Sasha Sokolov’s third novel Palisandriia (1985) is a mock-memoir and mock-odyssey of the fictional Kremlin eyewitness Palisandr Dalberg. Lavrenty Beria’s grand-nephew and Rasputin’s great-grandson, megalomaniac, graphomaniac, and erotomaniac, he exists in different time periods. The novel’s picaresque plot (a travel narrative) begins in the Kremlin from where Palisandr, an orphan, is banished to Moscow’s Government Massage Parlor, located in the famed Novodevichy Convent. (The reason is Stalin’s accidental death, the result of a prank played on him by the Kremlin children.) While there Yuri Andropov enlists him to assassinate Brezhnev (the attempt is unsuccessful), then Andropov exiles Palisandr abroad as a spy. The novel ends with his triumphant return to the homeland as Russia’s rightful leader soon after Jung discovers Palisandr’s secret – that he is a hermaphrodite, mark of his plenipotentiary power. Such is the bare skeleton of the plot fleshed out by multiple excessive subplots and adventures (excess is a defining features of the novel): for instance Palisandr’s familial and erotic relations with Soviet leaders and their wives; multifarious sexual exploits with elderly women, especially at the former convent and Russian émigré rest home (in a French chateau) for members of the Romanov family and other aristocrats (some of these rendezvous take place at cemeteries, one of his favorite haunts); encounters abroad with various famous writers and cultural figures. In sum then, Palisandriia (Astrophobia in English translation) is a postmodern parody of sensationalist pulp literature, e.g. pornography, but most importantly, of the official and dissident versions of Soviet history. Instead of rewriting it with the purpose of telling the historical “truth” like Solzhenitsyn (and others), Sokolov has written a self-reflexive, highly intertextual, and stylistically exquisite novel in which, moreover, time has been dissolved, among others by the “déjà vu.”

Selected Bibliography

Olga Matich, “Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandriia: History and Myth,” Russian Review, 45 (1986).

D. Barton Johnson, “Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandrija,” Slavic and East European Journal, 30/3 (1986).

Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (1987), pp. 102-112.

Alexander Zholkovsky, “The Stylistic Roots of Palisandriia,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 21/3-4 (1987).

Olga Matich, “Sasha Sokolov and His Literary Context,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 21/3-4 (1987).

Alexander Boguslawski, “Death in the Works of Sasha Sokolov,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 21/3-4 (1987).

Laura Beraha, "The Last Rogue of History: Picaresque Elements in Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandriia,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 35/3-4 (1993).

Mark Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999), pp. 173 – 180.

Karen Ryan, “Palisandriya: The Art of History,” Twentieth-Century Russian Literature. Selected Papers from the Fifth Congress of Central and East European Studies (2000).

Elena Kravchina, The Prose of Sasha Sokolov: Reflections on/of the Real (2013).