Sasha Sokolov

This chapter addresses Sasha Sokolov's first novel, A School for Fools (Shkola dlia durakov, 1976). Although School contains fewer of the explicit references to James Joyce found in his predecessors' works, the chapter stresses that Sokolov's style suggests a potent Joycean presence. Points of comparison include style (particularly stream of consciousness), structural play, and “forking characters” with fluid identities. While A School for Fools continues to draw on modernist models and Sokolov engages with Ulysses and Dubliners (1914), plot and character are dissolved almost entirely, much as in the protean Finnegans Wake. The chapter also illustrates how Sokolov's transformation of the Joycean model involves a disappearance into texture. The protagonist's story is less about his coming into his own as an artist through a revision of the past than it is about how language, style, and the novel's very structure supersede the artist as hero, in essence carrying Joyce's project to a new level.