Aleksei Lesnyanski
| Dezhurnye po strane | Servants of the Country Novel. Druzhba narodov 2007. Abridged version 2016. 176 pages |
Russia is going to be auctioned off and the lowest bid wins. A joke amongst college-leavers becomes the vocational kick-start for six fellow students. Instead of turning to alcohol or emigrating and trying their luck abroad, as their professor did who as a farewell present gave away good marks, a group of friends decide to put their efforts into providing honest help for their dreary provincial home-town in Siberia. Vasya helps the farmers to set up their own co-operative for selling their milk and meat produce. Aleksei infiltrates a group of neo-fascist skinheads to pass information about their activities to the militia. Artyem looks after the prostitutes. Vova visits the orphanages. Leonid disrupts a meeting of the town council which is mostly made up of the offspring of the provincial oligarchs. Their intention with the movement "Servants of the Country" is not to start voluntary clean-ups like the soviet subbotnik, nor to start a secret vigilante movement. They do not want to expose new old-culprits, but to convince people to take their lives into their own hands and to join the movement. And the first protest actions do indeed have positive results: a slum of make-shift huts is torn down and the inhabitants are given decent accommodation. But, as even in the last provincial town everything is interlinked, their enthusiastic actions also take a tragic turn.
With deliberate literary sentimentality, Lesnyanski writes in the positive tradition of revolutionary rhetoric, cleared of any false soviet patriotism, to give a fresh young voice to the daily minor heroics that the modern Russian civil society does so desperately need. In the light of this novel, the affected emotionalism of the current Russian patriotism exposes itself as hollow and empty.
With a good amount of self-irony Lesnyanski turns up as a fellow-student of the "Servants" and presents them with his literary "Outrage Now!". But they pull it to pieces as a poor reflection of reality and take him out to see the real world.
