36 pages • 1 hour read
Anthony MarraThe Tsar of Love and Techno
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Side A, Story 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Side A, Story 3 Summary: “The Grozny Tourist Bureau”
Set in the Chechen city of Grozny, which has just been labeled the “most devastated city in the world,” this story finds Ruslan, an art enthusiast who works as a bureaucratic government official, at the helm of a new assignment. His boss charges him with attracting more tourists to Grozny, which the war virtually destroyed. Ruslan’s friend Nadya needs an expensive surgery to recover the eyesight she lost during a bombing, and Ruslan wishes to help her. Nadya works as an art restorer, and her thesis was based on the work of Roman Markin, the art censor from “The Leopard.”
Ruslan tries everything to make his city more appealing, mostly to no avail. He even opens a small art museum in his own apartment, featuring a landscape painting of a farm where Ruslan lived with his wife and child, both of whom died in an explosion. Traumatized by the loss of his family, Ruslan spends his time trying to help Nadya, to whom he is a hybrid of boyfriend and caretaker.
Ruslan’s boss informs him that the tourist bureau project has failed despite his best efforts, and he tells Ruslan that he must conduct one last tour for Galina and her husband, the oligarch. When he brings the two of them to his apartment, Galina insists that they buy the painting of the landscape, which shows the exact location where Kolya died. The oligarch pays an absurd amount of money at Ruslan’s request—the money is enough to cover Nadya’s eye surgery.
Side A, Story 3 Analysis
The premise of this story is absurd from the onset, and yet Ruslan’s self-deprecating humor and earnestness in his desire both to help Nadya and to do his job well portray Ruslan as sympathetic. Ruslan’s sincere insights into his own motivations for helping Nadya humanize him in a genuine way. He is not a “knight in shining armor,” nor is he a soulless bureaucrat. Instead, he is a real, human character, flawed and self-aware. Moreover, his story is one of profound emotional loss. As he recounts the deaths of his wife and son, his tone is poetically nostalgic, as evidenced for instance in this passage:
With terror or joy, with abasement or delight, they remained my wife and child right to the end – I must remind myself because in the mystery that subsumes those final moments, they are strangers to me. I was in Grozny, at museum, and never heard the explosion (99).
Thus, just as Markin struggles to cope with his betrayal of his brother Vaska in “The Leopard,” Ruslan experiences his own guilt by not having been with his wife and child when they died. In the final scene where Galina buys the painting of the farm where Kolya was died, her own unbreakable connection to Kolya manifests in a request to the oligarch, who at the snap of a finger pays for the painting for an insurmountable sum of money. Furthermore, this third story in the collection connects and echoes the two preceding stories, as Galina, the tragic protagonist from “Granddaughters” appears in the story’s resolution, and perhaps more indirectly as Ruslan modifies the Zakharov painting, just as Markin had done in “The Leopard.” However, despite the connections, Ruslan is altogether a different protagonist. What distinguishes him the most is the fact that in the story’s climax, when he sells the painting to the oligarch, Ruslan’s actions are bold and intentional, whereas Markin and Galina are bound and paralyzed by their circumstances.
Related Titles
By Anthony Marra
