The Archivist's Story

February 12, 2007
Story writer Holland's impressive debut novel tracks the plight of disgraced literature teacher and reluctant archivist Pavel Dubrov, whose job, mainly, in 1939 Moscow, is to destroy books at Lubyanka prison, a dank, morbid depository for political prisoners where the boilers rarely work. When an unsigned story is discovered in a prison file, Pavel is ordered to authenticate its author, believed to be Isaac Babel, who is locked up at the prison. Haunted by his conversations with Babel and his love of Babel's work, Pavel steals the manuscript and hides it behind the crumbling bricks of his apartment's basement. (Later, he smuggles out a second manuscript.) He has little to lose: his young wife was killed in a train accident, his mentor is waiting to be carted off to prison for his unwillingness to walk the Party line, and his mother is succumbing to a brain tumor. All around him, literature is being destroyed, from the boxes of manuscripts he prepares for destruction to the page scraps his neighbor and lover Natalya uses to roll her cigarettes. Nearly everything and everyone in the novel is sad and broken, but Holland finds a kernel of hope in Pavel's mission. It's a melancholic and moving tribute to the written word.