A Terrible Country: A Novel - Couverture souple

"This earnest and wistful but serious book gets good, and then it gets very good. . . . [Gessen] writes incisively about many things here but especially about, as the old saw has it, how it is easier to fight for your principles than live up to them. . . . This artful and autumnal novel, published in high summer, is a gift for those who wish to receive it."
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Excellent. . . . In its breadth and depth, its sweep, its ability to move us and philosophize . . . A Terrible Country is a smart, enjoyable, modern take on what we think of, admiringly, as 'the Russian novel'—in this case, a Russian novel that only an American could have written."
—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books

"[A] lighthearted yet morally serious novel."
—Vadim Nikitin, The London Review of Books

"Hilarious, heartbreaking . . . A Terrible Country may be one of the best books you'll read this year. . . . One of the pleasures of the novel is listening to Andrei's hyper-intelligent, wry and ironic voice. . . . The other unforgettable character is Andrei's grandmother, an indomitable force of nature. Gessen's portrait of her is tender, and readers will be hard-pressed to find a more nuanced and poignant depiction of what it means to lose your memory. . . . Gessen's genius is in showing us how and why Russia is and isn't a terrible country. And how, in its ruthless devotion to market capitalism, the former socialist state bears a striking resemblance to our own."
—Ann Levin, Associated Press

“Hilarious. . . . To understand Russia, read A Terrible Country.”
—Time

"[Andrei's] wry observations about Moscow's day-to-day—his tour through his own family history, his grandmother's stuck-in-time apartment, his struggle to join hockey games and party in nightclubs—are completely engrossing. It's portraiture, showing us a place we may think we know but don't . . . A Terrible Country is a splendid guidebook."
—Entertainment Weekly

"My own feelings towards this complexly ambivalent novel aren't complex or ambivalent in the least. I loved it and expect others will too."
—The Boston Globe

"A Terrible Country is filled with moments of levity. . . . Gessen has shown how literature, academia, and anti-capitalism—topics often pushed to the periphery of political debate—have in fact much to say about the dehumanizing effects of neoliberalism. Tolstoy, who by the end of his life opposed private property, renounced the copyright to his literary works, and started a school for peasants, would probably like it."
—Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic

"Laser-true and very funny . . . Gessen evokes not only convincingly, but indispensably, something exceedingly rare in modern American fiction; genuine male vulnerability. There's enough heart here to redeem every recent male novel that's aimed for it and found solipsism instead . . . You won't read a more observant book about the country that has now been America's bedeviling foil for almost a century."
—The New York Times Book Review

“A Terrible Country tells the reader a lot about contemporary Russia and, importantly, lifts the lid on domestic political resistance to Putin. But what makes this a moving and thought-provoking novel is Andrei’s personal struggle to find his way in the world, his sense of obligation to his family, and his realization that his parents’ emigration—the very thing that has afforded him opportunities—was ‘the great tragedy of my grandmother’s life.’”
—Max Liu, Financial Times

"Wily, seductive and deeply affecting. . . . Gessen brilliantly captures the daily rhythms, allures and challenges of Moscow life in 2008-2009. It's as personable a book as it is political. . . . A great book with a great heart."
—Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

"Funny and incisive. . . . Marvelous. . . . A Terrible Country is a contemplative and compassionate novel about what it means to return to a place that is no longer home, and a fiercely political book about what oppressive regimes do to societies. There are few writers that do either as well as Gessen does both."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A fresh and often very funny perspective on contemporary Russia."
—San Francisco Chronicle

“A very funny, perceptive, exasperated, loving and timely portrait of a country that its author clearly knows well. . . . If the last two bizarre years have taught us anything, it’s that Russia is never irrelevant. I wonder how many more drugged spies, bent elections and political murders it will take for the rest of the world to realise that, for existential reasons, it would be smart for us to pay it a little more consistent and nuanced attention. A Terrible Country would be an excellent and entertaining place to begin.”
—The Guardian

"A Terrible Country . . . has a spare emotional force, as beautiful as it is paintful; [the novel] serves as a keen document of history past and present; builds in an unlikely way to the suspenseful climax of a taut (and very human) political thriller; and is the funniest work of fiction I've read this year."
—Christian Lorentzen, Vulture.com

“Taking such an intimate trip through the recent past of Putin's Russia is fascinating, made more so by the presence of Andrei's lively, sorrowful, unpredictable grandmother."
—Vanity Fair

"What is everyday life like under Putin's rule? Russian-born Gessen, founding editor of n+1 magazine, draws on his first-hand experiences to paint a vivid picture of Moscow circa 2008."
—Esquire's Best Books of 2018 So Far

