Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader (Vol. I) 9781618112231

Citation preview

Late and Post-Soviet Russian Liter ature A Reader Book 1 Pe r e s t r o i k a and t h e Po s t- S o v i e t Pe r i o d

C u lt u r a l S y l l a b u s S e r i e s Edi to r : M a r k L i p o v e t s k y ( U n i ve r s i t y of Colorado-B oulder)

Late and Post-Soviet Russi a n L i t e r at u r e

A Reader Book 1

P e r e s t r o i k a and the Post-Soviet Period Edited by Mark Lipovetsky and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya

B OS TO N / 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress.

The book is supported by Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation (translation program TRANSCRIPT).

Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-936235-40-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-383-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-61811-397-9 (electronic) Book design by Ivan Grave On the cover: “From the series ‘Kitchen Suprematism’” by The Blue Noses (Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin). Reproduced by permission of Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Rethinking Identities Excerpts from Dehexing Sex, by Helena Goscilo

8 10 18 26

Perestroika or Domostroika?: The Construction of Womanhood under Glasnost    26 Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction: Stigmata and Stimulation    43

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya

51

Hygiene    53 The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century    63 The Fountain House    75

Vera Pavlova

83

From If There is Something to Desire    84

Linor Goralik

85

They Talk    86

Slava Mogutin

98

Invitation to a Beheading    99 My First Man: Sentimental Vomit    114 Dreams Come True: Porn    117 We Were All Dying of the Same Diseases    119 The Triumph of the Family    121 The Death of Misha Beautiful    123

Oksana Robski Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski,” by Tatiana Mikhailova    134

133

Part 2. “Little Terror” and Traumatic Writing Excerpts from “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia,” by Serguei Oushakine

147

152

Excerpts from “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” by Alexander Etkind 171 Lev Rubinshtein

187

Smoke of the Fatherland, or a Filter Gulag    188

Evgeny Grishkovets

191

How I Ate a Dog (excerpts)    192

Elena Fanailova

207

From The Russian Version    208 “… Again they’re off for their Afghanistan…”    208 Lena, or the Poet and the People    212

The Presnyakov Brothers

218

Terrorism (excerpts)    219

Andrei Rodionov

250

“A beauty and junkie with long legs…”    251 “Once a month, he fought or got beat up…”    252

Excerpts from Overkill: Sex and Violence in Russian Popular Culture, by Eliot Borenstein Overkill: Bespredel and Gratuitous Violence    254 Honor among Thieves    260

254

Part 3. Writing Politics Vladimir Sorokin

270 276

“Russia is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire”: Spiegel Interview with Vladimir Sorokin    278 Petrushka    285

Victor Pelevin

296

Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’ (Homo Zapiens, 1999)    298 Review of Generation ‘P,’ by Gregory Freidin    298 Russian Literary Postmodernism in the 1990s, by Mark Lipovetsky    303 Survival of the Catchiest: Memes and Postmodern Russia, by Eliot Borenstein    307

Eduard Limonov

311

A Heroic Attitude to Life    313

Aleksandr Prokhanov

317

Mister Hexogen (excerpts)    318 Excerpts from “The Legitimization of Ultra-Right Discourse in Contemporary Russian Literature,” by Ilya Kukulin    337

Sergei Lukyanenko

348

The Anti-Matrix (Take the Blue Pill), by Aleksandr Tarasov    349

Boris Akunin

358

Excerpts from “A Country Resembling Russia”: The Use of History in Boris Akunin’s Detective Novels, by Elena V. Baraban    360

Dmitrii Bykov The Fall    374

373

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to many people who made this project possible. We are especially thankful to the authors who permitted us to include their work: Elena Baraban, Eliot Borenstein, Nadezhda Burova, Dmitrii Bykov, Vitaly Chernetsky, Sasha Dugdale, Mikhail Epstein, Grigory Freidin, Keith Gessen, Linor Goralik, Helena Goscilo, Alexander Etkind, Elena Fanailova, Gerald and Susan Janecek, Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, Ilya Kukulin, Tatiana Mikhailova, Slava Mogutin, Serguei Oushakine, Oleg and Vladimir Presnyakov, Valentina Polukhina, Robert Reid and Joe Andrews, Aleksandr Prokhanov, Andrei Rodionov, Lev Rubinshtein, Stephanie Sandler, Olga Sedakova, Aleksandr Tarasov, Genya Turovskaya, and Matvei Yankilevich. Our thanks to Eduard Limonov and Slavic and East European Journal for permission to include their respective texts. We owe Natasha Perova, Joanne Turnbull and GLAS New Russian Writing our appreciation for their support and permission to reprint Lev Rubinshtein’s essays. No less deserving of acknowledgment are the translators whose efforts enabled many works to appear here in English for the first time: Boris Dralyuk, Sibelan Forrester, Brian R. Johnson, Sarah H. Kapp, Matthew McGarry, Michelle Olson, Alexei Pavlenko, Rebecca Pyatkevich, Eugenia Sokolskaya, and Molly Thomasy Blasing. Special gratitude goes to Sibelan Forrester and Alexei Pavlenko, who we are indebted to in more ways than we can enumerate here.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to Igor and Kira Nemirovsky and Sharona Vedol at Academic Studies Press for bringing this project to completion. Grant funds from Transcript (The Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation) and the Text and Academic Authors Association were essential to the completion of this project, as were resources from The Florida State University and The University of Colorado, Boulder. The following publishers and institutions granted permission to reprint and translate texts: Excerpts from Helena Goscilo’s Dehexing Sex are copyright © 1996 University of Michigan Press. Reprinted with permission. Excerpts from Terrorism are copyright © 2003 The Presnyakov Brothers, and the translations are copyright © 2003 Sasha Dugdale. Reprinted by arrangement with the publishers, Nick Hern Books Ltd: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk “Hygiene,” “The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century,” “The Fountain House,” from There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Liudmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anne Summers, translation copyright © 2009 by Keith Gessen and Anne Summers. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Excerpts from Alexander Etkind’s “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied,” © Slavic Review, 68: 3 (Fall 2009). Reprinted with permission. “He gave me as a gift,” “The two are in love and happy,” from If There Is Something to Desire: One Hundred Poems by Vera Pavlova, translated by Steven Seymour, translation copyright © 2010 by Steven Seymour. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission. Translations of Vladimir Sorokin’s “Petrushka” and an excerpt from Evgeny Grishkovets’ “How I Ate A Dog” with the permission of the Galina Dursthoff Literary Agency.

— 9 —

Introduction

Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader documents the last several decades of cultural change in Russia. Technology, media, political and economic policy, the arts, and the day-to-day activities of ordinary citizens continually reshape Russia and its culture. Sometimes these changes are monumental, with human activity and ideas working together to influence many areas of cultural endeavor at once. More characteristically, people engage in divergent practices that communicate a range of ideas about individual identity, community, and nation. These ideas often differ substantially from each other, reflecting the needs and desires of many individuals and groups simultaneously. Given the multiplicity of views expressed at any given moment, whose perspective should be considered representative of an era or a nation? Who is entitled to define the times or change them? These questions, which have engaged scholars in anthropology, history, philosophy, sociology, and other fields, have shaped the study of Russian literature as well. The events, ideas and works included in this book illustrate how these questions have influenced the study of Russian literature and why these questions remain relevant today. When the question of who and what define a nation or an era is considered in terms of multiple events, ideas, and behaviors, rather than a single “who” or what,” art and our interpretations of it become powerful forces because of, not despite, their interaction with other fields of activity. By acknowledging the multiple

Introduction

and simultaneous events taking place during any given era, we foreground their interaction. Literature, culture, and how we study them are constantly shaping, and being shaped by, their social and historical contexts. Cultural change is thus the model and the subject of our study. One of the goals of this reader is to capture the multiple voices and meanings that have emerged in the last several decades of cultural change in Russia. Literary texts, essays, and scholarly writings are all represented. Many of the works in this volume appear in English translation for the first time, contributing new perspectives to the broader picture of cultural change. By integrating literary texts with the perspectives of politicians, journalists, and cultural critics, this volume presents views that range from individual needs, dreams, and agendas to efforts to understand those strivings from alternative perspectives. In this way it attempts to address the local and global meanings of the keywords that are used to describe cultural change. In keeping with its intent to accommodate multiple viewpoints, Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader is modular in structure. These volumes may be used on their own, but they readily lend themselves to integration with other materials. This first volume, which treats Perestroika and the post-Soviet era, easily accommodates films (Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch), fiction (by Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin, Boris Akunin, Dmitrii Bykov, and others), performances (Evgeny Grishkovets’ How I Ate a Dog), performative readings (The Presnyakov Brothers’ Terrorism), and discussions of current events. Readers may pair the later volume (on the Thaw and Stagnation periods) with a history of Russia that chronicles events from the Thaw to the post-Soviet period in order to further explore the relationship between cultural change and broader developments in Russia’s economy, its practice of democracy, and its participation in global affairs. The themes that organize each volume allow for investigation of a cross-section of perspectives on topics of global interest. By layering literary and scholarly texts of the late Soviet and postSoviet periods within three thematically organized sections, the present volume encourages discussion of the interaction between

11

12

Introduction

methodology, context, and content. Parallel with developments in recent scholarship, it challenges binary constructions of culture— such as Soviet vs. anti-Soviet, or Art vs. State—and emphasizes the range of values, discourses, and activities that organize the lives of ordinary citizens. The tendency to encapsulate multiple events, ideas, and behaviors using a single keyword reveals how we “chronicle and capture cultural change by creating common categories of meaning.”1 The period of de-Stalinization from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s is called “The Thaw”; it was followed by the years of “Stagnation,” when the reforms of the Thaw were revoked and Stalinist policies were partially rehabilitated. The short period from 1987 to 1991, which witnessed the collapse of the Soviet ideological and political order, was named perestroika. The term perestroika refers to the policy of restructuring Soviet political, cultural, and economic systems that was instituted in the 1980s. The term literally means “restructuring,” but it also evokes a variety of events, experiences, and ideas, ranging from Ronald Reagan’s 1987 exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” to the risky, but real, possibility for Soviet citizens to publicly assert new social identities. As readers, we may be attracted to keywords for their tendency to “sum up” the spirit of an era. The broadly encompassing meaning that the term perestroika holds for a global audience, however, coexists with the diverse and individual meanings that it held for those who lived through it. Keywords “proliferate in usages and meanings” during times of cultural change, so that a single term encompasses many individual “strategies of action.”2 The new keywords introduced during the mid- and late1980s—perestroika and glasnost’ (openness)—meant many different things to Russians during this time of instability. Perestroika initiated nothing less than a revolution in the cultural sphere.

1

     Amin Ghaziani and Marc J. Ventresca, “Keywords and Cultural Change: Frame Analysis of Business Model Public Talk, 1975-2000,” Sociological Forum 20, 4 (2005): 523.

2

     Ibid., 528.

Introduction

Together with the policy of glasnost’, Perestroika empowered public figures to take up the unfinished business of de-Stalinization that had begun during the Thaw period, as well as analyze the failures of communist ideology. They exposed the worst “achievements” of the Party, such as the rampant corruption, the cruel methods used to torture political prisoners, and other abuses that affected the health and quality of life of ordinary citizens, and did so in public forums where they could be discussed openly for the first time. Unfortunately, this process did not lead to the persecution of any former Soviet officials. In the absence of this crucial step, and with the devastating economic collapse of the early 1990s, many began to associate economic hardship and corruption with Perestroika. In turn, many also began to nostalgically idealize the Soviet past. This nostalgia continued into the 2000s, even after living standards for the Russian population had significantly improved. Capitalizing on the increased demand for oil and gas worldwide, some cultural figures during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin worked to create associations in the popular imagination between the increased role Russia played in the world market in the 2000s and the dominance of the Soviet Union in world politics in decades past. In literature, perestroika and glasnost’ meant first and foremost a steady relaxation of censorship laws and the gradual reinstatement of a great number of literary works banned during the Soviet period. Among these works were canonical texts by Russian modernists: Mikhail Bulgakov’s novellas, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Osip Mandelshtam’s late poems, Andrei Platonov’s novels and other works, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, works for adults by Daniil Kharms and other absurdist writers, the entire oeuvres of Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gumilev, Mikhail Kuzmin, and many others. Also reinstated were realist works from the 60s-80s, such as works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and Anatoly Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat, which became an international bestseller. The works of underground and émigré writers from the Stagnation period, including Venedikt Erofeev, Evgeny Kharitonov, Dmitrii Prigov, and Andrei Sinyavsky, were now published for the first time. As a result, a unique cultural situation emerged in which

13

14

Introduction

multiple literary voices and movements were entering the Russian literary tradition all at once. For the first time, the history of Russian literature could include the Silver Age (1900-1910s), the modernists of the 1920s, and Soviet underground and émigré literature from the 1920s through the 1980s. This rapid expansion of the literary field was not an easy process. Almost every publication in the Perestroika years had to overcome resistance from censors and Party control. The reshaping of the literary canon, coupled with the reevaluation of the Soviet experience, generated heated debates among contributors to literary journals. The discussions revealed irreconcilable contradictions between liberal and nationalist approaches to Russian history and culture. Both groups were critical of the Soviet regime, yet the former interpreted the Soviet past as a brutal archaizing movement that did not allow for the inclusion of Russian culture in the cultural history of modern Western civilization while the latter blamed communism for aggressive methods of modernization, resulting, they claimed, in the invasion of foreign ideas (Marxism) and antinational forces (Jews) into the Russian national tradition. While these debates continued, members of the artistic community became divided in their attitudes toward literary experimentation and new developments in postmodern writing. Some critics and writers perceived these new trends in literature—represented by Liudmilla Petrushevskaya, Victor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin—as immoral and detrimental to the development of Russian literature. Others accused realist writers of being aesthetically conservative and, in many ways, reproducing the banalities of Socialist Realism (except that in these new realist works, the Soviet past was critiqued, rather than valorized). It is a curious fact that the period of cultural history following Perestroika, stretching from the early 1990s to the present, has not yet been identified with a unifying keyword. The “post-Soviet” era remains dependent on the Soviet past, tethered to it by the hyphen and prefix “post.” Perestroika effectively ended when the seventyyear long reign of the Communist Party came to a close, but in the post-Soviet era that has followed, links to the Soviet past in politics

Introduction

and culture remain relevant, even after the death of its ideology and economic system. The modular structure of the present volume accommodates this feature of late and post-Soviet literature and culture: amid cultural phenomena that are shared between today’s global and commodity cultures, for example, what seems to be novel in the Russian context often turns out to be historic. Current debates about new directions for Russian literature reflect new cultural conflicts and divisions. The growth of popular literature and the marginalization of so-called “serious” literature, the financial troubles that threaten the existence of long-established literary journals, the emergence of venues for distributing literary texts online, and the general commoditization of the cultural sphere have contributed to new paradigms for the development of postSoviet literature. At the same time, new ideological pressures emerged when television stations, film studios, newspapers, and other media were bought by the government or came under the control of figures with close ties to the Kremlin. The post-Soviet period presents at once the emergence of new literary voices and the resounding echoes of Soviet-era ideologies. How postmodern subjectivity interacts with gender and sexuality is the focus of the section “Rethinking Identities.” By the 1990s new categories of writing, such as “women’s prose” and “gay literature,” had emerged in Russia, but these categories assumed unified communities of writers and readers when in fact the authors’ writing practices reveal highly individual approaches to constructing gender and sexuality. Liudmilla Petrushevskaya’s short stories, prose by Linor Goralik, and poems by Vera Pavlova do not present a unified female subject. Moreover, their work presents a challenge to the notion of a stable identity. Luce Irigaray’s description of feminine language—“‘she’ goes off in all directions … in which ‘he’ is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning”3— helps to illustrate the degree to which rigid models of identity were unsuited to writings about women, and also exposes the fact that 3

     Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980): 103.

15

16

Introduction

distinctly masculine uses of language had dominated the project of redefining the nation, its people, and its mythologies. In his essay “Invitation to a Beheading,” Slava Mogutin contrasts his dynamic writing with the rigidity of the law. Told by a state prosecutor that “you might be a good writer but the content of most of your articles is criminal,” Mogutin determines that homophobia is so thoroughly integrated into the imagined identity of the nation that his work, despite its inclusive aims, becomes interpolated into binary constructions in which one is either heterosexual and normative, or homosexual and criminal. As new models for the expression of identity emerged in the 2000s, so did the reaffirmation of stereotyped gender roles; as Oksana Robski proposes, consumerism and the subculture of glamour came to provide a viable and attainable, if wholly commoditized, path to social freedom. The section “‘Little Terror’ and Traumatic Writing” presents approaches to defining the self through violent encounters with the past and various Others. Evgeny Grishkovets’ play How I Ate a Dog draws the spectator into the author-narrator’s efforts to reconstruct his identity as he confronts the numerous iterations of his self which emerged from the trauma he experienced while serving in the Russian Navy. In the Presnyakov Brothers’ play Terrorism, the threat of a possible terrorist attack generates nervousness and boredom, a combination that destroys the play’s characters. Lev Rubinshtein’s essay “Smoke of the Fatherland” reveals the violence concealed inside everyday discourses of nostalgia, while Elena Fanailova’s “Lena and People” and poems by Andrei Rodionov lay bare the idea that post-Soviet society communicates through violence. Essays by Serguei Oushakine and Alexander Etkind explore possible reasons for the prevalence of violence in post-Soviet society and discourse. The final section, “Writing Politics,” explores popular writings by authors whose works appear at the intersection of politics, media, and literature. Beginning with the influential postmodern writers Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin—both of them acutely aware of literature’s ability to appropriate and challenge dominant cultural discourses—then introducing the nostalgic, violent, nationalist ideologies of Aleksandr Prokhanov and Eduard Limonov, this section presents writers’ diverse approaches to

Introduction

challenging reigning political ideologies, while emphasizing the need for reading practices that see literature as more than a mere market commodity or political propaganda. The participation of the popular writers Dmitrii Bykov and Boris Akunin in the antiPutin protest movements that began in 2011, and their extensive use of social media and websites to circulate their work, have brought new readers to their already sizable audiences. Bykov’s satire encourages a critical perspective on post-Soviet politics, while Akunin’s detective novels criticize nostalgia for the past and encourage engaging with institutional problems of the present. The film director Timur Bekmambetov takes a different approach to the problems of the present. His Night Watch series, based on the novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, presents a world in which “everything is clear, the beginning and the end, good and bad,” so that “terrifying contradictions will be resolved in one way or another.”4 Aleksandr Tarasov argues that “if The Matrix tells the viewer to ‘wake up and revolt,’ the Night Watch series tells him to ‘sit quietly and obey the regime.’” The popularity of all the works presented in this section, their range of views and widespread distribution, require us as readers to make responsible choices about how to engage with them.

4

     Timur Bekmambetov, Konstantin Ernst, Daniil Dondurei, and Lev Karakhan, “Zhazhda novoi krovi: ‘Nochoi dozor’—tekhnologii kommercheskogo uspekha,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 12 (2004).

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Part 1. Rethinking Identities

One of the goals of writing and reading literature is to represent and understand perspectives that differ from our own. Writing can create unique, self-ascribed literary identities: some of the works presented in this volume proclaim the emergence of new attitudes toward self-identity that confront previous writing practices and demand to be read on their own terms. In addition to introducing new identities and affiliations, the performance of identity in literary texts can allow communities that traditionally have been marginalized to assert their distinctiveness. These challenges to dominant literary discourses can lead to the questioning of existing value systems in the study of literature. In addition to empowering new voices, however, writing and reading practices can lead to the creation of stereotyped or otherwise problematic identities that become imposed upon the writing subject. For example, not all Russian women writers who published their work during the late 1980s and early 1990s appreciated the label “women’s prose” that was applied to their writing. Moreover, using binary constructs such as “dominant” and “secondary,” or “center” and “periphery,” as organizing principles is problematic. As debates about identity politics have demonstrated, if we agree that there is a center, then all of the diverse identities surrounding that center become “peripheral.” This can lead to an unsystematic consolidation of distinct identities based on gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, despite the fact that these categories clearly are not analogous to one another. As David Palumbo-Liu has observed, grouping “marginalized” people together constitutes

19

Part 1. Rethinking Identities

20

a form of typecasting in which individual identities become lost. The discussion of “racial and other minorities and women is geared to a set of historical narratives about ‘them’ precisely as groups, rather than individuals.”1 This chapter considers some of the new developments associated with the exploration of identity in Russian literature, and encourages discussion of some of the problematic ways these identities have been characterized. Helena Goscilo observes that in the Russian literary tradition, with the emergence of glasnost’ in the late 1980s editors and the public began to take notice of women writers. The phenomenon of “women’s prose” was heavily debated, but the term, as Goscilo notes, did not refer exclusively to literature by or for women. Female writers and critics alike defined “women’s prose” as writing preoccupied with “emotional life” and characterized by “triviality, coquettishness, and empty decoration.” If male writers could retreat from politics to produce writing with “serious implications,” women writers were perceived as writing about a petty world of domestic concerns. It comes as no surprise, then, that women writers often rejected the label of “women’s prose,” with the writer Tatyana Tolstaya arguing that “bad” male writers could also produce “women’s prose” when they tended toward the superficial. Despite Tolstaya’s claim, the practice of labeling literature according to the biological sex of the author continues. The literary critic and writer Olga Slavnikova, when asked about the enduring popularity and relevance of women’s writing, argued that women are “genetically programmed” to be indispensable: “In extreme situations, when men are obliged to die, women are obliged to survive.” In 2012 the provocative writer Zakhar Prilepin published 14, a collection of women’s writing intended as a follow-up to 10, a collection of writing by men published in the previous year. In a press statement ostensibly intended to publicize 14, Prilepin characterized prose by men as “full of a sensation of gloom and the burdens of life,” while “women’s prose, in some indefinable way, escapes from this

1

     David Palumbo-Liu, “Assumed Identities,” New Literary History 31, no. 4 (2000): 766-767.

Part 1. Rethinking Identities

feeling.” “But to be blunt,” he continued, “judging from the quality of the texts, men’s prose is better.”2 The question of how to interpret such characterizations of women and their writing is complex. Tolstaya’s negative characterization of “women’s prose” argues for the separation of gender and biology. Her dismissal of “women’s prose” as a mode of writing suggests that for her, themes and styles conventionally associated with women’s writing are not the inherent product of women’s genes or chromosomes, but are simply characteristic of bad writing. However much Tolstaya’s claim that “talent is talent” expresses a healthy suspicion of the notion of genetically determined identities, it also refuses to acknowledge the underlying biases that associate “bad” writing with women. Undoubtedly, the greatest of contemporary Russian womenwriters is Liudmilla Petrushevskaya, whose novel Time Night (1992) we strongly recommend for courses on contemporary Russian literature and who is represented in this volume by three short stories written in the 1990s. Petrushevskaya’s prose (and dramas) are usually treated as examples of “chernukha” (a dark and gloomy hyper-naturalism that became popular in the years of Perestroika). However, her contribution to Russian literature and her lasting impact on future generations of writers (e.g., the New Drama movement of the 2000s) can be better seen in the context of Russian modernism. It is not only Petrushevskaya’s heroines who frequently interpret their own lives in recurrent dialogue with the prominent cultural figures of the past (most illuminating is the example of Anna Andrianovna, the protagonist and unreliable narrator of Time Night who sees herself as the reincarnation of Anna Akhmatova). Petrushevskaya herself typically combines painstaking attention to the details of everyday life with concealed (or obvious) references to esteemed literary and cultural models. Such references are easily detectable in the stories included in this volume: ”Hygiene” replays both the Apocalypses and the Hollywood-inspired story of global 2

    “Zakhar Prilepin sostavil antologiiu sovremennoi rossiiskoi zhenskoi prozy” [Zakhar Prilepin compiled an anthology of contemporary womens’ proze] RIA Novosti, July 11, 2012 (http://weekend.ria.ru/books/20120711/696772045.html).

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Part 1. Rethinking Identities

catastrophe; “New Family Robinsons” refers to Defoe’s classic, and “The Fountain House” not accidentally contains in its title the address of Akhmatova’s residence. By this means Petrushevskaya transforms the scene of everyday life, permeated by everyday violence—mainly against and between those closest to each other— and the mundane struggle for power and domination between and within genders, generations, families, and the like into the site where “eternal values” are rigorously tested and discarded. The woman standing in the center of these global catastrophes concentrated into the space of a two-room apartment, hospital ward, remote hut, or similar small space, thus literarily appears to be the one who carries the burden of responsibility for the stability and future destiny of the entire world: her prosaic, meager decisions and seemingly trivial choices immediately attain the importance of mythological actions, eventually affecting everyone and everything around her. The poet, essayist, and prose-writer Linor Goralik directly continues Petrushevskaya’s line of inquiry in her cycle “They Talk.” Each snapshot of modern everyday speech included in this cycle presents a climax of a mundane tragedy (or tragicomedy) that invites the reader to restore the missing pieces of the puzzle in his/ her imagination. The very design of these intentionally fragmentary stories, in which climactic conclusions are excluded from the text but can be imagined by the reader, tangibly outlines the unifying context shared by the characters and the reader. This context is truly historical as it implies shared dramas, yet at the same time it consists predominantly of the mundane and “a-historical.” Goralik inherits this understanding of social history as the product of everyday relationships between ordinary men and women from Petrushevskaya. Much like Petrushevskaya’s heroines, the poet Vera Pavlova, also included in this chapter, has stated: “I am not a poet, I am a woman in love.” Her statement, in its rejection of the gender-neutral “poet” and embrace of the gender-marked “woman,” is consistent with the accessibility and sensuality of her creative work. Pavlova has noted that she began writing poems in a maternity ward, immediately after the birth of her first child (“Poetry came at the same time the

Part 1. Rethinking Identities

23

milk did”), and she has not resisted interpretations of her work that lean toward the biological (like DNA, “an ideal poem … contains all the information about its author”3). The power of her gendered poetic world has resonated with readers in Russia and abroad. Reviews of her poetry, however, reveal that some critics read her work as an affirmation of existing distributions of power. The critic Boris Paramonov, for example, likens her work to a “child’s album,” and the experience of reading her poems to the pleasure of being seduced by a “talented imp”: “Imagine Lolita twisting Humbert around her finger … and at the same time writing excellent poems.”4 If we draw from the readings included in this chapter, we can make the case that writings by women are so diverse that any attempt to generalize about “women’s writing” should be met with well-deserved suspicion. As we have seen, however, this has not stopped critics and writers themselves from generalizing about women’s writing in troubling ways. To enter into this debate is to confront a question that remains central to discussions of identity politics: individual identity and agency are important to maintain, but have we emphasized individuality to such a degree that it has become impossible to mobilize against essentializing discourses? Challenging the very notion of a center is one way that women writers have responded to this dilemma. This is not to say that Russian women writers have united against oppression by embracing an anti-patriarchal politics. Rather, they have circumnavigated, each in her own way, the institutional structures that support essentializing evaluations of their work. Pavlova and Goralik have experienced emigration (Pavlova to the United States, Goralik to Russia after periods in Ukraine and Israel) and expanded the linguistic, cultural, and national parameters that might be used to evaluate their 3

    Vera Pavlova, “Surdoperevod,” october/2011/9/pa4.html

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Oktiabr’ 9:2011,

http://magazines.russ.ru/

    Sergei Iur’enen, Vera Pavlova, Boris Paramonov, and Lilya Pann, “’Nebesnoe zhivotnoe’: V Ekslibrise Vera Pavlova” [A Heavenly Animal: Vera Pavlova at Exlibris], Radio Svoboda, September 24, 2003 (http://archive.svoboda.org/programs/ ex/2003/ex.092403.asp).

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writings. All three of the women under discussion have worked in diverse media: Goralik is a columnist, visual artist, translator, and author of comic books; Petrushevskaya performs as a cabaret singer; Pavlova has authored libretti, collaborated with visual artists, and explored new media as instruments for distributing poetry. They have intervened in the processes and institutions responsible for perpetuating assumptions about their work. The same cannot be said for all who read them. Slava Mogutin is explicit about challenging stereotypes with his art and life. “I’ve always enjoyed breaking taboos and stereotypes,” he writes. “I think that’s what real art is about, and I’ve paid my dues for expressing myself in the most radical and honest way.” In 1994 he attempted to register for the first same-sex marriage in Russia with his American partner, the artist Robert Filippini. For this, his writings, and his activism, he was compelled to leave Russia in 1995. Mogutin’s art, inseparable from his life, aims to trouble conventional assumptions about identity and its formation. His poetic alter ego performs a kind of literary coming out in “My First Man” with the words “I have never written or reminisced about it,” but then subverts any notion of a unique identity with the line, “I entered his life and unceremoniously appropriated it.” If the poem is about discovering oneself, it also acknowledges the role that appropriating another’s identity might have in shaping the self. By challenging the notion that the self can only be defined in opposition to an Other, the poem rejects the binary hierarchies that serve to reinforce difference and oppression. The so-called literature of glamour, epitomized by Oksana Robski, offered another, more conformist, approach to re-shaping one’s personal and social identity. About the lifestyle of the moneyed class but addressed to a broader audience, this prose not only promotes self-expression through the accumulation of material signs of prestige and power, it also presents consumerism as a path to individual and social freedom. The narrative fails to acknowledge the contradiction present in the fact that buying consumer goods makes the protagonist and her story subject to the whims of fashion and the market. Nonetheless, it is a model for self-fashioning that quickly moved into the cultural mainstream of the Putin era, mainly

Part 1. Rethinking Identities

through television shows and advertisements, magazines, and the highly mediated lives of celebrities. Robski herself became such a celebrity, as did Kseniia Sobchak, a former socialite who went on to become an organizer in the anti-Putin protest movement. Like many public personalities whose fame is to some degree dependent upon their ability to showcase consumer goods (whether in magazine photos, advertisements, or reality television shows, at sponsored events, or on the red carpet) Robski’s popularity suggests, despite multiple contradictions, that participation in consumer culture and individual freedom are compatible ideals. The various strategies of self-determination exhibited by the artists found in this chapter include ignoring, confronting, and even encouraging the expression of preconceived categories of identity. In this, they reveal the limitations of existing institutions for the distribution and evaluation of literature. These strategies, along with the writers’ extensive work in other media, also confront the idea that artists can only freely express their ideas within specially designated venues, where women’s writing, queer literature, or any other such cultural category that is set up in opposition to a central “norm” can be safely explored. The editors of this anthology considered whether concentrating these writers in a single section constituted the creation of exactly this sort of venue and risked contributing to the reductive reasoning that we can appreciate art only to the degree that it challenges existing conventions. Ultimately, it became clear that to consistently leave the work of dismantling reductive categories to the artists themselves was to absolve readers of literature of any responsibility in the process. We hope that the readers of this volume will work toward reformulating some of the problematic terms that have been used to evaluate their writing.

25

E xcer pts

from

D ehe x ing S e x

by Helena Goscilo

Perestroika or Domostroika? The Construction of Womanhood under Glasnost1 To see ourselves as others see us! —Robert Burns, “To a Louse”

So many representations, so many appearances separate us from each other. —Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together”

Messages from Russia: A woman should primarily love, care [for], and cherish her own family.2

Women by nature are destined to be weaker…. Men are women’s major game…. A woman without a family is without a master, like a stray animal.3 Women in the West [who] always ask why so few women in our country hold government and other leading posts don’t imagine how many women tyrants have made themselves comfortable in these posts and are tormenting both sexes. Female bureaucracy is more horrible than its male counterpart—a male bureaucrat can still be moved to pity by one’s belonging to the fair sex [sic], whereas a female bureaucrat can’t be moved by anything. I feel sorry for our embittered women, running wild and tortured by the burdens of life. But I pity the men just as much. In the West it is now fashionable to fight men to the death. Nothing has been heard about this yet in our country. Thank God. If women enter 1

     From Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 6-18, 87-95.

2

     Liliya Nikolayeva, “To Love, Care and Cherish,” Moscow News, 1987, no. 16: 2.

3

     Sigrid McLaughlin, “An Interview with Viktoria Tokareva,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 76.

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

the lists, they will win. For they are more cunning, wily and tenacious. And I would very much resent living in a land of conquered men.4 Western women feminists have teeth like sharks.5

Clearly, from Russia without love. These opinionated pronouncements emanate not from men but rather from educated Russian women of the intelligentsia, whose reflex response to the very terms woman writer and feminist recalls Dracula recoiling from a cross. That seismic reaction symptomatizes the fundamental discrepancies in assumptions and orientation between Russian female authors and the majority of their Western readers. The two operate by different, often antithetical, codes. Witness the case of Natal’ia Baranskaia, whose story “Nedelia kak nedelia” (A Week Like Any Other, 1969) impressed Western feminists by its purported expose of patriarchal oppression. Some have even dubbed this piece, which chronicles the dehumanizing effects of women’s double duty on the professional and home fronts, the angriest feminist cry to emerge from the Soviet Union.6 Yet during an interview with me in spring 1988, Baranskaia (not having read Roland Barthes and learned of the author’s death) asserted that her story, far from exposing the heroine’s husband as a chauvinistic exploiter, actually portrays the power of love. Although she intended to document the hardships endured by today’s women in Russia, Baranskaia protested, she deemed it unjust to hold men responsible for conditions that she imputes exclusively if hazily to the “system.” What Baranskaia did criticize was Western women’s efforts to displace men from their “natural” position of superiority, and the “unfeminine” tactics deployed in that campaign. Why, for instance, did the British publishing house adopt the name Virago — 4

    Tatyana Tolstaya, “In a Land of Conquered Men,” Moscow News, 24 September 1 October 1989, 13.

5

    Opinion of Viktoriia Tokareva, reported by Beatrix Campbell, “Writer’s Room with a View,” Guardian, 21 February 1989, 35.

6

    For a discussion of a story from such a viewpoint, see the competent survey of Baranskaia’s oeuvre by Susan Kay, “A Woman’s Work,” Irish Slavonic Studies 8 (1987): 115-26.

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which Baranskaia understood only in its secondary meaning, as a termagant, a loud, overbearing woman, and not in its primary dictionary definition, as a woman of great stature, strength, and courage?7 As Baranskaia’s indignant bafflement evidences, a Western audience reads according to a set of presuppositions and assimilated imperatives that Russians manifestly do not embrace— indeed, even find alien and repugnant. As a result of the radical self-assessment by the educated segment of society in the West during the last two decades, feminism has fundamentally transformed people’s ways of perceiving and thinking about women. That transformation in turn has influenced the norms guiding the production and consumption of culture. For the reconceived image of woman (womanhood “with a human face”) has infiltrated not only the process of reading texts, watching films, viewing paintings, and decoding advertisements and commercials, but also the very environment that incubates these artistic and media forms. In the United States, Germany, France, and England, where awareness of gender problems inflects the sensibilities of readers, viewers, writers, and directors alike, a more or less shared set of cultural experiences allies authorial choices with audience expectations and reactions. Recent fiction and film in the United States and England, for example, draws on a cultural context informed by the issues, if not necessarily the values, of the twenty-year-old feminist movement.8 Examples range from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Erica Jong’s series of unzipped novels, and Fay Weldon’s mordant shockers to Alison Lurie’s The Truth About Lorin Jones, David Lodge’s best-seller Nice Work (1989), such films as Working Girl (1988), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1989), and Switch (1991), and various media messages (e.g., the commercial for Virginia Slims claiming “You’ve come a long way, baby!”) that subliminally or overtly promote a more self-conscious version of gender.

7

    Interview with Natal’ia Baranskaia in Moscow, conducted and taped by Helena Goscilo (13 May 1988).

8

   Written in the early 1990s.

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

Recent Soviet films and prose authored by men or women lack a comparable context and, consequently, the fund of referents available to Western artists and their public. Since discourses and artistic codes and conventions partially derive from specific sociocultural circumstances, it is critical to contextualize contemporary Russian inscriptions of womanhood in order to grasp what underlies the failure at communication, let alone agreement. Accordingly, my discussion offers a selective commentary that falls into four unequal segments: (1) a summary of institutionalized concepts of gender in Soviet society, with a glance at the status of feminism within that structure; (2) an assessment of the impact glasnost has had on the Soviet concept of womanhood; (3) an examination of how orthodox Soviet views are reflected, challenged, or subverted in late Soviet women’s writing in general; and (4) a necessarily brief, closer look at three women writers whose heterodox authorial practices discomfited Soviet readers in the late 1980s and provoked heated debate.9 Context Formally, Russian women in the Soviet Union enjoyed rights that their Western counterparts might have envied. In the classic Marxist conviction that women’s emancipation depends upon their integration into productive labor, the egalitarian Soviet Constitution guaranteed women not only full political and civil rights but also access to most trades and professions, in addition to fixed equal pay for equal work.10 Because an ongoing need for an expanding labor force intensified the government’s efforts to retain female workers, until de-Sovietization ninety percent of Russian women were

9

   See particularly the famous dialogue between Sergei Chuprinin (“Drugaia proza”) and Dmitrii Urnov (“Plokhaia proza”), Literaturnaia gazeta 6 (8 February 1989): 4-5; Evgeniia Shcheglova, “V svoem krugu,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1990): 19-26.

10

   Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

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30

employed (the highest percentage in the world)11 in areas ranging from engineering and law to sanitation and construction. Women, in fact, accounted for 52 percent of the labor force.12 Moreover, thanks to the legislation written in 1988 by the Soviet Women’s Committee under Zoia Pukhova, the state vouchsafed women two years of maternity leave and job security for three years after parturition. It also provided free public child care facilities and legal abortion and divorce for a nominal fee. As no less a figure than the once omniscient and now roundly discredited Lenin declared, however, “Equality before the law does not automatically guarantee equality in everyday life.” The disjunction between the paper rights conferred upon women and the bleak reality of their empirical experience dimmed the glow of the pseudo-utopian picture implied by the Constitution. Ever since the Stalin period, when the official culture joined women’s economic role to the glorification of maternity and the reaffirmation of women’s traditional familial duties, the Soviet state and the society exhorted women to be both producers and reproducers. As a consequence, they bore the double load of full-time work and all domestic responsibilities. One might say that Russian women were in labor wherever they turned. Men’s unwillingness to assume any household or parental obligations left the woman alone to cope with rearing children and cleaning house, cooking, laundering, shopping, etc. Over a million women suffered the stress of single parenting while holding down regular jobs.13 In a country in which perpetual shortages of goods, shoddy products, lack of appliances, poor medicine, deplorable services, and inefficiently run institutions made everyday life a trial, women with a family had insufficient time and energy for career advancement. Hence, in spheres considered 11

   Figures vary, depending on source. In 1990 one of the most frequently cited statistics was 86 percent of women were working outside of home. Broadcast by Ted Koppel, “Sex in the Soviet Union” (January 1991).

12

   See also Helena Goscilo, “Russian Women Under Glasnost,” New Outlook 2, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 45-50.

13

   Kerry McCuaig, “Effects of Perestroika and Glasnost on Women,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 12.

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

suitable for women, they disproportionately clustered on the lowest rungs of the personnel hierarchy, even though employers readily acknowledged that female employees were more reliable and quick (not to mention sober) than their male counterparts. According to a freelance journalist in Moscow, few women harbored ambitions to assume top positions, knowing that prestigious establishments, especially, strictly observed a quota system, based on the unofficial but widespread formula: “We already have one Jew, two non-Party members, and two women.”14 The writer Tatyana Tolstaya and others deploring the so-called recent [i.e., during late Soviet period — eds.] feminization of Russian society pointed out that women account for over eighty percent of the country’s doctors and teachers, but she overlooked the low prestige of these specializations in the USSR as well as their links with nurturing and child raising. Women constituted ninety percent of pediatricians, but only six percent of surgeons; in the late 1970s the powerful USSR Academy of Sciences boasted 14 women among its 749 members (Lapidus 188); in 1986 men made up over 84 percent of the influential Soviet Writers’ Union. Of the approximately 15 percent of women, none held key executive posts. Editorial boards typically consisted of seven to eight men, with one token woman, at best. Under Soviet rule, most Russian women concurred that they felt crushed by emancipation. They complained that the average woman underwent twelve abortions during her lifetime (abortion was the chief mode of contraception, and some women had as many as thirty),15 and that she received no help from her husband with the children or the housework yet was forced to work for economic reasons, often under hazardous physical conditions, and so lived in a state of unrelieved tension and exhaustion.16 Although

14

   Index on Censorship 3 (1989).

15

   Here, as elsewhere, discrepancies in statistics reflect different sources. The variously reported averages seem to range from twelve to fifteen. […]

16

   Nearly half of Russia’s female workers engaged in unskilled labor. In agriculture, manual labor remained women’s province, for machinery tended overwhelmingly to be entrusted to men.

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women writers and sundry commentators repeatedly lamented the arduousness of women’s lives in the USSR, few appeared to make connections between official policy and women’s situation. In that connection an article by the American journalist Robert Scheer entitled “Where Is She, the New Soviet Woman?” expressed outraged bemusement: Many of my Soviet male friends tended to be primitive oppressors as regards women, viewing them as a mixture of beast of burden and sexual toy. More depressing, they seemed to find some moral confirmation in the laws of nature for clearly supremist and exploitative views that would be abhorrent [to them] in any other arena of life. It seems never to have occurred to anyone here that if women had political power in the Soviet Union one result might have been the greater efficiency of shopping and a vast increase in the production of labor-saving devices for the household. Why has there been such scant improvement, after decades of socialist organization, in the objective conditions that women now find themselves in? The answer is that women in the Soviet Union lack political power even to the degree experienced in the capitalist West. The disenfranchisement of more than half of the population is no minor discrepancy in a society struggling with questions of freedom and representation.17

Gender disposition in the Soviet Union corroborated Simone de Beauvoir’s aperçu that men have found more complicity in women than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed. Russian women internalized official propaganda and the traditional male system of prerogatives so thoroughly that they themselves propagated the very inequities that marginalized them. Even among the tiny minority of self-proclaimed feminists, some believed that a woman completely realized her essence and her destiny only through motherhood; that domestic tasks were “unfitting for a man”; that nature endowed women with the traits of nurturing, softness,

17

   Moscow News, 30 April – 7 May 1989.

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

compliance, and patience.18 In short, they essentialized, by mistaking social constructs (femininity) for biology (femaleness).[…] In the springs of 1988 and 1990, while conducting interviews in Moscow and Leningrad with some thirty female authors encompassing the full spectrum of background, age, and worldview, I repeatedly (and often in unexpected contexts) encountered the refrain, “A woman shouldn’t lose her femininity.” When asked what constitutes femininity, most cited gentleness, sensitivity, maternal instincts, and the capacity to love. When I suggested that these were not necessarily inborn traits, virtually all of the women resisted the very concept of a constructed identity.19 Ironically, in a country ruled by ideological impositions, women did not grasp the politics of gender formation. In irrationally hoping that general improvements in living conditions would ease their lot, without agitating for a fundamental reassessment of entrenched female-male roles, Russian women unwittingly reinforced gender stereotypes. Whereas Western women sought a “room of their own,” years of officially promoted self-sacrifice habituated Russian women to ‘’burdens of their own”—which they seemed reluctant to jettison on the grounds (or, rather, quicksands) of a biologically ordained self. Russian women frankly admitted that the majority of Russian men scorned domestic tasks as an inherently female province, proved often unsatisfying sexual partners (given to “premature congratulations”), and were conspicuously absent parents (paternity had virtually disappeared from the vocabulary); they likewise recognized that conditions of employment invariably favored men, even though they were less reliable workers. Yet, when exhorted to seek redress through political action on their own behalf, Russian women not only shied away from feminism but violently denounced it. As Nina Beliaeva, a feminist lawyer, observed, the 18

   See Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).

19

   […] For instance, the cult of maternity, despite its complicity with official demographic campaigns and the heritage of Stalinist coercion, persists as an ineradicable fixture of Russian thinking.

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very word “smacks of the indecent, the shameful,” and for many was associated with masculinization or lesbianism (universally despised).20 Feminism conjured up the specter of “bright, slovenly, raucous women with blunt gestures, bugging eyes, and cigarette smoke, in a small but vociferous procession of women declaring war on the opposite sex.”21 Indeed, even otherwise enlightened Russians conceived of feminists as vengeful, mustached hags or harridans thirsting for the wholesale metaphorical (if not literal) castration of men, intent on crushing or replacing them so as to gratify their lust for power, compensate for their self-doubts, or enact their lesbian inclinations. In addition to equating feminism with the masculinization or perversion of women, Soviets also stigmatized it on two counts: for decades it had been discredited as springing from bourgeois values. Many Westerners puzzled by Soviets’ uncompromising rejection of it failed to realize that Russians entertained a reduced and uninformed, or historically overmarked, concept of feminism. […] Second, given its manifestly political nature, feminism during Glasnost had little chance of taking root in a country that had suddenly lost faith in any political engagement as an activity. Many women, in fact, maintained that they preferred to leave the “dirty business” of politics to men, confining their energies to the more “authentic” spheres of family and intimate circles of friends, in a replay of Western Victorian scenarios. Glasnost Glasnost witnessed a growing receptivity on Soviets’ part to Western tendencies and a readiness to assimilate what earlier would have been dismissed as quintessentially Western phenomena incompatible with Soviet principles. Indeed, one might reasonably

20

   The few lesbians whom I have encountered in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, plus several gay men, would represent exceptions. […]

21

   Nina Belyaeva, “Feminism in the USSR,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 17.

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

attribute to Western influence the influx in the then USSR of what in the West could signal a burgeoning feminist awareness: (1) surveys of popular responses to questionnaires designed to highlight possible gender differences, such as the opinion polls reflecting attitudes to sexual practices, marriage, and divorce;22 (2) articles in various publications devoted to women’s issues and exhorting increased attention to them;23 (3) the opening in 1990 of a Center for Gender Studies within the Academy of Sciences […]; (4) the formation of a separate women’s section within the Writers’ Union, headed in Moscow by Larisa Vasil’eva […]; (5) a sudden spate of publications of neglected women’s literature from the past (Ekaterina Dashkova, Nadezhda Durova, Karolina Pavlova, Evdokiia Rostopchina) and various collections of contemporary women’s prose that materialized in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Zhenskaia logika, Chisten’kaia zhizn’, Ne pomniashchaia zla, Novye Amazonki […]); (6) the emergence (and prominence in the media) of individuals who committed themselves, despite formidable odds, to the dissemination of feminist ideas, for example, the independent Leningrader Olga Lipovskaia, editor of Zhenskoe chtenie, founded in 1988 and consisting of articles, original poetry and prose by women, and translations of texts pertinent to characteristic feminist concerns; and (7) the proliferation of women’s organizations, including Preobrazhenie, LOTOS (an acronym for the League for Society’s Liberation from Stereotypes), the club SAFO, a network of women’s councils […], and an international women’s press club called 33 Women and One Man, the man being the rotating elected “hero of the month,” ironically dubbed the “Knight of Perestroika,” whom the thirty-three women interviewed collectively in an effort to enhance mutual understanding between the sexes. Parenthetically, it is worth noting that the reaction of a prominent male political analyst on Soviet TV to the formation of

22

   Many of these were published in Moscow News, a flagship of glasnost.

23

   In 1988 Moscow News introduced a regular column entitled “She and We,” dealing specifically with women’s issues and featuring diverse items ranging from letter and opinion polls to editorials and “think pieces.”

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this club drove home the dire need for consciousness-raising in Soviet society. According to his “professional” judgment, women could be reporters and good interviewers, “especially if they are young and attractive, but never political commentators or serious analysts because the latter are at variance not only with tradition, but with the very makeup of women, their physiology [sic] and way of thinking.”24 In a similar vein a lawyer deploring the morals of prostitutes branched out into the following startling generalization: I respect the emancipation of women, but one perhaps ought to think of restoring the old rule banning women from restaurants in the evening unless accompanied by men. The woman who hangs outside a restaurant waiting to be let in, who sits at a table without a man, a glass of cognac in her hand, does not give others any reason to have a flattering opinion of her.25

Items appearing in such publications as Moscow News in the late 1980s testified to a strong division of opinion among Soviets regarding woman’s “proper niche” in life. That such issues were being debated at all awakened moderate optimism among some Soviets. […] These, however, were miniature pockets of revolutionary change, more cosmetic than systemic. Isolated developments on a modest scale, they virtually drowned in countercurrents, some new and imported from the West, others of immemorial domestic origins. After years of essentially denying that sex and the body exist, the Soviets discovered both — as a source of pleasure and economic gain. Especially the exploitation of women’s bodies as marketable commodities and objects of displaced male violence, which Western 24

   Moscow News, 1-8 January 1988, 12. According to several feminists in Moscow, the press club smacked of frivolity and “coquetry,” had no serious platform, and contributed little to the betterment of women’s social status. Interview with Natal’ia Filippova, former member of Preobrazhenie (Moscow, May 1990), recorded by Helena Goscilo.

25

   Elizabeth Waters, “Reading Between the Novosti Lines,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 34.

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

feminists (notably Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Susan Browruniller)26 have combatted, suddenly found unsavory expression in diverse aspects of late Soviet culture: (1) the highly publicized beauty contests that secured the then sixteen-year-old Mariia Kalinina (Miss Moscow 1988) and seventeen-year-old Iuliia Sukhanova (Miss USSR 1989) dubious fame; (2) a relentless barrage of films onanistically relying on female nudity, explicit sexual acts, and prolonged or repeated rape as a means of attracting viewers so as to amass profits (e.g., Kh. Kaiziev’s Shakaly [Jackals, 1990], A. Eidamadzhan’s Za prekrasnykh dam! [To Beautiful Ladies, 1990]); (3) a wave of video parlors (videosalony and videokluby) trafficking principally in sadomasochism and pornography; artistic milestones with such subtle titles as Devushki, razdevaites’! (Take It Off, Girls!), Obnazhennaia sredi kannibalov (Naked Among the Cannibals), Ty ne oboidesh’sia bez nebol’shogo rasputstva (You Can’t Do Without a Little Sluttishness), and Biust i taz—vot chto samoe glavnoe (The Bust and Pelvis Are What’s Most Important) […]; (4) heavy metal concerts during which female performers bared all (apart from musical talent); (5) display of female bodies au naturel on covers of any and all publications, ranging from fashion magazines to scholarly economic journals (e.g., Eko), on dashboards of taxis, on posters peddled in subway stations, and so forth; (6) the Soviet issue of Playboy photographed by Sasha Borodanin, which raised hopes of a profitable career abroad in many a pneumatic Soviet breast; and (7) a dramatic increase in, and a cynical respect for, prostitution as a ticket to material well-being and social prestige. In a 1990 survey, Soviet women ranked prostitution eighth in a list of twenty top professions; over one-third of high school girls freely admitted that they would exchange sex for hard currency (Koppel). The significance of these novelties in the Soviet Union could not be compared to that in the West, given the primitive level of 26

   See, for instance, Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975); Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Putnam, 1981); and Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). For more extensive bibliography, see MacKinnon (231-36).

37

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knowledge among Russians then about anything pertaining to sex. Virtually no sex education existed in the USSR; condoms were in disastrously short supply, and 70 percent of high school students who engaged in sexual intercourse did not use contraceptives the first time; owing to Russians’ fundamental ignorance of biology, some women reached the fifth month of pregnancy before realizing their condition; and, finally, every fourth abortion that occurred in the world was performed in the USSR (according to Koppel’s research). These were not ideal circumstances for the radical sexual revolution of the type that took place under glasnost. […] After decades of puritanism Russian males flocked in thousands to inspect, and to parade their appreciation for, what the society had denied them for so long. Within one social category, at least, the politics of erogenous commitment ousted earlier political idols: truck drivers quickly replaced the portraits of Stalin decorated with medals, which they used to display routinely on their windshields, with coyly pouting pinups free of any and all decoration. One might argue that such regressive sexist innovations pervaded only popular culture, and a minority within it, without impinging on “high culture,” the intelligentsia’s arena of significant activity. Such arguments, however, do not withstand close scrutiny. While pornography may he purchased by the proletariat, it is produced by writers—not necessarily talented ones, but members of the intelligentsia nonetheless. Surveys canvassing opinions regarding sexual, marital, and familial issues during the late 1980s unambiguously confirmed that both sexes across a broad social spectrum upheld the double standard. […] Women’s organizations, while affording members platforms for self-expression, not only failed to be taken seriously by those empowered to change women’s lot but also lacked the political weight to effect improvements in women’s social and political status. And scholarly feminist publications sparked enthusiasm in the West but left the educated Russian public largely skeptical and indifferent.[…] If beauty contests and pornographic videos propagated a degrading and reductionist image of womanhood, the titles of recent prose collections [of the late 1980s-early 1990s], such as those

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

mentioned, likewise enforced hoary gender stereotypes through their code-affirming implications: for example, Zhenskaia logika (Female Logic, 1989) relied on the tiresome and tireless fantasy of women as irrational, unpredictable creatures ruled by emotion and whim; Chisten’kaia zhizn’ (A Clean/Pure Life, 1990) evoked the hackneyed pseudo-ideal of woman as virgin or sterile/sterilized housekeeper, and so forth. Editors continued not only to exclude or drastically underrepresent women in anthologies of prose and poetry but also to withhold their birthdates while supplying that information for all the male contributors, on the understanding that women, unlike men, wish to hide their age (according to the cliché that women grow old, while men become distinguished […]). To the perceptive reader the markedly different treatment of these authors, who, moreover, served as isolated representatives of their gender, set them apart—outside the “malestream”—and betrayed the deeprooted gender bias that for decades prevailed in all spheres of Soviet cultural life and continued to do so during glasnost. Yet the majority of Russians, including those trained in deciphering the values and political allegiances attaching to ostensibly innocuous discourse, seemed impervious to sexist language or strategies. Though sensitized to the encoded sociopolitical connotations of literary and journalistic statement, they could not detect the articulation of gender politics in verbal formulations that any educated Westerner would find crudely chauvinistic. Women Writers How do women born and raised in such a culture perceive and inscribe themselves in their texts? The answer is, problematically. Russian women’s reluctance to explore the liberating political and psychological potential of feminism […] paralleled Soviet female authors’ categorical disavowal of themselves as specifically women writers, even though they and their society at every turn underscored their Otherness. Whenever gender issues were raised, irreconcilable self-contradictions riddled the impassioned reactions of both. Asked by an American scholar how she felt as a woman writer, Viktoriia Tokareva replied:

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It is no disadvantage that I am a woman. I am different because I write with humor. Humor is rare, even [sic] with male writers. I prefer male prose, though often women’s prose is overloaded with attention to detail. If the woman is talented this is delightful. But I like terse literature, not babskaya [broads’ or typical women’s] literature. (McLaughlin 75)

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya claimed to write in a “male mode,” focusing on the essentials of plot and character, as opposed to wallowing in the ornateness that she, like many others, associated with women’s style.27 For Tatyana Tolstaya, women’s writing was synonymous with superficiality and a philistine outlook, with a saccharine air and a mercantile psychology. But her revealing comment that men also write such “women’s prose” left unanswered the question why hack work of this sort merits a gendered label.28 Although the highly successful critic-journalist Natal’ia Ivanova doubted the validity and usefulness of a gendered literary category, she nonetheless proceeded to define “women’s prose” in purely derogatory terms. For her it denoted a parochial outlook, an exclusive preoccupation with women’s emotional life, and a concomitant glut of weddings, infidelities, and divorces; its stylistic earmarks were triviality, coquettishness, and empty decoration.29 Her contentious model recalled an earlier article (published in 1963) by the writer Natal’ia Il’ina, who summed up what she ironically dubbed “ladies’ literature” as a stultifying succession of narcissistic self-contemplations in mirrors breathless declarations of improbable desires and aspirations, littered with pretentious references to pseudolegitimating sources from Heraclitus to Kant and unintentionally hilarious stereotypes of incarnated masculine

27

   Sigrid McLaughlin, “Contemporary Soviet Women Writers,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 77.

28

   Tatyana Tolstaya. “A Little Man Is a Normal Man,” Moscow News, 1987, no.8: 10.

29

   Natal’ia Ivanova, “Kogda by zhizn’ domashnim krugom…,’” Literaturnaia gazeta 4 (1986): 72-4.

Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika?

and feminine ideals that flourish in Harlequin Romances today.30 In its derisive antipathy toward its subject the critique rivaled Nabokov’s dismissal of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises as a book about bells, bulls, and balls. In fact, when Petrushevskaya, Tolstaya, and Ivanova went on to assert that there is really only good and bad prose, it became evident that the negative epithet, for reasons suggested by the gender disposition in Russian society, was interchangeable with women’s. Female authors vehemently dissociated themselves from “women’s” writing, then, chiefly because the seemingly innocent terms did duty for evaluative (or, rather, devaluative) modifiers. In their works, which favored the genre of the short story or novella, Russian women authors under glasnost, not surprisingly, tended to focus on what they knew best and what interested them most: human interaction—often heterosexual relations, family dynamics, generational conflicts, problems of self-fulfillment, and the conflicting claims of job and home. Hallmarks of Soviet women’s prose during the last two decades include a subordination of plot to a preponderance of description; psychological exploration; a style that eschews modernist technique; and a fairly stable perspective, usually a female center of consciousness, conveyed through quasidirect discourse (erlebte Rede)—a limited viewpoint in which boundaries between author, narrator, and protagonist often become blurred. How have women’s narratives differed from men’s? Or, to cast the query in terms of the classic Freudian penal/penile test, one could ask, “What quintessential trait of male prose has women’s fiction lacked?” Above all, a direct, focal treatment of political issues and an immanent impulse to universalize. A nakedly politicized system such as the Soviet Union’s appreciated all too well that the personal is political, but not in the sense theorized by feminists and other Western intellectuals. According to orthodox Soviet principles, “retreat” into the private sphere signaled a repudiation

30

   Natal’ia Il’ina, “K voprosu o traditsii i novatorstve v zhanre ‘damskoi povesti’,” Novyi mir 3 (1963): 224-30.

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of the obligatory participation in collective endeavors and thought mandated by a monolithic ideology. In effect, then, the personal was treasonable. But because of the a priori separation of masculine and feminine arenas of activity—public for men, domestic for women— male apostasy became female propriety. Women’s literary forays into the private world followed so-called laws of nature (were a desideratum), whereas literary evidence of men’s withdrawal from political involvement carried serious implications. The discrimination paralleled official supervision of sexuality with male “deviance” (i.e., homosexuality) punished by a law that left lesbianism unmentioned, for lesbianism was, presumably, inconceivable or socially unidentifiable. In other words, the exclusion of manifestly political matters from women’s fiction and its emphasis on personal or familial aspirations coincided with establishment expectations. In that regard women’s fiction could be considered conformist. Its place in the culture paralleled women’s time, from a masculinist viewpoint, as a pause in the day’s occupations when serious business was set aside for a lighter entertainment. Moreover, the cult of maternity and self-sacrifice, the recurrent motif of guilt for striving to realize the self at the expense of the family (when the two proved incompatible), and the avoidance of formal experimentation all strengthened the impression that women’s fiction was conservative, devoid of risk and color. […]

Helena Goscilo

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Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction Stigmata and Stimulation

In the novel I wanted to compensate for the absence of corporeality in Russian literature. —Vladimir Sorokin, Interview

Some time in the 1980s, Russian women’s fiction shed its threadbare Romantic habits for new modes of gendered representation. Until then the idealizing impulse of Platonism, bequeathed by the Romantics, had shaped literary treatments of women’s physicality. As the incarnation of the sublime ideal that tantalized and tormented the male subject, woman (the dis-or misplaced Goal) was inscribed metaphorically or metonymically according to the dictates of the unitary aesthetic that Paul de Man justly attributes to the Romantic imagination. Hence, her appearance intimated the transcendent mysteries of that vague “beyond” that so beguiled Shelley, Coleridge, Hoffmann, Lermontov, Gogol, and Odoevskii […], while also permitting the Lavaterian observer to “read” and interpret her physiological “text” according to conventions that unhesitatingly extrapolated character traits from individual physical features. […] Generalized into a vague blur of ethereal beauty, in Russia as elsewhere, woman’s form was reduced to symmetry, delicacy, and harmony, its specifics carefully confined to large, expressive eyes (“mirror of the soul”), porcelain pallor, and clouds of hair.1 While religious icons (angel, Virgin Mary) dominated the conceptualization of womanhood, euphemism and lyrical effusions desexed any

1

   On the standard female ideal constructed in the nineteenth century, see Martha Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972).

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bodily part associated with potential sensuality (e.g., breasts, hips, feet). In that respect women’s writing of the 1830s intersected with men’s, as amply evidenced by the narratives of Nadezhda Durova, Elena Gan, Evdokiia Rostopchina, and Mariia Zhukova. […] For the psychological process of internalization shaped women’s self-perception in conformity to the gendered binarism that rules malestream Russian thought in the spheres of social, political, and cultural activity. While acquiescing to their relational identity as lesser antithesis, female authors for the most part opted for a double interiority, fictionally inscribing themselves from within and, moreover, primarily as vessels of thought and above all emotions. The totalizing aesthetics of Romanticism demanded that female virtue assumes a correspondingly attractive external form (“beautiful inside and out”), and that vice signals its presence through obverse (comparably visible) clues. That morally polarized code entrenched itself so firmly that, as late as the second half of the century, it dictated the descriptive particulars of the contrast between Turgenev’s transparent innocents (“turgenevskaia devushka” [the Turgenevian girl]) and his experienced sexual predators, for example, the snake-haired Polozova (Veshnie vody [Spring Torrents]); or between Tolstoy’s girlish, “truthful-eyed” Kitty Shcherbatskaia and Anna Karenina, whose lush figure, springy step, and riotous curls collectively implied an excess of sensual appetite. […] According to this economics of the female body, minimalism conveyed morality; voluptuousness evoked voluptuariness. […] If the 1890s witnessed a belated readiness to extend literary possibilities for inscribing women’s bodies […], any developments achieved by the 1920s were abruptly curtailed in the ensuing decade. The imposition of puritanical caveats by the caretakers of Soviet ideology, together with systematic official campaigns for population increase, led to the exaltation of women’s maternal and uxorial capacities at the expense of their sexuality. Accordingly, Soviet literature adapted the Romantic aesthetic of the preceding century to the pseudomodern Russian context, now highlighting the maternal instead of the virginal aspects of the Madonna paradigm.

Helena Goscilo. Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction

Unlike her fragile Romantic counterpart, the new Soviet heroine exhibited superhuman resilience and strength, but shared with her swooning predecessor traumas that novelists invariably cast as emotional, sometimes physical, but rarely sexual. In the (post)glasnost era the young generation of female authors producing so-called new women’s prose has reversed that protracted trend. Writers such as Nina Gorlanova, Marina Palei, Nina Sadur, Liudmilla Ulitskaia, Larisa Vaneeva, and Svetlana Vasilenko have elaborated a strategy of externalization, of maximal palpability, whereby not tearful lamentations but the female body— as the text’s physical and tropological center—testifies to women’s experience. Female bodies “document” their owners’ suffering and degradation: they bruise, hemorrhage, and break; they endure rape, childbirth, abortion, beating, and disease; they succumb to substance addiction, incontinence, and sundry dehumanizing processes—all painstakingly detailed in slow motion. Hence the fastidious distress among Russian critics that current women’s prose has betrayed women’s fabled uplifting mission of defleshed inspiration—das ewig Weibliche or the Prekrasnaia dama—by sinking into the muck and mire of physiology. From this viewpoint the reassuringly euphemized connotativeness of the female body has degenerated into the literalized dysphemism of gross, violated flesh. Whereas the Romantic heroine’s defleshed body projected the harmonious bliss of a paradise to be attained or regained, the body of today’s heroine is inscribed with the torments of a living hell— hence, the recurrent motif of the Dantesque circle (krug) in recent women’s fiction. […] As the site of a unitary aesthetic ideology, women’s earlier corporeal self was generalized and sanitized into the classical body—closed, disciplined, and permitted only two forms of effluvia: picturesque tears of sorrow (with the Pietà as iconic precedent) and maternal milk (nurture). The fluids now entering and exiting women’s orifices, by contrast, are blood, semen, mucus, bile, urine, and alcohol (Emma Bovary’s death sequence magnified to the nth power and systematically intercalated throughout a text). If earlier visual insignias of reformative immaculate beauty such as marblewhite foreheads, modestly downcast eyes, and ethereal grace

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elicited the distanced aesthetic pleasure of contemplation, current details of bruised faces, bloated stomachs, and bloodied thighs provoke moral outrage or visceral revulsion on readers’ parts. Whereas modified deviations from propriety-bound conventions formerly reinforced those very conventions, inasmuch as they invariably signaled infractions of a (putative) norm, those erstwhile infractions now constitute the norm. New women’s prose spotlights the grotesque body, the uncensored, disruptive body of apertures and appetites—Bakhtin’s lower bodily strata. It opens up the female body to “unsanitary” activity. And it raises several related issues: (1) the possible functions of body inscription in literature; (2) the probable motivation for the current displacement of the classical body with its grotesque counterpart; and (3) the potential benefits of the new modes of fictionalizing female physicality as manifested in the prose of women writers. […] As Wendy Steiner, among others, has observed, “painting until very recently has been taken as mimetic, a mirror of the world.”2 Accordingly, visibility purportedly vouchsafed verisimilitude, a transparent means of conveying the “truth of reality” through the palpable medium of paint (a kindred accuracy was later attributed to photography). Translated into the verbal—thus presumably more labile—form of fiction, the illusion of visibility was rendered primarily through accretion of concrete physical detail that consorted with other modes of characterization, such as action and dialogue, to produce the credible image of a person as well as of a place and time. Within this sphere the body, quite predictably, constituted the chief information center or locus of verification, particularly after the influential publications of Lavater’s physiological and Gall’s phrenological studies. Hermeneutics of the body presupposed a continuity between outer (visible) and inner (invisible) self to such an extent that any disjunction carried shock value and warranted commentary. […] Physical portraits as “speaking pictures” of

2

   Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xii.

Helena Goscilo. Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction

individuals, whether genred simply as physiological sketches (e.g., Lermontov’s “Maksim Maksimych”) or meta-genred as ekphrasis (e.g., in Anna Karenina) […], attest to the saliency of a materialized “body language” for the construction of fictional human identity. The body language that proliferates in current Russian women’s fiction, however, serves different ends. Rarely invoked in order to characterize or to reinforce credibility along a continuum of increasing verifiability (from intangible to material), it sooner fulfills the rhetorical function of metonymically installing authorial and authoring premises instead of pseudoconcretizing authored beings. In other words, alcoholism in Liudmilla Petrushevskaya and Vaneeva, rape in Vasilenko and Tatiana Nabatnikova, abortion in Palei and Gorlanova do not so much index the moral laxity of individual fictional personae as they inscribe the epistemological and conceptualizing habits that produce specific fictions or texts. Given the extraordinary power of body rhetoric in Russia today, to read the debased body in women’s fiction as merely body and thus symptomatic of physical brutality under deteriorating living conditions is to ignore both the tropological properties of the body and the highly differentiated interpolation of the body as rhetorical device by various practitioners of womens’ prose. […] Petrushevskaya, for instance, reverses discursive traditions by tabooing the emotional-spiritual dimension of experience privileged in nineteenth-century prose and replacing it with a lexicon of physiological processes as the sole permissible (unadulterated) mode of discourse […]3 Tolstaya, à la Paul de Man, explodes the assumptions behind totalizing readings by positing a definite disjunction between body and soul (physical versus imaginary or spiritual; outer versus inner). […] Valeriia Narbikova employs sexual acts to spotlight textual practices, and so forth. […] In Vasilenko’s fiction […] the female body resists stable identification with any single phenomenon. It functions, in fact, as the field through which passes every conceivable experience, open

3

   For more detail see Goscilo, “Petrushevskaia’s Vision: No Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness” (paper delivered at AAASS Conference in Arizona, 1992).

