City of Thieves1. 1941, Leningrad. Facing death sentence, a 17 year old thief Lev and a Red Army deserter Kolya were given an impossible mission to redeem themselves. That was the story.
Before watching the author explains how he wrote the book2, I believed his words in the preface that the story was roughly based his grandpa’s personal recount of Leningrad siege. And I was under the impression that Kolya was the reincarnation of the future author bringing abundent optimistism and humor into the story, while Lev was his teenage self with his grandpa’s war year memory, conveniently offering a first person perspective in the narrative. Therefore, the book is a trip for grandpa and author together, re-living an piece of memory and sharing an adventure. After watching the author’s own explanation, I know that was just my misinterpretation. Nonetheless, because the language is so smooth and the story so well written, I have been a fly3 on Lev and Kolya’s shoulder during the entire trip, hearing all their conversations and witnessing their narrow escpaes. After licking on their memories and fantasies, I do have some thoughts while rubbing my hands.
The first thing standing out is the mission: to find a dozen eggs beause the NVKD colnel needs the ingredients to make a cake for his daughter’s wedding, while residents of Leningrad were turned into cannibals. To make it more ridiculous, when Lev survived the ordeal and returned with a dozen eggs, he found that the colnel had already collected 3 dozens.
When I turned toward the colnel, he stared right back at me. Again he understood my expression.
“Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.” He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. “And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life.”
I read and appreciated those lines in 2021, after the year of 2020, which offered abundent irony and dark humor. If there’s another great writer who will write a great novel about 2020, I wonder what would be his dozen of eggs.
Another elephant in the room is the rampant sexual fantasies from both Lev and Kolya. The thoughts of sex were like unleashed puppies, fearlessly roaming around and ready to lift their legs and mark their presense any time anywhere. As once a teenage boy myself, I’m not surprised. I can’t agree more with one Chinese writer’s remark on this phenomenon: a teenage boy’s mind isn’t cleaner than a public toilet. If you have been a teenage boy and ever been to a Chinese public toilet 20 years ago, you won’t disagree with me. However, that’s from an old time when sex is tabooed and sinful. When I watched the Italian movie Malèna4 in my twenties, I was thinking to myself: director, how did you know my fantasies? At the same time, I was relieved of my guilt. After all, I wasn’t the only boy in the world who were tortured by the flood of hormones. However, the sexual fantasies in the book were not there to console your teenage guilt. Sex is about intimacy, so is talking about sex. Author added those moments not only to fit in a teenage boy’s mindset but also to wrap an arm around the readers’ shoulders and hold them closer. As someone says: if two men sit together but don’t talk about women and sex, you can tell they are not close friends. The author wants to be your close friend.
When Lev dozes off and was not thinking about girls, he often brought me into snapshots of his pre-war life. As those memories flashed by, one of them really impressed me: the poets’ clubhouse. Lev’s father was a well-known writer and poet in Leningrad and he often hosted gatherings of his friends. They made their home the Hotel Literati. I was the fly on the wall, overlooking the dining table full of writers talking about Battle of Cannae and reading poems. The scene transported me back to my own childhood. My father was a school teacher and aspiring writer. Birds of a feather flocked together. After dinner, when they started to drink tea, I grabbed my little stool, and sat down quietly. As if a banquet of stories is about to start and lucky me just got a free ticket. Politics, domestic or foreign, were always on the menu. Anecdotes of historical events were fascinating. Such as how an airforce officer who was going to blow up Mao’s special train with a rocket, but revealed the plan to his wife the night before the mission, hence aborting the Coup. Or mysterious stories like one of my father’s classmates went blind at young age but later made a fortune as a fortune teller. He once read my father’s palm and forcasted that at the age of 18, I would be very far away from hometown. Well, that was an cheap win for him, I went to college at the age of 18. As I get older and further away, I can’t find that stool and that circle any more. Now, how much I wish I could make my house the Hotel Literati and fill my son’s memory with stories!
Finally, the ending scene. It is too sweet, as indulgently loaded with sugar as donuts. An epic story shouldn’t have such a happy ending. Take a look at the ending scene of Lawrence of Arabia5. Lawrence’s car is moving on the dusty road sending him back home. As it passes by a group of Arab soldiers on cammels, Lawrence stands up and watches them moving backwards as if he tries to say Goodbye to them. As if himself is painfully aware that the curtain is falling on the heroic epsisode. He sits back in the seat, speechless. Endless dust on the road and heart sank with sorrow. That ending scene is much more beautiful and touching. If I may nitpick more, this book is more American than Russian, despite its setting in Russion history and the author’s Russian heritage. Comparing agaisnt another novel, Life and Fate6, written by Vasily Grossman who experienced the siege of stalingrad, I see sharp contrast. I didn’t read the novel but watched the TV series7 adapted from it. If I tasted pain and joy of flesh in City of Thieves, then I felt pain and joy of soul in Life and Fate. Maybe it’s simply because Vasily experienced the war himself as a Red Army correspondent, or because his root in Russian history and culture is deeper. Life and Fate attempts to have some heavy and profound conversations with its readers. City of Thieves only tries to tell an interesting story and keep you entertained. I haven no complaints about that because the book did well and accomplished its mission. I just don’t think City of Thieves would be a bestseller in Russia.
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Wait! A fly can’t survive the winter of 1941 in Leningrad? It’s a Piter’s fly, my friend. ↩