SITES OF MEMORY: SOVIET MYTHS IN POST-SOVIET CULTURE

BY

DARIA SERGUEYEVNA KABANOVA

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature
with a minor in Cinema Studies
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011

Urbana, Illinois

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor Lilya Kaganovsky, Chair

Professor Nancy Blake
Associate Professor Anke Pinkert
Associate Professor Richard Tempest
 ABSTRACT

Do we treat 1990s as a gap, a rupture between the Soviet past and the post-Soviet

present? Post-Soviet film and fiction certainly stage the break up of the Soviet Union and the end

of Soviet rule in this way. Post-Soviet culture has left behind a certain set of Soviet cultural

myths: the conquest of space, the normal functioning of Soviet life with clear sources of

symbolic authority, the Soviet notion of heroism, etc. These myths have not been replaced with

anything new. One can sense a real pause in films and texts from the late 80s and early 90s – as

ideology, already exhausted by late socialism, takes a break. Eliot Borenstein speaks of the

1990s as a moment of a loss of national identity, of emasculation of Russian culture. Mikhail

Epstein argues that the end of socialism created a loop in the time of national history, whereupon

the Soviet future (communism) became the post-Soviet past. Aleksei Yurchak has shown that the

utopian stability of the Soviet “forever” was lost in late socialism, staging a seemingly

cataclysmic break up of the Soviet Union and its ideological constructs. My project seeks to

uncover the sites that post-Soviet texts create in order to reflect on the Soviet narratives that

came to an end, and on those that can be put in their place. What kinds of myths do post-Soviet

texts rely on to construct a notion of continuity that overcomes what was previously discarded or

destroyed? What myths are persistent enough to survive the historical gap?

I show that the texts from the 1990s already seek a path to re-mythologize the myths of

the past. Their goal is to bridge the gap between the where Russia is now with where it had been.

The project surveys the major players of the post-Soviet Russian cultural landscape, its most

influential writers and filmmakers, to show that those same texts from the late 80s and 90s that

seemingly spoke of the rupture, were always speaking about continuity. Svetlana Boym

discusses the ways in which post-Communist nostalgia solidifies and stabilizes the mythological

ii
space of Soviet culture, providing contemporary Russian culture with a workable past. With the

imaginary worlds of Socialism gone upon the system’s downfall, the Soviet past solidifies into

the retroactively-produced Žižekian mythical object, the object produced by the loss itself. In this

imaginary and imagined past, the two meanings of myth merge: it is a “myth” in a sense that it

never existed, its illusory nature exposed by the collapse of Communist ideology and its post-

Soviet deconstruction. Yet, it is also a “myth” in the Barthian sense, in a sense that the post-

Soviet imagination inflects and expands the meanings attached to the signifiers of the Soviet

state. The signs and symbols of the (Soviet) past are invested with other, new meanings,

(re)constructed and used to structure and explain the country’s present.

iii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would not have been able to finish writing this dissertation without guidance and

support of my committee members, my friends’ patience and encouragement, and the love of my

family.

To my advisor and mentor, Professor Lilya Kaganovsky, I would like to express my

deepest gratitude – for everything. I have been extremely lucky to have such an amazing mentor

to guide me through the stages of the writing process. I would also like to thank Professor Nancy

Blake for the all the fun with Lacan, and for her patience and support. Many thanks to my

committee members, Professor Anke Pinkert and Professor Richard Tempest, for gently nudging

me into the right direction and for providing exciting new angles on my research.

Special thanks goes to the Comparative Literature faculty who always gave me excellent

professional advice. Professor Michael Palencia-Roth always encouraged my interest in the

theories of history and always knew how to answer that dreaded question, “what is it that you

compare?” Professor Waïl Hassan always had a word of encouragement for me. I would like to

thank Professor Valeria Sobol and Professor Harriet Murav of the Department of Slavic

Languages and Literatures, for their continuous guidance and for confirming my conviction that

good research and good teaching go hand in hand.

My colleague and friend, Oleksandra Shchur, never minded me bouncing ideas off of her.

Jennifer Bliss’s help with polishing the text had been invaluable. Writing this dissertation would

have been a much lonelier process without my good friends, Katya Balter, Jack Hutchens,

Gautam Basu-Thakur, Reshmi Mukherjee, Eric Dalle, and Ivan Borisov.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my family - my husband, Dmitry Klokotov, and

my parents, for standing by me, cheering me up and for always offering their support and love.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER 1: THE WRITER, THE READER, THE CHARACTER: RE-MYTHOLOGIZING

POST-SOVIET LITERARY SPACE ................................................................................32

CHAPTER 2: NATIONAL PAST, LUBOK-STYLE: POST-SOVIET CINEMATIC

CONSTRUCTION OF THE HISTORICAL PAST ..........................................................93

CHAPTER 3: THE FUTURE-IN-THE-PAST: POST-SOVIET DYSTOPIA............................134

CHAPTER 4: THE DEAD COSMONAUTS: SOVIET HERO IN POST-SOVIET SPACE ....181

CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................223

BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................229

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 INTRODUCTION

Situating Post-Soviet Culture

Mожно было подумать, что это не живой человек, что он уже умер, или и не жил

никогда, и ничего не видит в живом мире и не слышит ничего, кроме звенящих мертво

слов.

Федор Сологуб, Мелкий Бес

You might conclude that he was not a living person, that he was already dead or had never lived,

and that he saw nothing in the living world and heard nothing but dead-sounding words.

Fyodor Sologub, The Petty Demon

I.

The first chapter is omitted for the time being.

II.

The alarm clock rattled like a tin of bonbons. The alarm clock was cheap, painted, brown,

of Soviet manufacture… The clock was accurate, but Margulies did not depend on it…

Margulies could not really have faith in so simple a mechanism as a timepiece; could not

entrust to it so precious a thing as time1.