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to endless signification. A source of joy and suffering, the corporeal self is both metaphor and material entity, subject and object, depending upon the specifics of the given moment. As signifier, it floats more freely than any other body in current women’s prose. Although, in light of this multiplicity, to make claims for the typicality of any Vasilenko text would be misguided and misleading, her fictional body use emerges perhaps most forcefully in her novella “Shamara,” a latter-day women’s revision of Nikolai Leskov’s “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda” (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District). Set in a labor camp polluted by radiation (Vasilenko’s literary version of her native Kapustin Iar), the tale, tellingly and tautologically labeled videopovest’, is profoundly visual. In the course of its forty-odd pages the eponymous heroine’s body undergoes every conceivable violation in an environment ruled by “animal life”: married to the convict Ustin (one of the eight men who earlier gang-raped her), Shamara is terrorized by a harddrinking albino soldier in an armored troop carrier, has intercourse with him to save Ustin, terminates the resulting pregnancy in her own bathtub, and gets brutally beaten by Ustin, slapped by her coworkers and the local authorities, accidentally almost killed on a rollercoaster by her hermaphroditic friend Lera, and almost murdered by an escaped sexual psychopath. The entire world of the narrative consists of people’s holding knives to each other’s throats, randomly fondling others’ bodies, spying voyeuristically on copulating couples, attempting murder and suicide, succumbing to alcohol, and so forth. Vasilenko, however, does not single Shamara out as victim, thereby differentiating between her and other convicts and their mates: Shamara herself resorts to violence, thievery, bullying, alcohol, and magic spells (in the style of Nina Sadur), to prevent Ustin from straying. And, more important, Vasilenko inscribes Shamara’s body not only as an ambulatory testament to stoic suffering but also as a center of pleasure and aggressive appetite. Collapsing the world with her own subjectivity, Shamara recognizes in both a kindred primordial, unappeasable will—a will that Vasilenko vigorously sexualizes. Acknowledging her own needs, Shamara forthrightly articulates her sexual desire for a man, enjoys a drinking spree, and

Helena Goscilo. Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction

takes sensual delight in her own and others’ physical appearance; in addition, she perceives her surroundings in terms of sexual energy. Although shifting viewpoint within quasi-direct discourse complicates the attribution of perspective, within Shamara’s character zone inanimate objects become actively sexualized. Hence, the sun kisses her, the armored troop carrier, driven by lust for her (“okhvachennye pokhoi’iu”), flaunts itself, almost touching her with its hot flank (“zharkim bokom”), and tears and soils her dress. Indeed, this opening scene of the novella metaphorically foreshadows the albino driver’s later sexual demands on her. In “Shamara” as elsewhere (e.g., her first story, “Za saigakami” [Going after Goat Antelopes]), Vasilenko resists both conventional narrow troping and simple materialization of the female body. Neither antithetical to mind or emotion nor a visible emblem of them, woman’s body in Vasilenko has a capacity for multiple signification, including nonsignification. As these and other women’s texts evidence, the heart has lost its status as the privileged organ of women’s experience, displaced by the uterus and the bodily lower stratum that are the locus of women’s pain and pleasure. And the specific terms and significance of that displacement in recent women’s texts attest to the rehabilitation of female physical appetite, which traditional concepts of femininity stigmatized morally and aesthetically, regardless of whether that appetite was alimentary or sexual. Fictional women have regained their bodies and the expressive potential of their flesh. […] Bodily discourse has acquired formidable political and rhetorical powers in Russia through the longevity and inflexibility of the comprehensive interdictions against it (Foucault 6). By contrast, official abuse of lofty abstractions has wholly discredited “idealization.” Thus, while eloquent flesh “speaks,” the conventional voice stays mute or elusively deflective. “What formerly may have occurred behind the scenes of textual representation now solidly occupies center stage: rape in Tatiana Nabatnikova’s “Shofer Astap” (The Bus Driver Astap), Ulitskaia’s “Bron’ka,” and Vaneeva’s “Antigrekh” (Anti-Sin); prostitution, alcoholism, and addiction in Vaneeva’s “Parada planet” (Parade of the Planets) and Petrushevskaya’s “Takaia devochka” (A Girl like That); prolonged,

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agonizing childbirth and/or abortion in Elena Makarova’s “Na sokhranenii” (To Be Brought to Term), Vasilenko’s “Shamara,” and Palei’s “Otdelenie propashchikh” (The Losers’ Division); loss of control over body functions in Petrushevskaya’s “Ali-Baba,” “Gigiena” (Hygiene), and Vremia noch’ (Time Night), and Palei’s “Den’ topolinogo pukha” (The Day of Poplar Down). In visual terms women’s prose has shifted from Botticelli to Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec. Rose-petal complexions bedewed by tears—the sole permissible bodily effluvium in an age of sublimation—have ceded to eyes rolling out of sockets, supurating wounds, blood trickling down thighs, and buttocks smeared in excrement. This poetics of gross externalization was pioneered by Petrushevskaya, universally acknowledged as the patron saint of the “new physiology.” Indeed, if all nineteenth-century male authors came out from under Gogol’s overcoat, then today’s young female prosaists have emerged from under Petrushevskaya’s skirt. The vividness and wealth of concrete physical detail (regarding bedwetting, defecation, brutal violence, etc.) in her works and theirs have elicited revulsion, opprobrium, and bemusement from critics accustomed to the decorum of omission, periphrasis, or euphemizing tropes. To dismiss this phenomenon—what Russians call “chernukha” (grime and slime)—as merely a vulgar flaunting of newly acquired freedom in the interests of épatage is to underestimate the profound metamorphosis in psychology and aesthetics that women writers have sustained and written into their texts. […]

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya

H ygiene 1

One time the doorbell rang at the apartment of the R. family, and the little girl ran to answer it. A young man stood before her. In the hallway light he appeared to be ill, with extremely delicate, pink, shiny skin. He said he’d come to warn the family of an immediate danger: There was an epidemic in the town, an illness that killed in three days. People turned red, they swelled up, and then, mostly, they died. The chief symptom was the appearance of blisters, or bumps. There was some hope of surviving if you observed strict personal hygiene, stayed inside the apartment, and made sure there were no mice around—since mice, as always, were the main carriers of the disease. The girl’s grandparents listened to the young man, as did her father and the girl herself. Her mother was in the bath. “I survived the disease,” the young man said simply, and removed his hat to reveal a bald scalp covered with the thinnest layer of pink skin, like the foam atop boiling milk. “I survived,” he went on, “and because of this I’m now immune. I’m going door to door to deliver bread and other supplies to people who need them. Do you need anything? If you give me the money, I’ll go to the store—and a bag, too, if you have one. Or a shopping cart. There 1

   Texts in this section were initially published in Liudmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, trans. Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 23-35, 45-60, 97-107.

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are long lines now in front of the stores, but I’m immune to the disease.” “Thank you,” said the grandfather, “but we’re fine.” “If your family gets sick, please leave your doors open. I’ve picked out four buildings—that’s all I can handle. If any of you should survive, as I did, you can help me rescue others, and lower corpses out.” “What do you mean, lower corpses out?” asked the grandfather. ‘’I’ve worked out a system for evacuating the bodies. We’ll throw them out into the street. But we’ll need large plastic bags; I don’t know where to get those. The factories make double-layered plastic sheets, which we could use, although I don’t have the money. You could cut those sheets with a hot knife, and the material will seal back together automatically to form a bag. All you really need is a hot knife and double-layered plastic.” “Thank you, but we’re fine,” repeated the grandfather. So the young man went along the hall to the other apartments like a beggar, asking for money. As the R. family closed the door behind him, he was already ringing their neighbors’ bell. The door opened a little, on its chain, leaving just a crack, so the young man was forced to lift his hat and tell his story to the crack. The R. family heard the neighbor reply abruptly, but apparently the young man didn’t leave, for there were no footsteps. Another door opened slightly: someone else wanted to hear his story. Finally a laughing voice said: “If you have some money already, run and get me ten bottles of vodka. I’ll pay you back.” They heard footsteps, and then it was quiet. “When he comes back,” said the grandmother, “he should bring us some bread and condensed milk, and some eggs. And soon we’ll need more cabbage and potatoes.” “He’s a charlatan,” said the grandfather. “But those aren’t burns; they look like something else.” Finally the father snapped to attention and led the girl away from the door. These were his wife’s parents, not his, and he rarely agreed with them about anything. Nor did they exactly ask his opinion. Something really was happening, he felt: it couldn’t help but happen. He’d been sensing it for a long time now, and waiting.

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. Hygiene

For the moment he was experiencing a temporary stupor. He walked the little girl out of the foyer—there was no need for her to stand there until the mysterious stranger knocked again. The father needed to have a serious talk with the stranger, man to man, about treatment options, escape routes, and the overall circumstances on the ground. The grandparents stayed at the door, because they could hear that the elevator hadn’t been called up. The young man would still be on their floor. He was probably asking for all the money and shopping bags at once so that he wouldn’t have to run back and forth. Or else he really was a charlatan and a crook and was collecting the money only for himself, something the grandmother knew a little about since the time a woman knocked at their door and said she lived in the next entryway and that an old lady, Baba Nura, had died there. She was sixty-nine. The woman was collecting money for the funeral, and she held out a list of people who’d donated, their signatures, and the sums they’d given: thirty kopeks, a ruble, even two rubles. The grandmother gave the woman a ruble, though she couldn’t actually recall anyone named Nura—and no wonder, because five minutes later one of their nice neighbors rang the doorbell and said that they should be careful, some woman no one knew, a crook, was soliciting money under false pretenses. She had two men waiting on the second floor, and they took off with the money, dropping the list of names and sums to the floor. The grandparents were still at the door, listening. Nikolai joined them; he didn’t want to miss anything. His wife, Elena, came out of the shower at last and started asking loudly what was going on, but they hushed her up. Yet they heard no more doorbells. The elevator kept going up and down, and people got out on the sixth floor and made noise with their keys and their door slamming. This meant it could not have been the young man: he didn’t have any keys. He’d have had to ring the doorbell. Finally Nikolai turned on the television, and they had supper. Nikolai ate a great deal. He ate so much the grandfather felt compelled to make a remark. Elena came to her husband’s defense, and then the little girl asked why everyone was arguing, and family life went on its way.

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*** That night, on the street, someone shattered what sounded like a very large window. “It’s the bakery,” said the grandfather, looking down from the balcony. “Run, Kolya, get us some supplies.” They began to collect equipment for Nikolai to go out. A police car drove up, arrested someone, and drove off, leaving a police officer posted at the bakery door. Nikolai went downstairs with a backpack and a knife. By then a whole crowd had gathered outside. They surrounded the policeman, knocked him down, and then people began jumping in and out of the bakery. A woman was mugged for a suitcase filled with bread. They put a hand over her mouth and dragged her away. The crowd kept growing. Nikolai returned with a very full backpack—thirty kilos of pretzels and ten loaves of bread. Still standing on the landing, he removed all his clothes and threw them down the trash chute. He soaked cotton balls in eau-de-cologne, wiped down his body, and threw them down the chute as well. The grandfather, very pleased with the new developments, restricted himself to just one remark— the R. family would have to budget their eau-de-cologne. *** In the morning, Nikolai ate a kilo of pretzels all by himself. The grandfather wore dentures and dipped the hard pretzels lugubriously into his tea. The grandmother seemed depressed and didn’t say anything, while Elena tried to force her little daughter to eat more pretzels. Finally the grandmother broke down and insisted that they ration the food. They couldn’t go out robbing every night, she said, and look, the bakery was all boarded up—everything had already been taken away! So the R. family’s supplies were counted up and divided. During lunch Elena gave her portion to her daughter. Nikolai was as gloomy as a thundercloud, and after lunch he ate a whole loaf of black bread by himself. They had supplies enough for a week. Nikolai and Elena both called into work, but no one answered. They called some friends: everyone was sitting home, waiting. The

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. Hygiene

television stopped working, its screen blank and flickering. The next day the phone stopped working. Out on the street, people walked along with shopping bags and backpacks. Someone had sawed down a young tree and was dragging it home through the empty yard. It was time to figure out what to do with the cat, which hadn’t eaten in two days and was meowing terribly on the balcony. “We need to let her in and feed her,” said the grandfather. “Cats are a valuable source of fresh, vitamin-rich meat.” Nikolai let the cat in, and they fed it some soup—not very much, no need to overfeed it after its fast. The little girl wouldn’t leave the cat’s side; while it had been on the balcony, the girl kept throwing herself at the balcony door to try and touch her. Now she could feed the little creature to her heart’s content, though eventually even her mother couldn’t take it. “You’re feeding her what I tear out of my mouth to give to you!” she cried. There were now enough supplies for five days. *** Everyone waited for something to happen, some sort of mobilization to be announced. On the third night they heard the roar of motors outside. It was the army leaving town. “They’ll reach the outskirts and set up a quarantine,” said the grandfather. “No one gets in, no one gets out. The scariest part is that it all turned out to be true, what the young man said. We’ll have to go into town for food.” “If you give me your cologne, I’ll go,” said Nikolai. ‘’I’m almost out.” “Everything will be yours soon enough,” the grandfather said meaningfully. He’d lost a lot of weight. “It’s a miracle the plumbing still works.” “Don’t jinx it!” snapped his wife. Nikolai left that night for the store. He took the shopping bags and the backpack, as well as a knife and a flashlight. He came back while it was still dark, undressed on the stairs, threw the clothes into the trash chute, and, naked, wiped himself down with the

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cologne. Wiping one foot, he stepped into the apartment; only then did he wipe the other foot. He crushed the cotton balls together and threw them out the door, then dipped the backpack in a pot of boiling water, and also the canvas shopping bags. He hadn’t gotten much: soap, matches, salt, some oatmeal, jelly, and decaffeinated coffee. The grandfather was extremely pleased, however—he was positively beaming. Nikolai held the knife over a burner on the stove. “Blood,” the grandfather noted approvingly before going to bed, “that’s the most infectious thing of all.” *** They had enough food now for ten days, according to their calculations, if they subsisted on jelly and oatmeal, and all ate very little. Nikolai started going out every night, and now there was the question of his clothing. He would fold it into a cellophane bag while he was still on the stairs, and each time he came in he would disinfect the knife over a burner. He still ate plenty, though without any remarks, now, from his father-in-law. The cat grew skinnier by the hour. Her fur was hanging loose on her, and meals were torturous, for the girl kept trying to throw bits of food onto the floor for the cat as Elena rapped the girl on the knuckles. They were all yelling, now, all the time. They’d throw the cat out of the kitchen and close the door, and then the cat would begin hurling itself against the door to get back in. Eventually this led to a horrifying scene. The grandparents were sitting in the kitchen when the girl appeared with the cat in her arms. Both their mouths were smeared with something. “That’s my girl,” said the girl to the cat—and kissed it, probably not for the first time, on its filthy mouth. “What are you doing?” the grandmother cried. “She caught a mouse,” said the girl. “She ate it.” And once again the girl kissed the cat on the mouth. “What mouse?” asked the grandfather. He and his wife sat still with shock.

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. Hygiene

“A gray one.” ‘’A puffy one? A fat one?” “Yes, it was fat and big,” said the girl happily. The cat, in the girl’s arms, was trying to free herself. “Hold her tight!” yelled the grandfather. “Go to your room now, girl, go on. Take the kitty. You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?” His voice was growing louder. “You little tramp! You brat! You’ve played your games with your kitty, haven’t you?” “Don’t yell,” said the girl. She ran quickly to her room. The grandfather followed, spraying her path with cologne. He secured the door behind her with a chair, then called in Nikolai, who was resting after a sleepless night outside. Elena was sleeping with him. They woke up reluctantly; everything was discussed and settled. Elena began crying and tearing out her hair. From the child’s room they could hear knocking. “Let me out, open up, I need to go to the bathroom!” “Listen to me!” yelled Nikolai. “Stop yelling!” “You’re yelling!” cried the girl. “Let me out, please let me out!” Nikolai and the others went into the kitchen. They were forced to keep Elena in the bathroom. She was beating on her door, too. *** By evening the girl had calmed down. Nikolai asked her if she’d managed to pee. With difficulty the girl answered that, yes, she’d gone in her underwear. She asked for something to drink. There was a child-sized bed in the girl’s room, a rug, a locked wardrobe with all the family’s clothing, and some bookshelves. It had been a cozy room for a little girl; now it was a quarantine chamber. Nikolai managed to hack an opening high up in the door. He lowered a bottle filled with soup and bread crumbs through the hole. The girl was told to eat this for dinner and then to urinate in the bottle and pour it out the window. But the window was locked at the top, and the girl couldn’t reach, and the bottle turned out to be too narrow for her to aim into. Excrement should have been easy enough: she was to take a few pages from one of the books and go on those, and then throw this all out the window. Nikolai had

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fashioned a slingshot and after three attempts had managed to put a fairly large hole in the window. But the girl soon showed the signs of her spoiled upbringing. She was unable to defecate onto the pages as she was supposed to. She couldn’t keep track of her own needs. Elena would ask her twenty times a day whether she needed to go poo; the girl would say no, she didn’t; and five minutes later she’d soil herself. Meanwhile, the girl’s food situation was becoming impossible: There were a finite number of bottles, and the girl was unable to retie the ones she had used to the rope. There were already nine bottles scattered on the floor when the girl stopped coming to the door or answering questions. The cat must have been sitting on her, though it hadn’t appeared in their line of vision in a while, ever since Nikolai started trying to shoot it with the slingshot. The girl had been feeding the cat half of every ration—she’d simply pour it out on the floor for her. Now the girl no longer answered questions, and her little bed stood by the wall, outside their line of vision. They’d spent three days innovating, struggling to arrange things for the girl, attempting to teach her how to wipe herself (until now Elena had done this for her), getting water to her so she could somehow wash herself—and pleading interminably for her to come to the door to receive her bottle of food. One time Nikolai decided to wash the girl by pouring a bucket of hot water on her, instead of lowering the food, and after that the girl was afraid to come to the door. All this had so exhausted the inhabitants of the apartment that when the girl finally stopped answering them, they all lay down and slept for a long, long time. *** Then everything ended very quickly. Waking up, the grandparents discovered the cat in their bed with that same bloody mouth—apparently the cat had started eating the girl, but had climbed out, the makeshift window, possibly to get a drink. Nikolai appeared in the doorway, and after hearing what had happened slammed the door shut and began to move things around on the other side, locking them in with a chair. The door remained closed.

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. Hygiene

Nikolai did not want to cut an opening; he put this off. Elena yelled and screamed and tried to remove the chair, but Nikolai once again locked her in the bathroom. Then Nikolai lay down on the bed for a moment, and began to swell up, until his skin had distended horribly. The night before, he’d killed a woman for her backpack, and then, right on the street, he’d eaten a can of buckwheat concentrate. He just wanted to try it, but ended up eating the whole thing, he couldn’t help himself. Now he was sick. Nikolai figured out quickly that he was sick, but it was too late— he was already swelling up. The entire apartment shook with all the knocks on all the doors. The cat was crying, and the apartment above them had also reached the knocking phase, but Nikolai just kept pushing, as if in labor, until finally the blood started coming out of his eyes, and he died, not thinking of anything, just pushing and hoping to get free of it soon. *** And no one opened the door onto the landing, which was too bad, because the young man was making his rounds, carrying bread with him. All the knocking in the apartment of the R. family had died down, with only Elena still scratching at her door a little, not seeing anything, as blood came out of her eyes. What was there to see, anyway, in a dark bathroom, while lying on the floor? Why was the young man so late? He had many apartments under his care, spread across four enormous buildings. He reached their entryway for the second time only on the night of the sixth day—three days after the girl had stopped answering, one full day after Nikolai succumbed, twenty hours after Elena’s parents passed away, and five minutes after Elena herself. But the cat kept meowing, like in that famous story where the man kills his wife and buries her behind a brick wall in his basement, and when the police come they hear the meowing behind the wall and figure out what happened, because along with the wife’s body the husband has entombed her favorite cat, which has stayed alive by eating her flesh.

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The cat meowed and meowed, and the young man, hearing this lone living sound in the entire entryway, where all the knocking and screaming had by now gone silent, decided to fight at least for this one life. He found a metal rod lying in the yard, covered in blood, and with it he broke down the door. What did he see there? A familiar black mound in the bathroom, a black mound in the living room, two black mounds behind a door held shut with a chair. That’s where the cat slipped out. It nimbly jumped through a primitive makeshift window in another door, and behind that door the young man heard a human voice. He removed a chair blocking the way and entered a room filled with broken glass, rubbish, excrement, pages torn out of books, strewn bottles, and headless mice. A little girl with a bright-red bald scalp, just like the young man’s, only redder, lay on the bed. She stared at the young man, and the cat sat beside her on her pillow, also staring attentively at him, with big, round eyes.

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya

T he N ew Robinson C rusoes : A C hronicle of the E nd of the T w entieth C entury

So my parents decided they would outsmart everyone. When it began they piled me and a load of canned food into a truck and took us to the country, the far-off and forgotten country, somewhere beyond the Mur River. We’d bought a cabin there for cheap a few years before, and mostly it just stood there. We’d go at the end of June to pick wild strawberries (for my health), and then once more in August in time for stray apples and plums and black cranberries in the abandoned orchards, and for raspberries and mushrooms in the woods. The cabin was falling apart when we bought it, and we never fixed anything. Then one fine day late in the spring, after the mud had hardened a little, my father arranged things with a man with a truck, and off we went with our groceries, just like the new Robinson Crusoes, with all kinds of yard tools and a rifle and a bloodhound called Red—who could, theoretically, hunt rabbits. Now my father began his feverish activity. Over in the garden he plowed the earth—plowing the neighbors’ earth in the process, so that he pulled out our fence posts and planted them in the next yard. We dug up the vegetable patch, planted three sacks of potatoes, groomed the apple trees. My father went into the woods and brought back some turf for the winter. And suddenly too we had a wheelbarrow. In general my father was very active in the storerooms of our neighbors’ boarded-up houses, picking up whatever might come in handy: nails, old boards, shingles, pieces

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of tin, buckets, benches, door handles, windowpanes, and all sorts of useful old things, like well buckets, yarn spinners, grandfather clocks, and then not-so-useful old things, like old iron tea-kettles, iron oven parts, stove tops, and so on. Three old women were the village’s sole inhabitants: Baba Anisya; Marfutka, who had reverted to semi-savagery; and the redheaded Tanya, the only one with a family: her kids would come around and bring things, and take other things away—which is to say they’d bring canned food from the city, cheese, butter, and cookies, and take away pickled cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes. Tanya had a rich basement pantry and a good, enclosed front yard, and one of her grandchildren, a permanently ailing boy named Valera, often stayed with her. His ears were always hurting, or else he was covered with eczema. Tanya herself was a nurse by training, which training she received in a labor camp in Kolyma, where she’d been sent at the age of seventeen for stealing a suckling pig at her collective farm. She was popular, and she kept her stove warm— the shepherdess Vera would come from the next village over and call out (I could hear her in the distance), “Tanya, put the tea on! Tanya, put the tea on!” Baba Anisya, the only human being in the village—Marfutka didn’t count, and Tanya was a criminal—said that Tanya used to be the head of the health clinic here, practically the most important person around. Anisya worked for her for five years, for doing which she lost her pension because it meant she didn’t complete the full twenty-five years at the collective farm, and then five years sweeping up at the clinic don’t count, especially with a boss like Tanya. My mom made a trip once with Anisya to the regional Party headquarters in Priozersk, but the headquarters had been boarded up long ago, everything was boarded up, and my mother walked the twenty-five kilometers home with a frightened Baba Anisya, who immediately began digging in her garden with renewed vigor, and chopping wood, and carrying firewood and twigs into her house—she was fending off a hungry death, which is what she’d face if she did nothing, like Marfutka, who was eightyfive and no longer lit her stove, and even the few potatoes she’d managed to drag into her house had frozen during the winter. They simply lay there in a wet, rotten pile. Marfutka had nibbled out of

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The New Robinson Crusoes

that pile all winter and now refused to part with these riches, her only ones, when one time my mother sent me over with a shovel to clean them out. Marfutka refused to open the door, looking out through the window that was draped in rags and seeing that I was carrying a garden spade. Either she ate the potatoes raw, despite her lack of teeth, or she made a fire for them when no one was looking—it was impossible to tell. She had no firewood. In the spring Marfutka, wrapped in layers of greasy shawls, rags, and blankets, showed up at Anisya’s warm home and sat there like a mummy, not breathing a word. Anisya didn’t even try to talk to her, and Marfutka just sat there. I looked once at her face, which is to say what was visible of her face under the rags, and saw that it was small and dark, and that her eyes were like wet holes. Marfutka survived another winter but no longer went into the yard—she’d decided, apparently, to die of hunger. Anisya said simply that, last year, Marfutka still had some life left in her, but this year she’s done for, her feet don’t look straight ahead but at each other, the wrong way. One day my mother took me along, and we planted half a bucket of potatoes in Marfutka’s yard, but Marfutka just looked at us and worried, it was clear, that we were taking over her plot, though she didn’t have the energy to walk over to us. My mother just went over to her and handed her some potatoes, but Marfutka, thinking her plot was being bought from her for half a bucket of potatoes, grew very frightened, and refused. That evening we all went over to Anisya’s for some goat milk. Marfutka was there. Anisya said she’d seen us on Marfutka’s plot. My mother answered that we’d decided to help Baba Marfa. Anisya didn’t like it. Marfutka was going to the next world, she said, she didn’t need help, she’d find her way. It should be added that we were paying Anisya for the milk in canned food and soup packets. This couldn’t go on forever, since the goat made more milk every day, whereas the canned food was dwindling. We needed to establish a more stable equivalent, and so directly after the discussion about Marfutka, my mother said that our canned foods were running out, we didn’t have anything to eat ourselves, so we wouldn’t be buying any more milk that day. Clever Anisya grasped the point at once and answered that she’d bring us a can of milk the next day and we

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could talk about it—if we still had potatoes, that is. She was angry, apparently, that we were wasting our potatoes on Marfutka instead of paying her. She didn’t know how many potatoes we’d invested in Marfutka’s plot during the hungry spring. Her imagination was working like a little engine. She must have been calculating that Marfutka didn’t have long to go and that she’d gather her harvest in the fall, and was angry in advance that we were the rightful owners of those planted potatoes. Everything becomes complicated when it’s a matter of surviving in times like these, especially for an old, not particularly strong person in the face of a strong young family— my parents were both forty-two then, and I was eighteen. That night we received a visit from Tanya, who wore a city coat and yellow rubber boots, and carried a new bag in her hands. She brought us a little piglet smothered by its mother, wrapped in a clean rag. Then she wondered if we were officially registered to live in the village. She pointed out that many of the houses here had owners, and that the owners might want to come out and see for themselves what was happening, say if someone were to write them, and that all that we beheld was not just riches lying by the roadside. In conclusion, Tanya reminded us that we’d encroached on the plot of our neighbor, and that Marfutka was still alive. As for the piglet, she offered to sell it to us for money, that is for paper rubles, and that night my father chopped and pickled the little pig, which in the rag looked like a little baby. It had lashes above its eyes and everything. After Tanya left, Anisya came by with a can of goat’s milk, and over tea we quickly negotiated a new price—one can of food for three days of milk. With hatred in her voice Anisya asked why Tanya had come by, and she approved of our decision to help Marfutka, though she said of her with a laugh that she smelled bad. The milk and the piglet were supposed to protect us from scurvy, and what’s more Anisya was raising a little goat, and we’d decided to buy it for ten cans of food—but only a little later, after it had grown some more, since Anisya knew better how to raise a goat. We never discussed this with Anisya, though, and one day she came over, full of insane jealousy at her old boss Tanya, and proudly showed us that she’d killed her little goat and wrapped it

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The New Robinson Crusoes

up for us. Two cans of fish were the answer she received, and my mom burst into tears. We tried to eat the meat—we broiled it—but it was inedible, and my father ended up pickling it again. My mom and I did manage to buy a baby goat. We walked ten kilometers to the village of Tarutino, but we did it as if we were tourists, as if it were old times. We wore backpacks, and sang as we walked, and when we got to the village we asked where we could drink some goat’s milk, and when we bought a glass of milk from a peasant woman for a bread roll we made a show of our affection for the little goats. I started whispering to my mother, as if I wanted a goat for myself. The peasant woman became very excited, sensing a customer, but my mother whispered back no, at which point the woman began speaking very sweetly to me, saying she loved the little goats like her own children and because of this she’d give them both to me. To which I quickly replied, “No, I only need one!” We agreed on a price right away; the woman clearly didn’t know the state of the ruble and took very little, and even threw in a handful of salt crystals for the road. She obviously thought she’d made a good deal, and, in truth, the little goat did begin to fade away pretty quickly after the long walk home. It was Anisya again who got us out of it. She gave the baby goat to her own big goat, but first she covered it with some mud from her yard, and the goat took it as one of her own, didn’t kill it. Anisya beamed with pride. We now had all the essentials, but my indomitable father, despite his slight limp, started going out into the forest, and every day he went farther and farther. He would take his ax, and some nails, and a saw, and a wheelbarrow—he’d leave with the sunrise and come back with the night. My mother and I waded around the garden, somehow or other kept up my father’s work of collecting window panes, doors, and glass, and then of course we made the food, cleaned up, lugged the water for laundry, sewed, and mended. We’d collect old, forgotten sheepskin coats in the abandoned houses and then sew something like fur ponchos for the winter, and also we made mittens and some fur mattresses for the beds. My father, when he noticed such a mattress one night on his bed, immediately rolled up all three and carted them away the next morning. It looked like he was preparing another refuge for us, except this one would

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be deep in the forest, and later on it came in very handy. But it also turned out that no amount of labor and no amount of foresight can save you, no one and nothing can save you except luck. In the meantime we lived through the hungriest month, June, which is when the supplies in a village usually run out. We shoved chopped dandelions into our mouths, made soup out of weeds, but for the most part we just gathered grass, pulled handfuls of it, and carried it, carried it, carried it home in sacks. We didn’t know how to mow it, and anyway it hadn’t really risen high enough for mowing yet. Finally Anisya gave us a scythe (in exchange for ten sackfuls of grass, which is not nothing), and Mom and I took turns mowing. I should repeat: We were far from the world, I missed my friends and girlfriends, and nothing reached us anymore. My father turned on the radio sometimes, but only rarely, because he wanted to conserve the batteries. The radio was full of lies and falsehoods anyway, and we just mowed and mowed, and our little goat Raya was growing and we needed to find her a boy goat. We trod over to the next village again, but the peasant woman was unfriendly to us now—by this point everyone knew all about us, but they didn’t know we had a goat, since Anisya was raising it, so the woman thought we’d lost Raya, and to hell with us. She wouldn’t give us the other goat, and we didn’t have any bread now—there wasn’t any flour, so there wasn’t any bread—and anyway her little goat had grown, too, and she knew three kilos of fresh meat would mean a lot of money in this hungry time. We finally got her to agree to sell the goat for a kilo of salt and ten bars of soap. But for us this meant future milk, and we ran home to get our payment, telling the woman we wanted the goat. “Don’t worry,” she answered, “I’m not bloodying my hands for you.” That evening we brought the little goat home, and then began the tough summer days: mowing the grass, weeding the plot, grooming the potato plants, and all of this at the same pace as experienced Anisya—we’d arranged with her that we’d take half the goats’ manure, and somehow or other we fertilized the plot, but our vegetables still grew poorly and mostly produced weeds. Baba Anisya, freed from mowing grass, would tie up the big goat and its little kindergarten in a place where we could see them, and then scramble off into the woods for mushrooms

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The New Robinson Crusoes

and berries, after which she’d come by our plot and examine the fruits of our labor. We had to replant the dill, which we’d planted too deeply; we needed it for pickling cucumbers. The potatoes flourished mostly above ground level. My mother and I read The Guide to Planting and Sowing, and my father finally finished his work in the forest, and we went to look at his new home. It turned out to be someone’s hut, which my father had refurbished by putting in window frames, glass, and doors, and covering the roof with tar. The house was empty. From then on at night we carried tables and benches and crates and buckets and iron pots and pans and our remaining supplies, and hid everything. My father was digging a basement there, almost an underground home with a stove, our third. There were already some young vegetables peeking out of the earth in his garden. My mother and I over the summer had become rough peasants. Our fingers were hard, with tough thick nails, permanently blackened with earth, and most interesting of all was that at the base of our nails we’d developed some sort of calluses. I noticed that Anisya had the same thing on her fingers, as did Marfutka, who didn’t do anything, and even Tanya, our lady of leisure, a former nurse, had them too. Speaking of which, at this point Tanya’s most frequent visitor, Vera, the shepherdess, hung herself in the forest. She wasn’t actually a shepherdess anymore—all the sheep had been eaten long ago—and also she had a secret, which Anisya, who was very angry with Tanya, now told us: Vera always called for tea when she was coming into the village, but what Tanya gave Vera was some kind of medicine, which she couldn’t live without, and that’s why she hung herself: she had no money anymore for medicine. Vera left behind a little daughter. Anisya, who had contact with Tarutino, the neighboring village, told us that the girl was living with her grandmother, but then it emerged that the grandmother was another Marfutka, only with a drinking problem, and so the little girl, already half insane, was brought home the next day by our mother in an old baby stroller. My mother always needed more than the rest of us, and my father was angry because the girl wet her bed and never said a word, licked her snot, didn’t understand anything, and cried at

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night for hours. Pretty soon none of us could live or sleep for these nighttime screams, and my father went off to live in the woods. There wasn’t much for it but to go and give the girl back to her failed grandmother, but just then this same grandmother, Faina, appeared and, swaying on her feet, began demanding money for the girl and the stroller. In reply my mother went inside and brought out Lena, combed, showered, barefoot but in a clean dress. At this point Lena suddenly threw herself at my mother’s feet, without a word, but like a grown-up, curling herself up in a ball and putting her arms around my mother’s bare ankles. Her grandmother began to cry and left without Lena and without the baby stroller—apparently, to die. She swayed on her feet as she walked and wiped her tears away with her fist—but she swayed not from drink but from hunger, as I later figured out. She didn’t have any supplies—after all, her daughter Vera hadn’t earned anything for a long time. We ourselves mostly ate stewed grass in different forms, with plain mushroom soup being the most common. Our little goats had been living for a while now with my father—it was safer there—and the trail to his house had almost disappeared, especially as my father never took the same path twice with his wheelbarrow, as a precaution, plotting for the future. Lena stayed with us. We would pour her off some milk, feed her berries and our mushroom soups. Everything became a lot more frightening when we thought of the coming winter. We had no flour and not a single grain of wheat; none of the farms in the area was operating—there hadn’t been any gasoline or spare parts in ages, and the horses had been eaten even earlier. My father walked through the abandoned fields, picked up some grain, but others had been by before him, and he found just a little, enough for a very small sack. He thought he’d figure out how to grow wheat under the snow on the little field near his house in the woods. He asked Anisya when he should plant and sow, and she promised to tell him. She said shovels were no good, and as there weren’t any plugs to be found anywhere, my father asked her to draw him a plug on a piece of paper and began, just like Robinson Crusoe, to bang together some kind of contraption. Anisya herself didn’t remember exactly how it worked, even though she’d had to walk behind a cow with

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The New Robinson Crusoes

a plug a few times, in the old days, but my father was all aflame with his new engineering ideas and sat down to reinvent this particular wheel. He was happy with his new fate and never pined for the life of the city, where he’d left behind a great many enemies, including his parents, my grandmother and grandfather, whom I’d seen only when I was very little and who’d since been buried under the rubble of the arguments over my mom and my grandfather’s apartment, may it rot, with its high ceilings and private bathroom and kitchen. We weren’t fated ever to live there, and now my grandparents were probably dead. We didn’t say anything to anyone when we left the city, though my father had been planning his escape for a long time. That’s how we managed to have so many sacks and boxes to take with us, because all of this stuff was cheap and, once upon a time, not subject to rationing, and over the course of several years my father, a farseeing man, collected it all. My father was a former athlete, a mountain climber, and a geologist. He’d hurt his hip in an accident, and he’d long ago dreamed of escape, and here the circumstances presented themselves, and so we did, we left, while the skies were still clear. “It’s a clear day in all of Spain,” my father would joke, literally every morning that it was sunny out. The summer was beautiful. Everything was blossoming, flowering. Our Lena began to talk. She’d run after us into the forest, not to pick mushrooms but to follow my mother like she was tied to her, as if it were the main task of her young life. I taught her how to recognize edible mushrooms and berries, but it was useless— a little creature in that situation can’t possibly tear herself away from grown-ups. She is saving her skin every minute of the day, and so she ran after my mother everywhere, on her short little legs, with her puffed-out stomach. She called my mother “Nanny”—where she picked up that word we had no idea; we’d never taught it to her—and she called me that, too, which was very clever, actually. One night we heard a noise outside our door like a cat meowing and went outside to find a newborn baby wrapped in an old, greasy coat. My father, who’d grown used to Lena and sometimes even came during the day to help around the house, now simply deflated. My mother didn’t like it either and immediately went over to Anisya to demand who could have done this—with the

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child, at night, accompanied by the quiet Lena, we marched over to Anisya’s. Anisya wasn’t sleeping; she had also heard the child’s cries and was very worried. She said that the first refugees had already arrived in Tarutino, and that soon they’d be coming to our village too, so we should expect more guests from here on out. The infant was squealing shrilly and without interruption; he had a hard, puffed-out stomach. We invited Tanya over in the morning to have a look, and without even touching him she said he wasn’t going to survive—he had the infant’s disease. The child suffered, yelled, and we didn’t even have a nipple for the bottle, much less any food for him. My mother dripped some water into his dried-out mouth, and he nearly choked on it. He looked like he was about four months old. My mother ran at a good clip to Tarutino, traded a precious bit of salt for a nipple, and returned full of energy, and the child drank a little bit of water from the bottle. My mother induced stool with some softening chamomile brew, and we all, including my father, darted around as fast as we could, heating the water, giving the child a warm compress. It was clear to everyone that we needed to leave the house, the plot, our whole functioning household, or else we’d be destroyed. But leaving the plot meant starving to death. At the family conference my father announced that we’d be moving to the house in the woods and that he’d stay behind for now with a rifle and the dog in the shack next door. That night we set off with the first installment of things. The boy, whose name was now Nayden, rode atop the cart. To everyone’s surprise he’d recovered, then began sucking on the goat’s milk, and now rode wrapped in a sheepskin. Lena walked alongside the cart, holding onto the ropes. At dawn we reached our new home, at which point my father immediately made a second run and then a third. He was like a cat carrying more and more of his litter in his teeth, which is to say all the many possessions he’d acquired, and now the little hut was smothered in things. That day, when all of us collapsed from exhaustion, my father set off for guard duty. At night, on his wheelbarrow, he brought back some early vegetables from the garden — potatoes, carrots, beets, and little onions. We laid this all out in the underground storage he’d created. The same night he

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The New Robinson Crusoes

set off again, but limped back almost immediately with an empty wheelbarrow. Gloomily he announced: “That’s it!” He’d brought a can of milk for the boy. It turned out our house had been claimed by some kind of squad. They’d already posted a guard at the plot, and taken Anisya’s goat. Anisya had lain in wait for my father on his escape path with that can of milk. My father was sad, but also he was pleased, since he’d once again managed to escape, and to escape with his whole family. Now our only hope lay in my father’s little plot and in the mushrooms we could find in the forest. Lena stayed in the house with the boy — we didn’t take her with us to the forest now but locked her in the house to keep her out of the way. Strangely enough she sat quietly with the boy and didn’t beat her fists against the door. Nayden greedily drank the potato broth, while my mother and I scoured the woods with our bags and backpacks. We no longer pickled the mushrooms but just dried them—there was hardly any salt left now. My father began digging a well, as the nearest stream was very far. On the fifth day of our immigration we were joined by Baba Anisya. She came to us with empty hands, with just a cat on her shoulder. Her eyes looked strange. She sat for a while on the porch, holding the frightened cat on her lap, then gathered herself and went off into the woods. The cat hid under the porch. Soon Anisya came back with a whole apron’s worth of mushrooms, though among them was a bright-red poisonous one. She remained sitting on the porch and didn’t go into the house: we brought her out a portion of our poor mushroom soup in a can from the milk she used to give us. That evening my father took Anisya into the basement, where he’d built our third refuge, and she lay down and rested and the next day began actively scouring the forest for mushrooms. I’d go through the mushrooms she brought back, so she wouldn’t poison herself. We’d dry some of them, and some we’d throw out. One time, coming home from the woods, we found all our refugees together on the porch. Anisya was rocking Nayden in her arms and telling Lena, choking on her words: “They went through everything, took everything…. They didn’t even look in on Marfutka, but they took

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everything of mine. They dragged the goat away by her rope.” Anisya remained useful for a long time to come, took our goats out for walks, sat with Nayden and Lena until the frosts came. Then one day she lay down with the kids in the warmest place in the house, on the bunk above the stove, and from then on got up only to use the outhouse. The winter came and covered up all the paths that might have led to us. We had mushrooms, berries (dried and boiled), potatoes from my father’s plot, a whole attic filled with hay, pickled apples from abandoned gardens in the forest, even a few cans of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes. On the little field, under the snow, grew our winter crop of bread. We had our goats. We had a boy and a girl, for the continuation of the race, and a cat, who brought us mice from the forest, and a dog, Red, who didn’t want to eat these mice, but whom my father would soon count on for hunting rabbits. My father was afraid to hunt with his rifle. He was even afraid to chop wood because someone might hear us. He chopped wood only during the howling snowstorms. We had a grandmother—the storehouse of the people’s wisdom and knowledge. Cold desolate space spread out around us on all sides. One time my father turned on the radio and tried for a while to hear what was out there. Everything was silent. Either the batteries had died, or we really were the last ones left. My father’s eyes shone: He’d escaped again! If in fact we’re not alone, then they’ll come for us. That much is clear. But, first of all, my father has a rifle, and we have skis and a smart dog. Second of all, they won’t come for awhile yet. We’re living and waiting, and out there, we know, someone is also living, and waiting, until our grain grows and our bread grows, and our potatoes, and our new goats — and that’s when they’ll come. And take everything, including me. Until then they’re being fed by our plot, and Anisya’s plot, and Tanya’s household. Tanya is long gone, but Marfutka is still there. When we’re like Marfutka, they won’t touch us either. But there’s a long way to go until then. And in the meantime, of course, we’re not just sitting here. My father and I have commenced work on our next refuge.

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya

T he F ou nta in House

There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life. That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn’t have the body (they had all been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her). The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast. While they waited for the ambulance, and while the dead were separated from the wounded, the father held his daughter in his arms, though it was clear by then that she was dead; the doctor on the scene confirmed this. But they still had to take the girl away, and the parents climbed into the ambulance with their girl and rode with her to the morgue. She seemed to be alive, as she lay on the stretcher, but she had no pulse, nor was she breathing. Her parents were told to go home, but they wouldn’t—they wanted to wait for the body, though there were still some necessary procedures to be done, namely the autopsy and determination of the cause of death. But the father, who was mad with grief, and who was also a deeply religious man, decided to steal his little daughter. He took his wife, who was barely conscious, home, endured a conversation with his mother-in-law, woke up their neighbor, who was a nurse, and borrowed a white hospital robe. Then he took all the money they had in the house and went to the nearest hospital, where he hired an empty ambulance (it was two in the morning), and with a stretcher and a young paramedic, whom he bribed, drove to the

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hospital where they were keeping his daughter, walked past the guard down the stairs to the basement corridor, and entered the morgue. There was no one there. Quickly he found his daughter and together with the paramedic put her on their stretcher, called down the service elevator, and took her to the third floor, to the intensive care unit. The father had studied the layout of the hospital earlier, while they waited for the body. He let the paramedic go. After a brief negotiation with the doctor on duty, money changed hands, and the doctor admitted the girl to the intensive care unit. Since the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the doctor probably decided that the parents had hired an ambulance on their own and brought the girl to the nearest hospital. The doctor could see perfectly well that the girl was dead, but he badly needed the money: his wife had just given birth (also to a daughter), and all his nerves were on edge. His mother hated his wife, and they took turns crying, and the child also cried, and now on top of all this he had of late been assigned exclusively night shifts. He desperately needed money for an apartment. The sum that this (clearly insane) father had offered him to revive his dead princess was enough for half a year’s rent. This is why the doctor began to work on the girl as if she were still alive, but he did request that the father change into hospital clothing and lie down on the cot next to his daughter, since this apparently sick man was determined not to leave her side. The girl lay there as white as marble; she was beautiful. The father, sitting on his cot, stared at her like a madman. One of his eyes seemed out of focus, and it was only with difficulty in fact that he was able to open his eyes at all. The doctor, having observed this for a while, asked the nurse to administer a cardiogram, and then quickly gave his new patient a shot of tranquilizer. The father fell asleep. The girl continued to lie there like Sleeping Beauty, hooked up to her various machines. The doctor fussed around her, doing all he could, though there was no longer anyone watching him with that crazy unfocused eye. In truth, this young doctor was himself a fanatic of his profession—there was nothing more important to him than a diffi-

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The Fountain House

cult case, than a sick person, no matter who it was, on the brink of death. *** The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter—he went to visit her, as he used to visit her at summer camp. He prepared some food, just one sandwich, and that was all. He got on the bus— again it was a bus—on a fine summer evening, somewhere near the Sokol metro station, and rode it to the paradisial spot where his daughter was staying. In the fields, among soft green hills, he found an enormous gray house with arches reaching to the sky, and when he walked past these giant gates into the garden, there, in an emerald clearing, he saw a fountain, as tall as the house, with one tight stream that cascaded at the top into a glistening crown. The sun was setting slowly in the distance, and the father walked happily across the lawn to the entrance to the right of the gate, and took the stairs up to a high floor. His daughter seemed a little embarrassed when she greeted him, as if he’d interrupted her. She stood there, looking away from him—as if she had her own, private life here that had nothing to do with him anymore, a life that was none of his business. The place was enormous, with high ceilings and wide windows, and it faced south, into the shade and the fountain, which was illuminated by the setting sun. The fountain’s stream rose even higher than the windows. “I brought you a sandwich, the kind you like,” said the father. He went over to the table by the window, put his little package down, paused for a moment, and then unwrapped it. There lay his sandwich, with its two pieces of cheap black bread. He wanted to show his daughter that there was a patty inside, and so he moved the bread pieces apart. But inside he saw—and right away he knew what it was—a raw human heart. The father was terrified that the heart had not been cooked, that the sandwich was inedible, and quickly wrapped the sandwich back up. Turning to his daughter he said awkwardly: “I mixed up the sandwiches. I’ll bring you another.”

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But his daughter now came over and began looking at the sandwich with a strange expression on her face. The father tried to hide the little bag in his pocket and press his hands over it, so his daughter couldn’t take it. She stood next to him, with her head down, and reached out her hand: “Give me the sandwich, Papa. I’m really hungry.” “You can’t eat this filth,” “Give it to me,” she said ponderously. She was reaching her hand toward his pocket—her arm was amazingly long all of a sudden—and the father understood that if his daughter ate this sandwich, she would die. Turning away, he took out the sandwich and quickly ate the raw heart himself. Immediately his mouth filled with blood. He ate the black bread with the blood. “And now I will die,” he thought. ‘’I’m glad at least that I will go first.” “Can you hear me? Open your eyes!” someone said. The father opened his eyes with difficulty and saw, as through a fog, the doctor’s blurry face. “I can hear you,” he said. “What’s your blood type?” “The same as my daughter’s.” “Are you sure?” “I’m sure.” They carted him away, tied off his left arm, and stuck a needle in it. “How is she?” asked the father. “In what sense?” said the doctor, concentrating on his work. “Is she alive?” “What d‘you think?” the doctor grumbled. “She’s alive?” “Lie down, lie down,” the wonderful doctor insisted. The father lay there—nearby he could hear someone’s heavy breathing—and began to cry. *** Then they were working on him, and he was carted off again, and again he was surrounded by green trees, but this time he

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The Fountain House

was woken by a noise: his daughter, on the cot next to him, was breathing in a terribly screechy way, as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her father watched her. Her face was white, her mouth open. A tube carried blood from his arm to hers. He felt relieved, and tried to hurry the flow of blood—he wanted all of it to pour into his child. He wanted to die so that she could live. Once again he found himself inside the apartment in the enormous gray house. His daughter wasn’t there. Quietly he went to look for her, and searched in all the corners of the dazzling apartment with its many windows, but he could find no living being. He sat on the sofa, then lay down on it. He felt quietly content, as if his daughter were already off living somewhere on her own, in comfort and joy, and he could afford to take a break. He began (in his dream) to fall asleep, and here his daughter suddenly appeared. She stepped like a whirlwind into the room, and soon turned into a spinning column, a tornado, howling, shaking everything around her, and then sunk her nails into the bend in his right arm, under the skin. He felt a sharp pain, yelled out in terror, and opened his eyes. The doctor had just given him a shot to his right arm. His girl lay next to him, breathing heavily, but no longer making that awful screeching noise. The father raised himself up on an elbow, saw that his left arm was already free of the tourniquet, and bandaged, and turned to the doctor. “Doctor, I need to make a phone call.” “What phone call?” the doctor answered. “It’s too early for phone calls. You stay still, or else I’m going to start losing you, too….” But before leaving he gave the father his cell phone, and the father called home. No one answered. His wife and mother-in-law must have woken up early and gone to the morgue and now must be running around, confused, not knowing where the daughter’s body had gone. *** The girl was already better, though she had not yet regained consciousness. The father tried to stay near her in intensive care,

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pretending that he was himself dying. The night doctor had left already, and the poor father had no money anymore, but they gave him a cardiogram and kept him in intensive care—apparently the night doctor had managed to speak with someone. Either that or there really was something wrong with his heart. The father considered what to do. He couldn’t go downstairs. They wouldn’t let him call. Everyone was a stranger, and they were all busy. He thought about what his two women must be going through now, his “girls,” as he called them—his wife and motherin-law. His heart was in great pain. They had put him on a drip, just like his daughter. He fell asleep, and when he awoke, his daughter was no longer there. “Nurse, where is the girl who was here before?” he said. “What’s it to you?” “I’m her father, that’s what. Where is she?” “They took her into the operating room. Don’t worry, and don’t get up. You can’t yet.” “What’s wrong with her?” “I don’t know.” “Dear nurse, please call the doctor!” “They’re all busy.” An old man was moaning nearby. Next door a resident was putting an old lady through some procedures, all the while addressing her loudly and jocularly, like a village idiot: “Well, grandma, how about some soup?” Pause. “What kind of soup do we like?” “Mm,” the old woman groaned in a nonhuman, metallic voice. “How about some mushroom soup?” Pause. “With some mushrooms, eh? Have you tried the mushroom soup?” Suddenly the old woman answered in her deep metallic bass: “Mushrooms—with macaroni.” “There you go!” the resident cried out. The father lay there, thinking they were operating on his daughter. Somewhere his wife was waiting, half-mad with grief, his mother-in-law next to her, fretting…. A young doctor checked in on him, gave him another shot, and he fell asleep again.

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The Fountain House

*** In the evening he got up and, barefoot, just as he was, in his hospital gown, walked out. He reached the stairs unnoticed and began descending the cold stone steps. He went down to the basement hallway and followed the arrows to the morgue. Here some person in a white robe called out to him: “What are you doing here, patient?” “I’m from the morgue,” replied the father. “I got lost.” “What do you mean, from the morgue?” “I left, but my documents are still there. I want to go back, but I can’t find it.” “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re saying,” said the white robe, taking him by the arm and escorting him down the corridor. And then finally he asked: “You what? You got up?” “I came to life, and there was no one around, so I started walking, and then I decided I should come back, so they could note that I was leaving.” “Wonderful!” said his escort. They reached the morgue, but there they were greeted by the curses of the morgue attendant on duty. The father heard him out and said: “My daughter is here, too. She was supposed to come here after her operation.” He told the man his name. “I tell you she’s not here, she’s not here! They’re all driving me crazy! They were looking for her this morning! She’s not here! They’re driving everyone nuts! And this one’s a mental patient! Did you run off from a nuthouse, eh? Where’d he come from?” “He was wandering around the hallway,” the white robe answered. “We should call the guard in,” said the attendant and started cursing again. “Let me call home,” said the father. “I just remembered—I was in intensive care on the third floor. My memory is all confused; I came here after the explosion on Tverskaya.” Here the white robes went quiet. The explosion on the bus on Tverskaya had happened the day before. They took him, shivering

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and barefoot, to a desk with a telephone. His wife picked up and immediately burst into tears. “You! You! Where have you been! They took her body, we don’t know where! And you’re running around! There’s no money in the house! We don’t even have enough for a taxi! Did you take all the money?” “I was—I was unconscious. I ended up in the hospital, in intensive care.” “Which one, where?” “The same one where she was.” “Where is she? Where?” His wife howled. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m all undressed—bring me my things. I’m standing here in the morgue, I’m barefoot. Which hospital is this?” he asked the white robe. “How’d you end up there? I don’t understand,” his wife said, still weeping. He handed the phone to the white robe, who calmly spoke the address into it, as if nothing at all strange was happening, and then hung up. The morgue attendant brought him a robe and some old, ragged slippers—he took pity finally on this rare living person to enter his department—and directed him to the guard post at the hospital entrance. His wife and mother-in-law arrived there with identically puffed-up, aged faces. They dressed the father, put shoes on him, hugged him, and finally heard him out, crying happily, and then all together they sat in the waiting room, because they were told that the girl had made it through her operation and was recovering, and that her condition was no longer critical. Two weeks later she was up again walking. The father walked with her through the hospital corridors, repeating the whole time that she’d been alive after the explosion, she was just in shock, just in shock. No one noticed, but he knew right away. He kept quiet about the raw human heart he’d had to eat. It was in a dream, though, that it happened, and dreams don’t count. Translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers

Part 1. Rethinking Identities

84

F rom I f T her e

is

S omething

to

D esir e 1

He gave me as a gift. What can I give in return? My poems. I have nothing else. But then, are they mine? This is the way, as a child, I would give birthday cards to my mother: I chose them, and paid with my father’s money.

The two are in love and happy. He: “When you are not here, it feels as though you had just stepped out and are in a room next door.” She: “When you step out and are in a room next door, it feels as though you do not exist anymore.”

1

   From IF THERE IS SOMETHING TO DESIRE: ONE HUNDRED POEMS by Vera Pavlova, translated by Steven Seymour, translation copyright © 2010 by Steven Seymour. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

Part 1. Rethinking Identities

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T hey Ta lk 1

“… Do you know how I knew spring was here? I found a skull in the garden. I immediately looked for a bullet hole in it. Nope, no hole. Just some stupid fucker croaked in the garden.” *** “… this, you know, sort of middle-aged lady, not really old, the kind of one, like, actually quite beautiful, with this, like, mink boa with little tails on it, well made-up, and with her also a young girl, maybe about twenty or so. And it’s such a pleasure for me, you know, to look at them, that they are sitting together in a coffee shop, drinking coffee, during the day, on December 31. I’m sitting there, half listening to them while I’m reading the menu, and I’m thinking this could be, like, for example, an aunt and her niece. They’re truly close, and so they’ve met to congratulate each other with the New Year. There’s something very beautiful in this, somehow, and then the girl probably will go to meet friends to celebrate—well, in other words, a pretty clear picture. And the girl is telling the lady, you know, about what’s going on in her life and whatnot, and I’m listening, I generally like to listen in on strangers’ conversations. And so she’s 1

   Published in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, ed. Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, with an Introduction by Francine Prose (New York: Tin House Books, 2009), 21-32.

Linor Goralik. They Talk

telling her something about some Anya, that this Anya’s seeing her boss, and he took her somewhere, and now somebody’s been fired, and the lady keeps nodding, and then this girl says: ‘And Anya— her mother also abandoned her, but not like you did me …’—and then the rest of the sentence. But this I already couldn’t make out; at this point my hearing switched off.” *** “… still, like, shaking all over. And the whole day, you know, I’m like ill, totally turning inside out. And I decide I’m not going home ‘cause I’ve finally fucking had it with her. No, come on, six years I’m living with this woman, six years, and she fucking throws these kinds of tantrums over some fucking powdered detergent? Telling you, she’s fucking nuts, sees nothing in the world but her housecleaning. Fucking nuts. And she, like, yells at me: ‘I’m fucking tired of this fucking shit, don’t want to see you again, get the fuck out of here, you only think about yourself, go fucking die!’ I tell her: ‘Can you even hear yourself, what kind of words you’re using? You’re raising a daughter and this is how you carry on?’ So she just threw this same sweater at me! And I—what can I say?—well, that’s it, I decided that was it. Get lost, you say—fine, that’s it, I got lost! And so I’m like this all day, you know, walking around and thinking: Okay, so, I’ll spend the night at my mother’s, all the most essential things I’ll come and get tomorrow, while she’s at work, she still has money for now, so I’ll leave an extra couple hundred on the table, for my conscience, you know— and that’s it, and she can go to … I’ll talk to Natashka myself…. And so at this point, you know, we’re already going out for lunch, but I’ve forgotten my cell, so I say to the guys: ‘Guys, I’ll catch up with you shortly,’ and so I run back in—and the phone rings. And I pick up, thinking, Whoever you are, you can go fuck yourself, and suddenly I hear, well, wailing. Real concrete wailing, like a siren, sobbing and sniffling her nose. My heart drops to my gut; immediately I think— Something with Natashka. I say: ‘Lena, what’s with her, what’s with her? Lena, tell me, what’s with her?’ And she goes: ‘Wooooo … with whooo?’ Right away I feel relief. In general I can’t take it when she cries, my heart just starts falling out, I forget everything, no anger,

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no nothing, just this, you know…. I say: ‘Sweetie, honey, tell me, what’s wrong?’ She just wails. Then says: ‘I read in the paaaaper….’ ‘What,’ I say, ‘what’s in the paper, baby?’ Thinking—maybe relatives or something, maybe who knows what. And she’s like: ‘Woohooo … in the paper … that all men…. Yyyyhh…. That in twenty thousand years…. Well, not twenty, but…. That you’ll all diiie ouuuuut…. Your chromosome…. Woohooo….’ ‘Lenochka,’ I say, ‘what in the world are you talking about?’ And she’s like: ‘Your chromosome’s being destroyed … oooohhh…. One hundred thousand years—and you’ll all be gone…. It’ll only be uuuuuus….’ I say: ‘Lenka, so what of it?’ And she goes: ‘Lyesha, Lyeshechka, don’t die out, please! Come home, right now, please, pleease!’ So again I didn’t buy the powdered detergent. Nuts, I’m telling you, crazy!” *** “... anyway, fifteen years old. That is, she was still in high school. And this was exactly when they started teaching the upper classes safe sex and sexual health, and she was already in her seventh month. And everyone—both girls and boys—had to carry a doll around the clock, to understand what responsibility for a child means. And so she carried it—in one hand her belly, in the other the doll.” *** “… to talk with someone, I’m human, after all, I also can’t go on like this! But with whom can I talk? With dad—he starts crying, well, actually, no, you know, but—I mean, with dad? With dad there’s no point. But with who? Alik comes home from work at ten o’clock and plops down on the sofa still in his boots. I once tried to tell him something and he goes, like: ‘Just let me die in peace,’ as if I was, you know, his … his … God knows what. But I’m human, you know, I do need to talk with someone! So I was getting off on Lyubanka, Pushechnaya exit, and there’s the Children’s World right there, and I just thought, you know, You can all go to hell! So I went in and there, like, on the first floor, there is some kind of carousel, you know, and I bought myself a plush rabbit. The kind, you know, like, with

Linor Goralik. They Talk

the long legs, kind of faded-looking? Like, you know, you know the kind I’m talking about, yeah? Six hundred rubles, to be sure, but, after all, I can afford it, can’t I? The last time I bought myself a pair of jeans was nine months ago, so I can spend six hundred rubles, can’t I? Anyway, I stuffed him into a bag and carried him to my room, and, you know, Alik goes to bed and I lock myself in the bathroom, I sit the rabbit on a board and, like, tell him absolutely everything, you know, pour out my whole soul, until there’s not like even a single drop left…. The first night it was like this until six in the morning. You wouldn’t believe, I wailed, took pills, whatever else, what didn’t I do?... And so, you know, after that there wasn’t a single evening that I wouldn’t at least find a minute. And I hid him in the cupboard, you know, where the pipes are, we hang a bag in there, with an enema in it, of course nobody ever looks in there, so that’s where I kept him. And yesterday dad had his usual, you know, happening again, so I pulled him through with pills, put him to bed, and went right to the rabbit, and once I started telling him—I just couldn’t stop, you know, talked and talked, talked and talked, and I, you know, I kind of shook him like, hard, and I said to him: ‘Well, why do you always keep quiet?’ And here he looked at me and said: ‘Listen, did it ever occur to you to ask me, maybe just once, how I am doing?’” *** “… wife comes home, and the cat smells of another woman’s perfume.” *** “… during the war. He made it all the way to Berlin and sent her a parcel from the frontline with some kind of children’s things for Mother and Pasha, tablecloths, something else, and a luxurious chiffon peignoir. Well, here, you get of course they hadn’t ever seen the likes of such, right? She unfolds it—and there’s a single vermicelli stuck to it. As if some woman had been eating and accidentally dropped one. She retched for about twenty minutes,

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you know, then she grabbed the children and that’s it. He spent half a year looking for her afterward.” *** “… I grabbed Lenka by the hand—and ran up to the neighbors. It’s like this now once every week: he gets smashed and heads right for her, his paws digging ahead of himself, you know, like an excavator. So me and her are already trained: jump into our boots— and run. But besides that it’d be a shame to complain. There’s Natasha. Everyone told me: there is not a man on earth who will ever love someone else’s daughter, but there you have it, wouldn’t you know.” *** “… and so I’m walking and suddenly feel someone’s eyes on me. And I’m wearing this black-and-white checkered coat, you know, total scream of fashion then. Inka got it for me, cost two months’ salary. And so I’m walking, down that side, right, you know, where that—well, art salon or artists’ house or whatever is, right? Where the Indian restaurant is now. And suddenly I totally, like, feel someone’s looking at me, can you imagine? So I turn my head, carefully like, and there, you know, on the other side, walks a young man, get this, looking openly and not even, like, hiding. And there’s something, you know, about him … something in him … maybe looking like some actor or something…. But I—get this—I just at that exact moment, I knew: That’s it, this is my future husband. Well, you know, do you believe these things happen? It’s like, I only looked at him for a second and already I knew everything. And so I, well, I keep walking, proudly, ignoring him, over toward the Neglinnaya, but my heart is like thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. I glance sideways-like—and he, you know, is walking across, diagonally, as if to the sidewalk’s edge. And I realize we’re going to meet precisely at the corner. And I’m not even thinking what to say, because I already, you know, understand everything, you understand? Like, everything’s already clear and understood without words. And

Linor Goralik. They Talk

I’m walking and just thinking: I could’ve gone to pick up those shoes first, and that’s it. And there’s nothing else in my head, just this: I could’ve been picking up those idiotic shoes now and never would’ve met my husband! And I, like, keep glancing over—and he’s already stepping off the sidewalk, and even starting to walk faster, so as to intercept me, see. And here—get this—just like that, a car shoots out—and like woooooosh! And literally—I mean literally—within two centimeters from him. Really, seriously, within two centimeters. I’m standing there, even my heart stopped cold. Just can’t move. And he’s also standing, like a statue. And then—get this—he turns around—and starts walking right back, like, over to that one, you know, the metro, almost like half running…. And I’m standing there and thinking: Those shoes, I bet they aren’t even ready yet.” *** “… and until the dog kicks the bucket, you’re not moving it from that apartment.” *** “… trained myself so that at moments like these my head just switches off. I’m a robot. I already knew within one block, by the smell, that it was a fucking nightmare up there. And indeed— nothing was left of the cafe, just a wall. And so I just flip this little switch in my head: ticktock. I am robot, I am robot. Well, and then for three hours we do you know what. In fact, we just break into groups of three people: two collect, one zips up the bags. So here, I’m the one zippering—zzzziip, and it’s like these weren’t even people but just, like, different kinds of objects we’re putting into those sacks. Four groups of us there were, done within three hours. Tsvi tells me: ‘Okay, let’s do one last walk-around, just in case.’ Fine, what’s it to me, I’m a robot. We go around looking into every little corner, debris everywhere, wherever possible we turn things over a little. Seems like we’ve picked up everything. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I catch some movement. I’m like—’What’s this?’ Take a look, and right there by the wall, the one that didn’t collapse,

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there’s this sort of cupboard, completely intact, and in it are rotating pastries. And that’s when I threw up.” *** “… and screaming. And the dream is always the same: Mother slaps his face and asks: ‘Was it you who ate the chocolate?’ He wails and says: ‘No!’ Mother slaps his face: ‘Was it you who ate the chocolate?’ He: ‘No!’ Mother slaps the face: ‘Was it you who ate the chocolate?’ Here he breaks down and screams: ‘YES! YES!’ And his mother slaps him across the face, hard, with the back of her hand and shouts: ‘Haven’t I taught you—never own up to anything!’ Terrible, isn’t it? For half a year I couldn’t get it out of him, what was this nightmare he was having, he’d just say: ‘What nightmare, no nightmare, everything’s fine.’” *** “… when he loved me, I wasn’t jealous, and when he didn’t love me—I was. I’d start calling, aggravating both myself and him, until one time an ambulance came for me.” *** “… belong to this one rich person, and I have to sing when he tells me to. Because if I keep on doing this for another year, my band and I will get together enough cash to get ahead. But he’s a totally wild person, doesn’t want to understand anything, it’s all the same to him—if you’re sick, tired, have personal problems— still, go, sing. Vera went to her sister’s wedding, so he fired her. But I know this is necessary, or else we’ll never get ahead at all, very difficult. So I bear it. Yeah, and so he and his friends were grilling up some kabobs somewhere, and he called me—come, sing. And this was outdoors, and it was September already. I get there, he gives me this humongous coat, like a barrel, you know. And I felt so disgusted, you know, to be singing in this coat and all, I almost lost it. I explain to him: ‘Singing in cold air is bad for you, singing is

Linor Goralik. They Talk

all about breathing, if I breathe this kind of air normally, tomorrow I’ll have no vocal chords, and if I don’t breathe, and sing only with my vocal chords alone, I’ll still lose them anyway.’ And all this is at his dacha, huge dacha, pheasants, peacocks, dogs. And a silent pregnant wife follows behind him everywhere. I’m thinking, you know—it probably is a lucky marriage, she lives well, but her life must be awful, it seems to me. ‘No,’ he tells me, ‘sing.’ I would have quit a long time ago, but me and my band won’t get ahead without his money, and I want to. Well, no, I still would have quit a long time ago anyway, but he comes to me, after I’ve sung, sits down, and cries. No, not groping, why do you keep asking these fucking bullshit questions, huh?” *** “… his daughter accidentally slammed the hamster in the door, and he cried afterward. Kept saying: ‘Such an amazing dude he was!’” *** “… I ask, ‘Mama, what should I get you for New Year’s?’ And she tells me, the bitch, you know what?—’Don’t buy anything, sonny, maybe I won’t live that long….’” *** “…. always loved my wife, loved her so much, you can’t even imagine. And as for her loving me? Well, at least it seemed to me—maybe not so much. Mother says to me: ‘Why don’t you get yourself a mistress? Your wife will love you more.’ So I found myself a woman. Didn’t love her, of course. I loved my wife; I didn’t love this one. But I kept going to her. Then I think: I need my wife to find out. But I can’t tell her. I did all of this for that, but I just can’t bring myself to tell her. Mother tells me: ‘Why don’t you tell the children, they’ll pass everything on to her.’ And my children, I’ve told you about them, two sons, one had just entered college back then, and

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the youngest was fifteen. So I called for them, I came home, got them together, and said: ‘Children, listen to me. I’m going to tell you a terrible thing, and you will have to forgive me. I have, children, apart from your mother, I have another woman.’ And then I keep silent. They kind of look at each other for a moment, then suddenly burst into laughter! And the youngest slaps me on the shoulder and says: ‘You go, Daddy-o!’ And the oldest says: ‘Awesome, man. Don’t worry, we won’t rat you out.’ And so I still keep going to that woman, even until this day. It’s just hell knows what.” *** “… and the Day of Judgment, by the way, already happened, only no one noticed it. It’s just that from that day things went well for some, and for others they went badly.” *** “… saw her yesterday. Well, I’ll tell you this—it’s not even important how she looks, or that she’s beautiful—well, yes, she’s beautiful, I won’t dispute that, what’s true is true—but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is what I saw: nothing will come of it for them. No-thing. Eight years of marriage, Marina—quite a haul. I know him like this, understand, like this, like my own palm, like these here five fingers. So, believe you me: with this woman, nothing will work out for him, no-thing. She will suck his blood and throw him out, and he’ll come crawling to me again. You’ll see, mark my words. I’ve even calmed down. And actually, you know, when I’d only just learned about all this, I couldn’t eat for two weeks, completely, nothing. I lost seven kilos. That was such a joy, such an amazing feeling!” *** “… on that day everyone, of course, showed their true colors. For example, my best friend, Lepyokha, he called me and started shouting: ‘Dude, do you even know what’s going down here, over

Linor Goralik. They Talk

by the White House?”Well,’ I say, ‘I know, sure, I’m watching the television, what the …. “No!’ he shouts. ‘Dude, you have no idea! There are such hot bitches here! One can fuck them right on top of the tanks!’ Well, so I went to my wife—back then we were still married—and I tell her: ‘My dear, I have to go to the White House, to the barricades—to defend freedom and democracy!’ And she, wouldn’t you know it, didn’t let me go! That bitch, I forgave her everything, but this cruel heartlessness on her part I never forgave, and never will.” *** “… she’s a weak, timid, needy, completely untalented, a very hardto-take, very miserable woman. And we should feel sorry for her, instead of saying such nasty things about her.” *** “… by the way, the last time your mobile didn’t switch off, and I sat for about five minutes, listening to how you were walking through the snow. Thup-thup, thup-thup. I almost cried.” *** “… little doggie runs, dirty-dirty, its ears rosy-rosy, and see-through. And here I thought: Devil knows, maybe I should’ve given birth back then.” *** “… because God will fulfill your every wish if your thoughts are pure. My grandmother taught me—you always have to wish people well, even if something happens to you, you know, anything. It works, seriously. For example, when that bitch said that I was a junkie because I was pale, I decided: No, I’m not going there, you know, I’m just not doing it, I’m not. I did what instead? I prayed in the evening, real well, I said: ‘Dear God! Please deliver good health

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unto all my friends and acquaintances!’ And the very next morning that bitch fell down the stairs to her death.” *** “… haven’t been in a supermarket in a long time. Would really like to go there sometime.” *** “… so I bought season tickets to the opera. I’m going to start building the normal life of a single person.” *** “… don’t go to class reunions, so as not to indulge my pride. Otherwise you walk out of there with the kind of feeling a decent person is not supposed to have. I mean, look, the majority of them live in such a way that Google can’t even find them.” *** “… don’t be distracted by fucking bullshit, Pasha. You’re always getting distracted by fucking bullshit. I also remember one time, I take a look— a woman, kind of unfamiliar-looking, but then I look more—no, familiar, used to work at my research institute, it’s just this different angle through the lens, plus she’s cut her hair, you know, like a fur hat, sort of, wears it like a hat. I adjusted the lens more into focus, looked again: sure, she’s changed, of course, time—no arguing with time. And eating something. I adjusted some more: popcorn. She’s eating popcorn. Walking down the street with popcorn. Where’d she get it? For some reason, I suddenly got totally hung up on this: where’d she get it? Then I pictured this thing: seriously, you’ve got to really want the popcorn, go to the popcorn, I mean, the movie theater, go inside the movie theater, you know, buy the popcorn, and leave, in order to eat it on the go. I, like, pictured it with my own eyes, and she was always like that, a stubborn goat. Walking

Linor Goralik. They Talk

down the square and eating. I followed her to the corner, adjusted the focus some more, got a ring on her finger. That’s how I got distracted, and then they’re in my ear: ‘Blue, we don’t understand the delay. Blue, are you working or what?’ My guy, you see, he’d gotten away while I was distracted. Of course, I did get him still, but that’s how sometimes you get distracted by some kind of fucking bullshit, and then you walk around all mad for a couple of days.” *** “… day. All morning I’ve tried to write a script, but all I kept turning out was some kind of cheap melodrama. Because this doesn’t happen in real life—I mean such sheer intensity of tragedy. One minute everyone dies; next thing you know it’s something else. Inexpressible soul-wrenching all the way. Long story short, I went to pick up my suit, and kept thinking in the subway: No, really, is this normal? Because art—it is precisely that, this ability to discern big issues in small things. The drama, that is, in the simple things of life. And the more I think about this, you know, the worse I feel. And then, at Lubyanka, I suddenly decide: Ah, the hell with it, this suit. I’m going to get off now, walk over to Captains, and just have a drink there. That’s right. So I get out, and right at the exit, already upstairs, right away three SMSs come in at once, in a row. From three different people, obviously. As follows: I’m in psych ward, held here forcibly for now; Anya died yesterday. Not flying in; Dad keeps crying asking I bring him home. I read once, read twice, read three times, and suddenly I realize I’ve been staring at my phone for fifteen minutes already, walking in circles around the station pillar.” Translated by Mikhail Iossel

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Slava Mogutin

I n v itation

to a

B ehea ding 1

Bastard Mogutin! For a long time I had a suspicion that you were a nasty shit and a greasy, hidden Jew. Your writings are disgusting! Who gave you, reptile, the right to write this stuff? All kinds of faggots like you want to destroy our Orthodox country and corrupt our children. It will never happen! Our power is still strong! And tell this to your employers (or fuck buddies?) in Washington and Tel-Aviv! You have signed your own death warrant. Watch out now! If you are so courageous and principled, why do you hide under an idiot’s pseudonym and why don’t you disclose your real (Jewish) name? I can answer: you are afraid of the revenge of the Russian people who have been offended and mocked by you! But remember: we are sick of your rotten provocations! Enough is enough! Death! Death! Death!

