The Librarian is Mikhail Elizarov’s fourth novel, written in 2007 and awarded the Russian Booker Prize the following year. It is based on an ingenious premise: the continuing power of books in Russia. The books in question are the fruits of Dmitry Alexandrovich Gromov, a Soviet writer of socialist realist novels who died in 1980 in obscurity. His books, however, have retained an almost mystical power among those who read them now in post-Soviet Russia, as they recreate the world of heroic labour and ideological certainty of determined, patriotic and dynamic collective farm directors, factory workers, Komsomol members and young Pioneers, or soldiers returning from the Great Patriotic War.
Gromov’s world depicts a lost Soviet paradise, a reflection and celebration of the socialist realist ‘master plot’, but for their readers his books assume a different meaning, with narratives that can transform individual consciousness. Thus, the 1951 production novel The Proletarian Way becomes the Book of Strength; The Quiet Grass (1977), about agricultural production on collective farms, becomes the Book of Memory; Fly on, Happiness (1954), set during the virgin lands campaign of the 1950s, becomes the Book of Power; By Labour’s Roads (1968), about a working-class dynasty, is the Book of Fury; The Silver Channel (1972), about the harmonious relationship of a man and his son in the bosom of nature, is the Book of Endurance; and the heroic war story Narva (1965), set in 1943, becomes the Book of Joy. The construction novel A Meditation on Stalin Chinaware (1956) becomes the highly treasured Book of Meaning, though all the books have ‘meanings’ easily recognisable in the Soviet context, as they form the key building-blocks of Soviet civilisation.
The Librarian is set in 2000. The readers of Gromov’s books become part of a Reading Room, the books themselves are protected by a Librarian, and hundreds of Reading Rooms sprout up all over the country, with their readers waging cruel battles with each other in order to obtain a copy of a Book. These readers are the detritus of modern Russia: the old and decrepit, abandoned by their families in rundown care homes, the lowlifes in prison camps, manual workers, pensioners, mechanics, low paid public sector workers such as teachers and doctors, the occasional student, and electrical salesman.