In Valentin Kataev’s 1932 novel, Time, Forward! (Vremia, vpered!), the Socialist

industrial achievement defies time itself: the novel hurries past its first chapter, but its three

hundred pages of highly metaphorical narration, clipped sentences and immense narrative time

compression deal with just one day in the life of the builders of “Magnitka”, The Magnitogorsk

Iron and Steel Works in the Chelyabinsk region of the Soviet Union, an important event in the
1
Valentine Kataev, Time, Forward!, trans. Charles Malamuth (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1995), 3.

1
history of Soviet industrialization. The plot develops around the motif of waiting: will the

foremen allow the enthusiastic workers to beat the production record of the rival Kharkov

concrete mixers? Will a pregnant woman be able to join the father of her baby on the production

site? Will she be able to clean up his bachelor’s pad by nightfall? Will the engineer’s sister

manage to get the notes from the engineer’s former professor before noon? Will the production

deadline be met?

The measured, structured time of the clock is a nuisance - a timepiece does not reflect the

time of Socialism, hurriedly launching forward, towards its teleological goal. The sooner

Communism comes, the better. Herein lies the paradox of Socialist Realist art: it exists,

theoretically, in an ever-narrowing gap between the dark past and the bright Communist future

that possesses an indelible sense of finality; yet the industrial novel, like Kataev’s, records the

gap itself by narrating the building of Communism, and continuously postponing the arrival of

the future.

One is tempted, then, to read high Socialist Realist novel through Freud via Peter Brooks.

Brooks, in his application of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death drive to narrative dynamics,

argues that the narrative desire, “[t]he desire of the text… is…. desire for the end, … reached

only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension,

which is the plot of narrative.”2 In the larger scheme of Soviet cultural production, the Socialist

Realist novel delays the coming of Communism by the very fact of its existence, its desire for the

end of history in the form of the arrival of Communism counteracted by the circuitous narrative

path it takes to bring Communism closer, taking its characters on sometimes extensively long

journeys towards the heights of the Communist spirit.

2
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984), 104.

2
 The temptation is even stronger in retrospect: the tension of delaying the end of the

narrative is metaphorized as sexual tension in Vladimir Sorokin’s 1982 short novel, Marina’s

Thirtieth Love. The distinctly apolitical, neurotic and shrewd female protagonist spends the

whole novel exploring her sexuality, a taboo subject for Soviet prose, only to disappear in the

stylistically faithful recreation of a high Socialist Realist novel after a particularly powerful

orgasm (complete with a chorus singing the Soviet national anthem). After the narrative break,

the sophisticated protagonist is no more; having lost her name (she now goes by her surname, in

a nod to the Socialist novel’s stylistic preference), she goes to work in a factory and spends the

last pages of the novel struggling to increase productivity amidst her roommates’ discussions on

the most effective ways to contribute personally to the building of Communism. The novel

closes with the complete dissolution of the subjective narrative perspective, as the suddenly

emergent omniscient narrator proclaims that the “fruits of [the characters’] creativity” would

serve the “further increase in the economic and defensive power of the Socialist Fatherland, as

well as the rise in the prosperity of the Soviet people,”3 in the exact same language as the Soviet

newspaper formula would have it.

Intuitively, we may read Sorokin’s take on Socialist Realist literature as a purely parodic

one. The power seems to have gone from Soviet textuality as it becomes meaningless, formulaic,

agency-erasing in the closing pages of Marina. The beginning of the end was the year 1956, the

year of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, which exposed Stalin’s

personality cult, signifying a large symbolic shift at work in subsequent Soviet cultural

production. The figure of Stalin that seemed to hold Soviet narratives together, always their

3
All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. “Пусть же плоды их дерзаний и творчества лучше служат
дальнейшему повышению экономического и оборонного могущества социалистического Отечества, росту
благосостояния советских людей” (Vladimir Sorokin, Tridsataia Lyubov’ Mariny (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo R.
Elinina, 1995), 277)

3
implicit referent and addressee, “the master who… by being presented as standing outside

ideological discourse and possessing an external knowledge of the objective truth, temporarily

conceals the contradiction by allowing it to ‘appear through himself’”4, no longer legitimized the

production of Soviet textuality. In Lacanian terms, Stalin is the Soviet version of the Name-of-

the-Father; for Jacques Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father is the fundamental signifier that launches

the process of signification and thus identification:

The function of symbolic identification… [the paternal function] concentrates in itself

both imaginary and real relations that always more or less fail to correspond to the

symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it. It is in the name of the father that we must

recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has

identified his person with the figure of law5.

Especially in view of Russian culture’s propensity for “upholding the leader as the father

of the nation,”6 the revelations of the 20th Party Congress may be read as having launched the

definitive disintegration of the Soviet Name-of-the-Father, facilitating the creation of a glaring

absence in the symbolic structure underlying the way in which the Soviet state imagined itself.

The role of Stalin as the master signifier of Soviet culture becomes evident in retrospect, after his

personality cult is exposed; there is little doubt that, for post-Stalinist Soviet culture, Stalin

becomes more than just a major historical figure. The figure of Stalin acquires a paradoxical

duplicity in the later Soviet culture: on the one hand, post-Stalinist narratives forever lose their

universal referent, no longer legitimized by the paternal metaphor; on the other, scholarship on

4
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2006), 10.
5
Jacques Lacan. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, in Écrits: The First
Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 230.
6
Yana Hashamova, Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film (Bristol/Chicago,
Intellect, 2007), 116.

4
late-Soviet culture notes that this metaphor expands7 to become the signifier of the Soviet era

across a range of cultural texts. Even as the Soviet state continued to exist after the end of

Stalinism, Stalin’s ghost continued to appear on screen and on page as the symbol of the cultural

legacy of Socialism in the 1980s, still as important a staple of cinematic narratives as it used to

be in Stalinist cinema8. In this way, the Soviet state itself emerges in post-Stalinist Soviet culture

as a retrospective construction, as a structure of cultural memory solidified by the figure of

Stalin.