I received this letter shortly before I was forced to leave Russia this past March [1995] after a series of criminal charges brought against me for my writing, but even more so, for my position as a gay rights advocate and the only openly gay journalist in Russia. I got used to this kind of homophobic and xenophobic message, as I had received

1

   This essay was written in 1995, and all references to “today” and the “present,” as well as the use of present tense, relate to that period.

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them regularly through the mail and over the phone, but this one arrived via fax machine, in a country where faxes are still rare. These anonymous threats were not the most frightening compared with the threats from the state authorities and the militia for what I wrote or said. I had been writing poetry since my teenage years, and in 1990, shortly after I moved to Moscow, I began working as a freelance journalist. Most of my articles were on cultural and literary criticism and gay issues. I was widely published in new, independent papers like Yeshcho and Novyi Vzgliad, as well as mainstream publications like Nezavisimaia Gazeta, Stolitsa, and The Moscow News. I published interviews with a number of famous cultural and pop personalities, most of whom were gay and for the first time spoke openly about their homosexuality. I worked at Glagol, the first publishing house in Russia to publish international and Russian gay literature, including James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and the twovolume collected works by Evgeny Kharitonov, Under House Arrest. When I first came out and began to publish my interviews and articles, homosexuality was still taboo in the Russian media, culture, and public life. Perestroika and Glasnost had scarcely changed this situation. Although in 1993 Yeltsin repealed Stalin’s law punishing homosexuality with up to five years in prison, gay men in Russia still feared harassment and imprisonment from the militia. Homophobic persecution is a tacit state policy, with homosexuality considered criminal and morally abhorrent by most Russians. As recent polls have shown, almost half of Russians feel that homosexuals should be killed or isolated from society. Only a couple of years ago, the few first gay bars and discos were opened in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There is no gay community per se in Russia. There is no gay civil rights movement, nor are there any influential political, social, or cultural gay groups. Needless to say, there are very few openly gay Russians. Most gays and lesbians, especially in the provinces, are deeply closeted and married with children. The foreign journalists who interviewed me in Moscow told me that it was difficult for them to find any Russian gays or lesbians who would agree to show their

Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading

faces or give their real names even for Western audiences. My open gayness was shocking for the closeted journalists and editors in the Russian press, who supported me in the beginning of my career, but then decided that it was too dangerous for them to have any contact with me. “Don’t push gay issues,” one editor advised me privately. “I don’t want to lose my job for publishing your articles, and my wife will think I’m a queer.” From Recognition to Surveillance In 1993 my writing began to be widely published and received critical recognition. In 1994 I was called the best critic of contemporary culture by Nezavisimaia Gazeta. Although increasingly popular, most of my articles and interviews were partly censored by editors for their gay references and content. For example, “Homosexuality in the Soviet Camps and Prisons” (Novoe Vremia, No. 35-36, 1993) was censored before publication by the editor, Leonid Mlechin. What he excluded concerned homophobia among anti-Soviet dissidents. “Even if it’s true that these dissidents were homophobic, it’s still not a good reason to kick them!” said Mlechin. “Who cares about homosexuals, their rights and their problems? Only Mogutin does,” Sergei Chuprinin, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Znamia, wrote in his article in The Moscow News. These kinds of homophobic declarations and remarks are still common for the so-called democratic and liberal Russian press. After I published an interview with Simon Karlinsky, professor of Russian literature at the University of California at Berkeley and the key authority on homosexuality in Russian history and culture, the critic Nina Agisheva wrote in The Moscow News: “Mogutin and Karlinsky try to present all Russian classics as homosexuals! Even Gogol!” According to the old Soviet propaganda, which is still pervasive, there are no homosexuals in Russian/Soviet history; homosexuality is a “foreign disease,” and, as the conservative writer Valentin Rasputin put it, “it was imported into Russia from abroad.” In July 1993, I published an interview with the famous entertainer Boris Moiseyev, one of the few openly gay personalities in Russian showbiz. In an interview entitled “Filthy Peckers of the

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Komsomol Leaders,” Moiseyev revealed that at the outset of his career he had been the victim of “sexual terror” by certain highranking Komsomol and Communist Party officials, who were “fans of the beautiful bodies of young guys.” He described in graphic detail how during the Moscow Olympics festivities in 1980, he was forced to strip-dance in front of a group of the Komsomol leaders and later performed oral sex on “the filthy peckers of those old bastards … all of whom are still in power.” The Moiseyev interview created a huge scandal. It was first published in the independent Latvian newspaper Yeshcho, and later reprinted in several other newspapers, including the mainstream daily Moskovskii Komsomolets and independent weekly Novyi Vzgliad. I saw Xeroxed copies of my interview being distributed in samizdat, like anti-Soviet literature in the USSR before Perestroika. When the scandal reached the Parliamentary level, criminal charges were brought against me under Article 206.2 of the Criminal Code (“malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence”). The regional prosecutor accused me of using “profane language and obscene expressions, graphic descriptions of sexual perversions, illustrated with a photo of a homosexual nature.” The notorious Article 206.2, with a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment, was typically used against dissidents by the Soviet authorities. Following the Soviet prosecution system, the same charge of ‘’hooliganism’’ has been used against homosexuals in China and Cuba. I only found out about the prosecutor’s office decision through accounts I read in the press. In October 1993, right after the attempted coup, the Yeltsin government shut down those newspapers it proclaimed “oppositional.” Surprisingly enough, Yescho, which had initially published my interview with Moiseyev, was on that black list. On October 6, a group of militiamen headed by Detective Matveyev showed up at the door of Aleksei Kostin, the paper’s publisher. Without official warrant they searched the apartment and arrested Kostin. For three days he was held in custody without any formal charges. “We should have gotten rid off you perverts a long time ago!,” Detective Matveyev exclaimed, referring to the newspaper’s explicit content.

Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading

Yeshcho was singled out from the rest of the free press because it was the only paper in Russia to regularly publish positive and serious material on homosexual issues. In fact, Yescho was shut down after the publication of my interview with Boris Moiseyev and the opening of the criminal case against me. The prosecutors’ and militia’s repressive actions against Yeshcho, Novvi Vzgliad, and me were part of a new wave of homophobia, and a broader campaign against freedom of speech in the independent media. This campaign was enthusiastically supported by the conservative and governmental papers, such as Rossiiskaia Gazeta and Rossiiskie Vesti, as well as the more liberal Solidarnost and Vechernyaia Moskva. A series of homophobic articles against me and other journalists from Yeshcho and Novyi Vzgliad appeared during the next few weeks. One author proclaimed all of us “agents of the Israeli secret service MOSSAD [sic], who have received instructions to corrupt Russia.” On October 28, 1993, three militiamen came to the office of Glagol Publishing and shouted through the door to Aleksandr Shatalov, its editor-in-chief, inquiring as to my whereabouts. He answered that I was not in. They threatened to break the door down and check for themselves. They obviously had been informed that I was in the office at the moment. When the door was opened, they came in and showed me their documents. I was arrested by Lieutenant Andrei Kuptsov, handcuffed, and driven to the regional militia station. On the way there all of them used far more “profane language and obscene expressions” than the ones I had allegedly used. At the station I was interrogated by Kuptsov three times during five hours without break or the presence of a lawyer: first as a witness to the crime (i.e., the writing and publishing of my own article); then as the prime suspect in the crime; and, finally, as the one charged with committing the crime. He asked if I understood that the content of “Filthy Peckers” was illegal and that by writing it I had broken the law. I answered that this whole case seemed absolutely absurd. At the end of the interrogation I was forced to sign a document prohibiting me from leaving Moscow. “You’re lucky we don’t put you in custody like Kostin!” Kuptsov said to me. I did not have the right of travel and was, for all intents and purposes, under

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house arrest until the end of 1994. I was also banned from receiving my foreign-travel passport. Later, I found out that on the same day Kostin was also arrested. He was charged under Article 228 of the Criminal Code: “promotion, production, and distribution of pornography,” subject to up to three years in prison. In the old Soviet times this article was also regularly used against dissidents. Three months later Kostin was arrested again and placed in a general holding cell in the most notorious prison in Moscow, Butyrki. Despite the considerable press attention given to the case of Yeshcho and Kostin, and the numerous letters of protest from Russian and international human rights organizations, Kostin was held in prison for thirteen months without trial. The day after my arrest, Genrikh Padva, Russia’s most famous human rights lawyer, took on my case pro bono. His authority is based on the role he played in several high-profile political trials during the Soviet era. Padva was the founding father of the first professional lawyers’ union in the USSR, and the first lawyer to petition the Ministry of Justice to end the anti-homosexual Article 121.1 of the Criminal Code. Out Comes Zhirinovsky At around this time, at an art opening in Moscow, I was introduced to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. He ran for president in 1991 in Russia’s first free elections and became one of the country’s most popular politicians with his nationalistic slogans. His eccentric image and populist speeches made him an idol for many teenagers, and he was often invited to the openings of rock clubs and art galleries. Zhirinovsky was with his bodyguard who, as he proudly announced, used to be the bodyguard of Babrak Karmal, the head of the Soviet regime in Afghanistan. Zhirinovsky was surprisingly interested in me. He told me that he had heard about me and read some of my articles. “So why didn’t you come to me before?,” he asked upfront. “You could have come to me and said: I want to work for you and your party! Why didn’t you do it, like so many other young Russian guys have?” It was hard to determine whether he was joking or

Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading

not. Zhirinovsky invited me to join him at the restaurant of the Central House of Architects. There he pursued two teenage boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, and asked me to invite them to our table: “They can be good party members! I bet they will look great in military uniforms!” His manners, toasts, and speech seemed totally bizarre. He felt comfortable in my company, as he knew I was gay. He offered vodka to the boys, but they declined. He openly flirted with them, but succeeded only in frightening them off. Disappointed, Zhirinovsky shot down another glass of vodka and went off to the dance floor into a clutch of young female admirers. Zhirinovsky’s interest in young guys is not a secret to his inner circle, but it cannot be a subject for discussion among them. The issue of his sexuality is seemingly taboo for the Russian press as well. Although a number of major papers published a Reuters photo of Zhirinovsky kissing a Serbian soldier on the mouth, both naked in the sauna, during his visit to Yugoslavia, none made any comment on it. He’s often escorted by handsome young men, the members of the youth division of his party, or so-called “Sokoly Zhirinovskogo” (“Zhirinovsky’s Falcons”). He lives separately from his wife and spends almost every weekend at his private dacha outside Moscow. One young reporter who was invited to interview Zhirinovsky told me that he was instead propositioned by Zhirinovsky to pose naked for his camera in the shower. I received a different proposal from Zhirinovsky: he wanted me to be his press secretary. My reputation as an openly gay journalist obviously didn’t embarrass him. I suppose he had more sexual than political interest in me. On the other hand, I was already a known writer, and he may have wanted to use my name in order to score more votes from my readers as well as from gay people. I realized that collaboration with Zhirinovsky could put an end to my persecution and protect me from other possible troubles with the authorities. I was an easy target for them, as I had no political backing or protection. One telephone call from Zhirinovsky to the Prosecutor’s Office, and the criminal case against me would be closed. But I declined his proposal, as I wanted to remain independent from all political parties, groups, or organizations. In

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retrospect I would say that it is almost impossible to be politically independent in today’s Russia. Two months later, in December 1993, after an incredibly successful political campaign in the nation’s parliamentary elections, Zhirinovsky became the leader of the largest faction in the new Parliament. With his promises of cheap vodka for every man, a boyfriend and flowers for every woman, and legalized drugs for all, he was the only politician in Russian history to use slogans in support of private life for all citizens, including homosexuals. As a result, a significant part of his 12.3 million voters were gay. “We are against any interference in the private lives of our citizens,” Zhirinovsky said in an interview. “One person might be fascinated by Eastern religions, another spends all day standing on his head doing yoga, and someone else has particular sexual preferences. Why do we have to interfere in their private lives? We don’t want to! The American president had the same slogan. And I was the first Russian politician who did the same, wasn’t I? That’s good! And note my, let’s say, progressive ideology.” When he was asked about me, what he thought of my reputation, he answered diplomatically, “We have a lot of work now, and we need people. It’s why I proposed to work with him…. You can find some discriminative characteristic on everyone: one—dirty; another— poor; the third one—stupid; the fourth one has a different religion; the fifth one has a different Ideology…. And who’s left?” The Marriage On March 22, 1994, the Presidential Legal Commission on Informational Disputes held a hearing regarding my articles published in Novyi Vzgliad. The Commission was founded by a special Yeltsin decree, in order to monitor the media. Its chairman, Anatoly Vengerov, is an ex-Communist bureaucrat in his late fifties. The Commission consists of ten “experts,” all of whom are former Soviet apparatchiks. The legal status of the Commission is not clear, as its position is outside the Constitution, but its decisions have, in effect, the same power as presidential decrees. The work and the existence of the Commission have been criticized in the Russian

Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading

independent press and by the Parliament, although most of the press tries to placate the Commission, which tacitly controls all legal issues affecting the mass media. I was not invited to my own hearing, and found out about the Commission’s verdict in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, one of the government’s papers. I was proclaimed “a corrupter of public morals, a propagandist of pathological behavior, sexual perversions, and brutal violence,” etc. My writing “produces especial danger for children and teenagers.” After that, only the few most liberal papers continued to publish me. During this period I had been living with the American artist Robert Filippini. On my twentieth birthday we attempted to officially register our relationship as the first same-sex marriage in Russia. The marriage action was announced in the press, and we expected that the authorities would try to stop it. In the press release we wrote that the act was a “protest against the policy of homophobia and sexism, puritan public opinion and hypocritical morality,” and that “the primary objective for us was to draw public attention to the problems of gays and lesbians in Russia.” On the eve of the marriage action we went to the United States embassy to register Robert’s intention to marry me, as per the rules regarding marriage of foreigners and Russian nationals. Surprisingly, even telling the consul to take note of the genders involved, we received the certificate with the signature and stamp of the Embassy consul Paul Davis-Jones. On April 12, we arrived at Wedding Palace No. 4, the office for registering international marriages in Moscow. Over a hundred reporters and friends were waiting for us there. Karmen Bruyeva, the head of the Palace for over twenty-five years, had been informed about our visit through friends. To our surprise, she was polite and sympathetic. Bruyeva said that personally she understood our desire to get married, but that “marriage is a voluntary union between a man and a woman,” according to a Soviet law that has remained unchanged since 1969. “I’m really sorry, but I cannot register your union. If I accepted an application from two men I would be reprimanded and the marriage would be declared invalid,” Bruyeva said. “Why don’t you apply to Parliament and

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ask to amend the law? By the way, raise your hands, those of you, journalists, who favor amending the law?” And all of them raised their hands. The action drew a huge public response. The event was widely covered in the Russian and Western press. Most of the Russian press was sympathetic, except for one article in the Communist Pravda in which we were proclaimed “agents of Western drug trafficking and the porn industry,” and a couple of other homophobic articles in government papers. The Trial The trial concerning the criminal case against me under Article 206.2 was set for April 14th, 1994. Starting on April 13, Robert and I became the targets of militia harassment. That evening, two uniformed militiamen came to our apartment on Arbat and explained the reason for their visit: they had received letters of complaint from our neighbors claiming that we “had corrupted our neighborhood.” After looking around the apartment they left. A few hours later, two plainclothes detectives came to our apartment. The lead man, stout and with a prominent scar on his face, demanded to see our documents. When we asked to see their identification, “Scarface” responded, “Fuck off!” He and his partner, “Pretty Brute,” wearing long black leather jackets, walked us into our kitchen and began an hour-and-a-half-long interrogation on every aspect of our lives. Again, they told us that they had received a letter from a neighbor, accusing us of holding “orgies with young boys,” and then ranted on about their loathing of homosexuals and what they perceived to be the farce of our marriage attempt. “We can do anything with you two, put you in a psychiatric clinic, send you to jail, deport you from Russia! And neither PEN Center nor the American Embassy will be able to help you!” Scarface boasted. They stated that they were members of Zhirinovsky’s party. Their belligerence was unrestrained until I told them that I knew Zhirinovsky personally and that I could call him immediately to have him order them to stop their actions against us. “Don’t give us

Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading

this shit!” Scarface yelled. “How can you, queer, know Zhirinovsky personally?” I showed them his business card and his private number in my telephone book. After they drank nearly a liter of our vodka, they extorted $250 from us, promising that it would be the end of our “troubles with the neighbors,” and left the apartment laughing. The visit was utterly animalistic. We were absolutely demoralized and in shock, to the point that we were afraid to tell even our friends about the incident. On April 14, the Presnenskii Interregional Court held a hearing concerning the criminal charges brought against me under Article 206.2. Against code, I received no official notification for the date of my trial. I was not even familiar with the documents of the case against me, or with the indictment as it was written. When I protested this to the presiding judge, Elena Filippova, she was completely indifferent. My lawyer argued that I was targeted for prosecution because of my homosexuality. He said that this was the only case in the history of Soviet or Russian jurisprudence when a journalist had been charged with “hooliganism” for his use of language. Use of so-called profane language has a long tradition in Russian letters and classical literature, and it has become increasingly common in the media, including in large newspapers and on the government TV channel. Padva mentioned a number of examples when profane language was used by President Gorbachev, Vice President Rutskoi, President Yeltsin, and other Russian officials. Padva said that the case should be closed because of a series of violations of the Criminal Code on the part of the Prosecutor’s Office. He stated that this was not just “a minor point, but … a flagrant violation of human rights.” After the lawyer’s speech, Judge Filippova took a break for “consultation,” which was odd, as she was alone in her chambers. Evidently, she “consulted” with the Prosecutor’s Office and other initiators of the case against me. Even though the new Russian constitution states that the judicial system is to be independent of the Prosecutor’s Office, in Soviet and present-day Russia judges still represent the Prosecutor’s Office. After about forty minutes the judge returned and read her resolution. She found me guilty of all charges, but sent the case back to the Prosecutor’s Office for a new investigation, on technical grounds.

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On the night of April 16, the two detectives returned. For the next two hours a vodka-drinking Scarface—whose profanity-filled speech was a curious mix of foul Russian, English, and German—told graphic sexual stories and spoke of politics, religion, the philosophy of Hegel, Zhirinovsky’s glory, the Motherland, his poor old mother, the dangers of militia work, the Orthodox Power, family life, and the general moral disorder of the world. Throughout, he emphasized his hatred of homosexuals and the corrupting influence of the West. Thus did I discover the sophisticated spiritual and intellectual world of a militiaman. Midway through this monologue a large cellophane bag of hashish was laid on our table. The detectives laughed and proceeded to warn us of the prison terms dished out to those found in possession of drugs. They then offered to find some young girls to bring up to our apartment for group sex. Pretty Brute asked if we preferred eleven- or twelve-year-old-girls. Repeatedly during their visit, both of them demanded money from us. Again, they left the apartment drunk to the point where they could hardly walk. A couple of nights later Scarface returned alone. He showed us a handwritten letter full of homophobic scribblings, describing graphically orgies with young boys that supposedly took place in our apartment. He asked if we wanted him to kill our “motherfucking” neighbor, the purported writer of this letter. He raised his full glass of vodka, swilled it and said that he would now do us a favor, at which point he burned the letter in front of us, filling the room with smoke and yipping as he singed his fingers. After the extensive press coverage our attempted marriage received, we were frequently recognized and regularly stopped on the street by the militia. This was especially true in our neighborhood, where we couldn’t pass by the roving militia without being harassed. Though the anti-homosexual law has now been abolished in Russia2, the militia continue to keep and collect files on known 2

   Although the 2013 legislation against “the propaganda of non-traditional sexuality among minors” launched an anti-gay campaign in the Russian media, the criminalization of homosexuality that had existed in the USSR and Russia from 1934 to 1993 has not been restored as of the date of this writing, November 2013.—Eds.

Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading

homosexuals. “I control all of them in my district,” the Moscow local militia chief said in a TV interview. “I have to do it, because homosexuals are physically and psychically abnormal people. Every one of them at any time could pick up an ax and just kill somebody. Easily! They have to be isolated. They are sick!” Flight From Russia On September 20, 1994, under pressure from the liberal press, Russian and international human rights organizations, and legal efforts, the Prosecutor’s Office dropped the criminal case against me, because “due to the changed circumstances, Mogutin has ceased to pose a danger to society.” I learned of the decision only on October 10, when I was invited to the Prosecutor’s Office and had a three-hour conversation with Igor Konyushkin, first deputy prosecutor of the Office. Tall and thin, he chain-smoked nervously throughout our conversation. He seemed too young, too intelligent, and too gentle for his job. He spoke with me very frankly and seemed outwardly friendly, but I soon realized that he was being provocative. Konyushkin introduced himself as a “big fan of my writing.” “Because of my job, I had to read all your articles,” he said. “We have a huge file on you. You might be a good writer but the content of most of your articles is criminal. We could open a new case against you concerning anything from these articles as easily as we did with the ‘Filthy Peckers’ case. I just want to let you know that, although we dropped this case, we can always open another one. We’re giving you a chance to rehabilitate your mind: you must stop your writing or change your subject matter! You know what I mean? That’s my advice as your big fan!” My conversation with Konyushkin reminded me of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. There was something sadomasochistic about it. He seemed to be obsessed with me, my criminal prosecution being an extension of this obsession. Konyushkin told me that he was most outraged by an article in which I wrote that homophobes in the Prosecutor’s Office were just repressed queers. After my conversation with him, I was all the more convinced that what I had written was true.

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A few weeks later, the State Prosecutor’s Office issued a statement proclaiming their disagreement with the Regional Office’s decision to close my case, and they brought it into their jurisdiction for future prosecution. In February, the Presidential Legal Commission on Informational Disputes held two hearings concerning an article called “Chechen Knot” that I had written on the war in Chechnya. The article was highly critical of Yeltsin’s government, the Parliament, and the military complex, as well as of the Chechen separatists and the Russian press and intelligentsia. “Chechen Knot” was not the only article of this kind in the Russian press: I was again being singled out because of my open homosexuality. Like my earlier case, this one had a strong political motivation. Both hearings of the Commission were closed to the press and public: only reporters from the government press were allowed. The trial was in typical Soviet style: when I tried to say something in my defense, the microphone was turned off. The Commission’s members and the reporters just laughed at my protests. The chairman, Anatoly Vengerov, was screaming at me, “It’s scandalous! Stop this ugliness immediately or we shall call the militia! Where is security? Somebody, call security right now!” The members of the Commission accused me of violating the Constitution by “inflaming national, social, and religious division,” and recommended to the Prosecutor’s Office that new criminal charges be brought against me, and to the Committee on Press and Information that it shut down Novyi Vzgliad and rescind its publishing license. The official government TV channel Ostankino broadcasted the Commission’s decision on its prime time news program, Vremia (Time), and it was also published in Rossiiskaia Gazeta and other government papers. I was almost unanimously vilified in the press coverage of the new trial, in over a dozen aggressively homophobic articles. One of the authors called me a “hysterical mama’s boy” and appealed to the authorities to put me in a psychiatric clinic. Another reporter, the head of the Moscow Union of Journalists, suggested that it was too bad that the earring-wearing Mogutin hadn’t been killed instead of Dmitrii Kholodov (the journalist of Moskovskii Komsomolets killed by

Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading

a letter bomb in that paper’s editorial offices in October 1994 while working on a report on corruption in the Russian military). This three-year-long prosecution and intimidation campaign took its toll on me: I felt like a trapped animal. I was afraid of staying home just as much as being on the street, waiting to be arrested or harassed by the militia again at any moment. On the advice of my lawyer, I decided to flee the country, using an invitation from Columbia University for a series of lectures as an excuse. Expecting the situation to settle down in my absence, I left in the hope of returning in a few months. But shortly thereafter I found out that a new criminal case against me had in fact been opened under Article 74 of the Criminal Code, with a possible prison sentence of up to seven years. With that, going back home was no longer an option. I had no choice but to seek political asylum in the United States. I left behind in Russia not just my political and criminal troubles but also my language, audience, family, circle of friends, and celebrity status. I had to start my whole life again from square one. However, when people ask me how I find my present life, I tell them that being an anonymous political exile in New York is much better than being a famous gay writer in a Russian prison.3

3

   First published in The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 2, no. 4 (Fall 1995).

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M y F ir st M a n : S entimenta l Vomit

I have never written or reminisced about it as if this part of my memory got blocked: the recollections are vague and dim as if it had happened in my infancy long before i became who i became—DEPRAVED UNBRIDLED MONSTER i think i know what happened: i made myself forget about it my first experience with another man that guy at whose place i crashed in leningrad i don’t remember clearly either his face or his cock—just a blurry eroded image i was 17 he near 40 things did not get to fucking everything was quite innocent: i was lying like a log giving him complete freedom of action but he was delicate and courteous perhaps too much so he touched me all over and gave me a great blow job—my first blow job ever! he came twice but i was too nervous and stiff so i couldn’t come no matter how hard he and i tried he liked my body even my skinny legs he called “sexy” it must have been from him i first learned that i was attractive and this knowledge turned my world upside down in order to shock my teenage imagination he took me to a beriozka hard currency store where we solemnly acquired a bottle of some imported vodka

Slava Mogutin. My First Man: Sentimental Vomit

my imagination was indeed shocked it was bitterly cold we were dying to get warm so we split the bottle between the two of us that night i didn’t eat anything except some solyanka that was a bit off i got sick and puked all over him his bed and his bedroom i made a mess i vaguely remember how he started undressing me and when i was already naked he tried to take off the golden cross i was wearing (i got baptized shortly before that and was very religious at the time) i got ravenously angry called him a faggot a pervert and proudly fell asleep in my own puke while he offended went to sleep on the sofa a couple of months later i was arrested by the militia for a drunken row in the moscow subway the cops in the sobering station having beaten me up and stripped me naked emptied my pockets and expropriated my golden cross and my watch then threw me onto the concrete floor to “relax” under an icy cold shower where i realized that god had turned away from me and that my religion was not even worth my vomit upon my return to moscow i sent him some of my poems full of adolescent fears depression and vague forebodings of a future knockout life he wrote to me mad love letters at my old address—the letters which i read only after his death when he either slipped or jumped off a balcony one of them stated that he “cannot live without me” these words meant absolutely nothing to me later on things happened this way more than once the only thing that i do remember clearly and forever is the scent of his cologne drakkar—the scent that i can unmistakably distinguish from any others even though i myself never use perfume now it seems to me he was even good-looking

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then anyone could have taken his place i was waiting to be seduced and used the first one who came in handy (even though he was sure it was him who used me— so young and innocent!) he was only part of the faceless crowd of extras—one of those who later in my life were countless MY FIRST MAN THE FIRST OF THOUSANDS A semi-poet/semi-journalist/semi-playboy who didn’t leave behind anything except a slim book of poems and some rapidly aging boys who to this day preserve memories of his embraces I entered his life and unceremoniously appropriated it I adopted his identity and extended it to the point where he no longer existed My adolescent depression grew into something greater than a simple yearning for a good life and someone’s strong arms Even now I am writing not so much about him but about the vomit with which essentially the whole thing had begun Since then whenever I see vomit I get sentimental.

Slava Mogutin

Dr ea ms C ome T rue : P or n

as i witnessed myself getting double-fucked on screen i realized that i will never again be happy and satisfied ashamed or embarrassed i won’t blush and cover my face with my hands i will never again mourn a lost love and rejoice when i regain it i will never again be sincere because i simply don’t know what that means this is how dreams come true from now on i’m going to look at life through the dim prism of this experience wherever i go everyone will turn to look at me whisper and point fingers and trying to tame me offer food drugs or sex—the three things my uncomplicated life consists of three whales on which my suddenly empty universe rests lonesomely yes it’s true that whenever i’m in america they wait for me in europe and the other way round all the time someone breathes heavily into the receiver masturbating at the other end of the line (if there in fact exists an end or a line) but what does it matter to me what do i care about the geography of someone’s passions when my soul is like a burnt-down vacant lot or a noxious waste dump covered with snow

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my phone book is filled with names of those who’d be happy to use me from behind from below or from above i have nothing to retort with my mouth and ears are cluttered with some sort of impenetrable crooked-mouthed cotton-wool i am trying to say something but instead only a handful of senseless interjections squeezes out of me all that i know and remember are my poses my poses my poses the automatic worked-out quality of those poses the shaved head the glassy stare the broken lines of my body and the sinister german speech on the set like the announcement of a verdict every word can carry fatal consequences it’s hard to see whether i am laughing or crying squirming from pain or bliss i have no escape from this curve of my neck the grimace of my twisted arms this is the nightmare that will be pursuing me for the rest of my life blinding floodlights cameras penetrating my throat and my guts i had an epiphany at that moment i truly lost my memory i was in some kind of nirvana while they almost tore my ass the producer calls trying to get me to do additional filming i was again seen on german tv as always i was naked never again!—i tell myself trying to appeal to my willpower but all the same with my heart stopping i lift the receiver to dial his number this must be fate November 18, 1998, Berlin Translated by Vitaly Chernetsky

Slava Mogutin

W e W er e A ll Dy ing

of the

119

S a me Disea ses

parade of pipettes march of syringes we were all dying of the same diseases first exchanged experiences then bullshitted about nazis compared pills accounted with antibiotics - WHAT’S THIS WITH YOU BOYS GETTING SICK NOW? - WHAT ARE THESE WEIRD SPOTS ON YOUR BODY? doctors say jan’s got tuberculosis john ditched hospital but with his hormones spent pevzner got back to moscow—finger got ripped off by a mercedes 800 that rushed by misha—remember misha?—ate some bad soup and died the splinters in raoul’s leg—sea urchin needles - OH SHIT YOU’VE GOT THE BITES ALL OVER YOU! - IS IT DEADLY? SCARS: deep extended on left thigh—fell off the bike in berlin could easily be taken for a knife wound

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on right thigh chunk of flesh ripped off—jsmacked into a car on skates in new york scars from cigarettes extinguished on me: at least 2 from police beatings on spine—extended lines like lashes from a whip growing lump in right nipple under metal and this red spot on my ass probably will never go away yes we were all dying of the same diseases bit off the hangnail on the plane—caught an infection played with the ocean—broke a nail on a reef rode on the horse around jungles—took a beating on my ass and balls mosquitoes gnawed me half to death sleeping sickness: bytes from a tsetse fly tarantula bit me on the cheek—went out with scabs ate meat of a possessed ape—same one that howled in the mornings under the windows—in an hour buried burned to hell so it wouldn’t stink there will be no grave who fucking needs this shit in a foreign tropical country September 2000, Costa Rica Translated by Vitaly Chernetsky

Slava Mogutin

T he T r iumph

of the

121

Fa mily

this dreadful gray constancy replaces for me today all colors green blue red—what other ones are there? i don’t find a place for me here don’t know where to sit what to drink and to eat was it long ago that daddy amused himself with his sonny? the triumph of the family happened mother was entertaining herself with the daughter opening her mouth in the vicinity of hers saliva poured slowly from here into there never before two related bodies were as close as then green blue red gray constancy the identical you will never write like the different one you were gone gone and the heart was beating into the armpit like an exploded point here is this one and here’s another one completely different you are getting used to signs of differentiation silly are you getting completely assimilated?

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while father was amusing himself mother was entertaining herself the triumph of the family happened green blue red the russian word for “family” comes from the word for “pig” 1990, Moscow Translated by Vitaly Chernetsky

Slava Mogutin

T he Death

of

M isha B eautiful

Some friends from Moscow who recently passed through New York relayed this sad and disturbing news: Misha Beautiful was killed in prison. The story of his short life could provide good material for a book or movie. His death wasn’t reported in the obituaries. His name did not appear in the news. Actually, nobody even knew either his real name or his age (by my account, at the time of his death he was somewhere between 20 and 23). Everybody knew him by his English nickname. Not a single drug or rave party could take place without Misha. He was one of those exotic night creatures, androgynous club kids who keep it all going in any one of the world’s capitals.  We met at Michael Jackson’s concert at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. I was invited by my good friend Vladik Mamyshev, a.k.a. Monroe, who happened to have free tickets (otherwise I’d never pay my own money to see that American freak!). There was an incredible number of militia men there, one of whom displayed a rather aggressive interest in me, catching me taking a leak in an inappropriate place. Only my journalist ID saved me from his insistent pestering. At the stadium entrance several lines of cops thoroughly searched everyone. This got Monroe very excited and he went back and forth about three times to prolong the pleasure. Vladik was one of the most colorful and extravagant characters of the Russian underground art scene, a conceptual artist and performer who became famous for his brilliant campy

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impersonations of different pop icons from Marilyn Monroe to Adolf Hitler. The concert was a flop, the weather was nasty, rain was pouring, and people were standing up to their ankles in water. Misha came up to us and asked for a smoke. It turned out that back in St. Petersburg, not so long ago, he tried to pick up Monroe on different occasions and claimed to be in love with him. Don’t know what ever happened between those two, but Vladik told me he was now trying to avoid Misha. Monroe and his entourage left, and I remained standing in the rain with Misha, who was high and seemed to have some difficulty understanding what was going on around him. Later I never saw him completely sober, looking normal; his pupils were always dilated. Misha was a clear case of a teenager who grew too quickly— tall, dystrophic-thin, boyishly awkward, with long arms and legs and with shoulders and chest that had not shaped up yet. He truly was beautiful with the innocent childish expression on his face, wide open green eyes and long eyelashes, with a short haircut, in a baseball cap turned backwards and with excessive piercings in his ears, nose, and one eyebrow. Back then I was very much turned on by that. He slightly stuttered and slurred when he spoke, and his vocabulary was full of slang and Russianized English words. Later he became for me a walking dictionary of this simultaneously entertaining and somewhat ridiculous new language that served as a password of sorts for the “in” crowd. His head was an utter mess, he jumped from one thought to another, and his speech frequently resembled a Joycean stream of consciousness. I loved his stories and fantasies; to me they sounded like perfect material for an absurdist play yet to be written. After the concert he had to go back to St. Petersburg. In a kiosk by the metro station I bought a bottle of vodka which we opened and finished right there, chasing it down with some nasty franks. He got drunk instantly and was overflowing with affection toward me. He wrapped himself around me, grabbing and kissing my hands, feeling my cock through my pants, whispering excitedly, “Wow! So big!” We embraced, kissed, and rubbed against each other like lusty

Slava Mogutin. The Death of Misha Beautiful

wild animals, cold and wet from the rain. Old drunkards drinking vodka nearby watched us with both disgust and amusement.  Catching the last metro train, we found ourselves in an empty car and lay down on a bench, still kissing and rubbing against each other. He unbuttoned my fly, got his hand inside, and started squeezing and caressing my cock. At the moment when he was about to take it in his mouth, two thugs from the Caucasus, either Chechen or Georgian, walked into the car. By the mad look in their eyes I understood that they could have easily killed us right there if we did not manage to jump out of the car a moment before the doors closed. When I saw him off at the train station, we parted as if we had been lovers for a long time. We had only known each other for about three hours…. Back in St. Petersburg, he called me all the time, day and night, often leaving some ten messages a day in his bird language on my answering machine. The messages were about him missing me, thinking about me all the time, feeling lonely and stuff, deciding to kill himself, OD’ing on magic mushrooms and thinking he was about to die, screwing some chick and imagining I was doing to him whatever he was doing to her, and so on. At the time I was already a well-known journalist and poet, the first openly queer writer in Russia, regularly receiving both fan mail and hate mail, a generous portion of love letters and death threats. But Misha’s messages differed from them in that he didn’t have the slightest idea about the things I did or the origin of my fame and wasn’t at all interested in that. In any case, I am certain that he never read a single line of what I had written (if he knew at all how to read). However, he immediately became the inspiration for my writing. In the poem “Seize It!” dedicated to him there are the following lines:  And that boy in a baseball cap With a shelf that sticks out Sucks and swallows like God Nobody else could do it like him

As I found out later, the parents of Misha Beautiful are both wellknown and established people in St. Petersburg. Apparently, his father is the director of some big department store. And, as often

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happened in well-to-do Soviet families, he grew up “difficult,” a “problem child.” He told me about doing fartsovka (illegal exchanging of souvenirs for consumer goods such as jeans, sneakers, watches, and gum with foreign tourists and the selling of those goods on the black market—a crime punishable in the Soviet Union by a severe prison sentence in the 70s and 80s.—S.M.) next to the Intourist hotel. The fags who picked up foreigners also hung out there. Misha and his buddies periodically conducted remont (Russian slang for gay bashing.—S.M.)—beat the fags up and robbed them. Misha did not consider himself a faggot.  From his other stories I found out that as a child he fell down the stairs and suffered a severe concussion. Apparently this was the reason for his speech difficulties and arrested development. I was only older than him by some two years, but it seemed to me that a veritable age gap divided us, turning our communication (when his mouth wasn’t busy with something else) into some inarticulate babble. He was street-smart, with only two real passions in life: drugs and parties … and, of course, trendy, expensive clothes. He didn’t like to work and didn’t know how, and when he ran out of his parents’ money he stole or borrowed money from his friends, many of whom used Misha as a prostitute in return. If one were to try to count his regular partners or just one-night stands, it would be a rather long list of names, with some celebrities among them. For Misha sex was the only way to earn income, and he had all it takes to become a successful hustler.  He did not have either willpower, nor a strong enough personality, which is why, like some “Sons of the Regiment” (A term used to describe orphans found and taken care of by Soviet army regiments during World War II; an important element of Soviet propaganda and cultural mythology.—S.M.), he had a need for elder comrades in charge of his life and destiny. Having found himself in the coterie of Timur Novikov, godfather of the St. Petersburg underground art scene, Beautiful became a student at his New Academy of Fine Arts. Timur himself had admitted that “face control” was one of the main criteria he used for selecting students, thanks to which Misha, like many other young local talents, successfully passed the exams. As part of the educational

Slava Mogutin. The Death of Misha Beautiful

process, Timur’s boys posed naked for each other and had their pictures taken in togas and robes, mimicking ancient homoerotic statues and scenes. Various rooftops all over the city served as their locations. The Academy itself was located in a large communal apartment, one of the walls of which was covered from floor to ceiling by satin of the symbolic sky-blue color. (“Goluboi,” “blue” is Russian slang for gay.—S.M.) Not coincidentally, Timur’s main inspirations were Oscar Wilde, Baron Von Gloeden, and Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria. Timur, whom Misha and other students referred to respectfully as Timur Petrovich, was for Misha for a while a true idol and figure of authority. But even he, despite his definite organizer’s talent and his skill in, let’s say, “working with the youth,” managed to divert Misha from the lifestyle he had been leading only for a short while. Fine arts interested him far less than drugs and parties. Timur Petrovich sincerely tried to bring him to reason and take him back into the realm of neo-classical beauty, but his efforts were in vain....  Misha surprised me by showing up in Moscow on one of the days of the October 1993 coup, during the State of Emergency. He must have been the only person in the world who knew nothing about it. He had no papers on him. He called me from the train station. He had lots of acquaintances in Moscow, but he called me and no one else since, according to him, he came down to see me. And I felt somewhat responsible for him. The previous night Monroe had been arrested while wandering around Moscow past the curfew time, having his pictures taken for his self-published magazine ME and exposing himself in front of the tanks. Vladik and a friend of his had to spend a night in jail. This probably was the best possible scenario of what could have happened to Misha. Dropping everything, I grabbed a pack of my journalist IDs and went to meet, or, rather, save him.  Having found out that something scary and incomprehensible was happening in Moscow, Misha got totally excited and begged me to take him to the barricaded building of the Russian Parliament, called, ironically enough, the White House. Invisible evil snipers followed us lustily with their eyepieces, stray bullets whizzed by,

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the levels of adrenalin in our blood exceeded all Health Ministry standards, people wandered in the streets, bewildered and dumbfounded—all of this serving as an arousing backdrop. Like homeless teenagers forced to engage in public sex, we found ourselves in alleys and doorways, and Misha used every opportunity to kneel in front of me, unbutton my pants, and blow me. Several times we were caught in the middle of it, but in that situation our pranks did not cause particular reactions in anyone: queers on barricades! So this was my baptism by fire. Thanks to Misha, I will always remember that sharp feeling of sex in the midst of street fighting, shooting, general civil unrest and disobedience…. I am writing about Misha in such detail, trying to recall all that I know and remember about him precisely because he is no longer in this world. I am getting excited from some cruel and dark necrophiliac fantasies, thinking of whatever happened to his skinny body. De Mortius Aut Bene, Aut Nihil. I know I could be accused of blasphemy, but I am describing him the way he was, and he was by no means an angel. Both sexually and mentally he was so passive, so easy to take advantage of, and I did that, like everyone else. He was a stalker of sorts, and I just couldn’t resist his advances. He was doomed, and it was impossible not to notice that. It was written all over him. I saw that, sensed that, and tried somehow to influence his fate. But I had not fallen for him that badly. I had a life of my own into which he would intrude from time to time; we met periodically for a quick fuck, he was always somewhere nearby, and it seemed things would stay like this forever. As I was moving around Moscow, changing addresses and lovers, Misha somehow managed to find my phone numbers and called me, always giving me more inspiration material and running into troubles with my jealous boyfriends every now and then.  On April 12, 1994, the day of my twentieth birthday, when I tried to register officially the first same-sex marriage in Russia with my American boyfriend Robert, Misha’s ghostly figure suddenly appeared in front of the Moscow Central Palace of Weddings in the crowd of reporters armed with erect cameras and microphones. Sure enough, our marriage wasn’t registered, but we managed to

Slava Mogutin. The Death of Misha Beautiful

make enough noise for the whole world to hear, and we bravely withstood the marathon of interviews that followed, talking about the state of homophobia and gay rights in the state of Russia. As in the case of the coup, Misha was probably the only person unaware of that historic event. He fluttered his eyes and wrinkled his forehead in total oblivion of who was marrying whom and why there was such commotion.  I had neither the opportunity nor the desire to explain things to him, but instead introduced Misha to my friend Fedor, the son of a famous female playwright. Fedor was a cute, tall, blonde and blue-eyed guy, and an aspiring journalist with good brains and a kind heart. Prior to this the two of us fooled around somewhat awkwardly a couple of times—on his initiative, in spite of Fedor usually portraying himself as a big womanizer and lecturing me about my “corrupt” lifestyle. I knew he wouldn’t mind “doing it” with someone else. Misha was an ideal character for that and obediently went with Fedor as he was told to.  After our crowded and loud wedding party at Robert’s studio, Fedor grabbed Misha and brought him to his place. After another clumsy and awkward fuck, Fedor departed either for work or for college, letting Beautiful stay at his place and making the noble gesture of leaving him his only key from the apartment. He promised to get Misha a journalist ID so that he could attend any club or concert without a hustle. More than a month passed before the Good Samaritan Fedor managed to track down Misha and retrieve his key from him. He had to pay for the apartment he couldn’t even get into, while Misha turned it into a total drug nest, did not answer Fedor’s calls, and tried to avoid him at any cost. But an even greater surprise was still awaiting Fedor: his landlord demanded that he pay for Misha’s long distance and international calls to his tricks around the world. “I really tried to help him,” a frustrated Fedor later complained to me. “I wanted to drag him out of this swamp!” Later on I ran into Misha in some clubs, and by then he was already so drugged-out he could barely recognize me. He bumped into me and mumbled something nonsensical. Later Misha disappeared somewhere, and different stories about him reached

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me from time to time: he had hung out with some Scandinavian DJs who kept him on an ecstasy diet and gangbanged him for days; he had to move for good to Moscow since in St. Petersburg he “borrowed” too many valuables from too many friends; and now a lot of people in Moscow were trying to hunt him down for the same reason. Once I got a phone call from someone who was looking for Beautiful in order to retrieve a video camera that had disappeared after his visit. Misha had gone too far. For most people he was no longer “beautiful,” he started losing his looks and his appeal, and some serious dark clouds were beginning to gather over his head.  Our last meeting took place when he called me again out of the blue, in his usual manner, and found me in a horny and adventurous mood. We made a date in front of a subway station. It was sunny and warm and we walked around the Garden Ring, looking for a spot to get off. I missed him and his silly stories. One was about his parents cooking some mushrooms and him adding some of his own, and then his parents started seeing things, and his grandma had the most severe hallucinations. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me!” Grandma kept on saying. “I feel like a completely different person!” Another story, completely unreal, was about some rich girl that Misha was apparently involved with at the moment. The girl was into getting fucked up her ass and Misha proudly revealed that he could satisfy her better than any other guy. Then, he confessed, he himself grew to like anal sex as well. And then … he’d been invited by some guy to work as a model either in Italy or Spain, and that he would go for sure, “as soon as he’s ready.”  Having bought a couple of bottles of champagne, we dropped in at the studio of my friend, painter and fashion designer Katya Leonovich. She was being interviewed by a couple of lame tabloid journalists who nearly fainted at seeing the two of us at the door. Drunk on champagne, Misha and I started behaving in a rather frivolous manner, grabbing and kissing each other. Just like the first time, we were all over each other. In the bathroom I pushed him down on his knees and pulled out my cock. His cock-sucking skills had significantly improved since our first meeting. I kept on feeding him, he sucked and licked readily and eagerly, stopping from time

Slava Mogutin. The Death of Misha Beautiful

to time, looking puppy-like into my eyes, slurping and saying pitifully: “Don’t leave me, please! I want to be with you! Please!” At that moment I just wanted one thing—to cum—and could easily promise anything, so I did, as my load was going down his throat. A few minutes later, when it was all over and we came out of the bathroom, Misha took his shirt off to show his tattoos. Then Katya had him try on one of the outfits from her new collection. Being at the center of everyone’s attention, Misha was shy and at his best—so obedient and passive, like a doll or a mannequin. After all, he would make a great model somewhere in Italy or Spain!  Another few months had passed, and I had to flee from criminal prosecution because of my queer writing and “corrupt” lifestyle. On the eve of my departure—or, rather, escape—from Russia, literally a few hours before our plane, when Robert and I were hurriedly trying to pack at least something, Monroe burst into our place with his artist friends Ivan and Sergei. Monroe and Ivan were then renting an apartment on the Arbat, a two-minute walk from us, and whenever they were totally broke, they would come to our place for a free meal. We had to put off the packing until the very last moment and feed the hungry artists. It was then, at our Last Supper, that I learned from Vladik that Misha Beautiful had been thrown in jail for robbery and drugs. Monroe joked cynically that “now Misha’s doing the time of his life” and so on. But since at that point I had a good chance of finding myself behind bars as well, I understood perfectly well the seriousness of what had happened. For a homosexual prone to sadomasochist fantasies, prison sometimes appears to be an enticing sexual paradise, a place where the wildest dreams and fantasies come true. You can sit in the safety of your home and masturbate endlessly imagining how dirty, rough, and raw sex behind bars is: NO CONDOMS, NO LUBE, NO MERCY! Well, after spending a few months investigating the lives of gays in Soviet prisons and detention camps, all I can say is: under no circumstances would I want to end up there! I know too well what happens there to those like myself and especially like Misha Beautiful. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t even consider himself a fag.... 

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The story of his life and death could easily be reworked into a moralizing oration: look what drugs, gay debauchery, and crazy nightlife do to a person! He started out with fartsovka and mushrooms, and finished in prison, among the criminals! But one can also present it in a completely different way: it’s a pity that there did not appear a Michael Jackson who could have saved him and turned his life into One Big Neverland. It’s a pity that neither Monroe nor Timur Petrovich, nor me, nor Fedor became his Michael Jackson! 1996, New York City Translated by Vitaly Chernetsky and the author

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E xcer pts

from

“G l a mour a’ l a O k sa na Robsk i ,”

by Tatiana Mikhailova1

It’s interesting—what does a person who can buy a Vertu phone for six grand look like? Can a woman be that person? —Oksana Robski2

The First Generation of Happy Girls […] With all her books highly publicized in Russian glossy magazines and on TV as an insider’s look at the lifestyles of the nouveau riche, Robski became a symbol of the new consumerist culture of the 2000s.3 Gaily accepting the comparison of her writing style to that of a talking purse from Chanel, Robski presents a gendered view of the nouveau riche’s lifestyle, focusing on the lives and problems of the women in the elitist settlement, mostly the wives and mistresses of Russian businessmen and politicians. Mediocre in their literary qualities, Robski’s novels nevertheless constitute an illuminating case of the functioning of the glamour culture, in which happiness, as manifested by “status” and “success,” is not the result of certain achievements, but their very foundation. Although the characters are in most cases already “made” in money and status, the origins of their privilege are never quite clear. […] Perhaps the nameless autobiographical heroine of Robski’s first novel Casual is the closest reflection of the author. It is she

1

   From Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic, ed. Helena Goscilo and Vlad Strukov (London: Routledge, 2011), 90-104.

2

   Oksana Robski. Casual (Moscow: Rosman, 2005), 11

3

    A collection of reviews of Robski’s novels is posted on her personal site, www.robski.ru/pressa. Last accessed on September 15, 2008.

Tatiana Mikhailova. Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski”

who says to her girlfriends, “We’ll be the first generation of happy old ladies, just as we were the first generation of rich girls” (“Мы будем первым поколением счастливых старушек, как были первым поколением богатых девчонок”)4. The unquestionable equivalence of happiness to wealth in this motto is principal to Robski and is in many ways responsible for what may be called the “Robski effect.” […] The attraction of Robski’s novels and her persona is based on the fact that she goes beyond the banal “the rich cry too,” and presents the quests for happiness of those who already have a lot of money. So, what is happiness for a woman already in possession of a million-dollar cottage in Rublevka, her own business, a luxury car, and a diamond collection? To risk sounding tautological, I argue that this transcendental happiness is manifested by the concept of glamour. […] Glamour as a cultural concept appears as a result of the societal democratization of the mid-nineteenth century, when aristocratic symbolic capital was replaced by the mass consumption of “high culture” signs.5 There is an obvious similarity between this process and the rearrangement of social hierarchies in the post-Soviet years, when the Soviet aristocracy of the Party and cultural elite was ousted by the invasion of the nouveau riche, whose raspberrycolored jackets and criminal slang were within a decade replaced by Armani suits and Eton English. In this respect, Robski represents a perfect example of a cultural mediator between two epochs: a former member of the intelligentsia (her mother still teaches at one of the Moscow colleges), she grew up in a small khrushchevka,6 and now represents the highest strata of the social elite. Without a doubt, the very fact of having a house in the prestigious Rublevka neighborhood helped Robski attain the necessary level of

4

   Robski, Casual, 197.

5

   See Stephen Gundle and Clino T. Castelli. The Glamour System (London: Palgrave, 2006), 43-45.

6

   Small one-family apartments; named after Nikita Khrushchev, who launched a wide-scale construction of apartment buildings of this kind in the 1960s.

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immediate credibility in the eyes of her readers. Simultaneously with the publication of Casual, it was broadly reported that the author herself belonged to the same—“successful”—social stratum as her characters. Almost immediately after the release of her first book, Robski became a celebrity, a frequent guest and later an anchor of TV shows promoting the glamorous lifestyle. Robski’s novels gained a broad readership, mainly due to the illusion they create of familiarizing us with the world of the rich and powerful, and thus catering to those readers who, by default, do not belong to this world. Her books intend to “humanize” the highly demonized world of the nouveau riche, while at the same time exploiting the public mythology of the transgressive and criminal mores typical for this social stratum—evoking the genre of a mystery novel. The fact that a female writer describing the female aspects of this realm performs a “humanizing” function betrays the patriarchal, or rather Victorian, dichotomy (men = dirty job, women = cozy home) in which this discourse is rooted. Robski’s characters never question their economic dependence on their husbands and lovers; they perceive it quite simply as the route to their self-empowerment in relation to those less “successful” and less happy than they are. The Botox Effect Unlike such western canonical texts of glam literature as Danielle Steel’s and Jackie Collins’s bestsellers, Robski’s Casual, surprisingly, lacks emotion. The botox that eliminates all facial manifestations of emotion becomes an illuminating metaphor in this book: “Wrinkles vanished. Muscles atrophied. The doll-like face of a little girl with blue hair. And when I smile—Phantomas appears from a scary story: forcefully stretched lips and motionless glass eyes.”7 Accordingly, Robski’s narrator and heroines are emotionally numb, incapable of being shocked: for them, everything is acceptable, including murder. Indeed, botox appears to be an excellent synecdoche for the entire culture of glamour, since the latter also emphasizes the

7

   Robski. Casual, 31.

Tatiana Mikhailova. Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski”

surface and downplays the substance, also stays on the “skin-deep” level securing the invincibility of the lucky hero from the outside world, and most importantly from time, age, and death. Thus, both botox and glamour assign a supernatural, superhuman, or even transcendental status to the glamorous character, while at the same time paralyzing his/her subjectivity. Happy glam girls, as depicted by Robski, seem to be incapable of feeling anything, except for the excitement of power and envy for those who are more powerful than they are. Power and its visible signifiers—wealth, expensive goods, a rich husband—constitute the horizon of happiness in Robski’s novel. To achieve this horizon, a woman must mirror a man’s attitude to the opposite sex as prey, as another commodity signifying life success. However, the paradox of the Rublevka lifestyle as inadvertently reflected by Robski is based on circular logic: the woman, “masculinized” by the cynical ability to use any means possible to achieve her desires, equates her success with submission to the man whom she “conquers.” […] The “feminization” of the cold and power-oriented world of the nouveaux riches women is performed in these novels by a method borrowed from glamour magazines. Each character’s realm is presented through a list of commodities: “things to own,” such as houses, cars, furniture, clothing—frequently with an exact, specified price and brand name—and “places to go”: massage and hairdresser salons, “in” restaurants, fashionable entertainment venues, etc. All these details are marked as feminine, and thus set the system of standards for a “successful” woman’s lifestyle. The heroine possesses things that are quite inaccessible to the majority of Robski’s readers, thus placing herself “beyond the powers of articulate authority and accountability.”8 The representation of a character through a list of things s/he owns becomes a trademark of Robski’s literary method and a particularly obvious sign of the “botox effect” of glamour. Robski is definitely not original in this respect (see, for instance, Martin Amis’

8

   Nick Lee, “Becoming Mass: Glamour, Authority, and Human Presence,” in The Consumption of Mass, ed N. Lee and R. Munro (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 174.

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Money or Victor Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’), but she is probably the first Russian writer to assign a neutral or positive meaning to the equation of a human being with his/her possessions. This approach resembles more than anything else a catalog or a fashion magazine. In a sense, a character is equated with a certain kind of fashion magazine. Those characters whose lists are the most luxurious are separated from consumers of more affordable things not only by their economic status but also by their language and symbolic habitat. For instance, in the novel Liuboff/on, the heroine named Dasha does not belong to the circle of rich and powerful, although her lover tries to introduce her to his friends. These encounters lead to miscommunications, similar to those comically depicted in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. On the one hand, Dasha corrects lapses in the speech of her beloved—for him (unlike for Professor Higgins), a good command of Russian has nothing to do with his social status. On the other hand, Dasha finds herself failing to understand even the simplest conversation: “I can’t fit anything into my fridge,” complained an unbelievably pudgy girl […] I decided to take advantage of the situation and keep up the conversation; Rita and I had meditated on the subject of refrigerators for half a year already. “Bosch is really good,” I said. Several pairs of made-up eyes looked at me with interest. It felt nice. “Freezes well, beautiful design […] very conveniently made”—I enjoyed universal attention—“even a compartment for eggs. Not like other kinds. […] My words were drowned out by loud laughter. And the clink of glasses. “To refrigerators!” everyone toasted in unison. I raised my glass uncertainly. “But only to refrigerators for fur coats. And not for eggs,” specified the girl in the low-cut dress. And everyone joyfully laughed again.9

9

   Oksana Robski. Pro lubOFF/ON (Moscow: Rosmen, 2005), 35—6.

Tatiana Mikhailova. Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski”

Continuing the parallel with Pygmalion, one might notice that in the world of Robski’s characters it is not their language that defines their social/cultural status. Instead, their status and its manifestations through commodities change language itself. Indeed, words (such as “refrigerator”) mean something other than their normal definitions. Furthermore, for the inhabitants of Robski’s Rublevka, refrigerators for food do not belong to the sphere of discourse (these are objects for the commoners and the “help”); the only refrigerators that concern them are those specially designed for the preservation of their furs. Dasha’s failure to understand the conversation she invades is especially telling (and painful) because she is a professional linguist. Language is something she masters, and even her power over her lover is augmented by her role as his speech trainer. In another episode in the novel, Dasha revealingly compares a lack of money with the absence of a voice, or, in other words, with discursive deficiency: “‘Nine thousand, six hundred and forty dollars.’ I had only two thousand, four hundred and eighty. That’s probably how the mute feel. You want to say something, but you can’t” (“Наверно, так чувствуют себя немые. Хочешь что-то сказать, но не можешь”)10. The opacity of the glamour language is indicative of the magic aura created by glamour objects. The Magic of Sharing Even within this circle of magic objects, there is an unstated hierarchy between things more and less accessible. The former— such as products of Mercedes, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen, Makita, Bacardi, and Panache—are typically written by Robski in Cyrillic, while the latter—such as Cayenne, Bentley, Jack Daniels Blue Label, Dupont lighters, a fitness center in Rublevka entitled “World Class,” and a Provazi sofa—appear in Latin script. The foreignness of the name corresponds to the transcendental status of the thing, determined by its price. Thus, glamour is never entirely familiarized by Robski’s character: it always preserves some sense

10

   Robski, Casual, 117.

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of distance, which is precisely why the possession of a glam object can generate the “magic effect” of happiness. From this perspective, it is symptomatic that of Robski’s four novels, the first has an English title (Casual) and the third is based on an international pun (Про любоff/on). In Zamuzh za millionera (coauthored with Kseniia Sobchak) the first letter of the title, and in Glamurnyi dom the syllable “glam” are written in Latin script. The titles of Robski’s first and most recent book (Casual 2 came out in October 2007) are especially eloquent: what is “casual” for Robski’s heroine is foreign and therefore full of glamorous magic for the reader. This effect is self-perpetuating. Characteristically, the “real” wives of Rublevka and Zhukovka sent an angry letter to the NTV channel accusing Robski’s novels of inauthenticity. They were especially enraged by the fact that Robski’s heroine receives a monthly allowance of $2000 from her husband: “It’s a joke—write the ladies—for a whole month? That wouldn’t be enough for a day…. After that stupid book our husbands make fun of us: “Why don’t I ask this … kefir businesswoman for the numbers of those friends of hers who can get by on two thousand a month….” True “Rublevka wives” think that Robski’s project is PR for the poor, she just didn’t want to scare them with the real price of living in this Moscow suburb. To conclude, the ladies sneered at the writer for underestimating the cost of their lifestyle, and devaluing their feminine “services.” […]11

There is, indeed, something peculiar in Robski’s glamour discourse. Through her heroines she is not shy about enjoying and praising cheap products of questionable quality seemingly intended for the poor. She takes pleasure in a Doshirak noodle soup and a Prichuda vafel’nyi tort (a wafer torte); she is amazed to learn that a delicious tea that tastes no worse than the one she regularly drinks ($10 per sip) is actually ordinary Lipton. She is excited by 11

   [No author],“’Proletarskaia pisatel’nitsa glamurnykh bul’onnykh kubikov,” http:// www.stringer.ru/publication.mhtml?Part=38&PubID=4556 (last consulted September 21, 2008).

Tatiana Mikhailova. Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski”

her visit to a simple khoziaistvennyi magazin (a small version of a Home Depot) and is not afraid of a “dirty job,” although lacking medical training, she nevertheless knows how to give her daughter injections and even immunization shots. Or consider the following statement: “Katya’s maid fed us potato casserole. With that Filipino I learned to value simple human food” (”Катина домработница накормила нас картофельной запеканкой. С филиппинкой я научилась ценить простую человеческую еду”).12 These examples are quite frequent in Robski’s prose. Hardly any of them can be written off as product placement, and their recurrence in her prose reflects Robski’s positioning of herself as a mediator between the post-Soviet rich and the poor. However, the reason for these intentional lapses in glam taste, I contend, springs from the inextricable link between glamour and happiness. As Jean Baudrillard points out in The System of Objects, everyone in consumer culture “must constantly be ready to actualize all of his potential, all of his capacity for consumption. If he forgets, he will be gently reminded that he has no right not to be happy.”13 This universal obligation to be happy is maintained through everyday easy access to solidified happiness as embodied in consumer products: “Everything is appropriated and simplified into the translucence of abstract ‘happiness’”(ibid., 37). In other words, every brand, every fashionable symbol of status serves as a signifier of happiness. […] Yet I maintain that Robski goes beyond the pragmatics of embedding advice to naïve consumers in her prose. The presence of cheap products like Doshirak or Lipton in the list of happinesssignifiers allows virtually all of her readers to imbibe, in the process of reading, their own dose of glamour happiness, regardless of their income. In fact, the incorporation of cheap products into her “catalogues” of things is a rhetorical device intended to bond her with those readers who can afford nothing more expensive. By this means, Robski truly creates the illusion of sharing, which in turn 12

   Robski. Casual, 266.

13

   Jean Baudrillard. The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2005), 51.

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produces the effect of common values, understanding, and, most importantly, of the reader’s belonging to the glamorous world. Even the simple purchase of Robski’s book offers the reader an injection of glamour and, thus, is equivalent to symbolic citizenship in Rublevka or Zhukovka. The creation of this circle of shared happiness is the main reason for the popularity of Robski’s books, as well as for the transformation of her name into a commercial brand. This rhetorical mechanism is quite typical for the culture of glamour: “… Glamour is not the elusive pimpernel attainable through the god of riches…. It is easy to attain at least some of it, if not all of it, and half a loaf is better than none.”14 […] To Own (f)or To Be Owned Robski’s characters are reminiscent of Giuseppe Archimboldo’s baroque portraits, in which people’s faces are composed of fruits, vegetables, fish, and flowers, only Robski’s characters consist of fashionable objects, expensive houses and cars, powerful positions, etc. If this is so, the character itself, and a protagonist female character in particular, appears as an object too, though an expensive, glamorous object that not every buyer can afford. This situation, however, leaves unanswered the ubiquitous question of agency: does Robski’s protagonist—or the post-Soviet glam woman—preserve a certain, albeit limited, freedom, or does she only enjoy the passive position of a glamorous object? Robski seems to address the issue of a glam woman’s agency quite consistently. Four of her novels begin with a fairy-tale-like deficiency: a happy family is destroyed and a heroine has to build her happiness anew. In Casual, after her husband’s murder, the heroine tries to avenge his death and to find her own place in life. She starts a business that turns sour because of her staff’s disloyalty and hires a hitman to kill her husband’s murderer; yet, before justice is served, the heroine administers the murder of an person (albeit a gangster). As a result of these calamities, however, she finds

14

   Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.

Tatiana Mikhailova. Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski”

a new, rich suitor who does business outside of Russia and thus is hierarchically superior to her ex. In Den’ schast’ia: zavtra, the heroine undergoes a similar crisis. She is not widowed but abandoned by her husband, who tires of her cocaine addiction and her indifference to the family, especially their son. Left alone, the heroine overcomes her addiction and creates a successful security firm, even saving her father-in-law’s life. As a result, the husband returns to her, and family happiness amidst luxury is restored. In each novel, Robski’s heroine tries to rebuild her life (and happiness) through self-realization in business. This path implies a new (or renewed) model of subjectivity that seemingly invokes the ghosts of the Soviet female overachievers from the 1920s-30s, and ostensibly resonates with the feminist ideal of a strong woman breaking through gender stereotypes and proving her worth in a “man’s world.” However, when asked directly if she promotes models of women’s independence, Robski is aghast at the very idea: “You wrote a book about a woman who solves difficult ‘masculine’ problems all alone. Are you a feminist?” “No! Absolutely not! It’s just that they killed her husband, and she has to deal with everything herself. That certainly doesn’t mean that I share the theories of feminism.”15

Her fear of being labeled “feminist” is quite symptomatic of the paradoxical complexes of her heroines. Robski’s characters do not find psychological satisfaction in their free self-realization in business or other similar activities. They are more reminiscent of the Soviet “strong women,” such as the protagonist of Vladimir Men’shov and Vladimir Chernykh’s Oscar-winning Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears [1980], who achieved professional self-fulfillment but preferred to sacrifice their independence for “obedient” subordination in the private sphere. Unlike Soviet heroines, Robski’s protagonists are not interested in “real” men if they do not have 15

   Maria Baker, “Oksana Robski o schast’e, den’gakh i slave,” BBCrussian.com, September 12, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/entertainment/newsid_4236000/4236360.stm, (last consulted September 21, 2008).

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sufficient income or power. Furthermore, rich men are essential not only to the women’s attempts at self-realization through professional endeavors, but also (and preferably) to their “eternal happiness” through a lucrative marriage that provides a passport to glamour and all it entails. Thus, for any of Robski’s heroines, what seems like self-fulfillment paradoxically reinforces objectification—or, rather, self-objectification. The only purpose for the business activities of Robski’s heroines is to increase the businesswoman’s own price as a commodity. In the Rublevka world, a single woman with an income of her own possesses a higher “market value” than a woman without a business—in other words, the former can have a better, i.e. richer and more powerful, husband or lover who will “own” her along with her business. When a man willing and able to “purchase” the heroine appears, she eagerly sacrifices her freedom for marriage and dependence on an affluent, powerful husband. If Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s nineteenth-century bespridannitsa (bride without dowry), in the play by the same title, was shocked to learn that she was an “expensive and beautiful thing”16 auctioned off to the highest bidder, Robski’s heroines possess this “market-consciousness” from the outset. In fact, their concept of happiness is derived from it, and they strive to raise their value as “things” for conjugal sale. […] Thus, the agency of a glamorous woman in Robski’s novels is inseparable from the concept of commodity. This connection is twofold. First, Robski’s heroine is a valuable commodity herself, by virtue of the glamour qualifications that make her unattainable to men of modest means. Her youth, looks, and desirability, but more importantly her lifestyle, clothing, cars, jewelry, etc., are the means which establish her in this role. It does not matter that these items can add up to only a simulacrum of actual success: as was mentioned earlier, glamour is focused in principle on the surface rather than the substance, and thus willingly accepts a “member” based on appearance alone—dress is indeed the calling card (po

16

   This play was popularized among the “last Soviet generation” by El’dar Riazanov’s film The Cruel Romance (1984).

Tatiana Mikhailova. Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski”

odezhke). (This, by the way, explains why clothing and their brand names are so important for post-Soviet culture—in the realm of glamour, clothes are not just for wearing, instead possessing an emphatically symbolic function: they signify their owners’ social status, which is in turn is inseparable from their wealth and power.) Second, upon becoming the valued property of a happy husband (or lover), Robski’s woman acquires access to a magic wand (no double entendre intended) that allows her to purchase even more glamorous items and services, thus increasing her own value and enhancing the glamorous enchantment of her being. In other words, Robski’s narratives trace female upward mobility. In this upward movement authentic youth, looks, and an aura of desirability are translated into glamour values (expensive clothes, social contacts, and, most importantly, a sense, however false, of exclusivity). Only through these glamorous effects can a woman attain “substance,” i.e. actual wealth and power, although almost inevitably she does this through association with a rich and powerful man. Indeed, “in the 1990s glamour became a social and cultural lubricant on a unprecedented scale.”17[…] Gundle argues that “glamour contained the promise of a mobile and commercial society, in which anyone could be transformed into a better, more attractive, and wealthier version of themselves […] The dreams of consumers included, of course, fantasies of social promotion and of self-aggrandizement.”18 These cultural functions of glamour are indeed similar to the social and economic expectations of the anti-communist revolution of the early nineties, a.k.a. Perestroika. It is quite ironic that a full-fledged culture of glamour developed in Russia when the democratic vector of Perestroika had been replaced by the neo-traditionalist and restoration tendencies characteristic of Putin’s period (certainly, the general growth of living standards has had its influence on the development of glamour too). One may even maintain that the exponential proliferation of glamour in Russian culture of the 2000s 17

   Gundle. Glamour: A History, 352.

18

   Ibid., 7.

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appears as a substitute for the decreasing social mobility within Russian society. In this context, Robski’s success does more than exemplify the role of glamour in the culture of the 2000s. A close reading of her novels reveals the simulative character of glamour as the means of social mobility. In other words, if Perestroika and the following tumultuous decade offered real, although risky, possibilities for upward movement in the social structure for women and men alike, in the 2000s the glamour in Robski’s novels and elsewhere operates as a simulacrum of this facet—returning to the etymological meaning of the word “glamour” as magically delusive or alluring charm. As we can see, glamour in Robski’s works imitates democratic values by intertwining cheap products with catalogues of exclusive things and services that, in turn, serve as substitutes for personalities and identities. At the same time, it seemingly encourages women’s ambition for upward movement in the social hierarchy—another liberal value—but only as to secure their (self)objectification and dependence on rich and powerful men. Whether Robski is cynical or sincere in her powerful simulation is a moot point. It is obvious that her writings resonate with mass consumers’ political appetites of a peculiar kind. She herself formulates the demand for glamour (and her own books as a part of this culture), as the following: “If you do not have any other ideology [than the ideology of consumption], then glamour will become your beacon.”19

19

   [No author], “Shalost’—zhizn’ mne, imia—shalost’,” www.robski.ru/ http://www. robski.ru/pressa/, last consulted September 21, 2008.

