If ““Resurrection’’ feels somehow less cohesive than ““Lenin’s Tomb,’’ Remnick’s first book, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, that’s not really the author’s fault. It’s Russia’s. The demise of communism was a natural story, though a devilishly complicated one. The post-communist flotsam doesn’t lend itself to the same narrative flow. Remnick follows events more or less chronologically, beginning with Gorbachev, now in restless retirement, and ending with Yeltsin’s squeaker of a re-election last year. But many of the essays, though unfailingly interesting, say as much about Remnick as they do about Russia. One chapter deftly profiles a series of Russian writers (one favorite: Dmitri Prigov, ““part Derrida, part Monty Python’’). It concludes, however, that writers in Russia really don’t matter anymore.
The chapter on Solzhenitsyn displays Remnick’s gifts most brightly. First of all, he got access: no mean feat with that suspicious hermit. Second, he has read prodigiously in preparation (could he really have slogged through all 5,000 pages of ““The Red Wheel’’? Good grief). And third, he manages to make Solzhenitsyn, one of history’s most ungracious exiles, into a human being–not a normal human being, mind you, but a tired monomaniac in a ratty brown sweater, with three superachieving sons and a house in Vermont.
Some chapters, unfortunately, feel slightly dated. The essay on Zhirinovsky focuses on his stunning victory in the parliamentary elections of December 1993. ““Now … he was a contender to lead a country of 150 million people and thousands of nuclear weapons,’’ writes Remnick. But he’s not much of a contender anymore. Surely one reason to write a book about Russia is to step back from the parade of astonishments and assess what really turned out to be a crisis and what didn’t. Remnick, now on staff at The New Yorker, suggests in his epilogue that Russia’s future ““is more promising than ever before in history.’’ Wow. Too bad our tour guide didn’t have a little more time to explain that one.
