Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture 9781501762277

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HAUNTED DREAMS

A volume in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Edited by Christine D. Worobec For a list of books in the series, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

HAUNTED DREAMS

F A N TA S I E S O F A D O L ES C E N C E I N P OS T-S OV I E T CU LT U R E

Jenny Kaminer

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaminer, Jenny, author. Title: Haunted dreams : fantasies of adolescence in post-Soviet culture / Jenny Kaminer. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2022. | Series: NIU series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021020490 (print) | LCCN 2021020491 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501762192 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501762208 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501762277 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Teenagers in mass media. | Mass media and teenagers—Russia (Federation) | Teenagers—Russia (Federation)—Social conditions. Classification: LCC P94.5.Y722 R87 2022 (print) | LCC P94.5.Y722 (ebook) | DDC 302.230835—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020490 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020491 Cover image: Photo by Misha Sokolnikov (@mishasokolnikov). Candid shot of a group of Moscow teenagers, July 6, 2016.

In loving memory of Olga Kaminer (1939–1994)

Co nte nts

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Note on Transliteration

xiii

Introduction

1

1. The Ghost of Adolescence Past

26

2. Adolescence as Nightmare

47

3. Violent Imaginings

80

4. Specters in the Schoolhouse Conclusion Notes

Index

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133

Filmography and Bibliography 181

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163

I l lustr atio ns

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Posthumous Zoia, with airplane, Zoia Posthumous Zoia, with tank, Zoia “The moon for everybody,” Mermaid Alisa in utopia (“no place”), Mermaid Zoia (Renata Litvinova) and Vika (Anna Begunova), Cruelty Vika triumphant, Cruelty Collective of female suffering, Cruelty The Bible versus the bikini, The Student Venia triumphant, The Student The chain of sanctity, The Student Classroom in School Classroom in Scarecrow Smoking loft, School Ania and the emo girls, School

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ix

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible with­ out the generous support and assistance of many individuals and several institutions. At the University of California–Davis, I am grateful to the Femi­ nist Research Institute for supporting the “Gender and Adolescence” project, as well as to my collaborators, Corrie Decker and Liz Constable, and the other participants, for providing stimulating feedback on the earliest stages of this research. The Davis Humanities Institute (DHI) and its director, Jai­ mey Fisher, deserve special acknowledgment. The quarter I spent as a DHI faculty research fellow was crucial in affording time to complete the manu­ script, as were the comments and encouragement that I received from the other fellows. A DHI summer research fellowship also helped to fund a trip to Russia in 2018. Adam Siegel, polyglot and librarian extraordinaire, toler­ ated an onslaught of emails and kindly tracked down sources. As a relative newcomer to the field of Russian children’s literature and culture, I am grateful for the warm welcome and helpful feedback that I have received from Sara Pankenier Weld, Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova, Olga Bukhina, and Anastasia Kostetskaya. Barbara Henry and Katia Bow­ ers were stimulating conference partners-in-crime for several seasons. Eliot Borenstein provided much-needed encouragement and pointed me to some invaluable sources. A portion of chapter 1 was originally published as “The Ghost of Adoles­ cence Past: Teen Female Martyrs in Svetlana Vasilenko’s Little Fool and Anna Melikian’s Mermaid,” Slavic and East European Journal 63 no. 1 (Spring 2019): 52–73. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Imagining Adolescence in Selected Works of New Russian Drama,” Modern Language Review 113 no. 1 ( January 2018): 194–220. I gratefully acknowledge both journals for granting permission to reprint. This book owes an immeasurable debt of gratitude to my husband, Chris­ toph Gumb, who patiently read every page several times and made sure its author was well-fed and well-loved. He also took over childcare responsibili­ ties as the pandemic of 2020 upended all our worlds, allowing me to see this xi

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

project to fruition; too many books have been written without acknowl­ edging the magnitude of that debt. Thank you for helping me see the light amidst the darkness. And thanks to my daughter, Shoshi, for being the light. I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Olga.

N ote o n Tra nsliteratio n

This book follows a modified Library of Con­ gress transliteration system. For the sake of readability, commonly accepted spellings for proper names are used throughout the main text (for exam­ ple: “Alexei Navalny” rather than “Aleksei Naval’nyi”; “Dostoevsky” rather than “Dostoevskii”; “Valeria” instead of “Valeriia”; and “Olga” instead of “Ol’ga”). The translations are my own, except where otherwise noted.

xiii

HAUNTED DREAMS

Introduction

The camera trails a pale adolescent boy on a bicycle as he traverses a bumpy, lonely, provincial Russian road. An impen­ etrable cover of clouds provides a melancholy backdrop for his as-yet unde­ fined journey. He pedals energetically past sagging wooden structures and overgrown grassy fields denuded of any markers of historical time, except for a few unsteady electrical poles—this could be Russia in the twenty-first century or in the nineteenth. In the next scene a poignantly framed wide shot shows the bicycle splayed on the ground, as the boy hands a piece of paper to an older woman beside a dusty iron bus stop. The boy’s voiceover clarifies his mission: he is canvassing for opposition figure Alexei Navalny ahead of the 2018 presidential election, hoping to convince the older genera­ tion to reconsider its overwhelming support for President Vladimir Putin. An elderly woman stares blankly ahead as she wanly fingers the pages that he hands her, his youthful fervor a glaring contrast to her indifference. We then see the boy’s face framed in close-up, proclaiming the importance of his unglamorous, lonely quest: “One day I will tell my children and my grand­ children that I saved Russia.” Philip from Tula, quoted here, features prominently in Andrei Loshak’s 2018 documentary film The Age of Dissent (Vozrast nesoglasiia), which profiles young Navalny supporters across Russia.1 Philip and the other protagonists of the film endure beatings and various other forms of intimidation as they 1

2

INTRODUCTION

quixotically attempt to awaken enthusiasm for Navalny. In sympathetically portraying the youths’ unf lagging commitment to enact social change in the face of daunting resistance and persecution, Loshak’s film displays all the telltale signs of a fervent “romance with adolescence.” The American educa­ tion scholar Nancy Lesko defines this romance as an outsized belief in the potential of youth to ensure progress and the improvement of the human condition. Writing in 2001, she declared the American “romance with ado­ lescence” essentially over, but outbreaks have emerged since then. In 2018, for example, the New York Times wondered, “Can Teenagers Save America? They’ve Done It Before.”2 At around the same time, some observers were pondering the same thing about Russia’s teenagers. When protests against the Putin government erupted across Russia in March and June 2017, and again in the summer of 2019, many remarked on one striking and novel aspect of the participants: their youth. Galvanized by a 2017 video produced by Navalny’s anticor­ ruption campaign that garnered fifteen million views on YouTube, young Russians, who were not a notable presence during the previous protest wave of 2011–12, hit the streets in unprecedented numbers.3 Across the international media landscape commentators employed phrases such as Russia’s “new protest generation,” the “fearless generation,” and “youth revolution” to describe the presence of teenagers in these demonstrations.4 More than 130 minors were arrested in Moscow alone during the 2017 pro­ tests. These “Putin’s children”—as one former Kremlin political strategist termed them, since they have known no other political establishment— represent a potentially destabilizing force in contemporary Russia.5 Reject­ ing state-controlled television in favor of social media and internet sources, they exist largely beyond the grasp of official narratives. With the Kremlin withdrawing support for pro-Putin youth movements in recent years, Rus­ sia’s young people, like Philip f rom Tula, have begun to assert themselves in oppositional politics. This has prompted some to speculate that the future of Putinism may, in fact, hinge on this newly assertive and emboldened generation—a clear echo of the “romance with adolescence” that Lesko argues f lourished in western Europe and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Even before real-life teenagers took to the streets in the spring and sum­ mer of 2017, however, Russian writers, dramatists, and filmmakers had repeatedly turned to the adolescent protagonist in exploring the fissures running through contemporary Russian society. This book explores how the adolescent hero has become a locus for a myriad of anxieties, as well as a background for the projection of fervent hopes, throughout the tumultuous

INTRODUCTION

3

years since the end of the Soviet experiment. Recent Russian cultural pro­ duction has experienced something akin to the “adolescent turn” that has received sustained attention from scholars of North America, Europe, and Latin America but that has thus far attracted much less notice among those of the former Soviet Union. Through close analysis of selected works of prose, drama, television, and film, I identify some of the recurring elements and specificities of contemporary Russian culture’s “adolescent turn.”6 In voicing a belief in his ability to “save Russia,” Philip from Tula articu­ lated a connection between adolescence and heroism that first took shape, and continued to evolve, throughout the Soviet years. During the prerevolu­ tionary period, by contrast, Russian intellectual culture traditionally viewed adolescence as a time of irrevocable loss. The transition to adolescence signified the abrupt and painful cessation of what Mikhail Epstein terms childhood’s “prelapsarian” state. For gentry autobiographers, a tortured adolescence reaffirmed the myth of the untroubled childhood. Although childhood emerged as an important theme in the discourse of late imperial Russia, the focus remained primarily on young children, not adolescents, until after the Russian Revolution.7 Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1875 novel The Ado­ lescent (Podrostok)—feverishly narrated from the first-person perspective of its hero, nineteen-year-old Arkady Dolgoruky—represents a notable excep­ tion to this trend. Perhaps the first author in the Russian literary tradition to explore societal fissures through the prism of an adolescent protagonist, Dostoevsky sets his novel against the backdrop of pronounced historical change: the multiple upheavals occurring in Russia in the wake of the eman­ cipation of the serfs and the Great Reforms, as well as industrial growth and the inf lux of capitalist values. Dostoevsky employs the figure of the adoles­ cent to “represent Russia’s own modernization, the troubling coexistence of the old and the new” in a rapidly evolving society—anticipating the postSoviet writers, dramatists, and filmmakers discussed in this study.8 After 1917 adolescence became an especially potent source of Soviet cultural mythology. The works I analyze provide provocative material for exploring one of the pivotal questions facing scholars of contemporary Rus­ sia: do Soviet cultural models continue to dominate, or have they been tran­ scended?9 Rather than providing an encyclopedic, comprehensive overview of the countless exemplars of the adolescent protagonist in Russian culture since 1991, I have chosen texts that facilitate the historicization of contem­ porary Russian fantasies of adolescence. The selected works place in relief specific elements that reveal how these fantasies have mutated or, conversely, remained constant across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide, namely: violence, temporality, and gender and the body.

4

INTRODUCTION

A close analysis of these fantasies in contemporary Russian culture illu­ minates important aspects of the lingering inf luence of the Soviet heritage into the post-Soviet years. Some of the works considered here present the possibility of salvaging the model of the heroic adolescent for a new society. Others, by contrast, relegate this figure to the dustbin of history by evoking disgust or horror—or by exposing the tragic consequences that ensue from the combination of adolescence, violence, and fantasy. In unmasking the endurance of Soviet myths of adolescence into the Russian present, some cultural producers valorize prerevolutionary moral and religious ideals, either explicitly or obliquely. This veneration, in turn, casts a critical light on official Russian culture’s reliance on the tropes of the more recent Soviet past in creating models for post-Soviet youth. Many of the works considered in this study suggest a rebuke of contemporary Russian society, particularly its political and official media discourses. More broadly, several also challenge one of the central tenets that has underpinned both Russian and Western fantasies of adolescence: the notion that youth development marches irrevo­ cably forward, toward a predefined endpoint, thus ensuring progress and the health of society as a whole.

The Promise of Youth This is a book about the fantasies that adolescents have inspired in Russia since 1991 and how those fantasies have featured prominently in selected cul­ tural works. I borrow and expand upon the definition of “fantasy” proposed by the cultural theorist Laura Berlant, who defines it as “the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world ‘add up to something.’”10 Adolescence has provided one of the most potent and productive back­ grounds for the projection of vivid “idealizing tableaux” since at least the early twentieth century. The publication of psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s voluminous 1904 study propelled the myth of adolescence into the Ameri­ can cultural imaginary and rapidly attained an international readership as well. Hall attributed extraordinary significance to this newly articulated stage of life, believing that the adolescent stood poised between experiencing rebirth and acquiring higher traits, thus ensuring progress, or recapitulating the savagery of childhood, thereby precipitating the demise of civilization.11 In other words, society could “add up to something” only if adolescents developed accordingly. As adolescence became modern, emblematizing the promise of societal transformation, governments and institutions channeled resources into educating and controlling young people in an attempt to align

INTRODUCTION

5

reality with fantasy.12 Modernist writers and artists contributed to the devel­ opment of this new mythology. The now hackneyed image of adolescents as “rebels and revolutionaries struggling against the suppressive parental orders of family, church, and state” solidified in texts such as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and in expressionist art.13 In postrevolutionary Russia social theorists continued the preoccupation with the promise of youth catalyzed by Hall earlier in the century. Fantasies of adolescence were, as the historian Anne Gorsuch aptly puts it, “made Soviet.” For the early Bolsheviks adolescents were the most moldable of clay, the tabula rasa upon which the vision of the new Soviet person could most easily and effectively be imprinted.14 During the early years of the revolution and Russian Civil War in particular (1917–1921), vivid fantasies of the positive attributes of youth—“enthusiasm, energy, optimism, and rebelliousness”— f lourished.15 The process of toiling for the collective would, simultaneously, transform adolescents into the ideal, civic-minded citizens that postrevolu­ tionary Soviet society demanded. This dialectical relationship supposedly ensured the creation of the “constructors of communism” upon which the future of the Soviet experiment hinged.16

Violent Dreams Fantasies of adolescence, however, were also “made Soviet” by their incor­ poration of violence and the language of sacrifice. As discussed in chapter 1, adolescents became some of the Soviet Union’s most powerful and endur­ ing sacrificial victims. The language of militarization and violence circulated widely and prominently in official youth culture from the early years of the Soviet Union onward. During the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks heralded the adolescents’ “battlefield virtues” of “bravery and self-sacrifice, . . . strength, endurance, toughness”; youth were “warriors and rebels.”17 Even after the end of fighting, the language of combat still filled official youth newspapers. The initiatives of the Komsomol, the official organization for Communist youth (ages fourteen to twenty-eight), founded in 1918, were given military labels such as “light cavalry,” “brigades,” and “fronts.”18 The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), who produced several works for young readers, vividly captured this intermingling of militarism and youth in his poem “Let’s Take the New Rif les” (Vozmiom vintovki novye, 1927), where children learn to use guns while singing.19 Throughout the Stalinist 1930s, state ideology continued to propagate martial values for all citizens, while youth were trained to fight for a loom­ ing and seemingly inevitable confrontation. Against the backdrop of the

6

INTRODUCTION

threat of war, the Komsomol prepared Soviet adolescents for the “never­ ending task of defending socialism” by instilling discipline and organizing paramilitary training. On the stages of theaters for young audiences, a key site of direct ideological indoctrination, violence featured as a ubiquitous dramatic element.20 One of the key figures in Soviet literature for children and youth, Arkady Gaidar (1904–1941), interwove the themes of war and military preparedness throughout his extremely popular oeuvre. The fifteen­ year-old hero of his breakthrough work “School” (1930), for example, runs away to join the Red Army and masters his aversion to violence and death. In The Military Secret (1934), Gaidar captured the atmosphere of the decade by suggesting that the Soviet Union’s true “secret” was the “militant spirit of the growing generation,” the multitude of adolescents willing to sacrifice themselves in battle.21 This culture of militarism and violence helped spur a generation of young Soviet citizens to take up arms in World War II, volunteering to serve as frontline soldiers in unparalleled numbers.22 Those teenagers who died valiantly were transformed into heroes—celebrated and immortalized in literature, film, and visual art—and models for subsequent generations to emulate. Even in times of peace, cultural producers forged an irrevocable link between youth and heroic self-sacrifice, with World War II providing a seemingly lim­ itless source of inspiration. The Ukrainian teenagers of Alexander Fadeev’s novel The Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia, 1945) and its subsequent film ver­ sion (1948, dir. Sergei Gerasimov) captivated an entire postwar generation. Based on a true story, the work narrates the bold anti-Nazi activities of a winsome, underground group of Komsomol members in Krasnodon, before their eventual torture and murder by the Germans. Devoted, disciplined, and clever, the members of The Young Guard embodied the qualities that the state hoped postwar youth would reproduce; they neatly provided the link between the glories of the past and the imagined triumphs of the future. The glorification of World War II heroes, like the teens of Krasnodon, played a central role in the “moral engineering” of youth—intended to mobilize and to discipline—that characterized the Thaw period.23 The Young Guard also, however, unmasks the quasi-suicidal nature of how the Soviets attempted to socialize youth. Dead adolescents—such as the members of the Young Guard as well as eighteen-year-old Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, the so-called Soviet Joan of Arc, discussed in chapter 1—contributed disproportionately to the creation of the sacrificial mythology through which the Soviet state inculcated its values and promoted patriotic sentiment.24 A reinvigorated emphasis on the militarization of youth culture has char­ acterized Russian state policy since the mid-2010s. In October 2015, Putin

INTRODUCTION

7

ordered the establishment of the Youth Army (Iunarmiia), a “youth militarypatriotic movement” under the auspices of Russia’s defense ministry. Since its debut, roughly 808,000 children and adolescents between the ages of eight and eighteen have joined the Youth Army’s ranks.25 Members participate in martial games, learning how to assemble a weapon quickly, shoot accurately, and increase their physical endurance. Critics of the organization argue that it violates the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the militarization of childhood, and that it is a brazen attempt by Putin to compete with opposition figures like Navalny for the loyalty of Rus­ sia’s teenagers.26 State-issued cultural policy similarly emphasizes binding youth to the state through martial culture and history. Accordingly, in April 2019, Russian state television launched a new internet channel targeting the younger gen­ eration, Victory (Pobeda), which broadcasts World War II–themed movies and shows twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Konstantin Ernst, the director of Russian state television’s Channel One, emphasized Victory’s abil­ ity to forge intergenerational links, to allow the “passing of the baton” from those who lived through World War II to young Russians.27 Thus, wartime ideals, such as heroism and sacrifice, are reinserted into civilian life through the medium of television. The promotion of these values corresponds with the muscular foreign policy that Russia has increasingly been pursuing since 2014, as emblematized by the invasion of Crimea and the ongoing conf lict in eastern Ukraine. As a Russian lawyer defending an arrested journalist suc­ cinctly sums up, “Since 2014, we’ve been in a permanent state of war.”28 One of the central questions posed in this book addresses the Soviet legacy of interweaving adolescence with martial values, heroism, and self-sacrifice, which has clearly endured into the post-Soviet era. In the works discussed in the chapters that follow, writers, playwrights, and filmmakers grapple with the tradition of intermingling adolescence with violence in disparate ways. Considered together, they reject official Russian culture’s enduring attach­ ment to the figure of the militant adolescent inherited from the Soviet past.

Adolescence as Threat Fantasies of adolescence have been menacing as well as idealizing. In the United States in the early twentieth century, teens emblematized the dan­ gers posed by rapid modernization and urbanization. As cities grew, teen­ agers became more visible, and the category of adolescence was invented, in part, as a rehabilitative tool. The newly institutionalized juvenile courts and a changing educational system both responded to the figure of the

8

INTRODUCTION

threatening teenager—an image that, in turn, symbolized anxieties about urban growth.29 Young criminals captured the attention of the media during the Gilded Age, the heinousness of their deeds revealing the f lipside of the image of the noble, “genius” adolescent.30 As Lesko summarizes, “Adoles­ cence was singled out as a crucial point at which an individual (and a race) leaped to a developed, superior, Western self hood or remained arrested in a savage state.” The specter of the savage adolescent, whose “demonic energy” has been unleashed rather than transformed and channeled productively into reproducing various societal hierarchies, continued to haunt Western society throughout the twentieth century.31 Early Soviet society also worried about how the tabula rasa of youth could be inscribed with the wrong script. During the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s, which allowed limited elements of capi­ talism in order to revive the decimated Soviet economy, concern surfaced about young people’s inability to temper their zealotry. Would the moder­ ate course of NEP be derailed by overly militant youth? Could an excess of revolutionary enthusiasm be just as dangerous as antirevolutionary senti­ ment?32 At the same time, the tens of thousands of homeless children and teens—victims of several years of war, revolution, famine, and large-scale societal upheaval—also caused disquiet among both Bolsheviks and the gen­ eral population. With their highly visible appropriation of public space and recourse to criminality as a survival strategy, these young masses represented indifference to Soviet projects of social transformation. If initially they could be pitied as victims of the injustices of the old capitalist system, homeless children and teens eventually confronted Soviet society with its own failures. Many fretted that their “sickness”—deviancy, hooliganism, drunkenness— would spread and infect healthy youth if not contained.33 The government established a network of special children’s homes, communes, and even entire cities that were designed to rehabilitate and reintegrate these homeless youth into Soviet society. The trope of the wayward teenager, reforged into a model citizen in the collective environment of a Soviet institution, became a recurring element in literature and film.34 After World War II an especially acute moral panic about criminality and deviance erupted, with many adults wondering whether the violence and chaos of war had untethered adoles­ cents from any sense of morality.35 Apathy—doing nothing, believing in nothing—could also be construed as a dangerous form of hooliganism. The “gray mass of indifferent youth” vexed the Soviet government, especially in the postwar years. By the 1970s the Communist Party was allocating significant resources to battle the scourge of apathetic youth, who deviated from official atheism by blithely

INTRODUCTION

9

observing religious rites. This “spiritual consumerism” among the supposed constructors of the bright future, their indirect rejection of atheism as a worldview, threatened the very philosophical underpinnings of the Soviet state.36 The titular heroine of Vasily Pichul’s sensational perestroika-era film Little Vera (1988)—an eighteen-year-old trapped between an alcoholic father, an egotistical boyfriend, and a stultifying future as a telephone operator— became a symbol of this frustrated “gray mass.” When alone on the beach with her boyfriend, Vera responds to his question about her goal in life by ironically declaring: “We all have a goal . . . the same one: communism.” The line caused Soviet audiences to erupt in laughter.37 The most destabilizing aspect of adolescents in the Soviet imaginary, however, was their susceptibility and vulnerability to contagion by the allure of the West. In the early decades of the twentieth century, social scientists in Europe and the United States understood juvenile delinquency mainly as a result of internal factors: psychological problems or unhealthy familial dynamics. Their Soviet counterparts, by contrast, conceived of delinquency as an imported phenomenon, an external force that infected youth from without. A thread firmly interwoven into the fabric of the entirety of Soviet history, fears about young people succumbing to this danger came to the fore at several key moments. During the era of NEP, fashion and music that origi­ nated in Paris and New York inspired young Soviet f lappers and foxtrotters. For Bolshevik moralists this indulgence in foreign dress and dance signaled a destabilizing, heretical deviancy.38 By the 1950s the paradigm of the “youth as victim of Western inf luence” had achieved dominance, inf luencing the course of subsequent official pol­ icy. When scores of Americans, Europeans, and others descended on Mos­ cow for the 1957 Moscow Youth Festival, anxiety about foreign inf luence dovetailed with fears of untempered youth sexuality and reached a feverish pitch. The Cold War opened a new plane in the battle over the behavior of young people. Adolescents listening to Western rock music communi­ cated the defeat of Soviet values in the broader geopolitical struggle. During the 1980s some observers even claimed that Western intelligence services were actively targeting vulnerable youth, engaging in psychological warfare through music and other cultural forms.39 A scene from the contemporary nationalist writer Mikhail Elizarov’s (b. 1973) 2010 novel Cartoons (Mul’tiki), set in the late 1980s, concisely captures and conveys this anxiety. The work tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who joins a gang of street hooligans. To earn money, they roam the streets with a teenage girl, naked underneath a fur coat, who f lashes hapless men. The gang then demands payment from the victim for viewing the “cartoon.”

10

INTRODUCTION

After the protagonist is picked up by police and sent to a special location for reeducation, the boy encounters the formidable Olga Viktorovna, who will oversee his transformation from criminal to model Soviet citizen. In a lengthy monologue she gives retrospective voice to the fears of national decline pre­ cipitated by the weakness of youth that circulated widely during the Soviet Union’s last years. The country is living through an extremely dangerous time, she declares, with the enemy now looming everywhere. “Western pro­ paganda” has caused the decline of Soviet youth, she argues, because youth did not have enough “immunity” to resist “Western infection.”40 Unease about this weak immunity, among the other vulnerabilities plaguing young people, persisted into the post-Soviet era and reached its peak at the end of the 1990s. In public discussions members of the younger generation were portrayed as “apathetic, apolitical, and problematically self-interested,” as living testaments to the horribly botched transition to a market economy.41 After Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, the state began to channel significant resources into rescuing Russia’s supposedly lost youth, creating the State Patriotic Education Program to promote national­ ist sentiment and founding the pro-Kremlin youth groups Moving Together (Idushchiie vmeste) and Ours (Nashi). Young people were encouraged to tran­ scend the instability of the 1990s, to replace cynicism with dedication to ensuring Russia’s bright future. Amid the demographic decline that pre­ occupied many observers, the Kremlin’s patriotic youth initiatives enticed young Russians to eschew the allure of emigration, to stay home, “procre­ ate and serve the nation.”42 These two disparate fantasies of adolescence—the idealizing and the threatening—did not, of course, develop in isolation from one another. The teen dancing to American rock music was simply misdirecting the energy that rightfully should have been channeled toward the building of a hydro­ electric power station, as one Soviet security officer put it in the 1950s.43 More recently, promotional materials produced in the late aughts by the Federal Youth Affairs Agency (Rosmolodezh), one of the governmental agen­ cies tasked with enacting state-sponsored patriotic youth initiatives, evince a similar tension between youth-as-hero and youth-as-wrecker. While address­ ing their target audience as the potential salvation of Russia, these advertise­ ments nonetheless depict young people as self-indulgent, materialistic, and too enthralled by Western consumer culture to remember their civic duty. They attempt to awaken both patriotism and self-loathing, dreams of gran­ deur and fears of premature death. In other words, these advertisements recycle and comingle familiar Soviet-era tropes that invested adolescents with an outsized ability either to ensure progress or to destabilize society

INTRODUCTION

11

irrevocably. Both Russian and Western fantasies of adolescence, from the early twentieth century to the present day, are united by what they lack: room for moderation or ambiguity.44

Tyranny of the Future Fantasies of adolescence have also been deeply embedded in concepts of time. The central tension inherent in adolescence has been described, in tem­ poral terms, as between “being” and “becoming.”45 Some have even denied any discreteness to this stage of life, asserting that it is “a period of transition with little independent reality,” one that “draws its meaning from the past and from its relationship to some future adulthood toward which it aims and unfolds.”46 In other words, Western cultures and societies have attributed a teleological component to adolescence, one that elides the present in favor of the future. Lesko terms this phenomenon “panoptical time”—an empha­ sis on the endings toward which youth are expected to progress, their need to fulfill a prescribed temporal narrative. Stories about adolescent develop­ ment are “narratives of fulfillment,” dictating movement toward a preor­ dained ending—normative adulthood—at a predetermined pace. Any signs of precocity or other deviation from this moderate pace signal degeneracy. Accordingly, these abnormalities must be policed by both adults and ado­ lescents themselves. Like “Bentham’s panopticon prison,” Lesko explains, “adolescent development has been a way in which adolescents watch and correct” one another.47 Put another way, figurations of adolescence in West­ ern culture have often lacked “heterochrony”—to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation—or the possibility of multiple possible futures, always ending in the assumption of adulthood and the attendant movement from outsider to societal insider.48 The Russian language encodes this teleology linguistically, with the word for adolescent, podrostok, deriving from the verb “to grow (toward)” (podrastat’ or podrasti), emphasizing progress rather than stasis. The temporal aspect of constructions of adolescence, too, was “made Soviet” in specific ways throughout the twentieth century. The teenage martyrs of the Soviet era added a new dimension to the teleological “nar­ rative of fulfillment,” codifying a static connection between adolescence, extraordinary deeds, and self-sacrifice. In a sense, the Soviets removed the barriers between childhood and adolescence and adulthood, upending nor­ mative temporality in the process. Rather than envisioning young people as “citizens in the making,” the emphasis on militarization and patriotism pre­ supposed that children and teens were already capable of embodying fully evolved citizenship, culminating in the ability to sacrifice oneself consciously

12

INTRODUCTION

for the state. Adolescents evolved not toward adulthood, as in Lesko’s model, but toward the ideal version of themselves—an ideal that the teen martyrs of World War II embodied and inspired others to emulate.49 Soviet literature and theater reinforced the erasure of this boundary between childhood and adulthood, conceiving of a child of any age as a “comrade, participant in the whole of life, . . . builder of the new world, little master of the Soviet nation.”50 Stalinist cinema elided any visual distinctions between children and young adults, depicting them as equally willing to sacrifice themselves for the nation.51 At the same time, particularly in the immediate postwar years, a different type of temporal unease consumed both representatives of the regime and the general population. Many feared that youth had been so brutalized dur­ ing the years of violent conf lict that their development had been radically upended. Their childhood stolen by the ravages of war, Soviet youth had transformed prematurely and unnaturally into little adults.52 In the Soviet Union’s final decade and the first post-Soviet years, yet another manifestation of temporal anxiety circulated in both academic publications and popular media. The failure of the socialist experiment meant the increasing exclusion of the youngest generation from symbolic time; the end of the Soviet Union had left its youth both disconnected from the past and deprived of a future.53 I take this moment of temporal anxiety as my launching point. What relationship to past, present, and future have Russian authors and filmmak­ ers imagined for their young heroes since the ruptures of 1991? In the close readings of literature, drama, film, and television that follow, I pay particular attention to the disparate “chronotopes of adolescence,” to borrow Lesko’s reformulation of Bakhtin, that take shape in each cultural work. By chal­ lenging the link between adolescence and either heroism or progress, a con­ nection so firmly established during the Soviet period, these works explore the complexity of transmitting knowledge and values in a society no lon­ ger underpinned by one dominant metanarrative. Moreover, several of the works reclaim the ideals of a more distant, pre-Soviet past as the source of enduring models for contemporary youth.

Unstable Bodies Fantasies of adolescence are also deeply intertwined with ideas about gender and the body. Early twentieth-century theorizers emphasized the universal, supposedly genderless characteristics of their constructions. However, this did not preclude a “double discourse,” whereby, on the one hand, notions of recapitulation posited the universality of the adolescent experience, while on

INTRODUCTION

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the other, the “rehabilitative path that adolescence offered was gender spe­ cific and often misogynistic.”54 In other words, in romanticizing the prom­ ise embodied by youth, Hall and others elided gender in foregrounding the potential of adolescents to revitalize society. At the same time, institutions such as the emerging juvenile-court system in the United States clearly inter­ preted supposedly aberrant, “savage” behavior along gendered lines. While young boys were arrested for any number of crimes, young girls entered the American juvenile-court system predominantly for infractions deemed immoral or imperiling their virtue.55 Correspondingly, Hall believed in cur­ ricula that emphasized differing goals according to sex. Girls should prepare for futures as wives and mothers, while boys should cultivate and solidify their emerging manhood through physical activity. Any lingering signs of effeminacy were to be swiftly eliminated, as educational and other institu­ tions shepherded American boys along the certain path toward becoming the prescribed “manly Christians.” Throughout the twentieth century the adolescent body became a potent stage for battles over the contours of nor­ mative femininity and masculinity.56 Since the last decades of the twentieth century, feminist researchers have been exposing and unraveling the previously unexamined equation of ado­ lescence with embryonic manhood. They have criticized literary and cul­ tural scholars for approaching the topic as if it were a phenomenon that only applied to males.57 Some have labeled Hall’s writings as antifeminist, asserting that he was reacting against the threat posed by the New Woman, emerging in the last decades of the nineteenth century.58 The now thriv­ ing discipline of girlhood studies took shape in the 1980s and 1990s with a renewed approach to girls as agents of their own fates.59 A feminist poet­ ics of adolescence has materialized in the last decades as well, as writers increasingly interrogate the “teleologies of womanhood” with which young girls are often confronted.60 Scholars have critiqued how adolescence, includ­ ing for boys, has been feminized, or increasingly associated with supposedly feminine traits, such as emotional volatility and difficulty.61 In the Soviet years constructs of gender and the body often played a desta­ bilizing role, causing idealizing fantasies of adolescence to transform into threatening ones. While the noble and self-sacrificial adolescent hero, beauti­ ful in death, inspired adulation, the awkward liminality of live, maturing bod­ ies provoked disquiet. In early Soviet Russia the human body was envisioned as a machine—easily legible, reparable, and free of secrets—a conception challenged by the unpredictability of developing bodies.62 Early Bolshevik thinkers worried that adolescents’ “fragile organism” might imperil their transition into productive laborers, a societal role they should be prepared to

14

INTRODUCTION

fulfill from the ages of fifteen to sixty.63 Beginning in the 1930s pubescence violated the classical symmetry of Socialist Realist aesthetics, and a reticence about the physiology of maturing bodies characterized the cultural produc­ tion of most of the Soviet years. Catriona Kelly has detailed the “invisibility of adolescence” from official Stalin-era culture, noting, for example, that portraiture featured either children before puberty, admissible because of their proportionality, or young adults, often dressed and coiffed as if they were much older.64 In Soviet children’s literature of the 1920s and 1930s, children were depicted as essentially genderless, with the same qualities—“strength, agility, long legs, and strong hands”—valorized for both boys and girls.65 Ref lecting broader trends in Soviet literature as a whole, masculinity assumed prefer­ ence over femininity, and androgyny became the ideal. While these texts emphasize physicality and masculinity for boys, their uninterrupted readi­ ness to fight if necessary, girls are presented as having boyish figures, short hair, and a lack of interest in their outward appearance. When they were allowed to dream, these fictional girls fantasized about being boys. At the same time, any excessive focus on femininity rendered young girls suspicious to their peers. Acceptance by the collective was preceded by the renunciation of such cheap indulgences as clothing and accessories. Even as the image of the athletic, militarized female lost its dominance in literature and visual culture for adults, the taboo on any mention of puberty or adolescent sexu­ ality ensured a longer life for the androgynous ideal in culture produced for young readers.66 This invisibility of adolescence was tempered somewhat during the Thaw years in fictional works featuring more complex portrayals of young, pre­ dominantly male characters by writers such as Vasily Aksenov (1932–2009).67 The youth film f lourished as a discrete genre during the post-Stalin period as well, particularly during the Brezhnev years (1964–1982). Cinematic teenag­ ers began to make their own decisions, without relying on guidance from the Party or official ideology. Significantly, unlike their predecessors on the Stalinist screen, they are granted the right to a private life, with its own “secrets, interests, and dreams.”68 Brezhnev-era films by directors such as Ilia Frez [Not Even in Your Dreams (Vam i ne snilos’), 1980] and Pavel Liubimov [School Waltz (Shkol’nyi val’s), 1978], which explore romantic relationships between adolescents, albeit in a mainly allusive fashion, further challenged the prohibition on depictions of teenage corporeality. Their films have been interpreted as providing veiled commentary on Soviet sexual politics of the 1970s and early 1980s through their cinematic renderings of adolescent love and desire.69

INTRODUCTION

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However, these partial exceptions notwithstanding, Soviet culture still predominantly presented relations between males and females as “com­ radely.” Physiological themes remained taboo, despite the omnipresence of the theme of first love in Soviet literature about adolescents.70 It was not until the late 1970s that official newspapers began confronting the phe­ nomenon of teenage pregnancy and the possibility that adolescents were acquiring sexual knowledge despite the officially prescribed silence. A new frankness about sexual topics characterized public discourse during the glas­ nost’ and perestroika era of the mid- and late-1980s, although this did not extend unequivocally to teenagers. Sexual education in schools was brief ly introduced in the 1980s, but teachers’ lack of readiness ensured its failure.71 Cinema of this era was, however, distinguished by its introduction of cruel and selfish, even aggressive, adolescent protagonists, both male and female, who not only eschew the authority of older generations but pose a real threat to adults.72 The eponymous heroine of Pichul’s Little Vera came to emblema­ tize the loosening of censorship during the Soviet Union’s last years. It was the exposed breasts of a teenage girl, in a sex scene that was extremely racy by Soviet standards, that heralded the end of decades of officially imposed prudery.73 Long before Little Vera’s frank treatment of sexuality elicited heated reac­ tions from the viewing public, the specter of teenage female sexuality had already begun haunting Soviet society. In the early postrevolutionary years, the Soviet educational system aimed to produce a gender-neutral, ideal Soviet citizen. By the 1930s, however, party and education officials had iden­ tified gender-specific problems, those plaguing adolescent females in par­ ticular, that demanded intercession. Young girls were especially vulnerable to falling prey to the physical side of their natures, to straying from the ulti­ mate goal of building socialism. The top leadership feared that youth sexual­ ity in general, and female sexuality in particular, could not be harnessed in service of the state. This prompted the introduction of various preventive measures, and the Soviet system of upbringing returned to those stereo­ typical gender roles that it had earlier attempted to overcome. In response to unease about “girl-specific deficiencies,” the experiment with coeduca­ tional instruction was paused from 1943 to 1954, and students in urban areas were segregated according to sex.74 While boys were encouraged to chan­ nel their energies into physical activity, girls were enrolled in after-school activities, such as laundry, childcare, and cooking, that prepared them for their gendered futures. Teachers were tasked not only with facilitating the academic achievement of their students but their moral development as well; for girls this meant ensuring that they maintained their female virtue. After

16

INTRODUCTION

the experiment with segregation by sex ended, teachers and other officials were instructed to remain vigilant about the nature of any boy-girl friend­ ships that might develop.75 Anxiety about compromised young female honor continued to surface in Soviet society, becoming especially acute during World War II and in the postwar years, when accounts of sexual contact between Soviet girls and Nazi soldiers circulated. In one of the most pronounced moments of moral panic about the sexuality of young females, the supposed “loose girls” of the aforementioned Moscow Youth Festival of 1957—those who had sexual encounters with foreign men—inspired heated rumors about forcible head shavings and other theatrically punitive measures. Anecdotal evidence points to the exile of some of the female offenders to the far reaches of the Soviet Union. It was exclusively the pairing of Soviet teenage girls with foreign males that aroused official ire; teenage boys with foreign females elicited no such opprobrium. In 1964 Soviet scientists officially “solved” the problem of adolescent female sexuality by declaring its impossibility. The Soviet Minis­ try of Health conducted research that supposedly proved that young women did not develop an interest in sex until the age of twenty-two. Thus, at least in official Soviet discourse, all traces of nonreproductive sexuality were erased from the fantasies of female adolescence.76

Heroic Masculinity Unease about gender and the development of young boys also plagued the Soviet years. The ideal of adolescent masculinity for several generations of Soviet boys was embodied by the fictional heroes of works by Gaidar, most prominently Timur and His Gang (1940), also made into a popular film that same year. The qualities that twelve-year-old Timur exhibits—such as altruism, stoicism, leadership, and dedication to the collective above all else—represented the aspirational goal for all young Soviet boys. Despite his tender age Timur valiantly assumes responsibility for the well-being of those in his village. He leads his gang with integrity, inspiring their loyalty and unwavering respect. In all his actions, Timur strives toward adulthood, illustrating succinctly the elision of adolescence in Soviet cultural represen­ tations. Timur may biologically still be a boy, but in his deeds, words, and qualities he fulfills the demands of heroic masculinity and conveys the mes­ sage that, with such “men” as he in positions of authority, Soviet citizens may sleep calmly at night.77 Acute concern about the integrity of the heroic masculinity of Soviet boys developed after World War II, however. Many Soviet officials feared that

INTRODUCTION

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the strong presence of women in the armed forces during the war, as well as the catastrophic loss of male lives, was diluting and weakening masculinity. The decision to abolish coeducational instruction in 1943 stemmed, in part, from these fears. The question of how to socialize adolescent boys properly preoccupied educational and other authorities, prompting efforts to reclaim military spaces as masculine and to teach boys to venerate soldiers during the postwar period. For example, a network of military secondary schools opened at the end of the war in 1945; unlike other socialist childrearing insti­ tutions, these schools completely excluded the usual female, maternal fig­ ures. These were masculinized families, raising boys for a future in a world uncorrupted by femininity.78 Film and literature also played an integral role in shoring up imperiled masculinity. Tales of heroism and glory, such as The Young Guard, were heav­ ily promoted to a young readership, recreating the romance of battle amid a time of peace. Cultural works, such as Ivan Stadniuk’s 1952 novella Maksim Perepelitsa and the 1955 film version, dramatized how military service turned aimless, selfish teenagers into “real men.”79 Many of these works also sought to reclaim the military realm from the improper incursion of femininity that the exigencies of World War II had permitted. This is emblematized in a scene from the film The Soldier Ivan Brovkin (1955), a comedic variation on the same tale of a wayward adolescent boy who, like Maksim, eventually embraces military masculinity and thus attains manhood. The scene where the hero cuts his long blond curls—a “visual cue of his prettiness, weak­ ness, and effeminacy”—as he prepares for the military service telegraphs the eradication of all traces of unwelcome femininity.80 The mythology of adolescence that developed in the postwar Soviet Union, reinforced through cultural and other institutions, has been aptly described as “a quest for heroic models of behavior in a period of relative peace.”81 Unease about the embry­ onic manhood of adolescent boys, and how best to ensure their proper devel­ opment, played a significant part in shaping this mythology.

After the Fall After the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, an unabashedly martial variant of adolescent masculinity reasserted itself: the young-warrior brotherhood of street gangs who amassed power and grew precipitously as social and legal institutions unraveled throughout the 1990s. A belief in the effectiveness of violence as a strategy united these young males: “Violence can help you achieve what you want. . . . Everything in our world is built on violence,” as one young gang member summarized.82 As these boys grew up into “real men” on the

18

INTRODUCTION

streets, their transition to adulthood was often characterized by the pursuit of both legitimate careers and criminal enterprises simultaneously. Rather than representing marginal phenomena, the gangs and their associated vocabulary and norms penetrated into mainstream Russian culture. Fierce masculinity, which continues to be lauded in both popular culture and political behavior, originates, at least partially, in the real and symbolic practices of the adolescent males who dominated the streets of Russia in the 1990s.83 The end of the Soviet Union also precipitated profound changes in both adolescent sexual practice and in cultural representations of the young body. Russian sex researcher Igor Kon compares the transformation of sexual behavior among adolescents in the 1990s in post-Soviet Russia to the revolu­ tion that took place in Western countries in the 1960s. Among urban youth in particular, his research demonstrates a dramatic change in behavior tak­ ing place between 1993 and 1995, most notably a drop in the age of first sexual contact for both males and females. Compounded by a collapse of social institutions, the Soviet legacy of silence about sexual topics, and a rise in criminality, this “revolution” also catalyzed dangerous public-health consequences—namely, a steep rise in the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS and syphilis. Conservative religious and nationalist organizations seized upon these negative indicators as evidence of a collapse in the moral order. They launched an “anti-sexual crusade,” focused specifi­ cally on preventing attempts to introduce sex education in schools, to defend traditional Russian values from degradation.84 This crusade witnessed the return of the “youth as victims of the West” paradigm. Post-Soviet adoles­ cents, like their Soviet predecessors, are once again perceived as vulnerable to degeneracy imported from abroad. Works of popular psychiatry warn Russian youth about falling prey to homosexuality, which is described as a faddish and decadent Western import.85 A formal address to adolescents pub­ lished by the Russian Patriarchate crystallizes this viewpoint. The author envisions contemporary Russian adolescents as a symbolic battlefield: “Rus­ sia’s enemies . . . understand that it is impossible to conquer Russia by mili­ tary force. .  .  . Now they want to annihilate our people with the help of depravity, pornography, drugs, tobacco and vodka—by the same means by which THEIR forefathers annihilated American Indians.”86 Hence, the Cold War has ended, but Russian youth are still being targeted by pernicious West­ ern content as part of a broader geopolitical struggle. Kelly has speculated that the Anglicism “tineidzher” may be used more frequently in discussions of social problems facing teenagers, such as drug and alcohol abuse, further hinting at a continued connection between the West and the corruption of youth in the Russian cultural imaginary.87

INTRODUCTION

19

The collapse of the Soviet Union also saw the complete removal of cen­ sorship, followed by the f looding of the Russian market with sexually explicit and violent content. If, in terms of pure numbers, teenagers as leading pro­ tagonists almost disappeared from Russian films in the 1990s, it was nonethe­ less a young male who featured in the decade’s most iconic and emblematic film: 1997’s cult classic Brother (dir. A. Balabanov).88 The film’s depiction of its baby-faced hero, Danila Bagrov (played by Sergei Bodrov Jr., in the role that propelled him to stardom), ties together several recurring leitmotifs from the Russian mythology of adolescence, even if the character is most likely in his late teens or early twenties when the film’s action commences. Despite his youthful appearance, Danila has already served his country in a military capacity. While insisting that he just worked a desk job, his highly evolved skills in bomb making and shooting attest to a different kind of ser­ vice, one that recalls the Soviet Union’s symbolic linkage of youth with vio­ lence and sacrifice. Balabanov presents his hero in a highly ambiguous light: on the one hand, Danila kills according to a code of ethics, defending the weak and punishing the lawless, cold-blooded assassins who roamed Russia in the 1990s. Bodrov Jr.’s sheepish grin and the character’s lack of sophisti­ cation inspire the viewer’s sympathy and affection. On the other hand, he resorts to violence casually, almost instinctively, and piles up an impressive body count by the film’s end. Nonetheless, Danila Bagrov, in both Brother and its sequel, became the exemplary hero of the 1990s, resonating widely with a Russian viewership, particularly among adolescents themselves. As one eighteen-year-old film student wrote of Brother 2, Danila became something like a lodestar, a bastion of order amid the chaos of the 1990s’ breakdown of social, political, and cultural stability: “How we lived earlier without the brother is completely incomprehensible. It seems as if he had always existed. It is just we who had gone astray, set off down the wrong path. But with our brother it is possible no longer to be afraid; he will point out exactly the right road.”89 The complex questions raised by Brother about the consequences of endowing Russian youth with the power to commit violence reverberate throughout the texts examined in this book.90 Brother also evokes the “youth as victims of Western inf luence” paradigm, only to offer its cinematic hero as an unequivocal rebuttal to it. As Danila wanders through a St. Petersburg landscape dotted with the trappings of Western imports, he remains doggedly loyal to a Russian band, Nautilus Pom­ pilus; American popular culture exerts no power over him. Toward the film’s end Balabanov cuts from a shot of Danila, framed in the shadow of McDon­ ald’s Golden Arches in St. Petersburg, to one of him wandering through a snowy, stereotypically Russian landscape. The symbolism is unmistakable.

20

INTRODUCTION

With his imperviousness to corruption by the West, the character of Danila neutralizes one of Russia’s most threatening fantasies of youth. This may, in part, explain the intensity and broadness of his appeal to Russian viewers.

Little Women As the cultural sphere transformed, allowing previously unimaginable depictions of sexuality on the screen and on the page, the years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union also witnessed a reification of gender differ­ ences. In the early 1990s debates about the need to return men and women to their supposedly innate and natural roles played out in the mass media, which can be understood partially as a reaction against state-mandated gen­ der equality during the Soviet era. These debates extended into discussions about socializing children, where the importance of differentiated upbring­ ing for boys and girls was often emphasized. Nature could not be trusted to take its own course; rather, parents must present their children with the proper stimuli and role models to ensure that they develop according to the appropriate gendered models. Highlighting the pressure to produce norma­ tively gendered offspring, a cohort of Russian single mothers interviewed in the mid-1990s all expressed fear that they could not raise “real men” on their own.91 Advice literature for girls, published from the late 1980s to the Putin era, has evinced a similar preoccupation with promoting clear gender differences, hyperfemininity in particular. These books chart an evolution from the Soviet model, emphasizing the attainment of proper health and hygiene, as well as girls’ intellectual development, to a post-Soviet one, stressing physi­ cal beauty above all else. The Russian marketplace has been f looded with cosmetics and fashion, as well as the previously forbidden Western-style beauty magazines, and teenagers consume these products eagerly.92 Here, too, disquiet about establishing and shoring up the boundaries of Russian­ ness intersects with the bodies of adolescent girls. In the context of broad public antipathy toward feminism, hyperfemininity has become a “cultural sign aligned with Russianness.” Girls are taught to cultivate their appearance as a means to delineate what is truly Russian.93 Thus, the “teleologies of womanhood” recently explored by female American poets continue to yield particular force for young girls in contemporary Russia. As Helena Goscilo summarizes, just as in the Soviet era, “girls are still ‘little women’ planning for the future which, despite the post-Soviet shift to consumerism, individu­ alism, and aesthetics, presumes a heterosexual normativity grounded in mar­ riage and social acceptance.”94

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At the same time, disquiet about the integrity of masculinity surfaces in cultural depictions of adolescent males. This anxiety features especially prominently in Anna Starobinets’s story “An Awkward Age,” discussed in chapter 2, and in several of the plays discussed in chapter 3. The Soviet legacy of linking boyhood with martial masculinity still looms large. For example, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the inventor of the Kalash­ nikov, the Ministry of Education distributed guidelines for teaching children how to assemble and disassemble the weapon, in an attempt to instill patrio­ tism.95 President Putin projects a hypermasculine image, using machismo as a strategy for political legitimization.96 If boys and girls must be socialized according to strict gender ideals, then Putin himself provides an unabashedly masculine, muscular role model. Ironically, some of Putin’s performances of masculinity, as well as his political decisions, such as the annexation of Crimea, may have been inspired by the “bro logic” (patsanskaia logika) of the youth gangs of the 1990s.97 Post-Soviet Russian authors, playwrights, and filmmakers have confronted and interrogated this legacy of martial mascu­ linity in disparate ways, often implicating it in both individual and societal breakdown. Contemporary literature and film also present a much wider spectrum of male heroes than had been possible during Soviet times, including young boys with both physical and cognitive impairments. Rubén David González Gallego’s autobiographical White on Black (Beloe na chernom), which won the Russian Booker Prize in 2003, chronicles his experiences as a severely dis­ abled, orphaned child growing up in various cruel and dehumanizing Soviet institutions. Mariam Petrosian’s voluminous and fantastic 2009 novel The House in Which .  .  . (Dom, v kotorom .  .  .) became a surprise bestseller and was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2010; its main characters are also children and teenagers living in a home for the disabled. Another critically acclaimed bestseller, Alexander Snegirev’s 2008 novel Petroleum Venus (Neftia­ naia Venera) explores the complicated relationship between a father and his fifteen-year-old son, who has Down syndrome.98 In cinema, the documen­ tary Anton’s Right Here (Anton tut riadom) (2012, dir. L. Arkus), profiling a fifteen-year-old boy with autism, attracted notably large audiences and sus­ tained public attention.99 However, even pathbreaking works, such as those by Ekaterina Murashova—whose 2004 novella Corrections Class (Klass korrektsii) focuses on an adolescent special education class in St. Petersburg—reinforce rather tra­ ditional notions of gender.100 As Larissa Rudova details, Murashova’s works evince a nostalgia for the teenage male collective, as popularized in the works of Soviet-era children’s writer Arkady Gaidar. The post-Soviet version

22

INTRODUCTION

of these collectives, although helmed by such nontraditional heroes as a boy in a wheelchair, nonetheless reproduces strict gender binaries that relegate females to a secondary role, much as in their Soviet prototypes. Even nonnormative adolescent masculinity is defined against a very traditional vision of femininity.101

The Book’s Structure This book explores the Soviet legacy of interweaving adolescence with vio­ lence, heroism, and self-sacrifice, and the temporal and gendered contours of this linkage. Svetlana Vasilenko’s 1998 novella Little Fool (Durochka) and Anna Melikian’s 2007 film Mermaid (Rusalka), the two works closely ana­ lyzed in chapter 1, provide provocative material for understanding how these elements continue to resonate in post-Soviet Russia. While Soviet heroism, both adolescent and adult, was initially the domain of males, World War II marked the emergence of women into the ranks of Soviet sainthood. The most famous of these icons was eighteen-year-old Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, a girl-martyr who inspired countless artistic paeans to her courage in the face of torture and murder by the Nazis. Chapter 1 considers how the specter of the teenage female martyr, as exemplified by Zoia, continues to haunt two works of contemporary Russian culture, one literary and one cinematic. Despite initially conjuring up Zoia’s ghost, both of these texts ultimately decouple heroic adolescence from Sovietness, with its attendant violence, militarization, and ideology. In this uniquely post-Soviet variation on the “romance with adolescence,” cultural representations of teenage girls, both of whom challenge the dominant gender ideals of their respective historical contexts, are called upon to salvage the past rather than safeguard the future. While these two works reinvigorate the model of the adolescent mar­ tyr for a new era, the fiction and films analyzed in chapter 2 unmask the nexus of youth and sacrifice as irredeemable. The reintroduction of violence into the image of the noble adolescent creates moral ambiguity, something that Vasilenko’s and Melikian’s works had successfully excised. This chapter foregrounds the threatening aspect of post-Soviet fantasies of adolescence, focusing on fictional and cinematic protagonists who inspire fear, horror, or disgust. In Anna Starobinets’s 2005 story “An Awkward Age” (Perekhodnyi vozrast), a young boy is colonized by ants and forced to commit unspeakable crimes for the sake of his “queen.” I read the work as a recasting of the myth of heroic adolescence in the horror genre. Adolescent bodies, Starobinets suggests, can only be depleted and then discarded as biological waste, never occupying the symbolic firmament alongside Soviet martyrs such as Zoia.

