Stelvio Mestrovich, “Mar’ja Ivànova Petrova”

There are two things that strike in Stelvio Mestrovich’s “Mar’ja Ivanova Petrova”, the first is familiarity with Russian literature and Bulgakov’s Moscow, the second is absolute metanarrativity.

The first condition makes a novel set in Russia in the nineties, at the time of Putin etc, appear to us from the nineteenth century. Count Fedör Michaijlovic Golovkin and his beautiful beloved Mar’ja — but what kind of love is that? — are modern characters, but they seem to move in an even pre-revolutionary Russia.

The plot is simple: a man of noble origins sees his love for a beautiful and talented commoner, daughter of butchers, opposed. Jealous of her, and of her relations with the conductor of the orchestra in which she masterfully plays the violin, he will behave like many modern males who do not accept to lose the object of their love and exchange affection for possession. He even will pay a killer to amputate a hand to the girl, until her tragic conclusion.

But let’s go back a step: to obviate maternal insistence to marry him to a member of the aristocracy, Golovkin had pretended to be emasculated from war in Chechnya. To a false mutilation is therefore added a real one, the cutting of the hand, very serious for a woman in love with her art like Mar’ja, to demonstrate that what the protagonist is really jealous of…