White Russians
There’s a certain type of essay in which a writer uses the occasion of the release of a book (or film or study or whatever else) to essentially write about whatever he or she wants that is tangentially related to the subject. This isn’t always a bad thing; the New York Review of Books often has this kind of writing, and it’s generally good and interesting. But it can also be frustrating for readers who want to know more about the thing promised to them in the article’s header.
A recent NYRB piece from Timothy Snyder purported to be a consideration of a novel called Paranoia, by the Belarussian (!) writer Victor Martinovich. It’s always a rare and welcome event when an American publications runs a review of an untranslated novel, much less one by a writer from Europe’s last dictatorship. And sometimes tapping a non-literary critic — someone like Snyder — as a book reviewer can produce great results. Snyder is an excellent historian of Eastern Europe and writes very well for the NYRB on the subject. It’s too bad then that he essentially used the occasion of Martinovich’s novel to write a primer on modern Belarus, focusing on its police-state security apparatus and its sycophantic relationship with Russia. All of it is interesting enough, but it seems like a 101-level class, whereas Snyder is certainly capable of going deeper. Perhaps there are things Paranoia reveals about modern Belarussian life that are beyond the reach of traditional histories; instead, Snyder has essentially told us that Paranoia resembles Belarussian life. There’s more here, waiting to be drawn out, and Belarus’s censors must agree: a few days after appearing in stores, all copies of the book “disappeared.”
1 Notes