He is a young American poet who, in 2004, is spending a fellowship year in Madrid his project is “a long, research-driven poem” exploring the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. He could turn away from this chasm and dehumanize himself or suffer the heart-pain of ideological arrest: “After that there followed for some, the weaker and more impatient, the idle existence of a cornet on the retired list, the sloth of the country, the dressing-gown, eccentricities, cards, wine for others a time of ordeal and inner travail.” From this historical paralysis arose, during the next forty years, the drifting, weak, amoral, angry heroes of Russian literature: Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Turgenev’s Superfluous Man, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man.Īdam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station” (Coffee House $15), is a descendant of those frustrated Russian antiheroes. The young man was thrown into a quandary. Young radicals, Herzen wrote, discovered a “complete contradiction of the words they were taught with the facts of life around them.” Their books and their peers spoke one language, the language of reform and radicalism, but their parents spoke another, that of the dominant political and financial interests. Petersburg, was easily crushed by Nicholas I, the new tsar. In his autobiography, “My Past and Thoughts,” the nineteenth-century Russian writer Alexander Herzen discussed the moral stagnation that followed the crisis of December, 1825, when an optimistic rebellion, led by liberal aristocrats and Army officers in St.
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