The Maya Pill

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

The feisty concoction you’ve just (perhaps) finished reading is the product of the restless, fertile mind of Russian-Chechen author German Sadulaev. Sadulaev has proven to be one of the most original and prolific writers of the post-Soviet generation; his works have drawn a broad readership and critical acclaim. The Maya Pill, his first novel (and second book) to appear in English, was short-listed for both the Russian Booker and National Bestseller prizes, and his subsequent Chechnya-themed novel The Raid at Shali was also short-listed for the Russian Booker. I am a Chechen, a genre-bending collection of legends, stories, and reminiscences situated amid the wars in Chechnya, appeared in English in 2010, and has been translated into several other languages as well.

The “loose, baggy monsters” of the classic Russian literary tradition offered a broad, realistic picture of the social, cultural, and political life of their times even as they probed inward into the human psyche and outward into the universe. True to those roots, Sadulaev’s novel abounds in themes both trivial and profound. His protagonist commutes to work, swipes in with his smart card, scrolls lazily through his inbox, and performs his duties as a cog in the wheel of the new Russian capitalism. On this level, The Maya Pill offers as complete a picture of twenty-first century Russian office culture as can be found in modern fiction. But that is just the surface—and Russian thinkers have always mistrusted appearances. Maximus, it turns out, is a dreamer, a writer, an armchair philosopher. In his dreams he is Saat, humble Khazar horse-herder and future great Khagan, spokesman for the common people, ruler of the boundless steppe. Saat’s Khazaria, with its wars of aggression, its political intrigues, its neglect of the earth and its injustices to the little man, is Post-Soviet Russia, thinly veiled. Saat is also the child Maximus, who on his trips home to his grandmother, gathers armloads of poppies. And the frozen French fries that his company sells—do they even exist? Or are they, like the material world itself, a product of the imagination, of Maya—pure, distilled illusion? Or perhaps the culprits are Dutch hallucinogenic pills—derived from those very poppies, mixed into a heady fish paste and introduced into Western Europe long ago by itinerant Khazar merchants? Behind it all, the devil is at work, offering fame and fortune in exchange for human souls. Maximus treads a complex path indeed. His duties as a mid-level import-export manager lead him into contact with business partners in Holland and in China. Their paths, it turns out, run parallel to his. All three of them face the challenge of finding love in an alienating, virtual world. Are the women they meet just Maya, illusion, like the imaginary French fries that the Dutch are selling to the Russians? Sadulaev is nothing if not ambitious, and the attentive reader will reap rich rewards as all these plotlines come together at the end, when the devil comes in to close the deal, and when you learn that the novel you have just read has told the story of its own creation.

The Maya Pill took its translator on an exciting ride from Russia’s present-day urban reality to its hazy mythical roots and back again. Fresh words abound. Sadulaev’s language presents unique challenges that begin with the novel’s very title, Tabletka. By choosing this title—the word means “pill”—the author foregrounds the little pink hallucinogenic pills of his central plot, which were by some oversight included in a shipment from Holland to the Russian frozen food company’s warehouse. A literal translation (“The Pill”) would send the English-language reader down a garden path of irrelevancies; in spite of the novel’s abundance of themes, birth control is not one of them. “The Tablet,” too, would suggest wildly unrelated matters, from trivial items like notepads and computers to such profundities as Moses’s Ten Commandments. The Dutch pills lead Maximus to confront the nature of reality and perception—the classic Russian theme of beauty, which may or may not save the world—in the form of the Goddess of Sex, Spring, and Fertility who appears to him in the office elevator. She is the Hindu goddess of illusion, that force that veils true reality, and her name is Maya. Hence the English title. The titles of the novel’s four parts are also worthy of note: Itil, Samandar, and Serkel are names of lost cities of Khazaria, and Part IV, “Mack” (mak), is both the Russian word for poppy and the protagonist’s tabooed nickname.