Lacan posits that the lack of the Name-of-the-Father opens up a hole in the signified,

“set[ting] off a cascade of reworkings of the signifier from which the growing disaster of the

imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified stabilize in a

delusional metaphor.”9 Indeed, this may be an interpretative lens through which to read Vladimir

Sorokin’s take on Soviet textuality: no longer sustained by the cult of Stalin, by one single

legitimizing metaphor, the slogans and clichés of Soviet discourse become a parodic cascade of

empty signs in the final pages of Marina’s Thirtieth Love.

The post-Stalin history of Soviet Union has been read in precisely this way, as a gradual

crumbling of the Soviet narratives. Alexei Yurchak proposes a linguistic reason for the collapse

of the grand narrative of the Soviet state, as he explores the paradoxical situation in which Soviet

culture of the 1970s-1980s found itself. The paradox, according to Yurchak, was that the

seeming eternity of the Soviet system was very quickly replaced by the feeling of the

inevitability of its collapse. Yurchak sees the reasons for this paradox in the production and

7
See Derek Spring, “Stalinism: The Historical Debate”, in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (NY: Routledge, 1993), 1-
14.
8
Julian Graffy, “Unshelving Stalin: after the period of stagnation”, in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (NY: Routledge,
1993), 212-227;Svetlana Boym, “Stalin is with us: Soviet documentary mythologies of the 1980s”, in Stalinism and
Soviet Cinema (NY: Routledge, 1993), 201-212; and Anna Lawton, “The Ghost That Does Return: Exorcising
Stalin”, in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (NY: Routledge, 1993), 186-200.
9
Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Treatment of Psychosis”, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in
English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 445-489, 481.

5
reproduction of authoritative discourse that eliminated the constative element of the language—

in other words, the ability of signifiers to be unquestionably and “naturally” attached to their

signifieds. The radical break between the signifier and the signified, according to Yurchak,

stemmed from the endless repetition of authoritative discourse that had little to no relation to the

current social reality. This had drastic consequences for the production of subjectivity, as the

subjects of the state were bound to view state-controlled discourse as a “pure performance.” The

fall of the Soviet system, then, can be ascribed to the loss of its master signifier10.

Was, then, the power of Socialist textuality definitively exhausted by the late 1980s? At

the first glance, this indeed seems to be the case if we look at conceptualist art and sots-art in the

late 1970s and 80s; sots-art, in particular, asks for an intuitive reading as a straightforward

cultural reaction to the clichés of Soviet textuality and visuality, as it faithfully recreates these

only to rearrange them in order to create unorthodox meanings. When sots-art creators Vitaly

Komar and Aleksander Melamid were expelled from the Youth Division of the Artists' Union for

“distortion of Soviet reality,” this reality was crumbling on its own: in the 1966 painting Flowers

for the Teacher, an eerie green glow envelops the standard subject of Socialist Realist painting,

its formulaic composition lovingly preserved. The faceless girl giving a bouquet to the equally

faceless teacher in the painting may indeed be read as the distortion of Soviet reality. However, it

is precisely the faithful recreation of the Socialist Realist formula that brings scholars like Boris

Groys to read what looks to be a symptom of the system’s exhaustion to mean a paradoxical re-

launching of the mythologies of Socialist Realism. In his Total Art of Stalinism, Groys notes

Socialist Realism’s exceptional conduciveness for mythologizing not just the objects of art, but

aesthetic practices themselves. He argues that, through reproduction of Soviet images, sots-art

10
See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2006), 21-26.

6
returns to the utopian meanings attached to the Soviet symbolic system and especially to the

symbols of Stalinist culture. It does so in order to deconstruct Soviet utopianism while

simultaneously inscribing it into a universal paradigm of cultural mythologies. “The devices of

Stalinist indoctrination”, Groys argues, “were [used to demonstrate] the similarity of this myth to

those of both the present and the past to reconstruct the single mythological network in which the

modern consciousness functions.”11

It is this restorative aspect inherent in what looks to be an irreverent parody of Soviet

authoritative textuality that makes possible another reading of the ending of Sorokin’s Marina’s

Thirtieth Love: while the protagonists of Socialist Realist novels spend their respective narratives

waiting for the Socialist future to come, Marina’s own narrative path, however unorthodox, leads

her exactly to where the Socialist novel would want her to be - towards a narrative future that is

an endless celebration of the Socialist state as the individual disappears in the endless repetition

of the state’s discourse.

Wherein lies the appeal of Soviet textuality for the later Soviet and post-Soviet cultures?

After all, the fall of the Soviet Union, an outcome of the gradual crumbling of Soviet narratives,

has been popularly read as the radical break with the Soviet past. Communist ideology seemingly

completely discredited and outright negated by the emergent post-Soviet state, the 1990s looked

like a time of radical transition; the end of the Soviet state produced a range of anxieties about

national identity and national history as post-Soviet Russian culture attempted to craft a new

identity for itself12.

