Siberian Education

Nicolai Lilin comes from Transnistria (a no man’s land between Moldova and Ukraine) and writes in Italian.
He belongs to that cohort of immigrant authors who are making a significant contribution to the renewal of our literature, so often bloodless.
And indeed, the novel overflows with energy, with a vitality and brutality barely kept in check by the canons and formative paths generated within the communities of origin, beyond and outside the State.
The narrative opens with a few intense, harrowing pages.
We are in Chechnya and the Russian soldiers are exhausted: “we kept going like water waves....
we fought always, always.”
And precisely where respect for rules and hierarchy should be paramount, a soldier,

.
There follow two long chapters, “The Hat and the Knife” and “When the Skin Speaks”, in which the author describes, with anthropological meticulousness, the rules of coexistence and the modes of communication of the Siberian criminal community, which had been forced to relocate from Siberia to Transnistria.
A profound nostalgia for a world, whether real or merely envisioned, forcefully emerges:

.
A narrative that still imparts a sense of security (just as in territory ruled by the mafia one feels protected from petty crime) is followed by two chapters in which the clash between gangs devolves into pure violence.
In “The Day of My Birthday”, the protagonist, along with a friend, must deliver a message to a representative of another criminal community.
It is a simple errand, yet it translates into clashes, fights, ambushes, all set against a degraded urban landscape abandoned to itself.
And where coercion, promiscuity, and corruption prevail, as in “Juvenile Prison”, violence turns into moral, physical, and sexual subjugation.
From the outset of the next chapter (the decisive one in the protagonist’s coming of age), one might expect a glimmer of hope, and perhaps of love.
Ksjusa is a fragile autistic girl, protected by the Siberian community both as a woman and on account of her disability.
Yet she falls victim to a gang rape, and the hunt for the rapists begins: a protracted chase through every district of the city leading up to an inexorable, bloody vengeance.
Yet for the young protagonist, it is

.
The epilogue is “a free fall”.
It seems the protagonist has managed to carve out a different future for himself, outside the criminal community.
Until, forcibly conscripted into the Russian army, he finds himself sucked into a new spiral of violence.
Yet here is where one realizes that what is truly needed in life is a Siberian education.

It is unclear how much of the novel is autobiographical and how much pure invention.
Certain gang battles recall those recounted by other contemporary Russian authors, such as Elizarov in The Librarian, just as the sexual violence in the juvenile prison relies on common tropes of prison life, and some descriptions in this context are decidedly pornographic and overwrought.
Yet whether fact or fiction matters little.
The message is clear: the fragmentation of modern society, whose rules of coexistence seem increasingly rooted in kinship communities and clan logic rather than in state institutions.
In this descent toward a medieval world, there are rare moments of serenity: the relationship with nature (the fishing scenes are the most evocative), camaraderie among peers, the connection to the wisdom of the elders, the adherence to rules and rituals.
It is an anti-Enlightenment world that turns inward on itself.

The painstaking description of the rules and the various criminal communities, the repetitiveness of episodes that ultimately become predictable, the deficiency in narrative pace and in character depth—characters who remain, at bottom, stereotypical and often indistinguishable—are all factors that make the reading tedious.
One struggles to reach the end of the novel.

Why read it? It prompts reflection on modern society, but it fails to captivate.