Sadulaev’s rich and varied language reflects the novel’s themes. When referring to pop culture, the Internet, the streets and eateries of St. Petersburg, and the modern workplace, the style is jazzy, modern, and witty. A completely different diction takes the reader into Saat’s life in ancient Khazaria. Saat is illiterate, his perceptions visceral, his moral compass true. He is the classic wise fool who serves and suffers in an unjust economy and an unjust war. Saat bears witness to “misfortune, woe,” in short sentences that are the more powerful for their clumsiness. Saat’s naïve and awestruck perception of life in the Khazar capital bears the novel’s political allegory. Blue flashing lights attached at their horses’ tails clear the roadways for the oppressors as they sweep through town, just like the lights on Kremlin officials’ vehicles speeding through Moscow. The military requisitions officer confiscates Saat’s horses, including a tender foal that is of no use for the war effort, but will make a perfect pet for his children. Through it all, Saat observes and tries to understand. Sadulaev’s satire is light and humorous, but carries a bite. As always, wordplay and humor present a challenge to the translator. The best example is the description of the elections in ancient Khazaria, to which the voters proceed in a zombielike state, with their brains divided into segments supporting different political parties. Sadulaev found these “party-portions” out in a field somewhere, in a dialect word for manmade beehive boxes—bortii—which, yes, do sound sort of like “parties”—partii in Russian, a word as alien to Saat as bortii is to the compilers of the Oxford Russian-English dictionary, not to mention to a host of otherwise convenient Internet tools. The solution to this problem comes from author himself, who dubs them, in English, “peehives.” Various words conveying emptiness—pustota, pustosh, pustynia—which serve the novel’s theme of perception and reality, present another challenge. What seems to a Russia in economic thrall to nimbler neighbors west and east to be an empty, barren landscape—pustosh—fills, in dreams, with economic, cultural, and philosophical potential.

Even when English is a good servant to Sadulaev’s Russian, some elements transit over uneasily. Not everyone, notably the female half of our readership, will savor the sex scenes with equal relish. All three male protagonists illustrate distinctive cultural attitudes toward sex, and in all cases, the reality of the experience is mediated through a particular form of storytelling: literary, oral, and virtual. Readers of all tastes are urged, however, to appreciate the easternmost lovers’ use of (genuine) ancient Chinese poetry as foreplay. Sadulaev situates his China scenes within the perspective of the country’s millennia-long history, which colors his characters’ attitudes toward business as well as to sex and family life. The big picture above all; and above all, patience. It may also help to keep in mind that Maximus’s lover Maya functions more as muse than mistress, and the Dostoyevskian story she tells of sordid child abuse is not meant to be taken literally. Maximus, after all, is a writer, and the book in your hands is a story about its own creation—and the devil’s role in that creative process. More treacherous still for contemporary Western readers is the Dutch partner’s foray into the Internet sex chat room staffed by a Russian girl, with all its attendant nuances. More often than not, the sex scenes are better interpreted as reflecting cultural differences and attitudes toward illusion and reality than as serving some prurient purpose or social message. As for Sadulaev’s political themes, they participate in a gritty Russian literary tradition that wallows in the mud as it strives to solve the great problems of ontology, and for all that, exerts an unmistakable fascination upon its often bewildered readers—as it always has.

As they conduct their international business transactions, Sadulaev’s characters resort to the universal language of trade—English. Maximus’s dreams occasionally leave traces of the ancient Khazar language in his consciousness as well; the reader—like the translator—is unlikely to be able to decipher them, though readers proficient in Arabic may fare better. Russian novels have always been hospitable to heterogeneous intrusions, and The Maya Pill is no exception. Here can be found various interpolated histories: of the post-Soviet economy, of Khazaria, of the mythical origins of Rus. A dip into the chaos of the Internet yields a series of posts by a barely literate blogger that, for all their misspellings and crude vocabulary, do manage to lead Maximus to the secret of the fish paste, and from there, to the true nature of the pink pills.

The Maya Pill, like its hallowed literary predecessors, offers a panoramic picture of the contemporary social and economic world even as it probes deep into our assumptions about the nature of reality. True to the novel’s ambitions, the eternal “accursed” questions of Russian literature lurk quietly on every page. Here, though, they come with an understated irony that should endear itself to a modern readership that has heard and read it all before, or thinks it has.