The Old Man by Yuri Trifonov

First published:Starik, 1978 (English translation, 1984)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1973, with flashbacks beginning in 1917

Locale: Russia

Principal Characters:

• Pavel Evgrafovich Letunov, the old man and protagonist
• Sergei Kirilovich Migulin, a hero of the Russian Revolution, later proclaimed a traitor
• Asya, Migulin’s wife and Pavel’s childhood friend
• Vladimir (Volodya), Asya’s cousin and first husband, also Pavel’s childhood friend
• Shura, Pavel’s uncle
• Vera, Pavel’s daughter
• Ruslan (Ruska), Pavel’s son
• Oleg Vasilevich Kandaurov, a government executive vying for the same dacha (summerhouse) that Pavel’s children want

The Novel

While the thrust of Yuri Trifonov’s plot in The Old Man concerns Pavel Letunov’s recollections of certain events during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, there is a complementary subplot in which Pavel is at odds with his own family regarding the acquisition of a dacha. It is 1973, and Pavel,the old man of the title, is spending the summer at his dacha near Moscow.He receives a letter from an old friend, Asya, which triggers his memories of the impetuous and violent days of the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed.

Through kaleidoscopic digression, Pavel reconstructs the events which led him, Asya, and her cousin Volodya to join the Bolsheviks, who eventually were to seize power and set Russia into a frenzied spin culminating in the bloody civil war. It was during the civil war that Sergei Migulin, a prominent revolutionary leader and hero, became the vortex of events embroiling Pavel and Asya, then Migulin’s wife; although a respected hero, Migulin was labeled a traitor and executed. Asya’s letter, years later, compels Pavel to search his memory to find the “truth” regarding Migulin’s trial and execution.

Pavel’s quest for the truth of these events leads him to other “truths” as well. His search for the ultimate truth becomes the leitmotif of the novel: What is truth? Is there a generic truth? Does truth exist a priori or a posteriori? Is truth based on ideology, or is it situational, depending on specific times and places?

In his youth, Pavel was infatuated with Asya and vied for her attention even though he was too young to warrant her notice as anything other than a good friend. Pavel, Asya, and Volodya were inseparable before and after the Revolution. Together they roamed the streets of Petrograd, caught up in the excitement of the Revolution: the protests, marches, proclamations, and meetings. The ideals of Pavel’s romantic revolutionary uncle Shura and of his activist mother stirred them. Those were heady times, but the memory of Migulin overshadows Pavel’s reflections.

Migulin was viewed as a counterrevolutionary and declared an outlaw and a traitor for disobeying orders. He was condemned and sentenced to death. Although the sentence was repealed, he was later executed.

In his youth, Pavel supported Migulin out of loyalty to the Revolution and to Asya. Yet as secretary of the revolutionary tribunal which condemned Migulin, Pavel admitted that Migulin had led his men to the southern front although he had been ordered not to undertake such an action, thereby admitting that said action was counterrevolutionary and treasonous in time of war. Thus, Pavel helped condemn Migulin to death. Did he feel justified in doing so because Migulin had won Asya’s love? In order to redeem himself, Pavel later wrote a favorable article restoring Migulin to his historical role as a revolutionary hero.

Fifty years later Pavel receives a letter from Asya. He visits her and asks why Migulin led the march to the southern front in 1919. Her answer reveals the “truth” as she knows it, or, more important, as it matters to her: She never loved anyone as much as she loved Migulin; all the other “facts” about him are long forgotten.

The subplot of the novel centers on the acquisition of a dacha that belonged to a woman who had no heirs at the time of her death. Pavel is irked by the way his daughter Vera and son Ruslan have become wrapped up in their quest for material gain. Their lives seem to revolve around the competition to get the summerhouse, which they think will make them happy—the answer to all of their problems. Their continual hounding of Pavel to use his influence as a venerable member of the Communist Party to help them win ownership of the dacha drives him to escape deeper into his recollections of a time when one’s concerns were of consequence. Pavel’s memory serves not only as an escape valve but also as a search for the truth behind others’ and his own actions.

