The inspiration behind Martin Amis's latest novel, House of Meetings, was his boyhood reading of the great Russian masters. Foremost of these, he says, was Dostoevsky, whose mark on him has been indelible. You can see the hand of Fyodor on Amis, long before his own Russian novel appeared. It's evident in his affinity with the morbid, the moralistic, and above all the almost depraved misery of Dostoevsky's tormented world. House of Meetings is an obvious homage, but it wouldn't have needed much forensic examination to see traces of his mentor in Amis's early work. Like Amis and countless others, I read Dostoevsky when I was a teenager. It's an experience from which I have never quite recovered. Nowhere before had I experienced such visceral, desperate yet hauntingly lovely prose. His was the first voice from Russia I had ever encountered and I immediately made for the other literary titans
of this exotic, cruel, strangely alluring terrain, absorbing industrial doses of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn, right up to its most modern voice, the exiled Siberian Andrei Makine. Despite the grimness of the stories that most of them told, they were written so winningly and sensitively that Russia seemed synonymous with spiritual and emotional romance, a setting that in some ways was as otherworldly and fictional as Narnia, in others powerful precisely because it was rooted in dark historic realities that, at a distance of several thousand miles, were fascinating rather than threatening.
In recent months I have begun to relinquish this sentimental attachment. The murder last weekend of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya struck the last blow to an adolescent perception that was hopelessly out of date. There have been many signs of Putin's increasingly despotic grip on Russia. He may voice platitudes about the new climate of democracy but his tactics, in relation to Chechnya and, most recently, Georgia, are straight out of the fascist rule book. Despite the mounting tally of victims and the gradual erosion of civil liberties, however, it has taken the death of one individual to make many of us aware of just how dangerous and repressive a regime modern Russia has become. Politkovskaya was a fierce critic of Putin, denouncing his domestic and foreign policies and questioning the truth of many of his government's statements, over, for instance, the Moscow theatre siege - which
she claimed was carried out with the full knowledge of the Russian secret police - and in its treatment of Chechnya. As she said of the state's tactics in Chechnya: "The truth is that the methods employed in Putin's anti-terrorist operation are generating a wave of terrorism, the like of which we have never experienced." When Politkovskaya appeared two years ago at the Edinburgh Book Festival, it was clear that she was fully aware of the risks she ran in speaking out. Still suffering the after-effects of being poisoned, as she believes, on her way to negotiate with the hostage-takers at Beslan School, she said that of course she was fearful for her safety. Even so, she felt compelled to continue her work. She has paid the full price for that. As have others. One of the most chilling interviews after her death was with her hugely courageous editor at Novaya Gazeta, who mentioned the suspicious
deaths recently of two other staff on his paper. Faced with the deeply alarming picture emerging from the former Soviet bloc, it's hard to cling to the residual attraction the word Russia used to hold for me. It's one thing to read Solzhenitsyn on the Gulags when they were already a thing of the past, quite another to contemplate what ordinary Russian citizens are experiencing just now. Until another Solzhenitsyn or Dostoevsky emerges - and what chance of that in this climate? - we will never fully know. With the death of Politkovskaya and her colleagues, Russia's bloody history just got longer. That's not romantic at all.
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