INTRODUCTION

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In Marina Liubakova’s 2007 film Cruelty (Zhestokost’), an adult female falls prey to the notion of the teenage girl cast as redeemer. Unlike the heroines of the works analyzed in chapter 1, however, Cruelty unmasks the falsehood of this belief, revealing the devastating consequences of mistaking a troubled girl for a source of authenticity and meaning. Finally, I discuss the 2016 film The Student (Uchenik) (dir. K. Serebrennikov) and the earlier dramatic production upon which it was based. Both the film and the play present their scripturequoting teenage protagonist as attempting to occupy the same transcendent, iconic space assumed by the heroines of chapter 1 in the climactic moments of their respective works. Rather than demilitarizing adolescent heroism, Serebrennikov traces his teenage protagonist’s path to murder. While her­ alding the demise of the Soviet adolescent hero, these works foreground the teenager as the locus of an array of anxieties, ranging from the instability and vulnerability of the human body, to the preeminence of materialistic values and consumer culture, to the disappearance of moral codes. Each reconfigures Lesko’s “romance with adolescence” into a distinctive vision of adolescence as nightmare. This unsettling transformation, in turn, casts a decidedly pessimistic light on the hopes for societal renewal awakened by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The plays of three young, twenty-first century Russian dramatists—Vasily Sigarev, Iury Klavdiev, and Iaroslava Pulinovich—provide the focus for chap­ ter 3. Although stylistically quite distinct, these playwrights, like the authors and filmmakers discussed earlier, all interrogate the nexus of adolescence, violence, fantasy, and heroism. Whereas the works in chapter 2 excise her­ oism from the constellation, however, these plays reintroduce it; all three teenage protagonists strive to become heroes in their own lives. Rather than creating a new vision of youthful heroism decoupled from violence, as in chapter 1, Sigarev, Klavdiev, and Pulinovich each develop a similar chro­ notope of adolescence, one where violence creates a new teleology while simultaneously rendering heroic impulses superf luous. In Sigarev’s 2000 play Plasticine, an alienated and parentless thirteen-year­ old boy creates clay models as an escape from his grim reality, eventually employing them as tools for self-assertion and vengeance. Klavdiev’s The Bullet Collector (2004) features a teenage male protagonist who—forced to navigate a violent, decaying world filled with criminals and murderers—also crafts detailed fantasies of revenge. Unlike Sigarev’s protagonist, Klavdiev’s teenage hero successfully inscribes his mythopoeic fantasies into real life, transforming into an aggressor and assuming the top rung in the play’s social hierarchy. The final play that I consider, Pulinovich’s Natasha’s Dream foregrounds the inner life of sixteen-year-old Natasha, who also attempts to

24

INTRODUCTION

concretize the contents of her imagination—a decision that similarly propels her along the trajectory from victim to victimizer. Natasha’s fantasies, how­ ever, suggest the inf luence of contemporary Russian advice literature for young girls, which emphasizes self-reliance and agency alongside an obses­ sion with physical beauty. All three plays dramatize violence’s prehistory— and, thus, its inescapability—by depicting how it combines with fantasy to colonize the imaginations of the young. In exposing the tragic consequences of this colonization, these plays indirectly condemn official Russian govern­ mental projects such as the Youth Army, which aim to bind young Russians to the state by harnessing precisely this combination of aggression and imagination. Chapter 4 analyzes a controversial television serial that aired on staterun television in 2010—a show so scandalous it prompted President Putin himself to admonish the Russian public against falling victim to “hysteria.” School (Shkola) (dir. V. Gai Germanika) takes place in a Moscow high school and follows the lives of one class, along with their teachers, over the course of several months. I elucidate the particular chronotope, the conjunc­ tion of time and space, that Gai Germanika and her cocreators develop throughout School’s sixty-nine episodes, focusing specifically on how the serial challenges the primacy of Lesko’s concept of “panoptical time.” The interpersonal dynamics of School ref lect a f luidity of age categories, upending stable definitions of both “teenager” and “adult.” Where does adolescence end and adulthood begin, School seemingly asks? I then turn my attention from the temporality of School to the spaces that the serial’s teenage characters inhabit, detailing how they further challenge the possi­ bility of progress. The young protagonists of School face what I term the chronotopic dilemma: The physical remnants of Soviet society haunt Gai Germanika’s characters, while the trappings of a postcommunist, consum­ erist culture that the teens desire remain out of reach for the majority of them. The young characters navigate a labyrinth of stagnant spaces conjur­ ing up the Soviet past—a dead society whose specters nonetheless continue to circulate—that clashes palpably with the imperative to develop and prog­ ress forward. Despite the critical responses that the show engendered and its unvarnished depiction of teen sexuality, drinking, and other vices, School actually foregrounds rather traditional, humanistic values. After generating a complex temporality for her teenage protagonists to navigate, Gai Ger­ manika nonetheless ultimately reaffirms the desirability of development that accords with “panoptical time.” In conclusion, I discuss Russian media representations of a contempo­ rary teenage crusader: the climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Swedish

INTRODUCTION

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adolescent inspired vitriolic reactions among many Russian observers, who referred to her as a false prophet threatening to incite a wave of violence among her misguided young followers. Like the rest of the works dis­ cussed in this book, the heated Russian response to Thunberg suggests that the “romance with adolescence,” a belief in the extraordinary abilities of youth either to stabilize or to undermine society, has clearly survived into the twenty-first century in Russia. The figure of the adolescent occupies a prominent position as one of post-Soviet culture’s most seductive “idealizing tableaux,” to return to Berlant’s formulation—a vital and enduring catalyst for a society’s dreams, aspirations, and fears.

C ha p te r 1

The Ghost of Adolescence Past

At the conclusion of Viktor Pelevin’s (b. 1962) 1992 satirical novel Omon Ra, set during the late Soviet years, the young hero stands poised to emerge from the bowels of the Moscow metro after suc­ cessfully evading involuntary heroism and martyrdom. The teenager Omon had dreamt of touching the stars since childhood, of joining the ranks of that most celebrated exemplar of heroic Soviet masculinity: the cosmonaut. The novel charts Omon’s disillusionment as the farcical reality of the Soviet space program gradually comes into focus: it is an elaborate ruse, with sup­ posed space walks and moon landings actually being filmed in a subterra­ nean studio in the Moscow subway. Adolescent boys are recruited to join the “cosmonaut brotherhood,” to commit heroic deeds (podvigi) by playing their unwitting roles and then dutifully committing suicide.1 The space program must prove the Soviet Union’s technological superiority to the West, Omon is told, and so many boys must die. The greater truth of Marxism can prevail only through a lie, for which Omon and his young brethren must sacrifice themselves.2 Pelevin vividly and absurdly evokes the Soviet Union’s chronotope of violence and militarization: an officer tells the assembled group of aspiring young cosmonauts that the authorities have declared that they are living in a “prewar period,” which means that they had earlier lived in a “postwar

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period.” In other words, war provides the focal point, the organizing prin­ ciple of their existence; time is circular, and violence is inevitable. Pelevin himself has called the work a coming-of-age story, rather than a satire.3 In reference to contemporary American fiction, Kenneth Millard connects coming of age with the acquisition of historical knowledge, and Omon’s gradual discovery of the horrors that lurked beneath the heroic sur­ face of the Soviet space program accords with this definition.4 Unlike the mul­ titude of dead boys who preceded him, Omon fails in his suicide attempt. He survives, presaging the dissolution of a society predicated upon adolescent sacrifice. By refusing to play out his role, Omon shatters the circular chrono­ tope of never-ending violence. The novel’s final image, of Omon examining the linearity of a metro diagram, reinforces this radical break.5 It is tempting to read Pelevin’s novel, written in 1990, during the Soviet Union’s last days, as optimistically evoking the promise of a new, profoundly transformed soci­ ety about to rise from the ashes of the Soviet Union. In this chapter I closely analyze two contemporary Russian cultural works, one literary and one cinematic, that similarly awaken the hopeful prospect of adolescence—and Russian society as a whole—denuded of violence. Signifi­ cantly, however, the central protagonists of both works are female, drawing upon a different strain in the development of Soviet heroism. During and after World War II, women were permitted into the exalted league of Soviet sainthood; the most celebrated of these idols was eighteen-year-old Zoia Kosmodemianskaia.6 Often referred to as the Soviet Joan of Arc, Zoia was a girl-martyr who inspired countless artistic paeans to her courage in the face of torture and murder by the Nazis.7 Maria Tumarkin identifies Zoia’s story as one of the foundations of what she terms the “Soviet necropedagogical proj­ ect,” whereby “death becomes productive not only of particular kinds of sub­ jectivities but of citizenship itself.”8 Similarly, Yuliya Minkova describes Zoia as one of the Soviet Union’s key “sacred victims,” whose noble death inspired the “sacrificial mythology” integral to the state’s goals of “establishing tran­ scendent values and promoting patriotism.”9 Soviet values were inculcated and transmitted through the instructive example of a dead teenage girl.10 In elevating Zoia and other female adolescents to the ranks of the heroic, Soviet cultural producers harnessed the iconography and symbolism of Rus­ sian Orthodoxy, appealing to a population that had venerated saints for cen­ turies.11 Zoia’s initial introduction to the Soviet public, through an article written by Pravda correspondent Petr Lidov in 1941, already incorporated the requisite hagiographic elements—namely, a graphic photograph of her mutilated body—to ensure Zoia’s central position among the pantheon of

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Soviet saints.12 In their literary, cinematic, and other incarnations, Zoia and her fellow teen heroines all suffer violent and painful deaths, sacrificing their bodies for the victory of the noble Soviet people and its righteous leader, Sta­ lin. They are often described as radiating a “superhuman light,” telegraph­ ing a connection to the divine realm.13 To render their deaths legible to a mass audience, then, the representations of the Soviet teen female martyrs harnessed sacred elements in service of an atheist state. This blurring of boundaries between the secular and the sacred continues to inform public reception of Zoia, as illustrated quite pointedly by a proposal made to the Russian Orthodox Church to canonize her, despite the fact that she suppos­ edly died with Stalin’s name on her lips.14 Two contemporary Russian cultural works conjure up the iconic image of teenage girls traversing the territory between the secular and the sacred: Svetlana Vasilenko’s 1998 novella Little Fool (Durochka), and Anna Melikian’s 2007 film Mermaid (Rusalka). These works are products of two very distinct moments in post-Soviet history: Vasilenko’s text was published against the backdrop of the economic and social instability of the 1990s, during the chaos of the Boris Yeltsin years, while Melikian’s film premiered during the relatively stable, “petrodollar-fueled prosperity” of Vladimir Putin’s sec­ ond term.15 Nonetheless, Vasilenko and Melikian both engage with the myth of the Soviet girl-martyr—as exemplified by Zoia, the “architext for all portraits of girl heroes” in the Soviet Union—in order to decouple heroic adolescence from Sovietness, with its attendant violence, militarization, and ideology.16 In their depictions of teenage girls who possess extraordi­ nary powers, Vasilenko and Melikian each present a new adolescent savior who exposes the immorality and venality (among other f laws) of Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively. Little Fool and Mermaid can be understood in the context of other recent Russian works that also look to Soviet youth culture for elements that may be salvaged for the post-Soviet present. They are unique, however, in the manner in which they conjure up the saints of the Soviet period in order to replace them with the sacred content the Soviets had sought to eliminate. In doing so, they also point backward, to the endur­ ing values and cultural models of a prerevolutionary past as an authentic and more productive source of ideals for the twenty-first century.

Demilitarizing the Adolescent Heroine Svetlana Vasilenko (b. 1956), a founding member in the late 1980s of the feminist literary group the New Amazons, has been called “one of the

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most interesting writers of perestroika and post-perestroika literature” and continues to attract a significant amount of attention f rom critics.17 Her novella Little Fool received a nomination for the Russian Booker Prize and was named the best publication of 1998 by the journal Novyi mir. Vasilen­ ko’s work was published against the backdrop of one of the most tumultu­ ous years of the first post-Soviet decade: the financial crisis of August 1998 precipitated a stock market plummet, soaring inf lation, the widespread col­ lapse of banks, and the devaluation of the ruble. Many ordinary Russians were plunged deeper into the poverty and profound instability that had characterized the years since 1991 and Boris Yeltsin’s ascension to power. Although the economy would rebound surprisingly quickly, 1998 repre­ sented, perhaps, the nadir of earlier hopes for Russia’s speedy and painless transition f rom a command to a market economy. In 1998, amid the wide­ spread anxiety and suffering precipitated by the crisis, the post-Soviet future looked decidedly grim. Little Fool turns backward to two separate, fateful moments in Soviet his­ tory. With a dual structure, it contains a f rame narrative set in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis; and an embedded narrative that takes place dur­ ing the horrors of the Stalinist 1930s, which Vasilenko depicts as character­ ized by simultaneous epidemics of hunger, violence, typhus, cholera, and familial disintegration. The work’s heroines are two eerily similar thirteen­ year-old deaf-mute girls—Nadka in the f rame narrative, and Ganna in the embedded narrative—who, although they cannot speak, can sing achingly beautiful songs. The embedded narrative, which comprises the majority of the text, follows the orphan Ganna as she traverses the sadistic terrain of 1930s Russia, f leeing the clutches of the cruel Communist leader Traktorina as well as an entire cast of characters who either want to possess or to bru­ talize her. While Ganna begins as a marginalized, vulnerable, and homeless orphan, she ends the embedded narrative by healing the disabled and the sick, after a visit f rom the Mother of God renders her holy. The adolescent­ girl-as-savior trope continues into the novella’s conclusion in the f rame nar­ rative, where Nadka miraculously ascends into the sky, giving birth to a new sun that saves the world f rom imminent nuclear catastrophe. In narrating Ganna-Nadka’s journey f rom outcast to savior, Vasilenko fuses Soviet his­ tory with folk legends, Christian imagery, and allusions to medieval Russian battles, thus creating a complex and “transhistorical temporality.”18 Vasi­ lenko, who also trained as a film director, employs a highly visual, cinematic style in her prose. The novella is structured by short scenes, sometimes containing only images or descriptions of sounds, with very little narration.

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Vasilenko designates Little Fool a “novel-vita” (roman-zhitie), a fusion of two distinct and incompatible genres that immediately signals a play with the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. “Vita” refers to hagi­ ography, the formulaic medieval texts that detailed the lives and exploits of saints. Written as a testament to the virtuousness of the profiled individual, vitae created links in the chain of sanctity, f rom earlier saints all the way to the life and passion of Jesus Christ.19 They also served a didactic func­ tion, providing readers an inspiring model for evolving f rom the profane to the sacred to inscribe into their own lives. The Soviets drew heavily on the form and structure of hagiographical texts in creating their new heroes for a reimagined society, replacing devotion to God with fealty to the state.20 As Orthodox believers turned toward vitae for models of piety, so Soviet youth were encouraged to aspire toward the heights of bravery and self-denial embodied by adolescent saints such as Zoia. The vita designation, then, cues the reader of Little Fool to expect an account of an individual’s extraor­ dinary life and eventual salvation, one that is intended to provide a model for emulation.21 It is important to note that, by the 1990s, when Vasilenko was writing Little Fool, the term “vita” resonated not only with the original hagiographical genre but also with the Soviet reworking of it, a connection that criticism of the novella has thus far overlooked. Several scholars have observed, for example, that Little Fool offers a vision of society saved by a woman, neglecting to note that the one who does the saving is actually an adolescent girl, an important detail that links Vasilenko’s text to Soviet teen heroes.22 How, then, does Vasilenko engage with the myth of the Soviet teen hero in her characterization of Ganna-Nadka? Hagiographical texts invariably contain a description of the virtuous subject’s podvig, meaning “exploit” or “feat.”23 Little Fool concludes with Nadka’s podvig: her dramatic ascension and prevention of nuclear apocalypse, imagery that is rich in both Orthodox and folk symbolism, as Svitlana Kobets, among others, has detailed. The her­ oine’s remarkable feat also occurs shortly after the following speech by the Communist Traktorina, delivered to the children en route to the barren steppe of southern Russia, where they await an imminent American nuclear attack: Tonight, the ultimatum expires, and it’ll be zero hour. First, those who have remained in town will die with the first missile drop. We’ll perish with the second strike, but we’ll be the only victims on our side. Then our missiles will strike and will exterminate America in a few minutes. You, children, will become heroes just like Pavlik Morozov and Volodia

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Dubinin. The whole country will learn our names. They’ll make us into legends and sing songs about us. Young Pioneers! Be ready to fight for the cause of the Communist party!24 Traktorina invokes the myth of adolescent martyrdom, preparing the children to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the Soviet Union and the destruction of its enemy. She foregrounds a connection with some of the foundational Soviet teen martyrs, endowing the children’s imminent, abstract sacrifice with a concrete model for emulation. She also promises them immortality through artistic embodiment, the only afterlife offered to Soviet martyrs, who were deprived of the heaven that awaited righteous Christian sufferers.25 As Eva Rapoport observes, “Soviet society demanded more f rom its children than Christianity: that they accept a martyr’s death but without the promise of anything in return. Except, of course, eternal memory (commemoration).”26 Nadka, in a sense, responds to Traktorina’s call for heroism, committing a miraculous podvig that heralds a new world: “Nad’ka was giving birth to the sun. . . . It was a new sun. The sun lay in the sky like a newborn baby in swaddling clothes and gazed at the new world spread before it. . . . Nad’ka had saved us . . . there would be no nuclear strike, no missiles. . . . There would be no death!” (241). Nadka, by giving birth rather than dying, eliminates the necessity for a new generation of adolescent martyrs. She breaks the “chain of sanctity” of Soviet teen heroes by committing a podvig so singular—giving birth to a sun—that it cannot be reproduced. Vasilenko thus concludes Little Fool by simultaneously reinscribing and reimagining the myth of the girl heroine: a new world still requires adolescent heroism, but of a wholly distinct form f rom the Soviet version. Before the text’s miraculous denouement, the character of Ganna-Nadka presents a challenge to Soviet notions of ideal personhood. Most obviously, her physical and intellectual disabilities prevent her from conforming to the Stalinist ideal of a healthy, strong, and well-proportioned body, one ready and able to be harnessed in service of the collective.27 In addition, GannaNadka, like all adolescents, violates the classical symmetry of Socialist Realist aesthetics. A prohibition on any mention of the physiology of matur­ ing bodies remained in force throughout most of the Soviet period. During the Stalin years in particular, when Little Fool’s embedded narrative unfolds, adolescence was especially problematic, with the verbal taboo on unpleas­ ant topics such as illness extended to any discussion of the maturation pro­ cess.28 A culture speeding toward a bright future could not accommodate

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the awkward, transitional nature of the adolescent experience, an idea that continued to underpin official discourse until the end of the Soviet years. In other words, as both an adolescent and a deaf-mute, Ganna-Nadka could not be expected to attain “consciousness” (soznatel’nost’), the Soviet concept denoting an individual who has mastered his or her impulses to exhibit “careful deliberation and consideration of actions and complete polit­ ical awareness.”29 The normative plot of the Socialist Realist novel entailed the hero’s movement from “spontaneity” (stikhiinost’) (the “initial, elemental state marked by impulsive, ‘spontaneous’ actions and emotions”) toward the mastery of body and mind represented by “consciousness.”30 Very early in the frame narrative, Ganna reveals her “spontaneity” when she “pee[s] right in the square in front of Lenin” (124). Not only is this a comical profanation of the Soviet Union’s most revered hero, but it publicly demonstrates a lack of bodily control anathema in the Stalinist 1930s.31 Ganna-Nadka’s muteness also links her to the mythology of Zoia Kosmodemianskaia while illuminating how Vasilenko reimagines this myth. Among the Stalinist values that Zoia represented and helped to instill in successive generations of Soviet youth, such as “innocence, eagerness to learn, and modesty,” the most significant was willpower. Strong willpower was deemed the most effective method for regulating an individual’s “unor­ ganized psycho-social forces,” thus allowing her to battle successfully all of the Soviet Union’s enemies, whether bourgeois relics from the prerevolu­ tionary past or fascism.32 Zoia’s stoicism in the face of torture by the Nazis represented the apogee of this trait. Silence, even if she paid for it with her life, was Zoia’s ultimate quality, and it contributed to her eclipse of Pavlik Morozov—famous for his speech, for an act of denunciation—as the leading teen hero of the war and postwar periods.33 The 1944 film Zoia (directed by Lev Arnshtam), “the culmination of the wartime hagiography of Zoia,” begins with Zoia (played by Galina Vodian­ itskaia) defiantly choosing silence in the face of brutal interrogation by the Germans after her capture.34 She maintains her muteness throughout her final, semiclothed walk through the winter snow to the gallows. As Adrienne Harris notes, “Authors and artists have long focused both on Zoia’s purity and on her march through the snow, undressed and barefoot, f rom hut to hut where she was almost certainly violated.”35 Similarly, Ganna barely escapes violation in the embedded narrative, and Traktorina suggests that Nadka’s pregnancy occurs as the result of rape by three soldiers in the f rame narrative (219, 235).36 These two disparate cultural works, then, are linked by similar images of mute, wandering, half-naked adolescent girls, exposed to the elements and embodying physical vulnerability. Zoia, however,

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chooses her muteness as a response to external enemies, a demonstration of strength, “consciousness,” and willpower. Arnshtam’s Zoia refuses to speak, while Ganna-Nadka cannot speak or even control primitive bodily functions, a contrast that highlights the latter’s “spontaneity” and thus her unsuitability for heroism.37 From a Stalinist point of view, she lacks human­ ity, a view articulated quite bluntly by her nemesis Traktorina: “Creatures like her . . . should be exterminated right in the hospital. She’s not a human being” (235). Despite her abject position in society and her violation of the ideals of Soviet subjectivity, Ganna-Nadka is portrayed as extraordinary throughout the novella. She can sing despite being unable to speak. Vasilenko repeatedly associates her with the celestial realm as, for example, when she is described as singing like a “heavenly bird” (138). The natural world protects her from her enemies, and eventually the Mother of God visits her and endows her with the ability to heal the sick and to restore broken bodies to wholeness, including that of her tormenter, Traktorina (198, 221). In describing the enduring fascination of Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, Har­ ris observes that “the image of Zoia has always existed at the intersection of mythology, patriotism, erotic fantasy, and maternal and sisterly love; her narrative encompassed all of these aspects.”38 Similarly, Ganna-Nadka also elicits a multiplicity of impassioned responses in the characters whom she encounters, ranging from sexual desire in the orphan boy Marat in the embedded narrative; to the tenderness of her brother, also named Marat, in the frame narrative; to the reverence of the villagers whom she heals; to parental solicitousness in the numerous characters who attempt to domesti­ cate the itinerant Ganna.39 Even before she commits the climactic heroic feat of the novel, GannaNadka acts as a bulwark against the breakdown of humanity, the erosion of the border between human and animal, that Vasilenko depicts as endemic to the Stalinist 1930s. In an autobiographical essay, Vasilenko described the decades of the Soviet experiment as producing mutated human beings: We live in a society where the highest spiritual layer, comprised of religion and philosophy, was replaced with ideology. It was torn off, like skin, destroyed like the ozone layer of the earth is being destroyed, and through these gaping holes in the ozone .  .  . spiritual radiation seeped in. We know what kind of monster-mutants physical radiation produces. But now we’re on the eve of the birth of spiritual mutants, and it’s not clear, who and what that will look like. Will they be people? Animals? Human-animals?40

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Little Fool can be interpreted as a fictional exploration of precisely this hybrid­ ity that Vasilenko fears has been created by the atheism and violence of the Soviet Union. The text contains numerous examples of humans being linked with animals, such as the corpse-collecting couple who are called the “Canar­ ies”; or the description of a gun-wielding villager whose eyes are “bloodshot with rage” just like his horse’s (178, 183). Animals also sometimes exhibit human traits, such as the camel who falls in love with a woman and is inf lamed by jealousy of her husband (182). Several of the characters betray awareness of this porous division, such as the Canary wife, who laments that she had wanted to “bury her husband like a human being” (po-liudski), or the woman who screams at her religion-hating Communist son to “act like a human being” (184, 206).41 In the midst of these assaults on the integrity of humanness, GannaNadka acts as a stimulus to morality and compassion. In part 2, scene 11, for example, Ganna finds shelter for the night in the home of an NKVD agent and his wife. An agent of state violence, the man had, earlier in the novella, cruelly arrested an elderly woman who had cared for Ganna. Unexpectedly, Ganna inspires his mercy (he refuses to turn her in to Traktorina), as well as a desire to affirm his humanity: “‘I’m not a beast!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not a beast! I don’t want to be a beast! You all think we’re beasts! But we’re human beings, just like you!’ . . . He suddenly burst into tears. . . . He was crying. Ganna stroked him, trying to calm him down” (176). Hence, Ganna acts as a humanizing force, eliciting empathy, vulnerability, and the murmurings of a previously silent conscience from a perpetrator of Soviet terror. Ganna encounters the man again later in the work, when the NKVD arrives on horseback and attacks a crowd of villagers with whips. Once again, her pres­ ence spurs self-consciousness about the cruelty of his actions, about his ced­ ing of personal choice and morality to become a cog in the state machine of violence: “‘It’s not my fault!’ he cried to Ganna. ‘They sent us here!’” (209). Ganna’s ability to restore humanity crosses over from the metaphorical to the literal realm after she becomes a healer: she drives the demons out of a possessed woman who had been “howling like a wolf and barking like a dog” (223). Ganna-Nadka’s connection with mercy, compassion, and healing con­ stitutes part of the demilitarization of adolescent heroism that Vasilenko undertakes in Little Fool. The podvig of Zoia and other teen heroes like her was closely tied to triumph on the battlefield; as one of her post-Soviet admirers explains: “Looking at her and overcoming their fear, boys and girls went to war and won!”42 Soviet soldiers wrote her name on planes and tanks.43 The mythology of heroic youth developed against the backdrop of

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broad and sweeping attempts to instill what Evgeny Dobrenko has termed a “military consciousness” into the Soviet public, including through schools and youth organizations, beginning in the 1930s.44 One of the most beloved and widely read authors for children and young adults of the Soviet period, Arkady Gaidar, gave voice to this sentiment in the summer of 1941, when he wrote an article titled “Take Your Weapons, Komsomol Tribe!” encouraging Soviet youth to learn to shoot and participate in the defense of the nation.45 Traktorina’s speech to the assembled children, cited above, echoes Gaidar’s words: ending her call to heroism and sacrifice on a martial note, she exhorts them to “be ready to fight for the cause of the Communist Party!” Little Fool illustrates the interweaving of childhood’s geography with war when Marat (Nadka’s brother), believing he is about to endure the first strike of a nuclear attack, bids farewell to his hometown: First, we ran along Victory Street, where our school was located. Past the Officers’ Club, where our whole family used to attend movies and concerts. Then along Soviet Army Street, past our house. . . . Along Aviation Street, past the store . . . where we used to buy bread. . . . Past the Avenue of the Ninth of May, where the bathhouse was located. . . . Past Soldiers’ Park, where we used to ride on the merry-go-round. . . . It had been my whole life. (234) In Marat’s memories of his childhood, each ordinary activity (attending school, going to the movies, buying bread, washing in the bathhouse) occurs on a street that recalls some aspect of the Soviet Union’s defense or victory in war, revealing how the symbolic terrain of Soviet childhood was coopted by a military consciousness. Ganna-Nadka embodies a challenge to this incur­ sion of violence into the space of childhood. In Little Fool, Vasilenko presents a new model of adolescent heroine, one who replaces aggression with vul­ nerability, annihilation with rebirth, and who is grounded in Christian and folk iconography rather than Soviet atheism and violence. One final resonance between Vasilenko’s novella and the 1944 cinematic version of the life of Zoia merits attention. The fictional Nadka saves the world, and Zoia, too, in her mythologized incarnation, was credited with a salvational feat. As Rosalinde Sartorti points out, “Without the heroic deeds and model behavior of Soviet heroes and heroines during [the war years], fascism might have known a different history.”46 As suggested by the contem­ porary acolyte of Zoia quoted above, it was the example of Zoia and others like her that inspired a generation of Soviet fighters, motivating them to save the world, perhaps, from a different kind of catastrophe. Like Little Fool, the film Zoia concludes with the heroine’s ascension: the final frame features her

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“smiling face, high up in the wintry sky above the deadly combat fire of the front lines.” The ascension of a deceased Soviet hero to the sky, watching over and inspiring those left behind, had already been used to depict leaders such as Lenin and would eventually be used in depictions of the living Sta­ lin.47 Thus, the cinematic Zoia and the literary Nadka, rather improbably, occupy similar positions in the heavens at the conclusion of the two works. Vasilenko’s text suggests that a young girl does not have to die to make the transition from the terrestrial to the celestial realm. She elevates a deaf-mute adolescent girl, giving birth rather than dying a martyr’s death, into the same exalted position that, in Soviet film at least, had been reserved exclusively for saints such as Lenin and Zoia.

The Lunar Girl Mermaid (2007) is the second full-length feature film by the RussianArmenian director Anna Melikian (b. 1976), among the most internationally recognized and acclaimed filmmakers working in Russia today. The film was Russia’s nominee for the Best Foreign Film category of the Oscars in 2008, and Melikian received the World Cinema Directing Award at the Sundance Festival that same year, among other honors.48 Mermaid narrates the story of a fatherless girl named Alisa (played by Anastasia Dontsova as a child and Maria Shalaeva as a teen), beginning with her childhood in a sleepy, provincial Russian seaside town and culminating with her move to a f lashy, hyperconsumerist Moscow at the age of seventeen. Mermaid, released nearly a decade after the publication of Vasilenko’s novella, appeared at a markedly different juncture in post-Soviet history, as Melikian’s depiction of Moscow highlights. After Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, the Russian economy, buoyed by high oil prices, experienced a resurgence and entered the ranks of the world’s top ten larg­ est economies.49 Fear of a return to the chaos and poverty of the “wild 1990s” undergirded support for Putin among a majority of the popula­ tion. Amid this newfound stability and relative prosperity, a valorization of glamur (glamour)—an “ideology of money, success, entertainment, and conspicuous consumption”—featured prominently in Russian culture in the mid- and late-2000s.50 On television screens and in glossy magazines, in books and films, gorgeous, wealthy Russians lived the “beautiful life,” enticing their fellow citizens to emulate their fabulousness.51 Melikian’s Alisa, as we shall see, represents a challenge to the ideal of womanhood and the ideology of untrammeled, hedonistic consumption that glamur prescribed.

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Sometimes called “Russia’s Amélie,” in reference to the whimsical 2001 French film, Mermaid has been effectively described as “an urban fairy tale immersed into the dramatic context of a modern, Russian megapolis,” with a plot loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”52 Alisa, like Andersen’s mermaid, falls in love with an unattainable prince; in Alisa’s case, with a jaded, wealthy Moscow PR executive named Sasha (played by Evgeny Tsyganov), who acquires his riches by selling plots on the moon. Alisa saves his life several times and becomes the face of his advertis­ ing campaign as the lunar girl after she dyes her hair green. Nonetheless, the cynical Sasha, a post-Soviet variation on the disaffected, alienated nineteenthcentury Russian superf luous man, does not return her love. The film’s cli­ mactic event is Alisa’s death: she is struck by a car crossing a typically busy Moscow street, while her eerily cheerful voiceover reminds the viewer that such deaths occur thousands of times each year. Similar to the conclusion of Little Fool and the film Zoia, the final frames of Mermaid feature Alisa’s ascension: first, hovering above Moscow in an advertising billboard as the lunar girl; and second, her smiling face suspended in the sky against a seaside vista, linked via palette to the film’s earlier dream sequences. Melikian, like Vasilenko, also engages with Soviet cultural mythology in portraying a new model of teen heroine for the post-Soviet era. Ganna-Nadka and Alisa share several significant commonalities. Both are linked with folkloric elements and portrayed as in harmony with the natural world. Mermaid begins with Alisa narrating the story of her concep­ tion as a metamorphosis f rom fish to human: “Mother says I was a little fish swimming in her stomach, until papa came and I became a person.” Later in the film Sasha rejects the emotional overtures of his fellow human beings, evincing only sincere affection toward his fish. The film suggests a porousness between the categories of human and nonhuman that resonates with a similar motif in Little Fool, although without the overt linkage to the disintegration of morality found in Vasilenko’s text. Fish imagery also per­ meates Little Fool, most notably in part 2, chapter 20, when a naked Ganna, “all covered with fish scales, like a big fish,” is pulled out of the river by fish­ ermen, who exclaim that they have caught a mermaid (186). This prompts the fishermen to narrate a lengthy folktale set during the time of the Mon­ gol control of Russia, when another thirteen-year-old-girl, the dead Tuba, tries to lure her living lover into the river kingdom, where she reigns as mermaid queen. This tale encapsulates some of the complexity and ambi­ guity of the mermaid: erotic but childlike, vulnerable yet also threatening, possessing the ability to “both engender life and confer death.”53 In Mermaid, Alisa embodies some of these same contradictions throughout the film.

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In addition, the tension associated with the mermaid between sexuality and innocence, between needing protection f rom danger or catalyzing it, often underpins cultural discourses surrounding teenage girls as well. As Stephen Burt summarizes, “modern culture attributes to female adolescence .  .  . both (sexualized) danger and (sexualized) power,” a description that applies equally well to the folkloric figure of the mermaid.54 Hence, the presence of the mermaid—in addition to infusing the film with a web of folk and fairy­ tale allusions, as has often been explored in the criticism—also resonates with Alisa’s adolescence. Both Melikian and Vasilenko expand the typology of the Russian teen heroine, distancing her f rom her Soviet precursors, by suffusing their works with folk elements that also suggest figurations of female adolescence. Like Ganna-Nadka, Alisa is simultaneously human and superhuman. Both teenage girls are depicted as alienated from their societies and as suf­ fering from loneliness. Melikian illustrates Alisa’s abject position with a medium shot of her in a children’s choir, facing forlornly away while the camera slowly pans out to show the other children singing in rapturous uni­ son. Melikian often films her in solitary motion, counterpoised to crowds of her fellow townspeople and later the anonymous throngs of Moscow, whom she observes from the inside of an oversized telephone costume—the only job she could find. In Moscow Alisa’s decidedly unfeminine appearance heightens her estrangement. She contrasts sharply with the glitzy, larger-than-life adver­ tisements of heavily made-up women wearing designer fashions and spar­ kling jewelry against which she is often foregrounded. Alisa’s baggy clothes and sneakers, her boyish physique, ill-kempt hair, and face devoid of cosmet­ ics signal a rejection of the “teleologies of womanhood” toward which soci­ ety often compels adolescent girls to strive, as well as the culture of glamur.55 Her mother vainly attempts to force these teleologies onto Alisa, giving her for her eighteenth birthday, for example, an obviously too large, lacy animalprint bra, declaring that she will “grow into it.” The physical contrast between the bony and pale Alisa and her corporeal, lascivious, Fellini-esque mother underscores Alisa’s emotional isolation.56 The teenage girl refuses to “emerge into [the] sexual visibility” that accompanies female adolescence in the cultural imaginary.57 Remaining essentially childlike in her physicality, she does not possess the erotic allure attributed to the mermaid. As Vasi­ lenko’s heroine does not conform to Stalinist ideals for bodily perfection, so Alisa fails to embody the hyperfeminine, twenty-first-century Russian woman. Hence, like Ganna-Nadka during the Soviet years, Alisa is a root­ less, vulnerable societal outsider in post-Soviet Russia.58 If Ganna-Nadka

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could not hope to attain the ultimate Soviet value of consciousness, so Alisa seems destined never to internalize the superficial and consumerist values that Melikian depicts as ubiquitous in contemporary Moscow.59 Yet Alisa, like Vasilenko’s heroine, also possesses extraordinary powers that at least partially mitigate her vulnerability. During the film’s first scene that presents Alisa as a teenager (“seventeen years, two months, ten days”), her voiceover informs the viewer that she has learned to “make wishes come true. It’s simple: you just have to want it very much, and it will happen.” This newfound power is illustrated by her counting to five and willing all the apples to fall off a tree—an image overburdened, of course, with metaphori­ cal associations to the loss of innocence and the acquisition of incendiary knowledge. Alisa’s supernatural abilities also precipitate acts of destruction. Deciding she wants to leave her provincial hometown, Alisa, once again filmed running alone, stops at the edge of a pier and blows into the water while repeating, “I want to leave.” The sea greets her request with fierce waves and a brutal storm that destroys the town, forcing the family to relo­ cate to Moscow; in her voiceover she asks for forgiveness. Alisa’s wishes once again wreak havoc when she fails a university entrance exam in Moscow: this time repeating “I want to study” while counting, she seemingly wills a car accident—we hear the sound of a crash and screeching brakes. In the next scene she receives the news that she can assume the place of the student killed in the accident. Alisa does save the life of Sasha later in the film, but her exceptional abilities elicit mainly negative consequences, even if they do allow her to inf luence her own fate. How, then, to argue for Alisa’s resonance with the myth of the girl savior, if her extraordinary powers lead predominantly to tragic outcomes? Alisa’s heroism lies not in her feats, her podvigi, but in the antidote she represents to the superficial, vapid post-Soviet Moscow society that Melikian depicts. Alisa’s natural, unkempt appearance challenges the artificially enhanced, glamorous ideal of beauty projected f rom a steady stream of billboards throughout the film. Teenage girls in the post-Soviet years increasingly consume glossy, Western-style magazines that, similar to the ubiquitous advertisements featured in Mermaid, promote an augmented beauty as the ideal of Russian femininity.60 These publications guide young girls in the search for the proper mask, in the honing of a carefully constructed “natu­ ralness” that will facilitate their development into women who are attrac­ tive to wealthy men.61 Advice books for adolescent girls published in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union similarly devote great attention to clothes and cosmetics, highlighting the “eternal appeal of high-heels.”62 Alisa’s posthumous ascension herself to an advertising billboard as the lunar girl

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may be interpreted as an assault on this monopoly of the impossibly and uniformly beautiful woman. In addition, Alisa both intuits the falsehood that surrounds her, and, rem­ iniscent of Ganna-Nadka’s ability to stimulate humanity in an inhumane world, she catalyzes the removal of facades. Melikian embeds her protago­ nist amid glamur’s many layers of artifice, but Alisa’s presence pierces those layers. For example, when out with Sasha, she evinces a consciousness of the falsity surrounding her: “Did you ever notice how people have childish faces in the moment before they trip or fall? Probably because they stop lying for a moment.” The subsequent scenes show Alisa and Sasha recreating her favorite childhood game of “make the corpse laugh.” Alisa’s resolve not to laugh is so unshakeable that Sasha, that previously “emotionally unavailable media macho,” fears for her health and summons medical help.63 Framed in close-up, he rides in the ambulance with her and wills her to “hold on”; for the first time in the film, Sasha displays sincere emotions toward a fellow human being. After Alisa’s death Melikian cuts to a crowded Moscow street scene, where Sasha tenderly reunites with his beautiful, long-suffering girlfriend, Rita (played by Irina Skrinichenko), whom Alisa had jealously encountered in ear­ lier scenes. Henrike Schmidt interprets Alisa’s death as inspiring the reunion of Sasha and Rita. Mermaid, she argues, diagnoses post-Soviet Russia as suf­ fering from a “lack of love in the ruling classes,” with Alisa’s sacrificial death leading not only to the salvation of Sasha but also intimating a similarly posi­ tive trajectory for all Russia’s elites.64 This reading is supported by another scene that occurs after Alisa’s death: a couple that had been depicted as bit­ terly arguing at varying points in the film is now shown in their car kissing. According to this interpretation, Mermaid, like Little Fool, emerges as a post-Soviet cultural artifact that draws upon the myth of the girl-martyr, presenting the qualities she embodies as antithetical to the debased world she inhabits. In an essay on Vasilenko’s work, Nikolai Aleksandrov observes that Ganna-Nadka seems to “belong to another world, not touched by the world of ‘complete evil’ that is the 1930s.”65 A similar observation could be made about Alisa, if one replaces “complete evil” with “cynicism, conspicu­ ous consumption, and superficiality,” and “1930s” with “Putin-era Moscow.” Alisa’s guilelessness and sincerity lay bare the empty, hedonistic consumer­ ism of the Russian capital, unmasking glamur’s false promises. Rather than undermining her valor, the failure of Alisa’s extraordinary actions to pro­ duce anything positive suggests instead the obsolescence of the podvig-based model of heroism that characterized both the Soviet model and the Christian one upon which the Soviets drew.

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Like Little Fool as well as Arnshtam’s film Zoia, Mermaid concludes with the teenage girl’s rise to the heavens. Zoia’s connection with the defense of the Soviet Union is highlighted by the airplanes and tanks that cut through her posthumous image as it beams from the sky (figures 1 and 2). Alisa, by contrast, occupies the firmament of Moscow’s advertising billboards, the altars of materialism that loom so large in the film (figure 3). Melikian retains some of the hagiographic form of the story of a girl-martyr, death followed by immortalization, but replaces the content. Soviet adolescent heroes reached immortality through artistic embodiment; Melikian’s postSoviet one, by contrast, attains it by occupying a paradigmatic incitement to materialism, the billboard. Her ascension to this exalted position repre­ sents, perhaps, the triumph of authenticity over glamur’s shiny “spectacle of consumption.”66 The film’s final f rame leaves contemporary Moscow behind, suspend­ ing Alisa’s image in a setting stripped of any indicators of time or place but one evoking the earlier dream sequences that punctuate the film (figure 4). This transition f rom the specific to the utopian (in its original meaning of “no place”) accords with Theodor Gaster’s conceptualization of myth, defined as “any presentation of the actual in terms of the ideal . . . as an expression of the concept that all things can be viewed at once under two aspects—temporal and immediate . . . and eternal and transcendental.” Fol­ lowing this concept, Alisa embodies the “mythic idea” as she makes the journey f rom “the punctual and actual” to the “eternal and ideal” after her death. The film’s two final f rames, an ordinary Moscow street scene followed by an abstract, dream-like setting, underscore this evolution.67 Ganna-Nadka undergoes a similar transformation as she ascends into the sky to give birth to a new sun, in the process demonstrating that death need not precede mythologization. Both of these fictional teenage heroines traverse the territory between “real” and “ideal,” secular and sacred, their trajectory echoing that of the Soviet Union’s iconic teenage girl-martyr, Zoia Kosmodemianskaia. But unlike Zoia, these post-Soviet variations on the myth of the adolescent heroine cannot form a link in a chain of sanctity or spur other teenage girls to emulate their deeds.68 The feats of Soviet heroes, including the adolescent ones, did not merely provide examples of model behavior; they also brought Soviet citizens closer to the Communist Party and to its ideology. Like Zoia, dying with Stalin’s name on her lips, Soviet heroes could reach the heights of courage and self-sacrifice because socialist ideas endowed them with excep­ tional strength and fortitude. Evidence suggests that their podvigi did indeed lead to increases in enrollment in the Komsomol and the Communist Party.69

Figure 1.

Posthumous Zoia, with airplane. Zoia. Dir. Lev Arnshtam. Soiuzdetfilm, 1944.

Figure 2.

Posthumous Zoia, with tank. Zoia. Dir. Lev Arnshtam. Soiuzdetfilm, 1944.

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Figure 3. “The moon for everybody.” Mermaid. Dir. Anna Melikian. Central Partnership and Magnum, 2007.

Figure 4. Alisa in utopia (“no place”). Mermaid. Dir. Anna Melikian. Central Partnership and Magnum, 2007.

The post-Soviet fictional teenage heroines discussed here cannot, of course, inspire any comparable expression of ideological affinity. We return, then, to one of this book’s central questions, regarding the endurance of Soviet models in the post-Soviet period. These two cultural arti­ facts clearly draw upon a paradigmatic myth of the post–World War II Soviet Union, that of the adolescent heroine, as exemplified by Zoia. Both Vasi­ lenko and Melikian incorporate aspects of this myth while simultaneously

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decoupling their girl heroes from violence and from any discrete ideology. Schmidt has asserted that Mermaid is “ultra-conservative in its vision of contemporary Russian society. The latter’s integrity is endangered by the disintegration of its social classes, yet it is healed by love.”70 Although this observation elides some of the film’s complexity, one could argue that both of the works discussed do foreground pre-Soviet, Christian values—such as love, self-sacrifice, and compassion—that may aptly, if reductively, be clas­ sified as conservative. Both works pierce the layer of “social cynicism” that Dobrenko argues has “become a structuring characteristic of the post-Soviet worldview at all levels.” If cynicism compels “the pragmatic” to “predomi­ nate over the ideal,” in Little Fool and Mermaid, by contrast, the “ideal” even­ tually subsumes the “real,” as we have seen.71

Utopias of the Past In creating heroines who embody idealistic values at odds with the worlds they occupy, Vasilenko and Melikian evoke comparison with other contemporary Russian cultural producers who turn to the Soviet past as a source for positive values to reclaim for the present. For example, as Alexei Yurchak has analyzed, the St. Petersburg visual artist Dasha Fursei’s (b. 1978) series of pictures titled “Young Pioneer Girls” (Pionerki) draws upon memo­ ries of her Soviet childhood to isolate the “authentic idealism” from the hor­ rors of Soviet history with which the Pioneers came to be linked. As Fursei explains, the Pioneer organization “actually encouraged you to aspire for heroism [nastraivala na podvigi], and this aspiration was never cynical.” She offers her dreamy, red-scarf-wearing Pioneer girls as an antidote to the “prag­ matic young woman who is constantly calculating how much things cost and with whom it is useful to keep friendship, and whose ultimate dream is to marry a ‘New Russian’ man.”72 In other words, Fursei’s reimagined Pioneer girls provide an alternative to the same materialism and superficiality, the “petrodollar-saturated” glamur, that Melikian foregrounds in her portrayal of contemporary Moscow.73 In a similar vein the writer Aleksei Varlamov (b. 1963) refers to his 2018 novel My Soul, Pavel (Dusha moia Pavel) as a “utopia about the past.”74 Set in 1980 and subtitled a “coming-of-age novel,” the work follows the fate of its protagonist, an earnest, unsophisticated, and sheltered seventeen-year-old boy from a closed Soviet military town who is improbably accepted into the prestigious literary studies department at Moscow State University. Pavel manifests an unshakeable, romantic belief in the Soviet Union’s righteous­ ness and the nobility of its citizens who, like his parents, are prepared to

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sacrifice themselves for the greater good. His idealism clashes sharply with the cynicism of the other students, whom he implores to help him under­ stand how it is possible to “hate the motherland that has made you what you are?”75 Initially the object of derision and ridicule, Pavel eventually becomes the industrious and unf lappable hero of the work, whom the others envy because he can avoid the obligatory hypocrisy of late-Soviet society. Even after he is confronted with the horrors of the gulag, Pavel’s faith in the Soviet Union endures. In a climactic scene the character’s belief in the pos­ sibility of distilling positive Soviet values from the brutal history that pro­ duced them is narrated in indirect discourse: “The [real] Soviet is not . . . the Gulag, not thievery, and not baseness, the real Soviet—that’s when people are united by a common cause and when the collective is more important than the individual, because friendship—that’s what Soviet power is.”76 Like the Pioneer girls of Dasha Fursei’s paintings, the hero of Varlamov’s novel represents an “authentic idealism” uncorrupted by the bleak realities of the Soviet experiment. An analogous impulse helps explain the endurance of Arkady Gaidar, who had exhorted children to take up arms in defense of the Soviet Union, into the post-Soviet years. Gaidar continues to enjoy tremendous popularity among a contemporary readership, as well as to inspire the next generation of Russian children’s authors. His resonance in a new era, however, requires removing the layer of ideology from the “communist heroics” of his books, particularly Timur and His Gang, to unmask the universal values, such as the “pursuit of justice and universal brotherhood,” that lie just beneath.77 Similarly, Little Fool and Mermaid each conjure up an iconic Soviet image before stripping away that Sovietness and replacing it with nonviolent, humanistic elements. The works analyzed here, however, are distinctive in the manner in which they reconfigure the Orthodox Christian elements upon which the Soviets drew to create their own pantheon of adolescent saints. The Soviets coopted the sacred to serve the secular, borrowing Christian form and filling it with Soviet content. Vasilenko and Melikian engage with the Soviet myth of the teenage martyr in order to refill that form with some of the original Christian elements that the Soviets had excised. Ironically, some of Zoia’s admirers in contemporary Russia have employed a similar strategy, emphasizing her links with a prerevolutionary, Orthodox tradition of martyrdom that erases any connection with the violent Soviet context in which she lived and died.78 Little Fool and Mermaid both attest to the complex and often unexpected trajectory of Soviet myths in Russia since 1991, as well as to the enduring allure of the teenage girl cast as savior and redeemer. Con­ sidered alongside other cultural works that seek to salvage positive aspects

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of the Soviet experiment through the figure of the adolescent, they also suggest the power of the “idealizing tableau” of adolescence to obscure the nightmares of Soviet history. At the same time they foreground ideals—such as love, forbearance, and compassion—associated with prerevolutionary (namely, religious) value systems. In this uniquely post-Soviet variation on the “romance with adolescence,” cultural representations of teenagers are called upon to preserve the past rather than ensure the future.

