To many of us in the West, it might seem odd public opinion in
today's Russia reveals a persistent and growing nostalgia for, yes, the
days of Communist rule.
The nostalgia is ambivalent. Modern Russians don't yearn for
censorship, Stalinist purges, or command economy shortages. No, the
nostalgia is for something more ineffable: a certain social
connectedness everyone in the street felt, enabling them to cooperate
and survive.
The particular form this Russian nostalgia takes is the subject of
Andrei Makine's Confessions of a
Fallen Standard-Bearer. A novel of memory and meditation, the
story is of a small community lost to history. Narrated by an older
Alyosha (now an emigre writer in America), he and his best friend
Arkady grew up bugling and drumming for the Young Pioneers--the
Communist organization for youths--while marching red-scarved under
Soviet banners.
![[book cover]](makine.gif)
But Confessions of a
Fallen Standard-Bearer is less about belief in the banners under
which they marched and more about how and why they lived as they did:
what the "connection" at the center of their communal lives was. So, as
such, an evocation of the community in which the two youths became men.
Their fathers, their mothers, their extended family--all contributed to
the richness of their young lives.
Both youths know the personal sacrifice each father made during the
Great War. Alyosha's father, Pyotr, came home without legs and
practices a stationary trade, paradoxically, that of shoe cobbler.
Yakov's injury is more the psychological toll of survivor's guilt.
Although each father's war injury is consequential and permanent, it
doesn't subtract one whit from the community they inspire and foster
for Alyosha and Arkady.
It is for such fond memories Alyosha speaks. In evocative and
impressionistic language, author Makine summons a delicious nostalgia
he, as a Communist youth growing up in the former Soviet Union,
remembers well.
In sum, Confessions of a Fallen
Standard-Bearer shows an emotional yearning for what was lost
after Marxist-Leninism was consigned to history's dustbin. Yes, we
Westerners might have cheered Boris Yeltsin and his "economic shock
therapy." But the followup of crony and gangster capitalism, the
wholesale plundering of State-owned enterprises in the name of
comrades-turned-plutocrats only leaves the Russian Everyman wondering,
We gave up what for this? Read Makine's meditative novel about this
potent and peculiar Russian nostalgia for a social connection now lost.
Confessions of a Fallen Standard Bearer by Andrei Makine, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, Arcade Publishing, New York, 2000, 130 pp., ISBN: 978-1559-705295.
Read the
story collection, The Cat
at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable
formats:
.mobi
(Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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