Review of the novel “Campaign to Bar-Khoto” by Leonid Yuzefovich

Three-time winner of the Big Book Prize Leonid Yuzefovich has released a new novel. His hero is an exiled St. Petersburg orientalist, in his notes he recalls how, in the year the First World War began, he, together with a brigade of Mongol troops, set out to liberate a fortress held by the Chinese. How, to whom and to what extent this campaign brought freedom, I tried to understand Mikhail Prorokov.

An officer of the Russian army, out of love for Buddhism and a desire to find himself, writes a report on his transfer to the East. Soon he was already a military adviser to one of the brigades that made up the army of Khalkha, Outer Mongolia, an independent state, which is also a rebellious province that broke away from China. Russia officially recognizes Khalkha as belonging to China, but unofficially supports the separatists. In Urga (the capital of Khalkha, now Ulaanbaatar), at this time, the plan for the liberation of the Tordouts, a tribe inhabiting the region in the southwest, was born and strengthened. They themselves, being carriers of mixed Mongolian-Chinese blood, do not dream much of liberation, but this is not an obstacle for official Mongolian propaganda. The military adviser does not see the point in the campaign, but he does not consider it necessary to object to it either – he is not asked.

As a result, the Mongols set out to capture the main fortification of the region inhabited by the Tordouts, the Bar-Khoto fortress, forgetting to grab shells and not preparing for a long siege.

Leonid Yuzefovich’s new book has three heroes. The first, who is also the narrator, is Captain Boris Solodovnikov, known to the reader from the detective story “Prince of the Wind” (2001). The second is a young Mongolian officer Damdin, a descendant of an eminent family, who studied in Paris and returned from there as a convinced national idealist. The third is Zundui-gelun, either an astrologer or a shaman, who together with Damdin takes over the leadership of the campaign as the brigade commander loses hope of its successful completion.

The rest of the characters pass in the background, almost without affecting the main nerve of the book. In the preface to his notes, the narrator speaks of his uncertainty in “the ability to breathe life into the pictures and faces that are now crowding in front of me, like disembodied shadows before Odysseus who has descended into the kingdom of the dead.” But for the paintings to take on color, three truly animated characters were enough.

Moreover, they did not come to life alone – each took their ghosts with them. For Solodovnikov, these are his hopes for a new life, Buddhist truth and light from the East. Damdin has faith in the greatness of the ancient Mongolian nation. And Zundui-gelun wears his ghost around his neck – this is Zhamsaran, the god of war with bloodshot eyes, depicted on his amulet.

It is Zundui-gelun who calls for help when the adventurous assault launched by the Mongols, who have lost their artillery, chokes and the attackers are ready to flee. Having spread a rug made from the skin of a killed Chinese officer on the ground, he begins a shamanic dance. The ritual brings success – the brigade again goes on the attack, feeling the confidence of victory, already “achieved in a world less ghostly than this.”

The fortress fell, the victory, which should mark the beginning of the new happy Mongolia that Damdin dreams of, turns into a series of atrocities inspired by the same Zundui-gelun. Damdin, seeing this, commits suicide. Solodovnikov secretly leaves the brigade and returns to Urga. There he learns about the departure of his beloved woman and the arrest of Zundui-gelun. A week later, feeling the collapse of all hopes, he leaves for Russia.

But the story of Boris Solodovnikov does not end there. It is told in two time plans: the first – the one where the campaign to Bar-Khoto takes place, dates back to 1914, the second – to the second half of the 1930s, when the hero, as an “undesirable social element”, finds himself in Transbaikal exile. There he works on his notes, there, in his sixties, he sums up his life and understands that the best time of his life still passed there, in Urga, in Mongolia, his heart remained there, despite all the savagery and bloodthirstiness that surrounded him, theft, laziness, hypocrisy, lack of cemeteries and latrines. “Hate will definitely have a reason, but love is without reason” – these words end the penultimate paragraph of the novel.

The causelessness of love, for which people are ready to fight and sacrifice themselves, is the most important motive that connects “The March to Bar-Khoto” with Yuzefovich’s previous work, the novel “Philhellen.” But the heroes of that book, who invented their own Greece and went to their death for it, despite all their naivety, could still present something to confirm their illusions: the cradle of culture, after all, Aeschylus and Pericles and Socrates and Praxiteles will not let you lie. The suicide of the idealist Damdin clearly shows that when the illusions were dispelled, he had nothing left to hold on to.

What is left for Solodovnikov himself? The answer is at the very beginning of his notes. “I… have never felt freer anywhere than in Mongolia,” he admits. “I didn’t find in it what I was looking for, I didn’t write a novel, I didn’t become a Buddhist, but, unlike St. Petersburg… I lived among alive, saw all the colors of the world, walked next to death, loved and was happy.”

The victory won in Bar Khoto was meaningless, neither the copper mines nor the fortress itself were useful to the Mongols, the Tordouts, who lived by trading with the Chinese, left the area. But neither the cruel faith of Zundui-gelun, nor the rose-colored dreams of Damdin (who laughed at the Chinese, supposedly confident that if you treat a counterfeit thing as if it were a real thing, it will work, but in the end realized himself just as naive), nor the Mongolophile illusions of the narrator are meaningless were. Multidirectional, but equally groundless, they turned out to be rooted in some other, hidden soil. In that very “world, less ghostly than this.”

However, this does not add any meaning to either the campaign itself or the deaths of people and animals (horses, camels – participants in the night assault, they were simply driven in the darkness of the night to be slaughtered so that the Chinese would shoot the cartridges they were running out). There is considerable temptation to read Leonid Yuzefovich’s new novel as purely anti-war. But this is prevented by the words of the author, who in an interview with Kommersant spoke about the advantages of a democratic, independent Outer Mongolia over Inner Mongolia, which remained part of China, and his previous books. So the moral should probably be this: war can be inevitable, dreams can be beneficial. But it’s better for them to meet less often.