C ha p te r 2

Adolescence as Nightmare

Graphic imagery of innocence corrupted opens Dmitry Astrakhan’s 2013 film Kids (Detochki): in a state-run orphanage, beefy, half-naked middle-aged men molest trembling young children of both sexes. The camera quickly pans from one such scene to the next, underscoring the frequency of the violation and intensifying the viewer’s revulsion. In the next scene a teacher in the orphanage ushers in a man wearing a bathrobe, forcing the assembled group of terrified children to sing while he selects his next victim, the pulsing and dramatic nondiegetic music grotesquely drown­ ing out their words. The abuse of these children occurs, evidently, with the knowledge and even the active facilitation of the adults tasked with caring for them. The children are thus doubly betrayed. Just as our outrage builds to a crescendo while watching a small blonde girl in an oversized blue bow futilely attempt to elude her bathrobed tor­ menter, a knife pierces the frame and the man’s neck. The little girl’s savior emerges from the shadows—not a policeman or other sanctioned enforcer of societal norms, but a black hoodie-wearing adolescent boy, blond, with delicate features. As he wipes the blood off his knife, several other hoodie­ wearing avengers, looking like members of a medieval monastic order, f lank him and fill the frame. The rest of the film develops further the elements introduced in this opening sequence: a group of knife-wielding adolescents, both male and female, metes out vigilante justice, striving to restore morality 47

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to a world inhabited by corrupt judges, apathetic cops, drug traffickers, and sexual predators. Astrakhan subtitled Kids a “fairy tale” (skazka), and in an interview he referred to it as a “parable for our times,” a cinematic warn­ ing about the dark elements that threaten to destroy contemporary Russian society.1 Like Vasilenko’s Ganna-Nadka and Melikian’s Alisa, the avenging teenag­ ers of Kids are depicted as morally superior to the cruel and cynical world they inhabit. Their bravery and willingness to sacrifice themselves for the greater good recall the adolescent heroes of the Soviet era. Unlike the hero­ ines discussed in chapter 1, however, Astrakhan’s protagonists leave their mark on the world through violence. If in Little Fool Vasilenko decouples the terrain of childhood from the symbols of war and militarization, then Astrakhan fuses them back together. One of the young heroes of the film renders this notion explicit when he proclaims that “war has been declared to all of us,” thus justifying his violation of the biblical commandment against killing. The circular chronotope of never-ending violence that the teenage Omon escapes at the conclusion of Victor Pelevin’s novel recommences in Kids. Fifteen years after the fictional Ganna-Nadka gave birth to a new sun and prevented nuclear catastrophe, Astrakhan’s cinematic fantasy presents teenagers brandishing knives as Russian society’s best hope for redemption. The film’s final sequence, with its Eisenstein-like crowd scenes featuring throngs of hoodie-wearing youths spilling out of the frame, suggests the ultimate triumph of the kids’ violent vigilantism over the apathy and cor­ ruption of the adult world. Astrakhan presents his protagonists as unaltered by the violent acts they commit, as free from any stirrings of conscience over the film’s mounting body count. As with their slightly older cinematic cousin, Danila Bagrov from A. Balabanov’s cult film Brother (1997), their adherence to a system of values and the repulsiveness of their victims neutralizes any conscious­ ness of guilt. Viewers of Kids, however, may wonder about the integrity of a society where the right to legitimate violence lies in the hands of teenagers. Perhaps Astrakhan anticipated such a reaction when he described the film as a cautionary tale about what awaits Russia if “order is not restored.”2 Kids provides a useful transition between the works discussed in the previ­ ous chapter and those analyzed here: Anna Starobinets’s 2005 story “An Awk­ ward Age” (Perekhodnyi vozrast); the 2007 film Cruelty (Zhestokost’), directed by Marina Liubakova; and the film The Student (Uchenik) (2016) together with the dramatic production upon which it was based, both directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. The reintroduction of violence into the image of the noble adolescent creates moral ambiguity; Kids retains the notion of the adolescent

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as potential savior from the ills of a corrupt society while raising signifi­ cant questions about the desirability of such a salvational model. The other works discussed here dispense with ambiguity, clearly highlighting the perils of linking youth with heroism, of elevating the adolescent protagonist from the realm of the corporeal to the transcendental—the inverse of the ideas conveyed by the works of Vasilenko and Melikian. In his review of Kids, the film critic Evgeny Margolit identifies the films of Astrakhan as most precisely capturing key elements of the “mass conscious­ ness” of contemporary Russians, their fears and phobias. Like Astrakhan’s film, all the works considered in this chapter similarly foreground the nexus of adolescence, fear, and violence as an important aspect of Russian “mass consciousness.”3 These fictional and cinematic teenagers inspire terror, hor­ ror, or disgust. In Starobinets’s story a young boy is colonized by ants and forced to commit unspeakable crimes and eventually die for the sake of the ant queen. The story recasts the myth of heroic adolescence in the horror genre, as a cautionary tale about the exploitation of the adolescent body. In the film Cruelty, it is a teenage girl who acts as the invader, beguiling and destroying an older woman who falsely believes that the girl can save her from a materialistic, unfeeling Moscow. Finally, in Serebrennikov’s The Stu­ dent a teenage boy proclaims himself the savior of a corrupt Russian society, wielding his piety as a weapon that endows him with the right to punish and to kill. In a faithless world the adults in this dramatic universe embolden rather than impede the boy’s murderous impulses. While signaling the demise of the Soviet adolescent hero, the works dis­ cussed below foreground the teenager as the locus of an array of anxieties, ranging from the instability and vulnerability of the human body, to the dominance of materialistic values and consumer culture, to the utter disin­ tegration of moral codes. Each reconfigures Lesko’s “romance with adoles­ cence” into a distinctive vision of adolescence as nightmare.

The Adolescent Body Monstrous Anna Starobinets, born in Moscow in 1978, trained and worked as a journalist and editor before publishing her first short-story collection, An Awkward Age, in 2006. It was an auspicious debut, with the collection designated a finalist for the prestigious National Bestseller literary prize. Since then, her fantastic stories and novels have garnered significant attention, both from critics and the reading public, often eliciting comparisons to Stephen King and Philip K. Dick. Sometimes dubbed the “queen of Russian horror,” she is also a success­ ful writer of screenplays and children’s books and has been translated into

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numerous European and other languages. In 2018 she received the European Science Fiction Society’s award for best author of the year.4 Starobinets’s only full-length nonfictional work, Look at Him (Posmotri na nego) (2017), chronicles her harrowing experiences with the Russian health-care system after her unborn child is diagnosed with life-threatening abnormalities.5 The story “An Awkward Age” may aptly be described as Franz Kaf ka’s “Metamorphosis” meets Ridley Scott’s film Alien, seasoned with a sprin­ kling of teen romance and family melodrama.6 The work opens with a seemingly banal Sunday family outing: a recently divorced mother takes her eight-year-old twins, Vika and Maksim, on a walk in the woods near their Moscow apartment. Maksim, however, contracts a mysterious illness, diag­ nosed as an inner ear infection, after which both his behavior and his physiol­ ogy begin to alter radically and inexplicably (66).7 By the age of twelve, he performs poorly in school, has lost all social contacts, acts aggressively, and exhibits what the school psychologist deems a “horrifying physical shape”: swollen, sweaty, covered in pimples. He also eats bugs, shuns fresh air, and hoards candy and sweets in his pillowcase, turning his bedroom into a putrid and maggot-filled cave. Marina, the twins’ mother, clings to the only possible explanation for her son’s troubling transformation: it must be the “awkward age,” she repeats desperately (76–77). The twins turn sixteen, and Vika, a typical teenager, finds first love at a school dance. Mysteriously, however, first Vika and then Maksim disappear, prompting Marina to enter the filthy space of Maksim’s room, where she discovers his diary. The second half of the narrative unfolds through the boy’s diary, first from the point of view of little Maksim, scribbling in a childish scrawl. Then, men­ acingly, a different voice subsumes Maksim’s, casting the earlier events of the story in a terrifying new light: Maksim has been colonized by ants, and the queen boasts of successfully conducting the “first experiment in all the his­ tory of the Earth in the seizure of a human body and the construction inside it of an Anthill-Queendom” (115). Lamenting the degradation of Maksim’s organism, however, the queen details a new plot: rather than using Maksim as a host, they will inseminate Vika with ant semen, calculating her menstrual cycle and fertile days to determine the optimal timing. The reader then learns the horrific details of the twins’ fate: Maksim follows Vika and her boyfriend to the woods, kills the boyfriend and then rapes Vika, tying her up in a burrow and bringing her food and water until the “time comes.” Maksim’s voice has been completely overtaken by that of the ants, surfacing only once to express horror at his unthinkable crime (121). In the work’s climax, Marina frantically dashes to the woods and discovers the bodies of her two children. Vika, we learn, expired shortly after “forc[ing] out three large, sticky eggs which hung

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on the umbilical cord like a ridiculous bunch of grapes . . . just as the ants began abandoning her brother’s lifeless body” (122). Two of the three babies survive, zealously guarded and cared for by their ant siblings. The story ends with the image of Marina, a crazed mater dolorosa enacting a daily pilgrimage to the woods, bearing sweets for her ant-grandchildren. Although the ant-queen her­ self has perished, her minions continue to toil for her dream of extending the ant lifespan through human colonization. Before the discovery of Maksim’s diary, the story presents the bodily and psychic upheaval of puberty as indeed a plausible explanation for the boy’s increasingly troubling behavior. “An Awkward Age” creates a symbolic con­ stellation comprised of “adolescence,” “insect,” and “metamorphosis.” The latter two have repeatedly been linked in literary and other artistic represen­ tations of invertebrates, as most famously exemplified by Kaf ka’s tale. As May Berenbaum summarizes, “The most metaphorically evocative aspect of insect life is the process of metamorphosis, whereby, in a quiescent state called the pupa, larval tissues are broken down and reassembled to constitute the radically different adult stage.”8 The concept of metamorphosis has, of course, also featured prominently in figurations of adolescence across differ­ ent spheres, from the medical to the literary.9 By establishing this linkage, Starobinets transforms the maturing body into what Barbara Creed evocatively terms “the body monstrous.”10 Although Creed’s essay focuses on the horror-film genre, the interpretative framework she proposes also productively illuminates Starobinets’s fictional text. Creed establishes constant change as the dominant characteristic of the horror film’s body—the “body of becoming, of the process of metamorphosis”—a description that echoes the oft-used formulation of adolescence as “a state of being which also connotes becoming.”11 In “An Awkward Age,” the adoles­ cent body and the monstrous one are rendered analogous by this emphasis on transformation and instability; the story explicitly links bodily change with monstrosity. By evoking horror and disgust at the symbolic nexus of adolescent, insect, and transformation, Starobinets also creates an allegory about the terrors that ensue when coopting the adolescent body for a sup­ posedly heroic purpose.12 The work elides the distance between “adolescent” and “monstrous” by first establishing the porousness of the boundaries between human and ani­ mal, as Vasilenko had done in Little Fool. In the beginning of the story, for example, after Maksim contracts his mysterious illness, the usually docile family cat scratches him while he is defenselessly watching cartoons, neces­ sitating a shot against rabies (protiv beshenstva). The cat’s sudden aggression raises the specter of a contagion that may spread from animal to human,

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altering physiology as well as psychology and behavior. In Russian, the adjective beshennyi can connote not only rabidity but also emotional states, such as extreme anger or rage. Thus, the story reminds us that animals may assert their primacy over human beings, may deform both their bodies and their souls, by piercing f lesh and contaminating blood. The events nar­ rated throughout “An Awkward Age” grotesquely extend the possibilities of “rabidity” and contagion from nonhuman to human. Readers may conjure up the image of a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth; this evocation of bodily secretions emanating from the mouth foreshadows a recurring element in the story. Starobinets embeds allusions to the permeability of the divide between humans and animals throughout the story: the school psychologist with the “bovine” eyes, whom Marina refers to as a “brainless frog”; the “feline psy­ chology” of the twins’ grandmother (70, 71, 84). The mixing of human and animal bodily f luids suggested by rabidity is vividly concretized later in the work: family legend holds that the twins’ father, a triplet, survived World War II thanks to the “snow-white nanny-goat with a lovely big udder, full of milk” who volunteered her services to the triplets’ starved and desiccated mother (83). As Creed reminds us, “The abject is produced when a body crosses the boundary between the human and the nonhuman,” a bound­ ary that surely begins to blur when a human baby is suckled by a goat.13 Accordingly, a symbolic chain of abjection begins to form, extending from the father nursed by an animal, to the son colonized by ants, to the teenage girl giving birth to ant-human hybrids. In addition to questioning the integrity of the borders between human and nonhuman, Starobinets creates the adolescent monster through repeated descriptions of Maksim’s repulsive physiology. For example, when the twins are twelve years old, the narration, through indirect discourse, explains the disappearance of Marina’s sometime lover, Vitia: He was afraid of bumping into her son. Into a fat, sweaty creature, cov­ ered in a crust of blackheads. He didn’t want to take hold of the same door handles that those sticky hands had touched, or sit on a chair that had been warmed by that swollen backside. He didn’t want to remem­ ber how close he had once been to taking the place of that little freak’s father. . . . [He was] straining to try and understand how the woman lying next to him could have given birth to such a repulsive monster. (75–76) (emphasis added) Significantly, Vitia foregrounds Maksim’s bad skin, which is often associ­ ated with the hormonal changes occurring during puberty. He also hints at

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a fear of contamination through physical contact with bodily f luids—sweat or whatever else makes Maksim’s hands “sticky,” or what he leaves behind after sitting on it with his “swollen backside”—a fear that resonates with the earlier evocation of rabidity. The descriptive words chosen to refer to Maksim—“creature” (sushchestvo), “little freak” (urodets), and “monster” (monstr)—all elide the boy’s humanity and could aptly describe any number of horror-movie villains. The word “creature” in particular erases any dis­ tinction between human and nonhuman, suggesting only something that is animate but otherwise of unknown origin and taxonomy. Later in the narrative, when they are both sixteen, Vika similarly refers to her brother as a “formless mass” and a “dim, clumsy freak” (urod) (91). Before the explana­ tion for his hideous transformation emerges, Maksim’s smells, secretions, and pimples, the instability of the pubescent body, have already rendered him abject. As descriptions of Maksim’s physiology erode the border between human and nonhuman, so other aspects of his behavior produce disgust and contrib­ ute to this abject state. His treatment of food presents one vivid example. If disgust is “always about borders,” revealing our reaction to the dissolution of form, then the hidden cache of food that Marina discovers in Maksim’s room adheres neatly to this definition.14 Reaching into Maksim’s suspiciously malodorous pillowcase, Marina’s fingers “plunge into something wet, slimy, disgusting.” Her discovery reveals a cache of stolen candy that has altered from the inanimate to the revoltingly animate: “Once, quite a long time ago, it had probably been biscuits, wafers, chocolate bars. But now it had turned into a single, sticky, stinking lump, in which there swarmed—affably nodding their black, blind heads—little white maggots (78).” The hoarded sweets metamorphose from food into vermin, from objects containing dis­ tinct and individualized contours to one “stinking lump.” The journey from individual to “formless mass,” as Vika deems him, also aptly describes what happens to Maksim during the course of the story, as he is transformed into a mere host for the ant queen and her multitudes, his voice and free will completely effaced. A pubescent boy alters into a living anthill, just as food transmutes into vermin. In the fictional world of “An Awkward Age,” as this episode highlights, form may dissolve, matter is unstable, and transforma­ tions elicit disgust.15 Starobinets also reinforces the symbolic link between adolescent boy and insect by associating them both with excessive saliva and secretions. In the first half of the story, saliva figures as a recurring motif in descriptions of Maksim. For example, his mother recoils at hearing the word “mama” from his “champing and dribbling (sliuniavykh) lips” (79), and he later “chokes on

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saliva” (81); his mysteriously “sticky” hands may evoke any number of bodily secretions (75). The association between male adolescence and secretions becomes almost metonymical: at the school dance, Vika reluctantly dances with an unpopular boy who is distinguished, like Maksim, by his “dribbling lips” and “sweaty hands” (89). Creed argues that the “monstrous body of horror draws on the bodily categories of inside and outside in order to shock and horrify.” Accordingly, the mouth, as a portal between the body’s exte­ rior and interior, assumes particular significance, with the “lips lead[ing] into the body’s inner recesses.”16 The story’s repeated emphasis on saliva, then, may hint at the terrors that lurk inside the adolescent body. This anxiety about corporeal borders is rendered explicit when, just after the description of Maksim’s “dribbling lips,” the story depicts its first, but not last, image of an ant penetrating a human being: “The ant reached [Maksim’s] nostril and braked sharply. . . . It lingered a little, and then resolutely plunged in” (79).17 After creating this metonymical connection between adolescence and secretion, “An Awkward Age” establishes the importance of saliva for the ant world. It provides nourishment and sustenance, as the worker ants “feed the female and larvae with the secretions of their saliva glands” (112, 124). The ants are also inexorably drawn to the “saliva of the sick,” thus explaining Maksim’s mysterious daily visits to his dying grandmother. Failing or decay­ ing human bodies may sustain insect life—a process grotesquely magnified in the ants’ colonization of Maksim’s entire organism. Hence, the story’s recurrent imagery of saliva and secretions reaffirms the symbolic connection between adolescent and insect, as well as the disgust that this association generates: the human form begins to dissolve as insects imbibe its discharges. Adding to the horror of this imagery, the ants seek out the “saliva of the sick” in that repository of human physical weakness and vulnerability, the hospital. Maksim steals a book about ants from his school library and learns that the ants’ appetite for saliva leads them to invade hospitals, where the “insects hid[e] in cotton wool and bandages and crawl about during opera­ tions right under the surgeon’s scalpel” (113). The specter of ants scurrying around an operating room, ready to enter exposed human f lesh on the blade of a scalpel, quite graphically activates the horror genre’s troubling of the boundaries between interior and exterior. Maksim’s diary narrates the process by which an adolescent boy gradually loses his human contours, subsumed by a multitude of ants who transmute him into a mere host. Starobinets’s description of this process resonates with several of Western culture’s recurrent fears and anxieties about insects. For example, insects frighten us because of their “hyper-fecundity,” their ability to reproduce rapidly and in terrifying quantities. Although we humans may

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live longer, the insects’ capacity to multiply “compensates for [their] ephem­ erality.”18 The ant queen in “An Awkward Age” articulates awareness of the precarity of ant existence, invoking it to justify how she penetrated into the human’s head through the aural canal, and there I carried out . . . all my egg-laying—with the subsequent settlement of offspring throughout the entire organism. .  .  . The lifespan of a human significantly exceeds the lifespan of an ant. According to my scheme, we could live in a Human Queendom not eight to ten years, but much longer: twenty, perhaps thirty, entering into the life cycle of the human. (115) She thus instrumentalizes the ants’ “hyper-fecundity” to harness the longer existence of the human being. Insects’ reproductive superiority threatens our position at the top of the evolutionary ladder, our presumptive dominance over other forms of life.19 “An Awkward Age” realizes this fear of insect supe­ riority, most obviously through the ants’ successful colonization of Maksim and impregnation of Vika. At the end of the story, two ant-human creatures are born alive, surviving, we may presume, into the future, as indicated by the title of the final section, “The First Year.”20 Most pointedly, these hybrid creatures outlive their human progenitors, whose corpses are found in a bur­ row in the woods by their grieving mother. Significantly, Starobinets chooses the word “emptied” (opustevshie) to describe the bodies, indicating the mag­ nitude of the ants’ victory over the teenage twins. The developing human body has been completely depleted, proving no match for the thousands, or even millions, of ants who successfully harness its reproductive capacity for their own collective future.21 Before their physical triumph over Maksim, however, the ants also emerge victorious in the realm of language by coopting Maksim’s diary. A constitu­ ent feature of “insect poetics” in Western culture has been an anxiety about the limits of language. We worry about invertebrates’ “radical autonomy”— we cannot control them—but just as unsettling is the fact that we cannot name them all. The multiplicity of insects transcends the capacity of human language to categorize, to impose taxonomical order on the (perceived) chaos of the invertebrate world.22 Starobinets foregrounds this anxiety over the inadequacy of human lan­ guage as a foundational element of “An Awkward Age.” Much of the second half of the story’s dramatic tension is generated by the struggle between the voices of the ants and that of the adolescent Maksim. The earliest diary entries predate the arrival of the ants and are written in an endearingly child­ ish voice. Gradually, however, the ants interject themselves into the narration,

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their grammatical accuracy and sophisticated vocabulary contrasting with the mistakes and simple lexicon that characterize Maksim’s writing. The boy evinces a consciousness of his loss of self: “It’s very important. While I remember it. I’m Maxim. I’m in Grade 4. . . . My name is Maxim. I’m ten. They don’t let me” (107–8). The ants’ conquest is signaled by a change from first- to third-person narration, as indicated by the titles of the entries: “he’s eleven,” “he’s twelve,” and so on. The occasional resurfacing of Maksim endows the story with particular poignancy, as he begins to internalize his colonizers’ allegiance to their queen: “There’s almost nothing left of me now. There’s an awful lot of them inside me. . . . Sometimes I hear her voice quite clearly. The voice of the Queen, who governs them. And me too. She has a nice voice. . . . I don’t see anything wrong in this any longer now. Completely the opposite, it’s my duty to protect the Queen” (110). The brief resurfacing of Maksim’s voice renders the story’s horrifically climactic moment, the rape of Vika, even more unsettling. The reader may have taken some comfort in the belief that Maksim, as a sentient, conscious being, had essentially ceased to exist by the time the heinous deed occurred. Starobinets, however, denies us this comfort; enough of Maksim’s humanity and morality has survived to prompt his chilling exclamations: “Lord what have I done My sister! She’s my” (121). As Maksim is vanquished both physically and verbally throughout the work, his gender identity also becomes more f luid, recalling the fears about the dilution of masculinity that surfaced in the Soviet Union in the years after World War II. Since at least the modernist period, disquiet about “femi­ nization” and the loss of gender coherence have featured prominently in literary representations of ants, the ant queen in particular. Early-twentieth­ century writers such as Maurice Maeterlinck and E. M. Forster produced works where “the central presence of a female, ant-queen-like figure reveals how the mechanization or antification of society was viewed as a process of feminization.”23 Modernity endangered the masculinity and virility of men, who were at risk of becoming mere worker ants, toiling in the “giant machine of industrial society.” The monstrous insect queen, devoted only to ensuring the endless multiplication of her offspring, renders her male counterparts slavishly obedient, emasculated, and grotesquely weak: “The king . . . is shabby, undersized, punitive, fearful, furtive, and always in hiding underneath the queen. . . . Thousands of worshippers are incessantly licking and fondling the monster.”24 Thus, for early-twentieth-century writers the insect realm in general, and the ant queen especially, embodied the fears of impending modernity: the loss of autonomy, the erosion of agency, and an accompanying feminization of the male population.25

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In the description of Maksim’s eventual conquest by the ants, Starobi­ nets similarly depicts his gradual feminization. For example, when the twins are ten, Maksim’s teacher summons Marina to school to discuss his increas­ ingly disturbing behavior, including threatening to “strangle and bury in the woods” his classmate Lesha, foreshadowing the unfortunate boy’s ultimate fate after he becomes Vika’s boyfriend some six years later. Confronted by the teacher, Maksim enigmatically responds, “I can do anything, because I’m the queen.” It is his choice of language that preoccupies Marina, prompt­ ing the teacher to exclaim in exasperation: “So do you think if he’d said ‘the king,’ it would have cleared everything up?” (73). The description of Maksim narrated through the point of view of Marina’s lover also mentions features that may read as feminine, such as a “swollen backside”; notably, the Russian word for backside, zadnitsa, is a grammatically feminine noun. In the second half of the story, Maksim’s diary reveals even more explicit imagery of gender f luidity. Immediately after the fateful walk in the woods, he writes in his diary about a menacing dream: “First I dreemed I was f lying and it was really nice. But then these innormous birds appered and started chasing me. They wanted to eat me.” In the next entry he confesses a detail of the dream that he had first omitted: “I didn’t really tell the hole truth about that dreem. . . . When I dreemed I was f lying it was as if I was a girl. And I was even wearing a dress like Vikas got.” Maksim exhibits awareness of the disgraceful nature of this transformation into a girl by initially elid­ ing it. The dream clearly connects this moment of gender instability with the incursion of ants into his organism; not only does it occur immediately after the walk in the woods, but Maksim writes that his dress, unlike Vika’s, was black, “and growing strait out of this dress were big transparant wings” (102). In diary entries from a few weeks later, the dream returns: “I dreemed again that, I was a girl. And I had big seethrew wings.” This dream fuses the two transformations—into an insect and into a girl—eliciting shame and the boy’s violent attempt to reclaim his bodily and gender integrity: “I didn’t want enny one to see [the wings], so I pulled them off with my own hands. And it really hurt, worse than, my ears. Im not going to tell Mama” (103). A few pages later the ant queen’s voice surfaces for the first time, con­ cretizing the female presence that Maksim’s dreams had anticipated. Her first utterance evokes her horrifying linkage of birth with death: “Yesterday I had my first children. I ate three of them. I needed the strength” (105). At this point in the narrative, however, the true nature of Maksim’s aff liction has yet to be revealed, so it is not entirely clear who has done the birthing. The ambiguity created by this first-person description evokes the notion of couvade, or the male mother, which, as Creed argues, constitutes a recurrent

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and central feature of the horror film. The theme of birth has often been linked to monstrosity. When transposed onto the male, it represents the overthrowing of gendered order and, more broadly, a “world completely turned upside down.”26 Maksim is, of course, transformed into a host for the ant colony, becoming a mother of sorts. In the story’s closing moments we observe another unsettling linkage of birth with death: at the same time that Vika “forces out” her ant-human hybrids and dies, Maksim also expires while his ant colonizers exit his lifeless body. “Thousands and thousands of them” leave through unspecified orifices, thus reinforcing the couvade motif of the story (122). Both the male and the female adolescent give birth in a monstrous and unnatural way, eliminating the limitations normally imposed by biological sex on the functions of the body. In death the markers of sex that previously distinguished Maksim from Vika seemingly disappear, as their mother discovers: “Her son and daughter lay before her—motionless and emptied. Now they had found their primordial resemblance once more: the skin an identical pale-sallow colour, fat bellies helplessly sunk into the ground” (123). The phrase “fat bellies” resonates with the earlier description of Maksim’s “swollen backside.” This image of Maksim’s corpse provides the denouement to the troubling of gender that his character arc has tracked: as the ants transform him into a host and unwilling “mother,” Maksim is first feminized and eventually desexed. This trajectory reinforces the connection between adolescence, metamorphosis, and horror that underpins the work, further linking the pubescent body with the “body monstrous.” The English translation of “An Awkward Age” misses the sense of motion, the crossing of boundaries and thresholds, of the Russian original. Perekhodnyi, f rom the verb perekhodit’, literally means to cross over, to tran­ sition f rom one point to another. This meaning more effectively conveys the story’s dynamic essence—a young boy’s physiological journey f rom one point to another, a transformation that acquires hideous and fantastic contours. “An Awkward Age” tells the tale of a perekhod—a transition— that goes horribly awry, mainly because Maksim is conquered by ants but also because he loses his masculinity. Put more precisely, he never devel­ ops the masculinity prescribed for him by heteronormative society. In this respect the story challenges dominant cultural narratives often inculcated in coming-of-age tales, where “becoming a subject means moving f rom one side of a dichotomy to another: child to adult, feminine to masculine, abject to object, object to subject.” Maksim never accomplishes any of these transitions, never “moves through and past the feminine.”27 Instead, he is vanquished by the smarter, more sophisticated ant queen, whose triumph invokes early twentieth-century fears about insects and their perceived

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symbolic threat to the inviolability and integrity of masculinity—an anxiety that had plagued postwar Soviet society as well. Maksim and Vika become unwilling sacrificial victims of the ants’ dreams for social transformation. In a speech delivered to her adoring minions, the ant queen inspires them to toil on behalf of a beautiful future: “And so we must make every effort to realise our New Plan. .  .  . Only by being truly united, only by developing together from the very start . . . will we be able to achieve our aim. You are extending our lifespan up to 80 years! You are giving birth to a new, ideal civilization! My friends! My children! We shall do this together” (117). When the individual subsumes his or her desires for the good of the whole, allowing for true collective action, only then will the promised future materialize. Maksim himself intuits that ant soci­ ety demands the elimination of the self in favor of some abstract purpose: “There’s almost nothing left of me now. When I’ve gone completely, I’ll find out what their goal is” (110). This rhetoric resonates unmistakably, of course, with that underpinning the Soviet project, especially during its early years. Indeed, critics have interpreted the story as an “anti-utopia,” a cautionary tale about the dangers of collectivism.28 The story does contain elements that suggest a parody of Soviet society, such as the queen commanding her followers to keep a diary because it “orders our thoughts” (107);29 and its often absurd bureaucracy, such as the citation of the “report of the RSSTL— the Royal Scientific Subdivision ‘Together—Life’” (117). “An Awkward Age” certainly supports such a metaphorical reading, as a parable about the loss of the individual in a totalitarian regime and the atroc­ ities committed in service of an abstract future. However, it should also be read as an allegory about the horrors of imposed adolescent heroism, about turning teenagers into sacrificial victims. The bodies of Vika and Maksim are unwillingly sacrificed for the building of the ants’ “new, ideal civiliza­ tion.” Unlike the beautiful corpse of Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, for example, the twins’ bodies cannot occupy any transcendent space. “An Awkward Age” sullies the beautiful body of the dead adolescent, leaving instead two vio­ lated carcasses, quite literally brought to earth and left to decay in a hole in the forest. Their bodies become the corpse of the horror film, depleted of humanity and transformed into mere organic matter or waste.30 Like Little Fool, “An Awkward Age” concludes with the adolescent protagonist giv­ ing birth in a wholly fantastic, improbable manner. Both of these implau­ sible births are creative, although in radically different ways: Ganna-Nadka gives birth to the sun, saving the world from nuclear catastrophe; Vika gives birth to a new type of living organism, an ant-human hybrid that generates horror by blurring the boundaries between “human” and “thing.”31 By creating

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the adolescent “body monstrous,” “An Awkward Age” denies the possibil­ ity of transcendence and thus mythologization. Adolescent bodies, the story suggests, can only be used up and then discarded as biological waste, never occupying the symbolic firmament alongside Zoia, Ganna-Nadka, or Melikian’s Alisa.

A Cruel Friendship Marina Liubakova’s 2007 film Cruelty does not feature any fantastic meta­ morphoses or human beings defiled by insects. With its narrative unfolding in a decidedly realistic rather than horrific key, the film nonetheless contains one notable parallel with Starobinets’s “An Awkward Age”: it also explores the dynamics of the relationship between invader and host, demonstrating how the latter is ultimately vanquished by the former. If, in “An Awkward Age,” the adolescent twins become the innocent, unwitting victims of the ant queen’s scheme for societal betterment, in Cruelty, it is a teenage girl who plays the role of savvy victimizer, destroying an adult woman’s life. The cinematic depiction of Russian teenagers as manipulative or vicious is hardly unique, of course, and can be traced back to such perestroika-era films as Scarecrow (1983); Pliumbum, or A Dangerous Game (1986); and Dear Elena Sergeevna (1988). When Cruelty premiered at Russia’s leading film festival, Kinotavr, critics frequently compared it to Vadim Abdrashitov’s Pliumbum, about a self-righteous and merciless fourteen-year-old boy whose actions eventually lead to the tragic death of one of his classmates.32 A cluster of films featuring aggressive or difficult teenagers was released contempora­ neously with Cruelty, including Everybody Dies but Me (2008, dir. Valeria Gai Germanika, whose work will be discussed in detail in chapter 4); Fly (2008, dir. Vladimir Kott); Say Leo (2008, dir. Leonid Rybakov); Sonny (2009, dir. Larisa Sadilova); and I Am (2009, dir. Igor Voloshin).33 In these films teenagers unf linchingly reject the values espoused by adults, engaging in transgressive behavior that ranges from arson, to stealing cars, to performing sex acts for strangers online. Similarly, Vitaly Mansky’s 2008 documentary film Virginity profiles three young provincial girls who come to Moscow prepared to sell themselves—a cautionary tale about the incursion of market values into all aspects of the human experience.34 Cruelty’s producer, the well-known direc­ tor Pavel Lungin, described Liubakova’s film as a much-needed corrective to the prevailing “adulatory and sycophantic attitude toward youth,” as an attempt to reveal the truth about how adolescents can be insufferable and sinful—a revelation that several other Russian films from the same period were apparently also dedicated to making.35

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Cruelty merits particular attention because of its depiction of a teenage girl’s ability to stimulate an irrational belief in her salvational powers. In the film a woman falls prey to the notion of the teenage girl cast as redeemer, a role successfully fulfilled by the fictional adolescents analyzed in the previ­ ous chapter. Unlike those works, however, Cruelty, unmasks the falsehood and the danger of this belief, revealing the devastating consequences of mis­ taking a troubled adolescent girl for a source of authenticity, meaning, and renewal. Cruelty marked the feature film debut of Marina Liubakova, previously known as a documentary filmmaker; it premiered at Kinotavr in Moscow in 2007. In addition to being produced by the veteran director Lungin, the film featured a performance by one of Russia’s biggest female movie stars, Renata Litvinova, whose presence almost certainly attracted a level of media and popular interest that the aforementioned, thematically similar films could not muster. At least one reviewer identified Litvinova as the film’s salva­ tion, with her performance elevating Cruelty above the “troubled youth” genre.36 The screenplay was cowritten by Liubakova and Denis Rodimin, the well-known writer of the hit film Bimmer (2003). Often referred to as Russia’s answer to Thelma and Louise (1991), Cruelty focuses on Vika (played by Anna Begunova), whose characterization resonates with the “combative teenage female protagonist” that emerged across various American media in the mid­ 1990s.37 The rebellious and sharp-tongued teenage daughter of a haggard single mother, Vika spitefully steals a camera from a boyfriend who rejects her, allowing her to spy on the residents of the neighboring apartment build­ ing. When she discovers a married man having an affair with Zoia (played by Litvinova), she attempts to blackmail the husband with the photos.38 He responds by sending two thugs who beat and nearly rape her, prompting Vika to seek out Zoia and enlist her in a plot for vengeance. Despite her posi­ tion as the elegant, successful head of a corporate legal department, Zoia is rendered vulnerable to Vika’s inf luence by her loneliness. Initially resistant, Zoia gradually embraces the cathartic release through violence that Vika offers her. The two women steal and destroy her lover’s car, burn his dacha, commit various acts of giddy vandalism, and become criminals sought by the police. At this point the film adheres quite closely to the definition of the “political friendship film,” a subgenre of the “female friendship film,” as defined by Karen Hollinger. Like the heroines of Thelma and Louise, Vika and Zoia are “granted agency, resisting the traditional association of activity with masculinity,” similarly “mov[ing] out into the public world as outlaws, challenging men’s control of public space.” If the American heroines unite on the basis of their shared history of abuse, “revolting against a society that

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has not adequately protected them from crimes of male violence,” their Rus­ sian counterparts rebel against one that allows men to pursue and deceive multiple sexual partners with impunity.39 In the film’s climax, however, Vika betrays Zoia, as well as the conven­ tions of the “political female friendship film,” which requires its heroines to remain forever united and eternally unrepentant.40 As they are robbing Zoia’s former employer, Vika absconds with the money and leaves Zoia to take the blame, confessing that she had lied to Zoia about her lover having other girlfriends and had been manipulating her from the outset. Thus, in its climactic scenes, Cruelty shifts into another category, that of the “anti-female friendship film,” where a “destructive female relationship .  .  . mocks the possibility of women’s forming bonds of loyalty and affection.”41 The film ends with Zoia donning prison garb, shuff ling alongside a throng of uni­ formly gray female prisoners. Meanwhile, Vika, transformed from a scruffy, androgynous adolescent into a sharply dressed and coiffed femme fatale, struts confidently down a Moscow street, smiling. Cruelty, like Mermaid, was released in 2007, and certain correspondences between the films may strike the viewer. First, there is a physical resem­ blance between the two teenage girls: like Alisa, Vika wears ill-fitting, baggy clothes and sneakers, eschewing makeup or other indicators that she has accepted the “teleologies of womanhood,” to return to Stephen Burt’s for­ mulation.42 Early in the film, when Zoia asks her if she wants to be a girl or a boy, Vika replies that she does not know yet. Vika, like Alisa, seemingly rejects the ideal of the impossibly beautiful, hyperfeminine Russian woman propagated on advertising billboards and in advice literature and represented in the film by Zoia (figure 5). Like Melikian’s heroine, she initially refuses to “emerge into [the] sexual visibility” that accompanies female adolescence in the cultural imaginary, preferring instead to rely on aggression and wiliness in pursuit of her goals.43 If Alisa’s eventual ascension to the firmament of an advertising billboard suggests the possibility of an altered ideal of beauty, the narrative arc tracked by the character of Vika in Cruelty, by contrast, forecloses such an alter­ native. A key juncture in this trajectory occurs late in the film, when Vika sneaks into Zoia’s apartment: the scene opens, somewhat stereotypically, with Vika luxuriating in a bubble bath. Zoia’s sleek, modern apartment con­ trasts sharply with the outmoded shabbiness of Vika’s mother’s apartment, where we had earlier seen the older woman thanklessly toiling. The camera lingers on Vika’s face, framed in close-up, as she gingerly applies lip gloss and mascara. As she puts on one of Zoia’s slinky black dresses and high heels, we watch her watch herself in the mirror, the exhilaration with her newfound

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Figure 5. Zoia (Renata Litvinova) and Vika (Anna Begunova). Cruelty. Dir. Marina Liubakova. Pavel Lungin Studio and BFG Media Production, 2007.

glamour and sexuality visibly intensifying. As Olga Klimova points out, “The camera’s focus on Vika’s body, ref lected in the mirror and the extreme close-up of her face, presents her as a sexualized object for the audience’s voyeuristic gaze.”44 The cinematic elements of the scene—the mise-en-scène; the fram­ ing; the nondiegetic, smooth jazz music—underscore Vika’s intoxication with and acceptance of the “teleologies of womanhood” that she had earlier so unequivocally denied. The film’s final frames contain clear visual echoes of this earlier scene in Zoia’s apartment, marking it as the apotheosis of an unfolding process. The high heels, the black dress, the previously pale lip gloss replaced by a dark-red lipstick, all signal a teenage girl now fully assuming the sexualized power that society often ascribes to her. Significantly, the film’s final image of Zoia shows her, in contrast to Vika, stripped of all previous markers of femininity: her face without makeup appears wan amid the drab, heavy cloth of the prison garb—a far cry from her earlier stiletto heels; expensive, welltailored suits; and impeccable makeup and hair. This transformation, too, marks the culmination of a process: as Zoia falls under the inf luence of Vika, becoming increasingly more reckless, so she begins to resemble Vika physically—dressing in the same woolen cap and baggy clothing, replac­ ing heels with sneakers. Vika, then, absorbs the heightened femininity that Zoia had gradually peeled away, assuming Zoia’s place after separating her from her job, material possessions, apartment, and freedom. Vika accom­ plishes metaphorically what the ants of “An Awkward Age” succeed in doing

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literally: leaving their victims depleted, a mere shell of their former selves. Vika’s deception of Zoia allows her to assume the material trappings of the older woman’s lifestyle; she becomes, essentially, a better version of Zoia, more confident, savvier, autonomous. Again, elements of the mise-en-scène highlight this contrast: Vika’s f luid motion in the film’s final frame, the pro­ vocative and supremely self-assured swaying of her hips, project her mastery of the space she inhabits (figure 6). The setting of the film—a f lashy, alienating, hyperconsumerist Moscow— also prompts a comparison with Melikian’s Mermaid. Billboards featuring glamorous women advertise bright-red lipstick; expensive foreign cars fill the frame; skyscrapers of glass and metal dot the landscape. A notable parallel between the settings of the two films is exemplified by the phrase “Moscow Is Preoccupied with Business,” which hangs on a sign behind Vika as she waits at a bus stop. This resonates strongly with the omnipresent billboards past which the teenage Alisa walks as she wanders through the city: with slogans such as “Everything Is in Your Hands” and “Winner Take All,” they suggest the Darwinian atmosphere of competition of the capitalist market­ place, a background against which the action of both films unfolds. Both Mermaid and Cruelty also highlight the atomization of Moscow’s residents, as symbolized most poignantly by Alisa’s entrapment in a foam cellular phone costume. Alisa observes the city around her through a narrow slit, but her face and body remain hidden, condemning her to anonymity and lack of human interaction. Vika is similarly presented as alienated from her

Figure 6. Vika triumphant. Cruelty. Dir. Marina Liubakova. Pavel Lungin Studio and BFG Media Production, 2007.

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environment, a condition that her physical separation highlights. She escapes whenever possible to a solitary, makeshift retreat on the roof of her apart­ ment building, and her first dialogue in the film occurs through the barrier of a closed bathroom door. Vika, like Melikian’s Alisa in her telephone costume, also experiences a filtered reality. Cruelty’s first sequences feature Vika’s camera and what she sees from behind its lens. The incessant clicking of the shutter that we hear as the opening credits roll establishes the centrality of the camera, and the mediated perspective it compels, to the unfolding action. As she spies on her neighbors, Vika’s alienation is simultaneously heightened as well as miti­ gated by the camera. The zoom focus allows her to see the intimacy from which she is excluded, but the film in the camera allows her to preserve, potentially disseminate, and thus exert control over this intimacy. It is Vika’s failed attempt to monetize these captured private moments by blackmailing the unfaithful husband with photos—to “preoccupy herself with business” and actualize the advice propagated in the Moscow of Mermaid that “every­ thing depends on you”—that instigate the events leading to Zoia’s eventual downfall. Hence, both Cruelty and Mermaid take place against the backdrop of a Moscow consumed with capitalist pursuit and the beauty of surfaces. The two female teenage protagonists seemingly offer an antidote to this super­ ficiality. Melikian’s Alisa catalyzes the removal of facades and promises the transcendence of capitalist self-interest, as crystallized in the slogan of her billboard as the lunar girl: “The Moon for Everybody.” Vika, too, although much more sharp-tongued and aggressive than Alisa, embodies a raw authenticity and spontaneity that attracts Zoia and potentially inspires the sympathy of the viewer. In an encounter with Vika’s mother, Zoia con­ fesses that, before meeting Vika, she “didn’t have anything real, and your daughter showed me that, and I’m grateful to her.” In other words, Zoia mistakenly credits Vika with helping to f ree her f rom the inauthenticity of her earlier life; the layers of exaggerated femininity that she peels off during the course of the film emblematize this supposed liberation. As in other films that foreground a f riendship between two women, Zoia’s relationship with Vika becomes a “vehicle of self-knowledge” for the older woman, or so she believes.45 In a sense, Zoia had been looking for Alisa, a teenage girl who could embody the antithesis to the callousness and false­ hood of contemporary Moscow. By falling prey to this particular fantasy of adolescence, however, the character of Zoia becomes the victim of a master manipulator, a purveyor of lies rather than an unabashed speaker of truths.

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In their final exchange, as Vika reveals her deception to Zoia, a clash between opposing mythologies of Russian femininity also develops. While Vika lovingly caresses the wads of cash with which she is about to f lee, Zoia conjures up the specter of the noble and self-sacrificial, “terribly per­ fect,” Russian woman-mother, proclaiming: “I don’t need this money. I’m doing all of this only for you. I don’t need this money, do you understand? I don’t have anyone besides you, and I want you to take this money and be happy.”46 Zoia thus repeatedly affirms her willingness to transgress the law and risk her f reedom, all to satiate the desires of her teenage companion. Until this juncture in the film’s narrative, the relationship between the two women roughly adheres to nineteenth-century notions of women’s f riend­ ship as a potential bastion of constancy and idealism amid societal insta­ bility, as developed by such classic authors as Leo Tolstoy.47 The women’s destruction of property and recourse to violence undoubtedly complicates the analogy. However, Zoia’s sincere outpouring of emotion, her vulner­ ability and professed self-abnegation, contrast noticeably with the cynicism and individualism of the city “preoccupied with business” in which the film is set. By presenting herself as the self-sacrificial woman, Zoia attempts to realize the promise of women’s community as an antidote to the “ills of modernization and individualism” that nineteenth-century Russian authors had articulated.48 Vika’s response in the next moments of the film unceremoniously and unequivocally negates this promise. She asserts a radical individualism that mocks the ideal of both the self-sacrificial mother and the ennobling female friendship: “I don’t need another mommy. Sorry, but I had other plans. I just want to live for myself.” The teenager’s coldly devious manner, the non­ chalance with which she betrays Zoia, recall the version of modern Rus­ sian womanhood that the contemporary St. Petersburg visual artist Dasha Fursei had lamented: the “pragmatic young woman” who maintains a keen awareness of money and the utility of all her friendships. If cinematic female friendships serve as “vehicles of self-knowledge,” then Vika rejects this pos­ sibility in favor of unadulterated self-reliance. The f raming and editing of the scene where Vika confesses her deceit to Zoia underscore the women’s physical separation and the shifting power dynamics. The scene cuts rapidly back and forth between Vika’s face, f ramed in close-up as she relishes each syllable of her confession, and a medium shot of the back of Zoia’s head as she vainly tries to open the locked door. Vika’s stillness and control is counterpoised to Zoia’s frantic and scattered move­ ments, highlighting the teenager’s triumph over the older woman. This climactic conf rontation recalls one of the opening scenes of the film: Vika

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locks herself in the bathroom as her ex-boyf riend—who declares that she knew he had another girlf riend and so could not expect anything— desperately tries to retrieve his camera. The man’s harried banging, his vain attempt to penetrate the barrier that Vika has erected, parallels Zoia’s later attempts to f ree herself. In this opening scene, however, Vika appears vul­ nerable rather than dominant: a medium shot f rames her in profile as she hugs her legs and sways rhythmically. Despite her stealing of the camera, Vika appears the weaker party, a role that she displaces onto Zoia in the later scene. In presenting Vika as a triumphant victimizer rather than a meek victim, the film’s final frames associate the teenage protagonist with the momen­ tum of the future. The character of Vika succeeds in relegating the older woman, who has come to care for and to depend on her, to another time and place, one clearly linked with the Russian past. Vika’s callousness toward Zoia represents an unequivocal rejection of those supposedly enduring values—such as compassion, mercy, and love—foregrounded by the works analyzed in chapter 1; in Cruelty these ideals are presented as anachronis­ tic and an impediment to success. Director Liubakova herself expressed a related idea by observing that the “two female characters in the film rep­ resent two different epochs,” with the cruelty that Vika encountered in her formative years explaining her coldhearted and selfish behavior.49 In her last appearance on screen, Litvinova’s Zoia joins a prisoner milieu stripped of any markers of contemporaneity. The anonymous women wearing identical garb could be prisoners from Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead or a Stalinist gulag—from the nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first centuries—as indi­ cated by their babushka headscarves, black boots, and heavy, long clothing. Vika proclaims that she only wants to live for herself, and her betrayal pro­ pels Zoia into another collective: the community of suffering immortalized by the famous poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) in her narrative poem “Requiem” (1935–40), dedicated to the women alongside whom she spent interminable hours waiting outside a St. Petersburg prison in the Stalinist 1930s.50 Zoia is condemned to seek solace in a female collective forged by shared sorrow, while Vika revels in her independence and newfound allure, unambiguously rebuffing unity in favor of individualism. As Zoia disap­ pears into the all-female crowd, the fourth wall is brief ly broken as she looks directly into the camera before walking out of the frame (figure 7). The deep focus allows the viewer to see several haggard female faces simultaneously, underscoring Zoia’s ordinariness. Vika, by contrast, dominates the frame, and the camera follows her forward motion. The future clearly belongs to Vika, who has fully embraced self-interest and the pleasures of materialism.51

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Figure 7. Collective of female suffering. Cruelty. Dir. Marina Liubakova. Pavel Lungin Studio and BFG Media Production, 2007.

