Let the Dead Bury the Dead
In her second novel, Allison Epstein blends the historical and the fabulous with an understated elegance. Set in an alternative pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg of 1812-13, the novel begins with Sasha, a Russian captain, returning from the Napoleonic wars to his lover, the Grand Duke Felix. His nerves devastated by “the choke of gunfire [that] blotted out the sun” and “boys in tattered French uniforms … flesh blue and frozen stiff,” Sasha rescues a strange woman with hair the white of “feathers, of sun reflected off a frosted window.” He fears she is a vila (a malicious spirit), but attributes his unease to his maladjustment to peacetime. Yet he grows increasingly suspicious as the mysterious woman (Sofia) insinuates herself into the lives and ambitions of the other central characters, Grand Duke Felix and Marya, a revolutionary foot-soldier. The narrative moves between the three perspectives, as Sofia inflames their hearts and the very streets of St. Petersburg. Epstein’s storytelling echoes Sasha’s blurring of the modern and the mythical, of folklore and history.
From her opening pages, Epstein upends the “order, regularity, precision,” associated with traditional masculinity. The soft and feckless Felix idles away his time in a luxurious exile, while Marya steals and fights for the starving workers and serfs. Yet gender often seems incidental to the main narrative and in the string of vila tales that Epstein weaves through it. Even in its most darkly realistic moments, the novel has an air of a dark, grim fable. As in her earlier A Tip for the Hangman, Epstein’s prose is both spare and deliciously visual. Childhood words hang in the curtains, bones yearn for heat. I savored this novel, reading it slowly, despite or perhaps because of its deceptively simple surface.
