Outwardly a mystery story, The New Moscow Philosophy is concerned with the relationship between literature and life. Within the meta-textual story, the narrator’s argument that literature does not merely reflect life but is life takes place in a series of digressions. Scenes from everyday life separated by a century and a half are shown to be so similar that the novel invites us to reflect: what if Ecclesiastes was right and there really is nothing new under the sun? What does this hypothesis imply? First, that literature is implicated in the very idea of life itself. Second, that rather than merely being a crafty reflection of life, literature is the imprinted idea of life.
Setting the story in a communal apartment in Moscow during the Gorbachev period of glasnost allows Vyacheslav Pyetsukh to explore the communal apartment as a “university of newly structured human relations.”
Pyetsukh brings together thirteen principal characters, mostly residents of the communal apartment. Parodying Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, an old lady disappears, possibly murdered, and many residents are implicated by this apparent crime, each seeking the “augmentation of living space.” Two tenants take it upon themselves to solve the mystery, debating the nature of evil and morality as they do so.
The narrative, though entertaining, sometimes feels secondary: a structure to facilitate Pyetsukh’s philosophical discourse. But the argument he pursues is sufficiently perceptive and fascinating to drive the novel forward.
I agree with the idea that the story was probably built to support Pyetsukh’s philosophical discourse, and yet he manages to pull it off quite well. I loved the eccentricities of the characters and the whole situation. I am also a sucker for a good, intrusive narrator. Glad you liked this one!
Thanks, Michelle, give me a discursive narrator who is unafraid to make their presence known, and I am half way to loving a story.