11
Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton University
Press, 1992), 95.
12
See, e.g., Horton, Andrew, Michael Brashinsky, eds. The Zero Hour : Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition.
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992); Birgit Beumers, “To Moscow! To Moscow? The Russian Hero and the Loss of the
Centre”, in Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers (London: I.B. Tauris,
1999), 76-91; Susan Larsen, “National Identity, Cultural Authority and the Post-Soviet Blockbuster: Nikita
Mikhalkov and Aleksei Balabanov”, in Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Autumn 2003), 491-511; Nina Tsyrkun,

7
 Do we then treat the 1990s as a gap, a rupture between the Soviet past and the post-Soviet

present? In Yurchak’s argument, the utopian stability of the Soviet “forever” was lost in late

socialism, setting the stage for a seemingly cataclysmic breakup of the Soviet Union and its

ideological constructs. Films like Karen Shakhnazarov's City Zero, as well as texts like Viktor

Pelevin's Omon Ra, certainly stage the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of Soviet rule in

this way. Both texts end on an ambivalent note; the protagonists of each are traveling (in City

Zero, in a small boat with no oars; in Omon Ra, on the Red Line of the Moscow metro) but their

destination is unknown. They have left behind a certain set of Soviet cultural myths: the conquest

of outer space, the normal functioning of Soviet life with clear sources of symbolic authority, the

Soviet notion of heroism. These myths have not been replaced with new myths. One can sense a

pause in films and texts from the late 1980s and early 1990s as ideology, already exhausted by

late socialism, takes a break.

On the textual level, this break is staged as the manipulation of the peculiar narrative

temporality characteristic of Socialist Realist texts. As we have seen, this temporality is not

measured by the time of the clock. Katerina Clark, reading the Soviet novel’s peculiar

temporality through the Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope13, suggests that the futuristic

modality of the Soviet novel creates a tension between the mimetic “what is” and the completed,

immutable perfect world of “what should be.”14 Clark traces the parallels between this perfect,

“incontrovertible” reality that the Soviet novel constructs, and the time-value system of the

“Tinkling Symbols: Fragmented Society – Fragmented Cinema?”, in Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-
Soviet Cinema. Ed. Birgit Beumers ( London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 57-66; Adele Barker, ed. Consuming Russia:
Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev (Durham: Duke UP, 1999); Berdahl, Daphne et. al., eds.
Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000).
13
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics”, in
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael
Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981), 84-258, 84.
14
Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (U of Chicago Press, 1981), 40.

8
Bakhtinian notion of the epic which, Bakhtin says, tells of a mythic time separated from the

present by the unbridgeable gap of the “absolute epic past”. Clark argues that the Soviet novel

picks up on the sacred, closed time of the epic, making it into the mythic Great Time of the

Soviet novel, set to “annul time, to write off … the unbridgeable distance between… [the

Bakhtinian] absolute epic past and the present”15, “subordinat[ing] [the] historical reality to the

preexisting patterns of legend… [and] bridg[ing] the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought to be.’”16

The paradox of the Socialist Realist novel, then, is that it creates the temporal gap that it

is meant to cover over, behaving as if it is simultaneously set in the present and in the future,

going forward and not going anywhere. Without the authority of the paternal metaphor that could

legitimize the temporal paradox, in late-Soviet prose, the absolute time of Socialist Realism is

either “accelerate[d]”, or “slow[ed] down”, whereby “the retardation of absolute time” is

performed by creating “the absolute pause, silence, and the void (i.e., anti-time) [which for these

texts] are the ideal states.”17

It is this pause that the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet texts stage as they deconstruct

and reflect upon Soviet ideology, crafting de-ideologized textual sites where the time of national

history is suspended. The time of national history becomes, in the texts like Tatyana Tolstaya’s

novel The Slynx, or Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Russian Arc, an unmoving, floating, suspended

temporality. Trauma theory provides an avenue through which to read this temporal suspension:

a traumatic event creates a breach in the conventional temporal structure as accessible to the

subject. The subject is therefore stripped of that temporal frame of reference which ensures

15
Clark 40.
16
Clark 41.
17
As discussed in Marina Balina, “Playing Absolute Time: Chronotypes of Sots-Art”, in Endquote: Sots-Art
Literature and Soviet Grand Style (Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 2000), 58-76, 60.

9
integrity of identity, making the subject functional18. On a national scale, a rupture in time occurs

when major historical changes affect the state institutions and thus challenge the linear nature of

their shared national narratives.

In this way, texts from the late 1980s and early 1990s that feature temporal suspension,

such as City Zero, Omon Ra, The Slynx19 and others, suggest that late-Soviet Russia becomes a

site of trauma. After the fall of the Soviet Union, post-Soviet culture exhibits more traumatic

symptoms: scholars like Birgit Beumers, Yana Hashamova, Susan Larsen, and others20 have

delineated the ways in which national space becomes fragmented, unstable, and unmappable in

post-Soviet texts. One reason for this fragmentation is found in social and cultural processes

characteristic of the transitional period of contemporary Russian history, which presents a set of

challenges not just to the imaginary integrity of national identity, but also to the aesthetic

principles informing cultural production, as the aesthetic framework of Socialist Realism and its

mythmaking potential is challenged and exposed in the post-Soviet context. Anglo-American

cultural studies and literary criticism, informed by neo-Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and

trauma theory, treat the cultural processes in post-Soviet Russia as a reaction to a symbolic

collapse. Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky, Beumers, Nancy Condee, and others21 cite the

“symptomatic” disintegration of the grand narratives of the nation, nostalgia for the Communist

past, fragmentation of space, and displacement as primary trends of the post-Soviet cultural

production.

18
For the discussion of traumatic breach of temporality, see Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Jenny Edkins (see Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics,
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. xiii, xiv, also 13-14), extrapolates the theory into the social sphere.
19
Though The Slynx was published in 1999, Tolstaia began to write it in the late 1980s.
20
See: Beumers 1999; Yana Hashamova 2007; Larsen 2003.
21
See Horton and Brashinsky, 1992; Nancy Condee, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-
century Russia (London/Bloomington: BFI/Indiana University Press, 1995); Tsyrkun 1999, 57-66; Aleksandr
Ageev, “Conspectus of the crisis: Sociocultural Conditions and the Literary Process”, in Re-Entering the Sign:
Articulating New Russian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 170-189.

