The Fur Hat!

Our book today is a bit of an antidote to the massive doorstops we’ve been dealing with recently here on Stevereads: it’s The Fur Hat, a 120-page 1989 novella by caustic and sometimes brilliant Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, here translated into English by Susan Brownsberger.

The book is a treat of hangdog sarcasm. It tells the story of Soviet writer Yefim Rakhlin, a popular hack author who’s been a member of the Writers’ Union for eighteen years and has spent all of that time churning out one new book a year, non-political adventure stories starring decent, heroic people facing and overcoming natural disasters in order to perform selfless deeds. His books – with titles like Avalanche! Operation! And Ore! (“It’s not just the ore in the earth, it’s the ore in each of us …”) – are all bestsellers, and although we’re told that “in his heart of hearts, he always wanted to write something obscure and even impenetrable,” Rakhlin usually sets his literary sites at more mundane levels:

After typing the title of the novel, Operation!, Yefim stopped to ponder. He pictured the word displayed vertically. The fact that his more recent novels all had titles consisting of only one word was no accident. Yefim had noticed that the popularization of literary works was greatly facilitated if the titles could be used in crossword puzzles. The puzzles were a form of free advertisement that had been scorned by those authors who gave their works such long and many-worded titles as War and Peace or Crime and Punishment.

When he discovers that the Literary Fund has decided to honor the country’s writers by presenting them with fur hats, and that the quality of the fur hats will reflect the Fund’s estimation of the prose-quality of the recipients – reindeer fawn for the best, muskrat for the next echelon, marmot below that, and so on – Rahklin is first outraged and then obsessed over the fact that he himself will be getting a hat made of common tomcat.

In a series of deftly-handled comic escalations, Voinovich quickly intensifies this absurd premise to hilarious extents. As Rahklin’s outrage mounts, he gains more attention and becomes something of a cause celebre, seen as a defiant rebel against the Writers’ Union where he’d before been such a faithful member. His notoriety extends even abroad (when a Voice of America broadcast refers to him as a “leading” Russian writer, he can’t help but preen), and Voinovich keeps things so funny that his readers will need to remind themselves that they’re also taking in some fairly acidic observations about envy, state censorship, and of course celebrity culture.

And all in forty-five minutes of reading! It’s like a taste of Spring.