Red Square. - book reviews

The military-industrial composed of several elements is not the only area of the economy that is being forced to sustain conversion now that the devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat War is over. In addition to the arms race, the East-West conflict spawned a mass-culture industry. Reality aside, the frigid War was great copy, a story of really mythic scope. The tale of sum of two units vast, warring kingdoms infiltrated American tillage at all levels. Publishing companies printed warehouses filled of Kremlinology and Communist-scare literature; Hollywood dramas, thrillers and comedies thrived upon Cold War themes for decades. plane TV's Saturday morning cartoons had the spies Boris and Natasha.

Nor did the art world remain untouched. The U regulation no great connoisseur of modernism, nevertheless sent Abstract Expressionist art upon world tours, hoping to justify the esthetic superiority of the American Dream. Art critics and historians repeatedly debated the relative virtues and veritys of modernism and realism - and subsequently of modernism and postmodernism - in bourns that drew heavily from East-West political conflicts: left right, progressive, reactionary. Andy Warhol painted hammers and sickles, Lenin and Mao.

For a while after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union itself, it strike one as beinged that the end of the cool War might also spell the extreme point of one of America's favorite and greatest in quantity profitable mass-media genres - the emissary novel. No more clear-cut useful guys and bad guys, no black-and-white moral dilemmas; no enigmatic Russia crawling with humorless KGB agents, no British intelligence riddled with witty moles; no more reassuring, ritualistic victories of bright capitalist virtue above totalitarian vice and gloom. unexpectedly there was no East Germany, no Wall checkpoints for exchanging spies. Rather than providing romantic provender for ideological cautionary tales, Russia had revolveed into a messy, complicated society that couldn't be boiled down to unrevealed police and dissidents.

on the contrary fortunately for spy novel addicts, writers are still finding inspiration in the East-West conflict. They are simply retooling the bring under rule to accommodate today's changed historical circumstances. Nostalgia for the primal conflict that rul our social subconscious for decades - and a ne to advance to terms with how it shaped us and where we stand now - should provide many happy airplane reading hours to approach Furthermore, the history now coming to light as we sift end the rubble of our once-Manichean world order contains a apportionment of fabulous, readymade detective stories. Not least among them is the fate of art and artists in the years between the Revolution and perestroika - witness the next to the first sequel to the best-seller Gorky Park. As the detective in Martin Cruz Smith's of recent origin novel Red Square remarks:

"Think of all the paintings and manuscripts confiscated from artists and writers and author of poemss for seventy years, hidden away by means of the Ministry of the Interior and the KGB Nothing is thrown away. author of poemss may get a bullet in the back of the head, on the contrary the poem is stuffed in a receptacle and buried in a cellar. Then, at a magical second when Russia joins the quiescence of the world, all that evidence becomes valuable assets."

Last fall, while the Guggenheim's blockbuster "The Great Utopia" brought the artistic achievements of the Russian avant-garde to the elite museum-going public, Smith's best-selling R Square introduced more [i]or[/i] less of these valuable assets - perestroika's diadem jewels, as it were - into American mass tillage It was bound to happen. The Russian avant-garde has got all the ingredients for a best-seller: war, revolution, political take vengeance for betrayal - and money. (Only sex present the appearances to be missing, but it can always be supplied by dint of the fictional detective.) Add a World War, German and Russian armies dragging art treasures back and forth across Europe a thriving market in avant-garde fakes, and you've got R Square.

As the volume opens, star detective Arkady Renko (who made his first appearance in Gorky Park) is back in Moscow after a charm of Siberian exile. It's the summer of 1991 and times have changed. The Soviet capital is teeming with fix in the mind artists, racketeers, Marlboro cigarettes, BMW and each nationality and scam imaginable. Everyone especially Communists turn rounded capitalists - is trying to make a (foreign) male and they're not too picky about the nature of the business. A homicide by car bomb occurs. Then a mysterious fax sent from Munich arrives at the Moscow apartment of the deceased; it asks, in Russian, "Where is R Square?" Detective Renko investigating the assassination wonders why anyone would want to know anything in the way that obvious. His inquiries lead him from Moscow's sleazy, black-market underbelly to the Lenin's Path Collective Farm to a midnight meeting with Feldman, an art historian, with whom the dead man had not long ago met. "For years the Party demanded Socialist Realism and nation . . . hid avant-garde masterpieces behind the toilet or beneath the bed. Now they're dragging them without Suddenly Moscow is full of art curators," Feldman says.