10
 For domestic criticism and Russian émigré scholars, on the other hand, the fragmentation

of grand narratives and the disintegration of national space are not precisely the symptoms of the

collapse of national identity; instead, for scholars like Mikhail Epstein, Sergei Dobrotvorsky and

Mikhail Iampolsky22, they signal the advent of postmodernism as a dominant aesthetic principle

of post-Soviet art. Indeed, if one faced the task of characterizing post-Soviet textuality

succinctly, one of its most salient features would be the experimentation with language, narrative

and genre conventions, which Andrew Wachtel ascribes to the cultural necessity of finding a

new language with which to articulate the rapidly changing social reality23.

The search for this protean post-Soviet language is complemented by the manifest

reliance of post-Soviet textuality on other textualities: diachronically, the phenomenon is

evidenced by the staggering amount of intertextual references to the Russian/Soviet continuum

of literary tradition, as scholars like Lyudmila Parts24 show; synchronically, post-Soviet

referentiality manifests in borrowing textual and cinematic tropes from global popular culture,

most importantly from Hollywood entertainment cinema, with writers like Viktor Pelevin

making global cultural icons like Arnold Schwarzenegger into characters of his novels. This set

of phenomena contributes to the leveling of the divide between “high” and “low” culture, the

22
Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Critical
Perspectives on Modern Culture), trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar (University of Massachusets Press, 1995); Sergei
Dobrotvorsky, “Cinema Myths and the Future of Culture”, in Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian
Culture. Ed. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1995), 311-324. Mikhail
Iampolsky, “Death in Cinema” in Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture. Ed. Ellen E. Berry and
Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1995), 270-289.
23
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe
(Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. 217.
24
Lyudmila Parts, The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic. 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2008).

11
divide that, in the Russian cultural tradition, used to be sharply pronounced, thus strengthening

the Jamesonian arguments in favor of a postmodern(ist) nature of post-Soviet culture25.

These features of the post-Soviet Russian cultural landscape prompted theorizations of

post-Soviet culture as a hybrid culture26 as it clings to the Soviet legacy while infusing it with the

now-available Western cultural paradigms.

Yet, post-Soviet intertextuality is far from being unproblematically postmodernist –

Linda Hutcheon’s playfulness of postmodernist referentiality27 is often lost, subsumed by the

sheer amount of referentiality that films like the Aleinikov brothers’ 1992 Tractor Drivers II, or

novels like Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaiev i pustota (Clay Machine-Gun, alternatively Chapayev and

the Void) exhibit, referencing Hollywood and Stalinist cinema, Eastern philosophy and the

Russian modernist novel with equal, and overwhelming, sophistication. More than simply the

postmodern notion of all signifiers being equal in value and thus carrying no value at all, the

sheer violence of appropriative tactics of some of these post-Soviet texts brings me to argue that

the post-Soviet referentiality is actually – paradoxically - a quest for meaning. These texts poach

(to borrow language from Michel De Certeau28) other textualities for meaningful language.

After the breakup of Soviet Union, the fantasy of clear cultural meanings no longer

sustains the now-post-Soviet textuality; cultural meanings reveal their constructedness, their

25
Fredric Jameson stresses the leveling of the divide between the “high” and “low” culture in postmodernity, citing
postmodern art’s fascination with “this whole ‘degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's
Digest culture, of advertising and motels… materials they no long simply “quote”, … but incorporate into their very
substance”: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991),
3-4.
26
Stephen Lovell and Birgit Menzel, eds. Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular
Literature in Historical Perspective (Arbeiten and Texte zur Slavistik 78. Munich: Sagner. 2005), 32; Liliia
Shevtsova, trans. Mark Eckert, “Russia’s Hybrid Regime”, in Journal of Democracy (Vol. 12, Number 4, October
2001), 65-70 .
27
Hutcheon cites the works of Joseph Heller, Robert Coover and Kurt Vonnegut as examples of postmodernist
playfulness. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (NY: Routledge, 1988),
esp. 141-157.
28
Michel De Certeau, “Reading as poaching”, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), 165-176, esp. 171,174.

12
dependence on cultural and textual codes illuminated by the breakdown of these codes. Julia

Kristeva, building on Bakhtin’s discussion of literary dialogism and heteroglossia, speaks of a

critical interpretative moment when the “notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of

intersubjectivity.”29 In a perverse reading, the swarm of linguistic and cultural codes that are

used (and abused) by early post-Soviet films like Tractor Drivers II, in an endless stream of

references meant to articulate post-Soviet identity, comes to stand in for the post-Soviet subject,

masking a lack in post-Soviet subjectivity. In Tractor Drivers II, an avant-garde remake of Ivan

Pyr’iev’s 1939 classic, Tractor Drivers, the protagonist attempts to use the language staged for

him by high Stalinist culture in the early post-Soviet milieu; yet, he is compelled to drop the

Stalinist formulae and resort to screaming and bizarre behavior, thus signifying the failure of this

language to articulate the post-Soviet reality.

It is this impossibility of grasping and articulating the meaning of signifiers that brings

scholars like Serguei Oushakine to deem post-Soviet culture aphasic. Oushakine argues that, in

the post-Soviet context, the economic and cultural uncertainties, accompanied by a loss of the

frame of reference that allows the subject to discuss current sociopolitical reality, the loss of a

“metalanguage,” lead to a loss of the ability to understand what the very metaphor of “post-

Soviet” stands for30.

How does one read post-Soviet culture, then? Is it hybrid, aphasic, postmodern,

traumatic? Where does it “transition?” Was the Communist future simply replaced in Russian

teleology by the not-less-utopian capitalist dream of the market economy shaped by Western

cultural values? Why is it that in the same late-Soviet City Zero, as well as in early post-Soviet

29
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1980), 66.
30
Serguei Oushakine, “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia,”
Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 6 (2000): 991-1016.