Of Martyrs and Murderers If Russians films from the late aughts often featured difficult and manipula­ tive teenagers, by the mid-2010s, they were increasingly highlighting auda­ ciously amoral and murderous ones. For example, the heroine of Natalia Meshchaninova’s 2014 debut feature Hope Factory, seventeen-year-old Sveta, is desperate to escape her native Norilsk, in the Russian far north; she indif­ ferently drowns a perceived romantic rival before stealing money from her brother and f leeing to Moscow. In Ivan Tverdovsky’s cinematic retelling of Ekaterina Murashova’s pathbreaking novel about a group of disabled stu­ dents in St. Petersburg, Corrections Class, also from 2014, a paralyzed girl is viciously attacked and nearly raped by her classmates. In Alexander Varta­ nov’s 2016 Blueberry Fields Forever, a Russian variation on Natural Born Killers, two teenage lovers escape to a cottage in the woods, shooting and bludgeon­ ing to death all who would disturb their idyll and amassing a grotesque body count.52 These murderous cinematic teens emerged against the backdrop of a his­ torical and social context also significantly altered from 2007, the year of Cruelty’s release. After Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, an increas­ ingly authoritarian atmosphere prevailed in Russia, as emblematized by the crackdown on protesters in Moscow’s Bolotnaia Square in May 2012. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 heralded the shift to both a muscular foreign policy and an aggressively nationalistic domestic discourse. On the cultural

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front laws prohibiting supposed “homosexual propaganda” (2013) and the use of profanity in print and on stage and screen (2014), contributed to a “deepening tension between artists and the state.”53 The support for projects of cultural modernization and artistic experimentation, introduced during the four years of the Dmitry Medvedev presidency (2008–2012), dried up. More chillingly, theaters—such as Moscow’s storied Teatr.doc—and individ­ ual artists endured varying levels of persecution.54 Kirill Serebrennikov, one of contemporary Russia’s most renowned and internationally recognized directors of both theater and film, came to represent the difficult fate of the artist during Putin’s third and fourth terms. Arrested in August 2017 on charges of embezzling state funds, Serebrennikov spent more than a year and a half under house arrest. The charges were widely believed to be false and politically motivated.55 The concluding section of this chapter focuses on Serebrennikov’s 2016 film The Student, as well as the earlier theatrical production at Moscow’s Gogol Center upon which it was based. The Student’s teenage protagonist, like those of the contemporaneous films mentioned above, coldly com­ mits a brutal murder. If Liubakova’s teenage heroine eventually embraces the values she had earlier shunned, poised to thrive and to dominate others according to the cultural codes of contemporary Moscow, Serebrennikov’s Venia violently rejects his society and the institutions entrusted with mold­ ing him into a future citizen—the family and the school. While Vika’s tra­ jectory charts the journey from rebellion to conformity, Venia’s dismissal of the secular world in favor of a fanatical, Old Testament religiosity never abates during the time frame of either the film or the play. Rather, most of the adults in Venia’s midst, those who should be ensuring the integrity of society’s dominant values and their absorption by the next generation, succumb to his inf luence. Like Vika, Venia lays claim to the future. Like the adolescent avengers of Kids, he commits violence for a supposedly righteous cause. Venia, however, does not inhabit a fictional universe rife with hideous crimes or innocent victims demanding protection and justice; it is only the teenage boy himself who inf licts harm and threatens societal stability. I focus primarily on the film version but will also reference the dramatic production that preceded it, which premiered in 2014.56 Critics of the film in particular have often focused on the portrayal of Venia’s extreme religiosity— his incessant citation of Bible verses, his rejection of his mother and every­ one else because of their insufficient adherence to Christian teachings— interpreting it primarily as a comment on the resurgence of fanatical Ortho­ doxy in contemporary Russia.57 Others have focused on its critique of “blind fanaticism” more broadly.58 Serebrennikov himself maintains that the work

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condemns the indifference and fear that lead both individuals and institutions to acquiesce so readily to extremism.59 The Student has yet to be considered in the context of its representation of adolescence, as an artistic work that unmasks the dangers of linking youth with heroism. The film and the play both present the teenage Venia’s unequivocal rejection of the corporeal in favor of the transcendental, his staking of a unique claim to the transtem­ poral realm that endows him with the power to kill. In other words, Venia seizes the mantle of adolescent heroism, becoming the supposed salvation of a society that does not need saving. In identifying the foundational elements of myth, Theodor R. Gaster emphasizes the “intrinsic parallelism between the real and the ideal,” as succinctly illustrated in the mythologization of adolescent heroes such as Zoia Kosmodemianskaia. This connection between the “temporal” and the “eternal,” in Gaster’s formulation, extends beyond the individual to the gen­ erational level. According to this conceptualization, the current, living gen­ eration is “but the immediate punctual avatar of an ideal community which transcends the here and now and in which all generations are immerged.”60 The teenage protagonist of The Student excoriates his peers, claiming that his avowed piety and devotion to Christian teaching places him above them, thus rendering him the self-styled representative of that “ideal community of all generations.” This belief in his ability to traverse the terrain between “real” and “ideal,” to identify transgression and mete out punishment, ultimately leads Venia to brutality and murder. The Student conveys the violent and ter­ rifying consequences of an adolescent’s delusional attempts to embody the mythological. Like Maksim in “An Awkward Age,” Venia (played by Petr Skvortsov in the film and Nikita Kukushkin in the Gogol Center production) undergoes a profound, seemingly inexplicable transformation, although his metamor­ phosis into a scripture-quoting religious zealot has already taken place when the action commences. As in Starobinets’s story, the teen’s mother (played by Iulia Aug in both the film and the play) clings to the hope that his behavior is simply the turmoil of adolescence: an “awkward” or “transitional” age (perekhodnyi vozrast), as she offers by way of explanation for his erratic, cruel conduct to the Orthodox priest from whom she seeks advice. The only adult who challenges Venia, the biology teacher and psychologist Elena Lvovna (played by Victoria Isakova in both), similarly attributes his transformation to the “psychic upheaval” that defines puberty. Significantly, she explains her growing obsession with ameliorating Venia’s destructive actions in tempo­ ral terms: convinced that this “psychic upheaval” is only f leeting, a norma­ tive aspect of the developmental process, she must act to prevent it from

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becoming “chronic.” Thus, she conceptualizes his behavior as a transition that threatens to go astray, to linger in the pathological but temporary psy­ chological state that precedes the movement (perekhod) to functioning adult­ hood. Venia cannot develop according to the prescribed temporality without adult intercession. This notion, in turn, dovetails with what Nancy Lesko terms the phenomenon of “panoptical time” in cultural constructions of adolescence, defined as an emphasis on the endings toward which youth are expected to progress, their need to fulfill a prescripted temporal narrative.61 If Elena Lvovna characterizes adolescence as an impermanent psychic disturbance, Venia’s mother focuses instead on physiology. As in Starobi­ nets’s “An Awkward Age,” adolescence is associated with bodily transforma­ tion and its accompanying instability. With both his actions and his words, however, Venia expressly rejects corporeality.62 For example, the film opens with Venia’s mother confronting him about missing school for two weeks; he counters that he has only skipped swimming. Searching for possible expla­ nations for his refusal to ever attend gym class again, she settles on bodily shame: “You don’t like your body, right? That’s normal. Nobody likes their body. You should do sports.” The exchange takes place in the kitchen, and she utters this line while examining a chicken, adding a layer of absurdity to the discussion of the human form. Venia, however, responds that he “doesn’t give a shit” about his body (Mne naplevat’ na moe telo). Following him into the bathroom and addressing him as he urinates, the mother continues trying to impose logic on his irrational actions by evoking the physiological changes of puberty: “Maybe you’re embarrassed. . . . Boys your age, they have uncon­ trollable erections.” In response to Venia’s denying any “uncontrollable erec­ tions,” she screams at him that “it’s too bad you don’t have them!” In other words, she seeks solace in supposedly predictable pubescent male behavior, vainly attempting to render her son’s troubling behavior legible by attribut­ ing it to sexual development. She eventually acknowledges the failure of this physiological explanation. In a later scene she laments to the priest that her son immerses himself in Christianity rather than simply “jerking off a few times a day like normal people.” In the second scene of the film, which takes place in the school pool, teenage bodies assume center stage. Venia’s heavy black clothes contrast sharply with the bright bikinis and exposed limbs and f lesh of the unabashed young girls. In a single frame Serebrennikov archly highlights this contrast: Venia, in a medium shot on the left side of the screen, hunches over a Bible, while the bare midriff of a girl in a red bikini and with red fingernails, occu­ pies the right side of the frame (figure 8). While the girl’s head is missing from the frame, it is mainly Venia’s head that the viewer sees, with the

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Bible as the focal point in the middle. This composition underscores a clash between body, mind, and spirit—a battle that the delusional Venia wages on behalf of the spirit throughout the entirety of The Student. When he plunges fully clothed into the pool a few moments later, surrounded by a tangle of bodies, it is a salvo against the f lesh. Venia’s rebellion ultimately proves victorious. The school authorities prohibit bikinis, and a later scene in the pool shows the girls now wearing identically modest black suits—the color black clearly linked with Venia, who wears nothing else. In this later swimming pool scene, Serebrennikov delineates Venia’s triumph visually. Whereas his head, the Bible, and the bare female midriff earlier occupied the same plane, Venia now occupies a posi­ tion above the pool and the other teens. The camera follows him slowly up the stairs as he assumes his position in the stands above the pool, Bible in hand, while his classmates swim below (figure 9). The elements present in the earlier scene have been reordered to express a marked shift in the power dynamics. The school director and teachers who acquiesce to Venia’s judg­ ment about the immorality of girls wearing bikinis to gym class have, in a sense, endowed him with authority over the bodies of his peers, reaffirming his sense of exceptionality, his privileged access to the “ideal community of all generations.” This victory has clearly emboldened Venia, and the camera lingers on his self-satisfied expression. Several scenes later, Venia himself co-opts the power of the body, strip­ ping naked in Elena’s class to protest her lesson in sexual education and appropriate condom use. While exposed female f lesh supposedly violates Venia’s “religious feelings,” as he tells his mother, his own nude body can be employed as a communicative tool, one that again underscores his distinc­ tiveness from his peers. Significantly, Venia suffers no negative consequences when the director of the school walks in on his naked protest; rather, it is

Figure 8.

The Bible versus the bikini. The Student. Dir. Kirill Serebrennikov. Hype Film, 2016.

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Figure 9. Venia triumphant. The Student. Dir. Kirill Serebrennikov. Hype Film, 2016.

Elena who is chastised for veering too far from “theoretical knowledge” in her lesson on sexual hygiene. As with the earlier episode with the bikinis, this encounter with institutional authority only reaffirms Venia’s belief in his own uniqueness. Once granted, this power over the semiotics of the body intensifies through the remainder of the film and play. Venia’s eventual mur­ der of one of his classmates can be interpreted as a grotesque extension of this power. If, in Venia’s delusions, he believes that his religious convictions afford him authority over others, it is the teachers and other adult represen­ tatives of the social order who allow his destructive fantasies to f lourish in the real world. The Student presents its teenage protagonist as boldly and unf linchingly asserting a claim to the realm of myth. The work exposes Venia’s false belief that fervent religiosity grants him access to the “ideal,” in Gaster’s formula­ tion. He is not “of this world,” as he offers by way of defense to the teenage girl who attempts to seduce him. The work presents its hero as attempting to occupy the same transcendent, iconic space assumed by the heroines of Vasilenko and Melikian in the climactic moments of their respective works. Staging elements from the production of the work at the Gogol Center fore­ ground this important layer of meaning. Venia bases his assertion of power and truth on his constant recourse to verses from the Bible. In the theatri­ cal production, these verses are projected onto a back wall above the set whenever they are spoken. In an interview, Serebrennikov emphasized the importance of this element in transmitting his vision of the play, stressing that this was his original idea and had not been present in Marius von Mayen­ burg’s source text.63 The actors on the stage are dwarfed by the large words pro­ jected on the screen suspended above their heads. This staging choice evokes another plane of action for the events depicted in the play, a mythic or transtemporal plane that, initially, only Venia accesses. When Elena, who studies

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the Bible in order to confront Venia, counters with her own citation of the scripture—challenging him not only on the “real” but also on the “ideal” plane—she ignites his all-consuming rage. His unrelenting desire to harm her either physically or to defame her and thus force her out of the school collective, which he accomplishes in the work’s climactic moments, testifies to his desire to be the sole arbiter between the everyday and this transcen­ dent realm. In the film version the verses appear on the screen whenever a character speaks them. The constraints of film as a medium do not allow for the inclusion of elements beyond the boundaries of the frame. Conse­ quently, this transtemporal plane of action appears more clearly articulated in the theatrical production. This establishment of a transtemporal sphere, which the staging choices facilitate, also elucidates the work’s climactic scene. With all the main characters assembled in the school meeting room, Venia accuses Elena of sexually abusing him, which immediately prompts the director to fire her and demand that she leave. Why are Venia’s accusations instantaneously and unequivocally accepted as fact by all those present, even by Elena’s ex-boyf riend, the gym teacher, without so much as a single follow-up ques­ tion?64 First, through his repeated citations of the Bible, Venia has claimed authority and access to “Truth,” as the projection of the verses above the plane of action underscores. All the adults in his world, with the exception of his nemesis, Elena, enable Venia’s belief in his ability to occupy this transcendent realm. Second, in this scene, the exceptional absence of bib­ lical citations in Venia’s speech is striking. His false accusations of sexual abuse acquire the aura of credibility and truth because, in a sense, they fill the transtemporal space previously occupied by Venia’s quotations of scripture. After colonizing the domain of truth, he can effectively fill it with lies. As in Liubakova’s Cruelty, a teenager vanquishes an adult through decep­ tion. Both films present their young protagonists as embodying the future while their adult adversaries languish in the past. Venia’s history teacher, musing longingly about the Soviet years when “people used to believe in something,” emblematizes the insecurity of the older generation. Serebren­ nikov describes the character as disoriented, grappling with the fact that “now the priests are in the school,” whereas it used to be the communists and the Stalinists before that.65 Venia suffers from no such uncertainty. In The Student, this conf lict between stasis and dynamism, between the past and the future, is further crystalized in the work’s concluding scene. Elena, whom the director calls a “shame to her profession,” is banished from the school as a result of Venia’s false accusations. In her final salvo against Venia, however,

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she returns, nailing her sneakers to the f loor and repeatedly affirming that she has “found her place” and so will not disappear. She utters this phrase, however, alone in an empty classroom, desperately looking from side to side for an interlocutor, thus underscoring her isolation and powerlessness. Unlike those spoken by her teenage nemesis, Elena’s words wield no force and do not attract any devotees. They fail to reverberate in the transtempo­ ral realm, echoing instead in an empty room. The nailed-down sneakers, of course, also suggest immobilization and impotence; Venia has clearly tri­ umphed, despite Elena’s rebellious gesture. Although not literally impris­ oned like Zoia in Cruelty, Elena has been exiled from the school collective as a result of Venia’s lies. In the film version Serebrennikov cuts from Elena alone in the gymnasium to a wide shot of the body of Grisha, the classmate whom Venia murders, f lanked by two policemen; a jogger enters and exits the frame without acknowledging the presence of the corpse.66 The framing and the nonchalant gestures of the policemen underscore the insignificance of the dead boy’s body, suggesting that Venia will escape culpability for the murder. The final image lends credence to the prediction made by the dead boy’s spirit, who appeared to Elena in the hallway of the school, that Venia would kill her and get away with it. The teenager’s crime precipitates no punishment; he remains an unchallenged, self-proclaimed arbiter of good and evil.67 None of the institutions of the adult world will impede Venia’s ability to victimize, and the future clearly belongs to him, as it does for the teenage Vika in Cruelty. The play with words of the drama’s title, (M)uchenik—in Russian muchenik means “martyr,” while uchenik means “student”—also creates an important ambiguity absent from the more straightforward title of the film, The Student (Uchenik). The concept of martyrdom, however, is evoked repeatedly in both play and film. For example, shortly after his naked protest, Venia encounters the same priest whom his mother had earlier sought out. In this first meeting between Venia, the self-proclaimed representative of Christian morality, and an official representative of the Russian Orthodox Church, the priest voices sympathy for Venia’s protest against the school and for his desire to “live for his faith.” Venia counters by responding that he wishes not to live for his faith but to “die for it.” He emphatically rejects the priest’s suggestion that “there are many paths to serving God besides dying.” Venia criticizes contemporary Christianity specifically for its insufficient commitment to martyrdom, which has provoked ridicule among other faiths who produce no shortage of those willing to sacrifice themselves for a higher cause. In a later scene, when he first suggests murdering Elena, Venia again states that he would “die for God.” Yuliya Minkova identifies the prominence of “sacrifice as a meaning-giving

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concept” in post-Soviet culture, a phenomenon that she traces back to the Soviet Union’s reliance on sacred victims to inculcate and disseminate its values.68 Venia has seemingly internalized this imperative, drawing upon a selective reading of scripture that renders sacrifice the foundation for his worldview. Venia’s repeated references to martyrdom, including his assertion that Russians are losing the sacrifice game to other faiths, indirectly sug­ gest the Soviet mythology of the adolescent as sacred victim. By definition, however, the “language of sacrifice” is also a “language of violence,” thus, perhaps, anticipating Venia’s transition from would-be martyr to murderer.69 The play’s title, then, indirectly evokes the Soviet linkage of youth and mar­ tyrdom. Serebrennikov’s work exposes the ease with which an adolescent in contemporary Russia, inspired by this linkage, might evolve from victim to perpetrator. The play’s title also suggests the concept of the “chain of sanctity.”70 The noble example set by both medieval Christian martyrs and the adolescent heroes of the Soviet period was meant to be copied. Martyrdom should serve a didactic function, teaching and inspiring infinite generations of students. Venia fancies himself a martyr, as we have seen, and he also acquires a stu­ dent: the disabled boy, Grisha, who endures taunting by his peers but in whom Venia shows an interest.71 Grisha must take the hand of God, Venia insists, if he does not want to remain disabled his whole life. After this exchange, Sere­ brennikov cuts to a shot of the boys’ two hands, an unmistakable reference to Michelangelo’s famous painting “Creation of Adam” (figure 10). This shot provides an ironic visual instantiation of the chain of sanctity, with Venia clearly playing God’s part. Initially, Grisha appears to learn from his teacher: when Venia proclaims that he would “die for God,” Grisha answers that “he would too then,” and that he would do anything for Venia. Both the willingness for self-sacrifice and fealty to Venia, God’s self-proclaimed emissary, is thus affirmed. When Venia declares Elena a Jew and hence an enemy of Christianity who must be neutralized, Grisha initially defends her but eventually introduces a plan to cut the brakes on her moped. Grisha’s murderous plan earns his teacher’s blessing, and when Grisha declares, “It’s like I’m your student now,” Venia responds by confirming that Grisha is indeed his “only and favorite student now.” Hence, Venia seemingly passes along to his pupil a willingness to sus­ pend traditional morality and to commit violence, rather than instilling the noble values that both Christian and Soviet martyrs were expected to inspire. But the transmission has failed: Grisha ultimately refuses to sabotage Elena’s moped, thereby rejecting his teacher’s authority over life and death. He also extends the student-pupil relationship into a wholly unwelcome direction by

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Figure 10.

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The chain of sanctity. The Student. Dir. Kirill Serebrennikov. Hype Film, 2016.

attempting to kiss Venia; enraged at this perceived double betrayal, Venia repeatedly hits him over the head with a rock and kills him. The heroines of chapter 1 interrupted the “chain of sanctity” by com­ mitting deeds (podvigi) so singular—such as giving birth to a new sun—that they could not be reproduced. In The Student and (M)uchenik, the teenage protagonist breaks the grotesque “chain of sanctity” enacted by his relation­ ship with Grisha much more immediately, by literally eliminating his student. Little Fool and Mermaid engage with the Soviet model of adolescent heroism but excise the violent and ideological elements from this myth, transforming it for a contemporary context by drawing on its originary, pre-Soviet ele­ ments. While those works reinvigorate the model of the adolescent martyr for a new era, Serebrennikov’s film and play unmask the nexus of youth and sacrifice as irredeemable, regardless of the ideology that inspires this linkage. Rather than demilitarizing adolescent heroism, he traces his teen­ age protagonist’s path to murder. Thus, Serebrennikov reminds us that “the language of sacrifice” is indeed always a “language of violence,” particularly when wielded by an adolescent protagonist. Like Serebrennikov’s Venia, several of the other teenage murderers who rampaged across Russian cinema screens in the mid-2010s also elude punish­ ment and capture the momentum of the future in the concluding frames of their respective films. Sveta, from Meshchaninova’s Hope Factory (played by Daria Saveleva), heads for a f light to Moscow, where she may embark on a new life unimpeded by her recently committed crime. More improbably, perhaps, the young murderers of Blueberry Fields Forever (played by Ekat­ erina Steblina and Aleksei Maslodudov) craftily outwit the police after their capture; they gleefully resume their crime spree uninhibited by any of the institutions designed to ensure societal stability. The girl’s heavily pregnant

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figure symbolizes futurity and the couple’s ultimate triumph over the values of the adult world. If Pelevin’s young hero, Omon, escapes from the circular chronotope of perpetual violence imposed on him by adults, these cinematic adolescents triumphantly resurrect it. Alexander Vartanov (b. 1977), the director of Blueberry Fields Forever, explicitly connects his film with Serebrennikov’s The Student. He also links their cinematic portrayals of adolescent violence with real-life events, such as the fifteen-year-old couple from the Pskov region who escaped to a family dacha, had a shoot-out with police, and eventually shot themselves, post­ ing on social media until their very last moments. “All of this,” Vartanov contends, reveals that “we are living in a society that has completely lost its sources of support, its guideposts, its hope. Naturally, all of this begins with children. . . . All vertical and horizontal ties have been lost and some sort of unintelligible bonds are invented to replace them.”72 Vartanov’s observation about the “loss of ties” applies to both Cruelty and The Student; both Vika and Venia blatantly reject any concept of communality or collective identity, choosing radical individualism instead. However, the contours of this loss appear quite different in 2015 than they did in 2007. In films like Cruelty, as well as Melikian’s Mermaid and Mansky’s 2008 documentary Virginity, societal bonds are depicted as endangered by consumer culture, by an infatu­ ation with superficial beauty and pleasure over deeper and more substan­ tive values. Vika rejects female friendship in order to strut confidently into a future where she relies solely on herself; she upends Zoia’s life but does not extinguish it. By the mid-2010s, in The Student and other films featuring murderous teens, a “loss of ties” has come to mean something more dis­ turbing: the removal of all ethical impediments to accomplishing one’s goals or indulging one’s desires. The directors of these films portray adolescents who stake a claim to the future, but only because they have become moral monsters—a transformation that casts a distinctly pessimistic light on the hopes for societal renewal awakened by the end of the Soviet Union. The literature and film discussed in this chapter, then, present a progres­ sively more unsettling vision of Lesko’s “romance with adolescence” trans­ muted into adolescence as nightmare. Starobinets’s “An Awkward Age” evokes disgust at the pubescent body before rendering that body analogous to biological waste, denuded of any transcendent meaning. The adolescent repels but does not threaten. Both Liubakova and Serebrennikov, however, present the triumph of their respective teenage protagonists over individu­ als and institutions, suggesting that adult power structures are helpless to neutralize the destructive impulses of Russia’s youth. On the contrary, in The Student, the institutions of school and religion embolden them, facilitating

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the teenager’s eventual path to murder. By revealing the disgust, terror, and horror that a fictional, cinematic, or dramatic teenager can provoke, these disparate works all condemn the figure of the adolescent hero prepared to sacrifice herself for the greater good to the dustbin of history. Considered together, they constitute a fictional cautionary tale for any official Rus­ sian projects seeking to inspire such sacrifice among contemporary youth. As fifteen-year-old Katia proclaims in the final moments of Gai German­ ika’s film, “Everybody dies but me. And you, mama and papa, can go **** yourselves.”73

C ha p te r 3

Violent Imaginings

The teenage protagonists discussed so far all occupy a clearly defined position along the divide between victim and offender. The twins in Starobinets’s “An Awkward Age,” innocent targets of a fantastically devious ant queen, elicit disgust but also pity, whereas Liuba­ kova and Serebrennikov depict their respective adolescents as bearing culpa­ bility for reprehensible crimes. This chapter, by contrast, focuses on three plays that blur this line, dramatizing the moments when a young character transforms from a blameless victim of violence to the ethically ambiguous perpetrator of it. These plays—Plasticine (2000) by Vasily Sigarev; The Bullet Collector (2004) by Iury Klavdiev; and Natasha’s Dream (2009) by Iaroslava Pulinovich—depict teenagers who develop according to a notably similar pattern. First, the character immerses herself in the realm of the imagina­ tion; next, she attempts to inscribe that irrational, destructive fantasy into everyday life. These dramatists present adolescence as a time when their heroes navigate the continuum between innocence and aggression, between succumbing to and inf licting violence. For the protagonists of all three plays, a combustible mix of fantasy and pugnacity characterizes their adolescent experience, precluding any evolution from individualistic outsider to repre­ sentative of a stable social order. Critics frequently note the outsized formal and thematic significance of violence in the plays associated with New Drama, often connecting it to 80

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the chaos and instability of the 1990s in Russia.1 In her study of the rise of youth gangs after the end of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stephenson con­ cludes that Russia underwent a “decivilizing process”—a reversal of the pro­ gressive elimination of violence from European societies that, according to Norbert Elias, had taken place over the course of centuries.2 These plays may be understood as dramatic explorations of the contours of this deciviliz­ ing process. While drawing upon this critical foundation, the close readings below foreground a heretofore unacknowledged element, which I term the prehistory of violence. Sigarev, Klavdiev, and Pulinovich dramatize how vio­ lence makes the transition from the imaginations of fictional adolescents to their external, embodied realities. The prehistory of violence in these dramas also directly addresses one of this book’s central questions: How have contemporary Russian cultural producers responded to the intermingling of violence, heroism, and adoles­ cence inherited from the Soviet era? The plays discussed clearly interrogate this nexus, as Vasilenko’s Little Fool and Melikian’s Mermaid also do. As in the works of Starobinets, Liubakova, and Serebrennikov, the events dramatized in Plasticine, The Bullet Collector, and Natasha’s Dream evoke horror at the fates and crimes of their teenage protagonists. Whereas the works in the previous chapter excise heroism from the constellation, however, these plays reintroduce it: all three teenage protagonists strive to become heroes in their own lives. Rather than creating a new vision of youthful heroism decoupled from violence, Sigarev, Klavdiev, and Pulinovich unmask violence’s unf lag­ ging teleology, its unstoppable momentum that renders heroic impulses superf luous.

New Drama, Briefly The designation New Drama refers, broadly speaking, to the extraordinary proliferation of Russian-language theatrical writing that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. Some commentators assert that drama has overtaken prose and poetry as the most interesting and important genre of contemporary literature, f lourishing to a degree heretofore unseen in Russian culture. From its modest beginnings in basements and provincial play festivals, New Drama has exerted a strong inf luence on a broad range of other media, from cinema to graphic art.3 It is credited with awakening enthusiasm for the theater among new generations of spectators and with reviving the Russian theater scene after the fallow period of the 1990s.4 Many of its major figures, such as Serebrennikov, Sigarev, and Ivan Vyrypaev, par­ layed their theatrical successes into prominence in the Russian film world.

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The New Dramatists have achieved notable success beyond Russia’s borders, receiving awards and being staged in multiple countries and languages. Since its inception New Drama has manifested a markedly transnational dimen­ sion; its playwrights hail from Ukraine and Belarus as well as Russia, with the Russian language bridging three national cultures.5 The works and authors associated with the movement exhibit a remark­ able degree of stylistic and thematic diversity, resisting facile categorization. New Drama encompasses a range of disparate artistic phenomena, from the verbatim technique of documentary theater introduced at Teatr.doc, one of Moscow’s most important and inf luential alternative theaters, to the confes­ sional monologues of Evgeny Grishkovets (b. 1967) and the lyrical dramas of Olga Mukhina (b. 1970). The recurring elements that critics often iden­ tify in these divergent texts, in addition to violence, include fragmentary plot structures that lack traditional character development; the ubiquity of profane language (mat) and street jargon; graphic, hypernaturalistic sexual content; treatment of taboo topics such as homosexuality, prison conditions, and police brutality; and events that unfold against a backdrop of profound alienation and social dislocation.6 Typical New Drama heroes may be divided into the following categories: a vulnerable, victimized member of a socially marginalized group; a “kidalt” who is either unwilling or unable to grow up; and the wanderer, either literally or metaphorically lost or separated from home.7 The adolescent hero, residing in an economically depressed city with long-abandoned industrial centers, also recurs with notable frequency, including in Plasticine, The Bullet Collector, and Natasha’s Dream.8 Two of the plays discussed here were written by dramatists barely past adolescence themselves. Sigarev, born in 1977 in the small town of Verkh­ naia Salda in the Ural mountain region, wrote Plasticine in the late 1990s, at the age of twenty-two, while a student in the playwriting course of the well-known dramatist Nikolai Koliada. Pulinovich, born in 1987, belongs to the first generation that came of age in the post-Soviet period; like Sigarev, she wrote Natasha’s Dream at the age of 22, in 2009. Klavdiev, the oldest of the three, was born in 1975 and wrote The Bullet Collector in 2004, at the age of twenty-nine. Scholars have noted some of the difficulties inherent in studying adoles­ cence, a period about which most historical testaments are written by adults, thus ref lecting a retrospective view. Many coming-of-age stories privilege adulthood as the stable end point of conf lict, ref lecting a desire for youth to develop toward a predetermined and predictable conclusion.9 The play­ wrights considered here interrogate the teleology lurking beneath the sur­ face of fictional representations of adolescence. The supposedly inexorable

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connection with adult reality appears much more tenuous when considering works of imaginative literature produced by playwrights in their teens or early twenties.10 The dramatic form itself presents a potential challenge to this teleology, further testifying to the value of these plays for illuminating the dynamics of adolescence in contemporary Russian culture. A play’s limited tempo­ ral duration allows the focus to remain on the “teenager as such,” to more effectively resist an orientation toward the end point of adulthood, perhaps, than other genres.11 I consider these three plays primarily as works of dra­ matic literature rather than as theatrical phenomena, since individual direc­ torial choices, as well as variations from production to production, may steer attention away from the “teenager as such” that is this study’s main concern. My approach has also been inf luenced by the analysis of I. M. Bolotian, who argues that one of New Drama’s salient characteristics is an assertion of the supremacy of the text. Noting the tendency among New Drama writers to exclude traditional formal markers delineating their works as plays, Bolotian contends that many of these dramas can successfully be staged in a theater, made into a film, or published as texts for reading. Many of these plays may be classified more precisely as “universal texts,” and they are treated as such in the discussion below.12

Theorizing Adolescence and Imagination The plays analyzed here foreground the imaginative life of their teen protag­ onists, revealing new contours of the illusions that adolescents have inspired in the Russian cultural imaginary. They do so by dramatizing the fantasies within those fantasies. Many nonfictional studies similarly attribute profound significance to the adolescent imagination.13 For example, as early as 1903, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, the so-called inventor of modern adolescence, stressed the importance of “the eff lorescence of imagination” for endowing adolescents with their exceptional potentiality.14 He specifi­ cally linked biological changes with this capacity for a fantasy life: “Puberty is the birthday of the imagination. This has its morning twilight in reverie . . . in many sane children, their own surroundings not only shrivel but become dim and shadowy compared with the realm of fancy. This age is sadly incom­ plete without illusions.”15 The adolescent’s capacity for reverie, however, also contains the potential to prevent her integration into the social order; thus, the “roaming of the imagination” that may inhibit the “growth of altruism” should be prevented at all costs. Pierre Mendousse’s 1909 study, published a few years after Hall’s formative research, also manifested an admiring but

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cautionary stance toward adolescent fantasizing. Dreams, selfish and danger­ ous, substitute for reality during adolescence, but those who do not dream during this stage of life will never become creative. These and other early theorists of adolescence argued for the primacy of the mental realm over physiological processes and believed that sexual drives should be sublimated. For Hall, masturbation, narcissistic and thus asocial, represented the ulti­ mate threat of an improperly controlled imagination.16 In midcentury America, as psychoanalytic ideas exerted a powerful inf lu­ ence on popular culture and thought, gendered notions about adolescence and fantasy assumed prominence. Specifically, experts argued that young girls’ healthy development, their “sexual progress during puberty,” depended on their capacity for Oedipal fantasy. In order to realize her full feminine potential, a girl’s imagination must focus on her father as a “set point for the function of fantasy throughout her sexual life,” according to prominent psychoanalysts such as Helene Deutsch.17 More recently, Julia Kristeva, also inf luenced by psychoanalytic concepts, has asserted that adolescents of both sexes suffer from what she terms “the malady of ideality,” meaning that they nurture an overwhelming, destabilizing, and “fundamentalist” belief in and passion for an ideal object of desire.18 Like her predecessors, Kristeva identi­ fies the potential dangers of the adolescent’s fervent belief in an “imagi­ nary scenario enacted by desire,” which may descend into madness.19 The adolescent, she maintains, is easily carried away by enthusiasm, romanti­ cism, and even fanaticism. Indeed, she diagnoses adolescent depression as often rooted in the failure of the fantasy to be sublimated successfully in either educational or professional pursuits.20 In other words, imaginings not properly channeled can precipitate mental illness and delinquent behavior, among other negative consequences. The centrality of the imagination in adolescent development also assumed importance among Soviet researchers, particularly in the work of the inf luen­ tial psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934). One of the leading developmen­ tal psychologists of the twentieth century, Vygotsky is considered a pioneer of the sociocultural approach to education, which stresses the link between social interaction and cognition.21 According to Vygotsky, during the transi­ tional years of adolescence—when “childhood’s physiological equilibrium is disturbed” due to the onset of puberty—imagination “undergoes a revolu­ tion.”22 He attributed great significance to the exercise of the imagination for the development of the faculties necessary for successful adult functioning. Like his Western predecessors, however, Vygotsky also cautioned against the potential dangers of fantasy, against the “shadow of dreaminess” that can steer an individual either toward or away from reality—a shadow that adolescents

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are particularly ill-equipped to chase away.23 Crucially, Vygotsky distinguished between “dreaminess”—characterized by isolation, withdrawal and an “impo­ tence of the will”—and “creative imagination,” which seeks embodiment in reality.24 According to Vygotsky, it is the latter, striving for concrete representa­ tion outside the realm of fantasy—namely, in activities such as writing—that facilitates the process of maturation. Vygotsky endowed this second category of fantasy with profound importance, arguing that nothing less than the “entire future of humanity will be attained through the creative imagination.”25 This distinction between passive “dreaminess” and the more active “creative imagi­ nation” resonates especially strongly in the three plays discussed below.

Dreams Made of Clay Since emerging from the obscurity of Koliada’s Ekaterinburg playwriting seminar, Sigarev has enjoyed popularity and acclaim both in Russia and in the West. Plasticine marked his first dramatic success, winning the Russian Anti-Booker Prize and subsequently being staged by Kirill Serebrennikov at Moscow’s Center for Playwriting and Directing in 2001, becoming the hit production of that year’s theater season. Two years later, the play made its London debut at the Royal Court Theatre, garnering Sigarev the London Evening Standard’s award for Most Promising Playwright, the first foreignlanguage writer to be so honored. In the years that followed, two more of Sigarev’s dramas were staged by the Royal Court as well as by American theater companies in several major cities. Sigarev, like other prominent New Dramatists, such as Vyrypaev and the Presniakov brothers, eventually made the transition from dramatist to filmmaker, directing films based on his own screenplays. He released Wolfy, about a young girl’s obsession with her cruel and neglectful mother, which won the Grand Prix at the Kinotavr Film Festi­ val, in 2009; and Living—featuring three parallel plot lines, each exploring the reverberations of violent death, loss, and extreme grief—in 2012. His latest production, the comedy Land of Oz, was released in 2015.26 The opening, mute scene of Plasticine immediately establishes the central­ ity of the imagination for the play’s dramatic action. The stage directions describe the protagonist, fourteen-year-old Maksim, “working plasticine into a strange shape.”27 Sigarev’s protagonist has seemingly fulfilled Vygotsky’s admonition to seek concrete embodiment for the content of his fantasies, banishing the peril of dreaminess in favor of productive creativity. Maksim’s makeshift process of hardening the clay over a stove, however, hints that his creativity may unleash uncontrollable elements threatening bodily harm—a trajectory confirmed by all the plays considered here. As the remains of the

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plasticine “hiss, catch light, and f lare up,” the smoke rises to the ceiling and stings Maksim’s eyes and mouth, causing him first to cry gently and then to sob violently (74). This response suggests the ambiguity of embodied fan­ tasy, while the scene’s closing image, a cracked bowl, intimates the loss of innocence. In Western art a broken pitcher, usually in paintings featuring young girls, has often symbolized sexual violation and the loss of virginity.28 Maksim’s eventual fate concretizes what the symbolism of the cracked plas­ ticine in the play’s first scene merely suggests. The connection between sexuality and menace established in the opening scene intensifies throughout the dramatic action of Plasticine. Initially, Sigarev suggests that it is adolescent sexual energy that threatens societal norms. The play begins with Maksim visiting an apartment where Spira, an adolescent boy who apparently “hanged himself over some chick,” lies in a coffin (75). Maksim encounters two coarse old ladies who immediately spark associations with the witch of Russian folklore, Baba Iaga. The sight of Maksim inspires one of the old ladies to narrate a story of illicit adolescent sexual behavior: “There was one like him on the bus. He got right behind me and started to rub himself up and down on me. Got a hard-on straightaway. I took a-hold of him and pulled his hair. . . . I mean, you’d think he was only a kid—but he was already getting it up” (74). An anonymous youth molesting elderly grandmothers on public transportation crystallizes the threat of sexuality run amok rather than being properly channeled and sublimated. The old lady quickly transforms from supposed victim to potential predator, however. The scene ends with her whispering in Maksim’s ear, after which “he pales and runs off down the stairs” while the old woman “smiles strangely” (75). Maksim spends the remainder of the play navigating the “anarchy of tendencies” that Mendousse deemed characteristic of adolescent sexual awakening.29 This anarchy prompts Maksim to resist victimization through his plasticine sculptures—efforts that prove ulti­ mately futile and tragic, as we shall see. In Plasticine, sexual organs assume monstrous and menacing proportions, eliciting fear and disgust in Maksim and reinforcing the dysfunctional sexual­ ity that serves as the play’s backdrop. Sigarev severs sexuality not only from intimacy, but also from all individuality. In scene 18, for example, Maksim encounters a couple in a stadium, an eighteen-year-old boy and a woman described as around thirty, who engage in the following dialogue: Woman: Do you love me? Boy: I love you. Woman: I love you too. What’s your name? (87)

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The boy’s swift, profanity-laced departure immediately follows their anonymous, seconds-long sexual encounter. In Plasticine it is seemingly dis­ embodied organs, rather than human beings, that copulate. After her uncere­ monious abandonment by one young male, the woman begins to prey upon Maksim, thrusting her vagina into his face and commanding him, “Kiss it, you bastard! Kiss it if you love me!” The grotesque encounter culminates with Maksim vomiting on the woman (89).30 The image of a female taunting Maksim with her sexual organs recurs in the play’s closing tableau. Through­ out Plasticine an ethereal, nameless woman haunts Maksim; during his final moments, while he is suspended in space and facing the abyss of death, she returns. Exaggerated carnality now replaces the ephemeral grace of the eter­ nal feminine, however, as she provocatively “sticks out her tongue at him and then lifts her skirt and strokes her legs . . . run[ning] her hand between her legs and over her breasts” (103). This obscenely beckoning, anonymous female genitalia is the last thing that Maksim sees before he plunges to his death.31 Maksim’s first attempt to resist victimization by concretizing his creative imagination also assumes the form of a grotesquely enlarged sexual organ. After becoming the target of the unjust wrath of a teacher at his school, Maksim describes to his friend Lekha his plans for revenge: “I’ll make a plasti­ cine cock that comes down to my knees, and she can get off on that” (78). The boy’s fantasy of an oversized penis shocking a cruel teacher resonates with the anecdote narrated by the old woman in the play’s opening scene, playing upon the anxiety about unbridled adolescent male sexuality that this incident invoked. Vygotsky delineates two major categories of adolescent imagina­ tion, “plastic” and “emotional,” or external and internal, distinguished pri­ marily by the source materials that fuel fantasy. While “plastic imagination” uses “the data provided by external impressions” for its inspiration, “emo­ tional imagination” relies upon elements derived from within.32 The plasti­ cine phallus, then, can be interpreted as an example of “plastic imagination,” rooted in the impression produced by Maksim’s f leeting encounter with the creepy woman. This impression, however, combines with his “emotional imagination”—namely, his anger over his mistreatment and desire for vengeance—to inspire Maksim to embody his fantasies in an oversized phallus.33 The menacing genitalia that feature prominently throughout the remainder of the play resonate with this combination of the “plastic” and the “emotional” that characterizes Maksim’s imagination. The consequences of his embodiment of these illusions, however, are decid­ edly negative and unheroic. The unveiling of the phallus, not surprisingly,

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only prompts his expulsion from school. And his next plasticine revenge fantasy indirectly causes his death. After Maksim and Lekha are lured to a derelict building by a young girl, they are raped by two heavily tattooed men, presumably former prisoners. In scene 20, when Lekha appears at Maksim’s apartment to entreat him to accompany the “babe” he has just met—who has a comely friend intended just for Maksim—Maksim is “modeling the figure of a girl out of plasticine” (90). Thus, in accepting Lekha’s invitation, the character attempts to bridge the chasm between his artistic creation and reality, to replace a plasticine figure with a girl in the f lesh. Ultimately, how­ ever, Maksim’s inanimate creation is more real than the illusory female who exists only to entrap the unsuspecting boys. According to Vygotsky, “every construct of the imagination” also reverberates in the affective realm, elic­ iting a corresponding emotional reaction.34 Sigarev’s dramatization of the encounter between the two boys hints at such a connection: the plasticine figure has, perhaps, inf lamed Maksim’s emotions, rendering him vulnerable to Lekha’s fatefully timed enticements. The violence that befalls Maksim suggests the combustibility of the combination of adolescent imagination, emotion, and action. The climax of the play, Maksim’s murder, occurs as an indirect result of precisely this mixture. If his earlier revenge fantasy actualized the threat implicit in an enlarged symbol of masculine sexual potency, then his sec­ ond, doomed plot for vengeance involves transforming plasticine, the raw material Maksim uses to embody his “creative imagination,” into a tool for violence. After fashioning some primitive brass knuckles, Maksim returns to the foreboding building where the rape had occurred, hoping to avenge himself and Lekha. The boy’s attempt to employ his weapon fails clumsily, however, and one of the men propels Maksim out a win­ dow to his death. Thus, the sexual vulnerability and violence intimated by the cracked bowl in Plasticine’s opening scene, as well as the young death invoked by Spira’s coffin, is fully realized. Maksim had wanted to overcome his abuse by heroically enacting his “creative imagination,” but his environment allowed him no role except that of unequivocal victim. Sigarev thus dramatizes the futility of fantasy, the impotence of the imagi­ nation to catalyze positive change in a young boy’s life. Vygotsky under­ scores the significance of “orientation to the future, behavior based on the future and derived f rom this future” for the functioning of the creative imagination. In the dramatic world of Plasticine, the possibility of any future is rendered moot by the dynamics of victimization to which the fictional Maksim falls prey.

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A Russian Teen Fabulist Trained as a journalist, Klavdiev—who hails from the industrial city of Togli­ atti and describes himself as a “former Togliatti skinhead”—emerged onto the Russian theater scene during the Liubimovka New Drama festival in 2002. By 2008 his violent, fantastic style, drawing inspiration from martialarts films and American westerns, had helped establish him as one of Russia’s most original playwrights.35 Like Sigarev, Klavdiev also made the transition from theater into cinema, coauthoring the screenplay of Valeria Gai Ger­ manika’s 2008 drama Everybody Dies but Me as well as some of the teleplays for the television serial School (2010), which takes place in a Russian high school. A film version of The Bullet Collector (dir. Alexander Vartanov), with Klavdiev cowriting the screenplay and playing an on-screen role, was released in 2011. His plays have been translated into English as well as other European languages and have been widely staged in Russia and abroad. The Bullet Collector features a young male protagonist who bears a strik­ ing resemblance to Maksim: forced to navigate a violent, decaying world filled with criminals and murderers, he also clashes with adult authority fig­ ures, struggles with nascent sexuality, and conjures up elaborate illusions of heroic revenge. Like Plasticine, The Bullet Collector dramatizes the conse­ quences of the combination of adolescent imagination, emotion, and action, and also takes place against an anarchic, desolate backdrop. Klavdiev calls his character simply “He,” endowing him with allegorical overtones. The action of the play unfolds over seven days, each scene occurring on a separate day, suggesting a creation narrative. Indeed, The Bullet Collector charts the forma­ tion of a young male predator. The play centers on He’s detailed fantasies of a criminal sect that descends upon the aftermath of a crime to collect bullets, possessing such superior shooting skills and inspiring such terror that even the police refuse to tangle with them.36 Unlike Maksim, however, whose plas­ ticine creations only hasten his victimization, He successfully inscribes his mythopoeic fabrications into real life, allowing him to become a victimizer and emerge triumphantly at the top of the play’s social hierarchy. The Bullet Collector opens with an evocative illustration of the tension between power and impotence and the manner in which fantasy may be enlisted to transcend the latter. Adolescents prefer imaginary objects, Men­ dousse maintained in his 1909 study, because they lack control over the course of events in the real world.37 Accordingly, the heroes of contempo­ rary young-adult fiction overcome the banality and limited agency of their everyday lives by wielding power in fantastic realms.38 The play begins with three variants of the protagonist violently triumphing over a much-despised

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stepfather. These short scenes are followed immediately by the boy’s much less glorious quotidian reality of washing diapers and taking out garbage. Relegated to a stereotypically feminine, domestic realm, He resembles a young male version of the fairy-tale character of Cinderella. Instead of rely­ ing on charm or dainty feet to transcend domestic oppression, however, He, the play suggests, will enlist violence. The hacksaw blade that he hides behind the washing machine—and that he gingerly fingers before return­ ing to the diaper washing—bridges the two realms, imagination and banal reality, evoked in the play’s opening revenge dreams (247). The subtle inter­ play between these two spheres, as well as the power dynamics to which it alludes, establishes a pattern that will recur throughout The Bullet Collector. This character does not indulge in fantasy merely to compensate for his pow­ erlessness, as Mendousse argues, but rather as preparation for asserting him­ self in the real world. While Maksim expresses himself creatively by molding objects out of plasticine, Klavdiev’s protagonist’s chosen medium is words: he possesses a gift for crafting elaborate and captivating narratives. In other words, He is a teen fabulist, an “adolescent character whose spectacular fabrications . . . instigate both the pleasure and the perils of the dramatic scenario.” A recur­ rent figure in American drama, the teen fabulist originated in works by midcentury playwrights such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, and Rob­ ert Anderson. Klavdiev’s hero, then, resonates with a broader dramaturgical tradition of structuring action around a teen who seeks to instantiate his imagination through fantastic storytelling.39 He delivers his fanciful tales about the mythical bullet collectors—their epic battles with a rival gang, his own Romeo-and-Juliet romance with a girl from the wrong side—orally and with great conviction. Vygotsky believed that children’s art was “syncretic,” that it did not distinguish between differ­ ent genres, such as prose, poetry, and drama.40 Children’s art also allowed for the possibility of writing and acting out the contents of the imagination simultaneously—precisely what Klavdiev’s hero accomplishes. These creative literary endeavors marked a “new direction to fantasy”; namely, a “deepen­ ing, expansion, and purification” of emotional life, which is awakened and “tuned to a serious key” for the first time. The progression from the plastic or objective form of imagination, which takes its inspiration from external impressions, to the emotional or subjective form, which utilizes internal ele­ ments, accompanied this deepening emotional maturity.41 In other words, the process of maturation necessitates a concomitant progression in the inspiration for and content of fantasy. By this standard, then, He has already advanced along this trajectory, since Klavdiev suggests that it is the boy’s own

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emotional trauma that inspires his fanciful tales. As passionately described for his would-be girlfriend, Vika, the boy’s deep knowledge of the exploits of the bullet collectors comes from firsthand experience: My father was a bullet collector. He was captured .  .  . he escaped and was wounded, and my mother found him and saved his life. He couldn’t go to the hospital because he wasn’t registered anywhere, she nursed him at home for a week. And then he left. . . . I was five. . . . Probably he was killed. Otherwise for sure he would’ve come back. He always came back. (249) Later in the play, after the boy ascends to the top of the social hierarchy through his willingness to commit violence, he explicitly acknowledges a connection between paternal abandonment and the development of a fan­ tasy life: “When dad left us .  .  . he was so cool, it was so awesome with him .  .  . but when I turned five, bam, that was it. What else could I do? I made everything up. Everything” (277).42 This admission ref lects the link between emotions and creative imagination that Vygotsky has identified. By the time he makes it, however, the character has attained power beyond the realm of illusions—a progression that Maksim from Plasticine could never accomplish. Before assuming authority He endures degradation and brutality inf licted by those more powerful than he is. As in Plasticine, pivotal encounters take place in the school toilet, a setting that suggests an escape from oversight, a suspension of the laws that govern the functioning of the educational insti­ tution and the behavior of the individuals who comprise it.43 For the protag­ onist of The Bullet Collector, the violence he suffers in the toilet unmasks the vast gulf between his elaborately detailed fantasies of glory—the “dreams of leadership, victory, and splendor amid the plaudits of an admiring world,” as Hall described it—and his own dreary reality.44 On the second day, cornered by the bully Andrei and unable to produce the money that he demands, the boy is first beaten and then brief ly forced to perform oral sex. After the departure of Andrei, however, the boy remains in the toilet and immediately recreates a more modest version of the abuse he has just endured upon a younger classmate who haplessly enters the scene. This fictional transfor­ mation of oppressed into oppressor resonates with the ubiquitous and bru­ tal practice of hazing (dedovshchina) that characterized Soviet army life and has endured in the contemporary Russian army. Although the character’s metamorphosis occurs rapidly, his reenactment of his own brutality upon someone lower down on the school hierarchy suggests a similar dynamic. In the provincial school toilet, “barracks mores” combine with adolescent

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fantasies to fuel a cycle of violence.45 The abuse and rape that occur in both Klavdiev and Sigarev resonate with homosexual violence deployed as the ultimate threat and punishment in certain Russian adult male collectives.46 Viewed through this prism, the efforts of Plasticine’s Maksim to avenge him­ self against his rapists appear even more quixotic and doomed. He might have fared better had he acted consonantly with the prevailing dynamics and targeted a more vulnerable victim, one occupying a lower rung on the social hierarchy. As his hero advances along the trajectory from brutalized to brutalizer, however, Klavdiev portrays several poignant moments where tenderness and wonder surface but can find no possible outlet. On day three, for example, He confesses that his most intimate fantasies feature solitary contemplation rather than hacksaw blades: He: I just want for nobody to bother me. . . . I want to go away to the taiga, you know . . . or to Chukotka. Catch fish. Hang out with the reindeer. . . . I like to think more than anything else in life. You can’t do that in school. And in real life if I stay here I can’t do that either. You go to work and you’ll have some boss in some factory some­ where. . . . How can you think? (267) Later in the same scene, the boy’s profanity-laced threats against his stepfa­ ther are followed by emotional appeals to his mother, evoking a jarring con­ trast.47 But she greets his pleas for her to remember how “they used to sing together, softly . . . and love each other, right?” with silence (269). Forced to assume the ultimate position of powerlessness in the face of adult authority, kneeling in a corner, the character counters this impotence by accessing his imagination. The simplicity of his language and imagery clashes with the earlier aggression, and the repetition of the phrase “more than anything else on this earth” lends his speech the cadence of an incantation: He: More than anything else on this earth I want to live the way I want. More than anything else on this earth I want to die. . . . More than anything else on this earth I’m afraid of being wrong. More than anything else on this earth I like to watch movies and play. . . . More than anything else on this earth I want things to become the way that I imagine them. More than anything else on this earth I want to be the best. . . . More than anything else on this earth I want to live. (269–70) The mixture of self-aggrandizement with fear, hope with despair—the visions of “splendor amid the plaudits of an admiring world”—crystallizes

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some of the essential contradictions often associated with adolescence. Both the structure and the content of the monologue are reminiscent of the popu­ lar 1960s-era Soviet children’s song, “Let There Always Be Sunshine” (Pust’ vsegda budet solntse), each line of which similarly begins with a repetition of the phrase “let there always be . . .,” adding to the scene’s poignancy.48 During the remainder of the play, some of the boy’s grandiose illusions are, in fact, realized—alongside the subsuming of all traces of the childlike tenderness he had earlier displayed. The fantastic tales narrated by the teen fabulists of American drama usu­ ally fail to catalyze the dramatic resolution of the plays in which they feature so prominently.49 For Klavdiev’s protagonist, however, the boy’s willingness to actualize his brutal fantasies allows him to assume the top of the social hierarchy, now commanding obeisance instead of inspiring pity. His knife attack on his former abuser inspires his peers to swear an oath of allegiance and offer him the stewardship of his own brigade (272–73). Most significantly, He is visited by another adolescent known only by the allegorical name of “Boy,” who comes bearing the knife that had been lost in the attack. The battle between the two boys marks the climax of the play. It is characterized by the definitive interweaving of illusion with reality, by the embodiment of the protagonist’s imagination as Vygotsky had exhorted, and by the actual inscription of fantasy onto f lesh. They fight in an abandoned building, and their physical contact occurs simultaneously with the crafting of a truly syncretic narrative, as the imagi­ nary realm merges with the concrete one: Boy: They met in an old, burnt out building . . . He: There was thunder, and they hated each other . . . Boy: But it wasn’t really like that, right? He: It wasn’t really like that. But what the fuck do we care what it was really like? Boy: They were friends . . . He: They fought to the death, because they belonged to different worlds!

