my home?" The heroic past has become the sordid present. While tracking Bazarov many things in Ukraine seem familiar to her. "I thought I never knew these things. But obviously I did know them. And now, I can't help remembering them - even though I don't remember ever knowing them."

The author provides satirical insights into the academic milieu, particularly the current "democratization of the post-Soviet space" scene, which has given second wind to both displaced Soviet specialists ("I do Sovietology - or post-Sovietology, as we call it now") and émigré academics. When Jane goes to the Vienna conference to get information on the three murdered professors, she notes that "Everybody hated them not because they were sons of bitches but because they openly acted like sons of bitches; that's where academics draw the line." Prof. Motyl portrays the academics as socially gauche - one licks the dribbling hummus off his tie - and involved in bizarre research projects such as "gender construction among the S&M crowd in Russia."

Jane does discover the true nature of the quartet's project "to empower women and build civil society" by setting up women's institutes throughout Europe and the Middle East and she eventually meets Filatov in Lviv. Presenting himself as a Russian filmmaker, he charms her and after getting her drunk ... you get the picture. Anyone who has read Mickey Spillane - and can substitute hero Mike Hammer with a disillusioned Ukrainian American female diplomat - will probably guess the ending. Prof. Motyl does not disappoint.

(A note on Mickey Spillane: Spillane's books were the "under the covers" reading of my junior high school days in the 1950s. My non-English reading Ukrainian parents were not aware of "unsuitable literature," but Spillane's paperbacks had rather lurid covers, which meant they had to be kept out of sight. By making Sweet a Spillane fan, Prof. Motyl both emphasizes the 1950s crime story antecedents of his novel and brings in suggestions of Spillane's gritty urban settings which were not unlike those of Soviet Ukraine, which Filatov still sees around him.)

KYIV

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 24, 2005, No. 30, Vol. LXXIII

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