13
films like Ivan Dykhovichnyi’s 1992 Moscow Parade, Soviet myths persist despite the

deconstruction of Soviet ideology? In the late 1980s, City Zero makes use of the artistic

freedoms associated with the era of glasnost’ to stage the still-existing Soviet state as a place

with no sense of temporal progression. The film’s suspended temporality satirizes and exposes

the textual “eternal present,” a temporality characteristic of Socialist Realist art where the

passage of time does not bring about change. Yet, by satirizing this temporality the film

magnifies the time of the Socialist Realist text, preserving it in its own cinematic space. The film

already looks at Soviet history from a critical interpretative distance, thus contributing to the

staging of a historical break between Soviet and what is yet-to-become post-Soviet history.

History becomes, in the film, a museum, in which the events of Soviet, Russian, and world

history are grotesquely distorted and at times plainly invented; yet, Soviet history is preserved in

the underground memory vault, and the film’s appeal to the aesthetics of high Stalinism creates a

perverse continuity between the Soviet and the post-Soviet representations of history.

Moscow Parade, in its turn, exemplifies a distinctly uneasy treatment of the totalitarian

legacy in the post-Soviet context: while on the surface critical of Stalinism’s inhumanity, its

stifling of creativity and of freedom of expression, the film nonetheless dwells on the celebratory

aesthetics of Stalinism and lovingly constructs a fantasy of festive everyday life in a manner very

similar to totalitarian art. Problematizing the direction of post-Soviet cultural “transition,” post-

Soviet films look back not just to the events of Russian/Soviet history. Other films, like Aleksei

Fedorchenko’s First on the Moon and Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Barber of Siberia, demonstrate

that Soviet myths about the role of art inform post-Soviet aesthetic paradigms with increasing

insistence.

14
 In particular, First on the Moon, a mockumentary, crafts a practice of writing Soviet

history that implicitly dwells on the Soviet model. “Mockumentary”, a genre defined as “a partial

and concerted effort to appropriate documentary codes and conventions in order to represent a

fictional subject,”31 uses representational techniques conventionally associated with “telling the

truth” for dealing with fictional subjects. As Aleksandr Prokhorov argues, late-Soviet and post-

Soviet cinema “dealt with the gap between Soviet reality and its representations in Soviet

culture”32. Mockumentary, then, becomes a productive genre for a culture in which “the

association between factual discourse and factual means of representation is increasingly

tenuous”33. In the post-Soviet cultural context, permeated with the remnants of Soviet signifiers

that have proved to be empty, mockumentary’s representational mode, paradoxically, can

potentially become a functional model of working through the past, because it ironically yet

compulsively uses the same techniques of fictionalizing social reality that were used in creating

the Soviet master narrative in the first place. In other words, the mockumentary’s mode of

treating the “reality” of the event is very similar to the mode in which the Soviet official

discourse is perceived, in the post-Soviet context, to have treated Soviet social reality. Mourning

this lost modality of representation, First on the Moon, on one level, examines the creation of the

Soviet myth of the conquest of space. On another level, through the very fact of this

examination, it conceptually solidifies it, by consciously narrating it as a myth. This enables the

film to find a “proper place” for this important part of the Soviet grand narrative in the post-

Soviet context.

31
Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight. Faking it. Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2001, 2, quoted in Aleksandr Prokhorov, “The Redemption of Lunar Reality: Aleksei
Fedorchenko’s First on the Moon (Pervye na lune)”, 2005. Kino-Kultura 2006, no
11.<http://www.kinokultura.com/2006/11r-firstmoon2.shtml>, accessed May 29, 2009.
32
Prokhorov 2006.
33
Roscoe and Hight 3, quoted in Prokhorov 2006.

15
 By the end of the 1990s, it becomes even more evident that the traumatic historical gap of

the end of Socialism is countered by the desire for historical continuity. Mikhalkov’s The Barber

of Siberia, a late 1990s film, tries to re-assimilate (if not fully rehabilitate) the Russian past,

conceived now in the broadest possible terms that include Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.

The film’s goal is to bridge the gap between where Russia is now with where it had been. In the

film, for the duration of the cinematic illusion at least, the overconstructed space of Tsarist

Russia becomes a site where the emergent nationalist ideological fantasies can be played out. I

examine the emergence of the utopianized cinematic version of the Russian national past in the

course of the 1990s in Chapter 2. Reading three films from the late 1980s through the late 1990s,

I argue that Russian film resurrects the national past from its status as an uncertain category of

memory (which it became in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse) and assigns it another

status, that of the imaginary repository of cultural mythologies. In these films, the national past

becomes a cache of symbols that sustain the fantasy of a unified Russian national identity,

however problematic some of these symbols may have become. Post-1991 Russian culture, then,

at least partly “transitions” towards the past. Does the “reverse” direction of this transition

signify a cultural compulsion to repeat history?

Soviet culture constantly postponed the arrival of the future, and, as Mikhail Epstein

explains, as this postponement came to an abrupt end in 1991, the future and the past exchanged

places in the schema of Russian national history. In After the Future, Epstein argues that the fall

of the Soviet Union signified a major shift in the ways Russian culture conceived of national

history and historical temporality in general. He describes a “loop” that the time of Russian

national history makes in the aftermath of 1991, whereupon the Communist future, one of the

organizing temporal categories of the Soviet grand narrative, suddenly becomes the post-Soviet

16
past34. “For the Russian consciousness”, Epstein suggests, “the collapse of communism was not

simply the end, but rather an inversion of the beginning and the end, an almost impossible

anomaly of time. […] The historical perspective, once so confidently described by Marxism, has

been turned inside out.”35 For Epstein, the dissolution of the Communist teleological model of

history that coexists with nostalgic memories of a time when this model was functional, becomes

one of the definitive conceptual mechanisms at work in post-Soviet cultural production. The

memory of a relatively stable past, coinciding with an impossibility of a comparably stable

future, launches cultural mechanisms meant to restore the relative stability of the temporal

structure of history.