They fight with knives. (282)

Both boys acknowledge the insignificance of the boundaries between real­ ity and illusion, an irrelevance circumscribed temporally, as the following exchange illustrates: Boy: Are you a fighter?

He: I’d really like to be. . . . But I can only play. Do you get it?

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Boy: Well yeah. But we can for now. He: Yes. We’re allowed to. And nothing will happen to us for it. (281) Adolescence can thus be interpreted as a time when the imagination may be indulged and acted upon without fear of consequences, and in the legal realm at least, this notion contains some truth.50 The synthesis of violence with narrative that characterizes the battle between He and Boy does, how­ ever, elicit grave consequences: both are wounded, and the play concludes with He standing over a grave, perhaps that of the other boy. His rival had believed unequivocally in the power of He’s fantasies: before departing, Boy hands over a bullet, symbolically affirming the migration of the protago­ nist’s fanciful tales into the real world. Boy’s possible death could be interpreted as a kind of sacrifice on behalf of the protagonist’s imagination, an indirect response to the hero’s earlier lament that there is no one worthy of pity, no one whose goodness could inspire him to heroic acts (282). These comments suggest that traces of the imperative for heroic adolescence that dominated after World War II con­ tinue to linger in the post-Soviet period, but without any suitable outlet. In other words, heroic impulses remain, but the historical and social con­ text now renders them superf luous. The play’s closing image—He standing alone at a graveside, firing an imaginary pistol at birds—casts his rival’s pos­ sible heroism and sacrifice in a markedly ambiguous light. Interestingly, Ruslan Malikov, who directed the premiere of The Bullet Collector at the Praktika Theater in Moscow in 2006, suggests an uplifting interpretation of the play’s ending, insisting that it should inspire a “light feeling.” Malikov bases this optimism on the boy’s rich imagination, which, he believes, “helps him manage cruelty and extreme situations in reality.”51 Indeed, unlike Maksim in Plasticine, the protagonist of The Bullet Collector does live out the contents of his imagination, attaining the agency that has eluded other dramatic teen fabulists. This process, however, has been accompanied by the boy’s transformation into an aggressor, leaving readers or viewers of the play to wonder the kind of future his success in actual­ izing his illusions has prepared him for. Like Timur, Arkady Gaidar’s iconic boy hero from the Soviet era, Klavdiev’s protagonist commands obeisance from a group of male peers. This newfound authority assuages any anxiety about the erosion of masculinity evoked in the early scenes of He perform­ ing “feminine” domestic tasks. Timur, however, as we recall, harnessed his leadership skills in service of the collective, embodying the qualities that became exemplary for subsequent generations of boys: integrity, stoicism, and altruism. The model of masculinity that Klavdiev presents in The Bullet

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Collector encompasses no such admirable traits, unmasking the nihilistic cru­ elty of violence severed from heroism.

Fantasy, Femininity, and Violence Like Sigarev, Iaroslava Pulinovich, from the Siberian city of Omsk, also trained with Nikolai Koliada in Ekaterinburg. She attained impressive suc­ cess at a young age, winning the Debut literary prize for first-time Russian writers for Natasha’s Dream at the age of twenty in 2008. Her works have garnered her the attention of the international theatrical community: the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned a new work from her in 2009, and she was a writer-in-residence at the O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference in Connecticut in 2010. Following the pattern of Sigarev and Klavdiev, Pulinovich has coauthored several screenplays, includ­ ing the films I Won’t Be Back (2014, dir. Ilmar Raag), How to Catch a Thief in a Store (2010, dir. Evgeny Simonov), and How I Became . . . (2018, dir. Pavel Mirzoev). Her plays are among the most frequently performed works of contemporary Russian drama, appearing on the stages of traditional, vener­ able theaters such as the Moscow Art Theater as well as alternative ones, such as Moscow’s Praktika Theater.52 In the dramas written by the male authors discussed above, female charac­ ters play marginal roles, serving either as pitiful, one-dimensional predators (such as Natasha in Plasticine) or as passive objects of sexual fantasy (such as Vika in The Bullet Collector). Pulinovich’s short piece Natasha’s Dream, by contrast, thrusts the inner life of a teenage girl into the foreground, with the intensity and immediacy of the title character’s revelations heightened by the work’s monologic format. No other dramatis personae appear, compelling the reader or audience member to assume the role of confessor. Natasha’s cir­ cumstances provide an even more wrenching example of familial breakdown than found in Plasticine and The Bullet Collector: she winds up in an orphanage after her mother, an abusive and neglectful prostitute, is murdered.53 Pulin­ ovich, like Sigarev and Klavdiev with their respective teen protagonists, also dramatizes how sixteen-year-old Natasha seemingly heeds Vygotsky’s admo­ nition to concretize the contents of her imagination, which also propels her along the trajectory from abused to abuser. Much of the work’s dramatic tension arises from the conf lict between pity and revulsion that her words and deeds inspire in her imaginary interlocutors, who are addressed directly throughout the piece. Natasha’s dreams conform to clearly gendered catego­ ries. Accordingly, I situate these fantasies in the broader context of notions of femininity that have circulated in Russia since 1991.

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Whereas a fall from a window marks the tragic conclusion of Sigarev’s Plasticine, in Natasha’s Dream a fall demarcates the beginning of the heroine’s awakening to subjectivity and to a vivid, all-consuming fantasy life. Natasha plummets from the fourth f loor of a disco at the behest of her drunken friend, Svetka. The fear she experiences as she tumbles stimulates a rather traditional, heteronormative vision: I want real love. I want a bridal veil and chocolate candies. And I want all the girls following us in a line and I want ’em all dying of envy. Only that’s not the main thing. The main thing is for him to love me, for him to come to me and say, “Natasha. You are the baddest damn chick on earth. Would you marry me?” I’d marry a guy like that right now.54 Natasha’s inner desire for love is expressed in a vision of veils and chocolate— objects that serve as a convenient synecdoche for the feminine trappings that often accompany weddings. The 2012 production of the play at Moscow’s Taganka Theater underscored the significance of these elements by placing a sewing machine with a bridal veil in the center of the stage, with threads extending outward and upward, covering the whole stage like a web.55 Natasha’s tumbling wish, as this staging choice highlights, merges the emo­ tional imagination with the plastic one—the need for love with an exter­ nally derived form for its expression. Since 1991 Russian girls have read and actively consumed the newly available gender-specific magazines for teen­ agers, which undoubtedly became a potent source of inspiration for their plastic imaginations. These magazines endorse a new ideal of Russian femi­ ninity, based on artificially enhanced beauty, and aggressively promote the joys of conspicuous consumption.56 The contours of the fictional Natasha’s nuptial fantasy—as well as of the envy that it was meant to inspire in a gaggle of fellow girls—correspond to the notions of femininity propagated by such magazines, which, statistics indicate, are read regularly by every fifth Russian girl and casually by nearly all the rest.57 After Natasha awakens in the hospital, having miraculously survived her fall virtually unharmed, a man appears who provides the content for the form that her illusion had generated. Valery, a reporter from the local, pro­ vincial newspaper inquires about the motivations for her fall and about the conditions of the orphanage and her early family life. The reader or audience member immediately intuits the disjuncture between Valery’s dispassionate demeanor and Natasha’s romantic delusions—“when he came I realized right away it was him because who else could have just up and come to visit me in the hospital?” (422)—a tension that builds throughout the remainder of the play. The pivotal moment between Natasha and Valery occurs when

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he acknowledges the existence of her imagination, a possibility that had heretofore remained unrecognized: Then Valery asks me, “What’s your dream, Natasha?” That’s when I realized this was the guy. Because before that nobody ever asked me if I had a dream. And this guy just up and f lat out asked me. I say, “Valery, we’re grown-ups, what’s this about dreams? We gotta keep our nose to the grindstone!” But I’m thinking the whole time—ask me again. Man, I must have lost my mind to answer him like that. I should have just blurted it out about my dream so he’d understand me and say, “Natasha. You are the baddest damn chick on earth. Would you marry me?” (423) This acknowledgment of her capacity for dreaming prompts Natasha to pronounce Valery the lover whom her wish while plunging had conjured into being. According to Kristeva, the adolescent leaves childhood behind when he or she becomes convinced of the existence of another ideal, whether it be a romantic partner or a political, religious, philosophical, or other set of beliefs.58 Correspondingly, Natasha’s awakening to fantasy during her fall may be interpreted as the moment when her childhood definitively ends. At the same time, Valery’s serendipitous appearance propels him, unwittingly, into the role of teen idol. Natasha’s fantasies are the most unmediated of the three protagonists discussed here. Pulinovich does not depict her heroine channeling her imagi­ native impulses into the creation of objects, like Maksim, or weaving fanci­ ful narratives, like He. Rather, Pulinovich dramatizes how the character of Natasha attempts to inscribe the contents of her imagination directly into her life by haplessly pursuing a romance with Valery. She seeks him out at his office, promising to confess more sordid details about her past and her life in the orphanage. When he shows her compassion and tenderness, she mis­ takes it for romantic sentiment, falling into a feverish obsession that borders on illness. To borrow Kristeva’s formulation again, the character of Natasha succumbs to the “paradise syndrome” that can aff lict adolescents, defined by a “fanatic belief in the existence of an absolute partner and absolute satisfaction.”59 The deprivations and tribulations endured by the orphaned Natasha undoubtedly heighten her susceptibility to such a syndrome. As her monologue progresses, the character articulates a growing belief in Valery as the embodiment of the promise of absolute satisfaction: of salvation from her grim life in the orphanage and from the hazy yet painful memories of an indifferent mother. Kristeva identifies soap operas and gossip magazines as perpetuators of this syndrome and the “bourgeois couple” that so often

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constitutes an integral component of it.60 Contemporary Russian advice manuals for young girls, like the teen magazines mentioned above, may play an active role in sustaining a comparable “paradise syndrome.” In a 2010 work entitled The Big Encyclopedia for Supergirls, for example, the author emphasizes the transformative and quasi-religious nature of romantic senti­ ment: “Love is not only a striving for wholeness. A person in love also pro­ tests against death, defies death. It is no coincidence that people swear their ‘everlasting’ love, not only ‘until death’ but also after it, as if striving for the divine prerogative of immortality.”61 This and other, similar works impart the message that romantic love is a transcendent force capable of ensuring both earthly and immortal paradise. With the question “What’s your dream, Natasha?” continuing to rever­ berate in her consciousness, Natasha pursues Valery in an attempt to create precisely such a paradise for herself. She describes the advice received from her friend Svetka about the proper way to attract him: Valery . . . I’m dying I want to see him so bad. . . . I call Sveta over and I say, “Sveta, I think I’m losing it. Some kinda unhealthy bullshit is hap­ pening to me.” Sveta, though, she says, “What’s your problem, man? What do you mean you don’t know? Go see him, man. Say, ‘Hi, cutie. I’m your cutie pie,’ and all that shit. Make up your face and get all gor­ geous. What are you waiting for, man?” . . . You know Sveta’s basically a jerk but every once in awhile she says stuff that, like, wow. . . . So I’m thinking, yeah, I’ve gotta act [nado deistvovat’]. I put on all my makeup and pinned on Cross-eyed Tanya’s hair clip and I made a beeline for the newspaper. I get there all shit-hot and fancy like. (428) Svetka encourages Natasha to seize the moment, to capitalize on and accen­ tuate her femininity in order to accomplish her goal of luring Valery. Her counsel coalesces with the tenor of the advice literature and media targeting both Russian and Western girls in the twenty-first century. As Anita Harris has detailed, magazines for young girls in the West convey the message that they must work on themselves, perfecting their self-presentation in order to compete with other females and attain success in all spheres of life.62 Simi­ larly, the Russian beauty took the place of the earlier, traditional model of femininity, the Russian homemaker, in post-Soviet advice manuals for girls.63 Around the turn of the twenty-first century, advice books began to be distin­ guished from their predecessors in their emphasis on exaggerated femininity, in both appearance and behavior; they exhort girls to wear high heels and makeup and to share with each other calculated strategies for attracting the right kind of man.64 Physical appearance is presented as one of the most

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important tools in a girl’s arsenal, its improvement a critical component in the quest to continually “work, work, work on yourself,” as the author of the Contemporary Encyclopedia for Girls advises.65 Natasha’s comment that she has “gotta act” suggests an internalization of this strain of thinking, which endows the individual with exceptional agency and abilities, with the resources to overcome even the bleakest cir­ cumstances. These texts not only instill hope in their readers but also place on their young shoulders tremendous responsibility for improving their own lots in life.66 Natasha attempts to realize her fantasy, to overcome her unques­ tionably dire situation, by relying on precisely the combination of exagger­ ated femininity and assertiveness promoted by Putin-era advice books for adolescent girls. The character of Natasha strives to become the “can-do girl”: confident, ambitious, and self-reliant, capitalizing on her advantages to tenaciously pursue goals of personal success.67 The tragic events that follow in the play may be interpreted as Natasha’s misguided demonstration of the ambition promulgated by the ideal of the “can-do girl.” As Natasha’s visits to Valery continue, and as he politely but reservedly feeds her tea and candies, her obsession deepens and escalates: And that’s when it hit home—he was mine. And I wasn’t gonna give him up to anyone, because I’d never had anything before and now I did. . . . Only it’s not mine like something like Cross-eyed Tanya’s hair clip or my jeans or my notebook or something. It’s mine like some­ thing you can’t put in your pocket and you can’t throw away and you can’t ever get sick of it. It’s something like totally, totally mine. . . . You can’t even say why it’s yours. It just is, that’s all. And, man, that makes you feel so incredibly good. (429) After three months of daily visits, Valery refuses to see Natasha any longer; she follows him and spies him embracing and kissing another woman. Her despair quickly transforms into all-consuming rage at the woman who has unjustly stolen what she feels belongs to her. The “unconscious of the ado­ lescent believer,” acting on a fervent belief in the “absolute partner and abso­ lute satisfaction,” harbors a “high-risk ideality,” according to Kristeva.68 If the adolescent’s “paradise complex” fails, if her fantasies are denied, devastating consequences may follow. Natasha’s anger at her rival is intensified by what she perceives as the woman’s amassing of consumer goods that highlight her femininity and, thus, her capital in contemporary Russia: “Man, she’s got everything. .  .  . She’s got earrings and cosmetics and lipstick and a mobile and all kinds of clothes. . . . What right did she have to take him away from me? Doesn’t she

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have enough already?” (430). In the play’s closing lines, Natasha again stresses that her nemesis should have left Valery to her, since she will undoubtedly attract “at least ten other guys. . . . I mean, look at the clothes she wears” (431). These comments echo Natasha’s earlier reminiscences of her mother, where female consumer goods also feature prominently: My mom was really beautiful. Man, her makeup, like, sparkled. . . . I used to climb up on her lap when I was a kid and she’s, like, git offa me, I got my makeup on. You’ll mess it up. And I’d say, “Will you give me your lipstick when I grow up?” And she’d say, “Sure I will.” She was always promising to give me things—her lipstick, her dresses. (429) As his father had for Klavdiev’s unnamed hero, Natasha’s mother represents an idealized and gendered fantasy, one that Natasha hopes to inscribe into her own life. However, a murderous pimp denies Natasha her promised maternal inheritance of clothes and cosmetics, and her “absolute partner” was stolen, she believes, by a woman whose possession of those same female trappings should have satisfied her. Natasha’s response to the failure of her vision is violence: she enlists her girlfriends from the orphanage to savagely attack Valery’s girlfriend, leaving her in a coma.69 Natasha’s callous and profanity-laced description of the beat­ ing contrasts sharply with the poignancy of her earlier evocations of herself as a scared and lonely, orphaned child, a contrast similar to that developed in The Bullet Collector: “I . . . called some girls together, all the bitches, and I say, ‘We got a lesson to teach here.’ So we like hung around waiting for her for two days at that same doorstep. I recognized her right away, that slut” (430). Like Klavdiev’s protagonist, she has progressed along the spectrum from victim to victimizer, leaving the vulnerable child behind forever. The addressee of Natasha’s monologue is revealed to be the court, from whom she pleads for leniency. The production of Natasha’s Dream that I attended at the Praktika Theater in Moscow in June 2018 created an intimate, immersive setting, with actors embedded among the audience in the small auditorium before the beginning of the performance.70 By allowing only an uncomfort­ ably small distance between performer and spectator, this staging compelled audience members into the distressing role of jurors deciding the girl’s fate. Natasha’s future, the play’s conclusion suggests, will presumably unfold in an even more dehumanizing and cruel institutional setting than the orphanage she had previously called home. In the work’s closing moments Natasha’s monologue returns to the illusion that her fateful fall had awakened: “I didn’t want to put her in a coma. . . . I just wanted a bridal veil and candy. And I wanted all the girls to

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walk after us in a line and for all of ’em to be dying of envy. That was just a dream I had. Don’t you have dreams? That’s not fair to go around busting other peoples’ dreams” (431). She thus attempts to legitimize her violent actions by reaffirming the importance of the imagination, of her attempts to concretize her fantasies. Natasha’s actions were in line with contempo­ rary Russian advice literature for young girls, which emphasizes self-reliance and agency alongside an obsession with physical beauty. Russian girls, like their counterparts in the West, are encouraged to become “can-do girls,” to accentuate and employ their femininity as their most valuable asset—a pre­ scription that the fictional Natasha follows. In striving to embody the ideal of the “can-do girl”—proactive, self-actualizing, and confident—Pulinovich’s heroine actually becomes her opposite: the “at-risk” girl, who succumbs to her bleak life circumstances instead of transcending them. In choosing vio­ lence, Natasha has failed at the future, irrevocably foregoing the beauty and success that are the rightful recompense of the successful “can-do girl.”71 Sigarev, Klavdiev, and Pulinovich all foreground the imagination in develop­ ing their protagonists, an emphasis that coalesces with nonliterary studies of adolescent identity. Neither Maksim, nor He, nor Natasha succumbs to the peril of “dreaminess” or the “impotence of will” about which Vygotsky warned. These are not the “post-utopian’ youths,” suffering f rom a paucity of imagination, whom Matthias Schwartz identifies in works of postso­ cialist prose.72 Neither are they the “losers,” the youths who retreat into inner realms solely as a means of disconnecting f rom external realities, whom Tamara Hundorova describes in post-Soviet Ukrainian fiction.73 Rather, these plays dramatize how their teenage protagonists harness their desires and try to actualize their fantasies, endeavoring to become their own heroes. The violence that characterizes all three works, however, suggests that the “peril of dreaminess” pales in comparison with the danger of adoles­ cents living out their illusions. The contemporary Russian environment evoked by Sigarev, Klavdiev, and Pulinovich—characterized by bleak pro­ vincial settings, indifferent and cruel human interactions, and familial disintegration—engenders aggressive, quixotic dreams. The fates of Maksim, He, and Natasha cast Vygotsky’s notion that the “entire future of humanity will be attained through the creative imagination” in a markedly chilling light. The closing images of the plays—Maksim’s tragic fall, He stand­ ing alone at a cemetery and firing an imaginary pistol, Natasha childishly holding out beads while waiting to be swallowed up by the Russian penal system—convey unremitting loneliness. Like the protagonists of the films

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discussed in chapter 2, these dramatic characters are cut off f rom the pos­ sibility of any unity or collective identity, although this alienation occurs involuntarily. While all three plays present characters who provide a posi­ tive answer to Natasha’s poignant question “Do you have dreams?” they unequivocally sever the connection between embodied imagination and integration into a functional, stable social order. Sigarev, Klavdiev, and Pulinovich present the process of maturation in contemporary Russia as a toxic mixture of fantasy, aggression, and death. These plays depict vio­ lence’s prehistory—and, therefore, its inevitability—by dramatizing how it comingles with fantasy to colonize the imaginations of the young.74 These lonely, destructive fantasies, however, cannot inspire fealty to any idea or institution, as first Soviet and now official Russian projects targeting adoles­ cents, such as the Youth Army, aim to do. If, in conclusion, we return again to the closing image of Pelevin’s Omon Ra, with its young hero poised on the brink of shattering the circular chronotope of never-ending violence, then the teenagers discussed here and in the previous chapter represent the disappointment of that hope. Violent dreams augur the mutation of the “romance with adolescence” into adolescence as nightmare, one that clouds the promise of the post-Soviet future.

C ha p te r 4

Specters in the Schoolhouse

Among all the works discussed in this study— literature, drama, and film—none can boast the astounding cultural reso­ nance of a sixty-nine-part television serial about teenagers that premiered on the Russian state-run television station ORT/Channel One in January 2010. In the six months during which it aired, School, directed by Valeria Gai Germanika (b. 1984), attracted an estimated audience of thirty million, becoming the most widely viewed television serial in post-Soviet Russia.1 Motivated by a desire to attract a younger viewership and increase ratings, Channel One’s director Konstantin Ernst commissioned the project as a tele­ vision expansion on Gai Germanika’s critically acclaimed 2008 feature film, Everybody Dies but Me (Vse umrut, a ia ostanus’), about three teenage girls whose friendship shatters in the days leading up to a school disco.2 With its frank treatment of youth sexuality, drug abuse, suicide, and other taboo topics, School’s airing in prime time, on a state-owned channel closely aligned with the Kremlin, was nothing short of “revolutionary.”3 Throughout its run, the show elicited highly emotional and conf licting responses from various strata of Russian society. Some online commentators even demanded that Gai Germanika be shot.4 The controversy raging around School eventually became so heated that President Vladimir Putin himself felt compelled to weigh in, warning against the growing “hysteria” stirred up by the serial.5 If, as the sociologist Boris Dubin has argued, television provides 103

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the only source of symbolic unity in post-Soviet Russia, which has become a “society of television viewers expecting things they know and are used to,” then the shocking content of School seemingly threatened this unity and mobilized many to attempt to fortify it.6 Politicians, for example, wondered how they might shield the public from the show’s bleak depiction of contemporary teenagers; one deputy of the State Duma, Vladislav Iurchik, even expressed certainty that “millions of [Rus­ sian] mothers and fathers are outraged . . . and are waiting for the parliament to take action against this disgrace.”7 A group of teachers prepared a petition for President Putin, asking that the show be taken off the air. One teacher claimed that the negative fictional portrayal of his profession had “made him stop wanting to be a teacher.” Psychologists sounded the alarm about the impressionable nature of the adolescent psyche, which might compel the show’s younger viewers to reproduce in their own lives the sex, drinking, and violence depicted in the show.8 Many observers seemed obsessed with the question of the show’s verisimilitude, approaching it almost as a socio­ logical study that demanded either verification or refutation. Emblematic of this attitude, the conservative youth organization Ours (Nashi) announced that they were deploying representatives to various Moscow high schools, determined to answer conclusively the question of School’s “truth” (or lack thereof ) by surveying students, teachers, and parents. As Ours commissar Marina Zademidkova explained, “Society has split into two camps” over the accuracy of the serial, and the group felt compelled to mobilize its resources to get to the bottom of the matter.9 The serial’s aesthetics undoubtedly contributed to the documentary-like feel that many critics felt compelled either to praise or to denounce. Trained as a documentarian before making the transition to feature films, Gai Ger­ manika creates a raw authenticity in School that blurs the line between arti­ fice and reality.10 Her cinematic style draws upon the principles of Dogme 95 as well as on the Russian documentary film tradition of Dziga Vertov, who famously aimed to capture “life unawares.” Filming entirely with a handheld camera and often incorporating improvised dialogue, she eschews nondi­ egetic sound; prefers authentic locations (the show was filmed in an actual operating high school in Moscow); and relies on subjective, point-of-view shots, with extreme close-ups and low and high angles. Drops of champagne from an opened bottle or spit from an actor’s mouth remain on the lens of an unstable, hovering camera, amplifying the naturalistic feel. School takes place in a Moscow high school and follows the lives of one class, 9A, along with their teachers, over the course of several months. Two climactic events bookend the action: the stroke of 9A’s head teacher, Anatoly

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Germanovich Nosov, in episode 1, and the suicide of his granddaughter, Ania Nosova, in episode 66. Between these two points, the young charac­ ters, most of whom are fifteen years old or so, lose their virginity; drink copious amounts of alcohol; smoke; fight with their parents; experience unrequited love; lose parents to cancer; experiment with subcultures, such as emo and skinhead; fear they have become pregnant; exhibit a marked indifference toward their education; and generally struggle to forge rela­ tionships and define their individual identities. Meanwhile, the adults in the show (namely, the teachers at the school) cheat on their spouses; gossip and denounce one another; fall in love and get engaged; espouse fascist ideology; accept bribes f rom parents; and try sincerely but ultimately fail to communicate effectively with the young people for whom they are respon­ sible. One reviewer argues that Gai Germanika conceived of the serial as “a teaching mechanism to create better relationships between teenagers and adults.” Although many critics of School took offense because they per­ ceived it as a searing critique of Russia’s educational system, the serial actu­ ally aims its critical lens most acutely on the dire state of relations between parents and children.11 Gai Germanika herself supports this interpretation, insisting that the show is not about school at all but about the “loss of inter­ generational dialogue.”12 Gai Germanika and her cocreators develop a distinctive chronotope, a conjunction of time and space, throughout School’s sixty-nine episodes.13 The serial challenges the primacy of “panoptical time” which, according to Nancy Lesko, underpins the cultural discourses surrounding adolescence in Western culture. This conception of time foregrounds the ending toward which all adolescents must develop. It demands that they adhere to the same temporality that invariably culminates in the same way: maturity and a readiness to reproduce and perpetuate existing societal strictures. Progress toward this predetermined goal moves at a moderate, normative pace, one that eschews precocity and certainly never moves backward. The imperative for steady, forward motion toward the completion of a “narrative of fulfill­ ment” also compels the creation of what Lesko terms a “panoptical gaze.” Deviations from the prescribed speed and path of development demand cor­ rection. Accordingly, researchers, teachers, parents, producers of culture— and teenagers themselves, in observing each other—must invariably monitor for “progress, precocity, arrest, or decline.”14 The interpersonal dynamics of School, however, ref lect a f luidity of age categories. Throughout its episodes the serial upends stable definitions of both teenager and adult and throws the panoptical gaze distinctly out of focus. Where does adolescence end and adulthood begin, the serial seemingly asks?

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The spaces and places that provide a backdrop for School’s narrative fur­ ther challenge the possibility of adolescent development that accords with panoptical time.15 The serial’s teenage protagonists navigate a labyrinth of stagnant, stultifying spaces that conjure up the Soviet past—a dead society whose specters nonetheless continue to circulate—clashing palpably with the imperative to develop and progress forward. Gai Germanika’s characters confront what I term the “chronotopic dilemma”: surrounded by the decay­ ing ruins of the Soviet past, they long for the shiny objects of post-Soviet consumer culture that remain poignantly out of reach. Adolescence has been conceptualized as a process of perpetual transformation that precedes an eventual integration into the social order; the spaces of School, however, evoke a dissonance between past, present, and future that challenges this concept.16 The tension between teenagers, time, and space propels the dra­ matic action of School. My discussion of the serial’s distinctive chronotope draws upon the ideas of Pamela Thurschwell, who has explored what she evocatively terms the “ghost worlds of modern adolescence” in contempo­ rary American literature and film. Like the works that Thurschwell analyzes, School embeds its young characters in a state of liminality, amid “haunted spaces and unsettling temporalities”; it similarly leaves viewers with doubts about the viability and certainty of any sort of future at all.17 This chapter’s final section focuses on the character of Ania Nosova, whose tragic suicide provides School with its most harrowing moments. Her story line foregrounds the intersection of anxiety about young female sexuality and the imperative to develop in accordance with panoptical time, elucidating some of the concept’s clearly gendered contours. The binary opposition between exposure and concealment of teenage girls, Ania in particular, represents a dominant leitmotif in School and underpins its dra­ matic action. Gai Germanika dramatizes Ania’s revelation of herself, in both a mediated and an unmediated manner, as she attempts to construct a sense of identity. This unveiling attracts the panoptical gaze of one of her male classmates and leads indirectly to a series of disastrous, ultimately violent consequences. Her aestheticized, videotaped suicide—preceded by several days of prolonged silence and thus concealment—represents a final, defiant, and tragic act of adolescent female exposure. The girls of School, unlike their young male counterparts, are depicted as experiencing the deleterious consequences of sexual precocity—pregnancy scares, abandonment, alienation—of violating the strictures of panoptical time. This somewhat orthodox depiction of gender, whereby females endure punishment for transgressive behavior that males effortlessly escape, under­ scores this chapter’s concluding observation. Despite the critical responses

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that the show engendered and its unvarnished depiction of teen sexuality, drinking, and other vices, School actually foregrounds rather traditional, humanistic values. The only tenuous, murky hopes for a return to progress, for a productive future, that School offers lie in rejecting the allure of both consumer culture and of normatively “adult” vices. After generating a com­ plex temporality for her teenage protagonists to navigate, Gai Germanika nonetheless ultimately affirms the desirability of development that accords with panoptical time.

Future Shock Among the anxieties that School elicited in the Russian viewing public, the fear loomed large that the behavior of these teenagers in the present casts an ominous light on the Russian society of the future. These reactions reso­ nate with a well-worn pattern in “moral panics” about youth that Lesko refers to as the dread of a “past future”: the anxiety that “the future will be diminished, dragged down by teenagers’ failures to act in civilized or respon­ sible ways.”18 For example, Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, expressed his sincere hope that “the future of the country does not depend on the kind of youth” depicted in the serial. One of School’s only positive aspects, according to Kirill, was that the fear of such a grim future might stimulate society to consider more seriously the problems facing youth in the present. In a similar, although less alarmist, vein the leading Russian film critic, Daniil Dondurei, singled out the serial’s elision of the characters’ youth in favor of a forward orientation: “For the first time, in School there is a focus on the painful aspects of the daily life specifically of future adults and not children. . . . Social inequality, suspicion, treachery, . . . lies—everything, like with adults. Except much sharper, more painful, more unbearable.”19 One could also add that the adults in the show are similarly depicted as for­ mer adolescents, often behaving in a manner that echoes the teenagers who surround them. Gai Germanika introduces a circular conception of time, developing an interplay between progression and regression, that questions the teleology of human development. This unsettling idea may partially account for some of the strong emotional responses to the serial. Certain conventions of the serial format reinforce the nonlinear nature of time that School’s narrative development underscores. For example, with the same opening sequence repeated at the beginning of each episode, School compels its audience to contemplate the issues of change, development, and repetition (or lack thereof ) with each viewing. The sequence—lacking nondiegetic sound and foregrounding typical school noises, such as muff led

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conversations and bells ringing—also lingers primarily on the younger stu­ dents, rather than those featured in the serial. This forces viewers to observe the contrast between the prepubescent students who wander in and out of the show’s opening frames and the teenagers whose development School tracks more closely. The opening sequence prompts a consideration of con­ tinuity or discontinuity between child and adolescent. The serial format reinforces a f luid connection between past and present and offers a sense of societal stability to viewers.20 Cultural discourses of adolescence grounded in panoptical time are meant to offer similar reassurances. With its opening sequence, School indicates that the connection between past and present will be one of its primary concerns, but that a seamless movement from the for­ mer to the latter may not be assured.21 The show’s title also alludes to questions of normative time and progres­ sion. By definition, school, in our modern conception of it, suggests a linear passage of time and a finite structure, with students moving from one grade to the next until there are no more grades to complete. School also repre­ sents a key link in the chain of social stability: primary education prepares children and adolescents to assume a position in the next institution that facilitates their integration into the wider fabric of society, whether it is gain­ ful employment, a vocational school, or higher education.22 It is in school where the state encounters its future citizens, forcing their adherence to a predetermined structural and temporal framework in its efforts to achieve “intrasocietal cohesion.”23 Throughout all sixty-nine episodes of School, the conf licts between teachers and students, and—more chillingly, perhaps— the latter’s indifference to any knowledge that the former might impart to them, suggests the degradation of that strand of societal fabric. At the same time, the school remains constant and rooted to one place, while the chil­ dren and teenagers who roam its hallways, as depicted in the show’s opening sequence, inhabit it only temporarily. This contrast between the institution’s permanence and the teenager’s ephemeral presence within it underlies the dramatic action of the show. As Julia Vassilieva puts it, Gai Germanika devel­ ops a conf lict between the teen characters’ “liquid sense of identity” and the “solid” environment of school and family.24 If adolescents fail to develop according to the demands of panoptical time, will these “solid” values be able to penetrate and inf luence the teens’ “liquid” identities? Through the serial’s opening sequence and its title, School immediately foregrounds the questions of time, progress, and growth that will be central to its thematic development. How, then, do Gai Germanika and her cocre­ ators trouble the stability of age categories? A closer look at the first few episodes reveals a pattern of parallelism between adults and adolescents that

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continues throughout the serial. Episode 1 establishes Anatoly Germanovich Nosov, history teacher and head teacher of the 9A class, as the patriarchal authority figure for both “solid” environments: family and school. He clearly wields a paternal inf luence over both instructors and pupils, as well as his granddaughter, Ania, who, we learn, is under a regime of “home instruc­ tion” due to an unspecified illness and her grandfather’s insistence. Anatoly Germanovich demonstrates the f luidity of his dominion over both spheres when he sends a new student, Ilia Epifanov (one of the show’s main protago­ nists), to his home to collect a white shirt; when Ania opens the door, she immediately intuits the purpose of Ilia’s visit, suggesting that many previ­ ous students had made the same pilgrimage. Anatoly Germanovich’s inf lu­ ence over Russian teenagers, in fact, extends well beyond the “solid” spaces depicted in School; he informs Ilia that he wrote a history textbook used by half the country. Preparations for a celebration of Anatoly Germanovich’s seventieth birth­ day occupy the teachers, staff, and students at the school throughout episode 1. He, in turn, devotes much of the episode to policing any outbursts of overexuberance that this holiday atmosphere may provoke. Gai Germanika depicts adults and teenagers as equally vulnerable to the allure of overim­ bibing, a parallelism reinforced through framing and editing. For example, a group of teachers opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate Anatoly Ger­ manovich’s birthday in the teachers’ lounge, and drops of liquid from the spraying bottle remain on the camera lens. Later in the episode, an extreme low angle shot shows two teenage boys smoking, f licking cigarette ash onto the same camera lens earlier sprayed with champagne. Similarly, Anatoly Germanovich reprimands his secretary for acting like a “barmaid” during school hours as she readies the spirits for his celebration. In the next scene he busts two teenage boys for smoking and drinking during school hours. Without the paternal inf luence of Anatoly Germanovich, this opening epi­ sode suggests, both adults and adolescents might slip into indulgence and misbehavior. In episode 2, another teacher confirms this by stating that Ana­ toly Germanovich had held 9A “in check” (v uzde), and indeed his stroke and subsequent absence from the school do seem to catalyze the many crises that ensue.25 Gai Germanika continues to draw parallels between teen and adult overindulgence throughout the serial. For example, in episode 39, she intercuts two parties: a drunken game of spin-the-bottle at Epifanov’s house and the similarly tipsy toasts of the adults in the teachers’ lounge celebrating Women’s Day—a clear echo of episode 1. The blurring of boundaries between adolescent and adult extends into the realm of sexual behavior, established in the opening episodes. In episode 1,

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viewers overhear a conversation between Lekha—an older student who will eventually pursue and def lower two of School’s main female protagonists, Olia Budilova and Ira Shishkova—and the school’s guard. As Ira walks by, the guard leers after her and comments on her appearance, prompting Lekha to direct his attention toward her and similarly size up her desirability. It is clear that Lekha had never previously viewed Ira as a sexual object but that he feels compelled to reproduce the gaze of the older man. Inspired by this encounter with the guard, Lekha reveals his intent to pursue Ira in the fol­ lowing scene, asking Dima, Ira’s friend and neighbor, for her phone number. Lekha’s subsequent inf luence on Ira is portrayed as unequivocally harmful: she drops her beloved folk dance training because of his irrational jealousy; fights with her sympathetic and enlightened parents; endures his cold indif­ ference after they sleep together; and even jeopardizes her health by bribing her way into an infectious ward to see him. Thus, the guard’s brief comment about Ira’s sexiness indirectly occasions a series of harmful consequences for her. This unsettling illustration of an older man directing a sexualized gaze at a young girl recurs in a much more graphic manner in episode 38, which concludes with a wide shot of a drunk and barely conscious Olia about to be penetrated in a hotel room by an older, wealthy man whom she has only just met. With the camera positioned in the doorway, Gai Germanika forces viewers into the uncomfortable role of voyeur, watching as the man crudely and roughly handles the hysterically laughing teenager. At least for certain men, the serial illustrates, age does not limit the choice of sexual partners. The adult protagonist in School who provides the most sustained explo­ ration of the dynamics of progression and regression, of the blurring of boundaries between adult and adolescent, and thus of the panoptical gaze often directed at the latter, is the physics teacher, Natalia Nikolaevna. Her charisma and popularity with the students are established early on. In epi­ sode 2, she is filmed walking down the corridor, wearing an electric-blue dress that stands out against the drab school setting, and basking in the adoration of the students of 9A as they plead with her to replace Anatoly Germanovich as their head teacher. By the final scenes of the serial’s finale, however, Natalia Nikolaevna, carousing at a karaoke bar, appears indistin­ guishable from one of her young female students. How does Gai Germanika chart Natalia Nikolaevna’s regression through the show’s episodes? In the beginning Natalia Nikolaevna wields sexual power over both teen­ agers and adults. Conducting an affair with the wealthy father of one of her students, Sergei Korolev, she appears as the intergenerational apex of eroti­ cism. Gai Germanika reinforces this through editing: in episode 5, for exam­ ple, she f lirts with Korolev Senior over a meal; several minutes later his son wagers a male classmate that he can “score” with her. The mise-en-scène also

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foregrounds her sensuality, as exemplified by the eye-catching and figurehugging clothing that she frequently wears. In episode 26, mise-en-scène and camera work combine to highlight unambiguously her allure: we observe her tenderly cradling several exotic f ruit, placing them in a bowl in the teachers’ lounge. The camera lingers on just her hands and sometimes her breasts, with the f ruit in the background, a palpable erotic charge underly­ ing the shots. This scene represents the height of Natalia’s sexual power in the serial. Henceforth, Gai Germanika gradually reveals the destabiliz­ ing and destructive effects of an adult acting as an erotic conduit for both adolescents and their parents. The illicit affair between Korolev Senior and Natalia, both of whom are married, allows the younger Sergei to upend the teen-adult power hierarchy in his own favor. Emboldened by his knowledge, Sergei blackmails both parties, extorting money and expensive items f rom his father and an awkward kiss f rom Natalia. Sergei’s jealousy of his father and desire to control Natalia only intensify, contributing to his increasingly aggressive and manipulative behavior. The situation reaches its dramatic climax in episode 50, on an overnight field trip during the spring holidays to the historic town of Suzdal. Korolev Senior desperately tries to convince his son to join the trip, obviously to provide him with a reason to “chaperone” and thus to spend the night in the hotel with Natalia. Sergei unequivocally refuses to acquiesce to his father’s demands, delivering his ultimate challenge to paternal authority. The shots of Natalia having sex with Korolev’s father (who shows up in Suzdal any­ way) are somewhat comically intercut with those of the teens, whom Natalia should be supervising, drinking and carousing in their room. Gai Germanika follows a shot of Olga drunkenly taking off her top with one of Korolev’s father throwing Natalia on the bed. The parallelism gradually takes on a less comic and more ominous tone, however: Natalia and Korolev’s sexual encounter is intercut with shots of the teenage boys leaving the hotel and being bloodied in a fight, and an incapacitated Olga nearly raped by Dima. Natalia’s indiscretion and negligence of her supervisory duties leave her male charges vulnerable to violence and her female ones to sexual victimiza­ tion. The Suzdal episodes conclude with Natalia making a deal with one of the students that they will each keep quiet about the other’s misbehavior. With her moral authority completely depleted, this humiliating encounter emblematizes the erosion of distinction between adult and adolescent that Natalia’s narrative arc has tracked. The physics teacher’s descent into isolation follows the events of Suzdal. No longer able to sustain the affair with Korolev, her desperate attempts to reunite with her husband also yield no results. Despite the sexual magnetism portrayed in earlier episodes, episode 64 concludes with a shot of Natalia

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alone, masturbating. This closing shot—during which she indulges in an activity perhaps more often associated with sexually inexperienced, curious teenagers than mature adults—encapsulates Natalia’s evolution from intergen­ erational object of desire to a lonely and desperate woman. As she becomes increasingly excluded from adult society—her husband rejects her, the other teachers mistrust and envy her—she finds her only source of companionship and support in Dasha, one of the students from 9A. Whereas, early in the serial, Natalia had dispensed reasonable and mature advice to both Dasha and Olia, by the show’s concluding episodes she treats Dasha exclusively—and, for viewers, uncomfortably—as a girlfriend and peer. In episode 57 she takes Dasha along on a shopping trip, confiding in her intimate details about her marriage and enlisting her assistance in choosing a dress so enticing that it will lure her husband back. Natalia’s transformation from adult authority figure to giggling girlfriend culminates in the show’s finale, where Dasha and Nata­ lia follow Nosova’s funeral with carousing in a karaoke bar, the gestures and movements of the two females indistinguishable from one another. Thus, Gai Germanika leaves School’s viewers with this blurring of boundar­ ies between teenager and adult, a confusion that has punctuated the serial’s sixty-nine episodes. The grim fate of the physics teacher, however—reduced from vivacious object of sexual desire to lonely, needy companion to one of her young charges—suggests the desirability of concrete, rather than mallea­ ble, divisions between age categories. Throughout the episodes of School, Gai Germanika depicts both adults and teens attempting to overcome panoptical time—the former, as exemplified by Natalia Nikolaevna, by mimicking the behavior of the latter; and the adolescents by behaving precociously, engaging in such “adult” activities as sex and abuse of alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. In episode 46, the elder Korolev articulates the parallelism between teenagers and adults, the repetitiveness of the life cycle, by lamenting to his son that there are two “difficult ages” for men, and they are both currently in one. By destabilizing the “panoptical gaze” so often directed at teenagers, Gai Germanika responds to Lesko’s exhortation to reimagine adolescence to accommodate “the contradictions of being simultaneously mature and immature, old and young,” allowing time to “hold seemingly opposing identities simultaneously.”26 The serial depicts teenagers grappling with the difficulty of navigating these temporal contradictions in a complex and unvarnished manner. An exchange between Ilia and Olia in the serial’s penul­ timate episode neatly illustrates the characters’ struggle with a multifaceted temporality. Wrenched by guilt for her perceived role in causing Nosova’s suicide, Olia confesses to Ilia that she resents the adult responsibilities with which her impractical mother has unfairly burdened her and rejects the role reversal compelling her to assume the role of parent. Ilia replies that

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it is “time to be independent,” affirming the compatibility of adolescence with autonomy and agency. Olia responds to this possibility by seeking to retreat backward, by clinging to her biological age, fifteen, as proof that she is “still a child.” Ilia, however, dispels the possibility of such a retreat, of such a simultaneity of age categories, by pointing to her sexual promiscuity as proof of childhood’s irrevocable end. In earlier episodes, when afraid she had become pregnant, Olia had enacted a similar retreat. As anxiety about unwanted motherhood consumed her, she began peeling away the layers of exaggerated femininity—makeup, sexy clothing, teased hair—that had earlier marked her precocity, her efforts to escape childhood and project an unequivocal and sexually available womanhood. When the scare turns out to be false—the burdens of adulthood still comfortably in the future rather than the present—Olia immediately returns to the makeup, hair, and cloth­ ing of her earlier, sexier, less childlike incarnation. Ilia, by contrast—whose single mother dies of cancer during the course of the serial, leaving him orphaned—accepts the loss of the moratorium of responsibility prescribed by the discourse of adolescence, stoically working menial jobs to support first his mother and then himself.27 Through the narrative arc of characters like Ilia and Olia, then, Gai Ger­ manika offers a nuanced alternative to the linearity of the panoptical gaze often focused on teenagers. At the same time, however, the characters in the serial who inspire the most optimism are those who reject temporal contradiction, adhering more closely to a (hetero)normative progression of time: the history and English teachers, who fall in love, become engaged, and conceive a child during the course of the show; Sonia, the sensitive girl who writes poetry; and Timur, the kindhearted, ostracized boy from the Caucasus region, whose chaste romance with Sonia unfolds in stark contrast to the sexual promiscuity and victimization of his classmates.28 By contrast, many of those teenage characters who experiment with sexuality—primarily the girls—suffer anxiety, disappointment, objectification, and humiliation. It is the characters of School who are not precocious who appear in the most hopeful, redeemable light. Hence, Gai Germanika affirms the need, ulti­ mately, to fortify the boundaries between adolescent and adult; she demon­ strates the volatile and often negative consequences of allowing individuals of all ages freedom from the constraints imposed by panoptical time.

The Chronotopic Dilemma In episode 43 the history teacher asks the students of 9A to look back to 1991 and contemplate the end of the Soviet Union. Was it a good thing that the Soviet empire collapsed? The question fails to elicit an impassioned response,

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and the teens continue to drape themselves lethargically over their chairs and desks, weakly clutching at cell phones. Even Sonia picks at her nose and ears. Finally, an unidentified voice delivers a laconic verdict: it was “okay” or “ordinary” (obyknovenno) that the Soviet Union ended. The main item that the students can think of in support of the “pro” argument is that, unlike the Soviet days, they no longer have to listen to annoying, state-sanctioned singers on the television. When the bell rings, the camera pans over Vera’s head, face down on her desk: the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” as President Putin famously termed it, has inspired bore­ dom bordering on catatonia in this group of fictional, twenty-first-century Russian teenagers.29 While depicting their seeming indifference to this historic upheaval, Gai Germanika embeds her protagonists in spaces that still bear the physical and other traces of the Soviet past. Adolescence, as Pamela Thurschwell argues, “is caught between the past of childhood and the future of adulthood, a strange and uncanny temporal state that partakes of both backward-looking haunting and forward-looking desire.”30 Although she refers here to time rather than explicitly to space, her observations neatly encapsulate the chro­ notopic dilemma facing the young protagonists of School. The physical rem­ nants of Soviet society “haunt” Gai Germanika’s characters, while the trap­ pings of the postcommunist, consumerist culture that the teens yearn for remain mainly out of reach for the majority. Thurschwell analyzes fictional and cinematic portrayals of adolescents who adopt a consciously anachronis­ tic personal style, arguing that this choice can be read as a form of rebellion against their contemporary circumstances.31 But what about the post-Soviet teens of School, who are involuntarily surrounded by anachronism? Are Gai Germanika’s teens out of place, or are the places featured in School out of time? And how do the characters navigate this contradiction of which they seem to remain utterly unaware? Both of the primary “solid” environments that provide the backdrop for the serial, the school and the home, differ very little from their Soviet incar­ nations. The physical arrangement of space in the classroom, for example, appears relatively unchanged from that featured in an iconic Soviet film about adolescents from 1983, Scarecrow (see figures 11 and 12).32 The hallways feature the same drab colors, and the crumbling bathrooms, where several important encounters take place, show little evidence of renovation or even of basic upkeep. The school cafeteria serves the same soups, meat cutlets, and other traditional Russian fare as it did twenty, thirty, forty, or even more years ago, served on the same Soviet-era dishes and nylon tablecloths. When an adult journalist visits the school, he affirms even the olfactory aspect of this

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Figure 11. 2010.

Classroom in School. Dir. Valeria Gai Germanika. Profit and Russia’s Channel One,

Figure 12.

Classroom in Scarecrow. Dir. Rolan Bykov. Mosfilm, 1983.

continuity, observing that the classrooms smell exactly the way they did when he was a student (“like wet rags, chalk, and hope for the future,” episode 3). The mother of one of the students from 9A bribes a teacher to ensure her daughter will graduate with the coveted “gold medal,” ensuring her univer­ sity admission, just as was done in the Soviet era. (In episode 4, when the student delivers a subpar response about Pushkin, the teacher awards her the highest grade anyway, an injustice that the other students immediately intuit.) On a more comic note, the director of the school bribes the fire inspector with a bottle of cognac.

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The curriculum has also changed little: the paradigmatic Soviet author Maksim Gorky still occupies a prominent place in literature lessons, as does the national poet, Alexander Pushkin. While teaching Gorky, Valentina Kharitonovna evokes the myth of the heroic adolescent from Soviet times, reminding students that exceptional feats (podvigi) are necessary not only for oneself but to inspire heroism in others. Ilia delivers a rebellious blow against the dominance of this classical repertoire at the end of episode 1: tasked with orating a poem by Pushkin, “To Chaadaev,” during Anatoly Germanovich’s birthday celebration, he instead delivers lines by a living Russian poet, Alina Vitukhnovskaia (b. 1973).33 With this attempt to infuse contemporary reso­ nance into the “ghost world” of formulaic Pushkin worship, Ilia provokes an uproar, with the teachers and even his fellow students suspecting that this unsanctioned substitution caused Anatoly Germanovich’s stroke. A heated discussion about Ilia’s infraction unfolds in the teacher’s lounge in episode 2, with Natalia asking whether “they really think some kind of poem could cause a stroke.” The literature teacher, Valentina Kharitonovna, chillingly reminds the others that “before they would exile you for such poems, and they were right to do it,” invoking a supposedly distant time and place, the Soviet Union, when provocative writers and artists could be deprived of their freedom—or worse. By tacitly approving of this approach to incendiary poetry, she signals a continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet attitudes—a compression of time and space. Another remnant of the ugly Soviet past is conjured up, once again in the teacher’s lounge, when in episode 63 the geog­ raphy teacher suggests that they “inform” (soobshchit’) upper-level authori­ ties about a perceived mistake by Valentina (now the acting director of the school). The history teacher counters that they should use the appropriate term for the proposed action, not “inform” but “denounce” (nastuchat’). In an unambiguous allusion to the Stalin years, he ironically suggests that, since they are the children and grandchildren of those who once denounced oth­ ers, a genetic predisposition to such ignominy dooms them to repeat the past. Earlier events bear out this suggestion: the English teacher had placed an anonymous phone call to Natalia’s husband, informing him of his wife’s infidelity; when one of the students writes an anonymous essay detailing the lurid events of the Suzdal trip, the school secretary copies and distributes the text among the other teachers. In response to Natalia’s complaint about this violation, Valentina menacingly reminds her that, in true Soviet fashion, “there are no secrets from the collective” (episode 55). All these episodes imply that the specter of Soviet society is still haunting a twenty-first-century school, raising significant doubts about its ability to prepare a post-Soviet generation for the future.