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The state of the “post” in “post-Soviet” has lasted for twenty years, and may go on to last even longer. This reflects the peculiar state that has characterized Russian culture since the end of Perestroika. The sense of nostalgia for the Soviet period and the new reconstructions and re-mythologizations of the Soviet past have become defining features of the post-Soviet era. This chapter considers possible responses to this phenomenon. The anthropological approach is represented by an excerpt from Serguei Oushakine’s article on “post-Soviet symbolic aphasia.” Oushakine argues that aphasia, the loss of the ability to express or understand speech, is an apt metaphor for the absence of a new symbolic language adequate to the post-Soviet condition. His analysis centers on a “feeling of being lost ‘between’ the ‘old Soviet’ and the ‘new Russian,’ this feeling of being stripped of anything that could possibly reveal one’s symbolic belongingness, this feeling of a profound symbolic lack” that is responsible for the “permanence of transition” that has become characteristic of post-Soviet culture. The post-traumatic approach to post-Soviet culture is also explored in Alexander Etkind’s article “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction” (also included as a chapter in his book Warped Mourning).1 Employing Freud’s concepts of melancholia and

1

   See Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 220-42.

Part 2. “Little Terror” and Traumatic Writing

mourning, which illustrate the inability of the subject to dissociate itself from the lost object, Etkind views post-Soviet literature as a response to historical traumas. The traumas of the Soviet past, as well as the traumatic collapse of the Soviet world, still remain unarticulated and repressed. In Etkind’s interpretation, repressed traumas return in the form of the uncanny, generating a new mode of writing that he terms “magic historicism”: [In this literature], the past is perceived not just as “another country” but as an exotic and unexplored one, still pregnant with unborn alternatives and imminent miracles. […] Possessed by the ghostly past and unable to withdraw from its repetitive contemplation, post-Soviet writers find themselves trapped in a state of melancholia. […] The inability to differentiate oneself from the lost object prevents the individual from living in the present, from love and work. On the political level, the reverse is probably equally important: when there is no choice in the present, the historical past unfolds into an overwhelming narrative that obscures the present rather than explaining it.

Violence as universal language. The association of symbolic aphasia with the post-traumatic condition. Everyday acts of violence, or the “little terror” (to use Tatyana Tolstaya’s catchphrase)2 as a non-ideological “war of everyone against everybody.” These structures characterize relationships of authority and submission on a “horizontal level,” distinct from hierarchies in which those who occupy formal positions of power abuse those beneath them. In a state of symbolic aphasia, the only “language” that acquires the function of a universally comprehensible discourse is the “language” of violence, being as it is a product of shared traumatic experience. It is most acutely observed in the social practices of criminal subcultures, hazing rituals in the military, discourses of popular xenophobia and racism, and the communal reprisal of the collective against its own members, that is, the creation of social scapegoats. The arbitrariness in post-Soviet definitions of the Other—the target of violence who 2

   See Tatyana Tolstaya, “The Great Terror and the Little Terror,” in her Pushkin’s Children: Writing on Russia and Russians, trans. Jamie Gambrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 14-26.

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is now, unlike in the Soviet period, defined variously and in relation to shifting social situations—transforms this type of violence into a form of social communication, a discourse which is destructive and self-destructive at the same time. Literary texts included in this section address various aspects of communication through violence. The popular playwright Evgeny Grishkovets writes of systematic violence in the military. For Grishkovets, who served in the navy, violence in the military is the epitome of the post-Soviet political system’s devaluation of individual human life. The playwright examines from the inside the devastating effect that violence had on his psyche: it deformed the very concepts of the self, of the home, and of the meaning of life. (We also recommend that one of Anna Politkovskaya’s essays be read along with Grishkovets’s piece.3) The Conceptualist poet Lev Rubinshtein, in his essay “The Smoke of the Fatherland,” reveals the violence concealed inside everyday discourses of nostalgia, while Elena Fanailova, in her poem “Again, they are off for their Afghanistan” and her commentary to it, demonstrates how the violent and traumatic experience of the past transforms into a selfrighteous sense of identity. The identity that emerges is deformed and scarred, but nevertheless nostalgically preserved by the poem’s characters. Fanailova’s poem “Lena and People,” scenes from the Presnyakov Brothers’ play Terrorism, and poems by Andrei Rodionov lay bare the very mechanism of communication through violence. What unites these diverse texts is the concept of “negative identity.” As defined by the sociologist Lev Gudkov, “negative identity” is: [T]he self-constitution by contradiction, from another significant subject or concept but expressed in the form of denying some qualities or values of its carrier as another’s, disgusting, frightening, menacing, personifying everything that is unacceptable for members of the group or community; in short, as an antipode [...]. Thanks to such an idea there arises the border 3

   See, for instance, Anna Politkovskaya, “My Country’s Army and Its Mothers,” in her Putin’s Russia: Life In A Failing Democracy, trans. Arch Tait (New York: Owl Books, 2007) 1-24.

Part 2. “Little Terror” and Traumatic Writing between one’s own and another’s, allowing to support only the rules of behavior inside the group (tribal ethics), while other norms of behavior outside the group serve to establish a social distance between ours and others as an elementary basis of social morphology.4

In all these texts, the subject asserts itself by defining the other as the enemy, the necessary target of violence, whether rhetorical, psychological, or physical. Because this process is highly contingent, a perpetuator of violence in one situation can become a scapegoat in another. Nobody is safe, and everybody eventually becomes a perpetrator or victim. As a result, society engages in everyday mutual violence, the status quo of the post-Soviet social world.

4

   Lev Gudkov, Negativnaia identichnost’ [Negative Identity] (Moscow: NLO, 2004), 271-72.

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“I n

E xcer pts from P ost-S ov iet A pha si a : S y mbolic Dev elopment in C ontempor a ry Russi a”

the

S tate

of

Serguei Oushakine

[…] In the text that follows I want to suggest a different approach to what seems to be a problematic relation between the post-Soviet language, or rather, post-Soviet discourse, and the post-Soviet (transitional) speaker. I argue that the inability of the young postSoviet subjects to assume a certain subject-position and to perform a certain subject-function within the dysfunctional discursive field results not so much in speechlessness and/or silence but rather in activation of different, substitutive modes of signification that have been formed and shaped to a large degree by the previous cultural period. By developing the concept of the post-Soviet aphasia, I want to examine a particular case of discursive production of (post-Soviet) subjectivity in a situation wherein the very discursive field is going through a period of serious structural (e.g., semantic, syntactic, stylistic, etc.) changes. By tracing various discursive and cultural regressions and substitutions in the texts of my respondents, I want to answer the following questions: Does the post-Soviet discursive change have any internal logic, that is, an internal structure? How is the socio-cultural transformation of the discursive field reflected in individual discursive practices? And finally, what could be said about the subject who is to embody this transformational (or transforming?) discourse? Before I go into a discussion of the state of post-Soviet aphasia, a short terminological explanation is in order. For a long time, “aphasia” was understood as a speech disorder (literally, “inability

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”

to speak,” in Greek) caused by physiological reasons, more precisely by a certain type of brain damage.1 There are, however, other, non-physiological traditions in studies of aphasia. One of them, for example, is represented by Ernst Cassirer’s phenomenological philosophy of symbolic forms, in which “the theory of aphasia took a definite direction, leading toward the universal problem of the symbol”2 and representation, toward the problem of the individual perception and consciousness.3 Along with the phenomenological approach, the structural study of aphasia initiated in the early 1940s by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson has allowed yet another totally non-physiological understanding of this type of linguistic behavior. In this article I will also approach aphasia as a phenomenon whose logic can help to understand the peculiarity of intersection of the individual’s ability to speak and society’s ability to provide a language with which to speak. Following a longestablished tradition of phenomenological and structural analysis, I will use the concept of aphasia to interpret the “pathology” of the “symbolic”4 and “verbal consciousness”5 rather than a pathology of brains.

1

    It was Paul Broca (1824–80), a French anthropologist and surgeon, the founder of La Revue d’Anthropologie and of the Anthropological Society of Paris, who in 1861 presented a paper to the Société d’Anthropologie in which, based on post mortem medical analysis and clinical observation, he demonstrated that a severe loss of speech correlates with lesions in the middle part of the frontal lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere (see John Forrester, Language and the Origin of Psychoanalysis [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 15.) Thanks to Broca’s discovery, the problem of speech disorder—aphasia—was for a long time firmly connected with the problem of brain lesion. Or, in different language, the lack of expression /understanding was displaced onto the issue of localization of physiological damage. For more discussion see, e.g., Alexander Luria, Traumatic Aphasia: Its Syndromes, Psychology and Treatment (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 17–26.

2

   Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Three: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 215.

3

   Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 202.

4

   Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 205.

5

   Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998 [1929]), 15.

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In the “structural” understanding of aphasia, according to Jakobson, two interconnected processes are of pivotal importance: they are the processes of “regression and disintegration” of individual speech.6 I want to extend Jakobson’s rather individualistic treatment of aphasia to a collective discursive behavior and use the term “post-Soviet aphasia” to describe a manifestation of (1) regression to symbolic forms of the previous historical period that has been caused by (2) the society’s disintegrated ability to find proper verbal signifiers for the signifieds of the new sociopolitical regime. Aphasia, then, will be construed here as a double phenomenon that makes apparent discursive “losses and compensations.”7 On the one hand, the term will indicate what Jakobson called the “frozen” beginning stage,8 a state of lacking, at which the already formed desire to communicate is not yet complemented by the ability to communicate something. From that point of view, aphasia denotes the inability of the post-Soviet subject to use language creatively. On the other hand, like Jakobson, I also understand aphasia as a compensatory type of discursive behavior, in which lack of a new creative symbolic production (“disorder of output”) is to be filled by complex patterns of usage of the symbolic forms acquired during the previous stages of individual and societal development. The Loss of Transition When replying to my questions about their own social identity, the majority of the students chose to identify themselves as post-Soviet. But what exactly does this position imply? The following responses were typical: The post-Soviet man and post-Soviet woman? These are us—the ones who happened to catch the demise of the Soviet Union and 6

   Roman Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 13.

7

   Jakobson, Studies on Child Language …, 31.

8

   Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 15.

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia” who live now in a Russia not yet settled down (neustanovlenoi). (f-17)9 Post-Soviet person—I guess that’s me, for I cannot describe myself either as Soviet or as a new Russian. (f-17) Post-Soviet people—the ones who have not become new Russians but who are not Soviet anymore. They are the main part of the Russian population—dreaming about old times while knowing that there would be no return of the past. (m-17)

With some rare exceptions, what all these comments indicate is a certain feeling of being caught in-between: between two classes (poor/rich), between two times (past/future), between two systems (Soviet/non-Soviet). Certainly, this feeling of being on the borderline could be interpreted as the students’ reflection and projection of their own marginal structural location—between the family of their parents and their own family, between school and future job, between a situation of financial and social dependence and (anticipated ) economic and social autonomy. The interesting thing, though, is that neither of the poles that defined the young people’s frames of reference—be it the “Soviet” or the “new Russian”—functions in the essays as a site of possible identification. Instead, they act precisely in a framing, constraining manner, being perceived by the young people rather negatively. The post-Soviet threshold, the post-Soviet transitionality and inbetweenness, thus has a peculiar nature—it does not provide any cues about the direction to follow, it does not channel one’s identificatory process;10 instead it outlines the paths that should not be taken. For

9

   To indicate the gender of my respondents I will use M and F for male and female respectively; the number indicates the age of the respondent. Since all my respondents were either senior high school students (starsheklassniki) or first and second-year students at local universities, for the sake of brevity I will use the term “students” when referring to them all.

10

   In her study of self-identification of Rossiyane, the Russian scholar Natal’  ia Tikhonova points to a similar tendency: the young post-Soviet generation typically does not choose new models of civic self-identification instead of the old ones, but

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example, a female student describes the two alternatives known to her in the following way: A Soviet man? He wears the same shirt all year around, [is] unshakable in his opinion and decisions (and he has the ground for that—“the party’s directives”…). Woman for him is seldom of secondary importance: it is good if she occupies tenth place on his list of priorities. A Soviet woman? Despite her own wishes and desires, her family is always overshadowed by her job problems. Work always comes first. Plus all the financial problems of family life. In her early 30s she is already talking about men in this manner: “… those guys…, what could you expect from them….” In other words—these are largely unhappy people with an abnormal (unnatural) life style. A New Russian man? Those who have a business bent are happy today, but what about all the others?... New Russian man is a man of will, who needs nobody. He is also unhappy…. The New Russian man is a parody of an “average American” from a cheap Western movie. (f-18)

A male student gives a similar, although less “personalized,” account of the alternatives, neither of which is attractive: The Soviet Union—the leadership cheated the simple-hearted Russian man with his ideals of universal justice and his readiness to die for them. The new Russia? Everyone wants to get as much as possible; everyone thinks: “I can keep stealing until I am caught”—and thus our Russian society is falling apart. (m-17)

Yet another student, having described the Soviet past and the new Russian present, demonstrates a typical situation of not being willing to identify herself with any of the categories available: Soviet man and woman? They had faith in communism, they were fixed on it, and on their work. Women were lacking in femininity.

rather tends to refuse any type of civic self-identification altogether. See Natal’  ia Tikhonova, “Samoidentifikatsiia rossiian i ee dinamika,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’ 4 (1999): 11.

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia” Men were sort of bossy, with brief-cases. At first glance they looked totally innocent but were corrupt and rotten inside. The new Russian men? These are the hard-core bold guys with golden neck-chains, crosses, and huge bellies. They are not especially famous for their intellectual abilities but they are certainly good at counting money. They are way too far from being perfect. They spend money easily for it was not hard for them to get it. The new Russian women are slightly better, but not by much. The new Russians look down upon ordinary people, but at the same time they are effective and business-minded persons. I cannot relate myself either to the new Russians, or to the post-Soviet, or to the Soviet. I believe my friends and I belong to a new generation that would be able to change life for the better. At least this is what I hope for. (f-17)

There is an interesting tendency in the way the students symbolically map their picture of Russian society. Despite their temporal and even spatial proximity, the line that connects the “old Soviet” and the “new Russian” with the post-Soviet seems to have a rather complicated configuration. The extremes—the old Soviet/the new Russian—cannot be easily and straightforwardly connected. The extremes are not on the same continuum; nor do they indicate the trajectory of development. The post-Soviet person is not the new Russian’s embryo, nor is s/he an overdeveloped version of the Soviet one. Instead, as one student puts it, a post-Soviet person is one who is lost in this world, one who tries to find his self and who, despite the constant failure to accomplish this, has not lost his faith. Because this faith is the only thing he has; he is totally naked—spiritually, materially, and nationally. (m-17)

I think it is precisely this feeling of being lost “between” the “old Soviet” and the “new Russian,” this feeling of being stripped of any thing that could possibly reveal one’s symbolic belongingness, this feeling of a profound symbolic lack, that forces young people to metonymically bridge the “Soviet” to the “new Russian.” As I shall show, these extremes—epitomized by the “faithful communist” and the “self-indulgent new Russian”—function as the aphasic

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substitutes called upon to designate and circumscribe the empty space of the post-Soviet subject in/of transition. Before I try to outline the structural and cultural reasons for this transitional “loss” of the post-Soviet subject, I want to quote yet another, albeit less personalized, example. On March 11, 1999, a Moscow newspaper reported that the lower house of the Russian parliament—the Duma—had approved a draft of the law “On the State Anthem of the Russian Federation.” The draft proposes to use as the anthem of today’s Russia the music of the Soviet Union’s anthem written in the 1940s. As the newspaper reminded us, this move by the Duma challenged the decision made in 1990 by the Duma’s predecessor, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federation. In 1990, the Supreme Soviet chose to use as the anthem of the “independent” Russia the music of the “Patriotic Song” written by Mikhail Glinka in the early 1830s. The 1990 decision, however, did not solve one essential problem with the anthem’s text: the lyrics of the “Patriotic Song,” glorifying the Russian Emperor and the Russian people, were utterly inappropriate in the contemporary situation. As a result of this political—or, rather, textual—inapplicability, coupled with the inability to create a new text, until now11 the ‘Patriotic song’—to quote the title of the famous Russian New Year TV-show, the “Old Song About the Most Important”—has been performed during official ceremonies without words. The newspaper indicated that a specially created committee of the Duma had come to the conclusion that it would be impossible to produce a text that would match Glinka’s music. This forced the deputies to take a drastic step and—as Elena Mizulina, a member of the Duma from the Yabloko party, put it—to replace a melody which is “difficult even for simple reproduction” with the less convoluted and more familiar melody of the Soviet anthem, whose lyrics are also yet to be re-written. 11

   “Patriotic Song” was used in lieu of the national anthem until 2000, when it was replaced by the former Soviet anthem (music by Aleksandr Aleksandrov) with revised lyrics by Sergei Mikhalkov (also the author of previous versions of the Soviet anthem).—Eds.

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”

The paper also quoted Vasily Shandybin, a deputy representing the Communist Party, as saying “all the working people and the working class are impatiently looking forward to the situation when Russia will finally acquire its new [i.e. the Soviet] anthem,” for “we were born with the words of this anthem and we shall die with them.” “There is no reason to hurry to die,” the newspaper comments sarcastically, “for there are no words so far” to die with.12 I find these two examples—the wordless post-Soviet/Soviet anthem and the students’ inability to find a proper symbol, a proper signifier to represent their “post-Soviet” location—very similar in origin. It seems to me that, besides a clear lack of creativity, these examples reflect a more fundamental tendency of an individual and collective inability either to put into words normative ideals and desired goals of the post-communist period or to express the changes that have already happened in Russia. Despite (or maybe because of) the politics of glasnost’, the gaps that during the communist time separated one’s words from one’s thoughts and one’s actions so well have not become any narrower. Instead, as Andrei Sinyavsky, a prominent Soviet dissident, pointed out shortly before his death, there has been “an incredible devaluation … of words” in Russia.13 There is, as Vladimir Kolesov, a historian of Russian language, indicated recently, an obvious tendency in individual and public discourses towards a “deformed speech” manifested by a predominance of “vague and unclear … discourse.” “Have our language skills become worse,” asks the linguist, “or is it our language itself that rejects us as its ‘carriers’?”14 As if they had exhausted their former political appeal during the period of glasnost’, words in post-Soviet Russia somehow became meaningless, that is, both unable to manifest content and

12

   Dar’ia Korsunskaia, “S gimnom vas, dorogie tovarishchi!,” Vremia MN, 11 March 1999.

13

   Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia, trans. Lynn Visson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 75.

14

   Vladimir Kolesov, Russkaia rech’: vchera, segodnia, zavtra (St. Petersburg: IUNA, 1998), 210.

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unnecessary for this purpose. Thus the anthem remains without words, and the discussion—also symptomatically—is reduced to choosing among already-existing melodies; the lack of “new words” is covered up by the old (musical) symbols. I believe this dominant logic of the post-Soviet “deformed speech” in contemporary Russia is not unlike the logic of expressive aphasia elaborated by Jakobson. It seems to me that the “state of post-Soviet aphasia” can usefully describe a current situation in Russia that is characterised by a profound difficulty in bringing together a “world of words” with a “world of things,” a difficulty in mastering, managing the social world—even if only on the level of language. The main questions, certainly, are: What are the reasons? and What are the consequences of this post-Soviet aphasia? In the rest of the article I outline the linguistic characteristics of this postSoviet asymbolia and then offer my interpretations of political and personal implications of it. Chained Signifiers As the example of the “new” old Russian anthem suggests, there is an obvious difficulty in society with finding an adequate signifier to symbolically envelop the new historical period.15 And yet, as the example indicates, the difficulty might result in speechlessness, in the absence of a new, i.e. post-Soviet text, but not in silence. In that respect, a conclusion drawn more than a hundred years ago by Hughlings Jackson, one of the pioneers of studies of aphasia,

15

   Zinaida Sikevich, a sociologist from St. Petersburg, in her study of popular symbolic representation of past and present, has pointed out that the current situation does not provide people with any “basic” sign that could have epitomized the changes: “… if in the respondents ’ view about the past it was the [Communist] party that cemented with its activity all events of public and private life, then the current situation in Russia is more chaotic and internally contradicting : is it at all accidental that among the first four most frequent symbols are two ‘positive’ (freedom and democracy) and two ‘negative ’ (unemployment and the Chechen conflict)?” See Zinaida Sikevich, “‘Obraz’ proshlogo i nastoiashchego v simvolicheskom soznanii rossiian,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 1 (1999): 88.

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”

is still valid: “Speechlessness does not mean entire wordlessness.”16 Rather, it means a change in the pattern of communication.17 And this is a point I want to stress: the post-Soviet “disorder” of “symbolic formulation and expression,”18 while ostensibly lacking in new signifiers, manifests itself through an elaborate and intensive usage of “languages” of the previous, that is, the Soviet, period. The usual attempt to find a new expressive style, able to distinctively reflect changes of the period, was supplanted by what appears to be a “nostalgic” aesthetical and rhetorical regression. Contrary to some recent studies that construe “the post-communist political and intellectual world” as a “battlefield between different, often incompatible myths” that are “able to inspire collective loyalties, affinities, passions, and actions,”19 I argue that the situation is the reverse, at least when it comes to Russia. Instead of being involved in production of new mythical narratives able to encompass the ongoing changes and to embrace individuals in a collective entity, both public discourse and individual speech in post-Soviet Russia demonstrate a different dynamic. Mythologization of the narratives of the recent past has a somewhat parasitic (“nostalgic”) nature here. It is not the morphology of the narrative that gets “corrected” or “improved,” as usually happens during the process of “inventing” histories and traditions. On the surface, the structure of the “sacred” texts remains largely the same. What is being changed, though, is the context of the texts’ existence and origin, the texts’ etymology.20 It is in this de-contextualisation, in this dissociation of a cultural text

16

   As quoted in Jakobson, Studies on Child Language …, 63.

17

   See Jakobson, Studies on Child Language …, 63.

18

   Henry Head, Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech, vols. 1–2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), vol. 1, 211–212.

19

   Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 15 (emphasis mine).

20

   See, for example, Michael Urban’s discussion of Igor Chubais’s attempt to devise his own model of the Russian national idea: Michael Urban, “Remythologising the Russian State,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 6 (1998): 976.

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from the place of its origin, in this dissolution of a binding effect of the Soviet meta-language, that the “post-Soviet aphasia” makes itself apparent. […] Without distinctively articulated social and personal landmarks to signal the direction(s) of the transition and with quickly vanishing, even if only ideological, perspectives, how can the postSoviet changes be visualized and personally appropriated? What could function in this case as an object of positive identification? In other words, what does fill the post-Soviet symbolic void, then? Culture of Symbolic Shortages Given the regressive logic of the state of aphasia, it is hardly surprising that the post-Soviet cultural development in Russia has become closely associated with “longing for the past,” as a student put it, with a profound cultural nostalgia. It is an outbreak of “no(w)stalgia,”21 an “epidemic of nostalgia,” as it was defined recently,22 that frames the post-Soviet symbolic landscape in the late 1990s.23 Inability to articulate a new language adequate to a new period, coupled with a loss of the “enframing” meta-language, has been compensated for by stylistic regression to the language of the preceding period.24 21

   Natal’ia Ivanova, “Nostal’iashchee: retro na (post)sovetskom teleekrane,” Znamya 9 (1997): 204–211. For an English version of this article see Natalya Ivanova, “No(w) stalgia: Retro on the (post) Soviet Screen,” The Harriman Review 12, no.s 2–3 (Winter 1999/2000): 25–32.

22

   Ivanova, “Nostal’iashchee …”, 205.

23

   See also Mason and Sidorenko-Stephenson , “Public Opinion …”; Michael Urban, “Stages of Political Identity Formation in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” in Identities in Transition: Eastern Europe and Russia After the Collapse of Communism, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell (Berkeley: Slavic and East European Center, University of California, 1996), 140–154; Elena Bashkirova and Iurii Fedorov, “Labirinty posttotalitarnogo soznaniia,” Pro et Contra 4, no. 2 (1999): 142.

24

   Marilyn Ivy observes a structurally similar tendency in contemporary Japan, where “nostalgia as style” aims at the third post-war generation. As she puts it, “the use of 1920s typography and design or the actual reproduction of period pieces evokes, however, not a historical period but a free-floating past. Stripped of any tangible

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”

Certainly, to reduce the problem of cultural “no(w)stalgia’ exclusively to the individual incapacity to creatively use available symbolic means would be an exaggeration. Besides the transitional location of the post-Soviet subject there must be structural reasons within the symbolic field itself that not only provoke the aphasic regression to the previous cultural styles but also prevent the new symbolic styles from emerging. As I have argued elsewhere,25 the most significant of these reasons is the absence of what, following Pierre Bourdieu, can be defined as the field of post-Soviet cultural production. That is to say, the absence of the field in which postcommunist economic and political dispositions of the social actors could find adequate symbolic, cultural equivalents.26 Such a structural underdevelopment (or even absence) of “post-Soviet cultural industry”—connected with but not limited by the unstable structural location of the post-Soviet political and cultural elite and thus the hierarchy of cultural tastes—is compensated for by a relatively developed field of post-Soviet cultural consumption, with quantity as its main indicator. The thesis about the absent (or underdeveloped) field of post-Soviet symbolic production has certain consequences. One is a methodological shift to questioning the structure of symbolic consumption rather than its content. Or, to put it differently, instead of determining and delineating the (inherent) meaning of this or that symbol, the purpose of such an analysis is to try to understand how/why one’s attachment to (or investment in) certain cultural symbols has become possible and how this attachment is sustained. Instead of the structure of the institutions that define

historical context, these cited moments of style operate as novel elements in the image repertoire of hip Japan” (Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 56). 25

   See my article ‘Kolichestvo stilia: voobrazhaemoe potreblenie v usloviiakh simvolicheskogo Defitsita’, Sotsiologicheskii zhurnal, 1999, 3/4. See also Serguei Oushakine, ‘The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia’, Theory, Culture, and Society (17, 5, 2000).

26

   Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993).

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and determine forms of cultural consumption, it is the structure of the individual that occupies the primary analytical place. Let me pause here. As some scholars point out, the culturally un-operationalized condition of the post-Soviet realm is reflected most vividly in the absence of “mediating structures of political life,”27 in the lack of “a political matrix within which competing identities can find mooring.”28 Naturally enough, this fundamental lack of mediating structures that makes it hard for the individual to assume a certain subject position vis-á-vis social changes brings with it the problem of subjectivity, the problem of one’s self-localization and selfdescription in regard to the processes that have yet to be loaded with graspable meaning. To put it differently, the lack of mediating structures coincides with the lack of “tools” with which to understand the transformation. Without such tools, neither changes themselves nor one’s relation to them can become meaningful. Notice how absence of the code with which to “dissect” the knots of reality produces a state of hermeneutic paralysis: “To describe the new Russia? It is a country whose future is unclear,” writes a 17-year-old student, “whose present is foggy and contradictory (but I hope for the best)” (m–17). The main aspect of this paralysis, however, is not merely symbolic but has a lot to do with the role of symbolic mechanisms in the production of subjectivity and agency, in mapping out one’s field of possibilities and trajectories. Hence the post-Soviet asymbolia correlates with the post-Soviet anomie: the loss of words with the loss of self. For example, when asked to describe his own position, a male student wrote: “Where am I? I cannot associate myself with any of the categories—be it “Soviet” or the “New Russian…” (m–21). Another one puts it somewhat more resolutely: “I am not a new Russian. But I have no idea of who I am” (m–20). Yet another one, describing his attitude to the changes, phrased it this way: “My

27

   Richard Sakwa, “Subjectivity, Politics and Order in Russian Evolution,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 964.

28

   Urban, “The Politics of Identity,” 737.

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”

attitude to the changes is negative, and I do not see any place for myself there” (m–15). Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery in their recent discussion of studies of (post-communist) transition indicate that, while focusing on the process of evolution of the macro institutions in the post-communist world, transitologists remain largely blind in regard to the micro processes and micro transformations.29 Earlier, Richard Sakwa, demonstrating the same logic, went as far as to claim that “the transition from communism … entails the rediscovery of ‘subjectivity’ in the social polity.”30 In the remaining part of this article, in my analysis of the post-Soviet aphasia, I attempt to bring together the micro and macro levels of the transition by looking at reflections of social changes in individual language. In order to do this, I want to re-visit two major theoretical concepts of transitional development: Victor Turner’s “liminal stage” and Donald Winnicott’s “transitional object.” In spite of their different origins, I think the two concepts describe essentially the same phenomenon of profound transformation of the individual and/or society passing from one structurally defined location to another. While Turner emphasizes the societal, collective aspects of a transformation, Winnicott focuses on the individual side of this process. Both authors, however, are instrumental for understanding the logic of symbolic activity typical for the transitional/transformational stage in contemporary Russia.

29

   Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, “Introduction,” in their Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).

30

   Sakwa, “Subjectivity, Politics and Order,” 965 (emphasis mine).

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Permanence of Transition Following Arnold van Gennep,31 Turner32 develops a concept of “liminality” and “liminal personae” or “threshold people.”33 Studying rites of passage, that is, “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age,”34 van Gennep indicates that this “transition” from one state/status to another, reflected in the rites, consists of three phases: “separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation.”35 The first stage of separation consists of symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a “state”), or from both. During the intervening “liminal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the “Passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or no attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more. […] This anthropologically grounded three-stage explanation of the rites of passage might be useful for grasping the logic of the transition through which Russian society as a whole and people in Russia as individuals are going. It needs, however, a crucial amendment. Turner’s “liminal entities” which are located “neither here nor there;… [being] betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, customs, convention, and ceremonial,”36 are precisely

31

   Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1909).

32

   Turner, The Ritual Process.

33

   Ibid., 95.

34

   Van Gennep as quoted in Ibid., 94.

35

   Ibid., 94.

36

   Ibid., 95.

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”

transitional. In other words, liminality here has a metonymic, sequential nature; it is framed by a clear understanding of the point of departure and a clear picture of the point of arrival. The purpose of the liminal stage, then, is to provide the individual/group with a spatial and temporal location in which to become ready to learn the objectives of the new status. Hence, the positive, i.e. meaningful, effect of the liminal stage is a result of a double negation, as it were: negation of the structural constraints that have been previously exercised upon the person in transition and negation of (or freedom from) the limits that the anticipated state will bring with it. At first glance, Turner’s liminal stage conceptually coincides with the main thesis of studies of transition. That is, liminality here is a structurally necessary temporal period, a period of “growing a new skin,” as Katherine Verdery37 puts it. The question is, what happens during the liminal stage in a situation when structural configurations of the arrival point are not clear, as is the case in Russia? Moreover, if the major goal of the liminal stage, as Turner puts it, is to provide individuals with “myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art,”38 i.e., with symbolic tools capable of rendering happening changes meaningful, then how could the very absence of the post-Soviet field of cultural production modify both the notion of transition and the notion of liminality? As I have already indicated, in the absence of one of the opposites (the point of arrival), the post-Soviet stage of cultural liminality manifests itself as a twofold phenomenon. On the level of the signifier it is expressed as an extensive subversion and re-production of the previous symbolic structure (“the epidemic of nostalgia”), while on the level of the signified the liminal stage works through various mechanisms of personal investments and attachments, latent rather

37

   Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 229.

38

   I.e., ”with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassification of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature and culture, [while at the other,] they incite men to action as well as to thought” (Turner, The Ritual Process, 128-129).

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than manifested, associated with rather than expressed through the signifier. To put the same idea differently: in the absence of new cultural forms ready to epitomize ongoing social changes, an individual— the Passenger—faces basically two (not necessarily alternative) choices. One of them deals with changing patterns of usage of the old symbols; this approach can be called the “paradigm of remake.” The other is based on changing one’s attitude to the old symbols; this pattern of symbolic production can be labeled the “paradigm of revival.” Both strategies, however, are aimed at keeping the old signifier/symbol intact, while changing its signified/content/ context. Both activate the individual’s creative ability within the rigid symbolic frames of the previous era. […] Conclusion As I have tried to show, the state of post-Soviet aphasia—with its nostalgic regression and over-used Soviet symbols—can be seen as a reaction to socio-cultural transformations that started happening in Russia in the second half of the 1990s. I have suggested that one of the most striking aspects of this discursive behavior, demonstrated in the essays written by young Russians, was the loss of a metalanguage and thus the loss of ability to “dissect” the metaphor of the “postSoviet.” This lack of knowledge about one’s own location and being, I proposed, is closely connected with absence of the post-Soviet field of cultural production that could have provided the postSoviet subject with adequate post-Soviet discursive possibilities/ signifiers. This absence of an adequate post-Soviet interpellation capable of “naming” the subject39 undermines the very foundation of the existing discursive field and its institutions. The “postSoviet” remains an empty space, a non-existence, devoid of its subjectifying force, its own signifier, and its own meaning effect.

39

   Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174.

Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia”

For, as Voloshinov puts it, “if experience does have meaning, if it is susceptible to being understood and interpreted, then it must have its existence in the material of actual, real signs … experience exists even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs. Outside that material there is no experience as such.”40 The inability of young Russians to name, to identify the others vis-á-vis themselves and thus to structure their own location, i.e. the students’ virtual absence as subjects, manifests yet another aspect of the lack of post-Soviet signifiers. Sign is a product of the social, or, in Voloshinov’s terms, “signs can arise only on interindividual territory.”41 “It is essential,” Voloshinov continues, “that the two individuals be organized socially, that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape between them.”42 When looked at from this perspective, the state of post-Soviet aphasia with its lack of signs socially mediated and recognized as such, I believe, can be seen as a condition in which the “interindividual territory” has been increasingly shrinking and where the intersubjective is more and more reduced to the innersubjective, or to the inner speech.43 The culture of symbolic shortages thus makes the process of production of the post-Soviet subject very problematic. The symbolic structure of post-Soviet society apparently fails to produce clearly defined positions and functions with which the post-Soviet subject could identify. Moreover, being in its embryonic state, this symbolic structure cannot provide post-Soviet society with the necessary mediating link, thus provoking a situation of social dispersion and/or narcissistic withdrawal. In the absence of this mediating, intersubjective space, I argue, the very situation of transition might become institutionalized. Unable and unwilling to struggle with the symbolic impenetrability of the very conditions of their being, the potential post-Soviet subjects might find (and already have found) 40

   Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 28.

41

   Ibid., 12.

42

   Ibid., 12.

43

   Ibid., 29.

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an escape in the realm of the imaginary, being constantly propped up by the flow of nostalgic transitional objects. One of the students wrote in her response to my questions: The post-Soviet person is the answer to the old puzzle: “If it is neither fish nor fowl, what is it? It is a lobster.” [It is the] same with post-Soviet man—he does not know where he should move—forward or backward. (f-19)

Nor, as I suggest, does the post-Soviet person have a language to describe his/her situation. Except, maybe, for the old songs about the most important [things]. With lyrics. Or without.

“S tor ies

E xcer pts from U ndea d in the L a nd of the U nbur ied : M agic a l H istor icism C ontempor a ry Russi a n F iction ”

of the in

Alexander Etkind

Current Russian politics shows little regret for the millions who perished in the Soviet terror, but post-Soviet culture has produced unusual, maybe even perverted, forms of memory. Understanding them depends on the idea of memory as a performative interplay of cultural energies—memory that follows history but has a history of its own. As Walter Benjamin put it, “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater…. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”1 This theater of buried and exhumed memories selectively includes knowledge of the past; but more often than not, its performances defy rational explanation or historical precision. Two processes converge on the stage of postcatastrophic memory, the defamiliarization of the past and the return of the repressed. Excavating the past buried in the present, the scholar of a postcatastrophic culture watches memory turning into imagination. In Russia, many authors and readers seem to share a desire for a poetic reenactment of the catastrophic past. My point is that this is melancholy rather than nostalgia. Melancholy, famously counterposed against “healthy mourning” by Sigmund

1

     Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 314. 2.

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Freud, embraces the confusion between the present and the past, the obsessive reenactment of the loss, and the cessation of the relationship to the present. “The inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely.”2 The dialectic of reenactment and defamiliarization produces a rich but puzzling imagery. If we want to “understand” postcatastrophic culture, we need to “see” what is absorbing it so entirely. In this article, I look at the Russian memory of the Soviet terror as an enormous cultural formation that encompasses different media and genres, incompatible versions of history, and various rituals of mourning. Uncomfortably for the historian, postcatastrophic memory often entails allegories rather than facts. “The only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory,” said Benjamin.3 However unrecognizable, these allegorical images retain their dependency upon the past; but this relationship cannot be described in those terms that Russian cultural criticism is accustomed to. In the emerging field of Russian memory studies, concepts are either imported from the neighboring fields of Holocaust studies or postcolonial studies, or invented anew. Combining these approaches, I coin the concept “magical historicism” to define the bizarre but instructive imagery that has evolved out of postcatastrophic, post-Soviet culture. […] From the start, the cultural representation of the gulag has been imbued with strange creatures. Everyone remembers the amazing start of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the story of a delicious frozen monster, a prehistoric triton (a salamander in the English translation by Thomas P. Whitney), that is devoured by the prisoners. With the help of this triton, Solzhenitsyn presents the mission of his great book in strikingly ambivalent words. He wishes to render the camp not “as a nightmare to be cursed” but “as a monstrous 2

     Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (New York: Pelican Books, 1984), 11: 254.

3

     Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 185.

Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied”

world” to be “almost” loved; he hopes to bring this world to the startled reader “like the bones and flesh of that salamander which is still, incidentally, alive.” The mythological Triton has a man’s head, a fish’s tail, and a conch shell to raise storms, as Solzhenitsyn did. As an oceanic beast, Triton is, I would add, a distant relative of the Leviathan.4 In 1945, Anna Akhmatova wrote a prophetic poem, “There are three ages to memories.” With the passing of time, human memory defamiliarizes the dead who become alien and frightening; this third, shameful stage of memory is the bitterest. И нет уже свидетелей событий И не с кем плакать, не с кем вспоминать. И медленно от нас уходят тени, Которых мы уже не призываем, Возврат которых был бы страшен нам… И вот когда горчайшее приходит: Мы сознаем, что не могли б вместить То прошлое в границы нашей жизни,… Что тех, кто умер, мы бы не узнали. And there are no remaining witnesses to the events, And no one to weep with, no one to remember with. And slowly the shades withdraw from us, Shades we no longer call back, Whose return would be too terrible for us… And then it is that bitterness wells up: We realize that we couldn’t have fit That past into boundaries of our life… That those who died we would not recognize.5

4

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), vol.1, ix-x. The aquatic aspect of Solzhenitsyn’s monster, which is lost in English translation, alludes to his image of the gulag archipelago, which in turn comes from the Solovetskii archipelago.

5

     Anna Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1999), 2.1:100; Anna Akhmatova, “Northern Elegies,” The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Somerville, MA: Zephyr Press, 1990), 2:351.

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Akhmatova predicted important lines in the development of Russian memory: “I’d like to name them all by name, But the list has been confiscated.… And if ever in this country They decide to erect a monument to me.”6 Akhmatova speaks about this monument not metaphorically (text as a monument) but literally, as a man-made monument that would, hopefully, be erected in her memory. She does not specify any feature of this monument but its location: “Here,” in a Leningrad prison, Kresty. This is an essential feature of the postcatastrophic monument: it does not have a visual concreteness, since any such concreteness would reduce the catastrophic experience to a human routine; it memorializes the fact and location of the catastrophe. But, as Akhmatova foresaw in the contemporaneous Poema bez geroia, another and very different image will accompany her memory: И на зов этот издалека Вдруг откликнется страшный звук— Клокотание, стон и клекот…. …And from afar, responding to this appeal, Come the terrible sounds— Of gurgling, groans and screams….7

The theme of uncanny, otherworldly beasts is certainly not unknown to Russian literature. One easily remembers zadumchivyi vampir (a thoughtful vampire) in Evgenii Onegin, Mikhail Lermontov’s and Mikhail Vrubel’s Demon, Nikolai Gogol’s horrifying visions, and Aleksandr Blok’s vampirstvennyi vek (vampiric century).8

6

     Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:29. Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,” The Complete Poems, 2:115; for the analysis, see Susan Amert, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 58.

7

     Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:10, and Anna Akhmatova, “Poem without a Hero,” The Complete Poems, 2:443. […]

8

     For the classical study of gothic motives in nineteenth-century Russian literature, see Vadim Vatsuro, Goticheskii roman v Rossii (The Gothic novel in Russia, ed. Tamara Selezneva; Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002); see also N. D. Tamarchenko, ed., Goticheskaia traditsiia v russkoi literature (The Gothic

Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied”

Vampire stories were popular in the gulag. In Shalamov’s story “Zaklinatel’ zmei” (Snake charmer, 1954), prisoners force a fellow prisoner, Platonov, to entertain them with “stories.” Platonov’s favorite was “Count Dracula,” but prisoners preferred Russian pulp fiction.9 This is how Shalamov saw the Soviet writer: as a snake charmer, a magician who mesmerizes the public because, if he fails to do so, the public will beat him to death. In the twenty-first century, the new generation of post-Soviet writers has produced a variety of strange animals, monsters, and modified humans. Though the fantasy of fashionable post-Soviet authors such as Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Sharov, and Bykov seems unlimited, their actual themes overlap. They seem to be mostly interested in two areas of human experience—religion and history—which they combine in rich and shocking ways. At the same time, they are not concerned about other areas of literary interest, such as psychology or realistic analysis of social issues. The religion that they explore is sometimes Christian and sometimes not, but it is never Orthodox and usually does not belong to any known organized religion or confession. Invariably, it is saturated with noncanonical magic. The tradition in Russian literature; Moscow: RGGU, 2008). Jimmie E. Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in Dracula and the Lady of the Shroud (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006) demonstrates numerous Russian allusions in central texts of the British gothic. For gothic metaphors in early Soviet literature, see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Muireann Maguire, “Soviet Gothic-Fantastic: A Study of Gothic and Supernatural Themes in Early Soviet Literature” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2008). For a gothic reading of current Russian politics, see Dina Khapaeva, Goticheskoe obshchestvo: Morfologiia koshmara (Morphology of the nightmare; Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007); for a similar take on the newest Russian prose, see Olga Lebedushkina, “Nasha novaia gotika” (Our new gothic, Druzhba narodov [2008]: 11). In the European context, a number of scholars have suggested that the gothic novel developed in response to the terror of the French revolution; see Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” English Literary History 48, no. 3 (1981): 532-54; Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 9

     The name of this storyteller, Andrei Fedorovich Platonov, resembles the name of a Soviet writer whom Shalamov probably read or knew, Andrei Platonovich Platonov. “I loved Platonov,” writes Shalamov; his tale reads like an obituary of this author (Shalamov, Kolymskie rasskazy [Kolyma Tales], 124.

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historical periods that interest these writers are less variegated and focus, almost always, on the Soviet experience and its aftermath. These are stories about werewolves and vampires; about sectarians who copulate with the soil and biophilologists who clone the great Russian writers to extract the substance of immortality (Sorokin’s Goluboe salo [Blue Lard, 1999]); about the war between the Vikings (Russian Nordic bureaucrats and warriors) and the Khazars (Russian-Jewish liberals and businessmen) that unavoidably occurs after the collapse of oil prices (Bykov’s ZhD [Living Souls] 2006); about the restoration of the monarchy, public executions, and oprichnina (the Tsar’s death squads from the time of Ivan the Terrible) in twenty-first century Russia (Sorokin’s Den’ oprichnika [Day of the Oprichnik, 2006]).10 These stories have little in common with “science fiction” even in the broadest understanding of this term; with the exception of history, which they scrutinize in their unique ways, these narratives are not concerned with knowledge and technology.11 They do not belong to “popular literature,” as experts define it. Yet these writers are successful among Russian readers. They publish their novels with mainstream commercial publishers, produce literary scandals, and receive national prizes. To be sure, their commercial success depends upon the content of their novels, which responds to the unarticulated expectations of the

10

   For thoughtful readings of some of these authors, see Edith W. Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Mark N. Lipovetskii, Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)-modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul’ture 1920-2000-kh godov (Parologies: Transformations of [post]-modern discourse in Russian culture; Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2008). For a review of the latest trend in Russian fiction, which is more fearful of Russia’s future than of its past, see Aleksandr Chantsev, “Fabrika antiutopii: Distopicheskii diskurs v rossiiskoi literature serediny 2000-kh” (Antiutopia factory: Dystopian discourse in Russian literature of the mid-2000s, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 86 [2007]).

11

   For such understanding, see Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).

Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied”

audience and shapes these expectations. In recent years, “vampiric” and “demonic” themes have also proliferated in popular culture.12 A theoretical approach to these narratives can be found in a seemingly distant paradigm Benjamin created in his writings on mourning plays, baroque dramas of sorrow and mystery. Like Freud’s study of the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), Benjamin’s study of the play of mourning (Trauerspiel) combines factual observations and the personal project of mourning. “The laws which govern Trauerspiel are to be found … at the heart of mourning”; this genre is “the description of that world which is revealed under the gaze of a melancholy man,” wrote Benjamin.13 Like Weimar culture, mourning plays were “haunted by the idea of the catastrophe,” but fought against the “historical ideal of the restoration.”14 Though mourning plays caricatured classical tragedy, they produced the same effects, fear and pity, that Aristotle attributed to tragedy; but they were so “offensive or even barbaric to refined taste” that they were said to be “written by brutes for brutes.”15 Ghostly apparitions and dream visions frequently occur in these dramas, which substitute the tragic deus ex machina with specters who come from the grave.16 Only as corpses can their characters “enter the homeland of allegory,” which is the domain of the undead. If in

12

   Sergei Sobolev compiled an interesting catalogue of Russian fiction of a genre he calls “alternative history”; many of these novels have been written in the post-Soviet decades and are “magical.” See S. V. Sobolev, Al’ternativnaia istoriia (Alternative history; Lipetsk: Krot, 2006); see also Dmitrii Bykov, “Drugoi alternativy u nas est’!” Vmesto zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2006). Many films of the last decade, such as Nochnoi dozor (Night Watch) by Timur Bekmambetov (2004), 4 by Vladimir Sorokin and Ilya Khrzhanovskii (2005), and Zhivoi (Alive) by Aleksandr Veledinskii (2006) experiment with various combinations of the occult and the political. For a view of post-Soviet popular culture that emphasizes themes of sex and violence rather than history and magic, see Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

13

   Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 139.

14

   Ibid., 66.

15

   Ibid., 53.

16

   Ibid., 134.

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tragedy death is the “ever immanent reality,” in mourning plays death “frequently takes the form of communal fate, as if summoning all the participants before the highest court”; this is why mourning plays have no end.17 For Benjamin, allegory is not mere “illustrative technique” but “a form of expression,” sometimes the only form that is culturally or politically available. […] Developing these ideas, Jacques Derrida associated the ghostly visions of contemporary culture with the idea of justice: “This being with specters would also be … a politics of memory…. If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts,… it is in the name of justice.”18 Evidently, this idea of justice becomes relevant when the worldly courts deny hope; in a similar way, allegories bloom when other ways of constructing truth and memory betray the storyteller. The baroque and expressionism are separated by centuries, but in Benjamin’s vision, these cultural epochs shared “unremitting artistic will,” a “characteristic feeling of dizziness,” and “a desire for new pathos.”19 The genre of the mourning play still has a future, Benjamin predicted.20 Today, his work on the Trauerspiel helps us read the new Russian cultural scene through a triple allegory that integrates different melancholic epochs—the baroque, Weimar, and the post-Soviet. In Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s thirtieth love, 1999), Sorokin draws an ironic picture of a young Muscovite who vacillates in her commitment to political dissidents and Soviet true-believers. Marina’s loves, male and female, defy novelistic convention by their very multitude. Like other post-Soviet novels, this is a story of a community rather than an individual. In her dissident stage, Marina imagines underground Moscow in a typically post-Soviet manner: “Under Stalin’s skyscrapers, under the puppet-like Kremlin, under modern constructions lie the pressed bones of 17

   Ibid., 135-36.

18

   Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xviii.

19

   Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 55-56.

20

   Ibid., 113.

Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied”

millions of the tortured, murdered by the scary machinery of the gulag…. Nothing has changed here. It seemed that time ossified or maybe was canceled by decree. The hands of the Kremlin chimes turn in vain, like a windup doll without a spring.”21 Paradoxically, since there are so few monuments on the former sites of the gulag, these sites are imagined to be everywhere. In her search for truth and love, Marina spins around in vain, like a windup doll, and reshapes herself into a Soviet specter when her thirtieth love, a communist leader, manages to bring her to her first orgasm but traps her mind in Soviet discourse. This erotic novel effectively predicted the political events of the subsequent decade. History folds here into a cursed, spectral loop, like in the mourning play that features a particular conception of time which is repetitive rather than “fulfilled” and “spectral, not mythic.”22 In Sorokin’s Lyod (Ice, 2002), the characters are born-again rather than un-dead. People of the Ice produce their fellowship by hammering humans with sacred Ice. A few are fully transformed, but many more are killed in the process. The People of the Ice make their way into the core of the KGB and exploit the system for their benefit. In its own way, Sorokin’s fantasy responds to the same desperate quest for meaning that inspired Bykov’s Justification. The People of the Ice do not look like animals, do not suck blood (in fact, they are vegetarians), and are mortal. Like vampires, however, they are parasites on humans, whom they use with the utmost cruelty. These mystics produce their alternative history in intonations that are reminiscent of some Russian religious narratives, starting from Avvakum. Performing sacral manipulations on human bodies, the People of the Ice strive to reach a magic number of their fellowship, which will bring about the desired end of the world. This construction (managing an apocalypse by mutilating a target number of men and women) is probably taken from the central myth of the Skoptsy sect.23 Like 21

   Vladimir Sorokin, Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1999), 122.

22

   Walter Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 57.

23

   Sects were at the center of Andrei Siniavsky’s version of Russian cultural history,

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many of their historical predecessors, Sorokin’s characters struggle to overcome history but inevitably return to it. Quite recently, several Slavic scholars argued that the concept of magical realism can be applied to east European literatures that have been recently emancipated from Soviet domination and are arguably postcolonial; examples were the late Soviet works of non-Russian writers, the Kirgiz Chingiz Aitmatov and the Abkhazian Fasil Iskander, for example, as well as post-Soviet Ukrainian literature.24 Coined in Weimar Germany and then applied to Latin American and African fiction, the concept of magical realism made a huge loop before it arrived in the post-Soviet space.25 Salman Rushdie famously described magical realism as “the commingling of the improbable and the mundane.”26 Improbable as they are, Sorokin’s, Sharov’s, or Bykov’s novels do not have much of what could be plausibly characterized as mundane. Although they entail plenty of magic, to deem them “realistic” would be plainly wrong.

published as Ivan-Durak (Ivan the Fool; Paris: Sintaksis 1991). A Skopets was a character in Yury Mamleev’s Shatuny (Paris, New York: The Third Wave, 1988). Russian sects have also been important for Aleksandr Dugin’s philosophical speculations. Aleksei Ivanov’s Zoloto bunta (St. Petersburg, 2005) describes the fight between Old Believer communities over the treasure that the eighteenthcentury Emil’ian Pugachev allegedly left before his arrest. In Pavel Krusanov’s Ukus angela: Roman (The angel’s bite: a novel, St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2000), the wandering Old Believer inspires the emerging dictator by citing Freud and Johann Jakob Bachofen. For the role of sectarian themes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian literature and thought, see Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998). The reawakening of sectarian themes in post-Soviet literature deserves a special study. 24

   Erika Haber, The Myth of the Non-Russian: Iskander and Aitmatov’s Magical Universe (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003); Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill/Queens University Press, 2007).

25

   Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004); see also Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London: Routledge, 2004).

26

   Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Avon, 1982), 9.

Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied”

I believe that the application of the concept of magical realism to post-Soviet Russian fiction requires a major theoretical revision. Contemporary Russian narratives are similar to and different from magical realist ones in several important respects. They are similar because they make extensive use of magic in a full-scale novelistic construction. They also present an implicit critique of contemporary society by revising its historical foundations. They are different because they are self-consciously distanced from the traditions of the realist novel that are critical to magical realism. The post-Soviet novel does not emulate social reality and does not compete with the psychological novel; what it emulates and struggles with is history. I believe that a reasonable description for this particular trend in post-Soviet literature is magical historicism. Michael Wood distinguishes between two kinds of magical realism, one that is magic in its material and realist in its style (when “fantasy was represented by the deadest of deadpans, as if the author were reciting a telephone book”), and another that is realist in material and magical in style (when “the facts are the facts, but they are given to us as if they are fables”). Wood seems to be mostly interested in the first kind of narratives, which he suggests are written as if the reporter is sober and reality is drunk.27 The anthropologist Michael Taussig explores the connection between the internationally renowned prose of magical realists and native practices of healing and sorcery; he concludes that the literary elaborations of popular magic stand as a counterhegemonic force that is capable of confronting the usage to which the church and, sometimes, the backward-looking official culture put the remains of native religion.28 Famous Latin American examples such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, which clearly belong to Wood’s first kind of magical realism, deconstruct nationalist historiographies by impartially telling the fantastic stories of the past, as if the history

27

   Michael Wood, “In Reality,” Janus Head, 5, no. 2, Special Issue on Magical Realism (Fall 2002): 9-14.

28

   See Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 8.

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were drunk but the historian sober. Recruiting popular magic and multiplying its use in the most unbridled ways, these stories disavow the official narrative of the people’s suffering in the past as necessary, justifiable sacrifices for the sake of the people’s present. Projecting magic into history, these novels subvert scholarly discourses of historiography with their habitual emphasis on rational choices and social forces. These novels tend to follow some of the stylistic conventions of historical writing, such as impartiality and what Wood aptly calls sobriety. Rarely, if ever, do the narrators of these novels play Nabokovian games with their readers by actualizing the presence of the narrator in the course of the action. They boost their readers’ understanding of the relational, constructed nature of the narrated reality with genealogical rather than narratological experiments. This is where post-Soviet Russian fiction converges with that of post-colonial Latin America.29 In reality, there is no border between the past and the present; even less so in the realm of magic. Correspondingly, the border between magical realism and magical historicism is a matter of focus or emphasis rather than one of definitions or patrol. In the philosophical tradition, historicism strives to understand the current state of the world as the result of its development in the past. It also denies other ways of understanding the present, for example, that free will can shape the present without being predetermined by the past. Ironically, magical historicism shares a belief in the explanatory power of the past with rational versions of historicism. In Sharov’s esoteric novel Do i vo vremia (Before and during, 1993) the eternal Madame de

29

   For the recognition of the influence of Latin American “magical realist” writers on Russian authors of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, see Sergei Chuprinin, “Eshche raz k voprosu o kartografii vymysla” (Again on the cartography of fiction; Znamia, no. 11 [2006]). The Russian mother of a founder of Latin American magical realism, Alejo Carpentier, and her alleged kinship to the poet Konstantin Bal’mont is a subject of musings by Russian critics. An interesting example of anxiety of influence is Bykov’s speculation that in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez in his own turn emulated “Istoriia odnogo goroda” (History of a city) by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin; see Dmitrii Bykov, Vmesto zhizni (In place of life; Moscow: Vagrius, 2006).

Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied”

Staël lives in Russia, sleeps with its most important figures, from Aleksandr Skriabin to Stalin, who is also her son, and resides in a Soviet madhouse together with the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and a covey of old Bolsheviks. While the narrator is recording the oral history of these survivors, an apocalyptic flood drowns Moscow. A trained Soviet historian who refashioned himself into a post-Soviet writer, Sharov describes his credo: “The history I learned was not the history of humans. It was the history of hectares, crops, financial flows…. It was entirely foreign to me…. I am trying to understand what the revolution was,… why the people who had beautiful dreams committed monstrous crimes.”30 For some readers, Sharov’s, Sorokin’s, or Pelevin’s novels give clearer answers to these questions than social history does. Michael Wood’s twin concepts of drunk reality and sober observer help us understand Sharov’s fantasy of the eternal, Russified Madame de Staël.31 Indeed, who could have been an impartial observer of the revolution and terror? If such an observer could be imagined, he or she would be a fantastic personality. In Before and Then, the author bothers himself with such questions and presents a complex narrative construction that consists of the anchor character, de Staël, and the first-person narrator who collects her oral history. In other types of narratives, the author simply emulates the person-less voice of a history textbook. In melancholic visions of Sharov, Sorokin, and their colleagues, the past is perceived not just as “another country” but as an exotic and unexplored one, still pregnant with unborn alternatives and imminent miracles. Arguably, the expanded use of the subjunctive tense characterizes postrevolutionary periods. The feeling of

30

   Vladimir Sharov, “la ne chuvstvuiu sebia ni uchitelem, ni prorokom” (I consider myself neither a teacher nor a prophet), Druzhba narodov 8 (2004).

31

   Post-Soviet literature often plays with the idea of reincarnation. This idea is usually perceived as characteristically Buddhist; however, this idea was also central for Russian mystical sects such as the Khlysty; see Humphrey, “Stalin and the Blue Elephant,” for a fascinating analysis of reincarnation stories about Stalin, which are told by the Buddhist peoples of Russia, and Etkind, Khlyst, for the reincarnation mythology of traditional Russian sects.

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loss opens up questions of what might have been.32 Possessed by the ghostly past and unable to withdraw from its repetitive contemplation, post-Soviet writers find themselves trapped in a state of melancholia. At the same time, their readers celebrate an unprecedented consumer boom but feel the loss of the political opportunities they recently enjoyed. Writing in a glossy men’s journal, the cultural critic Grigorii Revzin described the situation in political rather than clinical terms: “The past does not know the subjunctive mood only if the present does know it.... If the present is what you cannot change at all, the past becomes what you can change in every possible way.”33 When politics does not provide alternatives, historiography offers them in abundance. In the final account, the popularity of magical historicism among post-Soviet writers and readers realizes the “compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal” that Freud ascribed to melancholia.34 The inability to differentiate oneself from the lost object prevents the individual from living in the present, from love and work. On the political level, the reverse is probably equally important: when there is no choice in the present, the historical past unfolds into an overwhelming narrative that obscures the present rather than explaining it. On the poetical level, Freud’s observation about the “piecemeal” character of the melancholic “compromise” provides a new perspective on the nature of postcatastrophic writing, which combines past and present, truth and fiction, allegories and metonymies. History and magic are strange bedfellows. Ghosts and witches are ahistorical, but witch hunts and ghost tours embody their historical moments. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other beasts help authors and readers discuss history that is not comprehensible by other means. Such was the Soviet period with

32

   See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 203.

33

   Grigorii Revzin, “O Tsaritsynskom dvortse i Iurii Luzhkove,” at http://www.gq.ru/ exclusive/columnists/152/44235/ (last accessed 15 May 2009).

34

   Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 253.

Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied”

its “unjustified repressions.” The uncanny scenery of post-Soviet literature signals the failure of other, more conventional ways of understanding social reality. It is not the pointed clarity of social and cultural criticism that attracts readers, but the inexhaustible fantasy of creators of alternative pasts. Often, the technological fantasies that authenticate these stories are manipulations of human bodies that allow for supernatural warmth and an immediacy of contact between the manipulated. After being hammered by Ice, Sorokin’s sectarians can speak to each other with their hearts. After being bitten by a vampire, Pelevin’s characters can understand other creatures, human or vampiric, by biting them. Sharov’s patients acquire similar abilities after having sex with Madame de Staël. In the post-Soviet condition, the antimodern fantasy of immediate, extralinguistic communication becomes a popular refuge. In most of these stories, immediate knowledge leads to unlimited power. They are stories of super-communes, not supermen. Magical historicism does have critical potential. Though the political boundaries in post-Soviet Russia tend to blur, magical historicists such as Sorokin, Pelevin, Sharov, and Bykov are recognizably different from those authors who use realistic techniques to spread their pro-Soviet nostalgia, like Aleksandr Prokhanov or Maksim Kantor. In 2002, the pro-Putin youth movement Walking Together (a historicist replica of the Soviet Komsomol) publicly destroyed copies of Sorokin’s Blue Lard by disposing of them in a giant commode in the center of Moscow (the use of the commode recalling, in its own turn, Marcel Duchamp). Set in the future, Blue Lard tells the story of an elixir that the monstrous clones of great Russian writers, from Lev Tolstoy to Vladimir Nabokov, produce when writing. Through this transformation into “blue lard,” their texts provide immortality. Exotic Russian sectarians of the future steal this substance from the Russian-Chinese scientists who produce the clones. Using a time machine, sectarians send this elixir to Stalin, who is presented here as Khrushchev’s lover. At the end of the story, we see the immortal Stalin as a servant to one of the pathetic masters of the future. The final pages drop a hint that Stalin is, in fact, the narrator of the story. Changing its focus from invented communities to pseudo-historical personalities and

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back to invented communities, this exemplary novel combines many features of magical historicism: unmotivated distortions of history, semi-human monsters, manipulations of the body, fantastic cults, circular time, and the resulting interpenetration of epochs. In a strange way that was, however, available to the semi-educated Walking Together, this novel sent an aggressively critical political message towards Putin’s Russia. While dehumanization can take various forms and steps, treating humans as animals is one of them; the conversion of humans into monsters is probably the next one. Practicing senseless violence that eludes any functional interpretation, the gulag effectively reduced humans to working animals. Starting with Solzhenitsyn’s triton, Vladimov’s dog, and Shalamov’s cat, the gulag’s memory in literature has used humanized animals to tell the story of inhuman suffering. In the early attempts at realistic representation, these animals were put into the position of witnesses, more reliable ones than humans on either side of the fence. In the later spirit of magical historicism, these characters have developed into monsters that embody the horror, not the truth, of the Soviet period better than either humans or animals.35 This memorial culture is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet. Many classical figures and motifs resurge here: monsters like the Sphinx, Moloch, Leviathan, and Triton; Antigone who wanted to bury her brother; Dante’s infernal adventures and Hamlet’s possession and revenge; Dracula, to be sure, and also Sharikov. But the most pertinent master-plot may be that of Little Red Riding Hood: the wolf ate the granny and now he looks like the granny—or maybe it is the murdered granny who looks like a wolf?

35

   Agamben discusses the relevance of animals and zoomorphic monsters for the representation of the Nazi camps in his The Open.

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S mok e

of the

Father l a nd,

or a

F ilter G ul ag 1

These days in Moscow cigarettes are advertised in the most resplendent fashion on enormous outdoor billboards at the bottom of which—according to the law of the genre—we are reminded, in fine and unconvincing print, that, actually, smoking isn’t all that good for our health. In other words, the attractive, happy and even excessively healthy people in the outsize posters can puff away with impunity. But for people like you and me, smoking is apparently dangerous. I don’t believe it! The Health Ministry’s pitiful prattle about the hazards of smoking against the background of the ads’ triumphant bacchanalia carries no more weight than does the formulaic civility in a verbal construction like: “Excuse me for saying so, but you are a horse’s ass!” But that’s just by the way. Especially as non-smokers don’t need any convincing, while confirmed smokers don’t need any ads. They particularly didn’t need any ads not long ago when crazed consumers of “the smoke of the Fatherland” took to turning empty cigarette stands upside down. Filter cigarettes made their debut in the early ‘60s. Domestic ones included. Or rather, domestic ones specifically. The first, it seems, were Krasnopresnenskiye; the second, Novost. Or maybe it was the other way round, I don’t remember. Side by side with

1

     From Lev Rubinstein, Here I Am, trans. by Joanne Turnbull (GLAS: New Russian Writing, 2001), 139-44.

Lev Rubinshtein. Smoke of the Fatherland, or a Filter Gulag

hip cafes, jazz and abstract art, filter cigarettes—as opposed to totalitarian, Stalinist papirosi—became signs of the thaw and of liberalism in general. It is difficult to convey the sweet feeling of initiation into world civilization with which one slowly undid the little red cellophane strip, with which one put the glossy pack on the plastic cafe tabletop for all the world to see, and with what Hemingway-and-Aksyonovesque abstraction one exhaled the smoke through one’s nose. “Old man, would you have a cigarette on you?” That’s a far cry from: “Hey kid, gotta papiroska?” That’s culture. The West, freedom, progress, glass and concrete, outer space, Yunost magazine, polymers and pointy moccasins for fifteen rubles a pair. The coming of the filter-cigarette age divided the smoking community into the up-to-date and the old-regime, into modernists and fundamentalists, into Westernizers and patriots. The pre-filter and essentially papirosi civilization wasn’t homogeneous either. One or another preference said more about a person than the preferences themselves. Stalin, as portrayed in hundreds of movies and novels, stuffed his pipe with tobacco from Gertsegovina Flor papirosi. The gray-at-the-temples prison warden usually uttered his sacramental “the Tambov wolf is your comrade now”1 between two puffs of a Kazbek. The big boys behind the shed smoked cheap Severs. In the folklore of young smokers, Sever somehow rhymed with treepper (gonorrhea). As in: “Anyone who smokes Sever is sure to get treepper.” What nonsense. Even children knew that smoking something even as vile as Sever was fraught with all sorts of things, but not that. Then again, poetry is beyond truth, isn’t that true? The most democratic and most statistically average thing to smoke was Belomors. At first, everyone smoked them. Then, in the filter era, the most stubborn. Later, and evidently to this day, aging human rights activists as a symbol of their asceticism. The most portentous aspect of a Belomor is its name, which has 1

     Once imprisoned, the Soviet man forfeited the right to address a superior as “comrade.” From now on the proper form of address was “citizen.” If the prisoner forgot, and addressed the warden as “comrade,” the warden would set him straight: “The Tambov wolf is your comrade now.” (Tr.)

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survived everything. Imagine a German cigarette called Auschwitz or Buchenwald. Consider as well the smoking chimneys and the similarity becomes ridiculous. You could split your sides laughing. Only why go butting into German history when we have our own just as good. The name Belomorkanal is not, in essence, very different from the name Gulag. What has prompted the remarks above and below is the recent appearance in cigarette kiosks of an amazing mutant: a Belomor cigarette with a filter. The Similar Prima appeared a little earlier. But in a socio-cultural context, a Prima as against a Belomor is like a carpenter as against a cabinetmaker. So then, a filter Belomor. With the same sickeningly familiar picture on the pack. A new wine in an old wineskin. The appearance of this remake evokes a bright bundle of meaningful metaphors. That this gimmick belongs to the “old-songs-about-the-main-thing”2 class is clear. Perhaps even too clear. What isn’t associated today with those ill-fated “songs”? This hackneyed formula seems to have enveloped our entire time and space symbolically. In other words, our space is going through a time of “old songs”—our own inevitably specific and local reception of postmodernism. It is as if to say we had a great era once. And now that great era has been fitted with a filter. So that you cough less. Cough less blood, too. Meanwhile, the new and improved Belomor is this: typical socialism with a human face. Or, to put it a bit more crudely: a filter Gulag. It is, like other large and small features of the “velvet” restoration, the same thing as today’s Stalinist anthem without the Stalinist words: the anthem, too, has been fitted with a kind of filter. That’s really all I have to say. Oh, I almost forgot: “Smoking, dear reader, is hazardous to your health.” Translation and notes by Joanne Turnbull 2

     “Old Songs about the Main Thing” was the name of a annual television program aired on New Year’s Eve on which singers performed Soviet songs that were especially popular twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. The program became a symbol of nostalgia for the Soviet era. (Tr.)

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How I Ate

a

D og ( e xcer pts )

CHARACTERS: Narrator: a young man in his mid- to late-thirties, dressed in a sailor’s uniform, holding a sailor’s cap in his hands most of the time, occasionally putting it on his head. Personal stories and observations can be inserted into the text ad lib, and any undesirable parts may be omitted. Ideally, the whole story should take approximately 1-1.5 hours. Ropes and other sailing accouterments are scattered around the stage, and there is a bucket of water and a washrag. A chair stands at the center of the stage. Narrator: Okay, so, imagine that you wake up one morning and you’re a hussar. A real cavalryman. You’ve got one of those fancy hats with this long thing coming out of the top, and a uniform jacket with a zillion little buttons and ties. You’ve got the pants, the boots, the spurs, the sword tucked right here, and … a horse! What a big animal a horse is! Okay, so, on top of all that, you already know everything: how to ride the horse, how to slash something with the sword, how everything is arranged, what regiment you belong to, your title, etc. And the really crazy thing is that you can remember all of your previous battles and daring conquests…. But at the same

Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog

time, you’re completely surprised by all of this. Because after all, you just woke up, and now there’s all this crazy stuff to deal with. And that’s exactly how it was all three years I was in the Navy; I’d wake up every morning thinking it, and the longer I served, the stronger these thoughts: “I’m a sailor! For real! Like in the movies, except even more real. A real sailor on a ship, that’s what…” No, it can’t be! It’s impossible! Riiiight… And on Russian Island things were … intense. It was … intense. I can’t stand watching kids on the first day of school. It’s just the most awful sight. It’s usually … well, it happens in all kinds of weather. Rain or shine, it doesn’t matter. The mother gets all dressed up and takes her kid, who’s squeaky clean in a new uniform…. And he doesn’t even seem old enough for school—he’s just this tiny little kid. He walks really straight holding a bouquet of flowers that his granny pulled from her garden. And Granny gets all teary-eyed, going on and on about how time flies and how our little, oh, I don’t know—Alex—is all grown up and going to school…. And there he is, holding those flowers, with a blank look on his face, just sort of spacing out. And they take him to school, and there are a lot of people everywhere, and then there’s the first bell. Riiiing! And they leave him there…. My first teacher was … Alevtina Petrovna or Zinaida Nikolaevna….1 Okay, so later on, the kid comes home from school … and he’s acting really strange…. The parents ask, “So? How was it?” How the hell do you think it was? (That’s me speaking, not the kid.) Seriously, I mean, how the hell do you think it was? The same as always. Exactly the same. I mean, jeez, you were there. You went to school…. So, you don’t need to ask…. You know! 1

     Teachers in Russia are addressed formally using their first name and patronymic. The first of these two names sounds especially funny to the Russian ear. An English equivalent would be something like Mrs. Thistlebottom or Mrs. Dungworth.