Oleg Kandaurov, the principal rival for ownership of the contested dacha, is a cynical and amoral pragmatist whose selfish motives define his “truth.” Eventually he succumbs to an illness and is forced out of the competition despite his manipulations. As an ironic Chekhovian denouement, the government requisitions the land that the cluster of dachas occupies in order to build a residence for government workers. All of Pavel’s family’s and Kandaurov’s efforts have come to nothing.

Although Pavel mourns the lost years and time wasted, he rejoices in a life well lived, rich in experiences, and in the fact that he has survived, in spite of his trials. A graduate student, writing his dissertation on the Migulin affair, interviews Pavel and realizes that the latter conveniently forgot about his role in condemning Migulin, which, in a sense, illustrates that truth and belief are so closely related as to be difficult to distinguish one from the other.

The Characters

For the most part, the characters in The Old Man are personifications of various shades of “truth,” that is truth as each one sees or perceives it. Thus Shura, Pavel’s uncle, is not blinded by Bolshevik ideology but searches for the ultimate truth of his conscience by refusing to participate in the kangaroo court deliberating Migulin’s fate. In contrast, Bychin, a minor character, lets revenge color his truth in his dealings with counterrevolutionaries. Kandaurov’s truth is pragmatism, self-aggrandizement, and unequivocal cynicism.Others, such as Volodya, have misconstrued ideology as the real truth, thus making the ends justify the means.

All forms of truth are rationalizations—a mental game. One form of truth, however, is based on feelings and intuition. It is interesting to note that Yuri Trifonov, like Boris Pasternak before him in Doktor Zhivago (1957; Dr. Zhivago, 1958), imbues his female characters with a “female” intuition or sixth sense which transcends “male” logic and sees truth through the medium of feelings. After all that has happened, it is love that has sustained Asya and that is all that counts, no matter what the deductive reasoning regarding Migulin’s innocence or guilt may be. In another case, Asya’s mother, whose family has been all but decimated by the Revolution and the civil war, finds no comfort or solace in such “logical” platitudes for the cause of her distress as “historical necessity,” for they do not alleviate her pain and anguish. Her truth is the experience of bitterness and resentment. Thus truth is not to be found in documents or accounts, either actual or distorted, for these sources render only part of the total truth; not to include the feelings of all the participants leads to a perverted truth.

Critical Context

In The Old Man, Trifonov elaborates on the general theme of his earlier works, in which his characters reflect the gradual loss of idealism in modern Soviet society. Included in this group are Dom na naberezhnoi (1976; The House on the Embankment, 1983), Utolenie zhazhdy (1963; the quenching of thirst), and his trilogy: Obmen (1969; The Exchange, 1973), Prevaritalnye itogi (1970; Taking Stock, 1978), and Dolgoe proshchanie (1971; The Long Goodbye, 1978). What was once a revolutionary, vibrant world has gradually acquiesced to the bromides of conformity, self-satisfied commonness, and vulgar banality. A full belly does not a revolutionary make, or, as the German playwright Bertolt Brecht has said, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” (first gobble up your food and then talk about ethics). The hunger for change and improvement has turned into selfishness and complacency. Trifonov’s theme is not unlike Anton Chekhov’s portrayal of the emptiness and dullness in Russian society of the 1890’s.

Trifonov’s stream-of-consciousness technique is a seemingly disjointed sequence of images, reflections, and ideas linked together through association with similar reflections and images, triggered by the five senses. In other words, the “smell” or “feel” of an object may conjure up a similar smell or feel from one’s past experience. This style has been used since the turn of the century by such writers as Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, not to mention Leo Tolstoy’s so-called interior monologue technique.

Bibliography

Brown, Deming. Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, 1978.

Brown, Edward J. Russian Literature Since the Revolution, 1982.

Terras, Victor, ed. Handbook of Russian Literature, 1985.

Woll, Josephine. “Trifonov’s Starik: The Truth of the Past,” in Russian Literature Triquarterly. No. 19 (1986).