"A Terrible Country positions complacency against resistance, and questions what 'home' really means."
—EW

"Like Gessen himself, Andrei ends up spending time back in Russia, a nation perhaps even more totalitarian than it was when his parents fled almost three decades earlier. He falls in with a group of anti-Putin socialists—a turnabout that, eventually, indicts the values of his adopted homeland."
—Boris Kachka, Vulture.com

"[A] funny and very perceptive portrait of a grandson, a grandmother and a complicated country."
—Jewish Weekly

“A complex portrait of a misunderstood nation. . . . Most of the book’s pleasures are traditional ones, welcome reminders of how much an old-fashioned novel can do. It expands the sympathies of its readers, delicately explores the connection between historical experience and the everyday, and offers a picture of a whole social system and what it does to the people who inhabit it. . . . Gessen weaves together many people’s stories, so that along the way we glean much about Soviet and post-Soviet life. . . . Gessen is as funny as ever.”
—Lidija Haas, Bookforum
 
“An essential addition to the ‘Before You Go to Russia, Read...’ list.”
—The Millions
 
“For those of us fond of Moscow’s street scenes, the fine descriptions of Andrei’s walks along the Garden Ring and his shopping trips and errands will draw out pangs of recognition. . . . The novel’s best, sturdiest theme is that life is, if not attractive, then at least possible in that ‘Terrible Country’ of Russia.”
—Christian Science Monitor
 
"A novel where Russia—a character so compelling that it could have sucked the air out of the room—is merely the landscape on which an even more compelling story plays out—about a human being, and his grandmother."
—Tablet

“[Keith Gessen] understands how unequally the profits of speaking on behalf of Russians are distributed, and how rarely Russians themselves end up the beneficiaries . . . A Terrible Country refuses . . . easy and individualized solutions: If Andrei alone is saved, that is no salvation at all.”
—Gregory Afinogenov, The Nation

“Keith Gessen’s dark, brilliant, drily hilarious new novel A Terrible Country, is about the experience of a modern American—an ex-pat, to be sure, but is there anything more modern and American that that? . . .  It is up to Andrei to navigate this country’s specific terribleness; or, rather, it is up to Gessen to guide Andrei through the mundane tumult of his life, and Gessen does so with a clarity and grace (and no small amount of humor) that makes for the kind of book that lodges inside your consciousness long after you’ve finished it, so compelling and provocative are its ideas, so unforgettable its characters.”
—Nylon

"A novel about life under neoliberalism. . . . A Terrible Country is not exactly a hopeful book about political protest, but neither is it a fatalistic one. Instead, it suggests what resistance might mean, not as a slogan, but as a life."
—Maggie Doherty, Harvard Magazine

"Sad, funny and altogether winning. . . . A compassionate, soulful read that avoids dourness by being surprisingly funny. A Terrible Country shows us that while you certainly can go home again, it often turns out to be a lousy idea."
—BookPage
 
“In Gessen’s exceptional and trenchant novel, floundering 30-something professor Andrei Kaplan flees from New York to Russia, the country of his birth, to reassess his future and take care of his ailing grandmother. . . . Andrei’s early attempts to reorient himself to post-Soviet Russian society bring about considerable insight and humor—getting rebuffed by a men’s adult hockey league, getting pistol-whipped outside a nightclub—leading him back to watching old Russian films with his grandmother. . . . While poised to critique Putin’s Russia, this sharp, stellar novel becomes, by virtue of Andrei’s ultimate self-interest, a subtle and incisive indictment of the American character.”
—Publishers Weekly, (starred & boxed review)

“With wit and humor, ­Gessen delivers a heartwarming novel about the multitudinous winding roads that lead us home.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Gessen's first novel in a decade is both a piercing look at contemporary Russian society and a touching story of the struggle to find your place in the world."
—amNY

“Timely and engaging . . . Moscow-born Gessen displays an affecting sympathy for the smaller players on history’s stage.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A cause for celebration: big-hearted, witty, warm, compulsively readable, earnest, funny, full of that kind of joyful sadness I associate with Russia and its writers. Gessen’s particular gift is his ability to effortlessly and charmingly engage with big ideas—power, responsibility, despotism of various stripes, the question of what a country is supposed to do for the people who live in it—while still managing to tell a moving and entertaining human story. At a time when people are wondering whether art can rise to the current confusing political moment, this novel is a reassurance, from a wonderful and important writer.”
—George Saunders, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