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And then sometime around seventh or eighth grade a history teacher would appear, as if from another planet. He was easy-going, completely different. You could actually have a conversation with this guy, and when he got pissed off at your class you sort of felt bad about it because you could, you know…. It’s like, you know, you’re standing in the bathroom taking a piss and this guy suddenly walks in and takes a piss. It’s hard to get your mind around…. Anyway, he was a cool guy! But then something happened. The other teachers wouldn’t accept him. He was so untarnished that they would just eat him alive, or there would be some sort of nasty rumors going around … or he was in a bad marriage….Whatever it was, he just disappeared one day, along with all of the wondrous possibilities. And his replacement was some Mrs. So-and-so … well, you get the idea... But on Russian Island things were intense… So the Officers met us there, along with a bunch of other people. The Officers thought of themselves as aristocrats or something, so they never cursed…. Never! They would just talk like this: Good morning Comrade Sailors! I know that things are [f***ing (silently mouth the word, ad lib.)] difficult for you right now! This is because you are [f***ing] thinking about [f***ing] home. (They didn’t curse. They just moved their lips to convey the necessary “clarification.”) So! You think that [f***ing] being at home with your [f***ing] mommy was better? You’re [f***ing] wrong! Now—and for the foreseeable future—we are all the [f***ing] family you’ve got. And in order to [f***ing] help you avoid thinking about home, we want you to focus on a man’s top three [f***ing] needs: eat, drink and sleep! Therefore, we’ll be giving you very little [f***ing] food, drink and sleep. And they did exactly as they said they would! And, actually, it did get a little better, but only much, much later. They (that is, the Officers) would say:

Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog

“A Chinese missile can get here in 30 seconds. You need to be able to defend the Motherland.” (They said this very loudly.) We didn’t protest. In fact, we … .never protested. And we had to get dressed really fast, so we could defend the Motherland. And wow, did we get dressed fast. The thing is, no one was really afraid of the Chinese missiles—everything we had to fear was all around us … right there. I can totally understand the Officers. Every morning they would come out to find us standing in formation. And it was obvious that they were really hoping to see something else. But there we were. There were the Uzbeks and the Tadjiks and the Kirgiz and, well, us white guys. But back when the Officers entered the military academy, they probably imagined themselves as Commander on the bridge, with the roar of the sea, and the navy flags raised high. It was all so ceremonious, full of pomp and circumstance, the flags and seagulls, and the “Hip-hip! Hurraaaaay!...” Yet there we were, a shaggy bunch … and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. And I felt ashamed because I wasn’t what they wanted, and I’d never be that, and I was to blame for, well, basically for everything…. There on Russian Island—what a name!—everything was done according to custom. Everything was coordinated, and a mark of tradition was evident in all that we did. From time immemorial, and forever after! And perhaps the most venerable traditional of all was “The Great Morning Release.” To participate in this ritual, you had to be born in our country, be 18 years of age, and … get stuck on Russian Island…. Lucky you. Okay, so at oh-six-hundred hours the national anthem would start blaring on the radio and that meant: time to get up. We got up— really fast!—and put on our boots—really fast!—(we already had our boxers on) and we ran outside where we would encounter not roads, but heavy fog. And we would run—in formation—and there was noise and shouting all around us: “Faster, you [f***ers]! You [f***ing.]…. Aaaand…. Run! Aaaand, double time, you sons-of-

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bitches! [****]…” And we ran, and ran. With our buzz cuts and dirty necks, all different colors, and in long, wrinkled blue boxers. We ran to the shore. There at the edge there was a cliff, the sea about 12 feet below. And cliff hung in an almost perfectly straight line above the sea, so you could fit something like three hundred guys standing at the edge all at once. And there in the dark (it was 6 a.m., after all), you could look across and see the city of Vladivostok, way off in the distance. I never managed to see it during the day, but there in the dark it shimmered—[sings] “Little lights, little liiights….”2 And I thought about how great it would be to have a little house there—like the tiny clapboard hut in that old Soviet Cipollino cartoon. I’d be like the little Pumpkin Man, who would climb inside the hut and escape the evil Señor Pomedór—I’d get away from all of this, and never want for anything. Okay, so there we were—two thousands of us men—running. Then, on command, in perfect rank and file, three hundred of us at a time would halt at the edge of the cliff. Then—on command—we’d drop our shorts and … piss in the ocean! The commanders kept careful watch, and when the last guy finished, they would bark another command. And everyone would pull up their shorts and step back in formation to let the next rank step forward. And the next three hundred guys took their turn. 2

      “Little lights, little lights…” refers to a popular Soviet-era chanson, a genre of song that can include themes ranging from love and loss, to the struggles of the urban underclasses, to tales of criminal activity. This particular song speaks of a longing for home, old friends and youth: If my friend is feeling lonely, If the guy is sad, forlorn— Let him come by car, on foot Let him wander unawares Toward the familiar nighttime glow. Little lights, little lights, at midnight they’re so bright, Little lights of my wondrous youth.

Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog

And as we stood there pissing into the sea, a triple-decker cruise ship, ablaze in lights, ferried across right in front of us. And we all felt a kind of genuine strength and majestic beauty uniting us. I know now why no enemy ever attacked us; we got up every morning and took a mighty collective piss in the ocean. That’s why no one ever attacked us. It wasn’t the nuclear submarines or the rockets. Every single morning—rain or shine—we’d get up at that ungodly hour and piss in the sea, and no one attacked. I guess I don’t mean it literally—I’m not an idiot or a fool—but we really were all in it together. Mhmmm…. There were butterflies on the Island—big, green swallowtails. They were huge, actually, bigger than a sparrow. And they flew really, really slowly. And the Officers would shout at us: “God [f***ing] help me, if any one of you sons of bitches even touches a butterfly, I’ll…. These butterflies … they’re on the [f***ing] endangered species list. They’re only found here. We are proud of these [f***ing] butterflies! God forbid one of you [f***ers]…. They’ve been here for a million [f***ing] years, and then you show up, and an hour later you just [sh*t] on every [f***ing] thing. The butterflies were really beautiful. They moved their wings slowly, and then flew off. Just like this. [Here it’s essential that you take off your shoes and demonstrate how these big butterflies flew.] Their wings were emerald green…. I killed three of them. They went crunch in my hand and this yellowish slime oozed out…. I had to wash my hands for a long time to get the green pollen-like wing dust off them…. Otherwise they really would, God forbid…. I mean, they weren’t joking. The Officers, that is. Sometimes there are moments in life when, for example, you’re standing in front of the mirror brushing your teeth, not in any particular hurry. Or you’re taking a bath or a shower, again, not hurrying—and everything is okay. And then suddenly you

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remember something, something that makes you feel ashamed ... terribly, terribly ashamed. Even if it’s something that happened when you were a kid. You remember some stupid lie you told ... or when, like an idiot, you pretended to be something you’re not ... it was obvious, but you still tried to fake your way through. Or something else horrible—something that no one remembers anymore, something that you yourself had completely forgotten. And then it all comes flooding back. And you feel so awful, so ashamed that you just want to curl up into a little ball, lie in the fetal position [here it’s necessary to actually curl up into the fetal position], to take up as little space as humanly possible. Or there are times when something is eating away at you; someone hurt your feelings, and you’re lying awake in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, imagining everything you’ll say to that person when you see him tomorrow. And you’re actually talking aloud, and he’s answering, and everything comes so easily to you, as you fire back with precisely the right words, and ... you finally fall asleep just before dawn. Then, just forty minutes later—the alarm goes off. Only forty minutes!... but it’s gone, all the words have disappeared. Or you’re walking along and something’s driving you crazy. And you’ve convinced yourself to let it go, that there’s nothing wrong, and you try to just walk. But everyone around you sees this guy. That is, they see YOU, walking along talking to yourself: “Yeah, well, it’s not my problem!” Then a pause. See? It’s you. You’re walking along and then you stop and shout: “What, do I really ask so much of you?” Pause. “Well, so-oo-r—ry!” Pause. “Well, I don’t know, I DON’T KNOW!” Okay, so it’s obvious—you’re having a lousy day. It’s nothing in particular, it’s just that ... things are always so ... crappy. Or something hurts, or you can’t stop worrying about something, well, you know ... you get the idea.... And it used to be—a long time ago—you’d run around all day in the yard, and yell and scream, and think up all sorts of crazy

Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog

antics. Your little arms and legs were brand new and nothing hurt. Wheeee! And then your dad would call from the upstairs window: John-ny, hey! Cartoons! And you would race home, greedily gulp some water right from the tap, plop down in front of the TV, and you’d be just about to burst with anticipation…. Because earlier you had taken the TV guide and, though there really weren’t many programs for kids, you took your pencil and underlined everything that you wanted to watch. And wow, there were twenty whole minutes of cartoons! And you’re just so excited you can’t stand it—while the station announcer speaks, then there’s the studio production logo with that little, you know, that little theme song … and then, when the film credits begin for the cartoon you—as always—you can’t contain yourself any longer, and you run to the bathroom … to pee. And you can almost taste the joy, the sweet satisfaction … and with every fiber of your being … you really and truly … hope. And then a puppet show comes on…. Noooooo! It’s the worst cartoon ever. The one about, you know, the bear and the rabbit and, I don’t know, a hedgehog. And the hedgehog, or the bear or whatever, is mean, or greedy or lazy. He’s got, like, an apple or something, but he won’t share it, or he won’t help anyone else. And then everyone stops hanging out with him, and they won’t talk to him anymore…. And he realizes what’s happening and starts helping people or sharing with everyone, and he feels real good about himself. Then, at the end, all the animals join hands and sing some stupid song…. You know, total crap. But…. But you manage not to get too upset about it, and you watch it to the end and then go back outside to run around. I mean, so what? Those people who made that cartoon probably hate you too. Whatever, you can just go run around. Who cares? It’s okay. Or you’re just this tiny little kid and you’re sleeping. It’s Sunday. Winter. It’s already almost noon and you’re dozing, but you can hear your granny saying, “No, it’s time to wake him up.” And she comes

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in and pulls off the covers and rubs your back. And her hands are coarse, like sandpaper, and it makes you squirm and twist around. Because your back is so nice and her hands are so rough, and you are, well, you know, you’re beautiful—all your relatives always praise you for it…. So later on, when you’re older, you’re completely shocked to look in the mirror and see: “Whoa. That’s me?” I look like that? No way. There was so much to be ashamed of! And for whatever reason there was an especially large amount of shame on Russian Island. And it’s weird, because there really shouldn’t be so much shame involved in growing up. But there was … there is. It just makes you want to lie down [lie down] and curl up into a little ball [curl up], and try to take up as little space as possible [do this, lie there for a bit, realize that it’s impossible, then say the following]. No, it doesn’t work … no … it’s useless. I mean, you once weighed only seven pounds. And before that, you were just a little tadpole thing, with a tail. It’s like you existed, but not really. Yeah, that was the life … or maybe not. I don’t actually remember it, but well, who are we kidding? No one remembers it. Yeah, it was much better back when you could just be afraid of the dark, or the neighbor’s basement, or the older kids next door, or some mythological creature or other … rather than those real fears that … on Russian Island … were more than enough. It was so great when you could dart into your apartment building and watch the little pellets of snow on your sleeve melt from the heat of the radiator, all the while being terrified of the older boys next door. Or to run, and run, and run, and then fall backwards into the snow and see—SUDDENLY—the night sky and the stars, and to think about infinity. Out there—beyond the stars—there were more stars, and more and more … and then suddenly … INFINITY. Like an explosion. It took your breath away … oh, gasp!... terrifying … and then … everything…released. It was awful … awfully good. You know, it’s interesting to think about whether any of the stuff

Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog

we did on Russian Island really mattered to anyone anywhere else in the world. I mean personally. Was there a person out there who really understood why everything there was the way it was? And if there was such a person, what was he like? I can’t even imagine…. Jeez. [sigh] Hard to believe…. It was there—in the service—that I got the sense, and soon came to really understand, that the Motherland and the country I was born in weren’t actually the same thing. I guess it’s probably obvious, but it’s something that’s important to understand—it’s vital! But many of the guys I served with didn’t really understand this, though they suspected that something was up. But what seemed to matter more to them was who betrayed us. Country or Motherland? That was what we need to figure out here … except we won’t. Like I said, the guys didn’t really understand … they just had their suspicions. But they thought up a variety of concrete things to be suspicious of. Everyone had … well, everyone had a girlfriend who didn’t wait for them, who cheated on them, who ran off with a student who had managed to dodge the draft. And they poured their grief into this, oh yes, they did: “As soon as I get back, I’ll find that student, and I’ll teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.” [sings] “Only mama won’t betray you,… only mama … only mommmmmy….”3 So we all wrote letters, letters to those girls. And

3

      This quote is from another chanson, this time from the criminal song sub-genre. The song is sung from the point of view of a young man serving time in prison. He sings of how a man’s mother is the only one who will stand by him, love him, and never betray him. The chorus reads: Only mama will call out: my dear son! Only mama will be there with you to the very end Only mama will hold out her frail hands to you Won’t lie to you, or leave or betray you Only mama will never betray you.

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we signed the backs of photographs with “may this fixed image of my face always remind you of me” and sent them off to random cities, God knows where…. To those far-off places … the kind of place that, if you drive up in the middle of the night you can see the outlines of the windows, illuminated from inside. And all of these windows are yellow…. That light … a light that makes you want to turn and flee back into the darkness. And sometimes you drive down the main street of a town, and all of a sudden you look through a second-floor window and you can see … it’s the kitchen. And the curtains are that familiar color…and the wallpaper… and the lampshade—orange and made of plastic. And then, for a brief second, a man’s back appears in the window. He’s wearing a T-shirt—probably … light blue. And it’s all so familiar, just like home. You know what their conversation is about, what’s in the fridge, what they’re having for dinner, what kind of dishes are kept in the sideboard in the living room, what kind of sofa they have, and even what pattern and vintage of oriental rug hangs as decoration on the wall…. And because you looked in that window, and because it’s all so terribly familiar … everything seems so … dull. It’s as if you reached down and gathered up all the dust bunnies that have collected there in those hard-to-reach corners under the bed, and you stuff them all into your mouth … and then just live like that. Just go on living. The Motherland betrayed us…. But we never betrayed our Motherland … we always defended her … constantly. Pause. On the ship we had this guy named Kolya E. Korean guy. That was his last name: Eeee. He was soft-spoken, short, beaten down, and always kinda dirty-looking. His Russian was terrible. He didn’t fit in well with the Uzbeks, and with the Russian guys he was a complete outsider. Poor bastard. It seemed like he always had the worst luck. Either he’d lost his hat, or his dish would run away with his spoon…. The guy never got leave time, but then one day we found out that he had gotten leave orders along with the rest of us.

Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog

And so now we had to stop messing with him, be respectful … you know, give the guy a break. And when E got back from his very first leave he showed up with a dead dog in his bag. We all freaked out and started yelling at him to throw it overboard. But he wouldn’t. And then he got upset. Said there was no way in hell that he would get rid of it—and he was dead serious. And then we realized that he was actually seriously offended. He dragged the dog away and hid it somewhere and … well, he was really sore. He sat up all night just crying his eyes out. I said, hey, buddy, take it easy, just let it go. I mean, you’ve gotta understand. That dog—it’s just nasty! And then he started to bare his soul to me, explaining bitterly that he had killed and cut up the dog according to tradition and that it was important to have the right kind of dog, so he had spent all day searching for the perfect offering. And he did this all for us—so that he could treat us to an authentic traditional Korean dish…. And then he started crying again. He was so hurt. And I remember how we sat there that night—Kolya E, Abror the Uzbek (the ship’s cook) and me—we sat there and ate that dog that Kolya had cooked for such a long time, all the while worrying what I would think of it. And I sat and thought: “Well, here I am, eating a dog…. And somewhere out there there’s a little girl, weary from crying, still releasing little whimpers and sobs as she falls asleep. She and her dad spent hours wandering the neighborhood with a flashlight, checking the barns and asking everyone they encountered if they knew anything about the beloved dog’s whereabouts. And they’d keep searching tomorrow, and there would be ‘lost dog’ signs written in the little girl’s handwriting, and a picture of the poor puppy with his little leash around his neck would hang above her bed for weeks…. Or maybe some old lady would step outside and look down the street, into the darkness and, at every rustle, she’d race to the door, open it and peer into the dark hallway—her hope completely in vain. “Here Rover! Here boy! Roooverrrr!” And then she goes back inside and sits down at the table covered with an

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oilcloth, and stares at the dish and bowl of water … and tears well up in her eyes. I ate and ate and thought about how inside of me—in my stomach— there was a piece of that trusting and helpless creature who had probably rolled over and wagged his tail when Kolya had lifted him up…. And as I chewed, I tried to sense some inner protest … but I couldn’t … it was delicious. Kolya had prepared it so well. And I had thought—up until the moment I tasted it—that there was no way I could eat it. But I could. With gusto. I wouldn’t have been able to before … in my previous life. I guess one version of me did the thinking, and another did the eating. And the one who ate was more … well, contemporary. That is, he matched the demands of that particular time. That time—my time in the Navy. My Navy Years. And now I can’t imagine eating a dog, not at night, down in the galley with Kolya E and the Uzbek cook, there on that enormous anti-submarine ship. I probably … probably couldn’t do it anymore…. I discovered within myself such strange feelings: whenever I was really sick, or when people had really hurt my feelings, or when I did something that no one should ever have to do—ever—you know, something really, really awful … or when they called me terrible names… Anyway, at those times … I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I didn’t feel sorry, and I didn’t get upset…. But I felt really, really sorry for my parents and everyone who had ever loved me. I mean, they loved me so much, and they were waiting for me to come home. For my mom, it would mean … and my dad…. And they know me so well—they know that I’m this and that, and that I’m one-of-a-kind. I’m me, and they love me…. But I’d been beaten … so badly … that I wasn’t me anymore…. That person that they loved so much, the one they were waiting for to come home…. That one-of-a-kind kid? He didn’t exist. I wasn’t him— I didn’t exist. And they had no idea. There’s no me anymore.

Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog

I felt so sorry for them. Mom wrote me a letter every single day. And sent packages. And it was really hard for me to eat the cookies she sent in those little boxes. I felt bad messing up the orderly little bundles she had put together. You see, they sent those packages to that kid who had waved goodbye to them as the train pulled away, headed for the Far East. But that boy was gone. They sent the packages to the wrong address. They weren’t delivered to their sweet, bright, only son. They were sent to one of any number of dirty, miserable, ugly sailors, each of whom had a number on his sleeve and was called by last name once a day, at evening roll. It was so painful to try to pretend to be that kid I had been, and answer my mother’s letters. “Dear Mama … Everything is fine. The food is fine … the weather is lousy, but soon it will … there’s no time to be homesick, there’s always work to do…. Love, Your Son….” It’s not as if I could write: Your son is no longer here. He’s gone, and another has taken his place. And then this other person I had become would write all about … no. No, I wasn’t a fool. I was a sailor, not a fool. At least I can say that. And the whole time, all I could think was “Iwannagohome, Iwannagohome….” I remember how it was that first night home…. How I slept well, but got up early. I spent three years imagining how I would get home, go to bed and just sleep in all day…. But I woke up at 6 a.m. sharp. I woke up in my room and though “Now what?... Look, I’m home … but there’s that ‘Iwannagohome….’ Wait, so where is home?... Hold on! Where’s home? But there is no home anymore!” My room, of course, was the same as it always was. Mom kept it exactly as it had been, everything laid out just so, like a museum. But it wasn’t home. I mean, my desire for HOME had been so strong that it grew and overwhelmed my actual home, so that it no longer fit inside, sort of like how I didn’t fit in any of the pants I had worn before I entered the Navy. But there was something else. Something … horrible. There was no home…! There was no me…!

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And what had life been like before? It was so simple: you finish school, which means you have to take exams, then you choose a college, etc., etc. Then you’re expecting to be drafted, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Then, in the service, there’s that constant thought of home…. So, life had always been about anticipating the next step … always just about to begin…. But … but now … there wasn’t anything to look forward to…. No next step … just go on living … but you don’t really feel like it … ’cause how can you go on…? But a little later on time seemed to appear, and there was a feeling that time was moving and … that it was disappearing … passing away, I mean. […] Translation and notes by Molly Thomasy Blasing

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F rom T he R ussi a n V ersion 1

“… Again they’re off for their Afghanistan…”

1 … Again they’re off for their Afghanistan, And black roses in Grozny, big as fists, On the plaza, as they form a square On their way to being smashed to bits. When they go to get sworn in, She flies to give it up to him, Like a new-fangled Tristan and Isolde (Special dispatch to all posts) And there’s a strange strain of Hep in Ashkhabad He drinks magnesia from the common trough, Making a racket with the metal chain While she recites Our Father at the doctor’s Counting the days of menstrual delays. The cure proceeds at its own pace, And meanwhile he carouses like a boy Bored and jerking away his days Corporal N., a bit older than the rest, Who are still wet behind the ears, Is an expert in the vulgar furlough arts, He pours black wine for them, 1

     Elena Fanailova, The Russian Version, trans. Stephanie Sandler and Genia Turovskaya, with an introduction by Alexander Skidan (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), 52-59, 149-59.

Elena Fanailova. From The Russian Version Remembering, not from the authorized Sections, but something along these lines: The diseases of dirty hands are Swallowed bullets made of shit Common myth and communal hell. She’s off to the abortion clinic, Exactly as the doctor has prescribed, Like a soldier marching the familiar march, According to the commander’s drill. And there she is, surrounded by her friends, Slender and skittish fauns and dryads all— Cattle at an abattoir. There’s no free will, Just chance, the luck to simply stay alive. And there in ‘Ghanistan were beer-soaked moustaches, Fucking beautiful Uzbek girls Unbraiding bridles with their tongues. They got to ride on armor metal, Fast and crude. Later, to keep the whole affair from leaking out, The colonel himself shot them dead In front of the regiment—or more precisely, Had them shot, the ones who dragged The girls into the bushes by their braids And those who raped them in the bushes, The Afghan girls who looked about sixteen, But weren’t any older than twelve, and barely. The rapists weren’t more than twenty. Their families heard nothing of it. And the ceiling bore down slowly like A chopper to the sound of women wailing Now they’re at the river getting soused And reminiscing about the good old days. And it’s as though a strange chill tugs

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Against their corporeal flesh. Now the lovers are both forty. Or, more precisely, the husband and the wife. The kid is ten, they had him late by Soviet standards. Their scars speak for themselves. I’ll never find another country such as this.

2 The story of how this text came to be is simple enough. In August 2001 I was sitting on the bank of the Usmanka River, near Voronezh. More precisely, I was sunbathing with a girlfriend; a campsite, warm weather, the last days of summer when you could still go swimming. Next to us was a group of people: husband and wife, their son, the wife’s mother, and some man, to whom they suddenly, and for no apparent reason, began to tell their story: how the husband was taken by the army, that the training was in Grozny, and the roses there were big and black, the time she went to see him for the swearing in, the roses on the plaza were fist-sized, remember, how beautiful the city was (addressing each other)? Then he came down with jaundice, and was sent to Ashkhabad for some reason, to the hospital, and they drank magnesium by the mug there, no other available treatment, and in the evening, in the ward, they drank local wine. I was hooked by the combination of sounds in “roses and Grozny” (the conversation was taking place on the second anniversary of the Chechen war). Also by the fact that they made no comments, no judgments along the lines of “they let the country go to shit, the bastards,” so it was as though they were speaking about their lives almost lightly, almost with humor. I gathered that they were around my age, because then they talked about Afghanistan, and immediately I began to fill in the medical history of that period in their lives (something I know well from med school). I saw their scars: the man had a laparotomy (most likely for a perforated ulcer). The woman, surgery related to a cyst. Probably several abortions too, taking into account their social status, and you can determine

Elena Fanailova. From The Russian Version

that by the swimming trunks alone (the speech, the faces of former defense industry workers who went into small business at the right moment). Soviet gynecology was the legalization of extreme humiliation and utter shame, all performed barracks-style, like the rest of Soviet existence. These people’s conversation (the systematic execution of the perpetrators, the Uzbek military girls who the soldiers screwed, all this recounted by the man, not at all self-conscious in front of his wife and child; in my text nothing is invented), the whole course and mechanism of this conversation call for a kind of opening of a window in time, and through this window the draft of the eighties begins to blow. The details, taste, and feel of the time all had to be captured, whenever possible, without distortions. I started to write the poem down right as their conversation was happening and finished it the next day. The sense of violence is the main thing that I remember about this era; this sense penetrated all entertainments, pleasures, sensations and feelings, not to speak of work, and it was fully present in the conversation of these people, my contemporaries. They speak about monstrous things in a rather ordinary way, even with some animation, because it is their youth they are referring to, and in the moment of telling their story they re-enter it. My job was to properly preserve this neutral intonation. The last line I wrote was my own; it of course expresses the intolerable bitterness of life and pain felt toward this country, and not at all an admiration for it, as it has seemed to some readers. Translated by Genya Turovskaya

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Lena, or the Poet and the People There’s a clerk in the all-night store Where I stop after work To buy food and drinks (I hate that word, drinks). One time she said to me, “I saw you on TV On the culture channel I liked what you were saying. Are you a poet? Let me read your book. I’ll give it back, I promise.” I say, “I don’t have a spare copy right now, But when I get one, I promise I’ll bring it to you.” I wasn’t at all sure She’d like the poems. That actor’s urge to be liked Is astonishing, whorish, It disappeared after Sasha d-d, But now it secretly returned. Eventually an extra copy of my book The Russian Version turned up A poet has to get involved Distributing books, after all Publishers don’t do much on this front. I handed it over. Right there, as I was paying for the food and drinks. (Kefir for in the morning, one gin and tonic, a second gin and tonic, Plus a little vodka, And farewell, cruel world, To quote Lvovsky’s1 version Of two Nizhny Novgorod boys’ conversation. No question, I remain a provincial teenager.)

1

     Stanislav Lvovsky is a contemporary Russian poet and critic.

Elena Fanailova. From The Russian Version It turned out that Lena and I were namesakes. I hate that word, namesakes And even more I hate the word connect It arouses physiological spasms in me Possibly because The word has echoes of coitus and sex, But I prefer fucking, pure and simple. After all, I am my own highest judge. “Could you autograph it,” she says. To Elena, I write, from Elena. I hand it over nervously. For a few days she doesn’t look me in the eye. Then one day there aren’t many other people, She says, “So, I read your book. I didn’t understand a word of it: Too many names of people no one knows. I had the feeling that you write For a narrow circle. For friends. For an in-group. Who are these people, who are they, Elena? The ones you name? I gave it to my girlfriends to read, One of them knows a little bit about literature. She felt the same way: It’s for a narrow circle.” I say, “Well, the part about St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, You didn’t get that?” She says, “No, I got the part about Tikhon.” I say, “What about Seryozha the drunk, did you get that?” She says, “I got that.” I say, “And the essays, you didn’t get them?” “I got the prose,” she says. “I even wanted to read more About the people you were writing about.” So I say, “Lena, believe me, I didn’t do it on purpose. I don’t want it to be hard to figure out.

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It just turns out that way.” She looks at me sympathetically And says, “Okay.” I keep on justifying myself, “You know, I write plenty of articles, And if you understand the ones in the book, Then you’d get the other ones too, right?” She says, “Okay, I get it. So, do you want two beers and menthol cigarettes?” “Yes,” I say, “Lena, I’m going to work on myself. The balloon came back, a sign of wealth. Look, that’s almost rhyme.” Why in the world do I care if she gets it? Why am I trying to justify myself? Why do I have this furtive sense of unease? This forgotten Wish that she like me? Do I want to be loved by the people, Like Vodennikov2 (poet or pianist)? Am I conducting a purely socio-cultural experiment Like D.A. Prigov?3 I already conducted one experiment In his memory At the election of a king of poets At the Polytechnic Institute (I read an anti-Putin ditty At a festival sponsored by his Administration. The pure wave of icy hatred that rushed at me from the audience— Students from provincial theater institutes— Was more than I had felt in a lifetime.

2

     Contemporary Russian poet.

3

     Poet and artist, the leader of Russian Conceptualism.

Elena Fanailova. From The Russian Version That’s a useful experiment.) I always used to say: Never show your poems To your children or relatives To workers or peasants Instead, show factories and production plants, To the poor—other people’s problems, to the rich as well But I Show the work of native speech In a country of natural resources I am not fucking anyone over, Like that poetess, Johanna Pollyeva4 Obviously, this is an unthinkable claim And an illegitimate assertion of power My father was right to be angry When he read in my adolescent diary: I would not want to pretend That I am the same as everyone else. (“What, do you think you’re above the rest?” He asked me with a passion That bordered on sado-masochism.) I was fifteen And depressed for the first time My parents didn’t notice a thing I wasn’t a complainer And wasn’t used to asking for attention I don’t think I’m better My claim is tougher than that I think I’m different—male, female, other, the others Like in the movie by that name 4

     A poet, author of lyrics for several pop songs and at the same time the head of the office of Russian State Duma (since 2012). From 2004-2011 she served as an assistant to the President of the Russian Federation. 

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Part 2. “Little Terror” and Traumatic Writing With Nicole Kidman in the lead I don’t get why On New Year’s Eve People run around looking for a tree And for gifts I don’t get the dumb tradition Of waiting around For the President’s speech on TV Before the drinking and eating I spent this New Year’s Eve On a train From Moscow to Voronezh With Chinese workers. Their Year of the Rat begins in February And they went to sleep at eleven And I fell asleep with them As opposed to my usual habit Of staying up until four I like to look into Windows all lit up Aquarium fish Live there among the seaweed This is all terribly interesting. But I do not understand how it works Who thought up the idea Of drinking champagne At the Metropolitan Opera? On the other side of the world It could have been entirely otherwise, In short I can’t pretend any longer I walk home thinking: Who is she, this Lena,

Elena Fanailova. From The Russian Version A clerk in an all-night store Heavyset, fifty years old, with glasses I love the word heavyset She is plump, not all flabby, tall A solid bleached blonde She watches the Culture channel When she’s not working around the clock Coming out to smoke on the stoop And joke with the security guard Who was she in that previous life? An engineer? A librarian? I have to remember to ask next time If there aren’t too many people around And of course, she’s right: It’s a complicated text, Even when it pretends to be simple, Like now

Translated by Stephanie Sandler

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The Presnyakov Brothers

T er ror ism ( e xcer pts ) 1

SCENE ONE The tarmacked area in front of an airport: instead of the cars usually parked in this area, there are numerous passengers sitting on their bags and cases. Judging by their miserable, huddled poses and their faces, which have stiffened in an expression of resigned desperation and silent hysterics, they’ve been here quite a while. It seems likely that these wretched people set off for the airport in order to fly somewhere they needed to go: some of them on business trips; some of them on holiday; and some of them, well, just because the time had come for them to fly somewhere. However, something has put paid to their plans and forced all these would-be flyers to stop right here on this inauspicious stretch of tarmac— suddenly a focus of misfortune. On the far side of the tarmac, directly in front of the glass-fronted airport building, stretches a line of armed men. It appears that it is because of this long and rather unsightly line of soldiers that no one can fly. The cordon is an indication of the seriousness of what is happening. No one is talking—neither the soldiers, nor the Passengers. It’s very quiet all around. There isn’t even the usual roar of planes landing and taking off. There is a depressing feeling of paralysis, acting upon all sounds and signs of life, and it is strengthened by the hardly discernible, yet insistent rustling of the main entrance doors, opening and shutting. A guard in the cordon is standing next to these automatic doors. He was positioned here and he is not able to move from his post, so the doors, which react with great sensitivity to the presence of a human body within their range, are twitching back and forth. The doors will only stop twitching if the soldier moves from his post…. A new P a s s e n g e r appears on the tarmac. Without paying attention to anyone, he walks with a carefully measured pace directly towards the guard, who is standing motionless by the door. Actually it only seems that the P a s s e n g e r ,

1

    From The Presnyakov Brothers, Terrorism, trans. Sasha Dugdale (London: Nick Hern Books, 2003). Excerpts from Terrorism are copyright © 2003 The Presnyakov Brothers, and the translations are copyright © 2003 Sasha Dugdale. Reprinted by arrangement with the publishers, Nick Hern Books Ltd: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

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Part 2. “Little Terror” and Traumatic Writing who is oblivious of everything, is walking towards the M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . In fact he is walking towards the doors, which the soldier’s bio force has jammed. The P a s s e n g e r appears to know this route well. He walks almost intuitively, without looking at anything around him, in his own little world, and this is why he doesn’t notice anything strange about the scene….

M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . The airport is closed. P a s s e n g e r . Pardon? M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . The airport is closed. P a s s e n g e r . But I have a flight to catch—it leaves in twenty minutes. M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . Papers. P a s s e n g e r . Here you are—this is my ticket and … erm … here’s my passport…. (He fusses getting them out and hands them to the soldier. The soldier studies them and hands them back.) M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . The airport is closed. P a s s e n g e r . So how am I going to catch my plane? The M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m remains silent, and sternly and fixedly gazes straight through the P a s s e n g e r . P a s s e n g e r . Listen, I’m sure you’re fed up of explaining why no one is allowed into the airport, but I happen not to know. I bought this ticket a week ago and no one warned me that everything could be just canceled, because the airport had closed without warning. So excuse me, but can you make the effort to answer my questions—they’re completely legitimate. M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . There is a bomb alert in the airport and all flights are delayed for the foreseeable future. When the airport has been cleared of explosive devices you will be able to enter. P a s s e n g e r . I will … but there won’t be much point by then…. Christ only knows what’s going on … bomb alerts at the airport. And when will you…. What’s the point…. The P a s s e n g e r mumbles something else whilst moving away from the soldier and sits down on his suitcase next to some other waiting P a s s e n g e r s.

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

P a s s e n g e r (addressing the man sitting next to him, who is perched regally on a checked case). Do you know what’s going on? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (looking up at the sky and wrinkling up his eyes). Of course … there’s a bomb alert in the airport…. P a s s e n g e r . Why … I mean, someone must have been arriving or about to leave, someone very…. Someone they’d want to attack … a politician or a scientist? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (addressing S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r , who is sitting on the tarmac as he has no baggage. Indeed the only way you’d know he was a P a s s e n g e r is because he is waiting for the airport to open, like the rest). Are you a politician? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . A scientist? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Strange. You’re the only person here who looks anything like a politician or a scientist…. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Why? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Because you haven’t got any luggage. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . So what? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . No luggage means nothing bothers you. Either it’s being delivered, or you don’t need it at all, because you’re so caught up in your politics or your science you don’t think about anything else…. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Well actually I’m not thinking about anything else. But I’m not a politician, or a scientist. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Are you worth attacking? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No idea…. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . I mean, could they have planted bombs in the airport because of you? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r (nervily). What makes you think there are bombs planted in the airport? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (with irony). I’m guessing. P a s s e n g e r . In fact it’s what that soldier said…. F i r s t and S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r s (together). The soldier said that? P a s s e n g e r . Yes, he just told me. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . I never heard anything like that from them…. I just know someone left some bags on the runway, and

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at the moment the bomb disposal people are trying to find out what’s inside. And while they’re doing that, all the flights are canceled and the airport is closed. P a s s e n g e r . All because of some stupid bags?! S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . All because of some “stupid bags”?! There could be anything in those bags! We could all go up in smoke. And it’s naïve to suppose that bombs are planted in airports because of politicians and scientists. They’re planted there for everyone, everyone sitting here…. Because when totally normal, innocent people are killed it’s even more shocking than when some famous person is. If the most ordinary people are killed … I mean, often and in large numbers, and not at war, but right in their homes and in airplanes and on their way to work … well then, everything in the country changes, and politicians with their pointless politics and scientists with all their science can go to hell…. P a s s e n g e r . To hell? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Yes—because no one and nothing can control a world in which ordinary people are killed that often … and in such large numbers…. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Yeah—that’s right. Why go chasing after the ones with the bodyguards? Because it’s so simple to kill an idea, assassinate the sense in things … no one guards them, do they? The meaning of life, the big idea … it’s in people, it’s in all of us, and no one’s guarding us! Even now they’re guarding the airport and not us. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . The innocent always suffer…. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . That’s right. The innocent always suffer…. After saying this phrase F i r s t and S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r s shake their heads theatrically. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Although one way or another everyone’s guilty of something. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Still, that’s no reason to start bombing everyone. P a s s e n g e r . Hang on, so where did you get the idea that something in those bags could blow up?

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . They’re finding out right now. We’re not claiming anything—we’re just discussing it. And they (He points at the soldiers. standing in a line.) … they’re finding out…. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . But in any case, it’s already blown up. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Yes, that’s right. It’s blown up. P a s s e n g e r . What? (Looks around theatrically.) So where’s the smoke? The splinters? Ruins? Where are they? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . It’s all inside. P a s s e n g e r . Inside? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Yes. Inside all these people sitting here right now—and the ones who are stopping us going in (He points at the soldiers.) … Those people standing in the cordon … they were tom away from something, from their own lives, whoever they were … made to worry, panic, even if they are pretending that they’re not scared. But they’re cold inside, a nasty little cold draught is blowing through them. They pretend it isn’t, but it is, I can see…. In all of us here something has been broken, we’ve been made to think about something completely different. And what can we do about it? Eh? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . And think about the ones out there on the runway at the moment—they’re risking their lives opening those bags. There are three suitcases and in every single one of them there could be an explosive. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . In every one of them? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . It’s not ruled out. There’d be such a blast that even here we’d be covered in splinters. P a s s e n g e r . You’ve clearly been here quite a while, you must be absolutely furious. You’ve obviously got to the point when you know what each other’s going to say, because you really seem to have your stories straight. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r (as if frightened). Straight? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (mockingly). Straight! After this everyone is silent for a while.

P a s s e n g e r . What’s the time? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . What difference does it make? No one’s going anywhere anyway. Where were you trying to get to?

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P a s s e n g e r . Does it matter? I just needed to get there. I wanted to fly from this place to another … meetings…. I was given a lift here. My wife packed my bag and saw me off and she’ll be waiting for me tomorrow, and they’ll be waiting for me there in three hours’ time. But it seems I’m not going to be there in three hours…. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . You won’t! S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No, you won’t! P a s s e n g e r . So I’m going to be late everywhere, it appears. What shall I do? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . What indeed? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . If everything blows up we won’t be flying anywhere for a while, till they mend everything…. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . We won’t be flying anywhere at all, if that happens! S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . If they get rid of the bombs we won’t be going anywhere for a while anyway. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Really? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . It’ll be two or three hours while they redo the timetable, after all, everything’s been put back. P a s s e n g e r . As long as nothing blows up. I’ve got to get there, whatever it takes. I’ve got to get there…. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . You’ll get there. In about six hours at the earliest, if they defuse the bombs right now. P a s s e n g e r . Good God. It’s madness—what sort of an age do we live in? You don’t feel safe anywhere now, only at home…. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . At home? P a s s e n g e r . Only at home now. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . You hold on to your convictions. P a s s e n g e r . What do you mean? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Who knows what all this will come to? For example, have you any idea what’s become of competition? P a s s e n g e r . Competition? You mean, market forces? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Whatever! When someone wants to prove to someone else that he’s better than he really is—it’s a harmless enough idea, isn’t it, and what’s become of it? P a s s e n g e r . What? What has become of it?

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Competition is all about choice now. If there’s something else on offer, why not go for it? It means choosing, it means, horror of horrors, refusing. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . In theory, yeah, that’s right—there is an issue of choice. But, like, they say Pepsi and Coca-Cola are owned by the same company and all this competition stuff is just a clever trick. If you don’t buy one, you definitely buy the other, and the owner gets the profit from the lot, because it’s all his. All of it! S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Yes … yes … yes…. Hmmm. So in fact this issue of choice is probably just a decoy. It’s a sham. Everything has already been decided. Even now. P a s s e n g e r . Now? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Of course. See, I’m boiling with rage inside. I can barely hold back from attacking someone because I’m late, I’m not going to make it on time, and actually I could have died—it’s a good thing they discovered those bags on the runway in time. And, in fact, I’ve got no choice. I’ve got to sit here and wait until all this madness is over. I’m forced to take part in it all. P a s s e n g e r . Well I have got a choice. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Really? P a s s e n g e r . Yes. I’m going home. And when everything’s returned to normal I’ll come back and get my flight. But right now I’m going home because I have no desire to wait here. This doesn’t concern me and actually I don’t care what happens. I’ll wait it out at home, they’ll change my ticket, the airline will pay me compensation for the delay and I’ll make it to where I wanted to go anyway. I’ll be late, but I’ll make it. And it doesn’t matter whether I’m on time or not as I have a good excuse. They can turn on their TVs and they’ll find out that I’ve got a decent excuse. I’ll wait it out at home. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . You’re just trying to convince yourself! F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Do you think it will help? P a s s e n g e r (muttering). There’s a bomb alert in the airport, I’m off home. I’ll be back in an hour maximum. Right, that’s it. I’m off.

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F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . So are you really going home? P a s s e n g e r . Yes. There’s no point in hanging around here, this pantomime will go on for ages. S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . For ages. P a s s e n g e r . Goodbye. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . But you’re coming back? P a s s e n g e r . Of course I am. I’ll get my flight today whatever. F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Well then, see you soon. P a s s e n g e r . See you soon? F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . As soon as this madness is over, there’ll be another, probably something along the lines of stuffing everyone into one plane, which will race around at the speed of sound dropping us all off where we need to be…. P a s s e n g e r . I don’t get your stupid jokes … what d’you mean by that? What’s the point of joking right now? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . So are they waiting for you? P a s s e n g e r . Who? S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Where you’re going. There. If there’s no one waiting for you why don’t you stay? P a s s e n g e r . It’ll be a surprise. (He collects up his belongings.) S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . See you then. The P a s s e n g e r leaves and F i r s t and S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r s remain seated, waiting.

S C EN E T WO The bedroom in a standard flat. In the middle of the room is a large bed. Slightly to the side is a cupboard with a mirror, and by the bed are bedside tables with lamps and a telephone on one. There’s a M a n and W o m a n in the bed.

W o m a n . I feel bad…. (She’s on the verge of crying.) M a n . Oh don’t start. Anything but that. What’s wrong with you, eh? What’s this all about—all this emotional stuff suddenly? Some memory upsetting you? Why are you crying for no reason? W o m a n . I don’t know. I feel bad, confused … like a used ashtray. M a n . A used ashtray….

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

W o m a n . I don’t know.... It’s like when you’ve held back for a long time, you really think it’s going to be special with that particular man, or with any man in fact … you hang on, you fantasize, and then, when it all happens, the second after, this emptiness suddenly descends on you, and now, this is like the whole lot together…. M a n . There must be something wrong with you … you can’t go round being like that! W o m a n . I don’t know…. But the hardest thing is getting over these first few seconds and minutes. After that, when you start to want it again, it gets easier…. (Suddenly shouts.) And then it all happens again! The whole lot again…. M a n . You’re a psychopath! How on earth does your husband put up with you? W o m a n . Habit. M a n . Habit … he puts up with you out of habit…. And are these hysterics of yours also habit, or did you arrange this show especially for me? W o m a n . For you … for you. It’ll pass in a minute. How was it for you? M a n . Yeah, alright. Could do it again. W o m a n . Oh God, find another word, anything else … are you trying to kill me? M a n (theatrically, and with a slightly mournful intonation, reads a poem aloud). Late autumn, The rooks have flown, The trees are naked, The fields are bare, Only a strip left to be mown, Casts us suddenly into despair, As if ears of corn were whispering together: We’re miserable here in the raging weather….

W o m a n . Stop it! M a n . I dunno. It’s helped me ever since school. I say it in my head or out aloud and the time flies past and I think about those ears of com and not about whatever it is that’s troubling

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me … just the ears of corn. It gets better as it goes on, because those ears of corn are sort of waiting for a peasant who hasn’t ploughed the land or harvested them, yeah, so they’re waiting and calling him and then there’s an answer, right, this voice from above or something, says to them, I mean, to these ears of corn: He doesn’t reap or sow the field, Because he is so very sick. The hands that tended strips of land Have dried to old stick, And hang like whips.

W o m a n (turns right over to face the M a n and suddenly climbs on top of him. The violent and yet coquettish way she does this suggests a sudden mood change). Fancy tying me up? M a n . Tie you up? What with? I don’t wear a belt … with his belt? W o m a n . He doesn’t wear one…. Oh, tie me up with a pair of tights. M a n . Tights? W o m a n . Yeah—take some out of the cupboard and I’ll lie here like I’m unconscious. (She rolls away from the M a n and pushes him out of the bed with her feet. The M a n falls on the floor.) So I’m lying here unconscious and you tie me up, whilst I’m still unconscious, and I’ll come round straight away, but it will be too late and you will possess me completely and I will submit, helplessly. M a n (crawls over to the cupboard). Won’t the tights tear? W o m a n . No, they won’t. (She adopts the pose of a woman who is unconscious for some unclear reason of her own.) Come on then, they’re over there in the cupboard in the middle drawer. The naked M a n stands up in front of the cupboard and opens the door. In front of him there are a large number of drawers of underwear. The M a n opens one, then another, quickly scans the drawer and, discovering nothing made of nylon, he sits down on the ground, deciding to make a more detailed search from the bottom of the cupboard.

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

M a n (pulling a pair of socks out of the cupboard). Your husband wears long socks. (He reads the word embroidered on the socks.) Carpenter…. They’re long ones … shall I tie you up with these, then? W o m a n . They could be dirty. He always chucks them back in with everything else without sorting them. M a n . With everything else … (He lifts the socks to his nose and sniffs.)… they’re dirty … (He lifts them again.) … what a strange smell…. W o m a n . Oh, I can’t bear it…. Get on with it, won’t you! (She lies back as if unconscious.) M a n . You live in a pigsty…. W o m a n (comes to, irritated). You keep an eye on your own wife. This pigsty is fine by me. M a n (takes a pair of women’s knickers out of the drawer and lifts them to his nose). That’s strange—your underwear smells like your husband’s socks. W o m a n (explodes). Did he chuck them in with my underwear? M a n . No, they’re in a different drawer, but they smell the same. W o m a n . Give them here! The M a n throws the long “Carpenter” socks and the knickers over to the W o m a n in the bed. The W o m a n sniffs the knickers first and then her

husband’s socks.

That’s odd…. Are you sure they weren’t in the same drawer? M a n . Sure. This is all your stuff—(He points at one of the middle drawers.)—and this is his—(He points at another drawer higher up.)—and these socks were down here actually. (He points at the lowest drawer.) W o m a n . I don’t know. It’s probably the cupboard making them smell. M a n . The cupboard? W o m a n . Yeah, the smell of wood…. M a n . Wood…. W o m a n (throws the socks and the knickers at the M a n ). Put them back and stop sniffing everything, will you? Get on with the business, for God’s sake! M a n (crosses to another compartment of the cupboard and opens it; in front of him is a space filled to bursting with clothes; the clothes

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are heaped up in a pile right to the very top of the cupboard). Your cupboard is full! W o m a n . And? M a n (pulls a crumpled and creased pair of tights from the heap of clothes, then another pair and carries on until he has about five or six pairs). That’s not good! W o m a n . Why? M a n . If your husband comes home I’ll have nowhere to hide. W o m a n . He’s not coming home. M a n . Not at all? W o m a n . He gets back tomorrow. M a n . All the same, we should have arranged this for when he was definitely on the plane. Or after he’d arrived in wherever he was going to. He could have rung to let you know he’d got there or something. I shouldn’t have come until then. Because this way was ridiculous—me sitting on the bench, waiting for him to come out of the building and walk off into the distance. (He goes over to the bed and gets up on it, continuing to speak, and starts tying the Woman’s hands.) I had fantasies, too—about breaking in here and making love to you…. See, I don’t care about the stuff people normally care about. You know, usually, when it’s someone else’s wife, you ask, “Did you give him a goodbye kiss? Did he hug you?” I don’t care about all that stuff because every one of us does exactly what they want. And I feel down and empty straight after I come as well, and then I want to do it again and then I want to eat…. It’s horribly ordinary, somehow, even the fact that you’re someone else’s wife and I’m tying you up … should I tie your legs? W o m a n (momentarily coming round and immediately afterwards “losing” consciousness again). Yes. M a n (continuing to speak and to tie her up). I don’t want to think about all this…. I want to imagine that … yes … something untasted and deliciously interesting is lying in front of me, all tied up, and I’m about to violate it and nothing will happen to me as a result, because, in theory, everything has been mutually agreed, although this stuff wasn’t in the small print (After tying

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

the W o m a n ’s legs he lays on top of her. He doesn’t move for a while and then he begins the sexual act.) and I know that I’d be far happier if I really had the urge to tie someone up and get pleasure from it, or to secretly sniff someone’s underwear or socks and to get off on it so totally that I could come with the single thought that I was about to sniff something intimate, something not mine. That would make me feel good … but I don’t like that stuff, I can’t get into it, and anyway I’ve realized that every little bit of my body is separate from the other bits and lives its own life, not understood by the rest of my body. All of it is separate and sometimes, right, one part of me terrorizes another part, yeah … at the moment my mind is making fun of everything that should turn me on. So I’m rubbing myself on you, but not getting any excitement because it’s like I’m in a diving suit, and the fact that I’m hard and I’ll probably come in a minute—all that’s my memory keeping me going, but every time my mind commits a terrorist act I get closer to forgetting everything and the first thing that will happen then is that I’ll become impotent and then it’ll go further and further and if I suddenly don’t like the smell of someone’s underwear or something, then that’ll be it … that’s it … that’s it. (He comes.) W o m a n . I’ve gone numb all over. M a n . Because of the tights? Shall I untie you? W o m a n . Because of your words…. I don’t know … they’re like chains…. M a n . Right. W o m a n . Turns out you’re worse than me. I just felt bad and I wanted to spoil your mood too, infect you with it—but you’re a nightmare, you’re completely hopeless … untie me. M a n . I wouldn’t mind a bite to eat. W o m a n . Great. Untie me. M a n . I wouldn’t mind a bite … so I must have something to eat, that’s for certain. After the second go I don’t feel so bad myself because I get up an appetite and suddenly I think “that was worth doing, after all” … it was worth it if only to get up an appetite…. I must feed it though, because while it’s still there, there’s still hope.

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W o m a n . Christ! The more time I spend with you, listening to all your words, the more I like my husband … soon it’ll get to the point where I fall in love with him again. M a n . I’m saving your marriage. W o m a n . Untie me. M a n . Is there anything to eat? W o m a n . In the kitchen … in the fridge. There’s a glass bowl covered with a plate. Salad in it. M a n . Bread? W o m a n . White? Black? M a n . Black? W o m a n . There’s no black. M a n . White? W o m a n . Baguette. M a n . Baguette? W o m a n . It’s stale…. We don’t eat bread…. From the day before yesterday…. We had guests the day before yesterday. Untie me. M a n . No I won’t untie you. Can I eat in bed? W o m a n . No. You should eat at the table, but if you don’t untie me you can eat in bed, ’cause no one’s going to stop you eating in bed. M a n (stands up and goes out to the kitchen. He shouts from the kitchen). I’ll eat straight out of the bowl, alright? W o m a n . Aren’t you going to untie me? M a n . No. This way is more interesting…. He appears in the bedroom with the bowl, chewing. He starts to say something else but he is interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing. The phone rings twice. The bound W o m a n twitches. The M a n stands and looks at the phone. The answering machine clicks on.

A n s w e r i n g m a c h i n e . Hallo. There is no one at home. Please leave a message after the tone. (The tone sounds and then the machine suddenly fails—it repeats the recorded message and after it the tone sounds and cuts off once again. A long hissing sound remains….) W o m a n . There you go—and the answering machine’s gone wrong! Turn it off, will you? That sound drives me mad. (The

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

M a n stands there, the answerphone hisses—suddenly it quiets of its own accord and seems to fade out.) Thanks. M a n . You’re welcome. Only I didn’t even touch it. W o m a n . Never mind. The main thing is it shut up. What were you saying? M a n . Who do you think it was? W o m a n . Who cares who it was. What, were you saying, would be more interesting? M a n . Real violence. I was saying that real violence would be more interesting. I’m not going to untie you. It couldn’t have been him? W o m a n . Him, her … whatever. I’m out! M a n (settles on the bed and eats). I’m definitely out! W o m a n . That’s for sure! What are you going to do when you’ve finished eating? M a n . Have a sleep. W o m a n . What about me? M a n . You can do what you like … but I’m not going to untie you yet. I’ll have a sleep, rest a bit and then make love to you again. W o m a n . You’ve got it all worked out perfectly … almost too perfectly! M a n . You don’t like it? W o m a n . No! M a n . Excellent! Now it’s for real … none of this playing around. Is it turning you on? W o m a n . Not just yet! M a n . Wait then. (He finishes eating and puts the empty bowl on the ground, lies down on the pillow and wraps himself up in the blanket.) W o m a n . What are you doing? M a n (as if he was half-asleep). Perhaps in a minute … or maybe in an hour … I’ll jump on top of you…. W o m a n . What? Are you really going to have a sleep? M a n . I’ll try…. W o m a n (hysterically). Untie me! Untie me! M a n . Do you want me to gag you? W o m a n (scared). No.

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M a n . Stop shouting then…. W o m a n . OK. M a n . See, you’re liking it already. W o m a n (hissing like a snake). Don’t sleep for long—I’ll get pins and needles in my hands. M a n . Gag … gag … horrible word, that—gag. W o m a n . You understood me … pins and needles in my hands. M a n (turns onto his side). Your bed squeaks like a swing— W o m a n . A swing? M a n . Yeah, a swing. You’ve got a swing in your yard and whilst I was waiting for your husband to disappear a kid was swinging for ages, and the swing made this eek-eek noise and your bed sounds just like that…. It squeaked the whole time when I, when we— W o m a n . Hey—well I can only check whether it squeaks or not with you— M a n . Just don’t complain! W o m a n . I’m not! M a n . You’re the victim, I’m the rapist…. It would be absurd if you started complaining to me. W o m a n . You started complaining to me first! That’s even more absurd—the rapist complaining to the victim that her bed squeaks. The M a n jumps up from the bed and runs over to the cupboard. He grabs some piece of underwear from a drawer and returns to the bed. He screws up the underwear and stuffs it into the W o m a n ’s mouth. The W o m a n twitches, tries to bellow something out, but the M a n stops up her mouth even more firmly.

M a n . You’re really spoiling it for me … you’re stopping me getting in the proper mood…. (The W o m a n soundlessly writhes.) I’ll wake up just as you’re getting tired and we’ll have a good time. You’ll have a doubly good time, I’ll screw you and untie you. Heaven. (He covers himself in the blanket from his head down. The W o m a n twitches some time more and then calms down. Suddenly the M a n throws off the blanket and gets up.) Can you hear? (He remembers that the W o m a n can’t answer.) Oh…. Something’s hissing. Is it the answerphone or something…. I didn’t tum it

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off, did I? They’re probably still working out a message to leave us…. Oh well, let them think…. (He covers himself in the blanket from his head down.) […] SCENE FOUR A yard with a bench. Two old W o m e n are sitting on the bench. From far off comes the sound of a swing. It is as if somewhere in the depths of the yard an invisible person is swinging on a rusty swing—a rusty robot. The robot likes swinging—so it’s not very likely that he’s going to stop for a break at any point and even less likely that he’s going to leave the swing in peace—he’s going to be swinging forever. The W o m e n sitting on the bench have probably realized this and they are trying to get used to the iron sounds piercing their hearts, and imitate them with the sounds and the droning of their own voices.

F i r s t w o m a n . Are you dressed up warmly? S e c o n d w o m a n . Yes. (She pulls up her skirt and displays to the other W o m a n her pink woolen longjohns.) That Lisa’s had a chill in her bladder and she always wears a pair like this, right over her tights. As soon as there’s a breeze, even a light one, she gets a chill in her bladder straight away. And then she wees blood. Says it’s like someone was sticking a fork or a penknife into her weehole. There she is squatting over the toilet and waiting for it to cut its way through. Five minutes, ten, twenty … and then it’s got blood in it. She was wretched with it until she started wearing these. F i r s t w o m a n . Better safe than sorry. S e c o n d w o m a n . Better safe than sorry. F i r s t w o m a n (turning towards the sounds of the swing, shouts). You not tired yet? C h i l d ’s v o i c e . No! F i r s t w o m a n . Well go on, then, go on. Have a swing. S e c o n d w o m a n . Let him swing. F i r s t w o m a n . His parents come home, lock him up in their four rooms and he goes over to the window and looks out, looks at that swing … like a dog who hasn’t been taken for a walk he

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looks out. I say to them, let the kid go outside, and they act like they can’t hear me, I mean, like I’m there but I’m not. I’m like the noise of the running water when you wash up … they notice me when they want something…. You’re a witness. S e c o n d w o m a n . Yes. F i r s t w o m a n . Like, I wouldn’t wish evil on anyone…. S e c o n d w o m a n . No…. F i r s t w o m a n . But them…. You’ll see! It’s right to my face. Like only yesterday I says to them, if I’m getting in your way … if you don’t want anyone in the way, well then put me in a home for old people. What do I care? I’ve seen everything I need to, they’re the ones who’ve got to live and bring up the kid. S e c o n d w o m a n . Oh come off it! Honestly, what sort of home would that be, then? F i r s t w o m a n . The usual sort. At least I’ll know there that I’m definitely no use to anyone. I mean, look how they treat me here. My own flesh and blood and they talk to me like that! S e c o n d w o m a n . What about your daughter? F i r s t w o m a n . What about her? Sleeps with him at night and then repeats his words all day. She does everything he puts into her head at night…. Sometimes I wonder if it’s my own daughter or not. S e c o n d w o m a n . Only got yourself to blame. F i r s t w o m a n . Only got myself…. S e c o n d w o m a n . I warned you, when he’d only just started seeing your girl … I told you straight off—he’ll make trouble for you! He’ll get his hands on the lot! You weren’t quick enough, you didn’t see him coming! And now you’ll suffer for it! F i r s t w o m a n (whimpering). Yes. S e c o n d w o m a n . What in God’s name were you thinking of? You know what nationality he is. It’s in their blood—commanding, taking control … and you allowed the blood to mix… . F i r s t w o m a n . Lovely child, though. S e c o n d w o m a n . Lovely! But so what? Grow up just like his Dad! Degenerate! F i r s t w o m a n . Stop it!

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

S e c o n d w o m a n . Come on. If you don’t manage to drag him out from his Father’s influence he’ll grow up just the same. F i r s t w o m a n . But he’s got a good job, money corning in! S e c o n d w o m a n . How much of this money do you see? Any? There you go. Where does he dance—in a casino? F i r s t w o m a n . A club, in the restaurant…. S e c o n d w o m a n . So he’ll keep the job as long as this fashion for ethnic holds. They get a load of these ones, like your son-in-law and ask them to dance and sing, all in their … national style. And no one understands a word of it, do they, what they’re singing and dancing, ’cause everyone’s on drugs, the in-crowd and they’re in seventh heaven—someone in front of them wriggling and howling something they don’t understand. The ones who’ve got money—they get high on it, on all this ethnic, and invest in the ones like your son-in-law. These ethnics then reckon that someone has really understood the stuff they’re singing, when in fact no one gives a monkeys—it’s just they’ve made it the fashion, ‘cause no one cares about normal songs and dances, they’ve all got brains like Aero bars, full of holes—and to them it’s boring. No one gets off on simple understandable human language or straight culture anymore. Druggies, druggies all around, they’ve got the money, these producers, network marketing managers, supervisors … all working for drugs…. My whole pension goes on paying for my mobile and food, and they’re working to pay for the drugs as well. Just wait and see, this fashion for ethnic will pass and your son-in-law will be back sweeping the yard or nicking scrap metal—which is, after all, what these shepherds in their ribboned shirts should be doing. F i r s t w o m a n . So, if they chuck him out of work, I’ll have to support them, will I? S e c o n d w o m a n . No one’ll ask you. You’ll be in slavery, sweetheart. Or they’ll just drown you in the bath and take the flat for themselves. F i r s t w o m a n . Oh my God, are you serious … what am I going to do….

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S e c o n d w o m a n . Here you are! (Takes a little phial out of her coat pocket and stretches it out towards the F i r s t w o m a n .) F i r s t w o m a n . What’s this? S e c o n d w o m a n . This is war, d’you understand? It’s time to move from preventative measures to ground attack! In this war it’s the first to make a move comes out the winner. One of these tablets in his soup or his tea every day and in just six months daughter, grandson and his favourite Gran will be one happy family. All that’ll remain of the son-in-law are … happy memories. F i r s t w o m a n . Look at these round pills. Is this poison or something? S e c o n d w o m a n . Lozenges, love. Of course it’s poison—don’t worry—you won’t be found out—it’s already tried and tested— personally, by me! And your son-in-law is just a crook, my husband was way worse! F i r s t w o m a n . So you— S e c o n d w o m a n . Helped him! Helped him, or he’d have been around another twenty years, preparing to meet his maker. F i r s t w o m a n . He was such a nice man— S e c o n d w o m a n . Nice? That nice man ruined my whole life. It’s only the last year I’ve started to live like a real person. Freedom, my own flat, all the kids sorted out and no one bothering me. F i r s t w o m a n . How many tablets? One? S e c o n d w o m a n . One. F i r s t w o m a n . What about two? Would it be twice as fast? S e c o n d w o m a n . If you try two—I’m telling you now—I won’t be bringing you food parcels in prison. He’ll have shit running in his veins instead of blood and they’ll work out it was you straightaway … so you be patient, let it take its time…. And then no one will guess what happened … just one tablet a day! Do you understand? A M a n carrying some suitcases approaches the bench where the F i r s t and S e c o n d w o m a n are sitting and sits down a little way from the W o m e n , puts the suitcases down near him and looks down at the ground. He tenses his forehead and mutters something. His eyes are already wet and the wetness is just about to trickle down onto his cheeks. The W o m e n break off

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism their conversation and look discreetly out of the comers of their eyes at the M a n sitting next to them. The F i r s t w o m a n calls out theatrically in the direction of the squeaking swings, still squinting at their strange companion.

F i r s t w o m a n . Are you tired yet? C h i l d ’s v o i c e . No! F i r s t w o m a n . Well go on, then, go on. Have a swing. S e c o n d w o m a n . Let him swing. The M a n , unable to restrain himself, starts crying. F i r s t w o m a n . What’s wrong, eh? S e c o n d w o m a n . Hey, hey, hey … now then … come on … get a grip! F i r s t w o m a n . Here’s a hanky. Wipe your eyes. (She offers the M a n a hanky.) M a n . Thank you. The M a n wipes away his tears. The WOMEN stare at him, expecting that he will unburden himself to them any moment now.

M a n . Yes…. (He loses himself in thought and looks into the distance. His tears stop flowing and his eyes dry up.) So what’s up with you? F i r s t w o m a n . With us? S e c o n d w o m a n . What do you mean? M a n . Well, why are you sitting here, what are you waiting for? F i r s t w o m a n . I’m giving my grandson some fresh air! S e c o n d w o m a n . And I’m getting a bit of fresh air … what’s wrong with that? I’ve got the whole day ahead! M a n . Well then…. (He stands up, picks up the suitcases and walks off.) F i r s t w o m a n . Well look at him! S e c o n d w o m a n . Honestly, do I have to account for what I’m doing out here? It’s my husband I account to, and he’s hardly going to ask me! F i r s t w o m a n . I always sit here! My grandson is swinging over there, and so what? S e c o n d w o m a n . Those bossy types, I’ve always managed to get away from them, and now, thank you very much, I’m free, I do exactly what I want! So now does every so-and-so think

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he’s got the right to ask me questions and give me instructions? Do I have to write reports or something now? F i r s t w o m a n . I took him into the yard one block along for a walk. The swings are better over there. These two military types came up and asked if some green car was ours. S e c o n d w o m a n . Who does he think he is … taking his suitcases out for a walk…. F i r s t w o m a n . I says to them, it’s not … why you asking? S e c o n d w o m a n . He was probably late somewhere and annoyed about that, and we got in his way…. I’m not leaving this place ever. F i r s t w o m a n . So then they asked for my name and address. The car’s tires had been let down, they said, and no one knows whose it is, so they start asking if I knew anything or saw anyone get in it or let down the tires. S e c o n d w o m a n . I’m not waiting for anything any more. I’ve done my bit of waiting … and then this one turns up here and starts asking…. I did my bit of waiting thirty years ago and now I’ve stopped waiting. F i r s t w o m a n . I says to them that I hadn’t seen who got into the car or who let down the wotsits, I’ve got other things to worry about—my grandson is on the swing over there and why should I give my name to any old so-and-so?! S e c o n d w o m a n . I don’t even report back to my grown-up children where I’ve sat and where I’ve been, so why does some other bloke think he’s got the right? They’ve got their lives, I’ve got mine—it just so happened that their lives started from me, but I don’t make any demands on them because of that! And they know they won’t get anything from their Mother. F i r s t w o m a n . All the same they took down the lot, wrote it down, even my postcode! See what I mean! So I don’t go to that yard anymore—keep well clear! There’s a swing here as well. Not a bad swing. Give us those pills, then. The squeak of the swing suddenly stops.

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S e c o n d w o m a n . Take them. (She passes the F i r s t w o m a n the bottle of tablets.) Who is he, anyway? What’s his name? With his suitcases! Nowadays they have to check out anyone carrying suitcases. F i r s t w o m a n . What’s that on your forehead? She stares at the forehead of her elderly friend. She has a bright red dot shining and trembling slightly, right in the middle of her forehead, like the symbol of marriage on an Indian woman. Only this isn’t a symbol of marriage, but a laser sight. S e c o n d w o m a n . What? F i r s t w o m a n . Red dot. Come here. (She spits on her finger and tries to rub the dot off, but the red dot, like a ray of sun, escapes from her finger and settles slightly higher.) I need a hanky. S e c o n d w o m a n . He took it off with him! Well I never! Took us for a right old ride, didn’t he. Stop it, will you? (She pushes away the hand of her friend from her forehead.)

F i r s t w o m a n . Oh—it’s disappeared! Oh—it’s back again! S e c o n d w o m a n . What’s that, then? F i r s t w o m a n . Oh—I think it’s one of those laser sights…. Like a sniper’s aiming at you… S e c o n d w o m a n . What for? F i r s t w o m a n . To shoot you. S e c o n d w o m a n . Oh my goodness! (Jumps up and runs around the bench, hides behind the F i r s t w o m a n and peeps out from behind her back.) Look, what’s that your grandson is pointing at us? F i r s t w o m a n . Oh! That’s what his dad gave him—it’s only a toy, that laser sight. S e c o n d w o m a n . So it’s started already! That’s how it all starts, with toys! Tell him to put it away! (Hides behind F i r s t w o m a n .) Tell him! F i r s t w o m a n (shouts at the CHILD). What are you up to, eh? (Turns to her friend.) Don’t be scared, it doesn’t shoot, it just aims. S e c o n d w o m a n . Oh right, it aims—it just aims and then it shoots! (She shouts to the disobedient CHILD.) Put it away, do you hear? Move it away from us!

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F i r s t w o m a n (to the CHILD). Sit down and have a swing! Sit down and have a swing, love! S e c o n d w o m a n . He’s not listening! F i r s t w o m a n . Right, I’ll teach him! (She rushes over to the swing with a shout.) Didn’t I tell you to put that thing away? Put it away! Sit down and have a swing! Or I’ll take you home! S e c o n d w o m a n (getting up). Look at what blood makes people do. Just in their blood, and that’s it, nothing you can do, doesn’t matter how you bring them up, you need to poison the lot of them, every single one…. (Shouts at the F i r s t w o m a n .) Go on, break it! Break it into bits, so he won’t ever play with it again! (She runs over to the swing.) SCENE FIVE In the shower changing rooms at the base of one of the military police divisions. Steam from the showers penetrates into the changing rooms and envelops the countless lockers and low benches. A M a n with an athletic build is sitting on one of the benches in front of an open locker. He is squeezing white cream out of a long, large tube onto his palm and then rubbing it carefully on his toes. There is an impatient knocking and rattling from the next locker as if someone was locked in there and trying to break open the door from inside. At this point the door opens with a bang and two more young M e n run into the changing rooms with towels around their waists. One is holding a box of washing powder, the other runs over to his locker, digs around in it and gets out a sheet of white paper. Together they go over to the locker, from which the noise is coming, laughing and egging each other on. One shakes out some powder on the paper and the other one lifts it over to the chinks in the door of the locker and blows as hard as he can. There is the sound of coughing from inside the locker. The M e n guffaw, pleased with their little joke.

F i r s t m a n . Chemical weapon attack! S e c o n d m a n (shouts into the locker). Don’t breathe! T h i r d m a n (rubbing cream off his hands). Why do you keep getting at him? F i r s t m a n . ‘Cause he’s a fucking meatball! S e c o n d m a n . Ravioli man! (They both roar with laughter and lift the paper with the powder on it up to the locker and blow. Someone starts coughing loudly in the locker.)

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

T h i r d m a n . Where’ve you been today? F i r s t m a n . A fire. Someone blew up a block. T h i r d m a n . What was it like? (The person locked in the locker begins to knock frenziedly, the noise drowns out their voices.) Come on, open it—you’ve worn him down between the two of you. The S e c o n d m a n opens the locker. A puny naked M a n falls out. He looks much older than the MEN who locked him up. He gets over his coughing fit and then goes over to his locker, opens it and starts dressing, muttering the whole time….

F o u r t h m a n . Bastards…. S e c o n d m a n . You should be thanking us… See, you’re ready for anything now—even chemical warfare! (Roars with laughter.) T h i r d m a n . So what had happened, then? F i r s t m a n . Gas explosion. T h i r d m a n . Accident? F i r s t m a n . No, it’s not clear yet, but most likely it wasn’t an accident. The whole floor was destroyed and the explosion was in one of the flats—the experts have been digging away and the first signs are that it was a set up. Someone switched on the gas, all the taps…. The S e c o n d m a n is now digging away in his bag. He takes out a photograph and shows it to the T h i r d m a n .

S e c o n d m a n . Hey, look at what I snapped! Lovely, eh? Lovely. T h i r d m a n . Whose hands are those? F i r s t m a n . Look, hands and feet are tied to the bed, and in the middle—nothing! Hey, wow! T h i r d m a n . You’re maniacs! You collecting for an exhibition? S e c o n d m a n . Look—the limbs stayed with the bed, ’cause they were tied to it … but the body was blown away … they found it outside, amazing, eh? (He roars with laughter and sticks the photo right under the T h i r d m a n ’s nose. The T h i r d m a n pushes him away and the S e c o n d m a n brings the photo up to the eyes of the F i r s t m a n .) F i r s t m a n . Put it away! I can’t sleep doing this work as it is. F o u r t h m a n . You’re all sick.