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The action of Gai Germanika’s first feature film, Everybody Dies but Me, has been aptly described as unfolding “against the bleak backdrop of the Moscow suburbs, where life seems to be in limbo between communism and postcommunism.” This description applies equally well to the spaces of School, where “dated, claustrophobic interiors” similarly evoke an atmosphere of “time [that] seems to be static, weighed down by its Soviet past.”34 The teen­ age protagonists experience this limbo not only at school but also at home. Most of them reside in cramped apartments that are part of enormous, uni­ form, Soviet-era apartment blocks. With their invariably dark, defaced stair­ wells and entryways, they crowd the frame whenever any of the characters looks out the window. The interiors appear similarly untouched from the Soviet period: sofas double as beds, hinting at a perennial shortage of space; crumbling bathrooms are scarred by rust and water stains; newspaper takes the place of wallpaper; layers of clashing dark fabrics cover every possible space: windows, f loors, sofas, tables, beds. Rugs hang on dark-paneled walls, just as they did in Soviet apartments. Light and air struggle to penetrate the cramped and cluttered spaces that the majority of the characters inhabits, with only the occasional IKEA bookcase, diegetic contemporary rock music, and computer indicating a post-1991 setting. The frequent use of extreme close-ups and high and low angles accentuates the claustrophobic feel. Gai Germanika also explores the intersections between domestic space (or lack thereof ) and familial dysfunction, resonating with such contempo­ rary Russian authors as Liudmila Petrushevskaia, whose fiction frequently exposes the toxicity of filial relations unleashed by Soviet living conditions. When Olia’s father leaves the family for another woman, he pressures her mother to give him their apartment and move into a smaller one with Olia. Anxiety about living space clearly plays an outsized role in the mother’s sub­ sequent decision to take her husband back despite his betrayal, a choice that enrages her daughter. After the reunion fails, Olia’s mother acquiesces to her father’s demand that she sell the apartment and give him part of the proceeds. The prospect of homelessness contributes to Olia’s primal rage, which she expresses in a conf lagration of violence against Ania Nosova—in turn provoking the latter’s suicidal despair. Thus, Gai Germanika forges a link between familial dysfunction, unease about living space, and teenage violence. Her precarious domestic situation also plays a role in Olia’s sexual promis­ cuity: the appeal of her older boyfriend, Nikita, undoubtedly lies not only in his nice car and the fancy dinners he can afford, but also in his spacious, clean, and modern apartment, which contrasts sharply with the other liv­ ing spaces featured in the show. In episode 68 we observe her attempting to

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inscribe herself into this domestic realm, lingering over dirty dishes after a sexual encounter. Nikita, however, confirms her superf luity in the kitchen by admonishing her to leave the dishes, since a housekeeper will soon come and take care of them. He thus signals that Olia can serve only a sexual func­ tion for him, denying her a more permanent place among the sleek white furniture and glimmering appliances. Her “forward-looking desire” for a contemporary, European-style apartment, to return to Thurschwell’s formu­ lation, will remain unfulfilled. This brief but significant encounter exposes the failure of Olia’s attempt to employ her sexual capital as an antidote to anxieties about domestic space. The familial discord and stagnant interiors depicted in School have seem­ ingly engendered a nihilistic and destructive relationship to place among the show’s teenagers. Gai Germanika frequently depicts spaces being used and destroyed by the adolescents in pursuit of hedonistic pleasure and escape. One of the most prominent settings throughout the serial is a dim, loft-like space in the school that the characters have transformed into a graffiti-scarred, cigarette-butt-filled smoking area, littered with the occasional beer bottle (fig­ ure 13). Although it exists within the physical enclosure of the school build­ ing, the characters transform it into a site of leisure, a space where they can

Figure 13. Smoking loft. School. Dir. Valeria Gai Germanika. Profit and Russia’s Channel One, 2010.

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congregate without the threat of adult surveillance.35 They retreat there to make out, to confide in one another, and to cry, but leave it defaced and filled with garbage. Their attempt to mediate between private and public space, to carve out an area within the space of the school free from supervision, ulti­ mately fails because of the foul condition of the loft. The space is eventually reclaimed by the adults and rendered inaccessible by a metal gate, precisely as a result of the cleaning lady’s complaints about its foul condition. With the traces of adolescent ownership of the space completely effaced, the loft eventually provides the backdrop for the history and English teachers’ furtive engagement, symbolizing its definitive transformation from teenage smok­ ing hole to sanitized site of heteronormative adult romance. Several other spaces in School provoke even more destructive energy from the teen protagonists. Episode 37 concludes with the camera lingering on spilled liquids and food wrappers littering the f loor of Vera’s house, as she desperately attempts to push her drunken and belligerent classmates out the door. Evidently inf lamed by alcohol and by one another, they cruelly treat her home with the same carelessness as the smoking loft. Similarly, Ania Nosova’s emo friends co-opt an office space owned by one of their mothers, transforming it into a cluttered and putrid site for partying and imbibing. This is seen clearly in figure 14, where Ania’s cigarette provides the central

Figure 14. Ania and the emo girls. School. Dir. Valeria Gai Germanika. Profit and Russia’s Chan­ nel One, 2010.

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point of focus in the foreground, the rest of the frame crowded by the detri­ tus of drinking, smoking, and other assorted indulgences. In this and other scenes, the teenagers exhibit a pronounced apathy, occasionally transforming into aggression, toward the places they inhabit. Seemingly, their sole method for leaving a trace of themselves on their surroundings—of interacting with their stultifying environment like humans and not like ghosts—is to soil it with cigarette butts and beer bottles. This ruin, in turn, connects viscerally with their own bodily pollution. The cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana that they smoke or ingest signal a violation of the imperative to develop in panoptical time, which demands that adolescents forego vices until they have reached the societally accepted age. The show’s characters interact with their environment in a way that illuminates the intersection of space and time, revealing how a rejection of panoptical time leads to a defacement of physi­ cal space, including that of their own bodies. The only teenager who exhibits a more constructive relationship to space is Sonia who, significantly, never visits the school’s smoking loft. In episode 52 she and Timur go on a date in a movie theater, stealing kisses in a man­ ner that seems quaint when contrasted with the sexual misadventures that took place during the class trip to Suzdal just a few episodes earlier. After­ ward they stroll through one of Sonia’s “favorite spots in the city”: Patri­ arch’s Ponds, an iconic Moscow park that features prominently in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, as Sonia herself points out. She also highlights the park’s connection to a prerevolutionary cultural and literary heritage, evoking its romantic appeal. Timur counters by observing that the park is full of “idiots,” which prompts Sonia to exhort him to see the beauty of the place and not its ugliness, not the bottles that litter it now but the spec­ ters of a more noble past that one’s imagination can conjure up. The camera work prompts the viewer to observe the scene through Sonia’s point of view, as the snowy park, softly illuminated by street lamps at twilight, fills the frame. Like Sonia, we do not see the seedier side of the park to which Timur had alluded, only its romantic possibilities. Thus, Sonia, unlike School’s other teenage protagonists, exhibits a connection with the space she inhabits, using it as a stimulus to imagination rather than merely a backdrop for indulgence or escapism—a connection that she attempts to instill in Timur as well. Sonia discovers a way to overcome the stagnation of space by conjuring up the “ghosts” of Russia’s literary and cultural heritage and employing them as a source for transcendence instead of alienation or disaffection.36 Sonia’s more positive relationship to place parallels her closer adherence to the demands of developing in panoptical time: she avoids alcohol and cigarettes, and her romance with Timur unfolds slowly and modestly. Her

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unremarkable, unprovocative clothes signal a rejection of the sexual precoc­ ity that the attire of other girls, such as Olia and Dasha, clearly projects. We never see her wearing an English-language T-shirt emblazoned with “SEX MONEY CRIME” or “FREE VIP PASS,” like those of her classmates, hint­ ing at her immunity from a “forward-looking desire” for consumer culture. According to Ilmira Bolotian, Sonia is unique among School’s teens because she is the only one allowed to narrate her inner life in her own words, through occasional voice-overs from her journals; and because of her Chekhovian name, Sonia Kashtanskaia (kashtan means “chestnut” in Russian). Although Bolotian stresses Sonia’s lack of popularity among her fellow students and argues for an ironic presentation of her character, these details—sly nod to Chekhov aside—underscore Sonia’s exceptionality.37 She is presented as one of the show’s few unambiguously positive characters, a sensitive writer of poetry associated with broader humanistic values such as compassion and tol­ erance, as her romance with the Caucasian Timur highlights. If Timur, unlike Ania (discussed in the next section) moves from “the margins of the collec­ tive,” Sonia’s openness and kindness facilitate that progression.38 Through the character of Sonia, then, Gai Germanika presents a possible solution to the chronotopic dilemma aff licting the post-Soviet youth of School: finding inspiration in the ghosts of Russia’s literary and cultural heritage, eschewing sexual precocity, and avoiding the alcohol and other vices that exacerbate a destructive attitude toward the places they occupy. The fact that Sonia herself appears somewhat anachronistic—the humanistic values she embodies por­ trayed as out of sync with the time and place she inhabits—suggests that the post-Soviet world depicted in School will only allow an imperfect, incomplete solution to the chronotopic dilemma facing its teenagers.

Teenage Girls, Exposure, and Suicide This section focuses closely on the character of Ania Nosova, whose suicide in episode 66 provides the serial with its dramatic climax. Ania’s narrative trajectory and ultimately tragic fate crystallize the anxieties about space and time detailed above. She begins the serial experiencing the most acute and unmediated problem with place of any of School’s teenage protagonists. Confined to her bedroom, placed on a regime of home study due to an unspecified illness (no physical traces of which can be discerned), her enclo­ sure and isolation from her peers are foregrounded from the very begin­ ning. In episode 1 Gai Germanika introduces Ania by cutting from a shot of Valentina Kharitonovna writing on the blackboard, in front of a group of students in school, to Ania poignantly coloring a butterf ly on her window at

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home, alone. This childish gesture inaugurates the serial’s charting of Ania’s struggle to overcome her confinement, to exert control over the spaces she occupies—a struggle that she eventually loses, remaining irrevocably out of place. Eventually, Ania chooses to solve her dilemma with place by putting an end to temporality, delivering the ultimate blow to the imperative for development in panoptical time. Ania’s trajectory foregrounds one of the central leitmotifs of the serial: the exposure of teenage girls, both volun­ tary and involuntary, mediated and unmediated. Through the videotaped suicide note that she leaves behind, Ania aestheticizes her death, according with Elisabeth Bronfen’s observations that a female’s “staged performance of death” can also “signify a moment of control and power,” transforming “self-disintegration” into “an act of self-construction.”39 Two curated, mediated attempts by Ania at self-construction via selfexposure bookend her narrative development as well as that of the serial. Although both the adult and teen characters suspect that Ilia’s unsanctioned poetry recitation triggered Anatoly’s stroke, Ania’s breasts are actually a more likely culprit: it is her grandfather’s discovery of the topless picture of her that someone snuck in among his birthday cards that immediately precedes his collapse. With this image of her striking a provocative pose, an adolescent female instantaneously “emerges into sexual visibility,” and her grandfather’s physical response to the image neatly concretizes the abstract dangers often associated with this newfound allure.40 The contrast between the childlike, modestly dressed Ania, coloring a butterf ly, and the stark sexu­ ality of the photograph jars the viewer as well. Since Anatoly’s stroke and subsequent absence from the school ultimately precipitate numerous events, eventually culminating in Ania’s suicide, a link between her mediated dis­ play of sexual precocity and her tragic death may be drawn. Ironically, we later learn that it was one of her classmates, Misha, who had paternalistically shared the photograph with Anatoly, believing that Ania could not be trusted with control over her own sexualized image and needed adult intercession. Misha casts a patronizing, panoptical gaze on his peer Ania; by identifying a supposedly aberrant display of precocity, he causes irrevocable and far-reach­ ing harm. Gai Germanika thus offers both Ania’s original act of self-exposure and Misha’s subsequent anonymous, unsanctioned sharing of it as potential sources of culpability.41 This continues the pattern of alternately challenging and affirming the desirability of adolescent development in panoptical time that recurs throughout School. By creating and sharing this seminude image with online chat partners, Ania had intended to breach virtually the walls of the “process of contain­ ment” that has underpinned cultural representations of girlhood across

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Western cultures.42 Ania’s containment is extreme: Isolated from her peers, abandoned by her mother, and allowed contact only with teachers and her elderly grandparents, she creates her own version of bedroom culture, one that consists of chatting with strangers under a pseudonym and disseminat­ ing racy photos. If bedroom culture can be both a “form of isolation” as well as “resistance to family authority,” Ania mobilizes technology and her own body in order to overcome the former and enact the latter.43 She eventually succeeds in escaping her confinement, receiving permission to attend school outside the home. Ironically, however, the fallout from her racy photos and the subsequent escalating conf licts with her peers lead her eventually to seek a return to the safe isolation of her room—a wish that her grandparents do not grant. Once scaled, the walls of domestic containment do not, seem­ ingly, permit reentry—just as the realm of childhood, according to Ilia, no longer allowed the sexually promiscuous Olia back into its fold. Ania’s uploading of seminude photos introduces a central leitmotif that is interwoven throughout multiple episodes of School: the exposure of teenage girls, both voluntary and involuntary, mediated and unmediated. In episode 35 several boys in the class read Sonia’s diary aloud, mockingly declaiming her most intimate thoughts. Gai Germanika’s framing of the scene empha­ sizes the visceral aspect of this violation: a close-up of multiple male fin­ gers pawing and pulling at Sonia’s diary evokes associations with physical assault. This intimation is brutally realized in episode 62, when a drunken Olia, along with several girlfriends, attacks Ania, wrestling her to the ground in the snow and stripping off her shirt and bra. Gai Germanika frames the scene similarly to the earlier one, with Ania’s body taking the place of Sonia’s diary, and probing female fingers replacing male ones. Thus, Sonia’s brutal emotional stripping in the classroom is linked several episodes later with Ania’s physical one outside it. The juxtaposition of these two scenes creates a symbolic constellation linking Sonia’s diary, the textual inscription of her innermost thoughts; Ania’s body; and violent, unwanted exposure. Ania’s videotaped suicide note, which she creates after ingesting a lethal amount of her grandmother’s pills, resonates with this constellation while also activating Bronfen’s nexus of femininity, death, and textuality.44 Like Sonia’s diary, Ania’s final address contains her most intimate emotions, but revealed voluntarily rather than involuntarily—an admittedly hollow victory over those who would expose Ania against her will. Delivered in the second person, the note is addressed to Ilia, the object of her unrequited love. Significantly, she implicates him in a failure of vision: “When I came to school, I thought that it was another world, not like the one I had at home, that I was needed, that I could talk

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to you, but you don’t even see me.” She had yearned for verbal communion with Ilia, but this desire was thwarted by his inability to see her. Ania, seem­ ingly, was either seen too much or not seen at all. By recording her suicide message, then, she achieves both verbal and visual preeminence—something that had eluded her in life—since this genre gives its creator, by definition, the ability to finalize the narration of her life text. Ania succeeds in trans­ forming exposure-as-violation into exposure-as-communication, with “the sheer material factualness of the dying and dead body lend[ing] certainty, authority and realness” to her “self-textualisation.”45 Olia’s performance of exaggerated femininity, followed by the peeling away of the precocious, sexualized layers during her pregnancy scare—her temporary “makeunder”—also fits the parameters of the exposure/conceal­ ment binary. By choosing again to disguise herself under thick makeup, an unabashed return to the “teleologies of womanhood,” Olia also conceals the childlike vulnerability that had brief ly surfaced.46 Ania, ironically, won­ ders why Ilia rejects her in favor of Olia, who is “not real.” She draws an explicit contrast between her own emotional sincerity and rawness (“I say everything that I think”) and Olia’s perceived superficiality. Embodying the emo aesthetic, as Ania does, of course, requires the use of cosmetics such as heavy black eyeliner and eyeshadow, and a certain type of clothing. But, as Ania implies during her emotional monologue in episode 25, the emo look brings to the surface and exaggerates inner feelings, whereas, for Ania, Olia’s f lashy, sexualized appearance implies falsehood.47 According to Ania, Olia’s makeup is an artifice that conceals, whereas her own makeup is an artifice that exposes. The cut from a close-up of the crying Ania, with her heavy black eye makeup running down her face, to a close-up of the unmade-up Olia in the school hallway, foregrounds this contrast while simultaneously undermining Ania’s own articulation of it. A key moment that contributes to Ania’s final descent into depression and suicide also features a teenage girl and a mediated act of self-exposure. After stealing Misha’s camera, Ania retreats to the school bathroom and views foot­ age of one of her emo friends f lirtatiously dancing for the camera and tak­ ing off her top (episode 60). This moving image resonates visually with the still, seminude photograph of Ania shown in the first episode; Ania has made the transition from the observed to the observer. The sight of this exposure inf lames Ania’s jealousy and paranoia, compelling her to sever unceremoni­ ously and irrevocably her friendship with the two emo girls, thus ending her one source of emotional support and fellowship. Ania reacts violently and physically to the footage, reminding the viewer of the dramatic response of her grandfather to her own unclothed image. The episode concludes with

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Ania dancing hysterically in her bedroom, anticipating her final mental break­ down. Thus, two images of adolescent girls asserting their sexuality—trying on the role of “fille fatale”—provoke incendiary reactions.48 Although Ania and her grandfather’s responses to these images are certainly motivated by contrasting factors, the extreme and visceral nature of both reactions sug­ gests the perils of such digitalized displays of precocity. If Ania had hoped to scale the walls of her domestic containment, to instrumentalize her body in search of human connection, these two episodes imply that provocative imag­ ery of teenage girls, once created, invariably escapes the parameters meant to contain it. Ania’s videotaped suicide note should be interpreted, then, within the context of these earlier episodes that explore the dynamics of female ado­ lescent sexuality and the mediated and unmediated ways that teenage girls can be either unveiled or obscured. Before creating her final “performance of autobiographical desire,” Ania methodically strips away the external markers of identity—namely, the emo hair and makeup—she had carefully cultivated.49 She attempts to transform herself into a blank page, an empty sign, first by uninscribing her body, then by eliminating her voice. The fact that viewers have not heard her speak for several episodes heightens the impact of her videotaped address. Significantly, she records over the other contents of Misha’s camera, including, presumably, the provocative dancing of the emo girl. This erasure ensures that it is Ania’s mediated image and not that of any other female teenager—her “version of the story”—that will be preserved for posterity.50 Through this aesthetically staged performance of death, Ania, like the nineteenth-century literary heroines whom Bronfen analyzes, gets both the last word and the last image. Unlike those of Madame Bovary and Clarissa, however, Ania’s final words are digitized and preserved, the communicative force of her writing with her body strengthened by its ability to be reproduced and disseminated widely. As the incidents discussed earlier reveal, mediated images of teenage girls revealing themselves, both physically and emotionally, possess an uncanny ability to reach unintended audiences and provoke incendiary, unpredictable consequences. In short, images of exposed teenage girls take on a life of their own, much like the controversy surrounding the serial School itself. Ania’s suicide can be viewed as a radical assertion of “atemporality,” an attempt to craft her own, autonomous temporal order and reject the stric­ tures of panoptical time.51 Death may certainly be interpreted as the most unequivocal and irreversible rejection of the “panoptical gaze” and thus a hollow, tragic liberation from the constraints of both space and time. More

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than any other character in School, Ania vividly illustrates the futile encoun­ ter of a teen’s “liquid” identity with the “solid” environments of family and school, and her death implies a breakdown of the temporal and structural order of both those institutions. The enduring presence of the Soviet past amid these spaces points to a similar failure. The character of Ilia delivers a more constructive salvo against the con­ straints of space and time in School’s opening episode: the unsanctioned poem by Alina Vitukhnovskaia begins with the lines “I did not materialize / Refused / I didn’t become / I was”).52 This line rejects the teleology inherent in the discourse of adolescence, with the speaker asserting the right simply to “be” rather than to “become.” The past tense forms of the verbs, how­ ever, simultaneously challenge this rebellion: if delivered from a retrospec­ tive perspective, did the speaker not, in fact, “become” rather than merely “be,” indicating some form of development and not just stasis? The temporal intricacy of this short poetic excerpt parallels the intricacy that the teenage protagonists of School must also navigate. In the fictional world of the serial, adults behave like teenagers and the ghosts of the Soviet past linger among the sparkling, elusive objects of the postcommunist present. Can “progress” or “development” be identified amid the temporal and spatial complexity that Gai Germanika and her cocreators generate? On one level School responds to Lesko’s call for a new conceptualization of adolescence, one that evades the “temporal trap of linear, cumulative development” by portraying instead a “simultaneity of contradictions.”53 The serial’s multidimensional and unsparing depiction of teenagers, in all their complexity and messiness, charted bold new territory in the history of post-Soviet television, as well as in the broader context of cultural rep­ resentations of Russian youth across all media. In introducing a circular conception of time, one that develops a subtle interplay between progress and regression, Gai Germanika renders it impossible for viewers to perceive School’s characters only through the prism of future adulthood, as Western discourses of adolescence have often required. The protagonists of School are neither heroic, like the female teenage characters analyzed in chapter 1, or antiheroic, like those in chapter 2. Violence punctuates their lives, as it does for the teens in the works of New Drama detailed in chapter 3, but it does not acquire its own momentum or teleology, nor does it preclude the future. In School the future is occluded through other means. Unlike the aggressive and murderous cinematic teens of chapter 2, the characters of School lack forward momentum; the future does not belong to them—or to anyone else, for that matter. Instead, Gai Germanika dramatizes her young characters’ entrapment in a chronotopic dilemma, one that implies that the past always

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lurks just below the surface of the present, crowding out all possible imagin­ ings of the future. The Soviet specters haunting School implicitly condemn contemporary Russian society’s inability to exorcise its most stultifying and tenacious ghosts. At the same time, however, Gai Germanika presents the avoidance of precocity and the embrace of humanistic values—such as those also embod­ ied by Vasilenko’s Ganna-Nadka and Melikian’s Alisa—as potential anti­ dotes to the troubles faced by the show’s teenagers, particularly its female ones. Most prominently, Ania’s escape from domestic containment and her mediated emergence into sexual visibility precipitate a series of events that culminate in her suicide. The character of Sonia, by contrast, rejects the allure of provocative clothing and cigarettes, choosing instead to ground her emotional life in respect for Russian classical literature—precisely the values that the post-Soviet school system attempts to instill in adolescent girls.54 In other words, despite School’s occasional troubling of the panoptical gaze, it ultimately confirms the desirability both of adult oversight of teenagers (as demonstrated most clearly in the Suzdal episodes) and of concrete, nonmalleable, boundaries between adulthood and adolescence. The “hysteria” stirred up by School, to return to President Putin’s choice of words, obscured these somewhat reassuring and rather inoffensive notions.55

Conclusion

Greta Thunberg, the fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist who arrived by boat in New York City in August 2019 and gave an impassioned speech at the United Nations, met with a decidedly chilly reception in Russia. She inspired an impressive array of memes on the Russian-language internet, ranging f rom the ridiculous (Greta as Golem f rom Lord of the Rings) to the sinister (Greta as Hitler).1 The opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who recorded a video for his YouTube channel titled “Everybody Hates Greta,” marveled at how the loathing of an adolescent girl had successfully united Russians f rom across the ideological spectrum, f rom pro-Putin to anti-Putin, f rom conservatives to liberals to libertarians. Her minutes-long speech at the UN had, according to Navalny, “driven everyone in Russia mad.”2 Across the media landscape no hyperbole was spared: commentators referred to her as a “spoiled child”; they stripped her of any agency for her actions, claiming that adults had turned “a sick girl into the leader of a totalitarian sect”; they connected her with historical outbreaks of “mass hysteria” supposedly similarly catalyzed by adolescent girls, as in the Salem witch trials.3 Clearly, the Swedish teenager had touched a nerve. While Thunberg accused adults of stealing the dreams of children with their indifference to environmental devastation, many Russians seemed con­ sumed by an irrational fear that she might unleash marauding teenagers 128

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into the streets. Several observers attributed ominous powers to Thunberg, worrying that the “eco-psychosis” she suffered from would inevitably spark “eco-terrorism.”4 On his Channel One television show, the pro-Kremlin jour­ nalist Mikhail Leontiev proclaimed his certainty that “the followers of Greta will sooner or later turn to spilling blood.” Leontiev and others referred to her as a “false prophet” who would eventually inspire an “attacking army” to employ violence in pursuit of her radical goals.5 Thunberg, according to this strain of interpretation, had brazenly assumed the mantle of prophet and staked a claim to the transcendent realm, one inevitably linked with violence—just like Venia, the fictional protagonist of Serebrennikov’s The Student, had done. The repeated references to the vulnerability of Rus­ sia’s teenagers to Thunberg’s supposedly nefarious inf luence also echo the “youth as victims of Western inf luence” paradigm of the Soviet years. And the image of an “attacking army” of teenagers clearly resonates with anxiety about the young protesters who had crowded Moscow streets the summer before—the so-called “fearless generation” challenging the invincibility of the Putin government.6 A non-Russian observer may register surprise at the intensity of the Rus­ sian reaction to Thunberg, at the quick leap these journalists and others made between a diminutive teenager delivering an (admittedly fiery) speech to world leaders and incitement to murder. This response, however, can be understood as a confirmation of the endurance of Soviet cultural myths of adolescence into the twenty-first century. These Russian commentators interpreted Thunberg as illicitly occupying the transcendent space that the Soviets had carved out for teen martyrs such as Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, who bore the right to legitimate violence. Thunberg had seized that space for a wholly unsanctioned and objectionable goal, one that conf licted with the interests of the Russian state: curtailing the fossil fuels upon which the Russian economy disproportionately depends (and which are a key driver of climate change). The heated response to Thunberg, like all the works analyzed in this book, suggests that the “romance with adolescence,” a belief in the extraordinary abilities of youth, has clearly survived into the twenty-first century in Russia. The figure of the adolescent occupies a prominent position as one of postSoviet culture’s most seductive “idealizing tableaux,” to return to Berlant’s formulation—an important stimulus for a society’s dreams, aspirations, and fears. Irrational fear inevitably accompanies irrational hope; hence, ado­ lescence as nightmare is the corollary of the “romance with adolescence,” rather than its opposite. The works discussed in chapter 2, those that inspire disgust at a pubescent body colonized by ants or revulsion at a teenage boy’s

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cold-blooded murder, nonetheless confirm the gravitational pull of the “ide­ alizing tableau.” Like the versions that developed in the United States and Western Europe, Russia’s variation on this romance has been deeply inter­ twined with conceptualizations of time. Some of the fictional characters analyzed in the preceding chapters seize the future, leaving behind a trail of defeated adults who languish in the past. The dramatic protagonists of chapter 3, by contrast, can access no such power, their futures occluded by the dreams that they could not enact. Russia’s “romance with adolescence” differs, however, f rom its Western counterparts in its orientation not only to the future but to the past. The works analyzed in chapter 1 exemplify a strain of post-Soviet culture that looks backward, hoping to salvage positive, productive elements amid the banality, hypocrisy, and violence of the Soviet years. These works, haunted by Zoia’s ghost, turn to a teenage girl as the most hopeful figure for accom­ plishing this reclamation. The protagonists of Gai Germanika’s television serial School are similarly haunted by the relics of the past, forcing them into a chronotopic dilemma: they cannot escape the Soviet Union’s physi­ cal and psychological remnants, nor can they grasp the shiny objects of the postcommunist, capitalist present. The sole, tenuous solution that emerges in the unstable fictional universe that Gai Germanika creates lies in an embrace of “timeless” humanistic values and in Russia’s prerevolutionary cultural heritage. Since the mid-2010s official Russian policy geared toward youth has evinced a similarly backward orientation. With its focus on ensuring the transmission of military-patriotic values through organizations such as the Youth Army, the Russian state is recreating classic modern efforts to ensure that conservative values are inculcated in and perpetuated by youth, facilitat­ ing the improvement of society; it is making adolescence “modern” all over again.7 Culture has been enlisted to play a key role in this project. The ghost of Zoia—or any of the other myriad Soviet heroes of World War II—can be channeled anytime, day or night, simply by tuning into the twenty-four-hour internet television channel Victory. Many of the authors and filmmakers whom I have discussed challenge these modernizing fantasies, particularly when it comes to allowing teenag­ ers to wield legitimate violence. Their cultural works dramatize the com­ bustibility of the adolescent imagination, the elemental, primal nature of youth aggression. Real-life events echo these fictional conclusions. Some scholars contend that a minority of young Russians have been radicalized in recent years, citing examples such as the eighteen-year-old boy in the Crimean town of Kerch who opened fire on and killed twenty-one of his

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classmates before committing suicide in October 2018; the seventeen-year­ old from Khabarovsk who opened fire on the offices of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor agency to the KGB), killing two; and another seventeen-year-old, this one from Arkhangelsk, who similarly targeted the FSB by blowing himself up in its local headquarters. A contributing factor in these tragedies—and in other, similarly violent incidents—may be the prolif­ eration of weapons that have entered Russian society as a result of the ongo­ ing conf licts in eastern Ukraine and the north Caucasus.8 Like the bullet that migrates from the imaginary to the real world in Klavdiev’s play The Bullet Collector, the tools of war travel from one sphere to another. The weaponry facilitating Russia’s martial operations may eventually end up in the hands of its teenagers, in whom the state attempts to instill military-patriotic fan­ tasies. Clearly, the transmission of those fantasies rarely, if ever, proceeds according to neatly laid plans. The activism of teenagers such as Philip, the crusader against the inevi­ tability of Putinism profiled in Andrei Loshak’s documentary Age of Dissent, or Olga Misik, the seventeen-year-old girl who read the Russian constitution out loud to police forces during the July 2019 protests in Moscow, may be understood as an escape f rom the strictures of fantasy.9 In asserting agency in the public sphere, these teenagers reject being reduced to an “idealizing tableau,” or at least they attempt to inscribe the tableau with a script of their own choosing. Accordingly, theirs is a fight for the present—and for a future no longer envisioned through a teleological lens, as it had been dur­ ing Soviet times. As Loshak summarizes, the young people he profiles are “about the future. But not about some distant future, or some unattainable ideals, such as communism or anarchism . . . they are for living a normal life, here and now.”10 In the concluding frames of Age of Dissent, we once again meet Philip, who had valiantly proclaimed his intention to “save Russia” at the beginning of the film. After many months of harassment from Russian authorities, Philip appears chastened: he emerges from an eight-day stint in jail lament­ ing that his experiences as an opposition activist have left him consumed by paranoia. Rather than saving Russia, he now intends to leave it. “In six years, I hope I won’t be here anymore,” he proclaims, before being whisked away in a waiting car and disappearing into the night. Philip’s obscured, inscrutable features contrast poignantly with the bright openness he exuded in our first acquaintance with him; the unsteady, handheld camera accentuates the sense of psychological deterioration and unease. Viewers may be prompted to worry that this adolescent boy can no longer save himself, much less Russia. Evidently, the post-Soviet Russian state brandishes many powerful tools for

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molding the inner lives of its young people, and it continues to do so assidu­ ously. Whether the state will successfully impose its fantasies, or adolescents can pursue their own dreams on their own terms, remains to be seen. The contours of the future glimpsed by the fictional teenage hero of Pelevin’s Omon Ra, as he surfaces from the subterranean world of forced adolescent heroism and sacrifice, remain undefined.

N otes

Introduction

1. Vozrast nesoglasiia [The Age of Dissent], dir. A. Loshak, Telekanal Dozhd’, 2018. 2. Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 164; Jon Grinspan, “Can Teenagers Save America? They’ve Done It Before,” New York Times, March 26 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/03/26/opinion/teenagers-gun-rally.html. Grinspan’s article focused on teens from Parkland, Florida, who became vocal antigun activists after a mass shoot­ ing at their high school. 3. Seraphim Orekhanov, “Generation YouTube: How Millennials Are Shap­ ing Russian Politics,” Carnegie Moscow Center, April 19, 2017, https://carnegie.ru/ commentary/68709. 4. See, for example, Andrew Higgins and Andrew E. Kramer, “In Protests, Krem­ lin Fears a Young Generation Stirring,” New York Times, March 27, 2017; Roman Dobrokhotov, “Russia’s New Protest Generation,” Al Jazeera, March 29, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/03/russia-protest-genera tion-170329113346416.html; Roman Dobrokhotov, “Youth vs Putin—2:0,” Al Jazeera, June 16, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/06/youth-protests­ russia-putin-170616115306522.html; Christian Esch, “The Fearless Generation: Russian Youth Stand Up to the State,” Spiegel Online, September 11, 2019, https://www.spie gel.de/international/world/fearless-generation-in-russia-stands-up-to-the-kremlin­ a-1285954.html; Elizaveta Mikhal’chenko, “Deti Putina na razvalinakh Kremlia, ili chto novogo v novykh protestakh?” Colta.ru, June 14, 2017, https://www.colta.ru/articles/ society/15110-deti-putina-na-razvalinah-kremlya-ili-chto-novogo-v-novyh-protestah. For interviews with some of the protesters, see Roman Dorofeev, “‘Dvizh ne pustoi byl,” Colta.ru, March 27, 2017, https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/14340-dvizh­ ne-pustoy-byl. 5. Quoted in Higgins and Kramer, “Kremlin Fears.” For an account of state-run youth campaigns during the Putin years, see Julie Hemment, Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 6. The phrase “adolescent turn” is employed in Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall, “Introduction: Visualising Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema—Gender, Class and Politics,” in New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall (Cham, Switzer­ land: Springer International, 2018), 23. Barbara White had already identified a verita­ ble “cult of adolescence” in twentieth-century American fiction by 1985. See White, Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood

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Press, 1985), viiii. Among the full-length works devoted to the broader topic of youth in a postsocialist context are Hemment, Youth Politics; Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel, eds., Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); E. L. Omel’chenko, Molodezh’: Otkrytyi vopros (Ul’ianovsk: Sim­ birskaia kniga, 2004); Fran Markowitz, Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova, Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland’s Last Generation (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015). The most comprehensive study of childhood in Russian culture, ending before the post-Soviet years, is Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Kelly explicitly excludes adolescents from her study, defining childhood as applying up to the age of thirteen or fourteen (Kelly, Children’s World, 16). 7. Mikhail Epstein, “Childhood and the Myth of Harmony,” in The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature, translated by Avram S. Brown (Boston: Aca­ demic Studies Press, 2017), 139; Kelly, Children’s World, 572; Andrew Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 130; Matthias Neumann, The Communist Youth League and the Transforma­ tion of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932 (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2. 8. Kate Holland, The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Prob­ lem of Genre in the 1870s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 129; Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2004). 9. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky, “The Burden of Freedom: Russian Literature after Communism,” in Russian Literature since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 14. 10. Laura Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. 11. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthro­ pology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1904); Kent Baxter, The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 50–53; Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2008), 68; Lesko, Act Your Age!, 28–29. Hall believed in the necessity of a “socially sanctioned prolongation of adolescence,” which, in turn, served as an “index of the degree of civilization” of American society (see Savage, Teenage, 72). 12. Don Romesburg, “Making Adolescence More or Less Modern,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Routledge, 2013), 229. 13. John Neubauer, The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 11. 14. Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 15; Neumann, Communist Youth League, xv. 15. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia, 15. 16. Hilary Pilkington, Russia’s Youth and Its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed (New York: Routledge, 1994), chap. 3. 17. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia, 16. 18. Pilkington, Russia’s Youth, 58.

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19. Ben Hellman, Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (1574–2010) (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 308. Mayakovsky’s poem was originally published in Pionerskaia pravda, no. 11 ( June 18, 1927). 20. Seth Bernstein, Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Social­ ism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 8. As Bernstein points out, a similar militarization of youth occurred in other countries, such as Germany and Italy, dur­ ing the interwar period. Boris Wolfson, “Juggernaut in Drag: Theater for Stalin’s Children,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (New York: Routledge, 2008), 184. 21. Arkadii Gaidar, Shkola: Povest’ (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo dets­ koi literatury, 1947); Arkadii Gaidar, Voennaia taina, in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1972), 2: 133–266; Olga Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9. 22. Kucherenko, Little Soldiers, 1–2. It remains nearly impossible to isolate an exact figure for underage combatants during the Second World War; Kucherenko cites estimates that vary between 60,000 and 300,000. See also Bernstein, Raised under Stalin. 23. Katarina Ul’, “Pokolenie mezhdu ‘geroicheskim proshlym’ i ‘svetlym budu­ shchim’: Rol’ molodezhi vo vremia ‘ottepeli,’” Antropologicheskii forum 15 (2011): 293; Juliane Fuerst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 142. 24. Aleksandr Fadeev, Molodaia gvardiia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo detskoi literatury, 1946); Molodaia gvardiia [The Young Guard], dir. Sergei Gerasimov, Gorky Film Studio, 1948. The term “sacrificial mythology,” and its relevance for both Soviet and post-Soviet society, is elucidated in Yuliya Minkova, Making Martyrs: The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018), 2. 25. See the organization’s official website, which keeps a running count of members: Iunarmiia, home page, https://yunarmy.ru. This total is current as of June 2021. 26. Evan Gershkovich, “Russia’s Fast-Growing ‘Youth Army’ Aims to Breed Loyalty to the Fatherland,” Moscow Times, November 6, 2019, https://www.the moscowtimes.com/2019/04/17/russias-fast-growing-youth-army-aimst-to-breed­ loyalty-to-the-fatherland-a65256. 27. Pervyi kanal, “Segodnia nachala veshchanie ‘Pobeda’—novyi kanal ‘Tsif ro­ vogo telesemeistva’ Pervogo,” April 9, 2019, https://www.1tv.ru/news/2019-04­ 09/363323-segodnya_nachala_veschanie_pobeda_novyy_kanal_tsif rovogo_tele semeystva_pervogo. For more on youth cultural policy and its incorporation of martial values, see Alexander Trustrum Thomas, “From Stalinist Socialist Real­ ism to Putinist Capitalist Realism,” in New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, ed. J.A.E. Curtis (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 59. 28. Sarah Rainsford, “Russian Journalists in Shock as FSB Hunts Enemy Within,” BBC News, July 12, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53361961. 29. This argument is developed in Baxter, Modern Age. 30. Savage, Teenage, 7–15.

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31. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 29. The phrase “the demonic energy of adolescence” is employed by Geoff rey H. Hartman in “A Short History of Practical Criticism,” New Literary History 10, no. 3 (1979): 502; quoted in Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 14. 32. See Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia, chap. 4. 33. Pilkington, Russia’s Youth, 60–64; Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia, chap. 7. 34. For example, Grigorii Belykh and L. Panteleev’s 1927 novella The Republic of SHKID, which was turned into a popular film in 1966 (dir. Gennadii Poloka); Nikolai Ekk’s 1931 film A Road to Life [Putevka v zhizn’], based on writings by well-known Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko; and Dinara Asanova’s 1983 film Tough Kids [Patsany], which offered a much more pessimistic assessment of the notion that wayward youth may be redeemed by state intervention. 35. Fuerst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 190–91. The term “moral panic” in relation to youth was coined by British sociologist Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972; reprinted, New York: Routledge, 2011). 36. Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 209, 205–15. 37. Malen’kaia Vera, dir. Vasilii Pichul, Gorky Film Studio, 1988; Frank Beardow, Little Vera: The Film Companion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 43. Another important perestroika-era film, the Latvian Iuris Podnieks’s Is It Easy to Be Young? (Legko li byt’ molodym?) (Rizhskaia kinostudiia, 1986)—the first documentary about youth in the Soviet Union—also features cynical teenagers lamenting that they have nothing to “reach for,” unlike the older generation that lived through World War II. 38. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia, 22, 118. 39. Kristin Roth-Ey, “‘Loose Girls’ on the Loose? Sex, Propaganda and the 1957 Youth Festival,” in Women in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Melanie Ilic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 89; Pilkington, Russia’s Youth, 67, 69, 80; Fuerst, Stalin’s Last Gener­ ation, 4. For more on the Cold War and youth, see Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Lesko, Act Your Age!, chap. 5. 40. Mikhail Elizarov, Mul’tiki (Moscow: ACT, 2010), 112. Elizarov, born in Ukraine, received the Russian Booker Prize for his novel The Librarian (Bibliotekar’) in 2008. 41. Hemment, Youth Politics, 28. 42. Hemment, 32. Nashi was founded, at least in part, as a response to the color revolutions of the early 2000s, particularly the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine; it was envisioned as an indirect attempt to squelch any oppositional activity among Russia’s youth. Members often resorted to violent methods, including “hiring skin­ heads and soccer hooligans to savagely beat members of the opposition and raid their headquarters,” earning them the moniker “Putinjugend.” See Fabrizio Fenghi, It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 16. 43. Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 133.

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44. Hemment, Youth Politics, 19–21. Hemment argues that neither the unease about youth evinced by the Russian state in the twenty-first century nor the strate­ gies employed to combat that unease are unique; both can be found in many other national contexts. See Hemment, 8. For more on the contrast between youth as ideal versus youth as threat in the early Soviet period, see Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, “Gezaehmte Helden”: Die Formierung der Sowjetjugend 1917–1932 (Essen, Germany: KlartextVerlag, 2005). 45. Stephen Burt, The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 213. 46. Elizabeth Douvan and Joseph Adelson, The Adolescent Experience (New York: Wiley, 1966), 229. 47. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 91. 48. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 368. “Heterochrony” is Morson and Emerson’s translation of the original raznovremennost’. 49. Maria Tumarkin, “Productive Death: The Necropedagogy of a Young Soviet Hero,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 4 (2011): 889–90. Tumarkin writes poignantly of her own adolescent obsession with Zoia and desire to reproduce her courage. 50. V. V. Smirnova, quoted in Helena Goscilo, “The Thorny Thicket of ‘Chil­ dren’s Literature,’” Russian Review 73, no. 3 (2014): 346n25. Kucherenko details how the “paradigm that children did not differ from adults” inf luenced the choice of repertoire for children’s theaters (Kucherenko, Little Soldiers, 33). Drawing an impor­ tant contrast between prerevolutionary and Soviet culture, Epstein points out that, while nineteenth-century writers such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky “make their best adult characters (Natasha Rostova, Alesha Karamazov, Prince Myshkin) childlike, the most positive children-characters of the 1920s–30s are striking in their adultness.” See Epstein, “Childhood,” 151. 51. Olga Klimova, “Soviet Youth Films under Brezhnev: Watching between the Lines” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2013), 84; Alexander Prokhorov, “Arrest­ ing Development: A Brief History of Soviet Cinema for Children and Adolescents,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (New York: Routledge, 2008), 138. 52. Bernstein, Raised under Stalin, 221. 53. Pilkington, Russia’s Youth, 193. 54. Baxter, Modern Age, 62. 55. Baxter, 41. 56. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 50, 42. 57. Catherine Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 6. See, for example, the critique of Savage and Neubauer in Beth Rodgers, Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Springer, 2016), 2. 58. Sarah Bilston, The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 1850–1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 172. 59. The interdisciplinary journal Girlhood Studies was founded in 2008. For a helpful overview of the field of girlhood studies and recent contributions to it, see Sharon R. Mazzarella, review of Regulating Desire by J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, Bad Girls

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by Amanda H. Littauer, and From the Dance Hall to Facebook by Shalya Thiel-Stern, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 489–93. 60. Burt, Forms of Youth, 213. 61. Driscoll, Girls, 7. 62. Kseniia Gusarova, “Khvorost v koster mirovoi revoliutsii: Pioner,” Neprikos­ novennyi zapas, no. 2 (2008), https://magazines.gorky.media/nz/2008/2/hvorost-v­ koster-mirovoj-revolyuczii-pionery.html. 63. M. A. Glezer, Podrostok: Perekhodnyi vozrast, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Nauchnaia mysl’,’ 1929), 52. 64. Catriona Kelly, “The End of Childhood and/or the Discovery of the Tineid­ zher? Adolescence in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture,” in Eastern European Youth Cul­ tures in a Global Context, ed. Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 27. Rosalind P. Blakesley describes how female adolescence was first visualized in Russian culture in Dmitry Levitsky’s late-eighteenth-century portraits of students from Catherine the Great’s Smolny Institute boarding school for girls. See Blakesley, “Ladies-in-Waiting in Waiting: Picturing Adolescence in Dmitry Levitsky’s Smolny Portraits, 1772–76,” Art History 37, no. 1 (2014): 10–37. 65. Marina Balina, “Narrating Love in Soviet Adolescent Literature of the 1930s: Ruvim Fraerman’s The Wild Dog Dingo; or, A Tale about First Love,” Russian Review 73, no. 3 (2014): 360. 66. Balina, 361–62. 67. On the emergence of the “youth novel” during the Thaw, by writers such as Aksenov and others, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 226–32. Aksenov’s 1961 Ticket to the Stars, about a group of teenagers who undertake a journey of self-discovery after their high school graduation, is perhaps the most well known of these works. See Vasilii Aksenov, Zvezdnyi bilet, in Sobraniie sochinenii (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1987), 1: 185–347. Alexander Prokhorov argues that, in films of the 1950s and 1960s, “the adolescent transgressed the former limits of the permissible” and thus helped delineate the newly redefined values of the Thaw. See Prokhorov, “The Adolescent and the Child in the Cinema of the Thaw,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1, no. 2 (2007): 118. 68. Klimova, “Soviet Youth Films,” 86. 69. Klimova, 129. 70. Goscilo, “Thorny Thicket,” 345n18. 71. Ann Livschiz, “Battling ‘Unhealthy Relations’: Soviet Youth Sexuality as a Political Problem,” Journal of Historical Sociology 21, no. 4 (2008): 412; Igor Kon, “Sexual Culture and Politics in Contemporary Russia,” in Sexuality and Gender in Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Aleksandar Stulhofer and Theo Sandfort (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2005), 113. 72. Klimova, “Soviet Youth Film under Brezhnev,” 305; Birgit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 202–4. A vivid dramatization of the danger that adolescents posed to adults unfolds in El’dar Riazanov’s 1988 film Dear Elena Sergeevna (Dorogaia Elena Sergeevna), where four teenagers hold their teacher hostage overnight in her own apartment in an attempt to force her to change one of their grades. 73. As “the first internationally recognized film that spoke of the unspoken lives of Russian teenagers,” Little Vera exerted a strong inf luence on the cinematic

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depiction of youth in other socialist and postsocialist national contexts. See Anikó Imre, “The Age of Transition: Angels and Blockers in Recent Eastern and Central European Films,” in Youth Culture in Global Cinema, ed. Timothy Shary and Alexandra Siebel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 78. 74. Livschiz, “Unhealthy Relations,” 398. 75. Livschiz, 410. As Anita Harris notes, “Schools have always been sites for the production of normative femininity and ‘appropriate’ young women.” See Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2004), 98. 76. Roth-Ey, “Loose Girls,” 83, 88. 77. Larissa Rudova, “Maskulinnost’ v sovetskoi i postsovetskoi detskoi literature: Transformatsiia Timura (i ego komandy),” Detskie chteniia 6, no. 2 (2014): 89–90; Arkadii Gaidar, Timur i ego komanda (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1965); Timur i ego komanda [Timur and His Gang], dir. Aleksandr Razumnyi, Soiuzdetfil’m, 1940. 78. Erica L. Fraser, Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 57, 53. 79. Fraser, 68; Ivan Stadniuk, Maksim Perepelitsa: Povest’ v rasskazakh (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1956); Maksim Perepelitsa, dir. Anatolii Granik, Lenfil’m, 1955. 80. Fraser, Military Masculinity, 70; Soldat Ivan Brovkin [The Soldier Ivan Brovkin], dir. Ivan Lukinskii, Gorky Film Studio, 1955. See Fraser, 68–70, for a more detailed discussion of both films. 81. Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, “Literature and Cultural Institutions by and for Soviet and Post-Soviet Youth,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (New York: Routledge, 2008), 113. 82. Svetlana Stephenson, Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 4, 221. 83. Stephenson, 234. 84. Kon, “Sexual Culture,” 111–13. 85. Brian James Baer, “Russian Gay and Lesbian Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, ed. Ellen Lee McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 434. The first novel for Russian ado­ lescents to feature a teenage protagonist openly grappling with the question of sex­ ual orientation, Daria Vil’ke’s Jester’s Cap (Shutovskoi kolpak), was published in 2013. See Vil’ke, Shutovskoi kolpak (Moscow: Samokat, 2013), and the English translation by Marian Schwartz, Playing a Part (New York: Arthur A. Levin, 2015). 86. Quoted in Kon, “Sexual Culture,” 120. 87. Kelly, “End of Childhood,” 34. 88. On the dwindling numbers of young heroes, see Klimova, “Soviet Youth Films,” 308; Brat [Brother], dir. A. Balabanov, STV, 1997; Brat 2 [Brother 2], dir. A. Balabanov, STV, 2000. On the inf lux of sexually explicit and violent content into the Russian marketplace in the 1990s, see Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 89. Quoted in Stephen M. Norris, Blockbuster History in the New Russia (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 9–10. 90. Before his untimely death in 2002, Sergei Bodrov Jr. himself explored this topic in his directorial debut, Sisters [Sestry] (STV, 2001). The film focuses on the two titular sisters, the older of whom, thirteen-year-old Sveta, possesses impressive

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shooting skills. When the sisters are hunted by enemies of their gangster stepfather, Sveta’s ability to handle a weapon is instrumental in ensuring their escape. Bodrov paints a clear moral contrast between the teenager and the corrupt, violent world of adults. At the end of the film, Sveta remains in Russia while her mother and stepfather leave for the West. Post-Soviet Russia, it would appear, still needs teen­ age girls who can shoot, and the viewer may wonder if she is destined to become a “righteous” killer in the mode of Danila Bagrov. 91. Rebekka Kei, “‘Takie sportivnye devchonki, kak mal’chiki’: O vospitanii detei v postsovetskoi Rossii,” in Semeinye uzy: Modeli dlia sborki, ed. Sergei Ushakin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2004), 2: 155, 157. 92. Andrea Lanoux, “Laundry, Potatoes, and the Everlasting Soul: Russian Advice Literature for Girls after Communism,” Russian Review 73, no. 3 (2014): 406–7; Goscilo, “Thorny Thicket,” 350. 93. Lanoux, “Laundry, Potatoes,” 426. 94. Goscilo, “Thorny Thicket,” 353. 95. Sophia Ankel, “Russian Children Will Be Taught How to Assemble AK-47s as Part of Patriotism Lessons in Schools,” Business Insider, October 31, 2019, https:// www.businessinsider.com/russian-students-taught-how-to-assemble-ak47s-in­ themed-lessons-2019-10. 96. Valerie Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 97. Political journalist Stanislav Belkovskii, as quoted in Stephenson, Gangs of Russia, 228. 98. Rubin Vincent Gonsales Gal’ego, Beloe na chernom (Saint Petersburg: Lim­ bus Press, 2005), and the English translation, White on Black, trans. Marian Schwartz (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006); Mariam Petrosian, Dom, v kotorom . . . (Moscow: Livebook, 2015), and the English translation, The Gray House, trans. Yury Machkasov (Seattle: AmazonCrossing, 2017); Aleksandr Snegirev, Neftianaia venera (Moscow: Eksmo, 2016), and the English translation, Petroleum Venus, trans. A. L. Tait (Mos­ cow: Glas, 2012). For Petrosian’s novel in the context of broader Russian cultural developments in the twenty-first century, including the representation of children and adolescents, see Ol’ga Lebedushkina, “Petrosian, kotoruiu ne zhdali: ‘Dom, v kotorom .  .  .’ kak ‘itogovyi tekst’ desiatiletiia,” Druzhba narodov 8 (2010), http:// magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/2010/8/le17.html. 99. Anton’s Right Here [Anton tut riadom], dir. Liubov’ Arkus, Drugoe kino, 2012. 100. Ekaterina Murashova, Klass korrektsii (Moscow: Samokat, 2007). Corrections Class was made into a film in 2014 (A Company), directed by Ivan Tverdovskii. For the film version, the main protagonist shifted from a twelve-year-old boy to a sixteen-year-old girl, both in wheelchairs, adding a focus on the girl’s discovery of her nascent sexuality, which was absent from Murashova’s original. The film’s depiction of the subjectivity of disabled youth is unique in Russian cinema. 101. Larissa Rudova, “Deti-autsidery i parallel’nye miry: Real’noe i fantastiches­ koe v povesti Ekateriny Murashovoi ‘Klass Korrektsii,’” Detskie chteniia 5, no. 1 (2014): 201–17. Anna Kozlova’s gripping, darkly comedic novel F20, about a teenage girl’s struggles with schizophrenia, represents a notable exception. See Kozlova, F20 (Moscow: Ripol Klassik, 2017).