“Keith Gessen is one of my favorite writers and A Terrible Country is even better than I hoped. By turns sad, funny, bewildering, revelatory, and then sad again, it recreates the historical-psychological experience of returning, for twenty-first-century reasons, to a country one’s parents left in the twentieth century. It’s at once an old-fashioned novel about the interplay between generational roles, family fates, and political ideology, and a kind of global detective mystery about neoliberalism (plus a secret map of Moscow in terms of pickup hockey). Gessen is a master journalist and essayist, as well as a storyteller with a scary grasp on the human heartstrings, and A Terrible Country unites the personal and political as only the best novels do.”
—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and The Possessed
 
“A Terrible Country is an engaging and entertaining novel, full of humor and humility, and always after one thing—the truth of contemporary life. Gessen gives us the people of Moscow—businessmen, anarchists, grandmothers, dissidents, baristas, hockey goalies, prostitutes, and FSB agents—not as fanciful characters but with the full force of the real. His affectionate, clear-eyed portrait of one terrible country has plenty to teach us about our own.”
—Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding

“I loved A Terrible Country, and I loved Andrei, the smart, likable narrator, a struggling American academic with a deliciously wry observational intelligence. I’d follow Andrei’s voice anywhere, but I was especially glad, at this moment, to go with him to post-Soviet Moscow. A fun, funny but sincere novel that explores with real integrity what it means to be an American ex-pat who can always leave, A Terrible Country is one of the most addictive and affecting books I’ve read in a while.”
—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“Like Primo Levi’s masterpiece If Not Now, When?, A Terrible Country makes the emotional case for an unfamiliar politics. Its critique of the Russian mafia state is balanced by a deeply humanistic attention to common decency. I would not hesitate to recommend this novel to a busy person who otherwise refuses to touch fiction. The only up-to-the-minute, topical, relevant, and necessary novel of 2018 that never has to mention Trump.”
—Nell Zink, author of The Wallcreeper and Mislaid

“Keith Gessen has written a poignant yet laugh-out-loud portrait of the new Russia of nightclubs, black Audis, and Wifi cafés, still haunted by an old Russia of kasha, hockey, and Soviet movies. A Terrible Country is a serious book that’s a pleasure to read, full of love and sorrow.”
—Caleb Crain, author of Necessary Errors

“For those of us who have grown up reading Russian literature, from Chekhov to Babel to Svetlana Alexievich, following this Americanized narrator through his return to contemporary Moscow offers an education and pure delight.”
—Mona Simpson, author of Casebook and Anywhere but Here

1.

i move to moscow

In the late summer of 2008, I moved to Moscow to take care of my grandmother. She was about to turn ninety and I hadn't seen her for nearly a decade. My brother, Dima, and I were her only family; her lone daughter, our mother, had died years earlier. Baba Seva lived alone now in her old Moscow apartment. When I called to tell her I was coming, she sounded very happy to hear it, and also a little confused.

My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, he returned to Moscow to make his fortune. Since then he had made and lost several fortunes; where things stood now I wasn't sure. But one day he Gchatted me to ask if I could come to Moscow and stay with Baba Seva while he went to London for an unspecified period of time.

"Why do you need to go to London?"

"I'll explain when I see you."

"You want me to drop everything and travel halfway across the world and you can't even tell me why?"

There was something petulant that came out of me when dealing with my older brother. I hated it, and couldn't help myself.

Dima said, "If you don't want to come, say so. But I'm not discussing this on Gchat."

"You know," I said, "there's a way to take it off the record. No one will be able to see it."

"Don't be an idiot."

He meant to say that he was involved with some very serious people, who would not so easily be deterred from reading his Gchats. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't. With Dima the line between those concepts was always shifting.

As for me, I wasn't really an idiot. But neither was I not an idiot. I had spent four long years of college and then eight much longer years of grad school studying Russian literature and history, drinking beer, and winning the Grad Student Cup hockey tournament (five times!); then I had gone out onto the job market for three straight years, with zero results. By the time Dima wrote me I had exhausted all the available post-graduate fellowships and had signed up to teach online sections in the university's new PMOOC initiative, short for "paid massive online open course," although the "paid" part mostly referred to the students, who really did need to pay, and less to the instructors, who were paid very little. It was definitely not enough to continue living, even very frugally, in New York. In short, on the question of whether I was an idiot, there was evidence on both sides.

Dima writing me when he did was, on the one hand, providential. On the other hand, Dima had a way of getting people involved in undertakings that were not in their best interests. He had once convinced his now former best friend Tom to move to Moscow to open a bakery. Unfortunately, Tom opened his bakery too close to another bakery, and was lucky to leave Moscow with just a dislocated shoulder. Anyway, I proceeded cautiously. I said, "Can I stay at your place?" Back in 1999, after the Russian economic collapse, Dima bought the apartment directly across the landing from my grandmother's, so helping her out from there would be easy.