The post-Soviet take on the communist teleology, simultaneously deconstructive and

nostalgic, finds expression in the post-Soviet dystopian novel that I examine in Chapter 3. There,

I argue that the post-apocalyptic and/or totalitarian landscapes of the future that emerge in these

texts are simultaneously in opposition to and in dialogue with Soviet literature’s cheerful

utopianism. The post-apocalyptic landscape becomes a site where the national past is questioned

by way of displacement and traumatic repetition. Tolstaya’s novel, The Slynx, re-imagines a

future that fully repeats the mechanisms of the past, paving the way for another such repetition,

staged in Vladimir Sorokin’s A Day of Oprichnik. Yet, I show that a utopian dimension opens up

in these dystopian milieus, as, in an unusual move for the genre, the protagonists feel “at home”

in these dystopias. The novels project this feeling of “belonging” to a dystopian society onto the

reader. This enables post-Soviet dystopias to metaphorize the tension between the parts of the

Soviet legacy, creating a textual space where Soviet totalitarianism can coexist with the nostalgic

reconstruction of the Soviet utopian fantasies.

34
See Epstein 1995.
35
See Mikhail Epstein, “Postmodernism, Communism and Sots-Art”, in Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet
Grand Style, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 3-31,20.

17
 Post-Communist nostalgia, as theorized by Svetlana Boym36, manifests itself in the

appeal that Soviet myths, seemingly completely discredited after the fall of the Soviet Union,

carry in the post-Soviet context. As much as the removal of Feliks Dzerzhinskii’s statue from the

Lubyanskaia Square in Moscow in 1991 might suggest a radical break with the Soviet past, the

ghost of Vladimir Lenin continues to resist exorcising as Lenin’s body, enshrined in the

Mausoleum, continues to define the landscape of the new Russian statehood.

Boym argues that sharing the memories of the past, on which principle communities are

united, requires representation of the past as a continuous narrative37. In the post-Soviet case, the

Soviet narrative of the eventual triumph of Communism (or at least the myth that the Soviet

experience was nobler, more superior and beneficial for humankind than its Western counterpart)

served as this uniting narrative. Boym conceptualizes nostalgia as primarily a longing for the

imaginary, idealized place that contains memories of the past38. The past itself, by extension, is

reconceptualized as a place, as something akin to a treasured memory vault. However, neither

the past as it is presented in nostalgic narratives, nor the actual places to which the memories are

relegated, ever "really" existed39. They exist, instead, on screen and on page, where the nostalgic

fantasy materializes as a textual and/or cinematic illusion.

According to Boym, nostalgia comes to be mediated through a kind of cultural fetishism,

that is, the remnants of the past (artifacts, images, and condensed symbols of the nation) serve at

36
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
37
See Introduction, Boym 2001, esp. xiii.
38
See Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
1994), 4, also 283-287.
39
To illustrate the point, one can think back to a very well-known post-Communist nostalgic text, Wolfgang
Becker’s 2003 film, Good-Bye Lenin, where the East German cultural milieu that the protagonist attempts to restore
for his sick mother is hyperreal and highly stylized, not only because of the memory’s faultiness but also precisely
because of the amount of restorative work that goes into recreating it.

18
the same time as triggers of and the ways to cope with nostalgia40. “I had a mirrored buffet. And

a colored TV with an Italian tube... My brother-in-law managed to get a hold of a Yugoslav

cabinet set, I had a separate bathroom and toilet, Golden Autumn wallpaper”41, says one of the

characters of Tolstaia’s post-apocalyptic The Slynx, in which a nuclear blast serves as a metaphor

for the fall of the Soviet Union. The past condenses, for this character, into artifacts associated

with well-to-do Soviet urban living.

Why is post-Soviet nostalgia so pervasive? Why do events of Soviet history and Soviet

symbols continue to hold the post-Soviet imagination of the 1990s? Susan Buck-Morss’s reading

of Soviet utopian ideology proposes a reason for the post-Soviet nostalgia for the past. The fall

of the Soviet Union, Buck-Morss elaborates, constituted a loss of the ideological illusion. Buck-

Morss makes use of Walter Benjamin’s analytical concept of “the dreamworld,” central to his

theory of modernity as the reenchantment of the world, in her analysis of the cultures of both

capitalism and socialism as utopian dreams of industrial modernity’s capability to provide

happiness for the masses42. In Buck-Morss’s argument, the fall of the Soviet Union marked a

definitive breakdown of this dream, the breakdown of the Soviet mythological imagination43,

which used to be sustained by networks of ideologically charged psychosocial fantasies through

which the subjects organize their experiences, by the networks of utopian cultural myths.

40
I am borrowing the lucky term of cultural fetishism from the discussion of nostalgia manifested in post-Soviet
Russian culture of advertising by Jeremy Morris (Jeremy Morris, “The Empire Strikes Back: Projections of National
Identity in Contemporary Russian Advertising”, in The Russian Review, Vol. 64, Issue 4, 642-660).
41
Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx, trans. Jamey Gambrell. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
2003),148.
42
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge-
London, MIT Press, 2002), 205.
43
See, e.g., Carol Barner-Barry and Cynthia Hody, “Soviet Marxism-Leninism as Mythology”, in Political
Psychology, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), 609-630.

19
Concealing their origins in ideology (to borrow the phrase from Louis Althusser)44, these myths

were staged as concrete mythical narratives in the texts of Socialist Realism.

Socialist Realism, the Soviet aesthetic doctrine, Evgeny Dobrenko shows45, was

predicated on the transformational nature of aesthetic activity; the famous goal of depicting life

not as it is, but as it should be, proclaimed at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers of 1934,

aporetically wedded the mimetic principles of realist representation to the Marxist

mythopoesis46.

