Iron Curtain Call

Jerome Charyn (Jerry Bauer)

THE GREEN LANTERN: A Romance of Stalinist Russia

By Jerome Charyn

Thunder's Mouth. 357 pp. $22

"He had yellowish eyes, like a wolf. But they crinkled with a warmth and a merriment that a wolf could never hope to have." Guess who? Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, a k a Stalin, is a despot with a heart and a twinkle in his eye in Jerome Charyn's new novel, The Green Lantern, which unfolds amid the political and romantic intrigues of 1930s Moscow. Stalin's murderous apparatchiks are all here -- the poisoner Yagoda, Yezhov "the Dwarf," and the bespectacled Beria -- as well as some of the artists and writers whom Stalin liked to toy with: Maxim Gorky, Sergei Eisenstein, Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel.

One notable absence (apart from a passing reference), however, is Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Russian Civil War play, "Days of the Turbins," is said to have been seen by Stalin 15 times. In 1928 Bulgakov started writing The Master and Margarita, his brilliantly inventive novel about devilish doings in Moscow. That book, published posthumously in 1967, set the bar very high for fictional renderings of the Great Terror. So high that perhaps it is unfair to draw comparisons, but anyone who has read Bulgakov's masterpiece will find The Green Lantern a disappointment.

Charyn's novel opens in 1933, after the suicide of Stalin's second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva. Newly arrived in town for a six-week run of "King Lear" is a makeshift acting troupe from Tiflis, Georgia. Unforeseen circumstances thrust an unschooled stagehand, Ivan Azerbaijan, into the lead as Lear, and his performance is an instant sensation. Stalin himself -- a doting father to his daughter Svetlana, and a terrible sentimentalist -- weeps when he sees Ivanushka's portrayal of the tormented king. Invested with the charms of his holy-fool namesake from Russian folklore, Ivanushka disarms the schemers and murderers swirling around Stalin and manages to navigate the serpent's lair unmolested -- though Stalin's signature fake-out ("He gives you the Order of Lenin, and lops off your head that very night") is the other shoe waiting to drop.

Ivanushka's romantic fortunes are in the hands of a fading starlet named Valentina Mikhailovna "Michaelson," who has been under house arrest as punishment for a traitorous flirtation with the American movie studio MGM. Her current lover is the dashing Volodya Rustaveli, a reformed Georgian bandit turned popular writer, protégé of Gorky, favorite of Stalin, and a spy for the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB). Rustaveli has a bad case of writer's block thanks to the demands of his secret-police gig, which include poisoning his mentor. But Rustaveli is not simply an opportunistic knave. He intervenes to help both a socialist-realist hack and the literary giant Mandelstam, whose fate was sealed by his 16-line "Epigram" on Stalin: "His cockroach whiskers leer/ And his boot tops gleam./ Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders/ . . . " Stalin, no illiterate country bumpkin, appreciated Mandelstam's genius, and his instructions were to "isolate but preserve."

The plot twists and turns, characters fall out of favor and allegiances shift, and Ivanushka, under Rustaveli's tutelage, learns how to play the game. Yet The Green Lantern never quite rises to its subject matter. Charyn's style is clipped and choppy; the writing, especially the dialogue, sounds at times like a clunky translation -- and other times like a bad romance novel:

"He'll send us both to a labor camp."

"Good. I'll swim in the White Sea with the winter bears."

"You'll freeze your ass off."

"But at least we'll have each other."

The book is packed with historical odds and ends -- Yagoda is smitten with Timosha, Gorky's fetching daughter-in-law; the title of Valentina's fictional film, "The Girl in the Green Hat," echoes the popular novel that Nadya was reportedly reading at the time of her suicide, Michael Arlen's The Green Hat -- but it's hard to shake the feeling that Charyn is just going through the motions, ticking off items on his list. A reader may nod in recognition or simply glide over the historical allusions, but in either case they add little true texture or depth.

Nor do they help to propel an often listless narrative. The Green Lantern should be a page-turner, but it suffers from a blurry focus and sketchily drawn characters. The story does pick up unexpectedly around page 300, when it breaks free of the repetitive machinations in Moscow and follows Ivanushka to a Siberian labor camp. Finally, Ivanushka is doing something about his long-simmering passion for Valentina -- though somehow there's not much in the way of sexual tension between these two. The reunion is complete with the appearance of a broken-down Rustaveli, who has been made to suffer for a seditious work called "The Green Lantern." This is Charyn's 38th book, and there is much to admire in his eclectic oeuvre, such as his rollicking autobiographical trilogy about growing up in the Bronx circa the 1940s. For a bewitching, unforgettable spin through the Stalin era, however, spring for a copy of The Master and Margarita. •

Julia Livshin is a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly.