Oleg Pavlov - Requiem for a Soldier

Oleg Pavlov’s Requiem for a Soldier is a meditation on death and the downfall of the Soviet Union suffused with all bleak absurdity of a Samuel Beckett play.

The protagonist, Aloysha, is 'a sullen, furtive creature, backward and deficient, remarkable only for his clumsiness', who has spent his military career collecting spent cartridge cases on a firing range in the ‘wild and barren’ Kazakh steppes. His only companion is his deaf commander, Abdulka. Abdulka feels a fatherly bond toward his charge, and promises him a parting gift: a silver tooth, which will last forever. All Aloysha has to do is visit the local infirmary, where the dental surgeon will fit it for him.

The infirmary, however, exists in a state of permanent chaos, presided over by the ‘strutting insect’ Institutov. A preening, tyrannical figure with 'the punctiliousness of a eunuch', Institutov torments his patients and wages a constant war against the army of mice which colonise his surgery and eat all his medicine. Aloysha’s tooth is extracted promptly, but the promised replacement never seems to arrive; the demobilised soldier is kept waiting while Institutov attempts to make the most of his presence, conscripting him to assist with various tasks around the infirmary.

One of these tasks involves a trip into the ‘kingdom of the dead’ – Aloysha and Institutov are tasked with collecting the corpse of a soldier from the forensic pathology lab and arranging for it to be transported to Moscow. Along the way, they enter into a grotesquely comic maze of bureaucracy, passing through forgotten remnants of empire run like private fiefdoms by the minor officials who populate them.

Pavlov brilliantly creates the absurd world of a crumbling empire, presenting scenes in which medical orderlies play games with their visitors rather than deal with the corpse they have been presented with, and where everything has a barter value. They are frustrated by porters who hold out for bribes and keep the couple waiting while they indulge in self-important patter, in the Shakespearian tradition of comedy functionaries. Finally, they encounter the forgotten people of Russia - beggar girls, nuclear scientists and assorted lumpy proles, living in disused train carriages - relics of the Soviet past.

Aloysha, the archetypal everyman, finds himself let down by the benignly patrician Abdulka and the state functionary Institutov alike. Both promise him eternal silver in return for his labour, but neither is able to deliver. Meanwhile, the infrastructure crumbles as petty officials pursue their own agendas, driven mad with power. The final novel of the Tales From The Last Days trilogy, this is a memorable absurdist satire with great relevance today.