Uncommon Talent: A Review of “The Genius Under the Table”
by Missy Andrews
National Book Award finalist Eugene Yelchin offers a poignant satirical portrait of his childhood in his 2021 autobiography, The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. With humor and sensitivity, he describes his experiences growing up in Cold War Russia.
The youngest of his family, Yevgeny (Yelchin) learns early the need to distinguish himself. He wishes he had a gift like his brother, Victor, a talented figure skater, but, alas, his anxious mother fears Yevgeny has no talent! She wants him to dance like Baryshnikov, the most famous member of the Russian ballet. She worked at the theater, and she’d been scheming to get Yelchin an audition there for years. Yelchin didn’t want to dance–he knew he had two left feet! But his mother knew something more. She knew the future of the ordinary man in Cold War Russia – poverty and want – and she hadn’t learned it from a book, either. She knew it because she lived it: a common life with Yevgeny’s father, a common man.
Together, they and their family lived in a single room in an apartment they shared with several other unremarkable families. Each night, Yevgeny’s father moved the furniture to make room for all of his family members to sleep. While his brother slept balanced on three, straight backed kitchen chairs, Yevgeny made his bed under the dining room table. With a pencil stub he’d stolen from his father, Yevgeny would decorate the “ceiling” of his makeshift “bedroom” while the others slept, working out the strangeness of his life in entertaining cartoons on the table’s broad undercarriage.
Housing and provisions were scarce, rationed through the state, but it didn’t do any good to complain. In fact, complaining brought punishment and made things much worse. So even when things got hard and mother and grandmother got angry, Yevgeny’s father would shush them and say something nice about the State (loudly, so the spy neighbor could hear).
But Yevgeny was too young to understand all this. Why couldn’t his mother complain about their hardships? Why wouldn’t they just tell the truth? Why did they shush him every time he asked why? Why wouldn’t anyone talk about the bad things all around them, and whatever had happened to his grandfather, the one no one would mention, whose picture was cut out of the family albums?
As Yevgeny grew, his questions grew, augmented by his perceptive observations of the inefficiency and corruption all around him. And since he couldn’t talk about what he saw out loud (Shhhh!), he rendered it in pencil on the underside of the family’s dining room table each night. He drew the nosy KGB spy that lived in his communal kitchen, ratting on neighbors that said anything against state policies. He drew the teacher, who taught him that art isn’t about being creative, but about following rules to produce uniformity and precision. He drew the girl he found in the schoolyard one night, sitting on top of a mountain of rotting paper and thumbing through a family album from which someone dear had been removed. Snip! Snip! And suddenly grandpa’s gone–not just dead, but erased from his family’s memory forever.
Author Yelchin speaks retrospectively of the stifling nature of enforced conformity to the party line, arguing that even a child can see its effects on education, resources, basic standards of living, supplies, aesthetics, and human dignity. He notes the results of communist doctrines on interpersonal relationships, inside and outside the nuclear family. He details the myriad ways Soviet policies affected his daily life: the difficulty of keeping himself and his home clean with rationed hot water, the uselessness of enforced community projects – evident in the mountains of rotting paper gathered in communal paper drives – and the scarcity of food and clothing to protect them from Russia’s extreme temperatures. But these all pale in comparison with the fear Yevgeny describes: the fear that caused his father to shush his mother and grandmother; the fear that kept his father from talking with Yevgeny about the obvious problems around them; the fear that made his father call the badness in their lives good; the fear that bound the Russian people to their failed system of government. It was the fear to speak the truth.
In the tradition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yelchin manages to divulge the brutality of Russian Communism without brutalizing the innocence of his young readers. In this he proves himself worthy of the title his father gave to him when he discovered his pencil and Yevgeny’s artwork under the dining room table: genius. It looks like mother got her wish. Yevgeny has talent.
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