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S e c o n d m a n . What’s wrong with you, eh? (He gives the photo to the F i r s t m a n and takes his towel from his waist. He folds it double and twists it up. Then he twirls it above his head, approaches the F o u r t h m a n and whips his thighs with energy.) F o u r t h m a n (shouts out hysterically). Leave off me! S e c o n d m a n . I’ll leave off you in a minute! I’ll leave off you so bad, you’ll do for our photo exhibition. I’ll just rip your legs off and stick them in your locker and we’ll take their picture and call it “Legs in a Locker.” (Roars with laughter.) F i r s t m a n . No—we’ll screw them to the bottom of the locker and then it’ll stand on his legs. (They both roar.) F o u r t h m a n . What do you want from me? Why do you get at me the whole time? (He starts to cry.) S e c o n d m a n . ‘Cause you’re a meatball! F i r s t m a n . Ravioli man! S e c o n d m a n . Seen your ears recently? F i r s t m a n . Was your Dad an elephant, then? Your Mum get too close to the cage at the zoo? Then she had you! S e c o n d m a n . Elephant! T h i r d m a n . Alright, that’s enough! Let him get dressed and disappear, the moaning he makes, I can’t stand it anymore. The S e c o n d m a n whips the F o u r t h m a n with the towel again. The F o u r t h m a n presses himself against the locker and remains silent.

S e c o n d m a n . Come on then! Give us a moan! The F o u r t h m a n suddenly turns around to the S e c o n d m a n and with all his strength, jumping slightly, gives him a swinging punch right in the face. The S e c o n d m a n falls over and lies there for some time working out what has happened. Then he jumps up suddenly and runs over to the F o u r t h m a n , lifts his hand and punches. The F o u r t h m a n dodges the blow adroitly and gives his aggressor another good punch in the eye. The S e c o n d m a n shouts out in rage and leaps onto the F o u r t h m a n , knocking him to the floor. Their bodies weave into a ball which rolls wildly from one side of the changing room to the other. At this point another fat, elderly M a n comes into the changing room. He is only wearing a t-shirt and trousers. He has bare feet and he is holding his tunic and boots in his hands. The M a n stops in amazement and looks at the F i f t h m a n , and then at the F i r s t and T h i r d m a n . They jump up and rush over to the F o u r t h and S e c o n d m a n and attempt to

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism part them. Then all four stand to attention along the bench in front of the F i f t h m a n . The F i f t h m a n goes over to his locker, puts the boots in at the bottom, hangs up the tunic and takes off his trousers. He wraps a towel around his waist. Without looking at the four standing to attention, he issues his command.

F i ft h m a n . At ease! (Turns towards them all.) Not tired yet? Lots of energy, eh? Eh? Can’t find a better use for your hands, eh? Give them something to play with. That’ll relax them. (Addresses the S e c o n d m a n .) You fight with him today, and tomorrow he might not drag you out of the rubble or from the epicenter, eh….You go on jobs together…. (Creaking, he sits down on the low bench.) Or maybe he’ll just give you a little push from behind. (He winks at F o u r t h m a n .) Eh? And that’ll be it—tragic accident on the job—and all because of your own stupidity…. Sit down. (They all sit down.) The F i f t h m a n remains silent for a long time, then he asks a question, but it isn’t clear to whom it is addressed.

Did you take any photos? They are all silent.

Come on then, show me, I saw you snapping away. Show me! The S e c o n d m a n gets up and goes over to his locker. He searches for the photo. The F i r s t m a n runs over to his locker and gets out the photo and stretches it out to the F i f t h m a n , who has a good look at it before handing it to the S e c o n d m a n .

A woman. O t h e r s (together). A woman? F i ft h m a n . Nails are painted. S e c o n d m a n . Painted? (Stares at the photo and then passes it to the F i r s t m a n .) F i r s t m a n . You’ve got eagle eyes—how on earth can you tell red nail varnish from blood? F i ft h m a n . You can tell—when you’ve seen as much as me, you’ll be able to. (He addresses the T h i r d m a n .) And where did they send your lot today? T h i r d m a n . The airport. F i ft h m a n . What was going on there?

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T h i r d m a n . The usual, suitcases on the runway…. F i ft h m a n . Did they explode? T h i r d m a n . No, they were empty. F i ft h m a n . Empty? T h i r d m a n . Yeah, someone left empty suitcases. F i r s t m a n . Deliberately? S e c o n d m a n . Why would they have deliberately left empty ones? F i r s t m a n . Well, perhaps they were giving a warning? To scare everyone. T h i r d m a n . Well they succeeded. We were stuck there for three hours, probing it all with the robot. F i ft h m a n . Well, we had … did the boys tell you? T h i r d m a n . Yes…. F i ft h m a n . Could have been an accident, could have been bloody anything. Someone turned on the gas, two people in the flat, then a spark from the doorbell set it off…. T h i r d m a n . The doorbell? F i ft h m a n . Yeah, from the doorbell … some kid, little fool … old woman and her friend were chasing him to give him what-for for some reason or other … anyway, he was going mad, running up the stairs, ringing all the doorbells on his way, so the people would come out of their flats and stop the women, ask why they were ringing and he could keep running and get away. T h i r d m a n . Cunning! F i ft h m a n . Yeah right, cunning—so he rings the doorbell of this flat and is blown away…. F o u r t h m a n . Probably scared they wanted to beat him up, probably…. F i ft h m a n . Yeah, got their own back, alright. They’re still alive, themselves. Not sure about the kid yet. T h i r d m a n . Old cows! What the hell were they playing at? F i ft h m a n . We questioned the women and asked them why they scared the kid so much that he started racing around the block, and one goes, “We do that a lot, but nothing’s ever blown up before.” I mean honestly … and the other one hasn’t said a word so far, it’s probably the shock…. She won’t say anything, just

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

keeps writing—some man’s name and then asks him to forgive her, writing and writing away…. “Forgive me,” and this bloke’s name. Then she looks around and shows us the bit of paper and moans…. T h i r d m a n . Anything can happen after something like that…. F o u r t h m a n . That’s right, some people tum into beasts after an experience like that…. S e c o n d m a n . What? F i ft h m a n . So why is it you keep taking photos of all this stuff? S e c o n d m a n . Why? I don’t know, like, for a laugh, and then maybe we can do an exhibition or something, like, “This is what not to do,” so everyone looks at all these horrible sights and is horrified and is more careful in future…. F i ft h m a n . You’re talking shit. S e c o n d m a n . Yeah?... F i ft h m a n . Yeah! Look how beautiful it is! (Takes the photo from the F i r s t m a n .) Eh? If it hadn’t been beautiful, you wouldn’t have taken a picture of it. That’s right! If someone looks at these pictures they see beauty in them and not horror. And so off they go to bring this beauty into being. And that’s how everyone is infected. Because after all, it’s not about how many die in all this—the explosions, murders, terrorism … it’s about something else, way more frightening—this is the beginning of a chain reaction. Everyone, I mean everyone, is infected. Innocent people get killed—so then the innocent become infected and the peacemakers go about doing violence with the zeal of the converted. And no one wants to stop. No one! But all these little thoughts, they’re neither here nor there. It’s even funny, how run-of-the-mill they are! Still, your idea is damaging, these photographs … an exhibition … it’s like the empty suitcases on the runway. Eh? Everyone studies them, analyzes them—but they don’t explode here and now, they explode later, in each person, in their life, each one differently. What?... Because it’s so easy now—my friend told me this story, about how late at night he threw his old dog off the balcony … easier that way, the sweepers will clear it up in the morning, no hassle, just chucked it off, and that’s that, an old dog. Horrible, isn’t

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it? I’m telling you that as an example of something terrible … because it is terrible…. So maybe, if you see what I mean, you go off and tell your friends that you’ve got this colonel whose friend is a sadist, and you tell them what he did with his dog, and they go off and tell their friends and then someone sees the point of it, I mean, after all, it’s handy—no paying to have it put down—just out on the balcony and over! And if no one had told him, would he have thought of it by himself, eh? Or he thinks, someone else has done it already, so why shouldn’t I go ahead? F o u r t h m a n . So you reckon even talking about it, showing it should be forbidden…. You reckon, yeah, that once it’s happened, that’s it. Bombs, murder, violence—let it go on. So long as we’re kept in a cage, right, kept so we know nothing, nothing, about it…. F i ft h m a n . I reckon that unless you show this lot (He points at the FIRST and S e c o n d m a n .) you mean business, they’ll fuck you over totally soon. Whenever I see you lot off duty they’re always on your back. Eh? What? You sort out your own problems first, and then think about other people’s. So stop the arguing. Alright, relax! He gets up and goes into the shower room. The F i r s t , S e c o n d , T h i r d and F o u r t h m a n start getting dressed. Suddenly the F i f t h m a n comes back in, goes over to the others and, completely unexpectedly, starts

to sing:

Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday, Mister President! Happy Birthday to you!

Eh? How did that sound? S e c o n d m a n . Like Marilyn Monroe. F i ft h m a n . Right! No one, no one, sings that from the heart, with real feeling. At all those anniversaries, concerts, at home … they all try to sing it like she did back then to the President. Did you know that the President and the rest, they were all waiting for her that night, but she was late, and she was … she

The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism

needed a fix, she was desperate…. Like, I mean, think about it, she needed help, help first, work it all out later…. That voice, those gestures—typical of heroin addicts … there’s your happy birthday for you. And everyone took it as the norm, everyone wanted to copy her. Imagine…. Eh? Alright, relax…. He goes out. […]

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Andrei Rodionov

“A beauty and junkie with long legs…”

A beauty and junkie with long legs Has lived with me for about a year. She’s the ex of a famous musician, A totally strung-out raver-freak. I know she probably isn’t cheating on me— Lately, she’s afraid of something: Tries not to hang with her old friends, Prefers to communicate with a disposable syringe. I get her: the bitch is tired— Even a large frigate needs a safe harbor. She gets to rest with me—I’m boring and quiet, And I never swear around her. She works as a secretary, I steal a bit From second-hands, USA Global shops, Deal a little dope, dance on the Arbat: Shake my ass at raves in front of chumps. Mom says it’s all the wife’s fault, That I’m headed for a breakdown—I know it myself. The cotton ball’s brown at the tip of the needle, But I’m not afraid—this is my life. I try to be strong, I try to be bold, Try to drink as much as her former “friends”— Try to keep it real, give myself whole, Though I’m surrounded for life by second-hands. She’s also “second,” in her own fashion: Things get tired and seek quiet hosts. And by the way, heroin, unlike nature Doesn’t leave the impression of paradise lost.

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“Once a month, he fought or got beat up…”

Once a month, he fought or got beat up— paid with blood for his nerves. These were periods of a sort, as if, once a month, someone crashed his server. The next day, with a light coat of make-up, he’d go out on the street, as if born anew. But yesterday, when they blew up The Chicken Grill at the Red Gate, he got surveilled on one of the cameras, poor boy. They drove up and carted him off to Petrovka. “What were you doing yesterday near The Chicken Grill?” “Bought some chicken to go to Perlovka.” “And did you notice a red sports car there?” “Not only did I notice it, I told the driver to fuck off.” “Tell us about the driver?” “Some creep. Got out of the car and slammed me in the mug with a sucker punch, then jumped back in his heap.” “And where did you go?” “I went to three stations and managed to catch the last train.” “Where do you work?” “I’m a journalist for LiveJournal and have my own page on the web! Then, on the train, I got into a fight. Beat up a bum—already had dirt on my shoes. I couldn’t stand it, the stench was so bad, So I forced him to get off at Yauza. When I got there, I met some girl who’d just had it out with her husband, it seems. We bought some vodka and three ‘Neva’ beers, and ate my chicken near the dentist’s.

Andrei Rodionov

Believe me, I didn’t blow up The Chicken Grill! I fucking love fried chicken, okay? That’s totally not my style, I don’t know why they found a fuse at my place!” Then the whole department beat him— whipped him in the face with a wire. He shed blood a second time, and for nothing, but he never confessed to someone else’s crime. There was something about him that Pushkin had lent to the image of Lensky: sublime obstinacy, a completely womanish stubbornness. Shedding blood every month—there’s something feminine in it. No wonder the cop called him a whore and pain in the ass. Since then, he doesn’t like chicken meat and practically stopped his monthly bouts. He’s started acting kind of like a fruit, and shut down his LiveJournal account.

Translated by Boris Dralyuk

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Se x

a nd

E x er pts from Ov er k ill : V iolence in R ussi a n P opul a r C ultur e Eliot Borenstein

Overkill: Bespredel and Gratuitous Violence1 Rita once again examined the premises where this woman had decided not just to live, but to live in harmony with herself and with the whole world. There was nothing pathetic or wretched in what she saw there—the pathetic or wretched remained up there, where Rita had come from. Here the usual standards didn’t work—this must be how the different understandings of life and death, of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, fall apart, when a person steps over the borders of earthly existence and the real essence of life opens up before him. But can this essence really open up to a person only in a forgotten sewer, on a pile of filthy rags and old cardboard Coca Cola boxes, ten meters from a pipe pouring out a turbid stream of shit and fuel oil, infecting the atmosphere with miasmas? —Sergei Pugachev, You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! (Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia!)

In 1999, the reading public was treated to a new addition to the emerging canon of Russian pulp fiction: a potboiler by Sergei

1

     Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 195-208.

Eliot Borenstein. Overkill

Pugachev entitled You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! Even in a market where lurid paperback covers are taken for granted, You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! stands out for its explicit sexualized violence: a man smiles as he holds a beautiful woman by the hair and forces her to suck on the barrel of a gun. When the novel begins, a young woman, Rita Prozorova, has just been fighting with her mother, whom she holds in utmost contempt. So naturally Rita kills her with a blunt object, slaughters a nosy neighbor who stumbles upon the scene, and sets fire to her apartment, all in the first chapter. The body count does not stop there; if anything, Rita becomes an even more prodigious killer as the novel wears on, leaving behind a trail of corpses stretching like breadcrumbs from her native provincial town of Pskov all the way to Moscow. Fairly early on, her long-lost fiancé’s criminal associates turn her into a heroin addict and gang-rape her, launching her on a quest for vengeance that culminates in a bloodbath. But the road to revenge is not easy: Rita is constantly obliged to avoid the many predators who want a piece of her—literally. When she arrives in Moscow, she barely escapes a ring of kidnappers who lure young provincial women to their home, drug them, and then sell their organs to rich Americans and Europeans who need transplants. At times, Rita wonders how such things can happen. After all, she has seen numerous films where justice triumphs and where legal procedure steps in to facilitate the determination of guilt and innocence. Then she remembers: “But that’s not how it is in our country. That’s what she saw on video. That’s in America. But we’re not America; we have no laws” (31). It is fitting that Rita compares her own lived experience to the stories about America that she has seen on TV, since You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! posits an imaginary Russia as a counterpoint to the hyperreality of near-perfect order embodied by American police procedurals. One of the most likely sources of her knowledge of the rights and privileges of American crime suspects is the long-running television show Law and Order, which Russian viewers could watch twice a day at the time that Pugachev’s novel was published. In its Russian translation, Law and Order (Zakon i poriadok) had the ring of a cruel joke, since domestic television and the print media were quite effectively constructing a crime-ridden Russia in which

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neither law nor order was anywhere to be found. In fact, the world in which Rita Prozorova fights for survival is defined precisely by their absence: the world of bespredel. Though the bloody backdrops of the detektiv (detective novel) and the boevik (thriller) are evidence of each genre’s preoccupation with violent crime, neither of them can match bespredel for sheer sensationalism or pessimism. Even Konstantinov’s multivolume saga of murder and betrayal allows for some hope that the forces of good can at least survive, if not triumph, while the forces of evil have the reassuring virtue of being understandable and even logical— nothing illustrates the economic doctrine of “rational choice” better than the self-interested actions of organized criminals. Indeed, the cardinal virtue of organized crime is the very fact that it is organized. At its most extreme, bespredel inspires horror precisely because it is chaotic, random, and without motivation. If organized crime is powerful thanks to its stranglehold on corrupt law-enforcement agencies, that means it relies on the functioning (or well-planned dysfunction) of an overall system. Bandit Petersburg is a far better place to live in than lawless Russia. Bespredel is a particularly difficult word to render in English. Literally meaning “without limits” or “without boundaries,” this noun is used freely and fluidly in contemporary Russian discourse, accruing new contents and contexts over time. Bespredel is an evolving concept; one of the few features that unite all its various uses and definitions is that it is always something to be lamented and decried (even when this disapprobation barely conceals the exploitation and sensationalism that keep the thematics of bespredel alive). My use of it as a rubric for the purposes of this chapter might not strike a Russian speaker as intuitive, but my approach is informed by the broad, varied, and at times contradictory manner in which the term is deployed. A number of English words suggest themselves as possible equivalents, but only for particular aspects of bespredel as it is understood by the various constituencies that invoke it. As it stands today, bespredel is an important Russian discursive category but a far from scholarly one. Rather than settle on any one of several English synonyms, I prefer to use all of them and none of them, keeping bespredel as an umbrella term to preserve

Eliot Borenstein. Overkill

its polyvalent strangeness but using the English words to highlight the concept’s key features. The term bespredel seems to originate, appropriately enough, in the world of organized crime and the national prison camp system (the zone). In this context, Vadim Volkov defines it as the “unjustified use of violence,”2 the violations of the norms of the criminal world. Here bespredel, with its literal lack of boundaries, actually functions to delineate the limits of proper lawlessness: the declaration that an enemy is engaging in bespredel effectively makes him an outlaw among thieves. By violating the rules of good criminal conduct, the bespredel’shchik (the person who commits bespredel) in effect also suspends these rules as they relate to him. Reminiscent of Agamben’s “state of exception,” the ability of organized crime to identify and punish those who threaten to disorganize crime constitutes the criminal leaders’ authority […]. Bespredel is the mathematical limit of violence, always to be approached but never reached. When invoked in film and fiction, bespredel transposes a nostalgia for the orderly days of Soviet power to the context of crime: the “good” thieves respect the laws of the criminal fraternity, while the gang leaders of today are simply scum who do not know the meaning of the word “respect.” Ironically, this criminal generation gap replicates the central anxiety of perestroika […]: what is wrong with kids today? Bespredel proved to be far too evocative a term to be limited to gangland misbehavior, and, as Volkov notes, the word has become a part of Russians’ everyday vocabulary, particularly in the realm of politics. Thus the Russian defense minister decried the 1999 NATO bombings of Yugoslavia as bespredel, while Vladimir Putin, in one of his early speeches as acting president of Russia, used the word to describe the alternative to his infamous “dictatorship of law” (Volkov 82). The term’s political meaning preserves its criminal roots, since it is applied when politicians and world leaders overstep their bounds. Even more broadly, when invoked as part

2

     Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 195.

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of a conversational litany of post-Soviet evils, the boundlessness of bespredel means total chaos, describing a state of pure and utter lawlessness, with crime and corruption running rampant. In this context, bespredel is a post-perestroika variation on what Nancy Ries calls a “perestroika epic”: tales of “complete disintegration” (polnaia razrukha). This “folkloric genre” contained many of the features of bespredel, particularly the emphasis on blood, gore, and violence.3 Yet bespredel differs in two crucial ways. First, I would argue that it is not the source of the twisted Dostoevskian pride that Ries discovers in complete disintegration. Complete disintegration, a variation on the Russian tale, sets up Russia as an anti-Disneyland that unites people in their common experience and shared suffering, suggesting a particularly Russian strength in adversity that no other nation could hope to match (Ries, Russian Talk, 50). Bespredel may be fascinating, but it is not heroic: bespredel puts the ordinary person in the position of victim. This leads to the second point, which is the question of agency: though tales of complete disintegration could (and mostly likely did) lead to the eternal Russian question, who’s to blame?, the focus was on collapse itself, not on those who took advantage of postsocialist chaos. Bespredel, with its implicit focus on the lack of limits, is all about the actions taken by people who recognize no strictures. Bespredel is horrifying because it is chaotic. The violence of bespredel is unnecessary by definition: it is popular culture’s gratuitous violence decried by critics throughout the world. This gratuitousness is crucial, defining both the aesthetics and the philosophy of bespredel. Aesthetically, bespredel is clearly about overkill in that it literally denotes a slaying that continues long after life has expired: no violence can be too much, no detail can be too graphic. Reminiscent of the ultraviolence of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, bespredel’s aesthetic certainly found common cause with the films of Quentin Tarantino (especially Reservoir Dogs). Philosophically, bespredel is a Dostoevskian nightmare world

3

     Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 44-47.

Eliot Borenstein. Overkill

in which the absence of God turns men into beasts. Or rather, bespredel gives a demonic twist to early-twentieth-century French thought, which put a different value on the gratuitous: l’acte gratuite (the gratuitous act). Demonstrating the principle that true human freedom could be expressed only in an action that had no motivation and no purpose, the most famous literary examples of l’acte gratuite were instances of murder: Lafcadio, the hero of Andre Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (The Cellars of the Vatican), who throws a man off a train with no warning and no consequence, and Meursault, the narrator of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (The Stranger), whose fatal shooting of an Arab is maddening in its apparent randomness. Bespredel posits a limitless, irresponsible human freedom that can take shape only in senseless violence.4 Finally, I apply the word bespredel to an important component of post-Soviet mass culture that is not usually covered by the term but that makes the actions and consequences of bespredel its central theme: the media representation of “true crime.” This includes the sensationalistic and lurid reports on criminal violence in newspapers and on television, as well as the documentary books and even novels (such as You’re Just a Slut, My Dear!) that find their primary purpose in the graphic depiction of violence. The audiovisual representation of violent crime comes as close to the aesthetic of pornography as violent entertainment can get (short of the snuff film), while the transformation of true crime into narrative entails choices that result in quite different stories from those found in the detektiv or the boevik. True-crime narratives lack positive heroes, focusing almost entirely on the criminals who, in other genres, would be the object of disapproval. Here the story is all about the crimes themselves, with only a minimal moral framework and little hope of redemption. Violence in true crime cannot be redemptive, for it cannot have meaning. It is, to borrow the title Marini4

     Thus I take issue with L. D. Gudkov’s observation that “mass literature” deals entirely in absolutes (Lev Gudkov, “Massovaia literature kak problema. Dlia kogo? Razdrazhennye zametki cheloveka so storony,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 22 (1996): 95). His argument may well hold true for the boevik, but it has limited applicability to the detektiv and fails to account for bespredel.

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na5 used in a different mode, “death for death’s sake,” violence that is fascinating simply because it is violence. The pleasure to be found in consuming this particular type of bespredel narrative is in the secondhand, guilt-free enjoyment of the acts themselves and in the reassurance of identifying with the performer of violence rather than with the victim. The external moral context is, of course, one of disapproval, but the reader’s or viewer’s shock at real violence only adds to the thrill of identification with the fictive violence, all the while confirming the basic message of bespredel in all its forms: we live in a world of unmitigated, but fascinating, horror.

Honor among Thieves Bespredel is an untidy term, but its messiness is helpful to anyone interested in the discourse of Russian violent crime, its evolution, and its growing hegemony over the culture at large. The word manages to be conversational and neutral (available to any speaker who cares to invoke it, without violating linguistic etiquette) and clearly marked; its origins in the Russian prison camp culture and its relevance to contemporary gangland culture have not been forgotten. The very fact that grandmothers and government officials use the word routinely is evidence that the once rarefied blatnoi (criminal) culture has moved beyond not only its initial isolation but also its Brezhnevera status as the source of an added piquancy to the daring songs of the Russian bards, who appropriated the slang of the zone in their own stylized, pseudocriminal songs. The first years of Russian independence saw a minor boom in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and ethnographic studies of the zone;6 with the benefit of hindsight, 5

     Aleksandra Marinina is one of the most famous post-Soviet authors of mystery novels. Her cycle of novels with the protagonist Anastasiya Kamenskaya was screened as mini-series on Russian TV and gained incredible popularity.

6

     The list includes, but is by no means limited to, Baldaev et al., Slovar’ tiuremnolagerno-blatnogo zhargona (The dictionary of prison-camp-criminal slang, 1992); Edvard Maksimovskii. Imperiia strakha (Empire of fear, l991); and Lev Mil’ianen’kov’s

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na5 used in a different mode, “death for death’s sake,” violence that is fascinating simply because it is violence. The pleasure to be found in consuming this particular type of bespredel narrative is in the secondhand, guilt-free enjoyment of the acts themselves and in the reassurance of identifying with the performer of violence rather than with the victim. The external moral context is, of course, one of disapproval, but the reader’s or viewer’s shock at real violence only adds to the thrill of identification with the fictive violence, all the while confirming the basic message of bespredel in all its forms: we live in a world of unmitigated, but fascinating, horror.

Honor among Thieves Bespredel is an untidy term, but its messiness is helpful to anyone interested in the discourse of Russian violent crime, its evolution, and its growing hegemony over the culture at large. The word manages to be conversational and neutral (available to any speaker who cares to invoke it, without violating linguistic etiquette) and clearly marked; its origins in the Russian prison camp culture and its relevance to contemporary gangland culture have not been forgotten. The very fact that grandmothers and government officials use the word routinely is evidence that the once rarefied blatnoi (criminal) culture has moved beyond not only its initial isolation but also its Brezhnevera status as the source of an added piquancy to the daring songs of the Russian bards, who appropriated the slang of the zone in their own stylized, pseudocriminal songs. The first years of Russian independence saw a minor boom in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and ethnographic studies of the zone;6 with the benefit of hindsight, 5

     Aleksandra Marinina is one of the most famous post-Soviet authors of mystery novels. Her cycle of novels with the protagonist Anastasiya Kamenskaya was screened as mini-series on Russian TV and gained incredible popularity.

6

     The list includes, but is by no means limited to, Baldaev et al., Slovar’ tiuremnolagerno-blatnogo zhargona (The dictionary of prison-camp-criminal slang, 1992); Edvard Maksimovskii. Imperiia strakha (Empire of fear, l991); and Lev Mil’ianen’kov’s

Eliot Borenstein

their publication seems almost prescient, as though the editors foresaw that the smart cultural consumer of the 1990s would have to acquire a basic literacy in organized violence. Now the helpful glossary at the back of Dotsenko’s first Mad Dog novel (Mad Dog in Prison) looks touchingly quaint, if not embarrassingly uncool: what Russian reader does not know that nishtiak means “good,” or bazar means “conversation”? (414-15). The same decade that witnessed an obsession with the mastery of English for career advancement and edification—with audiocassettes, guides for self-study, and ads for special classes on nearly every urban street corner—saw a subtler (and probably more successful) drive for linguistic competence: by the end of the 1990s, everyone knew how to speak crime. In his On the Other Side of the Law: An Encyclopedia of the Criminal World (1992), Lev Mil’ianenkov includes an entry for bespredel: “lawlessness, arbitrariness (samoupravstvo, proizvol); a thief who has left the world of thieves and ceased his criminal activities” (84). Thus Mil’ianenkov associates bespredel with the traditional ways of Soviet-era crime, but its rise as both a linguistic term and a discursive phenomenon is the result of the drastic changes that have shaken Russian traditional culture just as surely as they have transformed the culture at large. The word bespredel has escaped the bounds of the prison camp and thieves’ gang precisely because its culture of origin has been threatened by the lawlessness that the word describes. The Soviet underworld was one of the many subcultures that sprang up in opposition to officially sanctioned culture, and, like so many of them, it mirrored the structures that it purportedly opposed. Hence the Russian tendency to speak of such subcultures as “antiworlds” (antimiry), since they are by no means independent of official influence. The product of a fundamentally binary culture, they are to Soviet culture what Satanism is to Christianity: a deliberate inversion that wears its influences on its

Po tu storonu zakona; Entsiklopediia prestupnogo mira (On the other side of the law: An encyclopedia of the criminal world, 1992). For an analysis of the material presented in these books, see Condee (“Body Graphics”).

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sleeve.7 This criminal fraternity is truly organized crime, for it is just as fundamentally systemic as the Soviet Union itself. It arose, appropriately enough, within the Soviet labor camps and prisons during the 1930s, and the power of its leaders and its cultural codes is well documented by political prisoners from the purges onward, who were obliged to tread lightly around their nonpolitical (and hence more ideologically trustworthy) inmates. […] The leaders of the Soviet underworld were known as vory v zakone, which is usually rendered as “thieves-in-law,” an unfortunately literal translation that in English suggests an extended family (Married to the Mob) rather than a particularly authoritative status. I will follow the convention adopted by Volkov (to whom I am also more generally indebted for my discussion of the vory v zakone) and simply call them “thieves,” a shorthand commonly used in Russian as well.8 This thieves’ subculture was highly ritualized, with a strict hierarchy of subordination and control, and behavioral codes that regulated life both in and out of the zone. Thieves were forbidden to cooperate with the state in any fashion (even military service, which was theoretically mandatory for all adult men, prevented a criminal from rising in the ranks). Nor was a thief allowed to be gainfully employed, since honest physical labor (so idealized by the Soviet regime) was beneath his dignity. Devotion to the underworld left no room for any conflicting loyalties, resulting in a “criminal fraternity” truly worthy of the name: thieves had to break off all contact with biological relatives and were forbidden to marry or have children. Thus the thieves abided by a code that was quasimonastic in that it segregated them entirely from the “secular” world of both government and family, even if it did not celebrate the total self-denial required of true monastic orders (sex was fine, but heterosexual attachment was not; robbery was essential, but luxury was proscribed). The result was akin to a warrior brotherhood, like

7

     This is particularly evident in criminal tattoos, with their “blasphemous” caricatures of Brezhnev, Stalin, Lenin, and Marx (D.S. Baldaev, V.K. Belko, and I.M. Isupov. Slovar’ tiuremno-lagerno-blatnogo zhargona (Moscow: Krai Moskvy, 1992), 477-90).

8

     See Volkov’s detailed description of thieves-in-law (54-59).

Eliot Borenstein. Overkill

the mythic Cossacks celebrated by Nikolai Gogol, and was also far from antithetical to the masculine ethos perennially celebrated by official Soviet ideology.9 Indeed, the thieves’ world relied on a collectivist spirit that, in other contexts, a true Leninist could not have helped but admire: all thieves had to tithe their earnings into a central set of communal funds (the obshchak) that functioned as a social safety net for criminals during their frequent periods of imprisonment, supplying food, drugs, tobacco, and bribes to make zone life bearable (Volkov 54-58). The details of the thieves’ code are less important for my purposes than the mere fact of the code’s existence, the reliance on a strict hierarchy and unbendable rules. Thieves’ culture was systemic through and through, betraying the influences of Soviet ideology, the military, and the prison camps—institutions to which thieves’ culture was hostile by definition. The thieves’ code literally inscribed itself on its adherents’ bodies, with tattoos of images and slogans that both reminded criminals of their most important precepts and alerted them to the status of their interlocutors. Whatever the source of the term “thief-in-law,” it is perfectly appropriate, even if the juxtaposition of “thief” and “law” sounds paradoxical. These are criminals who, when faced with the dehumanizing conditions of prison camps, do not revert to a state of nature, nor do they descend into a Hobbesian nightmare of total chaos. Quite the contrary, the thieves’ world can be seen as reassuring evidence of a human tendency toward order and control, which is part of the thieves’ mythic appeal. On the one hand, they are outlaws, but on the other, they follow their own rules and are thus predictable.10 9

     See Borenstein, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 1-42.

10

   Nancy Ries notes that in her fieldwork in 1990 and 1992, the mafia was often invoked by Russians as “the supreme symbol of evil and terror”; four to five years later, “the terror the mafia provided was sometimes represented as the means by which avarice and corruption might be reined in” (“Honest Bandits,” 30.5). She argues that mafia served as “both the destroyer of any hopes for justice and social order and also the most likely potential source of justice and order” (278, emphasis in the original). See also Verdery on the “conceptual mafia,” or “mafia-as-symbol” of anxiety over the market economy and the post-socialist power vacuum (Katherine

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An ordinary person’s encounter with a thief could be easily survivable because a thief is not a blood-crazed sadist. Just as the orderly old-fashioned horror stories and monster movies are only minimally threatening (vampires cannot enter your house if you do not invite them in), the thief represents violent crime that is understandable and manageable precisely because it is always being managed. Also important is the primacy of zone experience for the thieves’ world; as Volkov argues, “prison life was its ultimate system of reference” (55). Thus the thieves’ code was formed in a context in which total freedom of action was excluded by definition. The limits were always visible: they were the barbed wire surrounding the camps and the armed guards keeping watch over the inmates. The thieves’ code implicitly accepted these boundaries, for the goal was to improve life in prison rather than to escape.11 The thieves’ code, rather than fighting against the limits on freedom, multiplied them: the barbed wire of the zone became metaphorical and portable, structuring criminals’ conduct. It is in this context that the notion of bespredel makes sense. A culture built on accommodation with incarceration cannot accept a state of pure lawlessness. Bespredel is about more than simply transgression (the concept implicit in the Russian word for crime, prestuplenie); it is about not recognizing the existence of any boundaries to transgress. The thieves’ insistence on orderliness and systems and their Foucauldian assumption of self-surveillance and self-discipline make bespredel the worst possible crime: it is the crime that no longer recognizes itself as crime. Punishing a criminal for violating the thieves’ code was already serious, but a declaration of bespredel meant that the offender had placed himself not merely outside the law but outside the outlaw. Thus bespredel could be fought only by eradicating it at the source, since the offender could

Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], 219). 11

   In fact, prison sentences were an integral part of the thief’s experience; one could not become a true thief-in-law without spending time behind bars.

Eliot Borenstein. Overkill

no longer be incorporated into the (anti-)social body. Bespredel is abomination. The rise of bespredel is connected to the pathos of the thievesin-law, who are something of a dying breed in the post-Soviet era. Volkov contrasts the thieves with the modem breed of “bandits,” who have a stranglehold on the economy in major metropolitan areas such as Petersburg and Yekaterinburg: “The thief’s income comes from the illegal secondary redistribution of property and consists of the appropriation, by illegal means, of the private possessions of other citizens or of state property. The bandit aspires to receive a share of other entrepreneurs’ income, which, as he claims, has been produced under his patronage or with the participation of the organized group he represents” (Volkov 60). As pure abstractions, thieves and bandits represent polar opposites, though the two groups have reached something of an equilibrium in recent years.12 The thieves’ way of life is a product of the zone, while the bandits are firmly rooted in civilian life. Bandits reject the monastic form of the thieves’ code, marrying and having children, although their attention to physical fitness and propensity to ban alcohol and drugs make the thieves look almost hedonistic (Volkov 60). If the bandits look upon the thieves as living relics, the thieves scorn the bandits for their refusal to follow the code. The bandits, whose ranks are filled with veterans of Russia’s military conflicts and former participants in sports clubs, are seen as disrespectful and unnecessarily violent. If the concept of bespredel has spread beyond the world of organized crime, it is in part because the development of bandit culture has led to more and more instances of what the thieves consider bespredel. From the point of view of the thieves’ code, much of banditry is bespredel, or it would be, if it were committed by thieves. Two opposing tendencies have facilitated the spread of bespredel as a phenomenon and as a concept: the first is the generational conflict between these two broad segments of the Russian underworld, and the second is their gradual reconciliation. As thief culture and bandit

12

   In the context, the late 1990s-early 2000s.

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culture have grown together, the thieves have relaxed some of their strictures, while the bandits have adopted many of the trappings of thief culture, even insisting on undergoing the “coronation” ritual that installs a new thief-in-law. And they have also inherited the concept of bespredel: accusing a rival gangleader of bespredel is fighting words. What constitutes bespredel for a given criminal formation is less important than the fact that bespredel remains an operative concept. Even a bandit world still recognizes its own rule of law. In contemporary Russian narratives about organized crime, bespredel sparks anxiety among the criminals themselves, for it is only people who belong to the underworld who can determine what behavior is considered out of bounds. When bespredel is presented as a result of the rise of bandits and the fall of thieves, such stories invariably side with the thieves, for reasons that are immediately comprehensible. The thieves stand for restraint, tradition, and honor, while the bandits are corrupt even by criminal standards. The political implications are never far beneath the surface: the old-fashioned thieves, often played by beloved Soviet-era actors on screen, take pride in their dying world just as their counterparts in law enforcement and the military might lament their motherland’s loss of great-power status. The fact that the thieves are criminals by definition only makes the comparison stronger, containing an implicit recognition that the lost great power itself was hardly angelic or perfect. But organized crime narratives present both the thieves and Soviet power as inherently ideological, which is viewed positively when compared with Yeltsin’s government, “wild” capitalism, and mercenary bandits. These post-Soviet phenomena represent the triumph of capitalism exactly as it is portrayed by its opponents rather than its boosters: all values are rendered valueless if they cannot be expressed in the cash nexus. For the new generation of criminals, as well as for the businessmen they extort and the state officials they bribe, everything is fungible: money, property, and human life. For the thief, such indifference is the essence of bespredel. This particular formulation of bespredel is expressed most clearly in Konstantinov’s Bandit Petersburg, particularly the fourth book, appropriately entitled The Thief (Vor)(which was filmed as

Eliot Borenstein. Overkill

the first miniseries, Baron). […] The Thief is focused on the conflict between an old thief-in-law bearing the noble nickname of “Baron” and the slippery bandit leader nicknamed “Antibiotic.” The reader’s and viewer’s sympathies are aligned from the very beginning with the Baron, who, as is fitting for the representative of a dying era, is pulling off his last heist before succumbing to terminal cancer. The Baron is educated, eloquent, and even gentle when circumstances allow, and Konstantinov’s story gives him several occasions to philosophize about the state of Russia and the underworld. Readers and viewers first meet the Baron when the story begins, as he is breaking into an apartment, but only the novel includes his meditation on Russia’s criminal mayhem: If in the old days, a [thief] with rotten tendencies took a long time to turn bad … after the triumph of democracy in Russia, which opened the gates to the road into the radiant capitalist future … formerly, decent thieves and movers and shakers went savage and turned into scum, for whom walking through blood was just as simple as stepping over a puddle…. Why even talk about the young people, if even respectable bosses (avtoritety) no longer try to resolve arguments and conflicts peacefully? Who needs words if a bullet, knife, or grenade can always easily compensate for the lack of fair arguments? Whoever is stronger is right. Of course, it was just like that before, but human life was more respected in the criminal world…. No question, serious people were killed before, only it wasn’t today’s low hits, but the execution of sentences—and everybody knew for what…. While bloodthirsty, trigger-happy bespredel’shchiki could be found and punished by the thieves’ world more quickly and effectively than by the cops…. But that was before, and now was the time of the collaborators (ssuchennykh) who twisted the thieves’ law like card sharks at a casino. (10-11)

Later the Baron laments the corruption of the country brought on by the new-style bandits who, unlike thieves, work with the state authorities, leading to a complete collapse of both state and underworld law: “[T]his was awful, because it gave rise to bespredel, which is unavoidable in an organization whose ideological basis was collaboration (ssuchennost’), lack of principle, and treachery in the name of power and money...” (147).

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It is only when the Baron gives an interview to the journalist (and authorial stand-in) Andrei Seregin that he gets the chance to explain his views in depth, this time in both the film version and the novel. His entire monologue is a requiem for the thieves” world: “Our world is fading…. Now there’s nothing but bespredel” conducted by complete “morons” (debily), whose underdeveloped brains know only food, sex, and fear. In the old days, criminals lived according to the “rules” (poniatiia), murdered only when necessary, and never killed cops, but for today’s thugs, murder is always justified if it can lead to greater profits (l67-68). This is more than just a criminal matter, for the Baron insists that bespredel is useful to Russia’s enemies: “I can only tell you one thing: a strong criminal world, with its own laws and rules, with traditions and without bespredel, is only possible in a strong country. And who needs a strong Russia? [The West] needs a weak Russia” (168). One of the intrinsic problems caused by the new world of bandit crime, which is impossible to disentangle from “legitimate” business and the business of state, is that it is becoming coterminous with Russia itself (“I always felt that the criminal world should be small, and not all-encompassing…” [168]). Here we return to the geographic metaphor implicit in bespredel: crime must have boundaries and must know its limits. The criminalization of Russia is, in this sense, the apotheosis of one of Russia’s central myths, the notion of the motherland’s “boundlessness” (neob”iatnost’), its wide-open spaces (prostory) that in turn define the expansive national character […].13 If bespredel were not such an irredeemably marked term, Rossiia bespredel’naia would sound like just another variation on national boosterism. Bespredel is a demonic inversion of everything that is good in Russia’s own mythic selfconception. Even as the West shares some of the blame for the mayhem of the 1990s, Western countries also have the most to lose by a postsocialist

13

   This myth, which was touted so successfully by Gogol (the troika scene in Dead Souls, his representation of the Cossacks as the embodiment of Russia’s boundless frontier spirit), was taken up by Stalinist culture as well, most notably in the “Song of the Motherland” made famous in the film Circus: “Broad is my native land / So many forests, fields and rivers! / I don’t know any other such country / In which man can breathe so freely.”

Eliot Borenstein. Overkill

Russia that has succumbed to bespredel. Like the troika at the end of Gogol’s Dead Souls, bespredel in Russia is a terrible force with which the rest of the world will have to reckon. “You know, sometimes I think that there’s going to be a new iron curtain, only this time it will be the West that establishes it out of fear of our bespredel” (168). Or perhaps bespredel is the criminal manifestation of Dostoevsky’s nightmare scenario in Demons (Besy): once all traditional authorities have been overthrown, the country will descend into a Boschian nightmare that could eventually sweep up the whole world in its wake. An old thief presents just such a view on his deathbed in one of the novels in Evgeny Sukhov’s I Am a Thief-in-Law series: Proper (pravil’nye) thieves are being replaced … by bespredel’shchiki…. Yes, before there was fear. And there was the law—harsh, strict, but fair. Everything was held together by fear in Soviet life. And in thieves’ life—by the law. And now there’s nothing left. Neither fear nor the law. Freedom and anarchy. And in Rus’, freedom was always called liberty (volia). Vol’nitsa (wild liberty). Russian liberty gone wild is a terrible thing. Wild liberty is …merciless and bloody. Pointless cruelty… (Oboroten’).

If I invoke Gogol and Dostoevsky in connection with thievesin-law, it is not to appeal to a prophetic literary tradition but to put bespredel in the context of perennial Russian laments and jeremiads about the country’s fate (hence the Baron’s conclusion that only cruelty on the part of the state can counter the cruelty of criminal bespredel [169]). In the pre-Soviet context of political upheavals and dissent, such fears of chaos were often part of a generational conflict, the older liberals watching in horror as their offspring militated for radical solutions. Post-Soviet bespredel is also troped as a generation gap, in this case decrying the moral degeneracy of younger criminals who do not know the meaning of the word “respect.” Bespredel takes the anxious hand-wringing over the younger generation that was so prominent in perestroika and ups the ante significantly, for the question of total honesty, idealism, and integrity is no longer even on the table. The very fact that the latest iteration of panic over wayward youth is situated in a context that takes criminality for granted is itself a sign of all-pervasive bespredel. […]

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Part 3. Writing Politics

In his book Art Power, Boris Groys argues that “art becomes politically effective only when it is made beyond or outside the art market, and in the context of political propaganda.”1 In making this statement, Groys anticipates the response that art that promotes political views is not really art. He cites the videos strategically released by Islamist separatist groups as examples of such art to illustrate his point. With this provocative gesture, Groys argues that propaganda art, whether we think it is good art or not, speaks powerfully—its very function is to get our attention—while other forms of art can only circulate as commodities in an already-crowded market. In this way, an artist can “challenge a regime based on an ideological vision in a much more effective way than he or she can challenge the art market.”2 As a way of responding to Groys’ thesis, we may look to the various ways in which artists have responded to the consolidation of political and economic power in post-Soviet Russia. Perhaps the most visible responses are the public protests that began in 2011 when it was announced that Putin would run for an unprecedented third term as president in 2012. The Russian constitution does not allow any president to serve more than two consecutive terms, and it was widely perceived that Dmitrii Medvedev’s presidency from 2008-2012, while Putin served a second term as Prime Minister (his 1

     Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 7.

2

     Ibid., p. 8.

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first term as Prime Minister lasted from 1999-2000), allowed for a “tandem” approach to the presidency. The writer Eduard Limonov, long a critic of Putin, participated in multiple public protests. The writers Dmitrii Bykov and Boris Akunin were among the many prominent public figures who marched with protesters to demand fair elections. Other actions by cultural figures were performed for distribution on YouTube and other video hosting sites. These include guerrilla performances by the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot, whose video performance of “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away,” filmed in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, led to the subsequent arrest of three of the band’s members. Also noteworthy is the popular video series “Citizen Poet,” which features satirical poems written by Bykov and performed by the actor Mikhail Efremov. The March 28, 2011, episode “Here’s How the Tandem Works” (V tandeme vot chto proiskhodit) was not aired, as Bykov found that his verses had been modified by the television station Dozhd’ prior to airing. Videos of Bykov and Efremov reading the original text, as well as the text itself (“He’s the president, but I’m the leader”), continue to circulate online. Returning to Groys’s proposal, should we regard these actions as effective challenges to the regime, while the writers’ literature should be considered a commodity that circulates only to support the market? Instead, we may consider that literature, the methods of distribution it relies upon, and even its readers, disrupt the binary construction that posits the goal of challenging political regimes against the goal of challenging the market. Products of popular culture, such as blockbuster films and bestseller novels, may support reigning ideologies and at the same time harness the power of the market to circulate them. Aleksandr Tarasov’s essay “The Anti-Matrix” argues that the blockbuster films in the Night Watch series encourage viewers to remain plugged into the world of market commodities and state power. “Dark” forces associated with commodities and popular culture, and “light” forces associated with state institutions are thoroughly implicated in each other; correspondingly, the film successfully propagandizes both state and market ideologies. Still, while Tarasov values the ideology of The Matrix and its depiction of “average citizens resisting a soulless

Part 3. Writing Politics

machine,” he does not acknowledge that in a consumerist society, the act of watching the film and participating in the larger institution of the entertainment industry can stand in for the meaningful action that the film advocates. Post-Soviet consumerism is a major theme for Victor Pelevin, who creatively and methodically illustrates connections between market and political discourses. Pelevin demonstrates that the mythology of power is inseparable from the “hyperreality of simulacra” (Baudrillard). Media images are indistinguishable from advertisements; they “sell” politicians and their initiatives. Pelevin first articulated this idea in his novel Generation ‘P’ (translated into English as Homo Zapiens). Developments on this theme can be found in his other novels as well. These include Omon Ra, The Life of Insects, Buddha’s Little Finger, and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, among others. Works by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Prokhanov present violence as a force that can destroy existing power structures, including the institution of literature itself. Limonov, once a poet who lived in New York and Paris, by his own admission “killed” his literary persona in order to establish the National Bolshevik Party and begin a life in politics. His writings, life, and even his body are fashioned in a way that supports his radical political agenda. Prokhanov’s novel Mr. Hexogen gives voice to extremist conspiracy theories about who was behind the September 1999 apartment bombings that were blamed on Chechen separatists and generally, those whom Prokhanov (and Limonov) defines as “enemies of the nation,” i.e., liberals, Jews, the West, etc. Mr. Hexogen may qualify as an example of what Groys calls propaganda art, but as Ilya Kukulin’s study points out, the work troublingly erodes long-held boundaries between the institutions of propaganda, literature, and their audiences. The cruel world of Vladimir Sorokin’s fiction does not wield violence, but leads the reader to question the pervasiveness of violence in everyday life. If in his earlier works he dismantled authoritarian discourses of power to reveal the rhetorical violence concealed within them, his more recent works, such as Day of the Oprichnik (2006), and Sugar Kremlin (2008) challenge the neo-

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traditionalist political and cultural discourses that have moved into the mainstream during the Putin era. In Day of the Oprichnik neotraditionalist power structures manifest themselves in dystopian scenes of mutual copulation (the “caterpillar” of chain copulation), rape, and mutual torture among the leader’s guards. In Sugar Kremlin the same dystopian society is depicted from various points of view. The short story “Petrushka,” about a jester’s performances at the Kremlin, evaluates the degraded position of the artist-performer. In the atmosphere of everyday violence that permeates Sugar Kremlin, entertainment and art are not diversions or a medium for reflection, but an obligatory and sadistic institution that structures behavior at work and in the home. In contrast to mechanized household devices performing their programmed functions, humans appear as base and savage creatures, with little holding them together other than their machine counterparts. Akunin’s series of crime novels featuring the detective Erast Fandorin are set in the nineteenth century but deal with present day issues, including post-Soviet nostalgia for the imperial past. While crime fiction often depicts non-normative behavior with the intention of moving readers toward identification with the detective who punishes its perpetrators, Akunin’s novels suggest that the social and political problems that plague Russia today have a long history in its past. As Elena Baraban’s study demonstrates, Akunin’s works critique the tendency to idealize the past (or any era) as a golden age and instead turn the reader’s focus to institutional problems of the present. All of the authors discussed in this chapter—Akunin, Bykov, Limonov, Pelevin, Prokhanov, and Sorokin—have publicly voiced their opposition to Putin’s rule. All are genuinely popular and read by wide audiences. At the same time, it is vital to recognize distinctions in their attitudes toward violence and reigning ideologies, and the reasons behind their decisions to distribute their work freely online (Akunin, Bykov, Pelevin, Sorokin) or harness the power of social media, newspapers, and other fora to promote their positions (Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, Prokhanov’s ultra-nationalist views). The intersection of literature, media, and politics points to the need for reading practices that engage post-Soviet writing

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beyond the value that the market places upon it and beyond the conventional venues for the distribution of propaganda. With their potential to expand into the discourses and practices of everyday life, the writings collected in this chapter invite our analysis.

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“Russi a I s S lipping B ack Author ita r i a n E mpir e ”

into a n

Spiegel Interview with Vladimir Sorokin1

SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, in your new novel “Day of the Oprichnik,” you portray an authoritarian Russia ruled by a group of members of the secret police. The story is set in the future, but this future is similar to the past under Ivan the Terrible. Aren’t you really drawing parallels to today’s Russia? Sorokin: Of course it’s a book about the present. Unfortunately, the only way one can describe it is by using the tools of satire. We still live in a country that was established by Ivan the Terrible. SPIEGEL: His reign was in the sixteenth century. The czardom was followed by the Soviet Union, then democracy under (former President Boris) Yeltsin and (current President Vladimir) Putin. Has Russia not yet completed its break with the past? Sorokin: Nothing has changed when it comes to the divide between the people and the state. The state demands a sacred willingness to make sacrifices from the people. SPIEGEL: The absolute ruler in your book bears some resemblance to President Vladimir Putin.... Sorokin: ... Which was not my intention. Coming up with a Putin satire wouldn’t be very thrilling. I’m an artist, not a journalist. And a novel is not a documentary. In my book, I am searching

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     © Spiegel Online, February 2, 2007. By Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp, trans. from the German by Christopher Sultan.

Spiegel Interview with Vladimir Sorokin

for an answer to the question of what distinguishes Russia from true democracies. SPIEGEL: What explanation have you found? Sorokin: Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen can say of themselves: “I am the state.” I cannot say that. In Russia only the people in the Kremlin can say that. All other citizens are nothing more than human material with which they can do all kinds of things. SPIEGEL: In old Russian, the word “oprichnik” means “a special one.” Do you feel that the divide between the top and the bottom in Russia today can no longer be bridged? Sorokin: In our country there are special people who are permitted to do anything. They are the sacrificial priests of power. Anyone who is not a member of this group has no clout with the state. One can be as pure as can be—just as magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky was—and still lose everything in a flash and end up in prison. The Khodorkovsky case is typical of the “oprichnina”—the system of oppression I describe. SPIEGEL: Does a character like Khodorkovsky appear in your book? Sorokin: Such a parallel didn’t occur to me. However, my book does begin with an attack on a rich man. This is almost a daily occurrence nowadays. It has always been that way in Russia. Only those who are loyal to the people in power can become wealthy. SPIEGEL: How is the elite reacting to the literary images you paint? Sorokin: The reaction to my book has been tumultuous. But I had no other choice than to put all this on paper. I have been carrying around this wish for a long time, and so it took me only three months to write it. SPIEGEL: Why did you suddenly feel the need to write this book? Sorokin: The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical. This was one of our favorite anecdotes: as German troops

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marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That was our attitude—you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life. SPIEGEL: Some of your novels are filled with violence. In “Ice,” for example, human beings are mistreated with hammers made of ice. Why is Russian society still so preoccupied with violence? Sorokin: As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country. I had that sense by as early as kindergarten and grade school. Later on I wanted to understand why human beings are unable to do without violence. It’s a mystery I haven’t solved to this day. Yes, violence is my main theme. SPIEGEL: How is this sinister energy reflected in Russia today? Sorokin: It is alive in every bureaucrat. Whenever you encounter a minor official, he lets you know that he is above you and that you depend on him. It is reflected in the superpower mentality that nourishes the Kremlin. An empire always demands sacrifices from its people. SPIEGEL: Criminal proceedings were launched against you five years ago for supposedly pornographic passages in your novel “Blue Lard.” Is censorship about to be reintroduced in Russia? Sorokin: What happened at the time was an attempt to test writers’ steadfastness and the public’s willingness to accept open censorship. It didn’t work. SPIEGEL: Did the pressure that was applied to you intimidate other writers? Sorokin: Certainly. I have Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to thank that a Russian writer can not only write anything he wants today, but also publish it. I don’t know what will happen in the future. The media—television, newspapers, and magazines— are already controlled by the state today. SPIEGEL: One of the characters in your book brags “that not just one diplomat was expelled from Moscow, not just one journalist was thrown from the television tower and not just one whistleblower was drowned in the river.” When you wrote this

Spiegel Interview with Vladimir Sorokin

you knew nothing about the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Sorokin: I just imagined what would happen to Russia if it isolated itself completely from the Western world—that is, if it erected a new Iron Curtain. There is much talk about Russia being a fortress. Orthodox churches, autocracy, and national traditions are supposed to form a new national ideology. This would mean that Russia would be overtaken by its past, and our past would be our future. SPIEGEL: How realistic is such a relapse in a globalized world? Sorokin: Putin likes to quote a sentence from Czar Alexander III, who said that Russia has only two allies—the army and the navy. As a citizen, this makes me sit up and take notice. This is a concept of self-imposed isolation, a defense strategy that sees Russia surrounded by enemies. When I turn on the TV I see a general calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of the latest American models by three five-year plans. It’s a nightmare. We are creating a concept of the enemy, just as they did in the Soviet era. This is a giant step backward. SPIEGEL: You have no confidence in the current Kremlin administration? Sorokin: This is their fault, not mine. My television teaches me that everything was wonderful in the Soviet Union. According to the programs I watch, the KGB and apparatchiks were angels, and the Stalin era was so festive that the heroes of the day must still be celebrated today. SPIEGEL: Why is there no opposition from Russia’s legendary intelligentsia? Sorokin: It’s astonishing. I can’t help but gain the impression that our champions of the freedom of opinion—writers, emigrants, and civil rights activists—had only one goal in mind: the collapse of the Soviet Union, started by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And now they are all silent. SPIEGEL: How do you feel about the former chess world champion, Garry Kasparov, who is trying to build an opposition movement? Sorokin: I have respect for him and other members of the opposition movement, like former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and

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(politician) Irina Khakamada. But these politicians do not exist for most people. About the only place you will find them is on the Internet. If a state-owned station were to report tomorrow that Kasyanov was visiting Russian cities and talking to the people, the manager of that station would be looking for a new job the next day. SPIEGEL: What can be done? Sorokin: It’s pointless to expect change to be ordered from above. The bureaucracy has grown such powerful roots, and corruption is so widespread, that these people have no interest in changing anything. SPIEGEL: In other words, everything is hopeless? Sorokin: Everyone must awaken the citizen within himself. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev once said that Russia has many ideas and few goods. It was that way throughout the entire twentieth century. Only in the last 15 years have the Russians managed to dress up and eat their fill. However, people with full bellies tend to become drowsy. This explains, for example, the disinterest among students. In no other country are they as apathetic as they are here. SPIEGEL: With so much pessimism, do you even like your fellow Russian people? Sorokin: The word “people” is unpleasant to me. The phrase “Soviet people” was drummed into us from childhood on. I love concrete people, enlightened people who live conscious lives and do not simply sit there and vegetate. To love the people you have to be the general secretary of the Communist Party or an absolute dictator. The poet Josef Brodsky once said, “The trees are more important to me than the forest.” SPIEGEL: In your book you describe a wall with which Russia isolates itself from the West. Why is this wall built? Sorokin: After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, former party officials burned their party books and traded in their black Volga limousines for black German-made sedans. That was it. We had no purifying revolution. Neither Communist Party officials nor KGB generals were forced to give up the reins of power. In August 1991, I was in the crowd standing in front

Spiegel Interview with Vladimir Sorokin

of the Lubyanka KGB building when the monument to KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was toppled. It seemed as if a new era was about to begin. But we underestimated the power of the Soviet Union. It became ingrained in people’s consciousness over the course of seven decades. After German reunification, West Germany became a mirror for former East German citizens. We didn’t have that. SPIEGEL: You hold a degree in petroleum engineering. Was the latest confrontation with Belarus over natural gas and oil an expression of Moscow’s power politics? Sorokin: Our government hasn’t become accustomed yet to the fact that Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Baltic states—in fact, the entire former Soviet Union—are now independent countries. Incidentally, I wrote my thesis on the development of dampers for oil pipelines. SPIEGEL: Did this expertise come in handy in your book? Sorokin: Yes, there is a sentence in it that reads: “We shut the damper, as the czar ordered.” SPIEGEL: How should German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, behave in dealing with the Russian government? Sorokin: The West should be even more vocal in insisting that the Russians respect human rights. All compromise aside, I ask myself whether Russia is moving in the direction of democracy. I don’t believe it is! Bit by bit, Russia is slipping back into an authoritarian empire. The worst thing that can happen to us is indifference in the West—that is, if it were interested in nothing but oil and gas. I am always surprised when I watch the weather report on German television. First they show the map of Europe and then the camera moves to the right. Then comes Kiev, then Moscow and then everything stops. This seems to be the West’s view of us—of a wild Russia that begins past Moscow, a place one prefers not to see. This is a big mistake. The West must pay closer attention. SPIEGEL: Does the West understand Russia? Sorokin: Yes and no. In Russia no one is surprised when an official accepts a bribe while at the same time portraying the state as some sacred entity to which the bourgeois should pay homage.

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This all sounds absurd to you. But for Russians it is completely normal. SPIEGEL: There used to be a similar attitude toward the state in Germany. But that changed after the Nazi dictatorship. Nowadays the state plays a more modest role in society, just as it does in America. Sorokin: That just happens to be democracy. The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said, “In a democracy, portraits of a nation’s leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp.” That won’t happen so quickly in our country. SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, we thank you for this interview. Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp. Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

Vladimir Sorokin

Petrushk a 1

The dwarf Petr “Petrusha” Samuilovich Boreyko, who served as a harlequin in the Kremlin Chamber of Merriment, returned to his home after Friday’s concert for the Kremlin Inner Circle in the third hour of the morning. The merrymakers’ big red bus, which, as usual, dropped the dwarfs off at night after the performance, drove him up to the very entrance of the nine-story brick house on MaloGruzinskaya Street. The driver opened the door and announced: “Green Petrushka—out!” Petrusha, who’d been dozing in the back seat, awoke, slid down to the floor, and slowly walked toward the exit. Another twentysix dwarfs dozed in the bus’s dim interior, in what seemed like disproportionately large seats. They were all in their merrymaking costumes, makeup, caps, and hats. And all were, without exception, sleeping. After walking down the aisle between the sleeping Baba Yagas, wood- and water-goblins, hags, and witches, Petrusha extended his little-bitty hand to the driver and said in a hoarse, creakingly high voice: “So long, Volodya.” The driver enclosed the little hand in his tattooed fingers:

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     From Vladimir Sorokin, Sakharnyi Kreml’ (The Sugar Kremlin) (Moscow: Astrel’; AST, 2008’).

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“Sleep well.” Petrusha descended the steps in a sweeping, swinging manner, and jumped down onto the asphalt, which was wet from the incessant drizzle. The door closed and the bus drove off. Petrusha began to climb up other steps—stone ones—toward the entrance. He wore the costume of the Green Petrushka: a tri-peaked green hat with bells, a little green caftan with huge buttons, iridescent green breeches, and short green booties with curled toes. Petrusha’s face was also green, but with red freckles and a big scarlet nose. Behind Petrusha’s back dangled a green balalaika, which shone brightly even at night. Another three Petrushkas—Red, Blue, and Gold—still slept aboard the departed bus. Petrusha pulled out a plastic key, applying it to the lock of the scratched and graffitied door. The door squeaked, opened. The dwarf slipped into the dimly lighted entrance. It wasn’t very clean here, but at least there were no traces of destruction or arson: the Council of Roads had redeemed the house and zemshchina three years ago. Petrusha summoned the elevator, but it didn’t respond. “Shit-clarinet!” Petrusha creaked out his usual expletive, remembering that it was no longer Friday, but Saturday, and on weekends, by order of the city council, not a single elevator was to work in all of mother-Moscow. Economizing! A foreign word.... And in Russian—frugality. Petrusha trudged up to the fifth floor on foot. He had to get a serious pivoting start on each step, tilting severely to one side or the other. His little bells rang, keeping time with his oscillations, and his green balalaika fidgeted behind his back. And so, with these swings, he overcame all five floors, and approached door No. 52, to which he applied the same rectangular key. The door sang out “Oh, someone’s come down from the hill!” and opened. A light immediately came on in the apartment and a big beigesilver robot named Yegorr rolled out: “Greetings, Petr Samuilovich!” “Hi, Yegorro,” Petrusha said wearily, leaning against a low hallstand and catching his breath after the long ascent.

Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushka

The robot rolled right up to him, its beige plastic stomach opened, lit up: there was a shot of vodka inside the robot. And the “March of the Toreadors” from Carmen immediately sounded. Four years ago this had become a tradition after each nighttime performance in the Kremlin. Having caught his breath, Petrusha removed the shot from the robot’s stomach, clinked the glass against its silvery forehead, drank the vodka, and put the glass back in place. He took off his balalaika, gave it to the robot. Leaning against the hall-stand, he pulled off his boots. Then he took off his Green Petrushka outfit, hanging it all on Yegorr’s hands. The robot rolled off, rumbling, toward the wardrobe. With nothing else on but little black underpants, Petrusha wearily stretched, yawned, and padded into the bathroom. The faucet was still making noise in here, filling the tub with foaming water. Petrusha noticed with satisfaction that what the robot had added to the water wasn’t “Apple Dream,” which had come to bore him, but the “Tale of the Seven Seas.” He pulled off his underpants, tumbled over the edge of the tub, and plunged into the water. The foam smelled of the sea. Petrusha submerged himself in it at once. The warm water, bubbling around his small, tired body, felt delightful. The vodka blossomed like a hot flower in his stomach. “Swell...,” Petrusha exhaled and closed his eyes. Yegorr rolled into the bathroom with a lit “Homeland” cigarette. Without opening his eyes, Petrusha parted his lips, which were painted scarlet. The robot placed the cigarette between them, turned, and stood still with an ashtray. Petrusha inhaled deeply with great pleasure, releasing a stream of smoke from his brightly colored mouth. Confronted by the smoke, the foam flickered with annoyance. Petrusha took another drag, mumbled. The robot took the cigarette from him. With a groan of pleasure, Petrusha grabbed his scarlet nose, pulled it off, and tossed it onto the floor. Then he began washing the makeup from his face. Having washed it all away, he again opened his little mouth, with its thin, pale lips. The robot placed the cigarette in it. The water stopped flowing. Petrusha smoked, lying relaxed in the tub and gazing at the dark-blue ceiling plastered with shiny stars. The

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performance had gone smoothly: he played the harlequin and danced quickly and gracefully, as always, with a “twinkle,” turning like a “spindle,” walking like a “poker,” “duck,” “blizzard,” “grouse,” “pike,” “samovar,” “roly-poly”—and when he passed by as an “American” with a pratfall, the entire Inner Circle, which had gathered in the Faceted Chamber, clapped and whistled approvingly, while Prince Boris Yurievich Oboluev tossed gold pieces at him twice. “Two gold and two silver ... ten rubles...,” he murmured, remembering and gazing at the stars. “What would you like, sir?” asked the robot. “Nothing,” Petrusha flicked ash into the foam. “Gimme a little more vodka.” “Yes, sir,” the robot opened its stomach. Petrusha removed the shot glass, emptied it into his mouth, and handed it back to the robot. “Phew ... alright ....” he murmured, first taking a breath and then a drag from the cigarette. “All’s well that ends well,” said the robot. “Exactly,” Petrusha closed his eyes, leaning back against the plastic headrest. “Rustle me up some grub. Just don’t heat anything up.” “Yes, sir.” The robot rolled away. Petrusha finished smoking and spat the butt into the foam. He got up, turned on the shower. Strong jets of water hit him from the outlet above. Petrusha hunched over, folding his hands over his genitals. Then he straightened up, tossing back his head and placing his face under the jets. He felt quite well, his fatigue flowing away with the water. “Well, then,” he turned off the shower and got out of the tub. He took a terry robe from a low hanger, put it on, climbed a wooden ladder in front of the sink, and glanced at himself in the mirror: a broad face with small, puffy eyes, a snub nose, and a small, stubborn mouth. He took a comb from the shelf and combed his sparse, sand-colored hair. “Well, then,” he repeated, and stuck out a sharp, white-coated tongue. “Be well, Petrusha!”

Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushka

He got down from the little ladder with a swing and went into the living room. Yegorr had almost finished setting the table. “Things going alright?” Petrusha slapped Yegorr’s eternally cold plastic ass with his palm, which was warm and pale after the bath. “As soot is white,” the robot answered, laying out the zakuski. “Re-fresh!” “Yes, sir.” Petrusha removed the shot glass from Yegorr, drank half, speared a pickled mushroom with his fork, sent it into his mouth, and commenced chewing. Then he drained the glass, grabbed a pickle, sat down at the table, and started crunching it. Before him lay a plate of boiled and smoked sausages that the robot had sliced, a saucer with eggplant caviar, and a not-very-carefully opened can of sprats in tomato sauce. In the center of the table stood a Sugar Kremlin. Petrusha had already eaten all the double-headed eagles and a part of the walls. “News?” he asked. “No news,” Yegorr replied. “That’s good news,” Petrusha nodded, took a piece of black bread, and greedily pounced on the food. He ate quickly and with obvious effort, as if he were working, which caused his head to jerk, while his facial muscles rippled furiously beneath his skin, which was pale, unhealthy, and worn out by makeup. “Refresh!” he ordered with his mouth full. The robot obediently flew open. After drinking the fourth shot, Petrusha suddenly became very drunk and started swaying on his chair. His little hands moved clumsily; he knocked over the can of sprats, broke off a piece of bread, and tried to sop up the sauce that had spilled on the table. “From be-e-yond the sea-ea—fro-om another sho-ore,” he sang, winking to the robot. “He came sailing to us, Uncle Ye-e-gor,” the robot immediately picked up the song. “Got himself a gre-ey wagon,” sang the dwarf, hiccoughing.

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“And a crea-ea-ea-ky nag,” sang the robot. “Yes, and ho-ho-ho-ho-houyhnhnm!” they sang together. Petrusha broke out laughing, leaning back and dropping his fork. Clutching the piece of bread with the sopped-up sauce in his hand, he chortled creakily, swaying. The robot stood still, blinking its blue eyes. “Refresh!” Petrusha shook his head. The plastic stomach flew open. Petrusha took the shot, sipped at it, and carefully placed it on the table: “Well, then….” He shifted the watery gaze of his small eyes to the robot: “What’s the plural of glass?” “Smithereens!” the robot replied. “Good boy,” Petrusha hiccoughed. “And things’re going alright?” “As soot is white!” “Go-o-od boy!” Petrusha pounded his fist on the table. The unfinished shot toppled. “Shit-clarinet … refresh!” The robot flew open. The little-bitty hand pulled out a shot of vodka. The watery little eyes spotted the Sugar Kremlin: “So.” He clambered up and stood on the seat of the chair, and then reached for the Kremlin, stretching himself flat on the table. When he got to it, he broke a merlong off the Kremlin wall, shoved it into his mouth, and crawled back, planting his palm in the sausage. He sat down on the chair with a sweeping jump and loudly crunched into the sugar: “And, umm... things going alright?” “As soot is white.” Petrusha crushed the merlong of the Kremlin wall with his molars. “Look, Yegorro,” he said thoughtfully, “lemme me have....” “What would you like?” “Gimme Ritulya.” A not very high-quality hologram of a young dwarf maiden, sitting in a rocking-chair in a garden, appeared in the room. The

Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushka

dwarf girl was rocking, smiling, and cooling herself with a fan that seemed humongous in her miniature little hands. “Turn around!” Petrusha commanded the robot. The robot turned away. Petrusha climbed down from the table with the shot glass in his hand, walked over to the hologram, and sat down awkwardly on the soft floor covering, spilling vodka. “Hello, Ritulya,” he croaked. “Hello, my dear.” The small woman continued to rock and smile. Periodically, she would bring the fan up to her face, hide behind it, and wink. “Ritulya. It was the same today again. Had the harlequinade without you. The sixty-second performance. Without you,” Petrusha muttered disjointedly. “Sixty-second! And without you. Eh? Like that. And everyone misses you. Terribly. All of ‘em! Nastya, Borka, Cucumber, Marinka. And what’s ‘is name ... the newbie ... Lil’ Samson. Plays the water-goblin. All of ‘em, all of ‘em. And I love you terribly. Terribly! And I’ll wait for you. Always. And it won’t be, you know. Not long. Year and a half. They’ll fly by quick. You won’t notice. Wham, at home. Won’t even notice. Fly by like a birdie. Flit, and that’s it. And the term will end. And everything’ll be, you know. Alright. We have a lot of money, now, Ritulya. Exceeding much. Today, this prince, you know. Oboluev. Tossed two gold pieces. Tossed ‘em in my mug! Oboluev. Eh?! And that’s it. And last time they hurled silver ... just ... well. Like that. Terrible! They throw and throw.... And Sergei Sergeich said. Exactly! That they’ll give me a raise in the new year. For long service. And I’ll have, you know. A hundred and twenty. Gold. A month. Plus the tossings. Eh?! We live like kings, Ritulya. Be well, there. Lil’ Rita. Here’s to you.” Petrusha drank, grimaced, sighed. He carefully placed the empty glass on the floor and looked at rocking Rita. “You know. Ritulya. Our lil’ Vitya, here. He had a harlequin gig on the side. For the secret service. Eh?! And there was one oprichnik there. Totally stoned. Plastered. Took such a liking to Vitya that he tossed him three gold pieces. All at once! And then, you know. Even sat ‘im on his knee. And ho-ho! Plied ‘im with wine. And said we could, you know. Perform for the oprichnina. ‘Cause the oprichnina

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didn’t like dwarfs before. But now, you know. They like ‘em. Eh?! There. Maybe. Why not? He’ll talk to that one, you know. Bavila. And that’s it. And we’ll start dancing for the oprichniks. And it’ll all be alright. All of it! And this fellow treated him. Vitya. So. And our Vitya, you know. He’s exceeding brazen. Asked the secret service fellow straight out. Right to his face: when’ll you review the case of the Kremlin dwarfs?! To his face! Eh?! Vitya! And that fellow heard ‘im out. Seriously. And all serious, you know. He answers: soon! That’s how it is. He seriously said: soo-oon! Soo-oon! And that means—there’ll be a, you know. A review. And then—amnesty. And all of you, all sixteen of you, will … go … free! There!” Petrusha screwed up his little eyes—which were swollen from drink, makeup, and fatigue—to rocking Rita. She was cooling herself as before, hiding her face behind the fan, winking. “Amnesty,” Petrusha said, and licked his little lips. “Just you wait…. I, you know. Told you. I told you! Already. Yes? Just you wait ... Yegorr!” “Yes, sir.” “Did I tell Ritulya about amnesty?” “You did.” “When?” “August 12, August 28, September 3, September 17, September 19, October 4.” Petrusha was deep in thought. Rita rocked, fanned, smiled, and winked. “What? What’re you laughing at? Fool.” He picked up the empty glass and hurled it at the hologram. The glass flew through smiling Rita, bounced off the wall, and fell to the floor. The shot glass was made of viviparous transparent plastic. The robot immediately rolled up, lifted it, and placed it in its stomach. “Cunt!” Petrusha shouted, glaring at Rita. Rita winked from behind her fan. “Just you wait...,” Petrushka curled his lips with concern, remembering something. “Wait, wait ... Yegorr!” “Yes, sir.” “I want! Quick! The! The! Cap!”

Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushka

Yegorr rolled up to the wardrobe, opened it, took out the green tri-peaked Petrushka cap. “Quick! Give it here!” The robot rolled toward Petrushka with cap in hand. “Hurry up, shit-clarinet! Step on it!” Swaying Petrusha grabbed the cap from him, pulled it over his head, and threw off his robe, standing naked. “Gimme the highest!” he shouted. The hologram of Rita immediately disappeared and was replaced by another: the sovereign, seated in the royal box of the Bolshoi Theatre. “Hail, sovereign Vasily Nikolaich!” cried Petrusha and tried to walk like a “samovar,” but fell. “Hail, hail....” Petrusha turned over and got up, staggering. He bowed to the sovereign, saluted, and murmured: “A little gift for Your Royal Highness from the desert’s dryness, from a lead brick, from a horse’s prick, from a cat’s asshole, from a lame mongrel, from a hungry whore, from a herpes sore, from a chopping block, from a headless cock, from a beaten snout, from rancid sauerkraut, from a bird of prey, from nuclear decay, from a rotting porch, from a branded crotch, from a broken knee, and a bit from me.” He bowed, sticking his wizened little rear right up to the sovereign’s calm face: “Yegorr! The fuse!!” The robot raised his middle finger-lighter to Petrusha’s rear and ignited a little flame. Petrusha loudly passed gas. It flashed a greenish-yellow. The quick flame engulfed the sovereign’s head and died down. A hole had formed in the hologram. The sovereign sat in the box, as before, but his head and a part of his left shoulder were gone. Petrusha stood up straight, staggered away from the hologram, and peered at it: “Well, then.” His completely swollen little eye-slits happily appraised the damage to the sovereign:

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“Swell! Eh, Yegorr?” “Right, sir.” “Well, then.... Gimme the previous one.” Another hologram appeared alongside the first one—exactly the same, but smaller. In it, the sovereign was only missing his neck and chin. “There, see?!” Petrusha came up to the robot and embraced his faceted hip. “I let ‘er rip downward that time. And, you know. It was weak that time, eh? A weak fart, eh?” “Right, sir.” “But tonight? How’d I do? Super! Eh? Yegorr!” “Right, sir.” Petrusha and the robot stood gazing at the holograms. The cap on Petrusha’s head—swaying, its bells ringing—brushed up, now and then, against the robot’s narrow waist. “Re-fresh!” Petrusha ordered. And stretching out his hand, he pulled the shot glass out of the robot. Spilling some of its contents, he brought it to his mouth. He wanted to take a drink, but stopped, grabbed the glass with his left hand, and showed the hologram a fig with his right: “Take that!” He elbowed the robot: “Yegorr!” The robot folded its silvery fingers into a fig and showed it to the hologram: “Here’s to you, sovereign Vasily Nikolaevich.” The two figs—one silvery-strict above, the other pinkish-white, swaying, below—hung in the air for a long time. Petrusha tired first, lowered his hand. “Good boy!” he slapped the robot on its rear, drank, and tossed the glass behind his back. The robot immediately turned around, picked it up, and placed it into itself. “It’s...,” Petrusha scratched his bare, hairless chest. “Need, you know....” His swollen little eye-slits peered around the room. “Yegorr!” “What would you like?”

Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushka

“It’s...,” Petrusha’s stubby-fingered little hands fumbled restlessly across his chest. “I, you know....” “What would you like,” the robot stared at him. “How is it...,” the dwarf recalled painfully, and suddenly plopped down, sprawled out on the carpet, rolled over on his back—but got up, shook his head. The bells rang. The robot stared at its master. While he stared at the robot, stirring his fingers and toes. “Who’re … you?” Petrusha asked, barely moving his tongue. “I am the robot Yegorr,” the robot replied. “And ... things alright?” “As soot is white.” “And you ... you know ... well....” “What would you like?” “Who’re … you?” “I am the robot Yegorr.” Petrusha raised his hand, reached for the robot, moving his lips, but suddenly fell backward, quiet. The robot rolled closer to him, knelt and slowly bent down, picked Petrusha up in its arms, straightened up and stood. It rolled into the bedroom. Petrusha slept in its arms, his little mouth agape. The robot placed him in the unmade bed and covered him with a blanket. It took the cap off the sleeper’s head and rolled into the living room. It put the cap away in the wardrobe. Cleared the table. Turned off the hologram. Turned off the light. Rolled up to the wall. Switched to sleep mode. Its blue eyes died down. Translated by Boris Dralyuk

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C r itic a l R esponses to G ener ation ‘P’ (H omo Z a piens , 1999) Review of Generation “P” Gregory Freidin1

Granted, the Soviet Union was one big Potemkin village— a communist Disneyland stretching over 11 time zones—a virtual reality, except that those who lived there experienced it as the real thing. What, then, is today’s Russia like? Before the collapse of communism, the answer depended pretty much on which side of the Berlin Wall the observer was facing. These days, according to Victor Pelevin in his latest and most provocative novel, Generation “P,” the answer depends—in the final analysis—on the last button you pressed on the zapper of your boob tube. Welcome, then, to the oral-obsessive, anal-compulsive, image-saturated, stimulantcrazy, brand-name infatuated, ghost-infested, violence-ridden, and confusing Russia of Pelevin’s absolutely sex-free novel, which in the bargain, has turned out to be a mind-boggling commercial success. A novelist with a cult following, Pelevin has already produced two brilliant snapshots of contemporary Russia—one through the eyes of post-communist citizens metamorphosing into bugs (The Life of Insects) and another (Chapayev and Void) through the eyes of a legendary revolutionary duo, Commander Vasily Chapayev and his sidekick, Petka Void, who shuttle between 1918 and 1996 and between Moscow and Outer Mongolia under the influence of all sorts of substances and Buddhist mantras. With the publication of

     Published in Foreign Policy, no. 118 (Spring 2000): 165-169.

1

Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’. Gregory Freidin

Generation “P,” Pelevin has launched another probe into the postcommunist terra incognita, this time in the form of a dissident poet trying to find gainful employment in the country’s real world. A dissident poet? Yes, a dissident poet. Has anyone ever wondered what happened to Russia’s dissident poets, those quixotic figures who breathed romance into the cold war the way Omar Sharif breathed it into the frozen steppe in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago? Pelevin found one such poet (unemployed, of course) and put him to good use as his alter ego: Vavilen Tatarsky, born in 1960, who became a poet by virtue of his encounter with a volume by Boris Pasternak in 1980. Like the author, Tatarsky (a significant name, given the Russian history of the Tartar yoke) came of age in the halcyon days of Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, when capitalism’s inroads were measured by such momentous developments as building the one and only Pepsi bottling plant to slake the thirst of the entire Evil Empire. The capitalist beverage, even without ice, did what it was supposed to do: instill in the young pioneers sipping the warm, clawing liquid the hope that “some day the far-away proscribed world from the other side of the ocean would enter their life.” It did. We know it did. With a vengeance. But the choice of the cola brand that produced the Soviet Union’s “P” generation may also help explain why the capitalism and democracy that followed the collapse of communism have turned out to be—to put it delicately—not the real thing. As one who has also tasted Pepsi while a captive of communism, some dozen years earlier, I can attest to the beverage’s ideologically corrosive effect. It was 1959, the year of innocence; the place was Moscow’s Sokolniki Park; the event was the U.S. Industrial and Cultural Fair. For me, a Moscow youth of 13, the free Pepsi offered at the fair was even more shocking than the fair sculpture garden consisting of the tormented, twisted figures of American expressionism and the tantalizing display walls showcasing hundreds of different models of men’s shoes (incomprehensible for someone used to treating footwear as a horse treats its hoof). A line snaked around an exotic-looking bright yellow stall. Behind it, half a dozen perplexed-looking Russian women dressed in white uniforms were filling and handing paper cups with the

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foaming American drink to Soviet citizens. The clientele looked about furtively, avoiding each other’s eyes while standing in line. Hesitating at first, they downed the industrial-tasting cola like vodka, Russian style, and ambled away only to turn around all of a sudden and get in line again for another gulp of what had to be, a mere six years after Joseph Stalin’s death, a treasonous potion. I, too, made several rounds, an adventure facilitated by the presence of a public toilet, strategically located nearby and almost as rare in Moscow then as was a bottle of Pepsi. With each round, I felt my Soviet loyalties, a matter of course at the time, ebbing away. Buoyed by the memories and hoping to find another key to Pelevin’s novel, I tried to research the history of the U.S. Industrial and Cultural Fair and came across a recording of that event’s other main attraction: the Kitchen Debate. “You may be ahead of us … in the development of the thrust of your rockets,” Vice President Richard Nixon began diplomatically, taking care of both his opponent’s pride and his missile gap constituency back home, “[but] we are ahead of you … in color television.” Premier Nikita Khrushchev was unimpressed: How can one even compare television and rockets? Forty years later, with the old enmities receding into memory, it is clear that the rockets and sputnik may have won a few battles, but it was the color television with its ability to sell anything and everything to everybody that has won the cold war. The intuition of Pelevin the novelist supports this Pepsi and color television theory of history. Our fictional hero, Vavilen Tatarsky, was born a year after Pepsi’s promotion came to Russia—the son of a man of the 1960s generation who, like Mikhail Gorbachev, loved the fiction of the semi-dissident author Vasily Aksyonov as much as he worshiped Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and therefore decided to give his son a name that combined elements of both. As he was completing his studies at the Gorky Literary Institute, Tatarsky looked forward to the idyllic double existence of a Soviet intellectual: a day job as a producer of Soviet pulp, with the night devoted exclusively to the creation of poetry for eternity. But then perestroika made matters complicated, “improving the Soviet Union so much that it ceased to exist,” and with it, ending the demand for official Soviet writing.

Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’. Gregory Freidin

All that remained was writing for eternity. But, as Pelevin notes: “The eternity to which Tatarsky [had] decided to devote his works and days [had] also begun to change…. It turned out that eternity existed only in so far as Tatarsky believed in it.” Indeed, this eternity “could exist only thanks to government subsidies or, which is one and the same thing, as something that was forbidden by the state.” Disenchanted, Tatarsky abandons poetry and hires himself out as a salesmen in one of the numerous retail kiosks run by Moscow’s Chechen mafia—until his way with words finds another application. He gets rediscovered by an old classmate and fellow poet, who is now a successful purveyor of PR. Thanks to this chance encounter, Tatarsky embarks on a grand career as an advertising copywriter. At first, his special talent is employed in giving a Russian spin to famous American brands, in anticipation of an onslaught of U.S. consumer products. One of Tatarsky’s greatest hits is a slogan for Parliament cigarettes that evokes the 1993 shelling of the Russian White House: “To Us, Even the Smoke of the Fatherland is Pleasant and Sweet.” The words are those of a famous aphorism from Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, familiar to every Russian schoolchild. Emblematic of the country’s pride in its letters, the words are now used as a product wrapper for a commercial hit. The more Tatarsky is drawn into the world of the makebelieve economy, the more successfully he combines his duties as an advertising kreator with an exciting career in psychedelic travel (certain Russian mushrooms apparently facilitate contact with the God of the Old Testament, as well as the more exotic ancient Babylonian deities) and Ouija board communications with the spirit of Che Guevara (the great leftist brand name), who proposes a heavily Freudian theory of consumer society. Thus enlightened, Tatarsky finally floats to the top of the super-secret and all-powerful media conglomerate that uses sophisticated computer graphics equipment for scripting, producing, and broadcasting a simulated Russian reality. Only the United States is capable of restricting the agency’s power—by controlling the speed of the graphics processors. (Just in case you have wondered why on some days Boris Yeltsin looked much more animated than on others….)

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In Russia, Generation “P” has become required reading for everyone, and many of its clever one-liners have already entered the hip argot. Che Guevara’s spirit announces to Tatarsky through an automatic writing planchette that a new species, Homo Zapiens (from the television zapper), is taking over the world, whose oral (consume!) and anal (disgorge cash!) obsessions account for the alternative name of the species, Oranus. Both Homo Zapiens and Oranus are now part of Russian speech, along with “wow impulses”— a unit of measurement for viewer responses to a commercial. Before becoming a super adman, Tatarsky writes his last poem, which can be read as an epigraph to the entire novel. Echoing Fyodor Dostoevsky’s musings in Crime and Punishment that eternity could turn out to be “one little room, something like a bath-house in the country, black with soot, with spiders in every corner” and those of the Russian rock band DDT in the song, “What is Autumn?,” the poem morphs into an extended question mark hovering over the post-Soviet, post-utopian space we call Russia: What is eternity? It’s a little bath house. Eternity is a little bath house with cockroaches But if a Man’ka—a common salesgirl Stops believing in this little bath house, What will become of the Motherland and us?

A postmodern consumerist Potemkin village, a color television screen projection of an advertising culture—this is what Generation “P” boldly suggests.

Russian Literary Postmodernism in the 1990s Mark Lipovetsky 2

[…] The protagonist of Chapaev i pustota (The Clay Machine Gun / Buddha’s Little Finger, 1996), the decadent poet Pyotr Pustota (Void), and the central character of the new novel Generation “P” Vavilen Tatarsky, “creator” of commercials, are essentially antipodes. Pustota does not know which of the realities known to him are authentic and which are fictitious. But he chooses for himself the world where he is a decadent poet and Chapaev’s Commissar, and follows this choice consistently. Tatarsky completely belongs to the given that is today’s reality. In order to escape from reality he needs to use different “stimulators” like LSD, bad heroin, mushrooms, or at least a Ouija board for communication with spirits. Pustota follows the path of philosophic enlightenment and finally finds the capability to “check out from the hospital,” or in other words follow the lead of Chapaev and create his own reality. Tatarsky also seems to go along the path of elevation, ranging from the laryok [night food/alcohol stand] salesman to the live god, the head of the secret order, Haldey’s Guild, which supplies Russia with illusory reality.

2

     Published in The Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 1 (January 2001): 31-50.

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In fact, his elevation is predicted by his name, Vavilen, created by the combination of letters borrowed from Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, and by the fortunate chance that it coincides with the name of the city (Babylon). His path is predetermined not by his personality or search, but by his name, that is by his “brand.” Tatarsky turns out to be the same thing, a product of the stuff for which he creates commercials. In Pustota, Pelevin depicted an almost Romantic image of the modernist. Here, the modernist was a genuine creator, one who chose emptiness for the ultimate expression of his freedom. As for Tatarsky, he is nothing but a human word processor. He is not a creator, but a “krieitor” (this English word sounds sarcastic in the Russian adoption), elevated to stardom by pure impersonal chance. He seems ridiculous with his notebook in which at any convenient or inconvenient moment he writes down ideas for commercials. This comic effect of his “creativity” is especially evident at the moment of the drug-generated epiphany when he produces (‘in redemption’) the advertisement “slogan” for God: “KhristosSpasitel’. Solidnyi Gospod’ dlia solidnykh gospod” [Christ the Saviour: Imposing Lord for imposing lords]. His ascent along the career/mystical ladder certainly reminds one of a computer game, with its three levels, three puzzles, and three bosses. But in fact he does not ascend by his will, but is moved as a figurine on the board. It is illuminating that each new elevation of Tatarsky occurs right after his boss/mentor’s death of unclear causes that are linked to some superior forces unknown to Vavilen. Pelevin used the model of the computer game as a plot model in his early short novel Prints Gosplana (The prince of Gosplan, 1990). However, the difference between the two is stunning. The protagonist of the early text recognized the simulative character of existence within the game when he discovered that the princess he was courageously trying to save was only a bunch of sticks and buckets, a dummy wrapped in colorful rags. But he chose to continue the game because, “when a man spends so much time and effort on a journey and finally gets to its end, he no longer sees everything the way it really is. [...]

Critical Responses to Generation “P”. Mark Lipovetsky

Although that’s not exactly it either. There is no such thing as the way everything ‘really is.’ Let’s just say he can’t allow himself to see.’”3 The Prince of Gosplan managed to fill the flat and fictitious framework of the game with himself: his individual path, his pain, losses and revelations. By this means he transformed the simulation into a reality of his own, free and authentic (for him). On the contrary, Tatarsky gets accepted into the big game under the condition of his total depersonalization. The final act of taking off Tatarsky’s virtual mask, the three-dimensional model that will be a mystical husband of Ishtar and will appear in all the possible commercials, symbolically manifests total alienation of Tatarsky from his face, which in fact never was too bright or distinguished with individual features. Generation “P” is a manifestation of the bitter realization that the principal individual strategy of freedom elaborated by Pelevin in his previous works can be easily turned into a repressive mechanism for the manipulation of mass consciousness. The transformation of simulacra into reality becomes industrial and consumer-oriented. Every commercial in Pelevin’s novel reveals itself to be the simulacra of happiness and freedom pretending to be “the real thing”: “Freedom is symbolized by an iron, or a tampon with wings, or lemonade. That’s what we’re paid for. We bullshit them from the screen, and they bullshit each other and us, authors. This is like radioactivity when it does not matter anymore who did blast the bomb.”4 Within such a disposition, the difference between the creator of the illusion and the consumer is not that deep. During the “mass reproduction” of simulacra, the poet Pyotr Pustota is substituted for by the commercial copywriter Vavilen Tatarsky. […] As for Pelevin, his Generation “P” is a logical step after his neo-baroque Bildungromans (Omon Ra, Life of Insects, Buddha’s Little Finger). In his previous novels the transfiguration of simulacra into

3

     Victor Pelevin, A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, trans. Andrew Bromfield (London: New Directions, 1998), 204.

4

     Victor Pelevin, Generation “P” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), 81. Hereafter references to this edition are indicated by a page number after the quote.

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a reality of individual freedom was the goal of the intellectual and emotional quest of the extraordinary character. In Generation “P” he naturally makes an attempt to offer this knowledge to a very ordinary character, an everyman who is no different from everyone. But the result of this experiment returns the author to the starting point of his quest, the hyper-reality of simulacra produced by the means of commercials that are pictured in Generation “P.” This scenario is no better than the hyper-reality of simulacra produced by the Soviet ideology and pictured in Omon Ra, Pelevin’s first novel. […]

Survival of the Catchiest: Memes and Postmodern Russia Eliot Borenstein5

[…] Though Pelevin is not the only author of “serious” fiction to incorporate the world of popular culture in his writing, he is certainly the most prominent. Moreover, Pelevin refuses to draw boundaries between high and low. Nearly all his work to date has been informed by an unwavering strategy: the casual conflation of television commercials, Hollywood movies, Latin American telenovelas, and (most recently) comic book superheroes, with Russian religious philosophy, Silver Age mysticism (Blok’s Beautiful Lady), trite philosophizing about Russia’s destiny, right-wing national-chauvinist rhetoric, and the Russian literary canon (along with a distinct admixture of canned Zen wisdom and hallucinogenic epiphanies). DPP (nn) contains an extended parody of Spider-Man, who, thanks to Russian phonetics and the protagonist’s obsessions, quickly metamorphoses into “Pidormen” (Queer-man). Though much of the scene seems to come from the Spider-Man film, some of Pidormen’s neurotic anxieties about his secret identity suggest that Pelevin is also familiar with the movie’s source material. Pidormen’s secret identity is used as a metaphor for the protagonist’s fears that his business rival and metaphysical enemy is seducing him and “turning” him gay.

5

     Published in: Slavic and East European Journal 48, no. 3 (2004): 462-83.

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While Pelevin is tapping into a long-established subtext of the superhero genre (secret identity as closet), the superhero trope and homosexuality are both equally foreign to the main character, and are both ambient influences that colonize his consciousness. Thus Pelevin uses the superhero for an effect that is virtually the mirror image of the recent resurgence of the superhero metaphor in American prose fiction (the Fantastic Four in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994), the entire panoply of 1970s Marvel heroes in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and the Escapist, a WWII mystery man created by Michael Chabon in his The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), in which the superheroes are connected with a bittersweet nostalgia for an unhappy childhood. In Pelevin’s hands, the superhero meme is aggressively alien, while for the American authors, it is reassuringly familiar. Pelevin’s apparently indiscriminate borrowing from every available discourse has placed him firmly within the Postmodernist camp, but it also facilitates a heightened awareness of the memetic character of the ambient culture. Where some might want to preserve the hierarchy between the canonical and the trivial, at least some of the appeal of Pelevin’s fiction clearly lies in his blithe insistence on the interchangeability of memes. Each of Pelevin’s books resembles the sidewalk lotki at which they are so often sold: the vendors see no problem placing Daniil Andreev side by side with Danielle Steele, and neither does Pelevin. Pelevin’s world reifies the notion of the “market of ideas,” since masscultural productions such as Pokemon compete with snippets of Pushkin and Lermontov for space in our consciousness. If Pelevin’s characters seem to lack a developed psychology (the author’s flagrant disregard for the traditions of psychological realism is one of the many factors that put him at odds with the Russian literary establishment), this very lack of an inner life makes them suitable representations of both the Postmodern “post-self” and Blackmore’s dismissal of the self as a “memeplex,” a conglomeration of memetic subroutines that creates the illusion of consciousness. Pelevin gives his readers a self that is all surface, an all but affectless vessel to be filled with the culture’s ambient

Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’. Eliot Borenstein

memes.6 His non-stop references to pop-cultural ephemera are no doubt a source of humor, but they also serve as a constant reminder that there can be no boundary between the individual consciousness and the surrounding memetic environment. Though memetic concerns run throughout Pelevin’s work, nowhere are they more prominent than in Generation “P.” From the beginning, Pelevin shows Russia to be particularly susceptible to such memetic interventions: “Naskol’ko Tatarskii mog sudit’, nikakogo srazheniia mezhdu tovarami za nishi v razvorochennykh otechestvennykh mozgakh ne proiskhodilo; situatsiia bol’she napominala dymiashchiisia peizazh posle atomnogo vzryva” (“As far as Tatarsky could tell, no battle was being waged among the merchandise for niches in the country’s muddled brains; the situation was more like a smoking landscape after an atomic explosion” [31]). The novel begins by setting the stage for Russia’s weakened position as an importer rather than an exporter of culture, using consumer goods as the symbols of something much less tangible: a Soviet “Pepsi Generation” that never had the chance to choose Coke now lives in the ruins of an unloved but powerful country (“stoilo li meniat’ imperiiu zla na bananovuiu respubliku zla, kotoraia importiruet banany iz Finliandii” (“Was it worth trading an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imports bananas from Finland?” [18]). […] By the novel’s end, [Vavilen Tatarsky’s name] is clearly associated with an ancient city of great thematic importance: Babylon.7 In the tradition of Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, Tatarsky’s name seems to predetermine his course in life: he goes into advertising, rising from copywriter to “creator,” bringing together

6

     The flat, detached tone of most of Pelevin’s works is reminiscent of a number of American authors who appeal to a similar demographic (disaffected youth): the later novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick), nearly the entire fictional output of the late Richard Brautigan, and, most recently, the novels of Chuck Palahniuk. Vonnegut was quite popular in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, while Palahniuk’s Fight Club has earned him a loyal following in Russia today.

7

     The Russian “Vavilon” is used for both the city of Babylon and the Tower of Babel, making it far more evocative than it would be in English.

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words and images from vastly different traditions in order to move product. His hilarious slogans grow increasingly absurd and brazen (an ad for Parliament cigarettes featuring a picture of a burning Russian White House, with the slogan “I dym otechestva nam sladok i priiaten” (“The smoke of the fatherland is also sweet and pleasant”) [59] […]; a campaign for “Head and Shoulders” dandruff shampoo depicting Stenka Razin’s execution on Lobnoe mesto, the notorious Kremlin chopping block (300). In developing their media “concepts,” Tatarsky and his admen indulge in a veritable orgy of bricolage, in which no obstacles prevent the irreverent juxtaposition of cultural icons and notions. All pre-existing memes (whether from Griboedov, the Russian Orthodox Church, or Seven-Up ads) are fair game, and therefore can be used as the building blocks for the new memes of commercial culture. This approach is memetic in that it does not distinguish between poetry and jingles, since both are strings of information competing for our brains’ attention.8 Pelevin’s playful examination of advertising shows it to be the most nakedly memetic of all human endeavors, because a successful ad is one that we remember in spite of ourselves.9 Moreover, in post-Soviet Russia, even the loftiest ideological questions prove to be little more than advertising campaigns, the slicker, more attractive heirs to Soviet propaganda: Tatarsky is asked to develop a new “Russian idea” (176). In a move that resonates with the cultural preoccupation with mind control, Pelevin soon reveals that advertising techniques are used to both govern and create Russian reality. Advertising proves to be a kind of hypnosis that keeps the population in line. […]

8

     Tatarsky learns the tools of his trade by reading Al Ries and Jack Trout’s 1980 treatise on the philosophy of advertising, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

9

     This is why so many television commercials entirely dispense with the notion of explaining the value of a given product, concentrating instead on a memorable image, phrase, or tune with which the product will be associated.

Eduard Limonov

A H eroic Attitude

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“It’s best to never part with a gun. Best to keep it under a pillow or on your belt when going out for a walk. But daily life in New York doesn’t allow for adhering to this precept, so one must arm oneself as opportunity allows. A knife, a stick, a chain—anything that can harm your enemy is useful to you. It’s good to continually train your thoughts on how to attack and defend, anticipating various configurations of close engagements and tough situations so that you know beforehand what must be done in this or that situation. While sitting in a bar, calculate if you can destroy a possible target with a chair, for example; or slash someone’s face with a wine glass (having broken its rim; look for a spot to break the glass), or with a broken bottle. Figure out how you can attack these three sitting at the next table, or those four sitting in the corner. What will you use? Out on the streets, at any hour of day or night, keep on thinking: what kind of weapon can you tear away from a fence or a wall? What will you use if suddenly you have to defend yourself? Unrestrained aggression is just as stupid as cowardice. If you can avoid a conflict with a moron, do so. If someone merely bumps into you, you can curse and keep on walking. But if you see that a fight is unavoidable, pounce first without a warning. 1

     Published in: Eduard Limonov, Ubiistvo chasovogo (Dnevnik grazhdanina) (The murder of a sentry: A Citizen’s diary). St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2002, 129-33. First published in 1994.

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An individual who is always ready to deal with such situations faces less danger. Ready not just physically (this is self-evident; one must devote at least one hour per day to physical exercise, two hours is better), but also mentally: train your imagination so that you have a hundred such scripts at your disposal. Don’t drink—alcohol makes you weak and defenseless. Make death part of you; get used to its presence over your shoulder, be ready to have a rendezvous with it at any moment. Do all this so that you are not scared of death while engaged in conflict.” A yellowed page with this text recently turned up in my New York papers. I wrote it for myself in the summer of 1976. It bears no title; only in the margins, penciled in block letters, it says: CODE OF CONDUCT (how to survive). Times were tough for me then. In my second year in the U.S., I had lost my purpose in life, my wife, my job, and was barely surviving on meager welfare aid. The loss of my job had sent me to skid row, the lowest class, the ones who had no choice but to be cruel. The life of skid row is always extraordinarily cruel. After all, the lowest layers of society have nothing but their skin for cover. This explains the desperate, naked inhumanity of my “Code of Conduct.” This explains my bitter resolve to defend myself. Bitter it is, of course. The bitterness is due to the circumstances— but it’s heroic, too. That’s how I see it. It’s a heroic attitude to life. Given the circumstances, I could have turned into a couch potato and sunk into a depression, or drunk a gallon of cheap California chablis every day and turned into a vegetable. Or horrified by this life, I could have killed myself by any number of pathetic means: drowned in the fetid waters of the East or the Hudson River, jumped from a skyscraper’s observation deck or under a rusty subway car, or—even worse—resign myself to the bottom, remain a shadow in the country of shadows. Since having survived and become a writer, having mastered English and learned French, having read thousands of smart books, I’ve discovered that the uncomplicated but aggressive “Code of Conduct” that I had compiled for my own use is part of the great and famous fraternity of similar codes. Because the Orient is more honest than the West, the majority of the wise sayings, cynical and

Eduard Limonov. A Heroic Attitude to Life

poignant like a stab with a razorblade, originate in the East. “In a dispute, strike out like vultures; attack and pounce like the hungry hawks who tear at their prey … like an old wolf, remain vigilant even on a calm day; in the dark, be wary like a black raven….” Such was the counsel given to the Mongols by the austere Genghis Khan. The Japanese samurai and monk Jocho Yamamoto (1659-1719) articulates his philosophy of action in his book Hagakure: “It is impossible to perform heroic feats while remaining in a normal state of mind. One must turn into a fanatic and work oneself into a frenzy in striving towards death.” The kamikaze pilots wore headbands with an inscription from Hagakure: “The path of the samurai is death.” One should not take this as a call to suicide, or as an abnormal love of death. Jocho Yamamoto, a philosopher of action, proclaims a heroic attitude to life: it’s about attaining absolute mastery over oneself, making oneself superhumanly brave. To achieve this, he advises that we trivialize death, habituating ourselves to it. “To become an excellent samurai, one must prepare every day, from dawn to dusk, for death. If a samurai mentally rehearses his death every day, he will be able to die calmly when the time comes.” These are the words of the basic commandment of Hagakure, the philosophy of courage, honor, and dignity (the kamikaze pilots’ motto originates from that same source): “I discovered that the Path of Samurai is death. In a fifty-fifty death-or-life crisis, simply resolve to choose instant death. There is nothing complicated about it—just concentrate and carry on. Some say that perishing without fulfilling one’s mission is to die in vain but this is a petty imitation of the samurai code by the Osaka merchants. It’s practically impossible to make the right decision in the fifty-fifty situation. We all prefer to live. And so it is only natural that in such situations we always find excuses for continuing to live. But the one who chooses to go on living after failing his mission will be disparaged as a coward and … this is a risky role. If you die while failing your mission, it’s the death of a fanatic, a death in vain. But it’s not a shameful death. Such death is in fact the Path of the Samurai.” This tragic and sober creed could be endorsed by the defenders of the Brest Fortress, and by the heroes of the Battle at Stalingrad. (This is in spite of the fact that the Japanese were our enemies in several wars.) It was

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endorsed by Marshal Akhromeev. A sentry who failed to guard his Motherland, he chose to die. The samurai code, the code of the Brest Fortress and of Stalingrad, of Marshal Akhromeev’s attack—these represent a heroic attitude to life. In the well-fed, rich countries of the West, the heroic attitude to life has become an increasingly rare phenomenon. In the interview he gave to Crisis magazine (1992, issues 10/11), the French general Pierre Gallois talks about the “devaluation of self-sacrifice.” “The idea that it is worth risking a significant loss in order to protect the right cause, or even in order to simply defend oneself, seems to belong to the past…. In those marginal conflicts that do not directly threaten the existence of the Western democracies, politicians still have to take into account the reactions of their electorate who no longer accept the risk of the loss of human life, even if the loss is minimal.” “In 1983, it was enough to kill 58 soldiers in one strike [French soldiers in Lebanon. — E.L.] to make us pack our bags…. The fear of war is a phenomenon characteristic primarily of the wealthy countries, where each individual is in pursuit, as quickly as possible, of his own best advantage.” The May 23 [1992] issue of Sovietskaya Rossiya is disturbing. “In the area of Dubossary, an intense exchange of fire continues between units of Moldova’s police and troops of the Transdniestr militia. Houses are being destroyed; people are being killed.” On the same page of the paper: “The Soviet Socialist Republic of North Ossetia and the republic of South Ossetia are in mourning … due to the tragic events at the village of Kekhvi, where 36 non-combatants were shot dead by Georgian militants.” It’s clear that Russia, now cut up into parts and bleeding, can little afford to lose the idea of self-sacrifice. The Code of Conduct (How to Survive) for Russia’s Patriots and for the Nationalists should begin with this phrase, “The path of the Russian Nationalist is Death.” We can only attain victory with this kamikaze motto. If we, the Russians, want to survive as a Great Nation and preserve a Great Superpower, we must make the heroic attitude to life our own. Translated by Alexei Pavlenko

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M ister H e xogen ( e xcer pts ) 1

“Shamil Basaev2 sends a message: if the build-up of Russian troops does not stop, if your fighter planes and helicopters remain in Mozdok, if the violence continues against our Chechen friends in Dagestan, there will be explosions in Moscow. Not just in trolleybuses, which only frighten pensioners and free riders, and not just in market places and underground walkways, but in multistory apartment buildings with all their inhabitants. The blasts will be of such power and devastation that only a fiery pit will be left: the buildings and people will be vaporized.” The enemy flashed before Beloseltsev,3 youthful and ruthless. His eyes burned like black mercury and sparkled with an incomprehensible hatred. The young Chechen, sitting on the edge of a city park bench, had brought death to Moscow. “Basaev says you have a week to respond. Otherwise Russia will shudder with explosions. The country is already wired. 1

     Translated from Aleksandr Prokhanov, Gospodin Geksogen (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002): 368-75, 425-35.

2

     Shamil Basaev (1965-2006) was leader of the Chechen separatist movement and one of the architects of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and 2004 Beslan school attack.

3

     Prokhanov’s perennial character—he is the protagonist in seven of Prokhanov’s novels. A highly placed officer of the military intelligence, he is the writer’s alter ego.

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

Explosives have been laid in every large city. There are men waiting at every atomic power plant, dam, and chemical plant. The Chechen diaspora has spread to every region, every provincial capital. It will be futile to search for saboteurs. Basaev says he brought Russia to her knees with a simple raid in Budennovsk. Now he will bring her to her knees with explosions in Moscow. If the ultimatum is not accepted, Muscovites will regret that they ever settled in Pechatniki, they will regret that they ever settled in Moscow. You will convey Basaev’s ultimatum to the authorities.” Beloseltsev was struck by the word “Pechatniki.”4 “I have no say in the mobilization of troops or the movement of squadrons,” he said, trying to understand why Pechatniki had been mentioned. “I am a retired general. My connections with the FSB were cut off a long time ago. Our meeting was accidental, as was my visit to Ismail Khodzhaev. Basaev’s ultimatum, which you have confided in me, would not reach the authorities. You would do better to send it directly to the authorities, or indirectly through the press. I can hardly be of any use to you.” “Viktor Andreevich, you, and no one else, will relay our ultimatum. You have connections with men of power and consequence who create real policy. Your initiative led to the realization of several operations that attest to the level of your influence. I was ordered to relay the ultimatum to you alone, as this is the most efficient way to change the course of events, to avoid bloodshed on both sides, to stop the war. You are a patriot, you will not refuse the opportunity to help Russia in her time of need.” The Chechen looked at Beloseltsev domineeringly and amusedly, in complete possession of his will. All of Moscow was wired.

4

     Pechatniki—name of a subway station and region of Moscow, location of the devastating explosion of an apartment building in 1999. According to authorities, Chechen terrorists were responsible for this and other similar explosions. Alternatively, a theory that the explosives were planted by the FSB in order to create casus belli for the Second Chechen War was discussed as well. See, for instance, Yuri Felshtinsky and Alexander Litvinenko, Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, trans. Geoffrey Andrews (London: S.P.I. Books, 2002).

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“Why did you say ‘Pechatniki’?,” Beloseltsev asked, trying to overcome the hypnotic effect of the Chechen’s lively, shining eyes. “Pechatniki? No, you are hearing things, I spoke of Moscow. Believe me, I am not acting on my own behalf, I am obeying orders.” The Chechen’s eyes dimmed under his brown eyelids, his voice changed from commanding and passionate to apologetic and hesitant, the British accent became more pronounced. “I am a Muscovite, just as you are. I love Moscow. My life is here, my relatives, my home. I, like you, do not want these explosions. I fear them. If we can help the Muscovites, our fellow countrymen, we will, Viktor Andreevich. Thank you for your time. Allow me to call you in a few days. Take care.” The Chechen stood, slender and supple, with a thin jockey’s waist. He walked toward the alley, fading into the mist, and disappeared completely into the shadows. Not a minute to lose; it was time to act. Head straight to the FSB, find some former colleagues, and without asking with whom their allegiances lay, inform them of the Chechen threat. But then a clever investigator, an experienced agent, might unravel the Swahili Project, thread by thread. The trip to the FSB was abandoned. He called Grechishnikov, who, fortunately, answered his phone at the Fund. “Sure! Come on over! You’re going on a trip? There’s an envelope with money for you here! Come over, we’ll have a drink before you hit the road!” He met his cheerful friend at the Fund. A hint of success glimmered about him and he gushed with good humor and love of life. Fumbling, losing then picking up the thread of the story, Beloseltsev told of the meeting with the Chechen and laid out the ultimatum. “He said that Moscow was wired with explosives … saboteurs are everywhere … at atomic power stations and chemical plants … their people are in every province. If the troop deployments and aerial assaults don’t stop…. I’m convinced this isn’t an empty threat.”

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

Grechishnikov’s orange eyes cooled and darkened slightly, as if a colored lens in them had been changed, but they continued to sparkle and laugh. “Goddamn black-asses! I’m sick of them! Wherever you go, kiosks, the prefecture, the dentist or the bank, you see those blackasses everywhere, counting up Russian money! We’re through with them! We’ll cleanse Russia of all those Caucasians. Send the Azeris back to Baku in the same trains that haul poison. We’ll send the Chechens by the trainload back to Magadan and arctic Ichkeria. Don’t get worked up about it! This Vakhid Zairbekov is a speculator and a crook. We’ll nail the bastard so he won’t prey on decent people anymore.” “He didn’t try to frighten or blackmail me. I trust my instincts. He had the eyes of a man who is ready to push the button…. He said everything is in place … they’ve chosen the buildings, wired the explosives, their men are ready…. He said Moscow is wired…. He chose me, told me to get in touch with you, to go to the Kremlin with their demand to withdraw the troops. He knows about everything, the trip to Dagestan … believe me, this is serious….” The orange eyes cooled and darkened again but continued to laugh. “Well, if you’re so worried, let’s call our friends at the FSB, send the signal to Moscow Criminal Intelligence. Let them sort out these Chechen rebels, comb through basements and warehouses. They can call on the agencies in the Caucasian communities. If there’s even a trace of explosive they’ll track it down, but it isn’t worth your getting all worked up about it. These rumors are always flying around Moscow.” “You didn’t see his eyes, you didn’t hear his tone of voice … it was exactly as with General Sheptun…. Look, I know when someone is only trying to scare me and when he is ready to kill. They will blow up apartments in Moscow…. He slipped and mentioned Pechatniki…. That is exactly where we must launch a massive search.” Grechishnikov closed his eyelids, his eyes behind them darting and fluttering, trapped in their sockets. “I don’t believe that they are ready to set off explosions. But even if it happens, if they commit these heinous crimes, they will

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only hurt themselves, and strange as it may seem, they will play right into our hands.” “What do you mean?” “We need a compelling reason to start the war. We need the people to support an armed invasion of Chechnya, and this time we will crush that nest of vipers, in Grozny, Vedeno, AchkhoyMartan, the Vedensky and Argunsky Gorges. We will show the smoky craters in Moscow to the whole world, they will see how we bury the victims in pieces, and then Europe will not object when we leave Grozny a noxious pit, filled with the dust of Chechen bones. Even more important, there must be a reason for the Chosen One to lead the march to Chechnya and dispense of that filth once and for all. He will avenge the bombed-out houses, the murdered children and our disgraced honor. Then the people will carry him into the Kremlin on their shoulders as their Deliverer.” “You would welcome the bombings in Moscow? You would use the blasts in the interest of the Swahili Project? This is pure cynicism! This is more terrifying than the crimes themselves!” “Do you really believe that?” Grechishnikov raised his eyebrows, his large orange eyes burned with rage, passion, and contempt. “I wouldn’t stop them. Let them blast away. If history has chosen this path for us, if she prefers to blast us into the future with these explosions, if God is pleased to utter this word and not another, then who are we to stand in the way? Who are we to stand in the way of Divine Providence?” “You say terrible things. You want these explosions. Maybe you’re the one behind them? Maybe you are in league with the Chechens? Are you provoking them to do this?” “Perhaps,” the red-orange eyes sparkled. “A little history is made with a little blood. Real history is made with real blood, but great history is made with great blood. History is written in blood. Every act of mankind runs red. We are making great history, slashing our way through any obstacles put in our way by traitors and dimwits. This is why we need the explosions. They were sent to help the Swahili Project forge history. If historical progress requires a truck full of hexogen with a Russian driver, a Chechen to push the detonator, and an Azerbaijani merchant to hide the explosives, then

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

we will make it happen.5 Who are we to ignore the hand of God? We are God’s instruments, our hands do not smell of incense, but hexogen!” It seemed to Beloseltsev that he was standing before a madman who thought he was a god. “You ought to be grateful that you’ve been forced to take part in history, pulled out of your dingy hole where you were hiding from the howling world. The magnificence of historical providence shines upon you, God’s right hand is upon you. You have already done much and you will do even more. You’ll see the creation of our new party, which will bring in the Chosen One. You’ll have money. The press will be in your hands. Very soon we will create a movement that will be named after the Russian totem beast and we’ll toss the bought-out democrats and outdated, hopeless communists out of the political arena. We will create a powerful lever, and with the help of the Chosen One, we will spark a revolution. But we need these explosions to stir up the people, to make them panic. We need to show the troops why they should invade and demolish Grozny. We must present the Chosen One to the people with a victory parade in Chechnya. We must force the Dummy to renounce his authority, and the grateful people to elect the Chosen One to power. What are we to do if this requires bloodshed? We will shed it....” “You are crazy! You need a psychiatrist! I should report our conversation. I will go to the newspapers and tell the press!” The orange eyes cleared, like an incandescent lamp that dims and becomes visibly cooler. Grechishnikov laughed quietly and contentedly. “What a trick I played on you. You really are gullible, so worried about the explosions and the Chechens…. He was only a false messenger, it was blackmail, trickery…. We can arrest him and make him confess, if you want. Calm down, my friend…. You are tired, your nerves are frayed…. Take a vacation and get some rest. Go to Kenya, or to the Côte d’Azur or your mystical Pskov. 5

     Hexogen is a powerful explosive also known as RDX, cyclonite, and T4. It was used in attacks that destroyed four apartment blocks in three cities, including Moscow, in 1999, and two stations in the Moscow metro in 2010.

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Here’s the money, there’s enough for your trip.” He opened the box and took out a fat envelope that flashed green with a brick of dollars. Thanks for stopping by. I have to visit the Chosen One. We’re discussing the birth of the new party.” He embraced Beloseltsev and walked him to the door. Beloseltsev walked along the embankment, between the river sparkling in the sun and the flashing, glittering limousines that crawled past the pinkish Kremlin wall. Above the wall, snow-white cathedrals rose through the trees. Beloseltsev was dumbfounded by the testing he had just endured. He had first fallen victim to the impudent young Chechen’s blackmail, and then to Grechishnikov’s well-meant but cruel practical joke, which took advantage of a friend’s suspicious nature and propensity to panic. Thank god the whole thing had already blown over, and he, having calmed down, was able to move about Moscow, the huge, rolling city, with its countless lives, each like a tiny seashell set in a stone fortress. The city was noisy and overflowing and released glassy thin air into the heavens, but Beloseltsev did not notice, he was too overjoyed with feelings of oneness with this beloved, eternal city. Suddenly the sense of panic returned. He remembered Grechishnikov’s devilish eyes, fiery-orange like torches, and he realized that Grechishnikov knew about the explosions, was himself readying them, and had a perverse link with the Chechens, and that this city—serenely overflowing with glass buildings, golden cathedrals, and faces flashing through car windows—was wired and was living out its last few hours and minutes. He began to run along the embankment, and the bridge across the river exploded, its tumbling slabs lit up by the heinous flash. The trusses slammed into the river, carrying cars and pedestrians with them, making the water boil with the red-hot iron and rocks, as if hail was bubbling and rippling in the river. Overturned limousines, broken street lamp posts, and scraps of charred flags fell into the river, all came crashing down from the sky. He turned towards the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and before his eyes the white cathedral sank in a deafening blast, the onion domes burst, the walls were ripped open and from the gaping hole poured black smoke, ash, and scorched gilding.

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

He crossed Manezh Square, glimmering like fish scales with automobiles and a white stucco palace. The square broke open, turning everything upside down and collapsing into a black pit; cars tumbled in, as if tossed from a baking sheet. The Pashkov House, which not long ago had shined sterile white atop a green hill, had the appearance of a rotten tooth with a black cavity. Beloseltsev choked. His eyes bulged and he clutched his heart and prayed, “Dear God, save Moscow!” The city trembled in the glassy smoke, as if retching from the blasts. His suspicious nature turned into insanity. He saw an old woman holding the hand of an awkward little girl dressed in striped stockings and a sweet little hat, and he imagined them minutes away from being destroyed by the blasts. He glanced at the face of an attractive young woman, whose blonde hair was whipped by the breeze from the river, and he pictured her in a grave, in a cemetery filled with other victims from the explosions. A smug, obese man with a carelessly knotted tie pushed passed him, small, fashionable briefcase in hand, and Beloseltsev thought about how the man would soon be lying among the debris, bloody bones sticking out through his torn dress pants. Everyone he saw was a suspect. The dark-haired teenager with a dyed blue streak could well turn out to be a Chechen terrorist, wiring a dark corner with explosives and waiting for the right moment to push the button. The bald driver with a sweaty, red face behind the wheel of a speeding van could be zig-zagging through yellow lights to deliver the explosives hidden in a package under a pile of potatoes. The arrogant chauffeur in a foreign-built stretch limousine with violet blinkers could be a conspirator, rushing to deliver secret orders to set off explosions in Moscow within the hour. Beloseltsev rushed about the city, lost in the maze of boulevards, riverwalks, bustling avenues, and quiet alleys. Anticipating disaster, he prayed silently, “Dear God, save Moscow!” […] “The Swahili Project, of which you have only a superficial understanding, is a huge labyrinth that grinds away at the rot and decay of society from the inside. It is set up in such a way that if one

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branch of the project is destroyed, the others become stronger. If one part is damaged, the other parts only flourish. The Project cannot be destroyed, simply because it demands that it be destroyed, and this only strengthens it. The Project is set up to draw all of humanity into itself; there is neither executioner nor victim, neither criminal nor judge. All are united in apocalyptic fear, and then they will beg for salvation. Only then will the Deliverer appear. The Chosen One will arrive. He will find the guilty, and even if they are not guilty, the people will rush to tear them to pieces.” “What do you want? To rule the world? You’re an old man, your death is not far off….” “Perhaps I will not die. And, as always, you are right. It is power that I want, power over the entire world. Power over a village or a farmstead, or a province or Moscow, or over New York, or so-called Eurasia, or Europe or the NATO countries, or over a hemisphere, be it the Western or Eastern hemisphere—this is not real power. True power must be universal, and only then does it become an instrument that can create history. Petty satraps, half-witted policemen, and their pitiful minions think you need power to get money and women and build imperial theaters or a cosmic army. The true rulers, from Genghis Khan to Alexander the Great, from Julius Caesar to Charlemagne, from Napoleon to Stalin, sought power in order to make history. To unite all of humanity, all the Earth’s land and resources, and to obtain the long-sought chance to control time. To put an end to humanity’s fragmentation, the senseless squandering of resources and minds, to put an end to wars and heresy and the absurd discordance of people who know nothing of each other. This is why the great empires of the past are superior to the great republics of today. They were founded upon a unified humanity, able to hear and embody the will of God. This is why the Russia of today, liberal and repulsive, is an abomination inferior to the Soviet Union, that great empire we so senselessly lost. What you will see today from this roof are not hexogen explosions, a pretext for a second war with the Chechens, or even a vehicle for ushering the Chosen One into the Kremlin. No, this is the Swahili Project being carried out as it was designed to be. This is the start of a new period in history,

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

a New World Order, the end of the Babylonian tragedy and the beginning of a universal empire....” The cold iron chimney pressed against Beloseltsev’s spine, he felt a dull pain in his neck and his arms ached in their twisted position behind him. It seemed to him that this was all a bad drama directed by a tasteless, brutal director who had turned an execution into a ritual, dressing the condemned in painted masks and throwing rope around their necks to the beating of tambourines, drums, and tom-toms. The man standing before him was a maniac and a criminal, and if by chance he got carried away with his burning ravings, he might take one step closer and Beloseltsev would be able to send him over the edge of the roof with a kick, and he would fall to the ground howling and would disappear, as if into an abyss, swallowed up by the black tree crowns. “People are always trying to guess the design and will of God. Is it to bow down one hundred times a day? To build a temple on every mountain? To raise the Pope above Caesar, and Nikon, the Patriarch of Moscow, above Tsar Alexis of Russia? To keep away from another’s wife, to love your enemy, to turn the left cheek when you are struck on the right? The will of God is nothing of the sort. It is to end the division in the church, among the people, to do away with the multitude of gods and languages, with the neverending strife and wars over territories and land and trade routes, over uranium deposits and Kimberlitic pipes. The will of God is to unify mankind, and in that unity, to reflect the image of a single, universal God. Why must mankind be united? Why must we do all this thankless work? Why should we not simply leave the black man in Africa, the yellow man in the Gobi desert, the white man along the Dnieper or the Rhine? Why has mankind roamed from place to place throughout history, like multicolored putty in the hot hand of God? It is because God wills what humanity can only accomplish when united. His will is greater than one country or people. It is greater than a single race. It is greater even than half or two-thirds of humanity. The divided world in which America and the Soviet Union wasted enormous resources on overpowering each other could not realize God’s will. While disunited they were not able to build the Tokomak thermonuclear fusion device. They

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couldn’t develop a vaccine against cancer or AIDS, or a way to control Earth’s climate. And all of these are merely preliminary goals, secondary to the principal, sacred goal, to which God is leading us, through all disasters and confusion, past Sodom’s sin and religious phobias, in order to present mankind with the gift of immortality. To conquer death, to trample down death by the death of Babylon. These purifying apocalyptic explosions will fuse mankind together, and up from the ashes, diamonds will appear in the crucible of the Day of Judgment. The Swahili Project, at its deepest, hidden core, is a religious project, bound up in eschatology and the realization of God’s will.” Beloseltsev listened as Grechishnikov spoke in a singsong voice, almost swaying, preaching, reading from an invisible theological book. His voice blended with the wind and the sound of the rain striking iron, and it seemed detached from his body, imbued with an agonizing passion, invincible faith, and apostolic zeal. Beloseltsev felt his head swimming and his eyesight clouding over, as if he were slipping into a dream. “A bipolar world is superior to a multipolar world. A unipolar world is superior to a bipolar world. The liberals are hyenas who feed on the corpses of great empires, they are cemetery worms that gorge themselves on the bipolar world and assume that the grave from which they slithered would swallow up all of humanity. They depend on America as a stronghold in the liberal world, but just like the Soviet Union, it will melt in the burning crucible of a unified human race. The Swahili Project is humanity united, organized for a universal purpose: so that man might achieve immortality. The power of technology, the magnitude of bioengineering, mathematical analyses, anthropological discoveries, and the insight of religious thinkers will all be focused on this resurrection. We will resurrect all who have died the silent death of old age or who were killed in the womb, those who fell by the sword or an atomic bomb, who died from disease or in torture chambers, we will resurrect the entire human race. Nero and the Christians he tortured, the Inquisitors and the heretics they burned, Hitler and all the Holocaust victims, we will resurrect Blumkin, Yagoda, and Yezhov and the archbishops they shot, the Cossack chieftains

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

and Russian aristocrats. We will resurrect the German soldiers of World War II and Stalin’s Red Army, who fought each other in battlefields around Moscow, Stalingrad, and Berlin. Their enmity, insurmountable while mankind was splintering and warring, will be discarded in the universal empire. We will resurrect those who barricaded the House of Soviets and the Colonel from Alpha Group, who was killed by a sniper. The martyr Yevgeny Rodionov, whose head was removed by a Chechen blade, and the Chechen warlord who was killed in the Russian trip-wire mine. We will resurrect Grammofonchik, who sipped from the wrong glass, and the little girl who was raped to death in St. Petersburg back when Grammofonchik was mayor. We will resurrect the armed Afghan caravan drivers, who were shot before your very eyes in Kandahar. And that beautiful Italian intelligence agent, your one-night stand in Siam Reap who was blown to pieces in a landmine explosion in Vietnam. We will resurrect Peter’s Namibian teacher, whom you sent to die in the “Mirage” bombing, and that dark beauty, Maria, whom you long for in the night. And, make no mistake, we will resurrect that glorious little boy, Sergei, who inadvertently fell by a Chechen blade because of your oversight. To resurrect them, we first had to kill them. Maybe all those killed on earth were destroyed in order to be resurrected in the future. The Swahili Project is the innermost essence of history. It has always existed, even before the creation of the world. It was hidden in the plasma during the Big Bang. It was always hidden deep within God’s will.” It seemed to Beloseltsev that he had been given a cup filled with a powerful drug. Everything that had previously horrified him now seemed logical, unavoidable, immersed in the knowledge of all mankind, and in complete accordance with God’s will. “Every generation preserved the priestly elite of the Swahili Project, who kept the covenant of resurrection. The covenant was transferred from age to age, from people to people, from religion to religion. We were always everywhere. Sometimes pieces of the Project were uncovered and we were destroyed, under various names, either burned or beheaded; they stood us against brick walls and shot us by firing squad, we were crushed in open fields under the rims of war chariots. Today we are everywhere. We

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are in Japan, China, Germany, and Russia. The Swahili elite have formed an intelligence core that began converging while Andropov and Reagan were in power. In orchestrating disarmament and détente, we created a secret intelligence society, to which our mentor, General Avdeev, belonged, as well as your American rival, Lee, and your Angolan adversary, Richard MacVillen, all of whom we spared from death and who also spared you. All around us, the greatest minds of the human race are joining together, often unknowingly: big-name politicians who preach globalism, the brilliant scholars who unraveled the secrets of the human genome, famous gerontologists who have lengthened our lives, the virtuoso surgeons and biochemists who created artificial organs, mystics, magicians, and psychics, keepers of the ancient cults, noosphere6 philosophers and Fedorov’s “Common Cause”7 that linked nature and humanity into a unified entity. The Doctor of the Dead, who guards Lenin’s mummy and to whom you paid a visit in search of the “Red Purpose,” is a part of our society. We have adversaries who do not want unity: European anarchists who outrageously and senselessly fight against globalization, the ‘Red Confucians’ in China who oppose the entire world, creating a second pole at the core of the Chinese billion, the Islamic fundamentalists who perceive a united world as the Devil’s scheme, Russian nationalists who talk about Russia’s special destiny. We have friends in the Jews, who took on the terrible, backbreaking burden of unifying our scattered galaxy, of bringing the pagan polytheists unto the hand of God, of joining the wasteful and motley human race into a unified team of craftsmen. They never fail to bring their offerings. They are persecuted, put to death, and hated. They are smothered in gas chambers and driven from their homes. But they keep the commandments, they wait for the Messiah, they bind humanity together with their 6

     Noosphere—a concept introduced by Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky (18631945) and developed by Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)—stands for a mystical sphere accumulating intellectual and cultural phenomena.—Eds.

7

     According to Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), the “common cause” of humanity is the resurrection of all dead.—Eds.

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

universal religion, universal money, universal culture, science, and information. Atros and Zaretsky were destroyed, not because they were Jews, but because they were liberals gone astray, their material and information assets were better put to use for the Swahili Project. I tell you this as the son of peasants, born in the village of Kostroma, a fellow FSB officer. Many people do not realize they are working for the Project, they do not know of the Chosen One. They should not know. We created him in our laboratory. He is synthetic. It is entirely possible that he is not made of proteins at all, but of silica and germanium. It is possible that he was fabricated, a figment of the imagination, a bundle of light rays. At the presidential inauguration ceremony you will see—not a human being—but a bright dot of light descending on the Kremlin.” Through the wisps of fog that pressed against his eyes like the translucent wings of an African butterfly, something began to agitate Beloseltsev. Memories. Lingering torment. He had been here before, whether recently or in ancient times. This had happened in this life or in a previous life. Someone had stood on a roof while in the distance glowed the temple of Angkor, the green minarets of Herat, the chiseled white and pink cathedral in Toledo, the snowwhite Church of St. Basil on a Hill in Pskov and the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building.8 The same rain and wind, the same pain in the back of his broken head, the rusty chimney that was ice against his back. And a second someone reached out his hand to the first, offering the first a tempting chance at life without suffering or death, offering eternal paradise and bliss, and demanding only one small sacrifice in return— to renounce the sacred shrines of old. “We have a special mission, here in Russia. We are the Russian branch of the Swahili Project. We have been called upon to end the folly of Russian history and the arrogant ‘Russian Idea.’ This myth of Russia’s uniqueness, of God’s choosing her, of her special destiny, comes at a high price for the world. It is even more costly for Russia herself. The great reformers tried to return Russia to the

8

     The famous House on the Embankment for Soviet elite, described in Yury Trifonov’s eponymous novella (1976)—Eds.

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world, as if she had fallen from her nest. They tried to draw her out of her religious twilight, away from her delirious theories, to protect her from the Russian messianism preached by its suffering writers and philosophers who gorge on psychedelic mushrooms. Any attempt to pull Russia away from the world, like the moon was ripped from the earth and pushed into orbit, will only turn this prosperous country into a lifeless satellite with vast craters and dry seabeds, and on the earth where Russia once was, there will be only a huge chasm filled with salty water. Everyone looks for Atlantis on the ocean floor, but Atlantis is actually the moon, which was torn from its mother planet and cast into the dead of Space. The ‘Russian Victory,’ ‘Russian Century,’ and ‘Russian Paradise,’ are all a miserable utopia that must be overcome, just as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander I’s freemasons, and Lenin’s commissars tried to overcome them before us. Your deranged buddy, Nikolai Nikolaevich, was God’s fool, an Old Believer and a kamikaze. He was the embodiment of the stubborn and feeble Russian mind, which would sooner blow itself up or burn to death on a pile of sticks than join with the rest of humanity. We will save Russia, we will not allow her to turn into a kamikaze country. The explosions you will see today are therapeutic explosions that will cleanse Russia of this ‘Russian Idea.’ We must set off these explosions to prevent more in the future. And we will succeed. Our adversaries are the men in the Main Intelligence Directorate, united, like us, in a secret order. With their military narrow-mindedness and barrack-like simplicity, they preach the Russian Revival. They plan for a Superior Russia. We will contend with them and we will be victorious. They are too late. We have cut them off. The explosions you will see will destroy them. We will bring our Chosen One into the Kremlin before they can bring theirs. But if you think that the Chosen One is the crown of the Swahili Project, you are mistaken. He is not the one at the top of our magical world pyramid. He is not the one waiting in the bowels of our crystal mystical circle. The one about whom I am speaking will come forth in the proper hour. You might even see him....” The wind raged against Beloseltsev’s face. The rain slapped against his cheeks. The image of Nicholas Nikolaevich appeared before him like an ethereal spirit, swaying against the backdrop of

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

the foggy city. And with that his delusion ended. He was sober once again. He was tied to an iron chimney on the roof of a building in Pechatniki. “Better to kill me now,” he told Grechishnikov, “or else I will kill you later, and there will be no force strong enough to raise you from the dead.” Grechishnikov merely laughed. “I am going to leave you here. You will live because you are too valuable to us. Seducing the Prosecutor, paying a visit to Ismail Khodzhaev, or delivering a suitcase full of counterfeit dollar bills, this is all below you, utterly insignificant. This was merely a trial, a test. Your spiritual experience is unique. We will need it in the future stages of the Project. What you will see today will enrich your soul as never before. We will meet later and I will give you your principal assignment. Who else can say they have watched the end of the world from such a convenient and safe vantage point? Many would pay millions for this opportunity. I brought you here as a free gift, I placed you in the most advantageous lookout point. From this moment on, you are no longer Viktor Andreevich Beloseltsev in Pechatniki, you are John the Baptist on the island of Patmos. Until we meet again. Amen.” He continued laughing, turned and disappeared into the dormer window. Beloseltsev was left to stand in the rain amid the noisy black heights. He stood tied to the chimney, waiting for the execution to begin, not only his own, but of the entire world. The world was also tied to the chimney, an enormous black chimney that was slipping up into the skies, but it knew nothing of this. The world looked calm and ordinary in its final moments. It wasn’t shivering with fear. It wasn’t praying. It wasn’t begging God for forgiveness. It wasn’t engaged in a reckless orgy to squeeze the last bits pleasure out of these moments. From time to time on the opposite bank, commuter trains made their way through the heavy curtain of rain. On the river nearby a midnight tugboat blinked through the blurry curtain, the river again faded from view, and gusts of black wind were the only signs of its presence. The light in one window of the neighboring building went out and another window lit up. Inside another apartment someone woke up

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from a heart attack or from poetic inspiration or simply from insomnia. Beloseltsev didn’t know what he should do during the universe’s final minutes. He tried to free himself. He wiggled his fingers and strained his wrists, but the rope was tied too tightly around his hands and the chimney. He pulled at the chimney, leaning forward and hanging by his hands. It trembled and shook from where it was fixed to the roof. He pulled harder, jerking at it, kicking it with his heels. The chimney rattled and a metallic shiver shot through his strained spine. Hoping to break the iron, he began beating and shaking it. He wore himself out. He stood there, wheezing, his wrists and shoulders ached. He tried shouting for help. His voice was immediately lost over the rooftops. The sound did not reach the earth below, but melted in the drizzling heavens. He shouted louder, his mouth gaping open, and the sharp, cold wind drove his voice straight back into his throat and plugged his mouth with a wet gag. No one heard him, and what good would it do if they did, if both rescuer and rescuee were doomed. He tried to attract God’s attention. Before he cried out to God, he wanted to make God notice him, tied to a chimney, to turn his severe face downward and take a good look. He hoped that God would take into account the good deeds and acts of kindness that he had performed throughout his life, he began recalling them, offering them to the Savior. He screamed them out silently, raising his eyes to the clouds. He felt the rusty iron chimney passing through his body; his flesh was pierced by the iron stake. And, staring into the deaf, unresponsive sky, he began to yell at the God who had turned his back on him. “Kill me now, Lord! Take my life if you must, but save the world! Hold me responsible for this great evil, but spare this city, spare the world!” But God did not hear his cry. He did not accept Beloseltsev’s remorse. It had come too late. The End of the World was not to be diverted, the point of no return had already passed, and nothing could stop the universe’s sullen gravitation toward its own destruction.

Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen

The wind howled, blowing not fog and rain, but hastening the End of the World. Beloseltsev was worn down by the mighty black torrent, and an ancient, instinctive horror overcame him, and he knew that this horror also filled the mountains and continents, the whales swimming in the ocean and the seabed beneath them, the cities with their bustling inhabitants and the countless graves with bones quivering inside. All living and non-living matter was waiting in horror for its own destruction, listening to the dark, whirling vortex. Beloseltsev saw the neighboring building begin to tremble and fade out of focus. A section of the facade with windows and doors broke off from the foundation and bits of wood went flying, breaking into hundreds of rugged fragments and shards. A red-hot, stinging tornado swept away rooftops. He choked in the vacuum it created, scalded by the heat. The chimney broke away from the roof and shot into the sky, carrying Beloseltsev with it. It lingered in the air for a moment, his eyes rolled wildly and he saw a dreadful, gaping hole where the building had just been, then he dropped from the sky and lost consciousness. An hour or two passed while he lay there unconscious. His eyelids were glued together and he pried them open. His head hung over the side of the roof, and his arms, twisted behind him, brushed against broken fragments of the chimney. Below, through the splintered trees, he could see a building with a gaping hole in the middle, lit up by a crimson glow, violet flashes and blades of roaming light. The hole was full of flickering toxic dust, billowing smoke and flowing mustard-colored fog, like a scene from an exploding nuclear reactor. It was as if a knife had cut open the building and removed a section, as it would a slice of cake. Naked rooms without walls were cruelly revealed through the cross-section of boxy exposed floors. The rugs on the walls, the swaying lampshades, and identical white toilets were all clearly visible. Water was pouring and gushing from every story. The yard was heaped with debris, and firemen bustled over the mounds, shooting up streams of water that disappeared and vaporized into the flames. Violet flares were everywhere, sirens blared, someone was shouting into a megaphone, and through the smoke, the boom of a crane stretched

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slowly upward. The noise of the crackling fire, the howling sirens, and the shouts of the rescuers blended together with an irregular, undulating howling and groaning, which filled the air around the buildings and trees, as if thousands of mourners were wailing in an endless, wordless chorus. His neck hurt and he tried to turn his head. Directly in front of his eyes lay a bodiless arm on the roof, its pale fingers tightly clutching a teaspoon. Beloseltsev fainted again. Translated by Michelle Olson with Alexei Pavlenko

Excerpts from “The Legitimization of Ultra-Right Discourse in Contemporary Russian Literature” Ilya Kukulin 1

1 In the summer of 2002 Aleksandr Prokhanov was awarded the National Bestseller prize for his novel Mr. Hexogen, which had been recently issued by the Ad Marginem publishing house. Immediately after this major national award had been conferred on Mr. Hexogen, literary critics of the liberal persuasion published trenchant attacks, arguing that the attempt to legitimize this Soviet, radically imperial, and singularly poor writer as if he were one of the most significant authors in Russia today reflected a crisis in literary criticism and the intellectual community in general. It would seem that the above facts have been well known for a long time now. But though the legitimization of Hexogen and its author were harshly judged by critics (“An outrage!”), its story has not yet received thorough analysis. We have not examined the preconditions that made Prokhanov’s integration into “high literature” possible, nor have we grasped the consequences of the hype surrounding the book’s promotion. People tended to see the legitimization of this ultra-right author as a devious PR scheme, as a postmodern game, or as the result of some behind-the-scenes 1

     Translated from Ilya Kukulin, “Reaktsiia dissotsiatsii: legitimatsia ul’trapravogo diskursa v sovremennoi rossiiskoi literature,” in Russkii natsionalizm: Sotsial’nyi i kul’turnyi kontekst, ed. Marlen Laruel (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 257-338 (257-263, 265-74).

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manipulations.2 However, personal conversations convinced me that in 2002 Prokhanov’s novel really did appeal, or at any rate, seemed interesting, to a relatively significant number of young readers, who on other occasions share “Western” aesthetic views and are immune to Prokhanov’s nostalgia for KGB omnipotence. Here I base my argument on the premise that a PR campaign alone cannot explain “the Hexogen phenomenon.”3 Rather, it is the result of profound changes in our social consciousness—changes that occurred in the second half of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s. There is no question that by the beginning of the 2000s the legitimization of ultra-right discourses in the Russian social consciousness had occurred. An integral component of the cultural arena—literature, philosophy, and journalism—consisted of pronouncements by those who were not ashamed of their extreme nationalism and fundamentalism or their fondness for fascism and Stalinism. By then, Prokhanov’s novels had been reviewed in the glossy magazines (Afisha, TimeOut-Peterburg, Russian Playboy, etc.) as trendy and topical reads. Prokhanov hosts a political talk show at the radio station Echo of Moscow, whose target audience consists of intellectuals and liberals (the other hosts anchoring shows at Echo

2

     In his 2002 article “After the fight” (Peremena uchasti [Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003]) Sergei Chuprinin observes that the theory that the FSB organized the 1999 bombings of apartment blocks in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk and blamed them on Chechen separatists in itself became a political event. But when that story became integrated into the plot of Prokhanov’s novel and the novel became a literary sensation, the hypothesis about the FSB’s involvement in the bombing was moved from the arena of political discussion to the realm of artistic fantasy. Any discussion of the real causes for the bombings thus dissipated. Later yet another metamorphosis took place: the film The Assassination of Russia, about the possible complicity of Russia’s federal structures in the apartment bombings, was sponsored by the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Since then, pro-government journalists have interpreted any support of the government complicity theory as “work for Berezovsky.”

