SThey’ve been living in the same house for years, Matvej’s and Maria’s rented rooms are across the long hallway. You share the large kitchen and bathroom with four other parties. The single, 54-year-old Matvej has had a crush on his neighbor for a long time, who shares her room with her mother Varvara, her daughter Janka and her daughter Kroschka. Finally there is a kind of rendezvous in Matvej’s room, they drink Armenian cognac and get closer. Until suddenly the door opens, “a complete stranger” looks into the room and then apologizes for the disturbance, “he must have lost his way, apparently some walls have been rearranged”.
If one wonders how it came to be that Russia is the state it is today, then looking at the moment when future reformer Mikhail Gorbachev stepped in to begin his work of “transformation” seems promising. On the day of his election as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, March 11, 1985, Katerina Poladyan’s novel “Music of the Future” was performed. It begins in the early hours of the morning and ends at dusk.
Katerina Poladjan: “Music of the Future”. Novel. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2022. 192 p., hardcover, €22.
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Image: Publisher
The author, who was born in Moscow in 1971 and has lived in Germany since 1979, does not name the location, it bears features of the city of Vladivostok from “Hinter Sibirien”, the travel story that she published together with Henning Fritsch in 2016, but appears with its industrial plants , the crumbling houses, the harsh weather and the nearby wilderness as a place that might be anywhere in northern Russia and certainly far from the center of power in Moscow.
News such as that of the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev’s immediate predecessor, arrives here with a delay and at first in a strange way: before the official announcement, the radio plays Chopin’s piano sonata movement, which is customary in such cases, and the communist functionary Matvej, whom he lost due to insomnia in drives the communal kitchen, intones the song “Immortal Victims”, the funeral march for the dead insurgents of 1905, which was played in the 1980s at the public funeral ceremonies of the Central Committee General Secretaries Brezhnev, Andropov and Tschernenko, who died in quick succession.
Poladjan skilfully leaves these connections in the dark, some for a few chapters, others for the entire novel. However, it quickly becomes clear that it is up to the reader to pursue them. “Music of the Future”, which was published this spring and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, is a strikingly acoustically structured novel, even beyond such allusions, whose protagonists sing and hum, scream, sigh and whisper, as if hanging in an atmosphere in which many things remains unsaid, all the more away from such statements. Or, as in the case of mother Janka, who is not quite of age yet, who that evening wants to give a concert in the kitchen of the apartment building, as if singing were the lifesaver in an encrusted society. In the end someone else will give the concert in Janka’s place, with her guitar and her songs, while the singer herself has lost the confidence to make a difference in this way.
