This skilful satire on Putin’s Russia has been compared to Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back, in which Hitler becomes a media celebrity in modern Germany, but Honig’s is a far darker form of satire than Vermes’s. Humour and the ability to provoke anger are two of the the satirist’s main tools, but keeping the anger from shading into despair can be difficult.
Vladimir P, five-time president of Russia, has been suffering from senility for years and is confined to a suite in his former state dacha near Moscow. Looking after him is a nurse, Sheremetev, who is the only honest person on the dacha staff (indeed probably in all of Russia). He goes about his daily duties blithely unaware that the rest of his colleagues are all on the make. (The drivers hire out the limos, the gardeners grow fruit and flowers in polytunnels for sale, the chef supplies the dacha’s food to half the restaurants in the town, and so on.)
The plastic greenhouses in the gardens have defaced the once-beautiful landscape. A row between the chef and the housekeeper over suppliers leads to various forms of dead meat being buried in a pit, which soon stinks out the atmosphere. In these ways, the dacha’s society becomes a microcosm for the ugliness and corruption of Putin’s Russia.
While there is humour in Sheremetev’s innocent ignorance and in the vodka-swilling chef’s ambition to open a restaurant in Moscow (“Russian fusion, minimalist décor”), it wanes as the housekeeper-chef feud becomes more bitter and especially when Sheremetev’s beloved nephew is imprisoned and a huge bribe is demanded by his jailers for his release. (They cannot believe that a man looking after “the biggest crook in Russia” would be content with a meagre nurse’s salary.)
Sheremetev grows towards painful self-awareness through realising the true nature of the country which the man he is caring for presided over for so long.
There is a chilling exchange between him and the chef, where Sheremetev wonders if his nephew was right when he wrote that Putin had a chance to save Russia but instead turned it into a mess. “Russia is Russia. To live in Russia is to live in hell – isn’t that what Pushkin said?” replies the chef.
Another character puts it more forcefully and fatalistically: “Shit piled on shit piled on shit. That’s Russia . . . It was the same in the days of Ivan the Terrible and . . . in the days of Stalin and it’s the same now.”
Honig, who is a medical doctor, conveys Vladimir P’s senility sensitively and accurately. He seems to have no regrets about his wars, his deals with oligarchs, or his treatment of dissidents and journalists. Only one thing troubles him from his past: the disembodied head of a Chechen fighter that he believes is pursuing him and trying to kill him.
Can the satire stop anger from shading into despair? When Sheremetev’s half-hearted and bungling attempts to find the money to rescue his nephew go horribly wrong, it’s hard to see any hope – although his final, somewhat futile, gesture brings satisfaction of a kind.
Brian Maye is a journalist and historian
