Andrei Bitov graduated from the Leningrad Mining Institute but chose to become a writer rather than a geologist. His new novel, Pushkin House (the second of his works translated into English), will probably share the “general acclaim” that greeted his short stories in Life in the Windy Weather, published a year ago. It is skillful enough to attract attention, and the varied typefaces, unfinished sentences, hints, and empty spaces between the paragraphs will impress snobbish critics with the many different levels of meaning.

Eager literary explorers will have inexhaustible opportunities to draw parallels, to trace sources, and to perform their mental aerobics in essays that fill the pages of magazines specializing in literary theory and criticism.

Bitov’s Lev Odoevtsev is the essence of all Russian classical heroes so far—an aristocrat born in Petersburg, with slightly confused ambitions and ideas, partially an idiot (though not a gambler), on the verge of having a duel to the death with his arch-enemy. He is obsessed all the while with a Nastasya Filipovna under a different name. His crucial flaw, however, is to have been born in modern Soviet Russia, thereby ruining his chances for a respectable tragic ending.

Besides intentionally constructing his book on the foundations laid by Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky—their writings, destinies, and heroes, and their undisputable role in establishing the greatness of the Russian written word—Bitov cannot refrain from further interventions, elaborations, and comments, like a baker convinced that his already rich cake needs an additional cup of sugar.

By serving us Lyova’s loves, friends, and power games in one version as well as all the other possible ones, Bitov tries to tell us that in today’s Russia not only heroes are killed before they are born, but so is art itself. His final statement about not wanting to deal with his hero anymore because he does not wish him incarcerated in a dusty volume or locked in a determined destiny is meant as a gesture of solidarity with all the possible heroes strangled by the bleak everyday life of his country with its background of labor camps, party secretaries, and mass parades for the nth anniversary of the revolution. But Bitov falls into his own trap: his thesis that such a sequel to greatness both in art and life is more than tragic—that is, his thesis of the impossibility of a book—is an epitaph altogether lost in his weighty volume. After all, there is no proof that the world of imagination has been so depopulated since Bulgakov’s times.

Unwittingly, Bitov admits that himself: in this novel there are marvelous passages glowing with life. He gives a wonderful sketch of the two Natashas coming from who-knows-where to the spontaneous party at the Pushkin House, Lyova’s place of employment. Their hair wrapped in gauze, they sit beside each other on a worn-out sofa pretending not to know why they are there and absolutely refusing to take vodka; instead, they drink their tea from the saucers. Bitov would have done better to trust his own mastery instead of striving for more.

[Pushkin House, by Andrei Bitov; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux]