Yuz Aleshkovsky's Nikolai Nikolaevich

Filled with sexually explicit language, Aleshkovsky's Nikolai Nikolaevich is a Soviet Portney's Complaint, if Portney had been a a pickpocket who spent prodigious amounts of time in the Gulag.  The novella's plot revolves around an ex-convict who, upon release from prison, gets a job as a janitor of a biological research facility. The author speaks in prison jargon, but, somewhat paradoxically, also makes countless allusions to the classics of Russian literature, including Dead Souls. Soon, Nikolai Nikoleavich is recruited to provide the biologists with sperm for bizarre but promising experiments.  These leading Soviet scientists hope to use his sperm to spread human life to another galaxy. However, the fictional Soviet government bans the science, as the real Soviet government once banned genetic science. The book is of course a blend of science fiction and satire.  For the author depicts Soviet science and society as caught in a vortex of Soviet absurdities, including consumer shortages, Party purges, judicial arbitrariness, ideological imperatives, antisemitic campaigns, and planning fetishes.

Favorite quotations:


...here in the USSR, it doesn't matter how much you swipe, the important thing is:  don't steal.

Remember it's tough to get groceries these days.  The whole country is starving, except for our leaders and heads of supermarkets.

In American I'd already have a summer house at a health resort, and I'd own a Lincoln Continental and other property.  I want you to know I'm no Chichikov, these aren't dead souls I'm selling to the government.  These are my own fresh, native sperm. 

But then, since I am a true Soviet citizen, I've introduced economizing measures.

I've never squealed in my life, but if you snakes put the squeeze on my spirits, I'll squeal to the Party Committee, the Local Committee, and the Trade Union. 

We geneticists are five minutes short of being enemies of the people. 

Remember when you couldn't get razor blades anywhere?  That was because the Chinese were hurling pubic crabs at us across the Amur River. 

"You must think of masturbation as work--you  must utterly exclude the sexual element as such.  Would old man Vasya be able to do his work in the morgue if he sobbed at the sight of every corpse?"

I wanted to learn a trade, but I didn't like working.

I just can't work.  That's all there is to it!  In the camps, they'd taught us how NOT to work.

The workday is not fixed norm.  After orgasm, you can go to the movies.