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Chapter 1. The Ghost of Adolescence Past

1. Fraser, Military Masculinity, chap. 5. An earlier version of this chapter was pub­ lished as “The Ghost of Adolescence Past: Teen Female Martyrs in Svetlana Vasi­ lenko’s Little Fool and Anna Melikian’s Mermaid,” Slavic and East European Journal 63, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 52–73. 2. Viktor Pelevin, Omon Ra (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), 51. For an exploration of the “transcendental connotations” that space f light and cosmonauts had attained for Soviet children by the 1960s, see Anindita Banerjee, “Between Sputnik and Gaga­ rin: Space Flight, Children’s Periodicals, and the Circle of Imagination,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (New York: Routledge, 2008), 67–90. 3. Victor Pelevin, interview by Leo Kropywiansky, Bomb 79 (Spring 2002), https:// bombmagazine.org/articles/victor-pelevin/. 4. Kenneth Millard, Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 10. 5. Pelevin, Omon Ra, 175. 6. As Juliane Fuerst points out, women were known to have participated val­ iantly in the Russian Civil War, among other key moments in early Soviet history, but they were overshadowed by more famous male heroes such as Petr Chaapaev and Alexander Stakhanov. See Fuerst, “Heroes, Lovers, Victims—Partisan Girls during the Great Fatherland War: An Analysis of Documents from the Spetsotdel of the Former Komsomol Archive,” Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military 18, no. 3–4 (2000): 73. 7. The official biography of Zoia, as summarized by Adrienne Harris, is as follows: “Zoia .  .  . grew up in the Timuriazovskii region of Moscow. At the age of eighteen, [she] accepted an assignment from the Komsomol to join the Special Forces . . . and work as a scout behind enemy lines [around] Moscow. She was cap­ tured in the process of burning down a stable in the village of Petrishchevo. Although gravely tortured and forced to march undressed and barefoot for hours in the snow, she refused to divulge any information about her mission, and instead delivered an inspiring speech to the villagers assembled to watch her hanged on 29 November 1941. . . . The Nazis let the body hang in the square a month, perhaps as a warning. On New Year’s Eve, inebriated Nazis stabbed the body with bayonets and cut off the left breast, finally submitting the body for burial the next day. After the area’s liberation several weeks later, Pravda correspondent Petr Lidov visited the village and learned of Zoia’s fate.” See Harris, “The Lives and Deaths of a Soviet Saint in the Post-Soviet Period: The Case of Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 53, no. 2–4 (2011): 277. As with Pavlik Morozov, the facts about Zoia’s biography have been called into question since the collapse of the Soviet Union opened up access to new sources. See Harris, 287–90, for details of the controversy. 8. Maria Tumarkin, “Productive Death,” 886–87. Tumarkin borrows the coin­ age “necropedagogy” from Ann Pelligrini, “‘What Do Children Learn at School?’: Necropedagogy and the Future of the Dead Child,” Social Text 26, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 97–105. 9. Minkova, Making Martyrs, 14, 2. A foundational text in the establishment and dissemination of Zoia’s myth, The Tale of Zoia and Shura, was written by her mother,

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Liubov’ Kosmodem’ianskaia, with the assistance of a ghostwriter, in 1951. The work establishes both Zoia and her brother Shura, also killed in battle during the war, as model children raised in an ideal Stalinist family, thus laying the foundation for their heroic sacrifices during wartime. L. Kosmodem’ianskaia and F. Vidorova, Povest’ o Zoe i Shure (Leningrad: Leningradskoe gazetno-zhurnal’noe i knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1951). See also Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta Books, 2005), 185–87. 10. It was the 2009 anime film First Division (Pervyi otriad), a Russian-Japanese coproduction, that introduced the cult of the dead adolescent hero to a new gen­ eration of contemporary Russian viewers. The film features a group of deceased teenagers—retrieved from the afterlife by their leader, fourteen-year-old Nadia—that plays a decisive role in the victory against the Nazis during World War II. The young heroes of the First Division have crossed over into a host of other genres and formats, and twenty-first-century Russian teenagers now dress up like Nadia and her cohorts when engaging in cosplay. See S. G. Maslinskaia, “‘Zhizn’ posle smerti’: Pioner-geroi v sovremennoi mul’tiplikatsii,” in Konstruiruia detskoe: Filologiia, istoriia, antropologiia, ed. M. R. Balina et al. (Moscow: Azimut, 2011), 254–65; Pervyi otriad, dir. Yoshiharu Ashino, Alesha Klimov, and Misha Shprits, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2009. 11. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 77. 12. Adrienne Harris, “Lives and Deaths,” 277. 13. Anja Tippner, “Girls in Combat: Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia and the Image of Young Soviet Wartime Heroines,” Russian Review 73, no. 3 (2014): 382, 383. In addi­ tion to Zoia, prominent girl-martyrs included Zina Portnova, Liza Chaikina, and Ina Konstantinova. See Tippner for a more detailed discussion. 14. Tippner, 372; Adrienne Harris, “Lives and Deaths,” 298. 15. Hemment, Youth Politics, 29. 16. Tippner, “Girls in Combat,” 371. 17. Marja Sorvari, “On the Margins and Beyond: Girl Protagonists in Novels by Svetlana Vasilenko, Dina Rubina, and Elena Chizhova,” Russian Review 77, no. 2 (2018): 281. For more on Vasilenko’s life and works, see Helena Goscilo, “Editor’s Introduction: Zone, Ozone, Blood, and Ascending Hope,” in Shamara and Other Stories, by Svetlana Vasilenko, ed. Helena Goscilo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), xi–xxii. 18. Benjamin M. Sutcliffe, The Prose of Life: Russian Women Writers from Khrushchev to Putin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 101. As several critics have observed, the character of Ganna-Nadka, as well as the novella’s title, also resonates with an important Russian Orthodox and cultural figure, the “fool for Christ” or “holy fool” (iurodyvyi). Inspiring their own category of vita, holy fools were margin­ alized figures—peripatetic, homeless, often unclothed—who exhibited symptoms of madness; their mental derangement was seen as a sign of a direct link with God. The majority of canonized holy fools are male. The holy fool has inspired a multi­ tude of Russian writers and artists, from Dostoevsky to contemporary filmmakers such as Pavel Lungin (see his 2006 film, The Island). For more on Ganna-Nadka as holy fool, see Svitlana Kobets, “From Fool to Mother to Savior: The Poetics of Rus­ sian Orthodox Christianity and Folklore in Svetlana Vasilenko’s Novel-Vita Little Fool (Durochka),” Slavic and East European Journal 51, no. 1 (2007): 87–110.

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19. Elina Kahla, Life as Exploit: Representations of Twentieth-Century Saintly Women in Russia (Helsinki: Kikimora, 2007), 45. 20. Clark, Soviet Novel, 89; Elizabeth Jones Hemenway, “Mothers of Communists: Women Revolutionaries and the Construction of a Soviet Identity,” in Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 75–92. 21. Kobets, “Fool to Mother,” 90. 22. See, for example, Elena Trofimova, “Mifologemy natsional’nogo v konstru­ irovanii zhenskikh obrazov (proza sovremennykh rossiiskikh pisatel’nits),” ILCEA: Revue de l’Institut des langues et cultures d’Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie 29 (2017): 5–6. Kobets contends that “Little Fool is essentially a work about Russia’s salvation by a woman” (“Fool to Mother,” 87). 23. Kahla, Life as Exploit, 46. 24. Svetlana Vasilenko, Little Fool, trans. Elena V. Prokhorova, in Shamara and Other Stories, ed. Helena Goscilo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 233. All further citations refer to this translation and are noted in the text. I have occasionally modified the translation. Original published in Novyi mir 11 (1998). Vladimir Dubinin, another adolescent hero, was a partisan scout who died in 1942, at the age of fourteen, while clearing land mines. 25. In Soviet children’s literature, it was Gaidar’s fairy tale “Mal’chish-Kibal’chish,” part of his longer work The Military Secret (1934), that contained the first example of a young martyr. After the hero gives his life fighting the bourgeois enemy, a large red f lag is erected over his grave, and his valiant memory is honored by planes that f ly overhead and ships that swim past. The work is significant because it outlines the manner in which young martyrs should be posthumously commemorated and celebrated. I am grateful to Marina Balina for this insight. Gaidar, Voennaia taina, 133–266. 26. Eva Rapoport, “Mif o pionerakh-geroiakh: Sovetskie mucheniki,” Chastnyi korrespondent, November 30, 2009, http://www.chaskor.ru/article/mif_o_pionerah­ geroyah_12938. 27. For a more detailed discussion of the Stalinist body, see Keith A. Livers, Constructing the Stalinist Body (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 28. Catriona Kelly, “‘Menia sama zhizn’ k zhizni podgotovila’: Podrostkovyi voz­ rast v stalinskoi kul’ture,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 1 (2013), http://magazines. russ.ru/nlo/2013/119/k10.html. 29. Thea Margaret Durfee, “Cement and How the Steel Was Tempered: Variations on the New Soviet Woman,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Lit­ erature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 92. 30. Clark, Soviet Novel, 15–24. 31. Catriona Kelly writes that the Bolsheviks connected children with the “phys­ ical sphere,” allowing them entrance “to the Bolshevik heaven only if they were purified and inculcated in reasonable modes of thought and in ascetic, self-denying modes of behavior. The drive to propagandize hygiene in children . . . was also a form of externally imposed discipline, a means of control over a population whose lack of ability to regulate its own physical needs was sensed as potentially trouble­ some.” See Kelly, “Shaping the ‘Future Race’: Regulating the Daily Life of Children

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in Early Soviet Russia,” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 258. 32. Tippner, “Girls in Combat,” 380. 33. Kelly, Comrade Pavlik, 186. 34. Andrei Shcherbenok, “Psikhika bez psikhologii: ‘Zoia,’ ideologiia i stalinskoe kino-prostranstvo,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 6 (2013), http://magazines.russ. ru/nlo/2013/124/9sh.html; Zoia, dir. Lev Arnshtam, Soiuzdetfil’m, 1944. 35. Adrienne Harris, “Lives and Deaths,” 293. 36. The scene where men “fell on Ganna on all sides. . . . The fellows held her arms and legs. She lay on the snow as if crucified” is interrupted, but the narrative does not conclusively exclude the possibility that Ganna was raped (219). The char­ acter of Ganna-Nadka also recalls Stinking Lizaveta from Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, another vulnerable, mute female holy fool who is violated. 37. Sorvari argues that Ganna-Nadka’s muteness “indicates the rejection of speech and reason in a society that does not believe in the existence of soul or spirit” (“Margins and Beyond,” 282). For more on the literary uses of aphasia in Vasilenko’s work, in comparison with another work of contemporary prose, Elena Chizhova’s novel Time of Women (2009), see Sorvari. 38. Adrienne Harris, “Lives and Deaths,” 295. 39. The name Marat recalls another well-known Soviet adolescent hero from World War II: Marat Kazei, a partisan fighter who died battling the Nazis at the age of fourteen. 40. Vasilenko, “O sebe,” Russkii pereplet, accessed February 1, 2021, http://www. pereplet.ru/avtori/vasil.html. 41. Prokhorova’s translation idiomatically but imprecisely renders po-liudski as “a nice burial.” 42. Tippner, “Girls in Combat,” 372. 43. Jonathan Brooks Platt, “Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia mezhdu istrebleniem i zhertvo-prinosheniem,” trans. Ol’ga Mikhailova, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 6 (2013), http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2013/124/8p.html. 44. Evgeny Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti: Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenii (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1993), 171–77. Quoted in Tippner, “Girls in Com­ bat,” 376. 45. Quoted in Kelly, Comrade Pavlik, 183. 46. Rosalinde Sartorti, “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints,” in Cul­ ture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 190–91. 47. Sartorti, 186. 48. For more on the film’s reception, see Lena Doubivko, “No Nailing Fins to the Floor: Ambivalent Femininities in Anna Melikian’s The Mermaid,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 5 (2011): 255–76; Rusalka [Mermaid], dir. Anna Melikian, Central Partnership and Magnum, 2007. 49. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 203. 50. Hemment, Youth Politics, 29. 51. Olga Mesropova, “‘The Discreet Charm of the Russian Bourgeoisie’: OKsana Robski and Glamour in Russian Popular Literature,” Russian Review 68, no. 1 (2009): 91.

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52. Veronika Chernysheva, “Zhestkoe i zhenskoe tvorchestvo,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, May 17, 2007, https://www.ng.ru/culture/2007-05-17/11_kinotavr.html; Andrei Plakhov, “Kirill Serebrennikov: Yuriev Day (Iur’ev Den’, 2008),” Kinokultura 22 (2008), http://www.kinokultura.com/2008/22r-yuriev-ap.shtml. 53. Helena Goscilo, “Watery Maidens: Rusalki as Sirens and Slippery Signs,” in Poetics, Self, Place: Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone, ed. Catherine O’Neil, Nicole Boudreau, and Sarah Krive (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2007), 63. 54. Burt, Forms of Youth, 138. 55. Burt, 213. 56. Doubivko, “No Nailing Fins,” 264. See Doubivko, 268, for a more detailed analysis of the relationship between Alisa and her mother. 57. Burt, Forms of Youth, 16. 58. Her physical vulnerability is highlighted when she is caught up in a riot that breaks out after a soccer game, leading to the destruction of her telephone costume. Another element linking the two protagonists is muteness: Alisa stops talking at the age of six and only recovers her ability to speak after she meets Sasha. 59. Lyudmila Parts argues that, in the contemporary Russian cultural imagi­ nary, Moscow has acquired the negative characteristics, such as greed, avarice, and immorality, previously associated with Western capitals. This image of Moscow as an “Occidental city of sin” accords with Melikian’s cinematic representation. See Parts, In Search of the True Russia: The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), 109–14. 60. Larissa Rudova, “‘Who’s the Fairest of Them All?’: Beauty and Femininity in Contemporary Russian Adolescent Girl Fiction,” Russian Review 73, no. 3 ( July 2014): 396. 61. Mariia Litovskaia, “Naturalness as the Mask of ‘Genuine Femininity’ in the Reading Materials of Post-Soviet Girls and Teenagers,” in Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers, ed. Urszula Chowaniec, Ursula Phillips, and Marja Rytkönen (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 210–11. 62. Lanoux, “Laundry, Potatoes,” 414, 407. Melikian’s 2014 film The Star (Zvezda), Magnum and Mars Media Entertainment, which features a teenage girl who com­ pulsively undergoes plastic surgery, delves further into the topic of adolescence and beauty ideals in contemporary Russia. 63. Henrike Schmidt, “Happy End,” Art Margins Online, April 30, 2009, http:// www.artmargins.com/index.php/henrike-schmidt-happy-end. 64. Schmidt. 65. Nikolai Aleksandrov, “Zhitie iazikom romana,” Druzhba narodov 5 (1999), http://magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/1999/5/aleksan.html. 66. Mesropova, “Discreet Charm,” 93. 67. Theodor H. Gaster, “Myth and Story,” in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 112–13. 68. As Juliane Fuerst has detailed, “The desire of the young post-war generation to match its predecessors was acute.” She cites one particularly dramatic example of a young girl who hurt herself with safety pins trying to be like Zoia. See Fuerst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 297. 69. Sartorti, “Heroes, Heroines, and Saints,” 187.

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70. Schmidt, “Happy End.” 71. Evgeny Dobrenko, “Recycling of the Soviet,” in Russian Literature since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 33–34. 72. Quoted in Alexei Yurchak, “Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cos­ monauts, and Other Soviet Heroes Born Today,” in What Is Soviet Now? Identities, Legacies, Memories, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon Jr. (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008), 265. Yurchak also details how Soviet symbols, such as Iurii Gagarin and the space program, were “made relevant for the post-Soviet, future-oriented youth cul­ ture” in rave parties of the late 1980s and early 1990s. See Yurchak, “Gagarin and the Rave Kids: Transforming Power, Identity, and Aesthetics in Post-Soviet Nightlife,” in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev, ed. Adele Marie Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 95. 73. Hemment, Youth Politics, 29. 74. Dar’ia Gritsaenko, “Vzroslenie dushi: Aleksei Varlamov napisal ‘utopiiu’ o Sovetskom Soiuze,” Tat’ianin den’, June 19, 2018, http://www.taday.ru/text/2230584. html. 75. Aleksei Varlamov, Dusha moia Pavel (Moscow: Isdatel’stvo ACT, 2018), 117. 76. Varlamov, 280–81. 77. Olga Maeots, “A Hero of Our Time, Seen by the Children of Perestroika,” Russian Studies in Literature 52, no. 2 (2016): 155–58. 78. Adrienne Harris, “Lives and Deaths,” 299–302. Chapter 2. Adolescence as Nightmare

1. Nikita Kartsev, “Dmitrii Astrakhan snial shokiruiuschii fil’m o detdomovtsakh,” Moskovskii komsomolets, April 5, 2013, https://www.mk.ru/culture/2013/04/05/837048­ dmitriy-astrahan-snyal-shokiruyuschiy-film-o-detdomovtsah.html; Detochki, dir. Dmitrii Astrakhan, Belorusfil’m, 2012. Astrakhan (b. 1957) has been a well-established figure in the Russian cinema industry for several decades. He has directed several dozen films, including such popular works from the 1990s as the melodrama Everything Will Be Ok [Vse budet khorosho] and the science fiction fantasy The Fourth Planet [Chetvertaia planeta], both from 1995. 2. Dmitrii Astrakhan, “‘Detochki’—eto fil’m-preduprezhdeniie,” interview by Elizaveta Simbirskaia, Snob, April 25, 2013, https://snob.ru/selected/entry/59664. Michael Brodski argues that it was Sergei Bodrov Jr.’s directorial debut, the 2001 film Sisters (Sestry), that introduced into Russian film the notion that “the innocent child and violent self-defense are compatible.” He identifies Kids as an extreme example of this combination. See Brodski, “The Figure of the Child as a Contradictory Signifier in Contemporary Russian Cinema,” in The Child in World Cinema, ed. Debbie Olson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 222–23, 228. 3. Evgenii Margolit, “Vozvrashchenie zritelia?” Seans, April 4, 2013, https:// seance.ru/articles/detochki_astrahan/. 4. RIA-Novosti, “Rossiianku priznali luchshim pisatelem-fantastom Evropy,” July 24, 2018, https://ria.ru/20180724/1525189861.html; Anna Starobinets, “Pishut, chto dali premiiu za to, chto Rossiiu nenavizhu,” interview by Svetlana Reiter, BBCRussian Service, July 26, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-44964400.

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5. For more on this work, see Anna Starobinets, “Gore ne beskonechno, kak ni koshchunstvenno eto ne zvuchit,” interview by Ekaterina Krongauz, Meduza, February 6, 2017, https://meduza.io/feature/2017/02/06/gore-ne-beskonechno-kak­ ni-koschunstvenno-eto-zvuchit. 6. The work’s Russian title, “Perekhodnyi vozrast,” is more literally rendered as “A Transitional Age.” I have retained the translator’s idiomatic phrasing throughout my analysis, and I discuss its shortcomings later in this chapter. 7. All citations are to Anna Starobinets, “An Awkward Age,” trans. Hugh Aplin, in An Awkward Age (London: Hesperus, 2010), 65–124, and are noted in the text. I have occasionally modified the translation. Original in Starobinets, “Perekhnodnyi vozrast,” in Perekhnodnyi vozrast (Moscow: Limbus Press, 2005), 7–75. 8. May Berenbaum, “On the Lives of Insects in Literature,” in Insect Poetics, ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 4. 9. For an example from the medical literature, see Daniel P. Krowchuk, “Ado­ lescence: A Metamorphosis,” North Carolina Medical Journal 71, no. 4 ( July–August 2010): 355–57. 10. Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-Monstrous,” in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 127–59. 11. Creed, 148; Stephen Burt, Forms of Youth, 213. 12. On the prominence of disgusting imagery in contemporary Russian chil­ dren’s thrillers, see Inna Sergienko, “‘Horror’ Genres in Modern Russian Children’s Literature,” Russian Studies in Literature 52, no. 2 (2016): 184–85. 13. Creed, “Horror and Carnivalesque,” 136. 14. Olga Matich, “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009): 284–85. The critic and writer Alisa Ganieva argues that the entire work is structured around the reaction of disgust that it elicits in the reader. She extends this observation to encompass much of Starobinets’s oeuvre, asserting that the “protagonist who separates him- or herself from society through a barrier of disgust” represents a recurrent motif in many works. See Ganieva, “I skuchno i grustno: Motivy izgoistva i otchuzhdeniia v sovremennoi proze,” Novyi mir, no. 3 (2007), https://magazines.gorky.media/novyi_mi/2007/3/i-skuchno-i­ grustno.html. 15. Although not about food in the technical sense, another disgusting moment involving ingestion occurs in the dream Maksim has shortly after that fateful August walk in the woods. While at school, he “really wanted to do a poo and I did one. And then I looked and saw that some thing strange had come out. Lots of little brite balls. And then I really felt hungry and I ate some of the balls” (104). 16. Creed, “Horror and Carnivalesque,” 136, 151. 17. Una Chaudhuri argues that part of what makes insects terrifying for human beings is their f louting of the territorial boundaries that “we guard most obses­ sively,” including the “skin that encases our bodies.” See Chaudhuri, “Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality,” Theatre Journal 65, no. 3 (2013): 323. 18. Eric C. Brown, “Introduction: Reading the Insect,” in Insect Poetics, ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii.

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19. Brown, xii. 20. The section titles throughout the story correspond to the ages of Vika and Maksim (“8,” “12,” “16,” etc.). 21. See Nicky Coutts, “Portraits of the Nonhuman: Visualizations of the Malevolent Insect,” in Insect Poetics, ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 299. 22. Brown, “Reading the Insect,” xii–xiii. 23. Charlotte Sleigh, “Inside Out: The Unsettling Nature of Insects,” in Insect Poetics, ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 292–93. 24. Maurice Maeterlinck, quoted in Sleigh, 289. 25. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans were increasingly concerned that their boys had grown degenerate. See Kenneth B. Kidd, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 60. 26. Creed, “Horror and Carnivalesque,” 133. 27. Annette Wannamaker, Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Mascu­ linity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (New York: Routledge, 2008), 31, 72. 28. See, for example, Ol’ga Lebedushkina, “Nasha novaia gotika: O chudesakh i uzhasakh v sovremennoi proze,” Druzhba narodov, no. 11 (2008), http://magazines. russ.ru/druzhba/2008/11/le21.html. 29. The translation misses some of the precision of this allusion by translating mysli (thoughts) as “things.” 30. Creed, “Horror and Carnivalesque,” 146. 31. Creed, 145. 32. For a more detailed discussion of the introduction of the “dangerous, delin­ quent, and revolting teenager” into Soviet cinema, see Klimova, “Soviet Youth Films,” 305–8. On the comparisons with Pliumbum, see Irina Liubarskaya, “Retsenziia na fil’m ‘Zhestokost’,’” Film.ru, December 4, 2007, https://www.film.ru/articles/ devochka-vika-na-kryshe-sidela. 33. Vse umrut, a ia ostanus’ [Everybody Dies but Me], dir. Valeriia Gai Germanika, NTV Profit, 2008; Mukha [Fly], dir. Vladimir Kott, Paradiz, 2008; Skazhi Leo [Say Leo], dir. Leonid Rybakov, Central Partnership, 2008; Synok [Sonny], dir. Larisa Sadilova, Arsi-Film, 2009; Ia [I Am], dir. Igor’ Voloshin, Argument Kino, 2009. 34. Devstvennost’ [Virginity], dir. Vitalii Manskii, Kino bez granits, 2008. 35. Quoted in Lidia Kuz’mina, “Baryshnia Mest’: ‘Zhestokost’,’ rezhisser Marina Liubakova,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 1 ( January 2008), https://old.kinoart.ru/archive/ 2008/01/n1-article7. 36. Dar’ia Goriacheva, “Uvidet’ Litvinovu i uiti v daun: ‘Zhestokost’’ Mariny Liubakovoi,” Gazeta.ru, December 4, 2007, https://www.gazeta.ru/culture/2007/12/ 04/a_2383241.shtml. 37. Chris Richards, “Hard Candy, Revenge, and the ‘Aftermath’ of Feminism: ‘A Teenage Girl Doesn’t Do This,’” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 7, no. 1 (Summer 2015): 42–61; Zhestokost’ [Cruelty], dir. Marina Liubakova, Pavel Lungin Studio and BFG Media Production, 2007. 38. Zoia is a common name in Russian and does not suggest any connection with Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia, discussed in the previous chapter.

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39. Hollinger, Company of Women, 122. Hollinger dates the association of the women’s friendship film with violence to the early 1990s; see Company of Women, chap. 4. 40. Hollinger, 124. 41. Hollinger, 207. Hollinger identifies the “anti-female friendship film” as a “short-lived response to the politically challenging association of female friendship and violence found in such films as Thelma and Louise,” 242. 42. Burt, Forms of Youth, 213. 43. Burt, 16. 44. Olga Klimova, “Marina Liubakova: Cruelty (Zhestokost’, 2007),” Kinokultura 20 (2008), http://www.kinokultura.com/2008/20r-cruelty.shtml. 45. Hollinger, Company of Women, 15. 46. Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 47. Anne Eakin Moss, Only among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019). 48. Moss, 2. 49. Quoted in Nikita Kartsev, “Litvinova isobrazila zhertvu,” Moskovskii komso­ molets, August 30, 2007. 50. Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,” in The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory, trans. Nancy K. Anderson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 135–42. 51. Klimova argues that “Vika represents a new generation of young people who have easily adapted to the changing economic conditions in contemporary Moscow and who have won the battle with the previous generation over financial power.” See Klimova, “Marina Liubakova.” 52. Kombinat Nadezhda [Hope Factory], dir. Natalia Meshchaninova, Focus Plus Cinema, 2014; Klass korrektsii [Corrections Class]; Dachniki [Blueberry Fields Forever], dir. Alexander Vartanov, Blancache Production, 2016. Vartanov’s film was originally titled in English but given the alternative title of Dachniki for a Russian audience. The film’s screenplay was cowritten by writer and dramatist Iurii Klavdiev and is based on motifs from several of his works. 53. Molly Flynn, Witness Onstage: Documentary Theatre in Twenty-First-Century Russia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020), 161. 54. Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt, “Introduction: Drama against ‘Theater’ and Theater after Drama,” in New Russian Drama: An Anthology, ed. Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), xxix. 55. For a useful overview of the Serebrennikov case, see Ulrich Schmid, “Kirill Serebrennikov and the Changing Russian Politics of Culture,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 228 (2018): 2–5; Ivan Nechepurenko, “Russia Frees Director after Nearly 20 Months of House Arrest,” New York Times, April 8, 2019. 56. The play, titled The Martyr/The Student [(M)uchenik)], was adapted by Sere­ brennikov from the German original by Marius von Mayenburg, which debuted in Berlin in 2012. The subsequent film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, winning the Prix François Chalais, an award that recognizes films for their topicality

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and contemporary resonance. See Otto Boele, “Kirill Serebrennikov: The Student (Uchenik, 2016),” Kinokultura 55 (2017), http://www.kinokultura.com/2017/55r­ uchenik.shtml; Uchenik [The Student], dir. Kirill Serebrennikov, Hype Film, 2016. 57. See the overview of critical responses provided in Elena Moreland, “Totali­ tarianism of Religion: Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student (2016) and Russia’s Right Turn” (master’s thesis, University of Colorado-Boulder, 2018), 27–29. The fictional character of Venia bears a resemblance to the far-right Orthodox activist Dmit­ rii Enteo (b. 1989). I am grateful to Ilia Kukulin for drawing my attention to this correspondence. 58. Iaroslav Zabulaev, “Retsensiia: ‘Uchenik’ Kirilla Serebrennikova,” Hollywood Reporter: russkoe izdaniie, October 14, 2016, http://thr.ru/cinema/recenzia-ucenik­ kirilla-serebrennikova/. 59. Kirill Serebrennikov, “Ekstremism ot pofigisma, press-konferentsiia o fil’me Uchenik,” interview, Iskusstvo kino 6 (2016): 25. 60. Gaster, “Myth and Story,” 113. 61. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 91. 62. Serebrennikov does introduce some doubt about the success of this rejec­ tion: Venia does not immediately or convincingly evade the kisses of a female classmate. 63. Michel Cieutat, “Entretien avec Kirill Serebrennikov: De l’aliénation reli­ gieuse comme mal de vivre,” Positif 669 (November 2016): 26. 64. In her review of the film, the critic Arina Kholina expresses disbelief that, especially in a provincial setting, Venia and his “foolish mother” do not provoke more skepticism from the school authorities. See Kholina, “Muchenik Kirilla Sere­ brennikova, fil’m,” Snob, September 13, 2016, https://snob.ru/profile/9723/blog/ 113540. 65. Serebrennikov, “Ekstremism ot pofigisma,” 29. Serebrennikov also notes that this character was altered significantly from the stage version, becoming more ref lective about her fate and more sympathetic toward Elena in the film. 66. The production ends with Elena’s monologue, which was significantly shortened in the film version. Elena’s abjection is thus mitigated in the theatrical production, giving her the last word in an auditorium filled with audience members. 67. Several critics have noted the work’s Dostoevskian motifs. See, for example, Iurii Gladil’shchikov, “Rozhdeniie chernorubashechnika: Fil’m nedeli—‘Uchenik,’” Forbes, October 17, 2016, https://www.forbes.ru/uvlecheniya/330803-rozhdenie­ chernorubashechnika-film-nedeli-uchenik. 68. Minkova, Making Martyrs, 140. 69. Minkova, 10. 70. Kahla, Life as Exploit, 45. 71. Serebrennikov refers to Grisha as “one of the most, if not the most, impor­ tant characters of the film,” who represents the many adolescents, especially those discovering their homosexuality, who can find no place in contemporary Russian society and end their lives in suicide. See Serebrennikov, “Ekstremism ot pofigisma,” 25. For a compelling documentary about LGBT youth in Russia, see Kids 404 (Deti 404), dir. Askold Kurov and Pavel Loparev, 2014. 72. Quoted in Aleksandr Vartanov, “Kak khardkornoe russkoe kino sovpalo s tragediei s pskovskimi shkol’nikami,” interview by Maksim Sukhoguzov, AfishaDaily,

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November 21, 2016, https://daily.afisha.ru/cinema/3647-kak-hardkornoe-russkoe­ kino-sovpalo-s-tragediey-s-pskovskimi-shkolnikami/. On the tragedy in Pskov, see Polina Eremenko, “‘Pit’ i ubegat’’: Reportazh s pokhoron pskovskikh Bonni i Klaida,” Snob, November 18, 2016, https://snob.ru/selected/entry/116768/. 73. Julie A. Cassiday argues that Everybody Dies but Me depicts the three adolescent female protagonists’ “violent sacrifice of self ” as an initiation into womanhood, one that symbolizes their transformation into model citizens of the post-Soviet Rus­ sian state. See Julie A. Cassiday, “Sacrifice and Self in Everybody Dies but Me,” in The ‘Other’ Martyrs: Women and the Poetics of Sexuality, Sacrifice, and Death in World Literatures, ed. Alireza Korangy and Leyla Rouhi (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019), 31. Chapter 3. Violent Imaginings

1. Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky’s formative study of New Drama is titled Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2009). See also Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Wey­ gandt, “Introduction,” xx. An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Imag­ ining Adolescence in Selected Works of New Russian Drama,” Modern Language Review 113, no. 1 ( January 2018): 194–220. 2. Stephenson, Gangs of Russia, 226–27. 3. Maia Mamaladze, “Teatr katastraficheskogo soznaniia: O p’esakh-filosofskikh skazkakh Viacheslava Durnenkova na fone teatral’nikh mifov vokrug ‘novoi dramy,’” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 3 (2005), http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2005/73/ mama28.html; Hanukai and Weygandt, “Introduction,” xxv–xxvi. 4. Hanukai and Weygandt, “Introduction,” xv, xvii. 5. J.A.E. Curtis, “The Politics of Theatre: ‘New Drama’ in Russian, across PostSoviet Borders and Beyond,” in Transnational Russian Studies, ed. Andy Byford, Con­ nor Doak, and Stephen Hutchings (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 169, 179. Curtis details how political events, such as the annexation of Crimea, have complicated relations between Ukrainian and Russian theater practitioners, prompt­ ing Ukrainian playwrights such as Natalia Vorozhbit to reconsider their use of the Russian language. 6. Hanukai and Weygandt, “Introduction,” xxvii; Curtis, “Politics of Theatre,” 171–72; J.A.E. Curtis, “Introduction: Recent Developments in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Drama,” in New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, ed. J.A.E. Curtis (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 17. On documentary theater and Teatr.doc, see Flynn, Witness Onstage. For a lucid overview of the origins of New Drama and recent trends in its development, see Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu, “The Story of Russian-Language Drama since 2000: PostDoc, the Postdramatic and Teatr Post,” in New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, ed. J.A.E. Curtis (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 23–40. 7. Hanukai and Weygandt, “Introduction,” xxvii. 8. Elena Koval’skaia, quoted in Susanna Weygandt, “The Structure of Plas­ ticity: Resistance and Accommodation in Russian New Drama,” TDR: The Drama Review 60, no. 1 (2016): 125. Sigarev’s 2001 play, Bozh’i korovki vozvrashchaiutsia na

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zemliu (translated by Sasha Dugdale as Ladybird), about a group of provincial youths who pilfer gravestones out of economic desperation, also fits into this category. See Sigarev, Ladybird, trans. Sasha Dugdale (London: Nick Hern, 2004); original avail­ able at Sigarev’s website, http://vsigarev.ru/text.html. Some of the other plays by New Dramatists featuring adolescent characters include Techniques of Breathing in an Airlocked Space (2005) by Natalia Moshina, an episodic play that features two teenagers dying of cancer; and Galka Motalko (2001) by Vorozhbit, about adolescent girls living in the dormitory of a sports training institute. Both plays are available through the online Teatral’naia biblioteka Sergeia Efimova: Moshina’s play, Tekhnika dykhaniia v bezvozdushnom prostranstve, is at https://theatre-library.ru/authors/m/ moshina_nataliya, and Vorozhbit’s is at https://theatre-library.ru/authors/v/ vorozhbit. 9. Neumann, Communist Youth League, 7; Kent Baxter, “On Coming of Age,” in Critical Insights: Coming of Age, ed. Kent Baxter (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013), 13; Douvan and Adelson, Adolescent Experience, 229; Lesko, Act Your Age!, 91. 10. Irina Denezhkina’s popular collection of stories featuring teenage protago­ nists, Give Me!, published in 2002 and written when she was twenty years old, is also interesting to examine from this vantage point. See Denezhkina, Dai mne! (Saint Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2005). For more on this work, see Matthias Schwartz, “Everything Feels Bad: Figurations of the Self in Contemporary Eastern Euro­ pean Literature,” in Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context, ed. Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 145–60. 11. Carolyn Salvi, “Scenes of Instruction, Scenes of Seduction: Figurations of Adolescence on the Late Twentieth-Century Stage” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2011), 5. 12. I. M. Bolotian, “‘Novaia drama’ kak teatral’no-dramaturgicheskoe dvizhe­ nie,” in Noveishaia russkaia drama i kul’turnyi kontekst, ed. S. P. Lavlinskii and I. V. Pod­ kovyrin (Kemerovo: Kemerovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2010), 38–41. As Boris Wolfson has observed, “The extent to which self-sufficiency as literary artifacts mat­ tered to the creation of New Drama texts has varied greatly.” He usefully identifies two extremes in categorizing the texts—“hyper-literary” and “post-literary”—with the former characterized by “extensive narrative stage directions in the manner of Shaw or O’Neill and dialogue in the tradition of Russian literary skaz, whose textual sovereignty, on a page, seems unassailable”; and the latter exemplified by the verba­ tim works of Teatr.doc striving to “preserve the ‘roughness’ of the interviews and documents from which they were composed.” The plays I discuss here fall squarely along the “hyper-literary” end of the spectrum. See Boris Wolfson, “New Drama,” in Russian Literature since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 269. 13. As John Neubauer summarizes, “The treatment of the imagination is a touchstone for studies on adolescence.” See Neubauer, Culture of Adolescence, 148. 14. Spacks, Adolescent Idea, 228, 230. 15. Quoted in Neubauer, Culture of Adolescence, 148. 16. Neubauer, 149–50, 153. 17. Rachel Devlin, Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 30. 18. Julia Kristeva, “Adolescence, a Syndrome of Ideality,” trans. Michael Marder and Patricia I. Vieira, Psychoanalytic Review 94, no. 5 (October 2007): 716, 717.

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19. Kristeva, 720. 20. Kristeva, 721. 21. Before his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-seven, Vygotsky produced numerous foundational texts—such as Thinking and Speech (1934)—that have exerted a significant inf luence on the fields of psychology and sociology as well as on educational theory and practice. His work remained banned and largely unknown in the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death; the publication of translations of his works in the late 1970s and 1980s led to a surge of popularity among Western scientists and educational practitioners that continues to the present day. Vygotsky emphasized the centrality of social processes in the development of higher mental functioning, the key role that culture plays in shaping those processes, and the importance of language for the growth of cognitive awareness. A deeply erudite individual, Vygotsky often incorporated analyses of fictional characters into his psychological works. For a useful introduction to his life and works, see, among many others, Harry Daniels, Michael Cole, and James V. Wertsch, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood,” Jour­ nal of Russian and East European Psychology 42, no. 1 (2004): 35. Translation of original Russian text: Voobrazhenie i tvorchestvo v detskom vozraste (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1967). 23. Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity,” 37. 24. Vygotsky, 37, 41. 25. Vygotsky, 88. 26. The New York Times published a profile of Sigarev in conjunction with the staging of one of his plays in New York City. See Ellen Barry, “Wrenching Tales from Russia’s Rust Belt,” New York Times, July 29, 2012. For a discussion of the poetics of place in Sigarev’s dramas, see Jenny Kaminer, “Vasilii Sigarev’s Post-Soviet Dramas of the Provincial Grotesque,” Russian Review 75, no. 3 ( July 2016): 477–97. 27. Vassily Sigarev, Plasticine, trans. Sasha Dugdale, Theater 34, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 74. All further references are to this translation and are noted in the text. I have occasionally modified the translation. Original in Sigarev, Plastilin, in Zhit’: P’esy i stsenarii (Ekaterinburg: Zhurnal “Ural,” 2012), 9–64. The texts of all of Sig­ arev’s works can also be found on his website, http://vsigarev.ru. For a discussion of some of the autobiographical elements found in the play, see Ivana Ryčlova, “Detstvo v p’ese Plastilin Vasiliia Sigareva kak obraz orkruzhaiushchego nas mira,” in Poésie et Théâtre, ed. Isabelle Després (Grenoble, France: Ellug, 2008), 87–98. 28. John B. Lyon, Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self: Violence and Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2006), 130. 29. Neubauer, Culture of Adolescence, 150. 30. A similar dynamic is also evoked in scene 8, where Maksim encounters a bride who forces him to touch her breasts. On the vagina dentata as a motif in fin-de-siècle European art, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin­ de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 294, 310. 31. In Serebrennikov’s well-known production of the play, these menacing female genitalia are replaced by a more lyrical closing image: Maksim and the girl, who had previously appeared onstage in a wheelchair, dance happily, while Maksim’s grandmother summons him for dinner. A recording of the production can be accessed online: Kirill Serebrennikov, dir., “Spektakl’ ‘Plastilin,’” Tsentr Dramaturgii

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i Rezhissury, posted by Vasilii Sigarev, February 16, 2013, YouTube video, 1:39:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-PIHOVNMbQ. 32. Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity,” 36. 33. As Susanna Weygandt observes, the “plastic material in Plasticine expresses the emotions that Maksim’s words cannot.” See Weygandt, “Structure of Plasticity,” 125. Beumers and Lipovetsky identify the phallus as a symbol frequently employed in carnival, arguing that in Plasticine “the constant arousal of the collective body causes a carnival state of the entire world, where the borders between bodies are constantly crossed.” See Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Violence, 156. 34. Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity,” 19. 35. Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Violence, 168; John Freedman, “Contem­ porary Russian Drama: The Journey from Stagnation to a Golden Age,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 3 (2010): 413. 36. Iurii Klavdiev, Sobiratel’ pul’, in Novaia drama, ed. Kristina Matvienko and Elena Koval’skaia (Saint Petersburg: Seans/Amfora, 2008), 249. All subsequent cita­ tions are to this edition and are noted in the text. All translations are my own. Beum­ ers and Lipovetsky argue that in this play Klavdiev “poeticizes violence as a form of youth revolt” (Performing Violence, 170). 37. Neubauer, Culture of Adolescence, 149. 38. Alison Waller, Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 195. An illustrative example of this dynamic from Russian young-adult literature can be found in Ekaterina Murashova’s 2004 novel Corrections Class, where the hero, a boy with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair, has the ability to transport himself to a parallel world where his physical limitations disappear and his wishes are granted. 39. Brian Eugenio Herrera, “I was a Teenaged Fabulist: The dark play of Adoles­ cent Sexuality in U.S. Drama,” Modern Drama 53, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 333. 40. This observation resonates with Bolotian’s designation of the plays of New Drama as “universal texts.” 41. Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity,” 67, 69, 36. 42. For an exploration of the dramaturgical significance of paternal absence in European and American drama, see Paul Rosefeldt, The Absent Father in Modern Drama (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). On fatherhood in film, see Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova, eds., Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 43. Beumers and Lipovetsky argue that in Plasticine “major events occur pre­ cisely when the border between private and public spaces is blurred,” such as when a female teacher enters the boy’s toilet, an observation that applies equally to The Bullet Collector. See Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Violence, 156. 44. Quoted in Neubauer, Culture of Adolescence, 148. 45. As historian Oleg Kharkhordin explains, “After being victims for six to twelve months, recruits themselves became perpetrators of brutal violence (those who refused to beat were themselves beaten by still elder soldiers) and perhaps even came to accept it by the end of their service as a natural order of things. The army thus functioned as the largest Soviet resocialization agency, which instilled unquestioned obedience through communal terror.” See Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 312.

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46. Kharkhordin, 308. This connection is reinforced later during the same scene, when He and Vika overhear adult gangsters punishing one of their own by forcing him to perform oral sex on the gang’s leader. Similarly, in Alexander Vartanov’s film Blueberry Fields Forever, cowritten by Klavdiev, one of the victims of the teen couple’s violent attacks eventually avenges himself on the boy by brutally raping him. Another work of New Drama that places a young male in the midst of a brutal collective is Konstantin Kostenko’s 2003 Claustrophobia (Klaustrophobia), where a mute adoles­ cent boy is nearly raped, terrorized, and eventually murdered by two adult men in a prison cell. The text of Kostenko’s play is available online through Teatral’naia biblioteka Sergeia Efimova, https://theatre-library.ru/authors/k/kostenko. 47. A similar poignancy characterizes Plasticine, particularly in the scenes between Maksim and his grandmother, whose death leaves Maksim completely lacking in adult sympathy or kindness. 48. “Let there always be sunshine / Let there always be sky / Let there always be mama / Let there always be me.” (Pust’ vsegda budet solntse / Pust’ vsegda budet nebo / Pust’ vsegda budet mama / Pust’ vsegda budu ia.) 49. Herrera, “Teenaged Fabulist,” 346. 50. According to the Russian criminal code, the age of criminal responsibility is sixteen—or fourteen for serious crimes such as homicide. See Russian Federation, Federal Law no. 64-FZ: part I, section II, chapter 4, adopted by the State Duma, May 24, 1996, http://www.russian-criminal-code.com/PartI/SectionII/Chapter4. html. The protagonist had already affirmed this idea in an earlier exchange with Vika when, in response to her query about the inspiration for his f lorid and dramatic tales, he replies, “It doesn’t cost anything to make things up if you’re planning on experiencing all of it” (278). 51. See Praktika Theater, “Sobiratel’ pul’,” accessed February 15, 2019, http://10. praktikatheatre.ru/materials/?show=22 (site discontinued). 52. See Iaroslava Pulinovich, “U dramaturgii zhenskoe litso,” interview by Anna Matveeva, God literatury, September 14, 2017, available at https://godliter atury.ru/public-post/slavina-mechta-yaroslava-pulinovich-i-an. 53. On the emergence of the “bad mother” as a recurring motif in Russian chil­ dren’s literature after the end of the Soviet Union, see Andrea Lanoux, “Bad Mothers in Russian Children’s Literature after 1991: Alcoholism, Neglect, and the Problem of Post-Socialist Realism,” in Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures: From the Bad to the Blasphemous, ed. Yana Hashamova, Beth Holmgren, and Mark Lipovetsky (New York: Routledge, 2017), 143–61. 54. Iaroslava Pulinovich, The Natasha Plays, trans. John Freedman, Theatre Jour­ nal, 62, no. 3 (October 2010): 422. All future citations are to this translation and are included in the text. I have occasionally modified the translation. Original Rus­ sian text published in Ural, no. 6 (2008) and available at http://magazines.russ.ru/ ural/2008/6/pu4.html. The play premiered in 2009 at the Saratov TIUZ (Theater for Young Audiences) and was staged later that year in Moscow at the Center for Playwriting and Directing, directed by Georg Zheno. It holds the distinction of being the first work by a New Dramatist staged at Moscow’s famous Taganka Theater, which mounted a production in spring 2012. Pulinovich wrote a companion piece to Natasha’s Dream titled I Won, another monologue featuring a teenage girl named Natasha, and the two are frequently performed in tandem. For a nuanced reading of

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the two works together, see Mary McAvoy, “Staging Contemporary Russian Teen­ age Femininity in Yaroslava Pulinovich’s Natasha Plays,” Youth Theatre Journal 27, no. 1 (2013): 20–33. A teenage girl and a fall from a window also feature prominently in Denezhkina’s story “Lekha-Rotveiler,” in her collection Give Me! The image of a female tumbling out a window similarly evokes Dostoevsky’s 1876 short story “The Meek One” (Krotkaia). 55. See Anna Banasiukevich, “Takie raznye Natashi v Teatre na Taganke,” RIA novosti, April 22, 2012, http://ria.ru/weekend_theatre/20120422/631969899.html. 56. Rudova, “Who’s the Fairest?,” 396. Popular titles include Western imports such as Elle Girl and Seventeen, as well as some homegrown variations. For a more detailed discussion, see Rudova, 395. For recent research on the experience of girlhood in the postsocialist context, see Olga Zdravomyslova and Elena IarskaiaSmirnova, eds., “Girlhood Studies in Post-Socialist Times,” special issue, Girlhood Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 2015). 57. Rudova, “Who’s the Fairest,” 395. 58. Kristeva, “Adolescence,” 720. 59. Kristeva, 719, 720. 60. Kristeva, 721. 61. Quoted in Lanoux, “Laundry, Potatoes,” 423. McAvoy convincingly argues that the Natasha characters in both monologues (Natasha’s Dream and I Won) “expose the mythology of the Rostova paradigm,” alluding to the heroine of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, who is frequently associated with certain idealized Russian feminine traits. See McAvoy, “Contemporary Russian Teenage Femininity,” 30. 62. Anita Harris, Future Girl, 19. 63. Lanoux, “Laundry, Potatoes,” 407. 64. Lanoux, 414. 65. Quoted in Lanoux, 416. As Julie Hemment adds, “In the era of petroleum wealth and glamour, the [Russian] media, glossy magazines, and TV are full of images of young women, insatiably consuming and pursuing an exhausting set of sexualized strategies as they labor to improve themselves.” See Hemment, Youth Politics, 190. 66. Lanoux, “Laundry, Potatoes,” 416. 67. See Anita Harris, Future Girl, chap. 1, “The ‘Can-Do’ Girl versus the ‘At-Risk’ Girl.” 68. Kristeva, “Adolescence,” 724. 69. Teenage girls acting collectively to commit violence also marks the climax of Vorozhbit’s Galka Motalko. 70. The production was directed by Marina Brusnikina. 71. Anita Harris, Future Girl, 25–26. 72. Schwartz, “Everything Feels Bad,” 155. 73. Tamara Hundorova, “Symptom of the Loser and the Melancholy of the PostSoviet Generation,” in Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context, ed. Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 103. 74. A Soviet-era work, the dissident author Eduard Limonov’s (1943–2020) auto­ biographical novel The Adolescent Savenko (Podrostok Savenko) (1983), contains some of the same elements as those identified in this chapter—teenagers, violence, and

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fantasy—but configured quite differently. The work’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, Eddy, had previously immersed himself in the “perils of dreaminess,” exhibiting a love of fantasizing, daydreaming, and reading, voraciously consuming a wide variety of literature, from guides to tropical plants to adventure books (chap. 3). His mother refers to this period as “paradise lost.” After he is beaten to unconsciousness by a classmate, Eddy decides to leave behind his books, to live in the real world, and to become the strongest and the bravest (chap. 16). He inaugurates this new version of himself by following two girls into the school bathroom and groping them. Thus, an encounter with violence causes the adolescent protagonist to abandon the realm of the imagination and transform himself into an aggressor. See Limonov, Podrostok Savenko (Paris: Sintaksis, 1983). Chapter 4. Specters in the Schoolhouse

