Kantor, or the song of the sign
Eric Naulleau
Out of the East, again. Just as light always takes its source in the East, from the East comes a new masterwork. Twenty times, thirty times, we have experienced this in the cinema. When pictures appeared like bolts from the black, as if the primitive instant had dilated, the universe was reborn and we discovered Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing, Sergei Loznitsa’s In The Fog or Lazlo Nemes’s Son of Saul.
Twenty times, thirty times, we have experienced this in literature. Though barely started - a book plunged us into a parallel world and we discovered Varlam Shalamov’s The Kolyma Tales, Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Ladislav Klima’s The Great Novel, Ismail Kadare’s The Great Winter, Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Unreality or Stanislas Witkiewicz’s Insatiability.  Novels - worlds for someones, novel – cathedrals for others.  But they are surely loosing competition to the «chapels» of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where writers of both sexes climb into the pulpit to announce to their assembled flock that they have discovered a fresh wrinkle in their navels.
It’s difficult to know what to admire most in Maxim Kantor: that a painter of international repute should also be an exceptionally talented novelist, at the height of his literary powers, or that this mastery should be put to such good use in presenting rich, historical matter. For one example among many of literary skill, admire this economy of style in evoking the fate of the Soviet Jews, gone from the vanguard of Leninism to being expiatory victims of Stalinism: “At that time, intellectuals were hunted down; now, the New Economic Policy was bringing back qualified scholars. The boat arrived in the USSR, and Solomon once again saw, in his mind’s eye, his father coming ashore down a gangplank: Moses Richter was wearing a blue woollen suit reserved for special occasions: it was in this suit that he was taken to prison, and in this suit that he was buried.” Who could better that? And specially: who could say shorter?
As for history, it should be remembered, along with Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy, that even after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, they nevertheless continue to form a demarcation line between two Europes: “The French seem to consider history as a reality that is admittedly indisputable, with which one of course maintains certain relations, but at heart not so important, and definitely not as awful as all that. According to Western conception, history was a part of landscape. Meanwhile for the rest of the continent, history evokes a monster or a spirit that suddenly rises up from time to time and whose apparition has terrible consequences.” It is possible that positions have converged somewhat since the 7th of January, and still more so since the 13th of November 2015.
But it is difficult to see who could easily, in a few pages,  put into the same melting pot the migrants on the Mediterranean sea, the war in the Ukraine, the sub-primes crisis, the Empress Catherine, Margaret Thatcher, the Tower of Babel, the advent of the plutocrats’ reign, cynicism considered as one of the contemporary fine arts, and Lenin’s sealed railway carriage. In the breathtaking second chapter of Red Light, a group portrait executed in the salons of the French Embassy in Moscow, Kantor raises the art dealer Bazarov to the level of a symbol of the Russian 21st century, just as the civil servant was that of the 19th and the Gulagprisoner that of the 20th. Some incidental talk of Solzhenitsyn is also no coincidence, nor the presence of an examining magistrate who sows the same dismay among those gathered as does the Government Inspector in the small town imagined by Gogol — always the same ambition to compose an all-enveloping work, a palimpsest of the great texts of the past. Bazarov, a corrupt and corrupting individual, has devised his own motto: “Who needs the market economy when you have the Bazaar(-ov) economy?”. Bazarov and his kind, virtuosos of the post-Soviet swindle, latter-day alchemists: “Everyday vocabulary has changed. Instead of “money”, people have started saying “dough”. Instead of “citizen”, they say “punter”; instead of “comrade”, “client”; instead of “ideal”, “project”. And citizens have been forced to learn this jargon, just as they were once forced to learn those incomprehensible communist terms “commissar” and “daily production quotas”.  In English, it calls “an update”.
This dung-heap (where the world keeps on dying) is seen through the eyes of Solomon Richter, an observer equipped with the same “mechanical eye” as that of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Vertov captured the birth of new dawns; Richter fixes dying sunsets, and Solomon Richter is dying. Paul Valet, a French poet of Russian origin, naturally enough, claimed that “a bedridden man sees the sky at its real height”, and it appears here that a dying man sees the earth at its real distance. More time to estimate Words, to hammer the ‘i’'s (poings sur les i) and to call for attack (parole d’assaut), to borrow again from Paul Valet.
To the circle of Putinophiles, now more populous than that of the dead poets, we only could advise to follow the thoughts of the dying man: “The President-Emperor had crystal-clear eyes. He inspired confidence. But in his appeal to the world, he had used the same arguments as Hitler in his address to Neville Chamberlain, and Solomon Richter, enfeebled historian, realised with horror that he knew Putin’s speech by heart: it was Hitler’s letter to Chamberlain dated 23rd of August 1939.”
Panoramic sight or snapshots (“Socialism couldn’t be destroyed without tackling the Empire”, “Every refined person, these days, well could be in contact with a thief and a killer in few handshakes”, “The Ukrainians were once anti-Semitic, then they became Jews”) - Kantor knows how to frame his subject. Kantor hunts down reality until it is trapped in his lens, to show us the full picture, before it’s too late. Kantor, the revealing agent.