the tsar of love and techno by anthony marra

The title of Galina’s one big hit, a cheesy genre flick called “Deceit Web,” speaks to the calamitous tangle of betrayals and denunciations that are the daily bread of Marra’s people. Just as a newly installed President Putin gives a new lease on life to Stalin’s repressive legacy, so Galina, the granddaughter of the ballerina whose career tanked under Stalin, honors her grandmother’s rebel spirit by bad-mouthing the new president, only to see her own flourishing livelihood as a movie starlet flame out in kind. In Marra’s ever-circling conception of Russian society, citizens and governments alike are fated to repeat and magnify the errors of their forebearers with a boomeranging self-destructiveness. But before he goes down, he finds poetical redemption in painting portraits of his ill-fated brother into every image he is compelled to retouch.

Roman’s hard-line communism is concretized in his aesthetic credo: “For art to be the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer.” Given the all-pervading paranoia of the state, one is not surprised when Roman becomes a victim of the very ideological hammer he wielded on others.

Ruslan lost a wife and son to one of those land mines, and it is all he can do to keep the cardboard tourist-bureau signs taped to his office door from being ripped off by the street children. Devastated from two wars and ringed with land mines, Grozny has descended into the kind of goth dystopia where one can buy knives at the airport gift shop. Ruslan has been railroaded into heading the city’s tourist office and tasked with rebranding Chechnya as “the Dubai of the Caucasus.” He’s got his work cut out for him. The speaker is Ruslan, a scholar, artist manqué, and deputy director of the Museum of Regional Art in Grozny.

‘Icame of age in the reign of Brezhnev,” says one of the recurring characters in “The Tsar of Love and Techno,” Anthony Marra’s cluster of ingeniously conjoined stories that touch on Russian life over a series of decades, “when young men would enter civil service academies hardy and robust, only to leave two years later anemic and stooped, cured forever of the inclination to be civil or of service to anyone.”

The tsar of love and techno by anthony marra