An affecting Russian fable about the power of hope

IN a drab district of a city, in a country which, though not named, corresponds to Soviet-era Russia, the members of an ordinary family struggle to keep hope and some idea of beauty and possibility alive. Anna is a school teacher, worried that she is no longer attractive and that her husband Sergei doesn’t love her anymore.

Sergei is a musician, playing the tuba in a theatre orchestra. He is oppressed by the banal, state- approved music he has to play, and longs to hear music that will transport him. He is afraid that, in his 40s, he is already old.

Teenage Alexander hates life in this city where nothing happens and there are no prospects. He drinks, consistently plays truant from school, and yearns for escape to some exotic place in the East.

Then hope for change arrives, in the form of a mysterious kiosk which appears on a side street. The rumour spreads that it will be selling tickets for a concert to be given in the city by the great composer Selinsky, in exile since the beginning of the revolution three decades earlier. The members of the household, including grandmother Maya, once a famed ballet dancer, unspeaking now for many years, all begin to covet possession of a ticket, hoping it will transform their lives. Mother, father and son take to spending long hours in the queue, over the course of a year in which much happens, and at the end of which, all is changed.

Based loosely on events surrounding a concert given by Stravinsky in Leningrad in 1962, Grushin’s novel is a simple and affecting fable about the power of hope and a study in the difficulties of keeping body and soul alive under a repressive regime.

The Concert Ticket is technically very accomplished. Grushkin weaves effortlessly in and out of the minds of her main characters, and point of view changes from chapter to chapter, developing individual stories.

But it is the lyricism of the prose, its descriptive richness, and the deft and sometimes lovely similes that make Grushin’s novel so rewarding: “The night outside hung enormous and warm and still, like a black sheet clipped to the heavens by some celestial housewife going about her chores.” “Skinny parings of sunlight” squeeze through a cleft in the curtains. This reviewer cannot recall another novel which has quite so many fine descriptions of light and dark and shadow.

Grushin was born in Moscow, and grew up there and in Prague. She lives in the US and writes in English, but retains her Russian citizenship. Her subject matter is life under the duress of totalitarian regimes — her prior novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov dealt with the cost of an individual’s compromise with the system. Her sensibility is unmistakably Russian. In the book under review, despite a comic disavowal of its existence, characters evince aspects of that nebulous thing, the Russian soul, which could perhaps be defined as a highly developed (one might say overdeveloped) capacity for conscious suffering.

This novel will delight readers who love family sagas and sumptuous prose. Its author is most definitely one to watch out for.