"I'm subletting it," said Dima. "But you can stay in our bedroom in grandma's place. It's pretty clean."

"I'm thirty-three years old," I said, meaning too old to live with my grandmother.

"You want to rent your own place, be my guest. But it'll have to be pretty close to Grandma's."

Our grandmother lived in the center of Moscow. The rents there were almost as high as Manhattan's. On my PMOOC salary I would be able to rent approximately an armchair.

"Can I use your car?"

"I sold it."

"Dude. How long are you leaving for?"

"I don't know," said Dima. "And I already left."

"Oh," I said. He was already in London. He must have left in a hurry.

But I in turn was desperate to leave New York. The last of my old classmates from the Slavic department had recently left for a new job, in California, and my girlfriend of six months, Sarah, had recently dumped me at a Starbucks. "I just don't see where this is going," she had said, meaning I suppose our relationship, but suggesting in fact my entire life. And she was right: even the thing that I had once most enjoyed doing-reading and writing about and teaching Russian literature and history-was no longer any fun. I was heading into a future of halfheartedly grading the half-written papers of half-interested students, with no end in sight.

Whereas Moscow was a special place for me. It was the city where my parents had grown up, where they had met; it was the city where I was born. It was a big, ugly, dangerous city, but also the cradle of Russian civilization. Even when Peter the Great abandoned it for St. Petersburg in 1713, even when Napoleon sacked it in 1812, Moscow remained, as Alexander Herzen put it, the capital of the Russian people. "They recognized their ties of blood to Moscow by the pain they felt at losing it." Yes. And I hadn't been there in years. Over the course of a few grad-school summers I'd grown tired of its poverty and hopelessness. The aggressive drunks on the subway; the thugs in tracksuits and leather jackets walking around eyeing everyone; the guy eating from the dumpster next to my grandmother's place every night during the summer I spent there in 2000, periodically yelling "Fuckers! Bloodsuckers!" then going back to eating. I hadn't been back since.

Still, I kept my hands off the keyboard. I needed some kind of concession from Dima, if only for my pride.

I said, "Is there someplace for me to play hockey?" As my academic career had declined, my hockey playing had ramped up. Even during the summer, I was on the ice three days a week.

"Are you kidding?" said Dima. "Moscow is a hockey mecca. They're building new rinks all the time. I'll get you into a game as soon as you get here."

I took that in.

"Oh, and the wireless signal from my place reaches across the landing," Dima said. "Free wi-fi."

"OK!" I wrote.

"OK?"

"Yeah," I said. "Why not."

A few days later I went to the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side, stood in line for an hour with my application, and got a one-year visa. Then I wrapped things up in New York: I sublet my room to a rock drummer from Minnesota, returned my books to the library, and fetched my hockey stuff from a locker at the rink. It was all a big hassle, and not cheap, but I spent the whole time imagining the different life I would soon be living and the different person I'd become. I pictured myself carrying groceries for my grandmother; taking her on excursions around the city, including to the movies (she'd always loved the movies); walking with her arm in arm around the old neighborhood and listening to her tales of life under socialism. There was so much about her life that I didn't know, about which I'd never asked. I had been incurious and oblivious; I had believed more in books than I had in people. I pictured myself protesting the Putin regime in the morning, playing hockey in the afternoon, and keeping my grandmother company in the evening. Perhaps there was even some way I might use my grandmother's life as the basis for a journal article. I pictured myself sitting monastically in my room and with my grandmother's stories in hand adding a whole new dimension to my work. Maybe I could put her testimony in italics and intersperse it throughout my article, like in In Our Time.

On my last night in town my roommates threw me a small party. "To Moscow," they said, raising their cans of beer.

"To Moscow!" I repeated.

"And don't get killed," one of them added.

"I won't get killed," I promised. I was excited. And drunk. It occurred to me that there was a certain glamor that might attend spending time in an increasingly violent and dictatorial Russia-at that very moment bombing the small country of Georgia into submission. At three in the morning I sent a text message to Sarah. "I'm leaving tomorrow," it said, as if I were heading for a very dangerous place. Sarah did not respond. Three hours later I woke up, still drunk, threw the last of my stuff into my huge red suitcase, grabbed my hockey stick, and headed for JFK. I got on my flight and promptly fell asleep.

Next thing I knew I was standing in the passport control line in the grim basement of Sheremetevo-2 International Airport. It never seemed to change. As long as I'd been flying in here, they made you come down to this basement and wait in line before you got your bags. It was like a purgatory from which you suspected you might be entering someplace other than heaven.

