A CERTAIN FINKELMEYER

A hopelessly self-effacing Russian Jew writes glorious poems under the Khrushchev regime but imprudently neglects the official steps to make a name for himself as a poet—an obvious parable for the career of its prolific author, who wrote this novel in Moscow during the early 70's and is finally about to see it published there. Aaron-Chaim Mendelevich Finkelmeyer is a truly exasperating man to his new friend Leonid Nikolsky. He's an unambitious wage-slave, an indifferent husband to his long-suffering wife Frida, and a friend whose other associates—his old buddy Leopold Mikhailovich, his lovers Emma the bureaucrat's wife and Olga the librarian, and a poetic patron identified only as the Master—are likely to act just as unpredictably as he does. He's also perhaps the worst soldier in all Russia. Ironically, Finkelmeyer's halfhearted attempt to get out of a military jam by spouting some chauvinistic doggerel that an oafish officer has praised to the skies, and his subsequent attempt to protect his poetic reputation by publishing his ``genuine'' poems under a pseudonym that's appropriated by stolid hack Manakin, eventually entangle him— via his raffish cohorts' wild attempt to keep a hidden cache of paintings out of reach of the authorities—in a silly, dangerous game of Who's the Real Poet?—with the prize sure to go to Writer's Union candidate Manakin as the novel heads into a neatly judged climactic trial and a downbeat epilogue. Roziner's soft-edged satire is filled with a genial, melancholy gaiety that will remind American readers of Josef Skvorecky—but without the Czech novelist's range or tightly controlled plotting.