3

   It is likely that generating controversy was in fact one of the motives that compelled Ad Marginem to reissue Mr. Hexogen in book form (the novel came out the previous year as a supplement to the newspaper Tomorrow). Both publications were accompanied by extensive publicity campaigns.

Ilya Kukulin. The Legitimizationof Ultra-Right Discourse

of Moscow are liberal writers and journalists). At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s Prokhanov became completely integrated into the cultural and political mainstream: he was a constant presence on TV talk shows, and from 2003-2005 he was one of the favorite debaters on Vladimir Solovyov’s popular talk show “Fight the Duel!” Prokhanov’s novels are printed by those publishing houses—Ad Marginem, Ultra.Kultura, Amphora—that position themselves on the market as “contemporary,” “intellectual,” and “youth-oriented.” At the 2003 Frankfurt book fair, Prokhanov was introduced to the German audience by the well-known cultural theorist Boris Groys. Prokhanov was not the only ultra-right nationalist who was allowed into “decent” society. Also allowed was the ultra-right political theorist Aleksandr Dugin, who writes for the most widely circulated national papers (Izvestiya and Komsomolskaya pravda) and the Russian edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Significantly, Rolling Stone has only two columnists—the other is Sergei Shnurov, a popular rock vocalist who in his songs and articles expresses views typical of the liberal left and libertarians.4 At the end of 2005, the journal Critical Mass, known for publishing sophisticated poetry and reviews of innovative works in the humanities, carried an article supportive of Dugin’s views on pop music.5 In 2004, the first complete Russian-language editionof Nietzsche’s collection of aphorisms The Will to Power went on sale in book stores. Vladimir Mironov, professor of history at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the book’s editor, wrote, without a trace of irony, in the afterword, “The ideologues of fascism saw Nietzsche as their forerunner […]. Guided by his recipes, Mussolini and Hitler restored, as it were, a powerful and warrior-like spirit in decrepit, moribund, vulgar and philistine 4

   Shnurov can also be seen in the 2005 film “4,” written by the author Vladimir Sorokin. Prokhanov no longer writes for Rolling Stone, which now employs a roster of primarily liberal columnists.

5

   For an example of Dugin’s views on pop music, note that in a review of a performance on “Star Factory” (Russia’s version of “American Idol”) Dugin wrote that “it is well known that only Satanists and perverts work in show business.”—Eds.

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Europe. They reawakened manly instincts, and filled the towns with resounding battle cries for war and valor.”6 In February of 2006 the Moscow club Hardcore hosted a poetry night organized by the poets representing the “For the Motherland!” faction of the ultra-right party “Motherland.” The party was recently banned from elections for its use of xenophobic slogans during pre-election campaigns. On most other nights, Hardcore serves as a venue for ethnic music concerts, reggae festivals, etc. In the fall of 2005, Russian television’s Channel One aired an entire concert by the rock band Alisa. Most of the songs on its recent albums (“It’s later than you think,” 2003; “The outcast,” 2005) written by the band’s leader Konstantin Kinchev, feature, at their core, nationalistic and fundamentalist religious ideology: So many jackals and dogs Come at us, baring their teeth, Coveting the gold of our grain, And the gold of icons.

(“The Monk, the Warrior, and the Jester”)

We are preyed upon by the horde, We bear the infidels’ yoke, But in our veins seethes The heaven of the Slavs.

(“The Heaven of the Slavs”)

The Kommersant journalist Boris Barabanov responded to this concert by observing that “airing a rock-band’s concert in its entirety during prime-time is considered a failure for ratings, no less because Alisa’s music is heavy and aggressive, not at all a ‘weekend-lite’ style. This sacrifice (i.e., the airing of the concert — I.K.) is conclusive evidence that among all Russian rock bands Alisa is the one that most accurately expresses state ideology.” While in fact Yury Shevchuk and his band DDT enjoyed greater popularity than Kinchev on television in the 2000s, Barabanov’s argument is

6

      Nietzsche F. Volia k vlasti (Will to power). Trans. E. Gertsyk et al., ed. and afterword by V. Mironov (Moscow: Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia, 2005), 634.

Ilya Kukulin. The Legitimizationof Ultra-Right Discourse

basically correct: Kinchev, who on several occasions has expressed his solidarity with extreme nationalists,7 in no way contradicts the ideology of contemporary political elites. Moreover, Kinchev continues to enjoy full recognition among the Russian rock musicians of the “Storm and Stress” generation (i.e., those who became wellknown in the second half of the 1980s), who were perceived as the heralds of democratization and socially critical spokesmen. Also, Kinchev enjoys the respect of rock critics: his views and chauvinistic lyrics are seen as elements of his poetics. Barabanov seems to be the only one who dared to challenge Kinchev in a public forum. 2 Both Prokhanov and Dugin present themselves as writers of the opposition, regardless of their integration into the establishment. Over the course of the 2000s, Prokhanov grew increasingly critical of the existing political regime and state ideology, while Dugin fashions himself as a kind of a metaphysical oppositionist who rejects the contemporary world order as a whole.8 Both authors first declared their opposition at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, when they categorically disagreed with the then-ongoing democratization and the liberalization movements. Over the 1990s, they went on denouncing democracy and liberalism. They carried the aura of the opposition even into the 2000s, when the ideological

7

   Interviewer: “Just now in Moscow there was the ‘March of the Right’ against illegal immigration. Would you support it?” Kinchev: “Of course. It is a colossal threat. […] Look at France. Perhaps now the Europeans will wake up from their sweet slumber and grasp that it was not by accident that the [tower of ]Babylon was destroyed. Nationalities should not intermingle. Every man should live where the Lord willed him to be born, instead of migrating here and there. (Konstantin Kinchev, “I am the power of the nation,” Izvestiia, November 11, 2005).

8

   Since the publication of this article in 2008, Dugin has become professor and chair in Moscow State University’s Department of Sociology. Moreover, in 2011 and 2012, years marked by public protests in favor of social justice and democracy in response to Vladimir Putin’s election to an unprecedented third term as president, both Prokhanov and Dugin presented themselves as energetic defenders of the regime.

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programs of the ruling elites and the social mood shifted sharply toward the right, toward isolationism, nationalism, and nostalgia for imperial grandeur. In his novels Into the Night and Mr. Hexogen, Prokhanov expressed his clear support for Vladimir Putin and an extremely negative attitude toward the democratizing Russia of the 1990s. Dugin, too, approved of Putin’s ascension to power. Soon after this, Prokhanov launched a series of sharp attacks against Putin and Putin’s party, “United Russia,” and published his support for the writer Vladimir Sorokin, who was then the target of the pro-Putin youth movement Marching Together. Today Prokhanov, together with his like-minded friend, apologist, and literary critic Vladimir Bondarenko, contend that the present rule remains liberal, just as it had been in the 1990s, and that therein lies the reason for the leadership’s authoritarianism. For example, Bondarenko’s critique of the Marching Together movement, published in the newspaper Tomorrow, was titled “UFO—Ultraliberal False Objective.”9 After 2002, critics of liberal persuasion ceased pondering the reasons behind Prokhanov’s legitimization: some of them decided that Prokhanov’s writing was so bad that his popularity was exclusively a phenomenon of popular culture and therefore did not warrant serious examination. Other critics viewed Prokhanov as an example of the radicalization of public taste, as well as of the political views of the younger literati and journalists, a generation that—they argued—could be viewed as one entity. During the 2000s, Prokhanov’s work was legitimized as not only oppositional, but culturally innovative, and the publication of Mr. Hexogen by Ad Marginem was a crucial step in that legitimization. The publishing house positioned itself on the book market in the 1990s and early 2000s as a publisher of “non-classical” Western and Russian philosophy (from Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida and Merab Mamardashvili), as well as fiction and non-fiction that violated familiar aesthetic conventions and broke various taboos (most notable in the works of Vladimir Sorokin). However, if Sorokin, Ad 9

   This is also a coded attack on the influential journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Observer), founded in 1992 at the peak of the early democratic reform movements. (IK)

Ilya Kukulin. The Legitimizationof Ultra-Right Discourse

Marginem’s favorite writer, had no chance of ever being published in the USSR, Prokhanov’s work had been published regularly since the end of the 1960s, both in literary journals and as books. Since the end of the 1980s, Prokhanov has had an established relationship with extreme right and nationalistic publishers, such as the journal Our Contemporary and the newspaper Tomorrow, where he serves as editor-in-chief to this day. Prokhanov’s new novel, The Political Scientist, has been described by Aleksandr Panov, one of the literary critics for the oppositional paper United Citizens’ Front, as “a kind of a mystery play whose characters […] traverse all the circles of the contemporary political inferno, which is described with the Dante-like sweep. The same goes for his power of imagination: at one time during the collapse of the empire this orthodox Soviet artist—the socialist-realist, the battle painter, and the singer of the Red Army Command Staff— […] turned into a flagrant surrealist.” Generally, the idea of Prokhanov’s transformation from socialist realist to communist surrealist, which supposedly took place in Prokhanov’s output in the 1990s, has become a commonplace in criticism, though this notion is not textually grounded. Prokhanov’s “innovations” can be attributed to his collaborations with avant-garde artists. The launch of his novel The Cruiser’s Sonata took place at the trendy A-3 gallery, which also showcased the novel’s illustrations by the experimental artists Alexander Savko and Vladimir Anzelm. The launch of The Political Scientist took place at the club Home, known primarily for showcasing new music, with accompaniment by the famous avant-garde artist and musician German Vinogradov. Anton Drel, a lawyer for the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky,10 also took part in the launch of The Political Scientist, which features a positive character clearly based on the oligarch. Thus, the publicity

10

   Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the Yukos oil company, was arrested on charges of fraud in 2003. While many, including Amnesty International and the European Court of Human Rights, have argued that the Russian authorities committed multiple violations in their arrest and subsequent treatment of Khodorkovsky, Khodorkovsky remains in prison as of this writing. (IK) Khodorkovsky was pardoned and released from prison in December 2013.—Eds.

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events for the book were calculated to function as hot art scene and political act at once; it suggested a framework within which Prokhanov’s “opposition” and Khodorkovsky’s political position were intended to be seen as comparable. Back in 2003, the journalists Fyodor Romer and Galina Yuzefovich commented on the shift that legitimized Prokhanov and his strategic association with the liberal opposition: […]Prokhanov […] is advantageous for the postmodernists in the current literary and arts scene. They crave to be radically nonconformist and slide up and down along the blade of the political razor; yet their good taste and sybaritic manners prevent them from brandishing red banners at protest rallies. How convenient for them to have a real opposition figure who shares their common language of conceptualism and is a playful aesthete....

In a bizarre turn, the authors of the article go along with Prokhanov’s self-manufactured image as a left radical; they do not notice his ideological position, consistently articulated in his novels, that has little in common with left radicalism. His position combines the celebration of imperial might, enthusiasm for technological advancement (special attention is paid to the construction of various spy gadgets), xenophobia (note the expression that Stalin “was martyred by kikes,” uttered by a positive character in Mr. Hexogen), and energetically fomented nostalgia for icons of Stalin-era ideology. The protagonist in Mr. Hexogen is outraged that Moscow’s Georgy Dimitrov Street was renamed into the “incomprehensible” Yakimanka Street—the fact that “Yakimanka” derives from the names of the parents of the Mother of God, Saints Joachim and Anna, is irrelevant to both Prokhanov and his hero. The protagonists of The Cruiser’s Sonata get into secret Soviet archives, where they find Semyon Babayevsky’s novels (!!),11 carefully preserved but frayed from multiple uses by the common folk. There is also a brochure against Solzhenitsyn with 11

   Semyon Babayevsky (1909-2000), a writer of Socialist Realist novels whose works provide illustrative examples of totalitarian literary aesthetics. Awarded the Stalin Prize in 1949, 1950, 1951. (IK)

Ilya Kukulin. The Legitimizationof Ultra-Right Discourse

a “clever” (Prokhanov’s term) title “So-Lzhets” (Solzhenitsyn, the liar). Clearly, joining imperial nostalgia with technological advancement and xenophobia does not add up any kind of left radicalism; rather, this ideology is genetically linked to the ideological precepts of late Stalinism of the 1940s and early 1950s. The aesthetics of Prokhanov’s novels are also rooted in the literature of late Stalinism. Having preserved the genres and motifs of late Stalinist literature, he was able to graft them onto new styles. In the 1970s, he adapted them to the surrealistic and dream-like metaphors of his contemporaries Vladimir Makanin and Anatoly Kim; in the 1990s, to the style of Solzhenitsyn’s historical epic The Red Wheel; in the 2000s, to the postmodern style of Yury Mamleev, Victor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin. Ideologically, Prokhanov is no oppositionist—in spite of his anti-Putin pronouncements, he is in sync with the defining trends of Putin’s period. One of these trends is a quest for a historically synthetic identity, that is, a desire to represent either a discrete phenomenon or the entire social and political system of the country as the heir to several different traditions simultaneously: to Soviet Russia; to imperial Russia “before 1913”; to ancient Rus (note Putin’s interest in ancient history, his media-covered trips to archeological digs, etc.); and in some cases to Western European civilization. An analogous construction of synthetic identity is described in Prokhanov’s new novels The Inscription and The Political Scientist. In the latter, the half-Jewish protagonist Strizhailo sides with the forces of good when at a decisive moment he remembers his Pskovian roots. In The Inscription, the process of constructing identity in the consciousness of a protagonist who is descending into a trance is described as follows: … As his brain was becoming smaller and smaller, the hazy intoxicating mists began to float around under the vaults of his now vacant skull. Along with the penetrating of the thin sharp tube, he too was sinking deep into himself, traversing through the layers which made up his consciousness. These were the layers of the “Soviet,” of the red, like a tightly packed banner; the layers of the “Russian Orthodox” characterized by the gold and the white like the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin; the “peasant” layers,

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Sometime after the above episode, the protagonist makes a dramatic decision, choosing for himself the Soviet layer as the most important one. On the whole, this motif of “conflating identities” is not an invention of Russia’s ruling elites or of some writers: it evolved spontaneously as the 1990s turned into the 2000s, when society conceived a desire for making history into an object of aesthetics, a wish to view history merely as a colorful drama, and a refusal to reflect on the traumatic episodes of the Soviet past. This desire became the psychological and aesthetic basis for various “mainstreaming discourses” prevalent in literature, the arts, journalism, and other media. It represented the country’s history in continuous and successive links, connecting imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet epoch. In Prokhanov’s novel Into the Night (2000), a member of one of the ruling elites makes a clear-cut, though extremely biased, prediction regarding the trend of events in contemporary Russia. The main hero, a retired KGB colonel, gets into a mysterious underground center where he finds an enormous, electric map of Russia. His senior comrade explains that the map indicates the penetration of the former KGB agents into state institutions and private companies of the new Russia. They are everywhere: they are the heads of the security departments in banks and companies (it’s hard to disagree with this assertion); they are also the deputy CEOs in the major corporations. They are all sleeper agents—at a secret hour they will come out of the shadows and take the governing of the state into their hands. This hour will come after a fair-haired man of medium height assumes power. This man, whom the Jewish oligarch Astros is preparing to replace Yeltsin, and who resembles Andrei Bolkonsky of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, will soon escape Astros’s control and will lead Russia in its true direction, that is, he will not allow the country to be transformed into an international

Ilya Kukulin. The Legitimizationof Ultra-Right Discourse

Jewish center. This episode, of course, cannot be considered an accurate description of the FSB’s infiltration into state structures and the management of the resource-based industries which occurred in the 2000s. Nonetheless, Prokhanov’s prognosis undoubtedly reflects the view of the elite that came to power in Russia during this period. Translated by Alexei Pavlenko

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T he A nti -M atr i x (T a k e

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B lue P ill )

Aleksandr Tarasov1

The culture industry does not sublimate: it represses…. Films … hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous attrition, the breaking of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. —Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Almost everyone who has written anything about the “Watch” films—Night Watch and Day Watch—has mentioned the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix. Why they were reminded of The Matrix—that they cannot explain. This, in itself, speaks to the cognitive deterioration of the writing community in contemporary Russia. The Matrix spontaneously appeared in writers’ minds, and they reflexively responded to its “appearance.” And yet this was no accident: there is, in fact, a direct connection between The Matrix and the “Watches.” The “Watches” are modeled after The Matrix as works of cinematic mass culture. But at the same time the “Watches” are made as a contradiction and counterweight to The Matrix. They are the anti-Matrix.

1

     Translated from Aleksandr Tarasov, “Anti-‘Matritsa’: Vyberi siniuiu tabletku,” in Dozor kak simptom. ed. B. Kupriianov and M. Surkov (Moscow: Falanster, 2006). 324-36.

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Of course, the Wachowskis’ film is of much higher quality than the “Watches.” After all, even in mass culture there is a hierarchy of quality, which defines each work as closer to or further from the standard of true art. The Matrix is at the highest level of “mass culture,” while the “Watches” are mediocre (if we measure according to international criteria, not through the blinders of Russian mass culture, which is derivative and provincial). But the difference in quality should not prevent us from drawing a comparison between the “Watches” and The Matrix. What exactly is The Matrix? It is an attempt, using cinematic mass culture, elements of fantasy, mythological allusions, and heavy borrowing of images from high art and fundamental cultural symbols, to instill a certain ideology in the audience. One could venture to say that the entire film functions as propaganda for JeanPaul Sartre’s social and political philosophy—adapted, naturally, for the consumer of mass culture. The Matrix reflects both of Sartre’s “hypostases”: existentialist and Marxist. In precise accordance with Sartre’s existentialism, The Matrix teaches us that the familiar world surrounding us is unreal, and, just as Sartre demonstrates in Nausea, reality does not in any way resemble what bourgeois-controlled “civil society” (religious, educational, cultural institutions, mass media) offers to us. And just as in Sartre’s explication of Marxism, it presents the true face of reality: a world of cynical, merciless exploitation, where people are harvested for energy, while their minds are poisoned with lies and illusions to prevent them from realizing the truth and rebelling. You can say that the world of the Matrix is capitalism taken to its logical conclusion: after all, even in “normal” capitalism people are harvested for their energy (their lifeblood), their minds simultaneously poisoned with lies and illusions. Really, who are the protagonists in The Matrix? The members of the Resistance. What are their goals? To free from slavery those who have been subjected to the Matrix’s merciless exploitation. What do they need to do to achieve that? Get as many people as possible to see the true state of affairs, make them stop being a part of the System. In the film, Morpheus directly tells Neo that they are battling for people’s minds, which are still “a part of the system.”

Sergei Lukyanenko. The Anti-Matrix

Why does the Resistance need more fighters? To carry out a Revolution, destroy the System, and put an end to the era of exploitation. You have to admit: this is not mass culture’s usual ideology. And who are the antagonists in The Matrix? First, the Matrix itself (meaning the System, both as an economic mechanism and as a system of illusions imposed on humanity), and second, the Matrix’s agents, meaning agents of the secret service, or, in Marxist terms, the government’s regulating institutions. After all, the Matrix is law and order; it may be an illusion, but it is normal modern bourgeois society, while reality is the ruinous aftermath of a civil war! This is a classic assertion in Marxism: behind the “proper” and even attractive façade of “prosperous” bourgeois society, there is a hidden world of merciless exploitation, deception, oppression, and death. Only Marxists speak of the exploitation of the proletariat, of the pillaging of “Third World” populations, of the prosperity of some at the expense of others, while the world of the Matrix, as we may recall, is capitalism taken to its logical conclusion, where practically everyone is among the exploited. The specialist has no trouble recognizing that The Matrix is a cinematic representation of the infamous Experience Machine described by Robert Nozick in his well-known book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick asked whether a person would agree to be hooked up to a machine that replaced real life and real experience with an image of this life and experience by stimulating certain areas of the brain. The image would be a pleasant one, where the person would be rich, healthy, good-looking, loved, respected, and so on— in short, he would be happy. Nozick famously claimed that if the person really thought this through, he would not agree, but would instead prefer reality (with all its discomforts) to a beautiful illusion. Like any liberal, Nozick simplifies the problem. In particular, he proposes that this is merely a thought experiment and that while existence in reality is not as perfect as in his illusion, it is not a complete nightmare (he’s a liberal professor from Harvard, what do you expect?). According to Sartre, this kind of experiment is not an experiment at all, but an existential choice that every person must make, and not

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nearly everyone finds the strength to “take the red pill,” to choose unbearable, torturous reality over a beautiful and comforting illusion, to choose true existence (being). Furthermore, Sartre claims, the majority tries not to notice even the possibility of an existential choice. In The Matrix this is confirmed by Morpheus, who says that “most people are not ready to be unplugged” from the Matrix. According to Sartre, there are social reasons underpinning the psychological reasons for our fear of existential choices: bourgeois society imposes certain social presets (“behavioral codes”!), which prevent spiritual rebellion, the escape from illusionary being into real existence. The Wachowskis illustrate this through the character of Cypher, who cannot bear the weight of truth and a life of hiding, and chooses “blissful ignorance” in the form of a new life as a wealthy film star (on the condition that he is unable to remember anything of his life in reality). To put it a different way, Cypher acts as a consumerist: he refuses his human essence in favor of a commodity. Marx called this commodity fetishism and showed (in the first chapter of Volume One of Capital, in the section titled “The Fetishism of Commodity and Its Secret”) that in bourgeois society products are presented to each participant in the capitalist economic mechanism in the guise of commodities, the monetary cost makes the cost of consumption appear prohibitive to the average mind, the essence of objects is clouded by their monetary equivalent, people begin to perceive not only material objects but even themselves as commodities, and they perceive the image of social reality as its true nature. Since the world of the Matrix is the ultima Thule of capitalist economy, in which it has reached reductio ad absurdum, then naturally commodity fetishism in it has also reached its ultima Thule and borders on reductio ad absurdum: the real product (nourishment provided to each human “battery” under exploitation) is replaced by its commodity form (the image of a steak, imposed on the mind from outside). The world of the Matrix is a world wherein mass media, PR, and commercials have completely defeated human reason and individual human experience, a world where fetish and form have replaced content. This is exactly what Marshall McLuhan was talking about in Understanding Media: “the ‘content’ of a medium

Sergei Lukyanenko. The Anti-Matrix

is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The Matrix is that burglar. The kind of burglar who steals a person’s life and covers up the theft with images of commodity fetishism. According to Sartre and Marx, humans, as creatures endowed with reason, have full responsibility for themselves, for the meaning of their lives, and for the surrounding world. Someone who has freed himself from the fetters of illusion can no longer play a social role, because such a role presupposes no freedom of choice (or freedom at all). Responsibility for oneself, the meaning of one’s life, and the surrounding world, is the basis for conscious revolutionary action directed at changing social reality, because that reality is so horrific. The Wachowskis insist on the unconditional value of reality (no matter what kind of reality it is) and on the fact that only reality has historical potential; this echoes Jean Baudrillard, who stated (in Simulacra and Science Fiction) that only reality can become a true utopia, an alternative project to modern society. They also unreservedly praise the revolutionary as one who, in Sartre’s words, “wants each person to realize his fate fully and freely” (Situations III). Let us now turn to the “Watches.” We’ll begin with a detail that illustrates their differences: the names. In the “Watches,” like in The Matrix, the characters have symbolic names. But not the main characters, just the highest-ranking ones. This means that The Matrix takes a revolutionary/democratic approach (the one who matters is the one who demonstrates why he is the hero), while the “Watches” take a secret service/bureaucratic approach (the one who matters is the one who has more stars on his uniform). And in The Matrix the names actually speak to the characters’ essences: Neo (i.e. Homo novus, or, as an anagram, One, i.e. the Chosen One); Trinity (i.e. the Holy Trinity); Morpheus (i.e. the Roman god, the only one who is capable of reaching the minds of human batteries put to sleep by the Matrix). In the “Watches,” on the other hand, the names simulate essence. Geser in theory fights demons, the forces of Evil, but in reality he is a trickster, a hunter of souls, Lord of the North, who is only required to battle

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with demons; Zavulon is one of the founders of the twelve Israelite Tribes (Zebulun), who was known to have been born of Leah, not Rachel, and he (and his tribe) “offered his life to death.” So these are pseudosymbolic, not symbolic names, corresponding to the authors’ view that the battle between the Light and the Dark is not the battle between Good and Evil, but something entirely different. And that is how it is with everything else. While The Matrix claims that there is reality and pseudoreality, true existence and illusion, the “Watches” say something completely different: the reality perceived by average minds is, of course, reality, but it’s not all of reality, not a complete reality. In addition to this first level of reality accessible to the masses (meaning us average movie-goers), there is supposedly another, higher level—a level exclusively for internal use, a level of constant behind-the-scenes action by the agents of Light and Dark, the “Gloom,” the “second level.” It’s not hard to guess with whom (or what) the Light and Dark are associated: the secret service. It is thus perfectly logical that The Matrix’s role model is the conscious activity of average citizens resisting a soulless machine, battling with it in the name of their own (and humanity’s) future, while the “Watches,” on the contrary, spread civil apathy and support faith in the omnipotence of government and governmental secret services, which apparently are supposed to decide the fate of citizens in place of the citizens themselves. The Matrix claims that anyone can see reality. The “Watches” say no, to see a higher level of reality you have to have been endowed with that ability at birth (the Others). This is social Darwinism, plain and simple, propaganda for social exclusivity. That is, we have the right to command and control because we are the superior race. The Matrix promotes existential choice, while the “Watches” deny it in favor of middle-class values, to the extent that the “happy ending” of Day Watch depicts how Anton Gorodetsky loses his essence as an Other and becomes a typical, average person. The Matrix praises the political (revolutionary) action of average citizens. That makes it revolutionary/democratic. The “Watches,” on the other hand, praise the actions of official institutions (the secret service). That makes them governmental/bureaucratic.

Sergei Lukyanenko. The Anti-Matrix

The protagonists of The Matrix are no philistines. They’re rebels, revolutionaries. They lead an underground life, in danger every second, thrown down to the lowest levels (literally) of society— they chose this life themselves, when they could probably have sat out the fight in Zion. Instead, they infiltrate the enemy, risk their lives, continue the fight, suffer constant hardship—in short, they live for an idea. The heroes of Night Watch and Day Watch (the agents of Light) are on the job. In terms of psychology and lifestyle, these are typical middle class citizens who work for the government. They are the next step up from the guys in beer commercials: they watch hockey and soccer nonstop (and to catch the soccer match on TV they might forget their work altogether), they drink heavily, and so on. As Goblin2 appropriately says, they’re just “operatives.” Or as Valeria Novodvorskaya3 would have it, “bloody KGBists” (in this case, by the way, literally bloody!). As strange as it may sound, The Matrix affirms the cult of Reason: the main force in the film is reason itself, reason that has freed itself from illusion and rejected the pseudoreality imposed by the Matrix. The fights and shootouts are secondary, since they don’t happen in the real world. Strength and weapons turn out to be useless if you can dodge bullets or stop them mid-flight. Reason triumphs over irrationality, over illusion. The “Watches,” on the other hand, affirm the cult of strength and magic. In fact, magic turns out to be more important than conventional, material strength. In the “Watches,” the irrational triumphs over reason; irrationality and mysticism are championed. It is worth noting that The Matrix really does show the battle between Good and Evil: Evil is the Matrix, the machine of oppression,

2

     Goblin is the nickname of the film and video game translator Dmitrii Puchkov, who was propelled to fame for dubbing Western films with alternative, and highly profane, versions of their dialogue. He also created an alternative voice-over soundtrack for the Russian blockbuster film Bumer, in effect creating a postmodern re-make.

3

     Valeriia Novodvorskaya, dissident, political activist, and journalist. A founder of the oldest liberal party, The Democratic Union, an outspoken critic of the KGB/FSB as the foundation of both the communist and Putin regimes.

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capitalism taken to the extreme, while the forces of the Resistance are Good. The “Watches,” though, have neither Good nor Evil: what is shown is the struggle between two forces of essentially the same type—the Light (our secret service) and the Dark (i.e. whoever the secret service is out to get). The Matrix assumes the existence of morality (social ethics); the “Watches” assume immorality. To be honest, if the Light and the Dark have an agreement about their respective spheres of influence, if the agents of Light are the ones who give the agents of Dark licenses to kill, what kind of morality can there be? Only class morality, which bases itself on the premise that you only have responsibilities to your own kind (in this case, the Others); moral responsibilities do not apply to the masses, that “inferior race.” This is why in The Matrix your average Agent Smith and your average revolutionary are fighting to the death, while in the “Watches” we observe, to borrow Ladislas Farago’s expression, a classic “game of the foxes”: the juxtaposition of two secret services, with mutual agreements, “double dealing,” and complicated plots. Even the challenges thrown down by the “opposition,” like the destruction of the Ostankino teletower, can’t fool anyone. Let us concede for a moment that television really is an “Empire of Deception.” But what does the tower have to do with it? It’s just equipment. Simple logic suggests that the leaders of this empire are the ones who deserve to be punished, not the equipment— equipment should instead be handed over into the right hands. This episode faithfully duplicates the long-running political debate in which one side confronts those who control the mass media about why they serve the public such utter crap, while those in control respond in the words of Minister Shvydkoy,4 “It’s not our fault, it just happens, you know, naturally.” The Matrix protests against constant surveillance and total control, advocating struggle against the system. The “Watches,” instead, praise constant surveillance and total control of the population, saying, “Calm down, get used to it,

4

    Russia’s Minister of Culture from 2000-2004.

Sergei Lukyanenko. The Anti-Matrix

don’t get upset, otherwise the Light won’t be able to protect you from the Dark.” Back in 1971 one of the first theorists of “mass culture,” Ernest van den Haag, wrote in A Dissent from the Consensual Society that products of mass culture must follow two principles: everything is clear, and everything can be fixed. The Matrix is an improper mass culture product, because neither principle is followed: not everything is clear to the average audience, and not everything can be fixed. Imitating The Matrix, the “Watches” deviate from the first principle: not everything in these films is clear. This (as in The Matrix) is intentional. Another founding father of mass culture, Barbey d’Aurevilly, wrote, “What influences the human imagination more powerfully than mystery?” The creators of Night Watch and Day Watch, relying on the effects of mystery, catch their audience with the same bait that self-proclaimed “gurus” or “yogis” do. But everything is fixable in the “Watches”! A global catastrophe is underway: look, Anton and Geser have messed everything up. And then everything is okay again, no catastrophe after all. If The Matrix aims toward the example set by true art, the “Watches,” by contrast, essentially rehash one of the most unsuccessful, unabashedly mass-cultural films, Fritz Lang’s Spies, which came out back in 1928! There, too, spies and secret service agents are presented as equals, two identical forms of organized crime, battling each other in a world of chaos. There, too, is the suggestion that in addition to normal life there is a higher level hidden from the masses. There, too, spies operate under the guise of certain “higher powers” and “unknown truths.” There, too, a massive catastrophe seems to be in the making. So while The Matrix tells the viewer, “Open your eyes and rebel!” the “Watches” say, “Sit tight and have faith in your government.” While The Matrix extols revolution, the “Watches” extol conformity and submission to one’s fate. While The Matrix asserts that “knowledge is power,” the “Watches” counter that “ignorance is bliss.” Both films openly (even too openly) impress an ideology upon their viewers. But their ideologies are different. Translated by Eugenia Sokolskaya

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E xcer pts from “A C ou ntry R esembling Russi a”: T he U se of H istory in B or is A ku nin ’ s D etecti v e N ov el s Elena V. Baraban1

[…] Among post-Soviet detective writers,2 Akunin seemingly is the one least interested in Russia’s present. Furthermore, he is the first among contemporary Russian detective authors to combine the genre of the historical detective novel with Postmodernist aesthetics. The author claims that by borrowing from classic literature and creating a postmodern mystery, he pursues the purpose of entertaining the reader with quality belles-lettres. Akunin asserts that Russians’ most precious possession is their great literature, and that by saturating his works with allusions to this literature, he caters to the tastes of sophisticated readers.3 Some critics agree that deciphering Akunin’s allusions to literature, film, and historical events constitutes the primary source of pleasure in reading his mysteries.4 Other

1

     Reprinted from: Elena V. Baraban. “A Country Resembling Russia: The Use of History in Boris Akunin’s Detective Novels,” The Slavic and East European Journal 48, no. 3, Special Forum Issue: Innovation through Iteration: Russian Popular Culture Today (Autumn, 2004): 396-420.

2

     Such as Aleksandra Marinina, Andrei Konstantinov, Daria Dontsova, Viktoriia Platova, Andrei Kivinov, Friedrikh Neznansky, and many others.

3

     See Alena Solntseva, “Massovaia literatura mozhet byt’ vozvyshennoi.” Vremia novostei, no. 121, December 6, 2000; Anna Verbieva, “Boris Akunin: Tak veselee mne i interesnee vzyskatel’nomu chitateliu....” Exlibris. Nezavisimaia gazeta, December 23, 1999.

4

    Lev Danilkin celebrates Akunin’s Postmodern style and the absence of ideology in

Boris Akunin. “A Country Resembling Russia”

reviewers are less supportive of what they view as Akunin’s overemphasis on allusion. In addition, many critics question Akunin’s interpretation of history and his stylizations of nineteenth-century Russian language. While some praise Akunin for his treatment of Russian history, others accuse him of purposefully distorting the country’s past. Of those who argue that Akunin’s texts are historically inaccurate, some accuse Akunin of xenophobia (Arbitman 218); others charge him with Russophobia and with creating a caricature of Russian imperial history; and another critic argues that Akunin articulates “various opinions on the Russian past without giving clear priority to anyone’s view.”5 […] Akunin’s nineteenth century is not a “golden age” that can be emulated by contemporary statesmen. It is a time of misery, corruption, and social inequality. In his interview with Elle (Shulpiakov), Akunin says that he is far from idealizing the Silver Age. According to Akunin, the nineteenth century was far from rosy, as it is now often presented; “the charming time of Fandorin” was also marked by appalling poverty, ignorance, and infringement on the rights of the majority of Russians. Many details in Akunin’s novels illustrate this position. Indeed, rundown districts with their mass graves for the poor, as described in The Lover of Death and “The Decorator,” are no paradise to which contemporary Russians would

his novels. Danilkin argues that in spite of the absence of a clear “message” in the Erast Fandorin novels, their active and highly positive protagonist may serve as a role model for present-day Russians. The latter have reflected on the fate of Russia instead of acting on improving it (Danilkin, Lev. “Danilkin v Izvestiiakh o Koronatsii.” Sovremennaia russkaia literatura s Viacheslavom Kuritsynym [n.d.]. http://www.guelman.ru/slava/akunin/danilkinl.html). Vasily Prigodich and Vladimir Berezin admire Akunin’s use of pastiche and his parody of Dostoevsky, Leskov, Chekhov, and other Russian writers. […] (see Vladimir Berezin, “Obshchestvo dokhlykh poetov: Geroi Akunina vyiasniaiut svoi otnosheniia s samoubiistvom.” Nezavisimaia gazeta, July 5, 2001; Vasilii Prigodich, “Razvlechenie dlia vzyskatel’nogo chitatelia, ili novaia kniga B. Akunina o prashchure i vnuke velikogo syshchika.” Londonskii kurier, 136, December 15, 2000: 29). 5

     Konstantine Klioutchkine, “Boris Akunin (Grigorii Shalvovich Chkhartishvili).” In The Dictionary of Literary Biography-Russian Writers since 1980, edited by Marina Balina and Mark Lipovetsky (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 7.

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aspire. In The Lover of Death—marketed as a Dickensian mystery— one of the main characters is Sen’ka Skorik. The details of his life are reminiscent not only of Dickens’s Adventures of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield but also of the short story “Van’ka” by Anton Chekhov. Like Van’ka, Akunin’s hero is an orphan. The master beats Van’ka “with anything that comes to hand” and Sen’ka is also beaten regularly by his cousin. For Van’ka, “there is nothing to eat”; in the morning and in the evening, he gets bread; “for dinner, porridge”; “but as for tea, or soup, the master and mistress gobble it all up themselves.”6 (Chekhov 479). Sen’ka is hungry too: even during Shrovetide, when the house is full of food, the “orphan is given only two torn pancakes and a tiny bit of oil.”7 Chekhov’s protagonist writes a letter to his grandfather “imploring” him “to come and take [him] away” from the evil people who just beat him and who have made his life “worse than the dog’s” (ibid., 481). In Akunin’s novel, Sen’ka receives a letter from his little brother who implores Sen’ka “to come and take [him] away” from the evil people. Significantly, the way Sen’ka’s brother writes the address on the letter—“to brother Senia who lives with Uncle Zot in Sukharevka, Moscow” —is similar to the way Chekhov’s Van’ka addresses his letter: “To Grandpa, in the village” (ibid., 481). Neither these allusions to Chekhov nor Akunin’s allusions to Dickens conform to the vision of a Postmodernist text as meaninglessly reshuffling fragments of renowned literary works. Akunin evokes Chekhov and Dickens, the masters of psychological realism who exposed the social problems of the nineteenth century, in order to support his own criticism of capitalist society, in which children are mistreated and opportunities for their personal and social growth are limited. Akunin’s critique appears to be particularly relevant in light of the challenges that face the post-Soviet education system. The fate of children from the lower classes is certainly one of the problems

6

     Anton Chekhov, “Van’ka.” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 5 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 479.

7

     Boris Akunin, Liubovnik smerti (Moscow: Zakharov, 2001), 13.

Boris Akunin. “A Country Resembling Russia”

that, in Akunin’s opinion, are typical of both post-Soviet Russia and Russia’s late imperial period.8 The gloomy atmosphere of nineteenth-century Moscow is highlighted in chapters discussing Sen’ka’s experiences in the Khitrovka district, the most dangerous quarter in old Moscow. A number of episodes in these chapters are a pastiche from Vladimir Giliarovsky’s depiction of the world of thieves in Moscow and the Muscovites. In particular, Akunin’s portrayal of Ivan Fedotych Budnikov, a police officer who managed to keep Khitrovka in some semblance of order, is a pastiche from Giliarovsky’s description of the policeman Fedot Ivanovich Rudnikov from the sketch “Khitrovka.”9 In Giliarovsky’s story, Rudnikov explains why, though he knows every criminal living in Khitrovka, he does not report them: if he did, he wouldn’t have worked in Khitrovka “for twenty years”; he “wouldn’t survive even a single day.”10 Even fugitives from Siberian hard labor camps considered Ivan Fedotych “fair.” He had been “beaten and wounded many times. Yet they would hurt him, not because they wanted to, but simply in the course of saving their own lives. Each was doing his business: one was catching […], the other was fleeing” (ibid.). Akunin’s Khitrovka is similar to the one depicted by Giliarovsky.11 Prom Akunin’s description, the reader learns that “if [Ivan Fedotych] had worked by written laws instead of working by Khitrovka laws, they would

8

     In his interview with BBC, Akunin asserts that many problems he describes in his novels about Russia in the nineteenth century are also typical of post-Soviet Russia (Romadova).

9

     Vladimir Berezin observes that Akunin merely switches the first name and the patronymic of Giliarovsky’s character. See: Vladimir Berezin, “Obshchestvo dokhlykh poetov: Geroi Akunina vyiasniaiut svoi otnosheniia s samoubiistvom.” Nezavisimaia gazeta, July 5, 2001.

10

   Vladimir Giliarovskii, Moskva i moskvichi (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1960), 26.

11

   Another example of Akunin’s pastiche from Moscow and the Muscovites is the novella “The Jack of Spades.” Giliarovsky’s sketch “Pod kalanchoi” depicts a famous Moscow swindler Speier and the Jack of Hearts gangster group. Akunin retells an episode in which Speier deceived the Governor of Moscow Prince Dolgorukov in a way similar to Giliarovsky’s depiction of the swindler. […]

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have slain him dead long ago. But as it is, if he takes someone to a police station, everyone understands: he can’t do otherwise; he also needs to prove to his bosses he’s working.”12 Such instances of pastiche are an example of intertextuality whose function is not simply to entertain the informed reader but also to create a powerful subtext that triggers the reader’s associations of the present with the past. Rather than being an expression of Akunin’s Russophobia and a proof of his parasitism on the classics, passages reminiscent of Chekhov and Giliarovsky counter post-Soviet depictions of the end of the nineteenth century as a period of abundance and social stability. For his depictions, Akunin relies on the reader’s cultural memory of the Russian classics. In a society in which the education system has devoted a great deal of attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Postmodern strategy of using nineteenth-century Critical Realism as a source of historical evidence becomes an effective supplement to more traditional strategies of reconstructing the past through documents. Typically, Akunin refers to those passages in the nineteenth-century classics that expose social inequality, poverty, and poshlost’ (banality) in the Russian empire. Moreover, at times he presents a more pessimistic version of a story that had been told before him by a nineteenth-century writer. In Coronation, for instance, Tsar Nicholas II and his family are depicted as negative characters, with Nicholas as a figure of little authority and his wife as more concerned about the disappearance of her jewelry than about the kidnapping of Nicholas’s cousin. Akunin’s depiction of the Khodynka tragedy on May 18, 1896, during which hundreds of people who had come to celebrate the coronation of Nicholas II died in a stampede, has allusions to Leo Tolstoy’s short story “Khodynka.” Tolstoy writes about a man who saves a little boy from being trampled in the crowd. The man sends the boy above and over the crowd to a safe place (375).13 Tolstoy leaves the

12

   Akunin, Liubovnik smerti, 26.

13

   Lev Tolstoi, “Khodynka.” In Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, vol. 14, edited by N. Akopova (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), 375.

Boris Akunin. “A Country Resembling Russia”

story of the little boy open-ended. Despite telling about a horrible tragedy, the whole story inspires optimism, because the main characters prove their humanity; they prove themselves to be above the circumstances in which they were made to lose their human dignity. In Akunin’s Coronation the Khodynka chapter tells about people in the crowd passing a small boy out to where the crowd ends. Then the narrator looks at the bodies of those who have died in the stampede: “Only once did I stop next to that very boy whom they had tried to carry out of the stampede; it obviously didn’t work. In dumb curiosity, I looked at how transparent his blue eyes were and stumbled on.”14 By producing a gloomier version of Khodynka than the one by Tolstoy, Akunin illustrates his point regarding the responsibility of the Russian upper classes for the tragic events of 1917.15 Through allusions and pastiche, Akunin highlights darker pages in the Russian social history of the nineteenth century and creates a contrast between these facts and the post-Soviet glorification of imperial Russia. Though the works of Mikhalkov, Panfilov, Govorukhin, and Radzinsky emphasize the country’s prosperity and stability under the tsars, Akunin argues the opposite by reactivating the reader’s memory of works by Dostoevsky, Giliarovsky, Chekhov, Korolenko, and Tolstoy. Akunin uses the classics’ “testimonies” to question the myth of Russia’s golden age. The multiplicity of historical pasts in Akunin’s works, then, is not just a characteristic that accords with Postmodernist principles. Rather, the philosophical principles of Postmodernism are used to create a pertinent critique of the idealization of tsarist Russia and to depict “the Russia we have never lost.”16 Akunin’s criticism of attempts to idealize the nineteenth century and his fascination with 14

   Boris Akunin, Koronatsiia (Moscow: Zakharov, 2001), 335.

15

   See Gleb Shul’piakov, “Pisatel’-prizrak, ili Put’ samuraia. Interv’iu s Akuninym.” Elle (July 2000). http://www.fandorin.ru/akunin/articles/elle.html

16

   In his interview with Segodnia, Akunin claims that the Fandorin project is an attempt to create a new epic, which could be titled The Russia We Have Never Lost (Makarkin, Aleksei. “Rossiia, kotoroi my ne teriali: Boris Akunin sozdaet epos novogo tipa.” Segodnia, no. 164, July 28, 2000).

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Russian literary classics determine his use of the Postmodernist techniques of allusion and pastiche. Rather than being a random reshuffling of fragments of preexistent texts, Akunin’s allusions and pastiche become historical details that help produce a nuanced and often ambivalent depiction of Russia. In a 1999 interview with Ogonek magazine, Akunin maintains that the Russia of his novels is “not quite real historical Russia” but rather “a country that resembles Russia.”17 Akunin’s prerevolutionary Russia is a projection of Russia’s present. He brings past and present closer to each other on the pages of his texts by highlighting nineteenth-century themes and issues that resonate with important topics in 1990s Russia. According to Trofimenkov, many details in Akunin’s books refer to present-day Russia. In particular, Akunin writes about corruption, prostitution, misery, anti-Semitism, class differences, the “Chechen factor,” […] and deviations from the accepted norms of sexual behavior.18 All of these were the topics of numerous publications and debates in the 1990s, as well as a century ago in Russia. By introducing allusions from the “past” to the present, Akunin creates an intertext that allows for a historical perspective on familiar problems. As a result, these problems are perceived not as something unique to today’s Russia but as something that has complicated social life in the country throughout the centuries. […] In The Death of Achilles, Fandorin, a secret agent of the Governor General of Moscow, Vladimir Dolgorukov, investigates the death

17

   See Kuzmenko, Elena. “Pisatel’ No. 065779.” Ogonek 34 (4621), November 1999.

18

   The depiction of the nineteenth-century gay scene in The Coronation resonates with the issues of homosexuality and homophobia in the 1990s. At the gay ball thrown by Grand Prince Simeon (his prototype is Prince Sergei, brother of Nicholas II), homosexuals intend to kill two “guardians” (bliustiteli), “members of a secret society of homophobes whose mission is to protect the honor of the Romanov dynasty, and of old Russian aristocratic families” (241-42). The analogy is with the present-day Russian “repairmen” (remontniki), whose mission is to convert homosexuals into “proper men” who can marry Russian women and participate in the reproduction of the country’s population. Akunin’s depiction reminds the reader of Pavel Lungin’s film Luna Park (1992), which portrays a brigade of young skinheads who try to “straighten” two homosexuals.

Boris Akunin. “A Country Resembling Russia”

of a prominent Russian statesman, General Sobolev. The prototype of Sobolev is General Mikhail Skobelev (1843-1882).19 The historical figure is still recognizable, but defamiliarization makes the reader aware of the fact that Sobolev is after all a literary character, not a historical figure. […] The character of Dolgorukov is based on the real historical figure, Prince Vladimir Andreevich Dolgorukov (18101891) […], who was the Governor General of Moscow from 1864 until 1891. He was a descendant of the old noble family of princes Dolgorukoi, the most prominent of whom was Yury Dolgoruky (1095/7-1157), the founder of Moscow. In the novella “The Jack of Spades,” Akunin’s narrator explains that the “almighty” Vladimir Andreevich Dolgorukov was called, among other things, “the Grand Duke of Moscow” and Yury Dolgoruky, that is, by the name of his great ancestor. Besides referring to a real governor of Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century, The Death of Achilles suggests two other historical figures: the current mayor20 of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and Prince Yury Dolgoruky. These three historical figures give the novel its depth—creating a multilayered Postmodern text in which irony is a major trope. Akunin’s character Vladimir Dolgorukov is a social commentary on contemporary Russian historicism. In 1996-1997, in the course of preparation for and then the celebration of the 850th anniversary of Moscow, the monument of the founder of Moscow Prince Yury Dolgoruky was “half-jokingly and half-seriously” referred to as “Yury Mikhailovich,” which is the first name and the patronymic of Luzhkov, the popular mayor of Moscow in the 1990s. […] Prince Yury Dolgoruky was the son of Vladimir, not Mikhail. However, the popular imagination aptly reacted to Luzhkov’s aspirations to view Moscow as his city and sacrificed historical accuracy to psychological effect. The Dolgorukov of the novel is not simply a depiction of the real Vladimir Andreevich Dolgorukov, but also “a nineteenth-century”

19

   General Skobelev took part in Russian military campaigns in Central Asia. Skobelev was a hero of the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878).

20

   Luzhkov held the office of Moscow mayor for 18 years (1992-2010) and was replaced by Sergei Sobianin in 2010.

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version of Yury Luzhkov. Like Luzhkov in the present, Dolgorukov has ruled Moscow for many years as if it were his fiefdom. Like Luzhkov in the 1990s, Dolgorukov supports expensive projects, such as the erection of “the Temple.” One of Dolgorukov’s clerks complains about the project: “And the notorious Temple! It has taken all life from the city. […] How many shelters and hospitals could have been built with this money? But our new Cheops desires to leave no less than a pyramid after himself.”21 The subject of this remark is the famous Church of Christ the Savior, built in 1812-1883 in commemoration of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, destroyed in 1931 on Stalin’s orders and built anew under Luzhkov (1990-2000). Thus, the connection of Akunin’s character with Luzhkov and Prince Vladimir Dolgorukov is not only through the comparison of Yury Luzhkov and Vladimir Dolgorukov to Prince Yury Dolgoruky of the twelfth century, but also through the projects they have both accomplished. The Church of Christ the Savior, the biggest Orthodox church in the world, involved an aesthetic controversy among Muscovites both in the 1870s-80s and in the 1990s. The idea of restoring the church was criticized in Russian newspapers in the 1990s because the project was so costly. Muscovites argued that instead of rebuilding one more Christian temple in the capital, the money could be used to help hundreds of small parishes around Russia.22 The Luzhkov implication is reinforced by another allusion: the painting of the Temple is commissioned to a Georgian artist Gegechkori, a “well-known scoundrel.”23 Dolgorukov’s councilors believe that it is both “cheaper” and fairer to commission the painting to Moscow artists who can paint “as well as, or better than, the

21

   Boris Akunin, Smert’ Akhillesa [The Death of Achilles] (Moscow: Zakharov, 2001), 76.

22

   In Altyn-Tolobas Akunin once again captures the controversy surrounding the Church of Christ the Savior. The protagonist’s father used to say that the “giant,” “non-proportionate” dome of the church spoiled Moscow and the only good that the Bolsheviks did was to destroy this church. But Nicholas, the protagonist of Altyn-Tolobas, finds the church quite agreeable (Boris Akunin, Altyn-Tolobas, Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2001, 44).

23

   Akunin, Smert’ Akhillesa, 66.

Boris Akunin. “A Country Resembling Russia”

Georgian.”24 In this depiction, Akunin is attacking the contemporary Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, who was commissioned by Luzhkov to paint the restored Church of Christ the Savior in the 1990s.25 The ironic attitude of Akunin’s narrator to Dolgorukov’s megalomania is a projection of Russians’ irony about Luzhkov’s megalomania, which, in turn, is a manifestation of the neo-imperial attitude in Russia, the desire to reinstate Russia’s greatness through pursuing grandiose projects such as the erection of the WWII memorial on Poklonnaia Hill, the celebration of the 850th anniversary of Moscow, and Pushkin’s bicentennial in 1999. Allusions from the past to the present make the past “recognizable”26 and help shift the narrative focus from a past that is no longer there to a past that is characterized by violations of social, political, sexual, and moral norms similar to those in the present. In Akunin’s works, allusions and pastiche cannot be reduced to a meaningless bricolage of signs; these Postmodern devices are a means of creating a comparison of past and present and thus of substantiating Akunin’s critique of the position that the past was

24

   Ibid.

25

   Tsereteli’s other projects, such as statues of Marshal Zhukov and Peter the Great, enraged patriots of Moscow and earned him a reputation similar to that of Gegechkori in The Death of Achilles.

26

   There are other examples of Akunin’s collage of times in The Death of Achilles. For instance, Fandorin learns about corruption in Moscow from an old servant: “Say, a seller-man wants to open a shop to sell, say, […] pants. What can be simpler? Pay a city tax of fifteen rubles and do your business. But that’s not the case! He has to pay a policeman, a tax officer, a medical inspector! And all that misses the city budget! And now those pants—their top price can’t be more than 1.5 rubles— are sold for three rubles. It is not Moscow but a pure jungle […]” (Akunin, Smert’ Akhillesa, 71). Every Russian who read newspapers in the 1990s is familiar with similar expressions of indignation about corruption among the tax police and regular police. The prices quoted in The Death of Achilles come from the nineteenth century, but the whole situation refers to present-day Russia indirectly. Another example of Akunin’s collage of times is the vodka trade in Moscow. Fandorin learns that sellers buy official stamps from tax officers, glue them onto bottles filled with moonshine, and sell it as a brand-name product (ibid., 71). The illegal vodka trade was the focus of numerous discussions throughout the 1990s.

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more wholesome than the present. Whereas the historical novel of the Realist canon is “the poetic awakening of the people who figured in [historical] events” and its reader “should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality.”27 Akunin’s novel, while providing a vivid depiction of the past, makes the reader experience the copresence of past and present. Such a shift in narrative focus leads to an affirmation of the position that there can be no idealization of either past or present, that idealizing the nineteenth century harbors the same problems as Soviet idealizations of the communist future. In this sense, Akunin’s works are a way out of the pessimism of the 1990s and of the Russian nostalgia for the past. […] A closer look at Akunin’s other novels, however, reveals a similar co-presence of past and present. Of course, one can support this argument by pointing out that Akunin is turning his novels into computer games (e.g., Turkish Gambit). Moreover, as the author admits, writing detective novels for him is similar to playing computer games.28 This explanation aside, the co-existence of the present and the past in Akunin’s novels is manifested on the level of style. Even novels with no parallel plots, such as the books about Sister Pelageia and Erast Fandorin, have the qualities of a virtual space. […] One may argue that although parallelism, the central organizing device in Recommended Reading and Altyn-Tolobas, is not as explicit in the series about Erast Fandorin and the nun Pelageia, it is still important for making these novels a social commentary on contemporary Russia’s search for its past. Akunin’s virtual Russia reconciles the conflicting images of Russia. This reconciliation of different perceptions of the country is reminiscent of reflective nostalgia as it is described by Svetlana Boym. In The Future of Nostalgia, Boym argues that for reflective nostalgics

27

   Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin, 1962), 42.

28

   “I love games. When I was younger, I used to play cards. Then I began playing computer games. Then it turned out that composing detective novels is even more engaging than computer games” (Kuzmenko, Elena. “Pisatel’ No. 065779.” Ogonek 34 (4621), November 1999.

Boris Akunin. “A Country Resembling Russia” the past is not made in the images of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic development. We don’t need a computer to get access to the virtualities of our imagination: reflective nostalgia has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness.29

In the sense that many of Akunin’s heroes consciously choose to absorb fragments of different cultures and open up their consciousnesses “to the virtualities of imagination,” they are reflective nostalgics. Such characters are decidedly different from “restorative nostalgics” who, according to Boym, are “focused on recovery and preservation of what is perceived to be an absolute truth” (ibid., 49). […] An analysis of Akunin’s style confirms the argument by Hutcheon that the constant “complaint that postmodernism is either ahistorical or, if it uses history, that it does so in a naïve and nostalgic way, just will not stand up in the light of actual novels.”30 In Akunin’s mysteries, the strategies and images we associate with Postmodernism are not merely matters of style, fashionable cliches, or intellectual fashion; rather, they are expressions of a shift in the way we think about Russia. Examined in light of the postSoviet identity crisis and the debate on Russian history, Akunin’s Postmodern historical mysteries show an awakening from the past, from a nostalgia for the golden age in Russian history. Although many details in his depictions of pre-revolutionary Russia may be viewed as expressions of admiration and nostalgia for the imperial past, Akunin is also critical of such nostalgia. By saturating his mysteries with allusions to literary classics, Akunin creates an intertext which is not simply a means of entertaining the informed reader but serves as a subtext that triggers the reader’s association of the present with the past. Far from merely reshuffling fragments of preexistent texts, Akunin uses allusions to the classics of

29

   Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 50.

30

   Linda. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 19.

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Psychological Realism as historical details and produces a nuanced and often ambivalent depiction of Russia. Instead of depicting the end of the nineteenth century as a period of abundance and social stability, favorably different from the economic and social chaos of post-Soviet Russia, Akunin frequently discusses problems relevant to both post- and pre-Soviet Russia. […] Akunin’s historical mysteries emphasize the co-presence of past and present. In his third detective series, this co-presence is further highlighted by the novels’ parallel plots and by a protagonist for whom history becomes a virtual playground. Akunin’s Postmodern protagonists do not worry about the impossibility of discovering a true Russia. For them there can be no idealization of either past or present. Instead of overcoming the multiplicity of positions that became a source of worry for the Russian intelligentsia of the 1990s, they advocate life with diversity, cultural eclecticism, and individualized meditation on history. In applying these strategies to their life, Akunin’s heroes find a way of overcoming pessimism and their own nostalgia for the past.

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T he Fa ll 1

The fifteenth quatrain of Nostradamus’s sixth century includes a prediction, which, after some mental exertion, can be translated verbatim into Russian as follows: On the Scythian land at the close of the Stone Age An old man, devoted to Bacchus, will hand over power. A young friend of Mercury, Mars and the northern chief will take his seat. He will have martial success, a fall in March, a sharp turn.

One usually has no difficulty interpreting this stanza, particularly after December 31, 1999. The friend of Mercury, Mars, and the northern chief triumphantly came to power and achieved a string of military victories.2 Like Kutuzov, he heroically yielded at Borodino and contributed to the ruin of Moscow, which then became all-powerful. Like Suvorov, he mastered skiing, and like Potemkin, he captivated the women, the most renowned of which happened to be Anna Politkovskaya.3 1

     Translated from Dmitrii Bykov, Kak Putin stal prezidentom SShA (Novye russkie skazki) (St. Petersburg: Red Fish Publ., 2005), 386-94.

2

     The “friend,” of course, is Vladimir Putin. The “Northern chief” is Anatoly Sobchak (1937-2000), the first post-Soviet mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin was one of Sobchak’s key deputies and responsible for much of the city’s day-to-day operations.

3

     Mikhail Kutuzov (1745-1813) commanded the Russian forces against Napoleon, most notably at Austerlitz and Borodino, and forced Napoleon’s long retreat from

Dmitrii Bykov. The Fall

Because Nostradamus’s prophecies only become clear in hindsight, discrepancies in interpretation arose exclusively around the fourth line: what of the mysterious fall in March and the sharp turn in its wake? The country’s political analysts, who in their prognoses had long been guided solely by Nostradamus with periodic reading of tea leaves (other methods of prognostication do not work in Russia), gathered for a secret meeting. “I believe this line predicts the fall of Putin’s bloody regime,” Evgeny Kiselev declared from the threshold.4 “Cool it, you’re not on the air,” said Svanidze, gently taking him down a notch.5 “I think it’s about the national currency.” “In my view, much snow has fallen,” unconvincingly offered Migranyan, who, as a southerner, could not tolerate winter. In sum, no consensus was reached, and each abandoned the secret conference with the firm intention of inculcating the masses with his own interpretation. Three days later it was announced that in the last days of March the Mir space station was going to fall. Despite multiple and passionate assurances to the effect that it would fall in the uninhabited part of the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Antarctica, panic reigned.

Moscow back to France. Aleksandr Suvorov (1730-1800) was a general esteemed in Russian military history for having never lost a battle. Grigorii Potemkin (17391791) was a military commander and statesman under Catherine the Great, primarily remembered today for being her most conspicuous grandee and lover. Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006) was a Russian journalist, political activist, and critic of Putin’s administration and the war in Chechnya. Here the narrator suggests that the order for her assassination came from the upper circles of Putin’s government, perhaps even the president himself, in retaliation for her reportage. 4

     Evgeny Kiselev (b. 1956) is a television reporter and news anchor who came to prominence during perestroika. A critic of the Russian military campaign in Chechnya, Kiselev resigned from the independent television station NTV after it was taken over by state-owned Gazprom in 2001.

5

     Nikolai Svanidze (b. 1955) is best known for his work as a television and radio show host. He has, by and large, used his position as a journalist to stand as an advocate and sometime apologist for the political establishment.

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“If it falls, then without fail it will fall on us!” protested the representatives of the Maritime Provinces. “Everything is falling on us these days….” “You fools, you don’t understand the strategic agenda. It will fall on Chechnya so that nothing is left….” (To be on the safe side, the one-legged Basaev and the onearmed Khattab moved to Jordan.6) “It will fall on Moscow to spite Mayor Luzhkov!”7 “But isn’t the Kremlin in Moscow too?” “Don’t worry about the administration, they have a bunker,” rumbled through the lines. The frightened population gathered their money and valuables and packed their suitcases with wretched goods, but they didn’t go anywhere, as it was unfathomable where the station would crash. “It’s said that it won’t fall on the people,” puzzled some of the elderly and the children. “Yeah, in August three years ago Yeltsin was claiming that nothing would fall, and then everything fell here.” In the restaurants and casinos they didn’t know what to do with their winnings. The New Russians hurriedly burned through what was left of their lives. While the population panicked, the Duma, as usual, went about looking for new forms of entertainment: “Guys, maybe this isn’t entirely about Mir. Maybe it’s something political?” “But what can befall us politically? What is there of any value in our political system? “Vertical power….” “Don’t make me laugh.” 6

     For Shamil Basaev, see above. Emir Khattab (1969-2002) was a Saudi guerilla fighter who fought with the Chechens and helped finance the two separatist wars against the Russian Federation.

7

     Yury Luzhkov (b. 1936) is co-founder of Putin’s political party United Russia and was mayor of Moscow from 1992 until 2010, when President Dmitrii Medvedev removed him from the position.

Dmitrii Bykov. The Fall

“Dear people,” waded in the judicious Zyuganov outside the parliamentary hearings, “I believe it is our government that will fall.”8 The room grew silent. Everyone pondered the prospect. “So it’ll fall,” Gryzlov said with uncertainty (and he did everything with certainty).9 “And then what?” “Well … it would be interesting,” Khakamada said, shrugging her shoulders.10 “But what if it doesn’t fall? What if we desecrate it, the government that is, but then Putin takes over and kicks us out? He would recruit a new cabinet in a snap, with his position in the polls, and where we would go? I mean, would we have to look for work? I’m not going along with this,” Boos waved off the thought dismissively. “You dolt,” Nemtsov gently teased. “You don’t appreciate your own worth! He’ll kick us out, but we’ll be voted back in. They’ll give us money, an election campaign, the works…. What’s wrong? Didn’t you like getting elected?” “But what if the second time around they don’t elect us?” “What do you mean, they don’t elect us? Who would they pick then?” “OK,” shrugged Gryzlov. “Let’s do it…. But are you certain the government will fall?” “It was written in Nostradamus, stupid,” interjected Seleznev.11 “Everything in Nostradamus comes true.” The next day the communists launched the idea of a vote of no-confidence in the government, but the Unity Party, which had closed its eyes out of fear and retracted its head into its shoulders,

8

     Gennady Zyuganov (b. 1944) is First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. He has run for President in 1996, 2008, and 2012.

9

     Boris Gryzlov (b. 1950) is former Speaker of the Russian State Duma (2003-2011) and a close political ally of Putin.

10

   Irina Khakamada (b. 1955), representative in the Duma from 1993-2003, ran against Putin in the 2004 presidential election.

11

   Gennady Seleznev (b. 1947) is associated with the Russian Communist party.

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did not support the vote. Gryzlov had nothing against Kasyanov,12 although Nostradamus had recommended getting rid of Kasyanov. But Gryzlov always obeyed his elders. Three days passed and Zyuganov flew into the session of the State Duma like a bullet and took the microphone from Seleznev. The leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was even redder than usual. “Brothers, we are rolling back the vote!” exclaimed Zyuganov excitedly. “The government stands. There is nothing in Nostradamus about the government falling!” “What is it then?” the deputies excitedly asked again. “The stock index fell!” “What, what index? Speak sensibly,” the Duma rustled. “How do I know which! They have three there, and all with infidel names.” “Dow Jones!” Lukin prompted from his place. “Aha!” nodded Zyuganov excitedly. “And even some other, altogether unpronounceable one.” The next day the Unity Party, having shut its eyes even more tightly and retracted its head between its shoulders once and for all, reported that there would be no vote of no-confidence, and that everything had been a tactical maneuver with the goal of demonstrating that “Medved,” that is, “The Bear,” despite the malignant gossip of his opponents, can listen not only to the Kremlin, but to the Communists as well. Panic intensified. But the panic reached its apogee on the day that all the major publications broke the headline “The Dollar is Falling!” In America everything came undone: this was no joke. First, George Bush Jr., hoping to tweak the previous administration, reported that the American economy was facing an unprecedented slump. Later,

12

   Mikhail Kasyanov (b. 1957) was Prime Minister of Russia (2000-2004) and is an open critic of the Putin administration. In hindsight, it is recognized that Kasyanov, one of Yeltsin’s last significant political appointments, contributed much to the growth and diversification of the Russian economy. That said, like those of virtually all Russian politicians of his generation, Kasyanov’s reputation is now plagued by charges of corruption.

Dmitrii Bykov. The Fall

Hillary Clinton filed for divorce, having discovered that her greyhaired playboy was involved in an ongoing romance that made the intrigue with Monica pale in comparison, a dowager in purple bowing before the new tsarina. It turned out that Monica was just a decoy to distract public attention. All that time Clinton loved some old mare, a girlfriend from his school years. As a going-away present on the last day of his term Clinton pardoned her husband, who was the 177th criminal to be pardoned during the Clinton administration. Kenneth Starr hurriedly collected the biographies of all those pardoned to determine the president’s connections with their wives and husbands. The majority of the exonerated, none of whom would turn down compensation for their name-and-shame stories, happily admitted to their relationships with the president. In such a debauched country the dollar, by definition, could not stand. Gerashchenko, chairman of the Russian Central Bank, poured oil on the flames, for once announcing in good time that the dollar’s normal value is fifteen rubles, and let them be grateful that it’s not five. The population, having stashed its savings in stockings and mattresses and boxes in the event of Mir’s fall, quickly grabbed their greenbacks and ran off to buy real estate. True, halfway along the way they stopped, realizing that even real estate would be a lost cause after Mir fell, no matter where you bought it. Since no one would be alive anyhow, and even real estate agents would be unprotected from the collapse of the market, the people reasonably assumed that to die on one’s own expanded property would be somewhat more pleasant. Multimillion-dollar savings were devalued in a single day. Those New Russians who already had real estate lived fast in entertainment pleasure palaces. Modeling agencies were unable to wipe down their concubines and push them back out in time to meet the demand. The New Russians who put in their orders for models too late ended up booking designers and claiming that their stylists wouldn’t mind. In the midst of this orgy a sober voice communicated the news from Channel One that cattle in Western Europe were experiencing a severe drop in number. In recent years, since Mikhail Lesin’s call for a long overdue reform of public relations in Russia, the media banged the drum for the Motherland with all their might. But because

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it had become increasingly difficult to find any grounds for positive PR, they elevated the Motherland by undermining the thoroughly corrupted West. Every news program followed this formula: first, a brief report about the routine travels of the president (who, because of his constant flying, heard nothing of the troubles of the Motherland); then it presented a running report about the opening in Swinograd of a grand performing arts hall with five hundred seats for a town of 350 people. After that it ran reports about catastrophes in the West. Catastrophes there came in running succession, as they did here at the beginning of perestroika: a hurricane turned into a snowstorm and led to avalanches, a scandal in government, and then the loss of cattle, which on Russian television was the triumphant climax of the report on the day’s unpleasant events. It was claimed that the cattle, having contracted rabies and bitten farmers, had almost completely died out. The ultimate goal of this story was to support domestic production, as rabid western European sausage had been unequivocally discredited in the eyes of viewers. “Livestock is dying!” raced across Russia’s great expanses. “Ours? Theirs?” “Theirs.” “It’s the end!” the people decided, and the all-Russian orgy assumed threatening dimensions. In the afternoon they bought up real estate, in the evenings they caroused in the clubs, in the mornings they periodically turned on the news in order to find out what else had fallen. Everything, in fact, had dropped: in Kiev, President Kuchma hung by a thread, in China, the price of construction materials fell, and in Barnaul an unprecedented amount of precipitation fell. Barry Alibasov’s hat fell off, the price of Bill Gates’s shares fell, and even the mysterious Pedigree fell after much resistance. The no less mysterious SECAM fell, as did Pal Palych Borodin, who ended up in the hospital. “How you’ve fallen!” screamed the New Gazette at Leontiev. Leontiev responded by calling the paper a “fallen woman.” Dmitrii Biryukov fell into the arms of Gazprom,13 and the newspapers Today and Itogi simply fell.

13

   Dmitrii Biryukov (1957) is president of the Seven Days Publishing House and first deputy director of state-owned Gazprom Media.

Dmitrii Bykov. The Fall

The seventh-grader Masha Ivanovna gave in to the entreaties of the eighth-grader Petya Sidorov and fell into his arms with pleasure. And everything that had brought Bill Clinton down fell too. “You only live once!” the people rejoiced. “Life as we know it has fallen to pieces. Go on, dears, go on!” And in the midst of this out-and-out orgy, when the models were thoroughly exhausted and the designers had only just come into fashion, some isolated, sober individuals noticed that March had ended. March ended but the dollar, as before, stood at around thirty rubles and would likely not fall, the Dow Jones straightened itself out, Mir crashed down unnoticed in the Pacific Ocean, and even the correspondents at Channel One in Western Europe figured out for themselves that three cows is not livestock as a whole. Putin’s bloody regime felt excellent. Kuchma took a vacation in the Crimea, and Clinton was even seen with some brand new intern—in his case the fall was not yet complete. The population woke up from the apocalyptic orgy with a severe hangover, burdened with a terrible amount of real estate with which it was now unclear what to do, amid total disorder, but with vivid memories. “And so we all believed that this was the end?” Russian citizens asked one another with some amazement. “Well, we’re accustomed to thinking that it’s always the end …” the most enthusiastic hedonists rationalized. “What we’re not accustomed to is simply living. We’re used to ‘oops, that’s it … game over.’” The population rummaged through stockings and mattresses, checked to see that their nest eggs were intact, reluctantly tidied up the territory entrusted to them, and with a groan got back to work. “So, Nostradamus was wrong?” Svanidze maliciously inquired of Kiselev. “Nostradamus can’t be wrong!” Kiselev cried. “Something fell, only we did not notice….” In that prediction, strangely enough, Kiselev was absolutely right. The fact of the matter is that the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, went skiing while on vacation in Khakassia and fell while fulfilling the sharp turn predicted by Nostradamus, but not very

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Part 3. Writing Politics

hard. He went and went, then tumbled with a plop. Surkov, the minister of emergency services and the head of administration, rushed to him. Surkov was always rushing to the president whether with or without cause—power mesmerized him. “Buzz off!” Putin said, annoyed. “It was a bit of surprise. I’m not Suvorov after all, just following in his footsteps. Let’s shake it off and move on.” From the third time on he skied down quite decently. Translation and notes by Matthew McGarry