But the Russians looked different than I remembered them. They were well dressed, with good haircuts, and talking on sleek new cell phones. Even the guards in their light-blue short-sleeve uniforms looked cheerful. Though the line was long, several stood off together to the side, laughing. Oil was selling at $114 a barrel, and their army had just won a short little war with Georgia-is that what they were laughing about?

Modernization theory said the following: Wealth and technology are more powerful than culture. Give people nice cars, color televisions, and the ability to travel to Europe, and they'll stop being so aggressive. No two countries with McDonald's franchises will ever go to war with each other. People with cell phones are nicer than people without cell phones.

I wasn't so sure. The Georgians had McDonald's, and the Russians bombed them anyway. As I neared the passport booth, a tall, bespectacled, nicely dressed European, Dutch or German, asked in English if he could cut the line: he had to catch a connecting flight. I nodded yes-we'd have to wait for our luggage anyway-but the man behind me, about the same height as the Dutch guy but much sturdier, in a boxy but not to my eyes inexpensive suit, piped up in Russian-accented English.

"Go back to end of line."

"I'm about to miss my flight," said the Dutchman.

"Go back to end of line."

I said to him in Russian, "What's the difference?"

"There's a big difference," he answered.

"Please?" the Dutchman asked again, in English.

"I said go back. Now." The Russian turned slightly so that he was square with the Dutchman. The latter man kicked his bag in frustration. Then he picked it up and walked to the back of the line.

"He made the correct decision," said the Russian guy to me, in Russian, indicating that as a man of principle he was ready to pummel the Dutch guy for cutting the line.

I didn't answer. A few minutes later, I approached the passport control booth. The young, blond, unsmiling border guard took my battered blue American passport-the passport of a person who lived in a country where you didn't have to carry your passport everywhere you went, where in fact you might not even know where your passport was for months and years at a time-with mild disgust. If he had a passport like mine he'd take better care of it. He checked my name against the terrorist database and buzzed me through the gate to the other side.

[AU/ED: with an American passport, would Andrei be on the same passport line as Russians? In many airports they separate them, yes?]

I was in Russia again.

My grandmother Seva lived in the very center of the city, in an apartment sheÕd been awarded, in the late 1940s, by Joseph Stalin. My brother, Dima, brought this up sometimes, when he was trying to make a point, and so did my grandmother, when she was in a self-deprecating mood. ÒMy Stalin apartment,Ó she called it, as if to remind everyone, and herself, of the moral compromise she had made. Still, in general in our family it was understood that if someone was offering you an apartment, and you lived at the time in a drafty room in a communal apartment with your small daughter, your two brothers, and your mom, then you should take the apartment, no matter who it was from. And itÕs not like Stalin himself was handing her the keys or asking for anything in return. She was at the time a young professor of history at Moscow State University, and had consulted on a film about Ivan the Great, the fifteenth-century Ògatherer of the lands of RusÓ and grandfather to Ivan the Terrible, which Stalin so enjoyed that he declared everyone involved should get an apartment. So in addition to Òmy Stalin apartment,Ó my grandmother also called it Òmy Ivan the Great apartment,Ó and then, if she was speaking honestly, Òmy Yolka apartment,Ó after her daughter, my mother, for whom she had been willing to do anything at all.

To get to this apartment I exchanged some dollars at the booth outside baggage claim-it was about twenty-four rubles per dollar at the time-and took the brand-new express train to Savelovsky Railway Station, passing miles of crumbling Soviet apartment blocks, and the old (also crumbling) turn-of-the-century industrial belt just outside the center. Along the way the massive guy sitting next to me-about my age, in jeans and a short-sleeve button-down-struck up a conversation.

"What model is that?" he asked, about my phone. I had bought a SIM card at the airport and was now putting it in the phone and seeing if it worked.

Here we go, I thought. My phone was a regular T-Mobile flip phone.But I figured this was just a prelude to the guy trying to rob me. I grew tense. My hockey stick was in the luggage rack above us, and anyway it would have been hard to swing it at this guy on this train.

"Just a regular phone," I said. "Samsung." I grew up speaking Russian and still speak it with my father and my brother but I have a slight, difficult-to-place accent. I occasionally make small grammatical mistakes or put the stress on the wrong syllable. And I was rusty.

The guy picked up on this, as well as the fact that my olive skin set me apart from most of the Slavs on this fancy train. "Where you from?" he said. He used the familiar ty rather than vy-which could mean he was being friendly, because we were the same age and on the same train, or it could mean he was asserting his right to call me anything he wanted. I couldn't tell. He began to guess where I might be from. "Spain?" he said. "Or Turkey?"