European Reading Challenge #8

Swan Song – T.J. Binyon

With the success of Gorky Park (Martin Cruz Smith) and Kolymsky Heights (Lionel Davidson) in the early 1980s, publishers were more open to mysteries, thrillers, and adventures set in the Soviet Union.

This 1982 thriller takes a quiet Russian professor of English Literature into perils. During their college days, Vanya, Tanya, Alek, and Lyuba spent their nostalgic summer of lifetime. After graduation, while Vanya steered clear of politics with a job in academe, Alek jumped feet first into a career with KGB, keeping an eye on domestic sources of trouble like nationalism and religion. Tanya became an internationally recognized film director. Idealistic Lyuba became a teacher, first in the far east, but then in Tallinn, Estonia and Suzdal, the heartland of medieval Russia.

This adventure novel touches on the mysterious ‘Russian soul.’ Also, called the “Russian heart,” it is stereotypically moral, tough, and profound but also prone to pessimism and fatalism. In the manner of her ancestors, Lyuba, who is prone to engagement and commitment, gets involved with a religious group that combines mysticism with hysterical nationalism and knee-jerk xenophobia. Also persuasive are the nods to Soviet reality in the last decade before the system keeled over of a coronary, like little food in the stores, much stair climbing due to broken elevators, and widespread apathy and cynicism about the future. The story is narrated by Vanya.

Author Binyon was a professor of Russian literature so he had the historical knowledge to write a convincing story with the background of the development of various religious groups and movements that diverged from the established Russian Orthodox Church. They were characterized by their own interpretations of scripture, practices, and beliefs. Binyon even refers to the Skoptsy, 18th-century sectarians known for practicing self-castration as a means of getting a handle on lust. 

Anyway, in a yet another of never-ending examples in the history of not only Russia, in the novel bad people hijack the sincere religious inclinations of ordinary people.