Book Review: The New Moscow Philosophy

Abstract

Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s New Moscow Philosophy, originally published in Novyi Mir No. 1 in 1989 as Novaia Moskovskaia filosofiia, is set up like a murder mystery that slowly emerges as a parody of a murder mystery. Unlike its primary inspiration, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, this novel may or may not involve an actual murder—we don’t find out until the end of part III. Nor do we find anything like the setting of that earlier work, as all the action takes place in a communal apartment in which all of the book’s idiosyncratic characters are residents. The thirteen are listed in the manner of a cast on the novel’s first page, giving the book the feel of a dramatic production, a performance in which the narrator takes part, commenting, contextualizing, and playing himself. The action takes place over three days, Friday to Sunday, and Monday serves as an epilogue. The book is tightly organized, careful, allusive in all sorts of ways that literary types will appreciate, and hilarious.