1. Anzhelika Artyukh and Justin Wilmes, “Neo-Romanticism and Authorial Myth in the Works of Valeria Gai Germanika,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 14, no. 2 (2020): 186n1. Valeriia Gai Germanika, dir., Shkola [School], Profit and Rus­ sia’s Channel One, 2010. 2. For more on the motivations behind Gai Germanika’s selection, see Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz, Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference (London: Routledge, 2015), 130. Everybody Dies but Me was rec­ ognized with two special prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Building on the success of her feature debut, Gai Germanika has emerged as one of contemporary Russia’s leading filmmakers on both the small and the large screens. Often choosing gritty, envelope-pushing subject matter that shocks and titillates audiences, she cultivates an enfant terrible persona in her media appearances (Artyukh and Wilmes, “NeoRomanticism,” 174). Her other feature films include Yes and Yes (Da i da, 2014) and The Imaginary Wolf (Myslennyi volk, 2019). She directed another serial for Channel One, Brief Guide to a Happy Life (Kratkii kurs schastlivoi zhizni, 2011), which chronicles the adventures of a young, sexually liberated professional woman in Moscow. 3. Artyukh and Wilmes, “Neo-Romanticism,” 186n7; Georgii Mkheidze, “Ne dozhivem do ponedel’nika,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 8 (2010), http://old.kinoart.ru/ archive/2010/08/n8-article20. School debuted on January 11, 2010; each episode was twenty-five minutes in length. It was first broadcast both at 6:20 p.m. and again at 11:30 p.m., with a pause during the Winter Olympics, and was also made available for online streaming. In response to the controversy the show engendered, it was even­ tually pulled from the 6:20 p.m. slot. See Stephen Hutchings, “Serializing National Cohesion: Channel 1’s ‘Shkola’ and the Contradictions of Post-Soviet ‘Consensus Management,’” Russian Review 72, no. 3 ( July 2013): 475. Mkheidze contends that the airing of School allowed Channel One to successfully refute any accusations of conformism or the “varnishing of reality” leveled at the network. 4. Hutchings, “Serializing National Cohesion,” 475. 5. Polit.ru, “Putin prosit ne ustraivat’ isteriku po povodu seriala ‘Shkola,’” Janu­ ary 25, 2010, http://polit.ru/news/2010/01/25/isterika/. 6. Boris Dubin, Intellektual’nye gruppy i simvolicheskie formy (Moscow: Novoe lit­ eraturnoe obozrenie, 2004), 182, quoted in Birgit Beumers, “The Serialisation of

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Culture, or the Culture of Serialisation,” in The Post-Soviet Russian Media: Conf lict­ ing Signals, ed. Birgit Beumers, Stephen Hutchings, and Natalia Rulyova (London: Routledge, 2009), 176. 7. RIA novosti, “Deputat trebuet ob’iasnennii ot ‘Pervogo’ v sviazi s serialom ‘Shkola,’” January 13, 2010, https://ria.ru/culture/20100113/204220264.html. The show elicited critical responses, but had numerous defenders as well. The noted cul­ tural critic Artemii Troitskii, for example, called School “the best product of staterun television of the entire post-Soviet period.” See Troitskii, “Pervyi kanal,” Ekho Moskvy, February 14, 2010, https://echo.msk.ru/blog/troitskiy/656618-echo/. 8. Iurii Bogomolov, “‘Shkola.’ Zvonok na urok istorii,” RIA novosti, January 22, 2010, https://ria.ru/authors/20100122/205785666.html; RIA novosti, “Skandalnyi serial: ‘Shkola’ zhizni ili karikatura na shkol’nuiu zhizn’?,” January 15, 2010, https:// ria.ru/culture/20100115/204684454.html. 9. RIA novosti, “‘Nashi’ namereny ‘postavit’ tochku’ v spore o seriale ‘Shkola,’” January 20, 2010, https://ria.ru/culture/20100120/205510653.html. 10. Julia Vassilieva, “‘Becoming-Girl’ in the New Russian Cinema: Youth and Vale­ ria Gai Germanika’s Films and Television,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 29, no. 1 (2014): 66, 75. In her review of the serial, Masha Boston con­ tends that the show wryly comments on the reality television genre and its “erasure of the border between the real and the fictional.” See Boston, “Valeriia Gai Germanika: School (Shkola, 2010),” Kinokultura 36 (2012), http://www.kinokultura.com/2012/36rr­ school.shtml. Gai Germanika first attracted notice with her 2005 documentary Girls (Devochki), focusing on the interpersonal relationships of a group of teenagers, which received the prize for Best Short at the Kinotavr Film Festival. 11. Joe Crescente, “Valeriia Gai-Germanika: School (Shkola) Episodes 29–69,” Kinokultura 29 (2010), http://www.kinokultura.com/2010/29r-school.shtml. 12. Sergei Grachev, “Valeriia Gai Germanika: ‘Moi fil’m ne o shkole! Ia snimaiu kino o chelovecheskikh,’” Argumenty i fakty, January 20, 2010, http://www.aif.ru/ culture/valeriya_gay_germanika_moy_film_ne_o_shkole_ya_snimayu_kino_o_ chelovecheskih. 13. Among the creative contributors to the serial are several New Dramatists who worked as scriptwriters, including Iury Klavdiev and Natalia Vorozhbit. Rus­ lan Malikov, the director of the Praktika Theater in Moscow, also directed some episodes, as did Natalia Meshchaninova, director of the film The Hope Factory. For more on the connections between School and New Drama, see Ilmira Bolotian, “Tele­ transformatsiia ‘Novoi dramy,’” Oktiabr’, no. 7 (2014), http://magazines.russ.ru/ october/2014/7/12bol.html. 14. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 91–96. Lesko draws on Michel Foucault’s conceptualiza­ tion of the panopticon in formulating her ideas. 15. My analysis adheres to Mikhail Bakhtin’s insistence on “the intrinsic con­ nectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” in a work of art. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 16. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 94. 17. Pamela Thurschwell, “The Ghost Worlds of Modern Adolescence,” in Popu­ lar Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, ed. Maria del Pilar Blanco and

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Esther Peeren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 240. Thurschwell’s discussion focuses on Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World (1998) and the 2001 film based on it, directed by Terry Zwigoff. 18. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 94. Lee Edelman, in his inf luential work No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, identifies “the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unques­ tioned value” and posits “queerness” as the rejection of this futurity. See Edelman, No Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. 19. Daniil Dondurei, “Piar-kontent, kontent-piar. ‘Shkola’ kak obrazets pro­ diuserskogo tvorchestva,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 1 (2010), http://kinoart.ru/archive/ 2010/01/n1-article2. 20. Beumers, “Serialisation of Culture,” 159. 21. In addition, as Dondurei observes, School contains no closing sequence, no listing of the names of actors and roles, thus accentuating its “documentary” feel. Only Gai Germanika’s name appears in the very first frame, thus positioning her as School’s one “author and superstar” (“Piar-kontent, kontent-piar”). 22. The Russian educational system allows students to choose a vocational school at the age of fifteen or to continue for two more years of school, followed by application to enter the university. 23. Hutchings, “Serializing National Cohesion,” 481. 24. Vassilieva, “‘Becoming-Girl,’” 72. 25. Hutchings and Tolz have argued that the serial ultimately “builds support for the symbolic importance of the pedagogue” (Nation, Ethnicity, 133). 26. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 184. 27. For more on the “adolescent moratorium,” see Lesko, 105–6. 28. For a more detailed discussion of how School engages with the “national question,” see Hutchings and Tolz, Nation, Ethnicity, 130–44. 29. Associated Press, “Putin: Soviet Collapse a ‘Genuine Tragedy,’” April 25, 2005, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7632057/ns/world_news/t/putin-soviet-collapse­ genuine-tragedy/. 30. Thurschwell, “Ghost Worlds,” 239. 31. Thurschwell, 245. 32. The discussion of “boycotts” and collective action taken by the group against individual students also echoes Chuchelo [Scarecrow], dir. R. Bykov, Mosfil’m, 1983. 33. Rote memorization and recitation of canonical poetry were standard activ­ ities in Soviet schools. Vitukhnovskaia emerged as a poet in the early 1990s. She acquired notoriety after being arrested in 1994 on drug charges that were widely believed to be fabricated, making her “one of the first victims of the absurdity and arbitrariness of the post-Soviet judiciary system.” See Fenghi, It Will Be Fun, 110. 34. Vassilieva, “‘Becoming-Girl,’” 67. 35. Anita Harris argues that leisure spaces have become the last “surveillance­ free space for youth.” See Harris, Future Girl, 113. 36. This connects her with the teenage protagonists of the Brezhnev-era youth films of Sergei Solov’ev—such as A Hundred Days after Childhood (Sto dnei posle detstva, 1975), The Lifeguard (Spasatel’, 1980), and The Heiress Apparent (Naslednitsa po priamoi, 1982)—who similarly developed their autonomous personalities with the help of prerevolutionary culture. See Klimova, “Soviet Youth Films,” 276. More

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recently, Dar’ia Dotsuk’s young-adult novel Voice (Golos) presents literature as inte­ gral in helping a young girl heal f rom trauma. The work features a sixteen-year-old girl who suffers panic attacks and anxiety after witnessing a terrorist bomb blast on the Moscow subway. She is able to overcome her trauma through reading and discussing literature with a group of other teens. Dar’ia Dotsuk, Golos (Moscow: Samokat, 2017). 37. Bolotian, “Teletransformatsiia.” 38. Hutchings and Tolz, Nation, Ethnicity, 142. 39. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992), 141. 40. Burt, Forms of Youth, 16. As Constance Nathanson writes, “The girl’s pas­ sage from childhood to adulthood has been continually perceived as fraught with danger.” See Nathanson, Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991), 81–82. 41. It also resonates with a pattern of anonymous informing that recurs through­ out the show—another specter of the Soviet past. 42. Driscoll, Girls, 257. For an overview of how the private spaces of girls became an object of study by youth scholars, see Anita Harris, Future Girl, 95. 43. Driscoll, Girls, 261. For more on girls’ “bedroom culture,” see Driscoll, 257–63. 44. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 356. For a discussion of how this triangula­ tion has been configured cinematically, see Michele Aaron, “Cinema and Suicide: Necromanticism, Dead-Already-Ness, and the Logic of the Vanishing Point,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 71–92. 45. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 141. Hutchings argues that the “voyeuristic mode” of the intrusive camcorder featured in earlier episodes links it with “the oppressive state institution.” Therefore, Ania’s appropriation of the camcorder for her suicide message may also be interpreted as an assertion of “the right of the objectified Other to take control of his/her own self-representation” (“Serializing National Cohesion,” 486). 46. Burt, Forms of Youth, 157. 47. As Ariela Mortara and Simona Ironico point out, emos emphasize the “need for authenticity . . . through a search for emotions,” rejecting “the cult of the appear­ ance and fashion’s ephemeral values that underpin contemporary society.” See Mor­ tara and Ironico, “Deconstructing Emo Lifestyle and Aesthetics: A Netnographic Research,” Young Consumers 14, no. 4 (2013): 356–57. 48. Kristen Hatch, “Fille Fatale: Regulating Images of Adolescent Girls,” in Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, ed. Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 163–81. 49. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 142. 50. Bronfen, 142. 51. Pamela Thurschwell, “Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the ‘Case’ of Adoles­ cence,” in A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, ed. Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley, 2014), 172. 52. “Ia ne osushchestvlialsia. Otkazyvalsia. Ne stal./ Byl.” The poem is titled “She Who Doesn’t Understand” (Neponimaiushchaia) and may be read in its entirety at Polutona: Rabochii stol, posted January 16, 2017, https://polutona.ru/?show= 0116214653.

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53. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 185. 54. Litovskaia, “Naturalness,” 202. 55. In a related vein, Stephen Hutchings concludes that despite the controversy the serial generated, it ultimately “contribut[es] to a wider post-Soviet trend toward nostalgia for an idealized Soviet past and reestablishing the Myth of the Child, and of the Teacher, central to Soviet culture, particularly during the Stalin period” (“Serializing National Cohesion,” 480). Conclusion

1. Lurkmore, “Greta Tunberg,” last updated December 25, 2020, https://lurk more.to/Грета_Тунберг; Tisha.Sys, “Gretler,” Pikabu, October 14, 2019, https:// pikabu.ru/story/gretler_6988266. For more on Russian internet memes of Thun­ berg, see Eliot Borenstein, “Hating Greta Thunberg,” Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. online lecture, June 5, 2020, https://jordanrussiacenter.org/event/ russian-internet-memes-the-short-course-part-ten/. 2. Aleksei Naval’nyi, “Naval’nyi: Vse nenavidiat Gretu Tunberg,” posted by Naval’nyi LIVE, September 28, 2019, YouTube video, 24:43, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=Ulz28cp9fJ8. Borenstein convincingly argues that some of the extreme Russian response to Thunberg may be explained by a negative reaction to her Asperger’s syndrome. I am grateful to Borenstein for bringing the phenomenon of Greta hatred to my attention. 3. Dmitrii Bavyrin, “Chem opasna Greta Tunberg,” Vzgliad, October 2, 2019, https://vz.ru/politics/2019/10/2/1000692.html; Vesti, “Anti-Greta vs Greta: Kli­ maticheskii skeptik protiv ekoshizy,” March 1, 2020, https://www.vesti.ru/article/ 1706622; Iulia Latynina, “Pionerka Greta Tunberg,” Novaya gazeta, September 26, 2019, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/09/26/82123-pionerka-greta-tunberg. 4. Iaroslava Kiriukhina, “Greta Tunberg v zerkale rossiiskikh SMI: ‘Ekopsikhoz’ i ‘ekoterrorizm,’” BBC, October 3, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/russian/features­ 49906769. 5. The episode of Leontiev’s show, However (Odnako), referencing Thunberg aired on September 28, 2019. See Mikhail Leont’ev, “Analiticheskaia programma ‘Odnako’ s Mikhailom Leont’evym,” Pervyi kanal, September 28, 2019, https:// www.1tv.ru/news/2019-09-28/373062-analiticheskaya_programma_odnako_s_ mihailom_leontievym; Bavyrin, “Chem opasna Greta Tunberg.” 6. Esch, “Fearless Generation.” 7. Romesburg, “Making Adolescence,” 229–48; Moscow Times, “Russia Plans $63m Military-Patriotic Youth Education Center—RBC,” July 29, 2019, https:// www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/07/29/russia-plans-63m-military-patriotic-youth­ education-center-rbc-a66603. 8. Richard Arnold, “The ‘Russian Columbine’ Shooting in Crimea High­ lights Youth Radicalization, Proliferation of Firearms,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 15, no. 149 (2018), https://jamestown.org/program/the-russian-columbine-shooting­ in-crimea-highlights-youth-radicalization-proliferation-of-firearms/. The news outlet Mediazona conducted an exhaustive investigation into the rise of actual and threat­ ened school shootings in Russia since 2014. See Elizaveta Pestova, “Aktovyi zal, AK dostal. Kratkaia istoriia ‘Kolumbainov’ v Rossii,” Mediazona, December 11, 2020,

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https://zona.media/article/2020/12/11/columbine. On the attack in Khabarovsk, see Kommersant, “V Khabarovske v rezul’tate strel’by v priemnoi FSB pogibli tri che­ loveka,” April 21, 2017, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3279290. On the events in Archangel’sk, see Tat’iana Britskaia, “Vzryv protesta?,” Novaia gazeta, November 1, 2018, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/11/01/78426-vzryv-protesta. 9. Ol’ga Misik, “Druzheliubnaia devushka, chitaiushchaia Konstitutsiiu OMONu,” interview by Irina Kravtsova, Meduza, July 29, 2019, https://meduza. io/feature/2019/07/29/druzhelyubnaya-devushka-chitayuschaya-konstitutsiyu­ omonu. 10. Denis Kurenov, “‘Ne znaiu, pochemu oni takimi vyrosli’: Interv’iu s Andreem Loshakom o geroiakh ego fil’ma ‘Vozrast nesoglasiia,’” Yuga, March 30, 2018, https:// www.yuga.ru/articles/society/8367.html.

FILMOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Filmography

Anton tut riadom [Anton’s Right Here], dir. Liubov’ Arkus, Drugoe kino, 2012.

Brat [Brother], dir. Aleksei Balabanov, STV, 1997.

Brat 2 [Brother 2], dir. Aleksei Balabanov, STV, 2000.

Chuchelo [Scarecrow], dir. Rolan Bykov, Mosfil’m, 1983.

Dachniki [Blueberry Fields Forever], dir. Alexander Vartanov, Blancache Production,

2016. Deti 404 [Kids 404], dir. Askold Kurov and Pavel Loparev, 2014. Detochki [Kids], dir. Dmitrii Astrakhan, Belorusfil’m, 2012. Devstvennost’ [Virginity], dir. Vitalii Manskii, Kino bez granits, 2008. Dorogaia Elena Sergeevna [Dear Elena Sergeevna], dir. El’dar Riazanov, Mosfil’m, 1988. Ia [I Am], dir. Igor’ Voloshin, Argument Kino, 2009. Klass korrektsii [Corrections Class], dir. Ivan Tverdovskii, A Company, 2014. Kombinat Nadezhda [Hope Factory], dir. Natalia Meshchaninova, Focus Plus Cinema, 2014. Legko li byt’ molodym? [Is it Easy to Be Young?], dir. Iuris Podnieks, Rizhskaia kinostu­ diia, 1986. Maksim Perepelitsa, dir. Anatolii Granik, Lenfil’m, 1955. Malen’kaia Vera [Little Vera], dir. Vasilii Pichul, Gorky Film Studio, 1988. Molodaia gvardiia [The Young Guard], dir. Sergei Gerasimov, Gorky Film Studio, 1948. Mukha [Fly], dir. Vladimir Kott, Paradiz, 2008. Naslednitsa po priamoi [The Heiress Apparent], dir. Sergei Solov’ev, Mosfil’m, 1982. Patsany [Tough Kids], dir. Dinara Asanova, Lenfil’m, 1983. Pervyi otriad [First Division], dir. Yoshiharu Ashino, Alesha Klimov, and Misha Shprits, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2009. Pliumbum, ili opasnaia igra [Pliumbum, or A Dangerous Game], dir. Vadim Abdrashitov, Mosfil’m, 1986. Putevka v zhizn’ [Road to Life], dir. Nikolai Ekk, Mezhrabpomfil’m, 1931. Rusalka [Mermaid], dir. Anna Melikian, Central Partnership and Magnum, 2007. Sestry [Sisters], dir. Sergei Bodrov Jr., STV, 2001. Shkola [School], dir. Valeriia Gai Germanika, Profit and Russia’s Channel One, 2010. Skazhi Leo [Say Leo], dir. Leonid Rybakov, Central Partnership, 2008. Soldat Ivan Brovkin [The Soldier Ivan Brovkin], dir. Ivan Lukinskii, Gorky Film Studio, 1955. Spasatel’ [The Lifeguard], dir. Sergei Solov’ev, Mosfil’m, 1980. Sto dnei posle detstva [A Hundred Days after Childhood], dir. Sergei Solov’ev, Mosfil’m, 1975.

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Synok [Sonny], dir. Larisa Sadilova, Arsi-Film, 2009. Timur i ego komanda [Timur and His Gang], dir. Aleksandr Razumnyi, Soiuzdetfil’m, 1940. Uchenik [The Student], dir. Kirill Serebrennikov, Hype Film, 2016. Vozrast nesoglasiia [The Age of Dissent], dir. Andrei Loshak, Telekanal Dozhd’, 2018. Vse umrut, a ia ostanus’ [Everybody Dies but Me], dir. Valeriia Gai Germanika, NTV Profit, 2008. Zhestokost’ [Cruelty], dir. Marina Liubakova, Pavel Lungin Studio and BFG Media Production, 2007. Zoia, dir. Lev Arnshtam, Soiuzdetfil’m, 1944. Zvezda [The Star], dir. Anna Melikian, Magnum and Mars Media Entertainment, 2014. Bibliography

Aaron, Michele. “Cinema and Suicide: Necromanticism, Dead-Already-Ness, and the Logic of the Vanishing Point.” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 71–92. Akhmatova, Anna. “Requiem.” In The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory, translated by Nancy K. Anderson, 135–42. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 2004. Aksenov, Vasilii. Zvezdnyi bilet. In Sobraniie sochinenii, 1: 185–347. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1987. Aleksandrov, Nikolai. “Zhitie iazikom romana.” Druzhba narodov 5 (1999). http:// magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/1999/5/aleksan.html. Ankel, Sophia. “Russian Children Will Be Taught How to Assemble AK-47s as Part of Patriotism Lessons in Schools.” Business Insider, October 31, 2019. https:// www.businessinsider.com/russian-students-taught-how-to-assemble-ak47s­ in-themed-lessons-2019-10. Arnold, Richard. “The ‘Russian Columbine’ Shooting in Crimea Highlights Youth Radicalization, Proliferation of Firearms.” Eurasia Daily Monitor 15, no. 149 (2018). https://jamestown.org/program/the-russian-columbine-shooting-in­ crimea-highlights-youth-radicalization-proliferation-of-firearms/. Artyukh, Anzhelika, and Justin Wilmes. “Neo-Romanticism and Authorial Myth in the Works of Valeria Gai Germanika.” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 14, no. 2 (2020): 170–89. Associated Press. “Putin: Soviet Collapse a ‘Genuine Tragedy.’” April 25, 2005. http:// www.nbcnews.com/id/7632057/ns/world_news/t/putin-soviet-collapse­ genuine-tragedy/. Astrakhan, Dmitrii. “‘Detochki’—eto fil’m-preduprezhdeniie.” Interview by Elizaveta Simbirskaia. Snob, April 25, 2013. https://snob.ru/selected/entry/59664. Autant-Mathieu, Marie-Christine. “The Story of Russian-Language Drama since 2000: PostDoc, the Postdramatic and Teatr Post.” In New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics and Protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, edited by J.A.E. Curtis, 23–40. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Baer, Brian James. “Russian Gay and Lesbian Literature.” In The Cambridge His­ tory of Gay and Lesbian Literature, edited by Ellen Lee McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, 421–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist,

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abdrashitov, Vadim, 60

abjection, 52–54, 57–58. See also body monstrous; holy fools Academy Awards (Oscars), 36

Adelson, Joseph, 11 quoted adolescence: as corrupted by West, 9–10,

18–20, 128–29; and heroic masculinity,

16–17; and imagination, 83–85, 101–2; and

normative gender roles, 20–22; promise

of, 4–5, 10; romance with, 1–4, 22–23, 25,

45–46, 49, 78, 102, 129–30; Russian words

for, 11, 18; teleology of, 11–12, 82–83, 88,

105–6, 126; temporality of, 11–12, 70–71,

93–94, 105–6, 114; threat of, 7–11, 15,

17–20, 22–23, 128–29; unstable bodies of,

12–16, 50–54. See also heroism: linked to

adolescence

advertisements, 10, 37, 41, 43, 62, 64

advice literature, 20, 39, 62, 98–99, 101

Age of Dissent, The (Vozrast nesoglasiia)

(Loshak), 1–3, 131

Akhmatova, Anna, 67

Aksenov, Vasily, 14

alcohol, 18, 109–10, 112, 115, 119–20

Aleksandrov, Nikolai, 40

alienation, 64–65, 67, 75, 82, 101–2, 106,

120–23

Amélie, 37

anachronism. See chronotopic dilemma Andersen, Hans Christian, 37

Anderson, Robert, 90

animals. See human/nonhuman crossings anime, 142n10 anti-sexual crusade, 18

anxieties: corporeal borders, 23, 53–54; feminization of men and boys, 21, 56–59, 94; financial/economic, 29; foreign influence, 9–10, 18–20, 129; inadequacy of language, 55–56; insects, 54–56, 58–59,

147n17; living space, 117–18; modernity,

56; moral panic, 7–10, 15–16, 18, 106–7;

pregnancy, 113; urban growth, 8

Arkus, L., 21

Arnshtam, Lev, 32–33, 35–36, 37, 41, 42

Asanova, Dinara, 136n34 Astrakhan, Dmitry, 47–49, 69

atheism, 8–9, 27–28, 30–31, 33–34, 45–46 Aug, Iulia, 70 authentic idealism, 44–46, 73

“Awkward Age, An” (Perekhodnyi vozrast)

(Starobinets): and adolescent body in,

59–60; ant triumph in, 54–56, 58–59;

gender fluidity in, 56–59; introduced,

21–23, 48–51; vs. Liubakova and

Serebrennikov, 60, 70–71, 78; rabidity

and secretions in, 51–54; title of, 147n6;

translation of, 58, 147n6; and victim/

offender divide, 80

Baba Iaga, 86

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11–12, 158n15. See also chronotopes Balabanov, Aleksei, 19–20, 48

Banerjee, Anindita, 141n2 Baxter, Kent, 12–13 quoted beauty magazines, 20, 39, 96, 98

Begunova, Anna, 61, 63, 64

Belarus, 82

Belykh, Grigorii, 136n34 Bentham, Jeremy, 11

Berenbaum, May, 51 Berlant, Laura, 4, 25, 129

Bernstein, Seth, 135n20 Beumers, Birgit, 154n33, 154n36, 154n43 Big Encyclopedia for Supergirls, The, 98

Blakesley, Rosalind P., 138n64 Blueberry Fields Forever (Dachniki) (Vartanov), 68, 77–78, 155n46

181

182

INDEX

Bodrov, Sergei, Jr., 19–20, 146n2 body: defacement of, 120; and refusal of corporeality, 71–72, 72; and sexual organs, 86–88; unstable, 12–16, 50–54, 70–71. See also disabilities body monstrous: and birth, 57–58; and corpse, 59–60, 75; and disgust, 52–54, 78–79; and gender fluidity, 56–59; and metamorphosis, 50–53 Bolotian, Ilmira [I. M.], 83, 121, 154n40

Bolotnaia Square, 68

Bolsheviks, 5, 8, 9, 13, 143n31

Borenstein, Eliot, 161n2

Boston, Masha, 158n10

boyhood, 13–17, 21

Brezhnev, Leonid, 14, 159n36

Brodski, Michael, 146n2

Bronfen, Elisabeth, 122–23, 125

Brother (Brat) (Balabanov), 19–20, 48

Brown, Eric C., 55 quoted

Bulgakov, Mikhail, 120

Bullet Collector, The (Sobiratel’ pul’)

(Klavdiev): creative imagination in, 101–2, 131; introduced, 23–24, 80–82; vs. Pulinovich’s and Sigarev’s plays, 89–92, 94–95, 97, 100–102; teen fabulist in, 89–95 Burt, Stephen, 38, 62

Bykov, Rolan, 60, 114, 115

Cannes Film Festival, 149n56, 157n2

carnival, 154n33

Cartoons (Mul’tiki) (Elizarov), 9–10

Cassiday, Julie, 151n73

Catherine the Great, 138n64

Center for Playwriting and Directing, 85,

155n54

Chaapaev, Petr, 141n6

Chaikina, Liza, 142n13

chain of sanctity, 30–31, 41, 76–77, 77

Channel One, 7, 103, 129

Chaudhuri, Una, 147n17

Chekhov, Anton, 121

childhood: and lack of bodily control,

143n31; militarization of, 7; as

prelapsarian, 3, 97; as undifferentiated

from adulthood, 11–12, 16; and

vulnerability/tenderness, 92–93, 100, 124

children’s literature, 6, 14, 21, 45, 143n25

Chizhova, Elena, 144n37

Christianity. See hagiography; Russian

Orthodoxy chronotopes: of adolescence, 11–12; circular, 107–13, 126–27; of Gai Germanika’s

School, 24, 105–6; of violence, 26–27, 35,

47–49, 77–79, 102

chronotopic dilemma, 24, 106, 113–21, 126,

130

Cinderella, 90

circular conception of time, 107–13, 126–27

Clowes, Daniel, 158n17

Cohen, Stanley, 136n35

Cold War, 9, 18, 29

collectivism, 59, 67, 94, 116

coming-of-age stories, 27, 44, 58, 82

consciousness, 32–33, 39, 49

contagion, 8–10, 18–20, 51–56

Contemporary Encyclopedia for Girls, 98–99

Convention on the Rights of the Child, 7

Corrections Class (Klass korrektsii)

(Murashova), 21, 68, 154n38

“Creation of Adam” (Michelangelo), 76, 77

creativity, 84–88

Creed, Barbara, 51, 52, 54, 57–58

Crimea, 7, 21, 68, 131, 151n5

Cruelty (Zhestokost’) (Liubakova):

female friendship in, 61–67, 63, 64,

68; introduced, 23, 48–49, 60–61; vs.

Melikian, 62, 64–65; vs. Serebrennikov,

69, 74–75, 78; vs. Starobinets, 60, 63–64;

teleologies of womanhood in, 62–64

Cuban missile crisis, 29

Dear Elena Sergeevna (Dorogaia Elena Sergeevna) (Riazanov), 60, 138n72

Debut literary prize, 95

decivilizing process, 81

delinquency, 7–10, 13, 60–61, 68, 84, 148n25

Denezhkina, Irina, 152n10, 155n54

Deutsch, Helene, 84

Dick, Philip K., 49

disabilities: and autism/Asperger’s, 21,

161n2; and deaf mutism, 29, 31–33, 36,

145n58; and institutional settings, 21, 68;

and nonnormative masculinity, 21–22, 76;

and Russian health-care system, 50; and

wheelchair usage, 153n31, 154n38. See

also body

disgust, 52–54, 78–79, 87. See also body monstrous

Dobrenko, Evgeny, 35, 44

documentary cinema/theater, 1–3, 60–61,

78, 82, 104, 131, 136n37, 159n21

Dogme 95 (filmmaking movement), 104

domestic space: containment by, 121–23,

125, 127; stagnant, 117–19

Dondurei, Daniil, 107, 159n21

Dontsova, Anastasia, 36

INDEX Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 3, 67, 137n50, 142n18, 144n36, 150n67, 155n54

Dotsuk, Dar’ia, 159n36

Douvan, Elizabeth, 11 quoted

Driscoll, Catherine, 122 quoted

drugs, 18, 103, 112, 120, 159n33

Dubin, Boris, 103–4

Dubinin, Vladimir, 30–31

Edelman, Lee, 159n18

education. See schools

Eisenstein, Sergei, 48

Ekk, Nikolai, 136n34

Elias, Norbert, 81

Elizarov, Mikhail, 9–10, 136n40

Elle Girl, 156n56

Emerson, Caryl, 137n48

emo aesthetic, 105, 119, 119, 124–25

Enteo, Dmitrii, 150n57

Epstein, Mikhail, 3, 137n50

Ernst, Konstantin, 7, 103

European Science Fiction Society, 50

Everybody Dies but Me (Vse umrut, a ia

ostanus’) (Gai Germanika), 60, 79, 89, 103,

117

extremism/fanaticism, 69–71, 75–77, 84, 97,

130–31

Fadeev, Aleksandr, 6, 17

fairy tales, 37–38, 48, 86, 90, 143n25

fantasy, conceptualized, 4. See also

imagination

Federal Security Service (FSB), 131

Federal Youth Affairs Agency (Rosmolodezh),

10

femininity: vs. androgyny, 14, 62; and

can-do girl, 99, 101; hyper-, 20, 36–41,

62–65, 113, 124; mythologies of, 66–67,

68, 87; normative, 13, 15, 20–22, 96–101,

120–21; removed from military realm,

17, 139n90

feminism, 13, 20, 28

financial collapse (1998), 29

First Division (Pervyi otriad), 142n10

Flynn, Molly, 69 quoted

Forster, E. M., 56

Foucault, Michel, 158n14

Fraser, Erica L., 17 quoted

Frez, Ilia, 14

Fuerst, Juliane, 141n6, 145n68

Fursei, Dasha, 44–45, 66

Gagarin, Iurii, 146n72

Gaidar, Arkady, 6, 16, 21, 35, 45, 94, 143n25

183

Gai Germanika, Valeria, 104, 157n2. See also Everybody Dies but Me; School Ganieva, Alisa, 147n14 Gaster, Theodor, 41, 70, 73

gender: and adolescent fantasy, 84,

95–97; and androgyny, 14, 62; and female

friendship films, 61–67; and female

suffering, 66–67, 68; instability of, 12–16,

56–59; and reified normativity, 20–22; and

transgressive behavior, 106–7. See also

body; sexuality and romantic relations

generational divides, 66–67, 74–75, 105,

108–13

Gerasimov, Sergei, 6

Gilded Age, 8

girlhood: and advice literature, 20, 39,

62, 98–99, 101; fantasies of, 95–101;

and female friendships, 61–67, 112; as

genderless, 14; and girl-as-savior, 29–30,

39–41, 45–46, 61; and martyrdom, 22,

27–28, 30–31, 40; and schooling, 15–16,

138n64; and (self-)exposure, 121–25; and

sexuality, 15–16, 86, 110; studies of, 13

Give Me! (Denezhkina), 152n10, 155n54 glamur (glamour), 36–41, 44, 62–65, 96,

98–100

glasnost’, 15

Gogol Center, 69–70, 73

González Gallego, Rubén David, 21

Gorky, Maksim, 116

Gorsuch, Anne, 5

Goscilo, Helena, 20

Grinspan, Jon, 133n2 Grishkovets, Evgeny, 82

gulag, 45, 67

hagiography: in Melikian’s Mermaid, 39–41,

43; Soviet, 22, 27–28, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 41,

42, 45; in Vasilenko’s Little Fool, 29–36;

and vitae, 30. See also Kosmodemianskaia,

Zoia

Hall, G. Stanley, 4–5, 13, 83, 91

Harris, Adrienne, 32, 33, 141n7

Harris, Anita, 98, 139n75, 159n35 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 136n31 Hellman, Lillian, 90

Hemment, Julie, 36 quoted, 137n44, 156n65 heroism: as farcical/obsolete/emptied,

26–27, 34–35, 40, 48–49, 59, 61, 66–67,

70, 75–79; linked to adolescence, 3–4,

6, 10–13, 23, 30–35, 59, 70, 77, 132; and

masculinity, 16–17; and New Drama

protagonists, 81–82, 94–95; of teenage

184

INDEX

heroism (continued) girls, 22, 27–28, 44; on television, 7. See also hagiography; Kosmodemianskaia, Zoia Herrera, Brian Eugenio, 90 quoted Hitler, Adolf, 128 Hollinger, Karen, 61–62 holy fools, 29, 31–33 homosexuality, 18, 69, 82, 91–92, 150n71 hooliganism, 8–10, 60–61, 68 Hope Factory (Kombinat Nadezhda) (Meshchaninova), 68, 77, 158n13 human/nonhuman crossings: and animals, 33–34, 37; and insects, 50–60 Hundorova, Tamara, 101 Hutchings, Stephen, 108 quoted, 159n25, 160n45, 161n55 idealizing tableaux, 4, 25, 46, 129–31 imagination: and adolescence, 83–85, 90; and banal reality, 89–94, 130–31, 156n74; and connection to place, 120; and dreaminess vs. creative imagination, 84–85, 101–2; and menacing sexual fantasies, 85–88; and plastic vs. emotional, 87, 90, 96; and teen fabulists, 89–94; violence in, 23–24, 80–81, 100–102 Imre, Anikó, 138n73 infection, 8–10, 18, 51–56 insects: bite of, 147n17; and endangered masculinity, 21, 56–59; hyper-fecundity of, 54–55; and metamorphosis, 50–53; and secretions, 53–54 Ironico, Simona, 160n47 Isakova, Victoria, 70 Iurchik, Vladislav, 104 I Won (Pulinovich), 155n54, 156n61 Jesus Christ, 30 Joan of Arc, 6, 27 Joyce, James, 5 juvenile-court system (US), 7, 9, 13 Kafka, Franz, 50–51 Kalashnikov, 21 Kazei, Marat, 144n39 Kelly, Catriona, 14, 18, 133n6, 143n31 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 154n45 Kholina, Arina, 150n64 Kids (Detochki) (Astrakhan), 47–49, 69 King, Stephen, 49 Kinotavr Film Festival, 60–61, 85, 158n10

Kirill, Patriarch, 107

Klavdiev, Iury, 82, 89, 149n52, 158n13.

See also Bullet Collector, The Klimova, Olga, 63, 148n32 Kobets, Svitlana, 30, 143n22 Koliada, Nikolai, 82, 85, 95 Komsomol, 5–6, 35, 41, 141n7 Kon, Igor, 18 Konstantinova, Ina, 142n13 Kosmodemianskaia, Zoia: and Arnshtam’s film Zoia, 32–33, 35–36, 37, 41, 42; family of, 141n9; and Melikian’s Mermaid, 41, 43–44; official biography of, 141n7; and Soviet sacrificial mythology, 6, 22, 27–28, 32–34, 41, 45, 70, 129–30, 137n49; and Starobinets’s “An Awkward Age,” 59–60; and Vasilenko’s Little Fool, 32–33, 35–36 Kostenko, Konstantin, 155n46 Kott, Vladimir, 60 Kozlova, Anna, 140n101 Kristeva, Julia, 84, 97, 99 Kucherenko, Olga, 135n22, 137n50 Kukushkin, Nikita, 70 Lenin, Vladimir, 32, 36 Leontiev, Mikhail, 129 Lesko, Nancy: on panoptical time/ gaze, 11–12, 24, 71, 105–7, 112, 126; and past future, 107; on romance with adolescence, 2, 23, 49, 78; on savage adolescent, 8. See also panoptical gaze; panoptical time; romance with adolescence “Let There Always Be Sunshine,” 92–93 Levitsky, Dmitry, 138n64 Lidov, Petr, 27, 141n7 liminality, 13, 105–6 Limonov, Eduard, 156n74 Lipovetsky, Mark, 154n33, 154n36, 154n43 Little Fool (Durochka) (Vasilenko): and adolescent heroine, 30–31, 34–36, 40, 45–46, 48; holy fool in, 29, 31–33; and humanness, 33–34, 48, 51; introduced, 22, 28–30; vs. Melikian, 37–41, 43–44; vs. Serebrennikov and Starobinets, 59–60, 73, 77 Little Vera (Malen’kaia Vera) (Pichul), 9, 15 Litvinova, Renata, 61, 63, 67, 68 Liubakova, Marina. See Cruelty Liubimov, Pavel, 14 Liubimovka festival, 89 Lord of the Rings, 128

INDEX Loshak, Andrei, 1–3, 131

Lungin, Pavel, 60–61, 142n18

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 56

Makarenko, Anton, 136n34

Malikov, Ruslan, 94, 158n13

Mansky, Vitaly, 60, 78

Margolit, Evgeny, 49

martial values. See militarism; violence

masculinity: endangered, 21, 56–59, 90;

fierce/martial, 17–19, 21, 94–95; heroic,

16–17; machismo, 21; normative, 13,

20–22

Maslodudov, Aleksei, 77

mass consciousness, 49

masturbation, 71, 84, 86, 112

Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 5

Mayenburg, Marius von, 73, 149n56

McAvoy, Mary, 156n61

Medvedev, Dmitry, 69

Melikian, Anna, 145n62. See also Mermaid

Mendousse, Pierre, 83–84, 86, 89–90

Mermaid (Rusalka) (Melikian): and

adolescent heroine, 37–41, 43–44, 43,

45–46, 48; introduced, 22, 28, 36–37;

vs. Liubakova and Starobinets, 60, 62,

64–65; vs. Serebrennikov, 73, 77, 78; vs.

Vasilenko, 37–41, 43–44

Meshchaninova, Natalia, 68, 77, 158n13

“Metamorphosis” (Kafka), 50–51

Michelangelo, 76, 77

militarism: culture of, 5–7, 11–12, 130–31;

and demilitarization of adolescent

heroism, 28–36, 48; and gang culture,

17–19; and hazing, 91–92; and heroic

masculinity, 16–17; and sacrificial

mythology, 5–7, 11–12, 27–28, 30–31,

41, 42, 129; and youth, 5–7, 17, 21,

34–35

Military Secret, The (Voennaia taina) (Gaidar), 6, 143n25

Millard, Kenneth, 27

Miller, Arthur, 90

Minkova, Yuliya, 27, 75–76, 135n24

Mirzoev, Pavel, 95

Misik, Olga, 131

Mkheidze, Georgii, 157n3

monstrosity. See body monstrous

moral panic, 7–10, 15–16, 18, 106–7

Morozov, Pavlik, 32

Morson, Gary Saul, 137n48

Mortara, Ariela, 160n47

185

Moscow, 64–65, 117, 120, 145n59. See also

Cruelty; Mermaid; School

Moscow Art Theater, 95

Moscow Youth Festival, 9, 16

Moshina, Natalia, 151n8

Moving Together (Idushchiie vmeste), 10

Mukhina, Olga, 82

Murashova, Ekaterina, 21, 68, 154n38

myth, conceptualized, 41, 70, 72–75

Natasha’s Dream (Natashina mechta) (Pulinovich): feminine fantasies in, 95–101; introduced, 23–24, 80–82; vs. Klavdiev’s and Sigarev’s plays, 95–97, 100–102; production history of, 155n54 Nathanson, Constance, 160n40

National Bestseller literary prize, 49

Natural Born Killers, 68

Nautilus Pompilus, 19

Navalny, Alexei, 1–2, 7, 128

Nazi soldiers, 16, 27, 32

Neubauer, John, 152n13

New Amazons, 28

New Drama, 80–83, 158n13. See also

individual plays and playwrights New Economic Policy (NEP), 8–9

New Russians, 44

New Woman, 13

NKVD, 34

Novyi mir, 29

Omon Ra (Pelevin), 26–27, 48, 78, 102, 132

O’Neill Theater Center, 95

Orange Revolution, 136n42

ORT/Channel One, 7, 103

Ours (Nashi), 10, 104

panoptical gaze, 105–6, 110, 112–13, 122,

125, 127

panoptical time, 11–12, 24, 71, 105–8,

112–13, 120, 122, 125

Panteleev, L., 136n34

paradise syndrome, 97–99

parody, 59

Parts, Lyudmila, 145n59

Patriarch’s Ponds, 120

patriotism: and Putin’s youth initiatives,

6–7, 10, 21, 130–32; and sacrificial

mythology, 5–7, 11–12, 27–28, 30–31

Pelevin, Viktor, 26–27, 48, 78, 102, 132

Pelligrini, Ann, 141n8

perestroika, 9, 15, 29, 60

186

INDEX

Petrosian, Mariam, 21 Petrushevskaia, Liudmila, 117 Pichul, Vasily, 9, 15 Pioneers, 31, 44–45 Plakhov, Andrei, 37 quoted Plasticine (Plastilin) (Sigarev): creative imagination in, 85–88, 101–2; introduced, 23–24, 80–82, 85; vs. Klavdiev’s and Pulinovich’s plays, 89–92, 94–97, 101–2 Podnieks, Iuris, 136n37 podvigi (exploits), 30–31, 34, 39–41, 77, 116 political protests, 2, 128–29 Poloka, Gennadii, 136n34 pornography, 18 Portnova, Zina, 142n13 Praktika Theater, 94, 95, 100, 158n13 Pravda, 27, 141n7 Presniakov brothers, 85 Prix François Chalais, 149n56 Prokhorov, Alexander, 138n67 Pskov double suicide, 78 psychoanalysis, 84 puberty, 50–54, 70–71, 83–84 Pulinovich, Iaroslava, 82, 95, 155n54, 156n61. See also Natasha’s Dream Pushkin, Alexander, 115–16 Putin, Vladimir: economic prosperity under, 28, 36; and efforts aimed at youth, 6–7, 10, 21, 130–32; on fall of Soviet Union, 114; machismo of, 21; Navalny’s opposition to, 1–2; repressions under, 68–69; on School, 24, 103–4, 127; youth protests against, 2, 128–29, 131–32 Raag, Ilmar, 95

rape and sexual assault, 32, 50, 61, 68, 88,

91–92, 111, 123, 155n46 Rapoport, Eva, 31 reality television, 158n10 Riazanov, El’dar, 60, 138n72 rock music, 9–10, 19, 117 Rodimin, Denis, 61 romance with adolescence, 1–4, 22–23, 25, 45–46, 49, 78, 102, 129–30 Royal Court Theatre, 85 Royal Shakespeare Company, 95 ruble devaluation (1998), 29 Rudova, Larissa, 21 Russian Anti-Booker Prize, 85 Russian Booker Prize, 21, 29, 136n40 Russian Civil War, 5, 141n6 Russian criminal code, 155n50, 159n33 Russian Orthodoxy: fanatical, 69–71, 75–77; on Gai Germanika’s School, 107; and holy

fools, 29, 31–33; iconography of, 27–28, 30, 45–46. See also hagiography Russian Patriarchate, 18 Russian Revolution, 3, 5 Russian State Duma, 104 Rybakov, Leonid, 60 Sadilova, Larisa, 60 Saratov TIUZ (Theater for Young Audiences), 155n54 Sartorti, Rosalinde, 35 satire, 26–27 Saveleva, Daria, 77 Scarecrow (Chuchelo) (Bykov), 60, 114, 115 Schmidt, Henrike, 40, 44 School (Shkola) (Gai Germanika): atemporality in, 125–27; and blurring of generational divide, 108–13; chronotope of, 105–6; chronotopic dilemma in, 113–21, 130; and destructive uses of space, 118–20, 118, 119; and exposure of teenage girls, 121–25; format and plot of, 104, 107–8, 159n25; heteronormative leanings of, 106–7, 113, 120–21, 127; introduced, 24, 89; and nonlinear time, 107–8, 112–13; solid environments of, 108–9, 114–17, 115, 126; viewership of and responses to, 103–4, 107, 161n55 schools: coeducational vs. segregated by sex, 15–16, 17, 138n64; and militarism, 17, 35; and sexual education, 15, 18, 72–73; shooting at, 130–31; unchanging nature of, 108–9, 114–16, 115, 127. See also Student, The Schwartz, Matthias, 101 Scott, Ridley, 50 Serebrennikov, Kirill, 69, 81, 85, 153n31. See also Student, The Seventeen, 156n56 sexuality and romantic relations: and bedroom culture, 122–23; and exposure of teenage girls, 121–25; homosexuality, 18, 69, 82, 91–92, 150n71; and male gaze, 110, 122, 124–25; as menacing, 85–88; as possible escape, 96–101, 117–18; and sexual education, 15, 18, 72–73; societal discomfort with, 14–16, 106–7, 122, 124–25; transgressive, 60, 110–13. See also body; gender; glamur Shalaeva, Maria, 36, 43 Sigarev, Vasily, 82, 85, 89, 95. See also Plasticine Simonov, Evgeny, 95 Sisters (Sestry) (Bodrov), 139n90, 146n2 Skrinichenko, Irina, 40

INDEX Skvortsov, Petr, 70, 72, 73, 76

Sleigh, Charlotte, 56 quoted Smirnova, V. V., 12 quoted

Snegirev, Aleksandr, 21

Socialist Realism, 14, 31–32 Soldier Ivan Brovkin, The, 17

Solov’ev, Sergei, 159n36 Sorvari, Marja, 144n37 spontaneity, 32–33 Stadniuk, Ivan, 17

Stakhanov, Alexander, 141n6 Stalin, Joseph, 28, 36, 41, 153n21

Stalinism, 29, 33–34, 67, 116

Starobinets, Anna, 49–50, 147n14. See also “Awkward Age, An” State Patriotic Education Program, 10

Steblina, Ekaterina, 77

Stephenson, Svetlana, 81

Student, The (Uchenik) (Serebrennikov):

adolescent development in, 70–71; and

attempt to embody mythological, 70,

72–74, 72, 73, 129; introduced, 23, 48–49,

69–70; vs. Liubakova and Starobinets,

69–71, 74–75, 78; and loss of ties, 78–79;

and martyrdom, 75–77; vs. Melikian and

Vasilenko, 73, 77–78; and (M)uchenik

(Gogol Center production), 69–70, 73–77;

refusal of corporeality in, 71–72, 72;

transtemporality in, 70, 72–75

suicide, 26–27, 106, 112, 117, 121–25, 127,

130–31

Sundance Festival, 36

superfluous man, 37

Sutcliffe, Benjamin M., 29 quoted symbolic time, 12

syphilis, 18

Taganka Theater, 96, 155n54 Teatr.doc, 69, 82, 152n12

teen fabulists, 89–94 teleologies: of adolescence, 11–12, 82–83, 88,

105–6, 126; and progression/regression,

107–13; rejection of, 131; of violence, 81,

102; of womanhood, 13, 20, 38, 62–64, 124

television, 7, 103–4, 161n55. See also School temporality: of adolescence, 11–12, 70–71,

93–94, 105–6, 114; atemporality, 125–27;

and circular time, 107–13, 126–27; of

drama, 83; of myth, 41, 70, 72–75; and

static time, 108–9, 114–17; and symbolic

time, 12; and temporal anxiety, 11–12,

51; transhistorical, 29, 40, 66–67. See also

panoptical time

Thaw, 6, 14

187

theater, 6, 69, 137n50. See also New Drama

Thelma and Louise, 61

Thunberg, Greta, 24–25, 128–29

Thurschwell, Pamela, 106, 114, 118

Timur and His Gang (Timur i ego komanda)

(Gaidar), 16, 45, 94

Tolstoy, Leo, 66, 137n50, 156n61

Tolz, Vera, 159n25

transition (perekhod), 58, 70–71, 147n6

Troitskii, Artemii, 158n7

Tsyganov, Evgeny, 37

Tumarkin, Maria, 27, 137n49

Tverdovsky, Ivan, 68, 140n100

Ukraine, 6, 7, 21, 68, 82, 101, 131, 136n40,

136n42

United Nations, 7, 128

urbanization, 7–8

utopia, 41, 44–46, 59, 101

Varlamov, Aleksei, 44

Vartanov, Alexander, 68, 77–78, 89, 155n46

Vasilenko, Svetlana, 28–29, 33. See also Little

Fool Vassilieva, Julia, 108

Vertov, Dziga, 104

Victory (Pobeda) (television channel), 7, 130

Vil’ke, Daria, 139n85

violence: and 1990s street gangs, 17–19, 21,

81, 155n46; chronotope of, 26–27, 35,

47–49, 77–79, 102; culture of, 5–7, 68–69,

91–92, 130–31; and female friendship

films, 61–62, 66–67; and hooliganism,

8–10, 60–61; of illusions, 100–101;

imaginings of, 23–24, 80–81; and invasion

of Crimea, 7, 21, 68, 131, 151n5; and

language of sacrifice, 75–77; and loss of

ties, 78–79, 105, 108; poeticization of, 6,

154n36; prehistory of, 24, 81, 101–2; as

redemption, 47–49; teleology of, 81, 102

Virginity (Devstvennost’) (Mansky), 60, 78

Vitukhnovskaia, Alina, 116, 126

Vodianitskaia, Galina, 32, 42

Voloshin, Igor, 60

Vorozhbit, Natalia, 151n5, 156n69, 158n13

Vygotsky, Lev, 84–85, 87–88, 90–91, 93, 95,

101

Vyrypaev, Ivan, 81, 85

Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko, 17 quoted Wannamaker, Annette, 58 quoted Western influence, 9–10, 18–20, 128–29 Weygandt, Susanna, 154n33 White, Barbara, 133n6

188

INDEX

Wolfson, Boris, 152n12 World War II: adolescent heroes of, 12,

27, 94, 142n10, 144n39; hardships of,

52; moral panic after, 8, 16–17, 56;

state glorification of, 6–7, 130. See also

Kosmodemianskaia, Zoia

Yeltsin, Boris, 28–29 Young Guard, The (Molodaia gvardiia)

(Fadeev, Gerasimov), 6, 17

“Young Pioneer Girls” (Fursei), 44–45, 66

Youth Army, 6–7, 102, 130

YouTube, 2, 128

Yurchak, Alexei, 44

Zademidkova, Marina, 104

Zheno, Georg, 155n54

Zoia (Arnshtam), 32–33, 35–36, 37, 41, 42

Zwigoff, Terry, 158n17