his worlds, the sudden feeling that you (and they) might not have understood their “true” state after all—the most wonderfully startling moments of his work can be found. Various of Volodine’s (and his heteronyms’s) works touch on this in different ways: someone we thought to be human suddenly appears to be a rampaging giant insect, animals speak with a human voice, a train journey goes on for days and we still haven’t left the city. Are we really on a train at all? we might ask ourselves. Did that woman suddenly sprout feathers? Is she a woman or in fact a bird? Is that narrator exorcising a family of ghosts or is it in fact he who is the ghost?
Volodine’s worlds are vertiginous and strange, sometimes absurd, sometimes funny, often disturbing. But nothing is arbitrary in them—and this for me is what makes Volodine’s work so much more resonant than that of many absurd or surreal writers. Even if the situation is absurd, you get the sense that Volodine is playing for keeps, that the philosophical and political investigations he is engaged in are real and that he cares deeply about the people who populate his fiction. Zuckerman’s very fine translation captures not only this aspect of Volodine’s work, but also that of Volodine’s musicality.
The more Volodine you read, the more you appreciate the intricacy of what he is doing. One of the key features of Volodine’s work comes in the echoes that operate both within individual books and between books. The more you read, the more you come to understand, and even reconsider, what you have already read. Each book transforms slightly the books read before it.
There is no other writer I know of so able to conjoin non-realist fiction with such honest revelation of the political unconscious of our time. There is no other writer who destabilizes narrative in a way that seems so absolute and so firmly connected to his project. And, in addition, there is no other writer whose project seems at once so consistent from book to book and yet so unique from book to book. Indeed, Volodine’s work gives the impression of being a living, breathing thing, a constantly developing and changing creature. His is a major, necessary work, and Radiant Terminus is a wonderful and powerful entry into it, a perfect place to start.
CONTENTS
part one
KOLKHOZ
part two
ODE TO THE CAMPS
part three
AMOK
part four
TAIGA
1
• The wind came toward the plants again and it caressed them with nonchalant strength, it bent them harmoniously and it lay upon them with a purr; then it ran through several more times, and, when it was done with them, their scents sprang back up: savory sage, white sage, absinthe.
The sky was covered with a thin varnish of clouds. Just beyond, the invisible sun shone. It was impossible to look up without being dazzled.
At Kronauer’s feet, the dying woman groaned.
—Elli, she sighed.
Her mouth half-opened as if she was about to talk, but she did not say anything.
—Don’t worry, Vassia, he said.
Her name was Vassilissa Marachvili.
She was thirty years old.
Two months earlier, she was walking deftly down the streets, skipping, in the capital on the Orbise, and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to turn as she passed, because her appearance as a joyful, egalitarian fighter made hearts warm again. The situation was bad. Men needed to see faces like hers, to come close to bodies filled with freshness and life. They smiled, and then they went to the outskirts to be killed on the front lines.
• Two months earlier—an eternity. The downfall of the Orbise had happened as predicted, immediately followed by exodus and a completely empty future. The city centers flowed with the blood of reprisals. The barbarians had reclaimed power, just like everywhere else on the planet. Vassilissa Marachvili had wandered with a group of partisans for several days, and then the resistance had dispersed, and then died out. So, with two comrades in disaster—Kronauer and Ilyushenko—she managed to get around the barriers erected by the victors and enter the empty territories. A pathetic fence had forbidden her entrance. She crossed it without the slightest tremor. She would never go back to the other side. There would be no return, and the three of them knew it. They were fully aware that they were trailing the Orbise’s decline, that they were sinking with it into the final nightmare. The path would be difficult, that too they knew. They wouldn’t meet anyone, and they’d have to depend on their own strength, on what would remain of their own strength before the first burns. The empty areas harbored no fugitives or enemies, the radiation levels were terrifying, they hadn’t diminished for decades, and they promised every interloper radiation death and promised nothing else. After having crawled under the second fence’s barbed wire, they began to make their way southeast. Forests without animals, steppes, deserted villages, abandoned roads, railroad tracks invaded by plants—nothing they passed unnerved them. The universe vibrated imperceptibly and it was calm. Even the nuclear power plants, which had rendered the subcontinent uninhabitable through their bouts of insanity, even these damaged reactors—sometimes darkened, always silent—seemed harmless, and often, out of defiance, it was those places they chose to bivouac.
They had walked twenty-nine days in all. Very quickly they felt the consequences of radiation exposure. Sickness, weakening, disgust at existence, not to mention vomiting and diarrhea. Then their degradation sped up and the last two weeks were terrible. They kept progressing, but, when they lay down on the ground for the night, they wondered if they weren’t already dead. They wondered that without irony. They didn’t have any facts for an answer.
Vassilissa Marachvili fell into something that barely resembled life. Exhaustion had carved her features; the radioactive dust had attacked her body. She had more and more trouble talking. She couldn’t keep going.
• Kronauer leaned over her and walked his hand over her forehead. He didn’t know how to soothe her. He pressed at the sweat that was seeping from the ends of her eyebrows, and then he set to disentangling the black strands of hair stuck to her feverish skin. A few hairs stayed between his fingers. It had started falling out.
Then he got up and looked around the countryside again.
The panorama had something immortal about it. The immensity of the sky overpowered the immensity of the meadow. They were on a small hill and they could see far. Iron tracks cut the image in two. The land had once been covered with wheat, but over the course of time it had returned to the wilderness of prehistoric grains and mutant plants. Four hundred meters from the spot where Kronauer was hiding, at the bottom of the slope, the rails went along the ruins of a former sovkhoz. On the place that, fifty years ago, had been the heart of a communal village, agricultural facilities had endured the assaults of time. Dormitories, pigsties, or warehouses had collapsed upon themselves. Only the nuclear power plant and a massive doorway were still upright. Above the pharaonic pillars, a symbol and a name could be made out: “Red Star.” The same name was inscribed on the small power plant, half worn away but still legible. Around the buildings intended for habitation, roads and
