The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

Finally found this novel--I found it and read it in a hostel in Guilin in 2015, for some reason it lingered, however, I had forgotten the title.

The novel begins with a reminiscence of the first-person narrator's past, where he participated in the Russian civil war as a 16 year old and shot a bullet into the chest of a man with grey eyes on a white stallion. This "murder" marks the start of his independence, and has "left an unconscious mark on everything [he] was destined to learn and see thereafter" (p. 13). He encounters a book of short stories that tells of the exact same story from the point of view of the man he was supposed to have killed, written by a man named Alexander Wolf.

The novel has the feel of a detective story. The protagonist is pulled physically by a fatal force while he simultaneously makes detached, incisive observations; note how the start of an affair with the cold and enigmatic Yelena Nikolayenev is written:

"More keenly than ever before in my life I sensed that all this came down to some blind, obscure movement, to a sequence of visual and aural impressions, accompanied by an unconscious, simultaneous muscular gravity that was developing uncontrollably... this was of the greatest importance, and this predetermined what was to come" (p. 90).

The protagonist struggles with the contradiction between his animal self and his body's desire for sensuality, and his devotion to art and culture (maybe these are very Russian categories, I am reminded of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan/Aloysha vs Dmitri), his analysis of the boxing match demonstrates a harmony of these two sides.

Alexandre Wolf is described through the same categories of sensuality and spirituality, but his narrow escape from death kills off his physical body and his sensual self, leaving him a spectre with a perspective of life haunted by the presence of death; like Hemingway's Lost Generation the experience of war has left previous, stable-seeming systems of morality in ruins.

However, the last remnants of Wolf's physical body provokes him to revenge, and in the end fate captures what had barely escaped it.

---