I once read that we should always beware of an "ism." This is a cute, simple way to warn against ideology. While I haven't taken the advice to heart (because I'm a disaffected young woman in a “post-modern,” “post-capitalist world”), I have re-directed my doubts towards self-professed "philes." Francophiles, with their soft, black berets and their golden baguettes. Bibliophiles, who collect books without cracking their spines. Logophiles, Anglophiles, oenophiles, necrophiles—I have boundless supplies of suspicion.

Anthony Marra is a Russophile. His first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, was a best-seller about the Chechen wars, dubbed "brilliant" by The New York Times and "profound" by The Washington Post. His up-coming book of short stories, The Tsar of Love and Techno, is bursting with that same passion for Russia, from its bleak arctic circle to the wedding-cake palaces along the Neva.1 The book is composed of nine stories, featuring a cast of recurring characters and spanning about seventy years. The tales overlap and collide, of course, as they wind around a key question—what has become of "Empty Pasture in Afternoon," a minor landscape by Pyotr Zahkarov-Chechenets, a nineteenth-century Russian realist painter?

In one story, the painting has fallen into the hands of a Soviet censor, Roman, who paints a political boss onto the field. In another, an oligarch's wife gives the painting to her dead lover's brother. In a third, a widower restores the canvas, damaged by bombings in Chechnya. Like the censor, he adds to the landscape. Marra doesn't tie the narrative knot too tight, however, and the stories are loose enough to stray from the painting, towards crime, corruption, and capitalism in post-Soviet Russia.
The problem with "philes," really, is that their love is often blind, stupid, and senseless. Nothing—not even books or words—deserves veneration for veneration's sake. Certain books should be loved, yes, and certain French customs too, but not all books and certainly not all Gallic traditions. Yet Marra's Russophilia has surprising nuance, and it shines through "The Tsar of Love and Techno" like white light through a prism. He doesn't just offer his own admiration, but a whole emotional spectrum, from fear to pride, from pity to awe. While he loves Russia, his love is shot through with doubts and misgivings.

In the more tricky stories, ones that need historical accuracy in addition to pathos, Marra fumbles a bit. "The Leopard," for instance, has moments of extravagant gravity, a gravity that pulls suspended disbelief back down to the ground. Roman, the censor, spouts Soviet slogans in the story's first pages, then switches to dissident, counter-revolutionary rhetoric a few pages later. The shift is drastic and a mite unconvincing.

Really, "The Leopard" raises hairy questions about how we remember the past—it's a lovely story, but also an imagined, inspiring tale of courage in a totalitarian regime. How can any American writer even begin to imagine life under Stalin? How dare we layer our own faith in "human nature" over such a distant, foreign past? While these are questions that undermine the very tenets of fiction, they're usually fine on the back burner. Less so when an author tackles something as huge, complex, and impenetrable as communism.

Marra works best on a smaller scale, when he plunges into lyrical descriptions of polluted arctic ponds and Russian subway stops. He has a shocking talent for verbs, eschewing the bland "to be" and "to have" for a rainbow of bright, beautiful words. In describing a rocket's take-off, he writes that "blue heat seared the oxygen from the air" and "the sky bruised with fire." Each story glows with powerful images, and some even feature comic repartee. ("You must have seen Forrest Gump," says a man. "It is a nature film?" asks the father.)

The Tsar of Love and Techno may be an ode to Russia, but it's a long and pretty ode, with moments of subtlety. Marra's details are sometimes sharp as glass—the mothers who stir jam into tea, the hot rush of a Petersburg subway car—and he sketches out vivid and engaging characters. (They're perhaps a little too good and a little too honorable.) One of the book's sympathetic thugs, Sergei, is an aspiring aphorist: "Why read a book when you can sum up the point in a single pithy little line? I like sayings, fortune cookies, single-serving packets of wisdom." The Tsar of Love and Techno shatters this false dichotomy: it's a nuanced portrait of post-Soviet Russia, yet a simple, sugary slice of wisdom, too.

1 The Tsar of Love and Techno, by Anthony Marra; Hogarth, 352 pages, $25.

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