THE MOST VIVID character in "The Tsar of Love and Techno," Anthony Marra's new story collection, is not a person but a place, specifically the Russian city of Kirovsk, an arctic purgatory of nickel smelting plants, where one out of every two residents contracts lung cancer. In Marra's Kirovsk there's a polluted man-made lake surrounded by a dozen smokestacks that locals have named the Twelve Apostles; more memorable still is the White Forest, a field of metal and plastic birches planted in Soviet times by the local party boss's wife, to combat the city's reputation as an eyesore. Everything about the place reeks of disaster, even the name: Sergei Kirov was a Bolshevik whose assassination - probably on Stalin's orders - became a pretext for the show trials of the 1930s. And since Marra's preoccupation is history, and its ability to both erase and lend meaning to individual lives, Kirovsk is a fitting centerpiece for his audacious, strange and occasionally brilliant book. In many ways, Marra's Russia is a place as extreme as the wartime Chechnya of his acclaimed first novel, "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" - it's possibly less lethal but just as corrosive. In "The Tsar of Love and Techno," the war in Chechnya remains the catastrophe at the center of many of the stories, but here Marra's broader scope positions it as merely the latest in a series of calamities that span 75 years and shape the book's large, nearly Tolstoyan ensemble of characters. These characters are interconnected and recurring, giving the collection the feel of a novel, and Marra's narrative jumps from one to another like the flu. The first story is set in Leningrad in 1937, the height of Stalin's purges; its protagonist, Roman Markin, a retoucher in the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation, blots out the faces of the condemned from newspaper photographs. One of those faces belongs to a prima ballerina who stages "Swan Lake" in a labor camp, and later in the collection we meet her granddaughter Galina, who rises above the bleakness of her native Kirovsk by becoming Miss Siberia and marrying Russia's 14th-wealthiest man. Galina's high school boyfriend, Kolya, enlists as a contract soldier and goes missing in Chechnya, where his younger brother, Alexei, a college-age techno fanatic, travels to find him. Elsewhere we meet Ruslan, a curator who opens a museum of regional art in his ramshackle apartment in Grozny, and Sergei, a teenage grifter who accompanies a legless army veteran begging aboard the trains in St. Petersburg's metro. These are only some of the characters, many of whom turn out to be connected to one another in intricate, often unexpected ways. This material may suggest that "The Tsar of Love and Techno" is a heavy-handed or grim piece of writing. That it is neither is a testament to Marra's seamless prose, telling use of detail and brisk pacing. The narration throughout is particularly agile - the stories move between first and third person, and one is narrated by six of Galina's friends, who appear as a kind of Greek chorus. Marra endows each of his narrators with a distinct voice, particularly Alexei, who dreams of being a professional aphorist and tends to sound both endearing and comically overwrought. This is how Alexei describes the experience of a nightclub crowded with beautiful women: "The heat-seeking desire flowing from my heart via my southlands was indiscriminate in its aim." Populating a book with a multitude of distinctive narrators would strain even the most resourceful stylist, and not all of Marra's are as convincing as Alexei. At times, the retoucher Markin can sound like a historical tendency come to life. When his interior monologue yields sloganeering like "The light of socialism burns bright enough to illumine even his brutish soul," a reader can be forgiven for wondering whether even loyal supporters of totalitarian regimes think in such platitudes. The linked characters aren't the book's only connective tissue; there are also several recurring, mysterious objects: a photo of the ballerina, a mixtape Alexei gives Kolya on the eve of his departure, and an oil landscape by the 19th-century painter Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets. The last is altered, embellished and redacted so many times that it begins to function as a metaphor, a palimpsest attesting to the historical upheavals alluded to in the book. Zakharov-Chechenets was a Russian painter of Chechen origin, and here his landscape embodies the complex and ultimately tragic relationship between the two cultures, a relationship that animates both of Marra's books. Marra's feel for post-Soviet Russian life (he lived in St. Petersburg as a college student) is assured and considered, especially in his handling of Vera, a pensioner who had denounced her mother during the Great Terror. Like many Russians of her age, Vera struggles with the new order; many of her values and cultural touchstones have been leached of value and meaning. Marra's vivid descriptions of her milieu - the leather-bound volumes of Gorky she decides to sell, the passive-aggressive exchanges with her newly prosperous friend Yelena, the trips to a kiosk to buy chocolate bars "so aerated they could be used as packing material" - lend Vera verisimilitude and depth. When she becomes an unwitting accomplice in a murder, her grief and guilt result in some of Marra's most powerful writing. THERE ARE WELCOME flashes of humor throughout, particularly the dark, sardonic strain that Russians call chernukha. Watching his hapless father speak about his passion project - a homemade space capsule to be used in the event of a nuclear war - Alexei remarks that "his cheeks remained red with excitement and dermatitis." After taking English classes, Sergei calls Americans at home and steals their identities by posing as an I.R.S. agent with a Russian accent; he tells his father that he finds his clueless victims by trolling Tom Hanks's Facebook fan page. "Those who enjoy his acting are unfamiliar with human nature," he explains. A handful of plot devices - like the conclusion to Markin's story and the book's futuristic coda - feel overly familiar, as though recycled from a big-studio Hollywood film. Some of the cosmic connections feel overdetermined and too neat, and the vertiginous telescoping in time and the sheer number of characters sometimes make it difficult to spend enough time with a favorite one before the reader is whisked away. But these missteps barely register in the wake of a book this ambitious and fearless, one that offers so much to enjoy and admire. At a time when a lot of fiction by young American writers veers toward familiar settings and safe formal choices, Marra's far-ranging, risky and explicitly political book marks him as a writer with an original, even singular sensibility. Of course politics alone isn't enough to create art. In writing so evocatively about the harrowing stories of his characters, both Russian and Chechen, Marra brings to mind the novelist Tatyana Tolstaya. "Politics disappears; it vanishes," she told an interviewer. "What remains constant is human life." Marra's Russia is a place as extreme as the wartime Chechnya of his first novel. ALEX HALBERSTADT is the author of the forthcoming "Young Heroes of the Soviet Union," a family memoir. |