One life among millions dead

It is a pity that the French title of Andrei Makine's latest novel about Russia, La Musique d'une Vie, has not been translated more literally into English for this edition. For Makine's title, like his story, reveals a polemical purpose. It picks out a life for novelistic contemplation; one life, from what appears, at first glance, to be an impenetrable collective tragedy or, worse still, a phenomenon to be explained away with a sociological label. A Life's Music is the reply of a creative writer's imagination, which deals in particulars, to the kind of theorising about society which deals in generalisation, and usually gets it wrong.

Less than a decade before the eclipse of Soviet communism, Russian emigre writer Alexander Zinoviev published Homo Sovieticus, a pessimistic analysis of the force of "social entropy" which he believed gave the communist system its stability. Under communism, individuals are free from the burdens of social responsibility and conscientious effort in their work, secure in the dismal conformity of their lives. For Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus is a creature capable of adapting to its threatening environment like a bug which survives evolutionary changes that destroy more complex life forms.

Zinoviev showed how, under communism, language itself was corrupted so that it became not only dangerous, but impossible to contradict the lies on which the system was founded. A dissident was not hailed by the masses as a witness to truth, but doomed to be bullied and silenced as a traitor to the collective, a disruptive element in an order whose raison d'etre was predictability. But, like a dissident voice, history is free and unpredictable. Though Zinoviev's portrait of collective Soviet man was full of compelling insight, events would soon make nonsense of his prophecy that stagnant communism would prove more durable than liberal democracy.

Like Zinoviev, the narrator of this short novel turns his gaze on his native land from the internalised vantage point of the West. At first, he can only look on his people in a spirit of despair and contempt.

Waiting in a railway station - a microcosm of Russia - "somewhere in the heart of the Urals", he passes the time by taking "a turn along the well-trodden paths of the national character, those accursed questions of Russian-ness ... A land outside of History. The crushing inheritance of Byzantium. Two centuries of the Tartar yoke. Five centuries of serfdom. Stalin. 'East is East'."

These phrases explain "everything and nothing," but Zinoviev's "devastatingly telling" term pins down the "impenetrable collection of lives" around him, gives definition to the blurred conglomeration of "wet overcoats, weary bodies, alcohol fumes and warm, tinned food" in the waiting room. Then he befriends a man in the crowd. As they travel together towards Moscow, this rough-knuckled old lag in a standard-issue coat and shapka tells the story of his smashed and stolen life. The term homo Sovieticus begins to lose its meaning, dwindling to nothing more than the marker of a vanished era, a way of dating an encounter with a personality.

Alexei Berg's story begins when he is a young pianist in Moscow in

1941. He is about to perform his debut concert when his intelligentsia parents are arrested. He turns fugitive. In the first days of the war against Germany, he steals the identity of one of the thousands of corpses strewn across the battlefields of the Ukraine, and becomes someone else: a fighter, a rough. He returns to Moscow after the war, scarred inside and out, as the chauffeur to a general whose life he once saved. The general's pretty daughter makes Berg an object of amorous experiments; she takes ingenuous erotic satisfaction from teaching the taciturn veteran to pick out clumsy tunes on the piano. When Berg finally breaks down and reveals his lost virtuoso self by performing impromptu at a reception in the general's apartment, he condemns himself to decades in the camps in eastern Siberia and the Arctic Circle. There he learns the fate of his parents.

Recent social histories of the Soviet period, such as Catherine Merridale's delicately researched Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia have done much to turn the ungraspable statistic of 20 million unjust deaths into some sense of as many private tragedies.

Paradoxically, it is Makine's attempt to turn one Soviet life into a work of art that diminishes the power of his polemic against the depersonalising language of statistics and generalisation. What happened in Russia in the 20th century escapes form. And it is not always a virtue of fiction to seek resolution and harmony, or even to be morally in the right.