In the world of Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian émigré soldier turned taxi driver who began writing fiction in the 1920s, doublings abound, though their meanings are rarely resolved. As with his great contemporary Nabokov, this hall-of-mirrors effect provides a pleasant means of exploring the fragmentary and illusory self.
But it is Dostoevsky, and his novel The Double, that really loom larger here than Nabokov. Gazdanov shares Dostoevsky’s penetrating psychological insight, and is drawn to characters in the midst of a breakdown. While Gazdanov seems in thrall to these vastly different novelists, he has his own utterly distinctive voice.
First published in 1950, The Buddha’s Return is a deceptively slight novel, narrated by a student plagued by hallucinatory waking dreams (described as ‘excruciating deliriums’) which call into question his responsibility for his actions. It opens with our (unnamed) narrator remembering his imagined death as he scaled, and then tumbled from, a sheer cliff edge. There is much vivid sensory detail here, from the flash of a lizard’s tail across the branch he has clung to to the ‘insistent melodiousness’ of a buzzing bumblebee.
The unsettling thing about the scene becomes not so much the drop itself but the haunting potency of the memory. And so we are introduced to some of the novel’s main concerns: namely the narrator’s deepening isolation and corkscrewing consciousness. It’s a set-piece that demonstrates Gazdanov’s ability to use a cliffhanger framing (literally, in this case) to venture into existential terrain.
This scene also presages a second death: the violent murder of the billionaire Pavel Alexandrovich. He has previously befriended the narrator, and they share some of the novel’s rare moments of connection, in conversations that range from literature to religion, as they are watched over by a statue of the golden Buddha (with upraised arms and an expression of ‘austere ecstasy’).
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