History repeats as dialectical farce in Ken Kalfus’ The Commissariat of Enlightenment.

One of the few glimmers of humor in Ken Kalfus' Soviet-set The Commissariat of Enlightenment comes as a bit of Hegelian slapstick in a rustic cottage. Returned from exile to take advantage of a moment of revolutionary possibility, Lenin challenges Stalin with a password in order to gain his audience. Their sign-and-countersign exchange: "Thesis!" "Antithesis!" "Synthesis!"

It's hardly a laugh-out-loud moment, but it shows Kalfus' command of situational irony (even when it's cheap). It also shows the degree to which he's able to layer even throwaway gestures with levels of significance. The password exchange works as a gag; it illustrates Commissariat's view of Soviet history, but it also crystallizes the structure of Kalfus' book. His novel mimics a dialectical movement, with each scene, and even isolated moments, carrying that structure in miniature.

This attention to structure, and the ideas that this structure allows Kalfus to explore, distinguish The Commissariat of Enlightenment from the bulk of historical novels. Commissariat has all of the trappings of the latest fads in publishing: a setting that comes out of the not-so-distant past, historical figures playing ironic minor roles, even a concentration on an obscure moment in the history of science cribbed from the Dava Sobel school of new-historical writing. This is a fashionable, marketable book -- but one that uses the fads it buys into as a springboard for serious meditation on historical crises and modern obsessions.

Kalfus' vehicle for these meditations is the young filmmaker Gribshin; Commissariat follows him for 15 years, overseeing his transformation from naive pre-Revolutionary technophile to cynical apparatchik in Stalin's propaganda ministry. Gribshin's story dramatizes his growing ability to manipulate "enlightenment," from the Jupiter film lamps that banish shadows for the newsreels to the engineered display of Soviet truths embodied by Lenin's tomb. From the book's opening pages, Gribshin feels himself hurtling forward in history, part of the motion jerking Russia from a timeless past into an industrialized technological future.

But Kalfus is not content to rest with the simple opposition between Russia's superstitious past and the Soviet modernity Gribshin champions. Gribshin learns early on, in a carefully imagined childhood flashback, that the miracles governing the Russian imagination are manipulated; the icon of the Madonna that seems to cry real tears is revealed as a cunning mechanical contraption. And later, covering Tolstoy's death for newsreel pioneers Pathe Freres, Gribshin learns to manipulate the apparent realism of cinema to create an alternative history, a mythology equal to the tearful icon's.

The lesson Tolstoy's death -- or, rather, the media circus that surrounds it -- teaches Gribshin provides the thesis for Kalfus' system. Gribshin learns to create a false reality through film. The second half of the novel provides an equally powerful refutation, through a series of excellent set pieces that show Gribshin -- now using the nom de guerre Astopov, in tribute to the town where Tolstoy dies and receives his personal enlightenment -- fighting against and losing control of the reality film creates. His Jupiter lamps confirm peasant superstitions; scripted riots turn real; his subordinates prove just as adept at creating alternative, non-doctrinaire versions of filmic reality.

Commissariat's second half climaxes in another sickroom with another death. But where Tolstoy's death teaches Gribshin how to create truth out of thin air, Lenin's death gives him the opposite test. Astopov, in a relatively grisly denouement, takes the actuality of death and makes out of it a mechanized myth. The balance Kalfus strikes between these two moments, and the process he follows to get there, takes what could be a run-of-the-mill historical novel and moves it much closer to a novel of ideas.

For all of the seriousness of Kalfus' exploration of the politics of the image, and for his skillful manipulation of trendy fictional elements, the book still contains false notes. Its coda -- the synthesis to Gribshin/Astopov's tale -- becomes an absurdist fantasy at odds with the tone of the rest of the book. And Kalfus' talent with details occasionally misfires, as when Gribshin views a tableau of peasants at their plows "frozen in time, leaning away from their carts, against the direction of history." But his occasional overwriting gets balanced by the kind of careful observation and clear knowledge of Russia and its history his previous collections of stories have exhibited so well. And this makes the combination of stylish, readable narrative and serious contemplation Kalfus achieves in The Commissariat of Enlightenment, well, pretty dazzling.

Ken Kalfus reads Thu., March 20, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine sts., 215-686-5322.