Sokolov's Dreamscape: In-Between Memory and Madness
Dacha [ˈdæʧə]
noun
​
A second home (third, after school), usually inhabited by city dwellers in summer. Located in the exurbs. Comes with a garden, vegetable beds, and often a faulty water system. Not to be confused with a country house: dacha is an inherited burden of responsibility. A remorseless thing that will make the most serious gentleman get on his knees and start pulling weeds.
The dacha is where we first meet our nameless narrator, the boy “so-and-so” of Sasha Sokolov’s novel “A School for Fools,” who, unlike us, seems to be utterly indifferent to time or place, or anything else that has to do with objective truth. We meet him on the pond near the dacha. The dacha his father has sold and built. Or built and sold. In this book, the difference is artificial.
With his first sentence, Sokolov plants uncertainty, sets up a tone, and reaches back to the very essence of book writing: “Right, but how to begin, with what words? It doesn’t matter, begin with the words: There, on the pond at the station.”
In 1976, the famous poet and novelist Vladimir Nabokov, known for his genius writing and for his unsparing assessments of fellow authors — he once described Hemingway’s prose as “something about bells, balls, and bulls,” and called Dostoevsky a “slapdash comedian” — surprised his publishers with the following letter:
“I have read Sokolov’s “A School for Fools” — an enchanting, tragic, and touching book.”
It certainly is all that. The novel’s enchantment lies in its intermittent narration, mesmerizing allusions, and melodious chimes of enigmatic words. A water-lily Nymphaea Alba and a bird Nightingale coexist within a rustic countryside. These exotic words, shrouded by a mysterious haze, sound almost absurd in such a context, but charming, nevertheless.
There is no structure to the plot, only outlines. A boy with a condition reminiscent of a split personality disorder converses with the other, painting an image of his untethered routine. Accounts of chasing butterflies and playing accordion at his grandma’s grave are distorted by his unique perception of things and time, “you do understand that not everything is right with my memory. And you think all is well with mine? All right, forgive me, please, forgive me, I didn't want to interrupt you.”
In Sasha’s imagination, a Milanese fortress exists just outside his dacha; Leonardo Da Vinci converses with the boy’s long-dead teacher, who sometimes is called Pavl, sometimes Savl — a reference to Saul-Paul the Apostle from the New Testament. Nothing is constant in this novel, including names, which the boy disregards as “arbitrary.” His love interest, for instance, often appears under the names of Veta Acatova, white Rose of the Winds and Rosa Vetrova. Sometimes, she is a thirty-year-old teacher, sometimes — a young girl and a “sepulchral flower”, and sometimes — dead. Some scholars go as far as to claim that the only characters in the novel who exist outside Sasha’s mind are the boy’s mother and father.
The timeline of the novel is similar. Boy(s) make up stories, confuse each other, argue, and simply wonder at the surrounding world. Sokolov’s prose is subtle yet elusive: beautiful in its obscurity and confusion. The lines are infinite. They run incessantly through the pages like trains along the branch lines, turning into the trees and acacia branches, turning into vetka (Russian for a branch) and Vetka Acatova (a nickname for Elizaveta). Certain descriptions reflect an extraordinary metamorphosis of the narrator’s thought:
“… sleep sleep branch permeated with creosote in the morning wake up and bloom later finish blooming pour your petals in the eyes of the signal posts and dancing in the rhythm of your wooden heart laugh at train stations sell yourself to those who pass by or depart cry and shout getting naked in the mirrored compartments what’s your name I’m called Vetka I’m a branch of acacia I’m a branch of the railroad I’m Veta impregnated by the gentle bird called Nightingale I’m pregnant with the future summer and with the crush of the freight train here take me take me I’m waiting anyway…”
This remarkable novel, published in 1976, marked Sokolov’s literary debut. He wrote it while living as a recluse in the x woods, drawing on stories of patients in Russia’s best-known mental hospital, which he had learned at first hand. Sokolov’s own life story resembles the fervid descriptions in his novel. The author was born in Canada in 1943 to a family of Soviet embassy workers. When the boy turned three, the Sokolovs fled the country. His father happened to be an undercover Soviet agent, who had been collecting information on nuclear weapons at the behest of the former NKVD leader, Lavrentiy Beria. From safe and welcoming Canada, Sasha landed in a post-war Soviet reality. There, he experienced many things, including the white walls of a psychiatric ward, where he was committed twice, though in perfect health. He attempted to flee the Soviet Union and return to the West several times in the 1970s, finally succeeding in 1975, the year before he became an author.
“A School for Fools” is a text that transcends itself, a meta-text. It’s not an accurate representation of mental illness but an attempt to imitate the unconscious. The articulate games that Sokolov plays with his reader have a timeline and words that reflect a carefully conducted experience, not an arbitrary flow of consciousness. The unique rhythms of his prose and literary devices are so native to the text that they come through even in translation. Some things aren’t so easy to interpret as, but Alexander Boguslawski, translator of the new 2015 edition, wonderfully clarifies the most vital points in footnotes.
Sasha Sokolov—one of the few Soviet writers whose works are considered postmodernist for their intertextuality, unreliability, blurred boundaries, and stream-of-consciousness prose—is alive today, and living in the Canadian mountains, where he works as a ski instructor. Now 80, he has not published a work of fiction in nearly four decades, though he is rumored to be writing still. The world may never know the many characters who have existed outside Sokolov’s mind these last decades, but with School for Fools, he leaves an enigmatic, beguiling record of an unfettered mind in a trackless time.