The Tsar of Love and Techno

by Anthony Marra

IN MY generation the position of correction artist is a consolation prize for failed painters. I attended the Imperial Academy of Arts for a year, where I made small still lifes of fruit bowls and flower vases, each miniature as realistic as a photograph, before moving on to portraiture, my calling, the most perfect art. The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose, and mouth that compose a sitter’s face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins.

For art to be the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer.

On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss’s wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth.

No one believed the state-sponsored propaganda: The philosophy of Marxism-Leninism predicts the inevitable contours of history, the individual is significant only in his submission to the collective, the chemicals in the water cause cancer. Our revolution was a Sunday swim.

But contrary to his plans, by the next summer the pain in my mother’s chest would have already taken her to the doctor, then the hospital, then the crematorium, and finally the living room bookshelf, where her ashes still rest, and will likely spend eternity, in a pickle jar between a can of spare buttons and two phone books, despite my father’s promises to someday scatter them in waters off Sochi.

technique: stringing of clauses for narrative

Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.

Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.

White-orange flapped atop a flare stack. A blackbird cursored across the blue screen of sky.

Lovely description

Six months later, he had signed Sergei up for language classes taught by an Australian man with English teeth. Al Pacino quotes and Tupac lyrics qualified as rudimentary English and Sergei placed out of the intro course. Within two years, he spoke well enough to take Business English I and II, which used Donald Trump’s autobiography for a textbook. In such richly manured soil, a seed hardly needs sunlight to grow.

Here in the New Russia, you weren’t bound by the past. The grandson of an enemy of the people, the son of a convict, his boy, a successful businessman.