The Faculty Of Useless Knowledge

The Year of Terror, 1937. Zybin, an exiled intellectual and archaeologist in the far province of Alma-Ata, finds himself wrongly accused of a crime during the darkest days of Stalin's reign. Soon, he and his colleagues are caught up in an ambitious Cheka investigator's attempts to set up a show trial to rival those taking place in Moscow. Vivid, courageous and defiant, The Faculty of Useless Knowledge is the crowning achievement by the author of The Keeper of Antiquities and The Dark Lady and draws heavily on autobiographical experience. First published in Russian in 1978, it is a masterpiece of anti-totalitarian literature, and stands alongside the works of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov in illuminating the chaos, absurdity and bureaucratic labyrinths of Soviet Russia.

About the Author :
Yury Dombrovsky (1909-1978) was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish lawyer. He was arrested for the first time as a student in his second year of theatre studies in 1932 and exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, where he published his first novel, Derzhavin. In 1937 he was arrested again and sent to a camp in northeast Siberia. Between 1943 and 1949 he lived in Alma-Ata teaching foreign literature; there he completed The Monkey Comes for His Skull, which he had begun in prison hospital, and wrote The Dark Lady. He was again arrested in 1949 in the campaign against "foreign influences and cosmopolitanism" and this time received a ten-year sentence to be served in Siberia. He was eventually released in 1955. His novel The Keeper of Antiquities was published to acclaim in Novy Mir in 1964, at the end of Khrushchev's brief period of liberalization, but, like his other books, was not reprinted in Russia until the late 1980s. The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, his masterpiece, was written between 1964 and 1975, and first published in Russian in Paris just before he died; it only appeared in Russia in 1988. It was widely believed that the KGB disapproved of his writing and Dombrovsky received numerous threats following publication; his arm was shattered by a steel pipe in the course of an assault on a bus, and he was finally attacked and severely beaten in the House of Literature. He died about a month and a half later, in May 1978.

Review :
There are moments in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, amid the flashbacks and shifting points of view, when a kind of magic begins to tug at the surface Drawing from personal experiences during his own sentencing and exile, Dombrovsky writes passionately and often humorously about the terrifying Soviet judicial system. Fear and chaos pervaded the lives of Russians in 1937, the height of Stalin's purges. During this time, Zybin, an archeologist in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, is wrongly accused of a crime and then forced through the labyrinthine prison system, in which the bureaucratic investigations are even more grueling than the physical punishment he endures. Meanwhile, all those who know him, including his young assistant, Kornilov (many of these characters were introduced in Dombrovsky's The Keeper of Antiquities, his only other novel translated into English), are subjected to long interrogations in which every word can be twisted to incriminate Zybin or even themselves. Theological arguments about justice weave their way throughout the novel, and, as in Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita, these discussions focus primarily on the person most active during Christ's trial?Pontius Pilate. Dombrovsky argues that Pilate was a weak governor, a mere bureaucrat who constantly feared for his position. The interrogators and prosecutors of the novel are allegorical Pilates. The young and frightened Kornilov breaks down and betrays Zybin, who, unlike Christ, is not willing to acquiesce to the system as it stands. Wonderfully written and darkly witty, Dombrovsky's novel, first published in Russia in 1978, draws us into the surreal world of Stalin's Soviet Union. An imposing fictional portrayal of the Stalinist terror, set in 1937 in the eastern Russian republic of Kazakhstan (on the Chinese border) and featuring themes and characters from Dombrovsky's earlier novel, The Keeper of Antiquities (1969)... Thickly textured, eloquently argued, as informative as it is dramatic: a superb novel that brings to our attention an important near-contemporary (Dombrovsky died in 1978) whose books belong on the same shelf with those of Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn