Innokenty Petrovich Platonov slowly awakens. He’s in a hospital bed. At first, he doesn’t know his own name or why he’s there. Slowly and over an extended period, a nurse and a physician, Dr. Geiger, explain.
Childhood memories come first. His favorite book to read was Robinson Crusoe; he can recall his grandmother reading it to him when he was sick. His fascination with airplanes and aviators. Memories of traveling to a summer retreat and playing airplanes with a cousin.
The nurse unintentionally leaves a bottle of his pills on the beside. And he sees the manufacture and expiration dates – 1997 and 1999, respectively. It’s the first indication that something is not right. He looks like he’s 30 years old, but he was born in 1900 and is “as old as the century.”
As more is gradually revealed, the doctor has him keep a journal. Innokenty comes to understand that he raised in the middle or upper middle class of pre-Revolutionary Russia, that the Revolution destroyed the life he’d known, and that he was eventually imprisoned in the Gulag of Stalin and the Soviet system. And more: he became a test animal in a scientific program – he was frozen in a tank of liquid nitrogen to be thawed at some future date. Dr. Geiger succeeded in unfreezing him. Innokenty is now living is a culture and time he doesn’t understand, where little outside a few buildings in St. Petersburg is recognizable. He is a man of a vanished time having to make his way, much like the Robinson Crusoe of his childhood stories.
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| Eugene Vodolazkin |
Innokenty had a great love, a young woman named Anastasia, a professor’s daughter. He will learn she is still alive, barely hanging on in a hospital, watched over by her granddaughter, also named Anastasia.
The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated by Lisa Hayden) is a novel of Russia in the immediate post-Soviet period and the pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods. Innokenty Platonov is a representative of a vanished time and the soul so many strive for, the people who believed that the end of Soviet dictatorship would bring true democracy, only to be disappointed. Innokenty sees and understands this disconnect, and his story because a debate, not only of the Russian soul and Russian people, but a debate about all of us. And while his name implies “innocence,” his personal history may not.
Voloalazkin works in the department of Old Russian Literature at the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg, where he is an expert in medieval Russian history and folklore. The author of several novels, he was awarded the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize in 2019. His novel Laurus won the Russian Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award.
The Aviator is a remarkable, wonderful story. It is a Russian story and a universal story. It’s a love story, and a story about science and faith. It is a novel of the gulag. It is a story about the Robinson Crusoe in each of us, we strangers in a strange land. And it’s a romance of the dashing aviator contained in each of us, the hero taking both courageous and foolhardy risks.
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