Ardabiola by Yevgeny Yevtushenko: book review

Ardabiev is tired; he hasn’t slept for three days. He’s worried about his safety, for he’s a genius. He has just created the plant, Ardabiola, the offspring of an insect and a plant.

Set in Moscow in 1980, Yevtushenko’s Ardabiola (1984) describes the mind of young student, with a shaven head and striking blue eyes, who has just completed his masters’ thesis on plants. Not related to his thesis, Ardabiev is excited about his new creation. “It’s vital that I don’t die just now,” he thinks. “I ought to lock myself up for safety’s sake… it’s possible I’m the most needed man in the world.”

It began with a local plant in the region of his birth, Khairiuzovsk in Siberia. It was on old custom that the fedyunnick, like a bog whortleberry, when eaten would act as an anti-depressant and heal cancerous tumours. Ardabiev’s own father had eaten fedyunnick and his lung tumour was in remittance. However, its effects were temporary. Ardabiev, studying botany, crossed the fedyunnick with a gene of an African tse-tse fly strain – for it was discovered that a particular form of cancer existed in exactly those parts of Africa where the tse-tse fly was found – to create a new plant, which he not so humbly named after himself. Testing an infusion of the Ardabiola leaves on rats and his father resulted in their astonishingly excellent health. Ardabiev was undoubtedly convinced that he had created a cancer-curing plant.

His obsession with his plants came at a price. His wife had an abortion, and they separate. But on the day he celebrates the end of his thesis, The Use of Music in Growing Vegetables, and the exhilarating knowledge that his plant will cure the world of cancer, he receives a telegram. His father is dead.

Ardabiev travels to Siberia for his father’s funeral. As he is preparing to return to Moscow, a youth wanting “a pair of real Western jeans” brutally beats him. After the man steals Ardabiev’s jeans, he realizes that they were actually Yugoslav jeans, and not from the West at all. With severe head injuries, Ardabiev’s memory is cruelly impaired, and he cannot even remember the name of his cancer-curing plant, let alone its potential value.

A year later, reconciled with his wife, they are packing for a three-week holiday. Ardabiev tells the woman who will look after the apartment and animals not to water the plant – “I’m fed up with it!” he said.

Surprisingly, the plant becomes agitated by Ardabiev’s imminent departure and fearful that it is being left to die: so agitated that it begins swaying of its own accord.

Sharply written in novella form, Yevtushenko richly animates his few characters, neatly tying the threads of their existence and interactions to each other amid the stark reality of Soviet life and the fantasy of its therapeutic vegetation.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).