A brief look at the textual strategies of the Soviet novel elucidates the reasons why this

particular type of textuality is especially conducive for covering gaps in meaning and for

mediating mythic content. Here is a passage from Aleksandr Fadeev’s The Young Guard

(Molodaia Gvardiia, 1943-1951):

In those early years he had distinguished himself as a staunch and able soldier. But he

was promoted not only for that: staunchness and ability are not rare qualities.

Unassumingly, little by little, even slowly as it appeared, he had assimilated everything a

Red Army soldier could learn from the company political instructors and the battalion

and regimental political commissars – that countless, nameless army of workers from

political departments and Red Army Party groups, and may the memory of these people

live on down the ages. He did not simply learn their science; he chewed it over and made

44
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays.
(Monthly Review Press, 1971),121-176:153.
45
See Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet
Literature. 1st ed. (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1997), 17
46
Boris Groys proposes in his The Total Art of Stalinism that the “Stalin era satisfied the fundamental avant-garde
demand that art cease representing life and begin transforming it by the means of a total aesthetico-political project”
(see Groys 1992, 36); Also see: Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic. Trans. Catherine Porter
(Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1992).

20
 it an integral part of himself. Then all at once he stood out among his fellows as a man

with exceptional political gifts47.

The otherwise brilliant translation does not do justice to the strategy of epic retardation

that this classic Soviet novel continuously employs. Alluding to one of Stalin’s favorite

rhetorical strategies, pleonastic restatement48, the original passage repeats “he rose from the

ranks” (on vydvinulsia) four times as it narrates the story of a Party official who would play an

important role coordinating the Donbass anti-Fascist resistance during the Great Patriotic War.

The passage is illustrative of the Soviet novel’s epic strategies, even featuring a concealed

invocation of the Party, the muse of the Soviet epic. Such literary environment was, as Katerina

Clark has shown, especially conducive for the Soviet novel’s major function, which “since at

least 1932-34… has been to serve as the official repository of state myths”49.

Regine Robin calls Socialist Realism an “impossible aesthetic”50, and indeed, larger-than-

life epic heroes of high Stalinism merged within this aesthetic with stock characters representing

“social types”, like the sublime, yet nameless army of the political workers in Fadeev’s novel.

Soviet formulaic mythical narratives and their origin in the foundational myths of Russian

culture have been extensively outlined by scholars like Robin, Clark, Groys, Mark Lipovetsky51

and others. Yet, this study aims to show that this aesthetic continues to hold a mythopoetic

47
Aleksandr Fadeev, The Young Guard, trans. Violet Dutt (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959?),
39.“В те юные годы он выдвинулся как стойкий боец. Он выдвинулся как умный боец. Но он выдвинулся не
только поэтому: стойкие и умные люди не редкость в народе. Исподволь, незаметно, казалось бы даже
медленно, усваивал он все то, чему учили бойцов-красноармейцев ротные политруки, батальонные и
полковые комиссары - вся бесчисленная, безыменная армия работников политотделов и воинских
партийных ячеек, да живет во веки веков память об этих людях! И он не просто усваивал их науку - он
перерабатывал и прочно укладывал ее в своей душе. И вдруг выдвинулся среди боевых товарищей своих как
человек незаурядного политического дарования” (Aleksandr Fadeiev, Molodaia Gvardiia (Moskva:
Gosudarstvennoie Pedagogicheskoie izdatel’stvo ministerstva prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1959), 39).
48
See, e.g., Iosif Stalin, “Golovokruzheniie ot uspekhov”, in Pravda, no. 60 (2 March 1930), for a concise classic
example of Stalin’s epic rhetorical strategies.
49
Clark xii.
50
See Robin 1992, esp. Part 1.
51
Mark Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue With Chaos (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe,
1999).

21
temptation for the post-Soviet culture even after Soviet novel, clichéd and conventionally

“unreadable,”52 was exposed as a cache of empty Party slogans and meanings.

This mythopoetic potential is a function of the meta-literary implications of the Socialist

Realist aesthetic and its inherent aporetic duplicity noted above. In Groys’s reading, Socialist

Realism, with its transformational goals, is inherently an avant-garde aesthetic; yet, formally it

is, first and foremost, a restorative project, a historical project to inscribe the history of

proletarian art into the general teleological schema of Marxist history. Clark argues that “the

only thing that was absolutely new about Socialist Realism was the term itself”53. Indeed,

Lenin’s pronouncement about the “proletarian culture not [having] sprung out of nowhere…

[being] a logical development of the store of knowledge that the mankind had accumulated under

the yoke of the capitalist society”54 determined, on the level of state philosophy, the inherent

reliance of Socialist Realism on cultural and aesthetic continuity. Formally, Socialist Realism

was a return to the principles of realist representation that Russian modernist and post-

Revolutionary avant-garde seemingly had done away with. Indeed, the very foundational

document of Socialist Realism, the Central Committee’s 1932 Decree that established Socialist

Realism as an official state art, is called “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art

Organizations.” In the original Russian, the Decree uses the word “perestroika”. It is too

tempting to pass on an opportunity for an analogy: the Socialist Realist “return” to the principles

of realist representation was meant to undo the harms of uncontrolled and uncontrollable,

runaway avant-garde textuality as much as Mikhail Gorbachev’s (failed) late-Soviet policy of

52
Clark ix.
53
Ibid., 29.
54
Vladimir Lenin, “Zadachi Soiuzov Molodezhi: Rech na III Vserossiiskom s’ezde RKSM 20 oktyabria 1920
goda”, in Vladimir Lenin. Polnoie Sobraniie Sochinenii, Vol 41, (Moskva: Politizdat, 1967-81), 304-305, 304.
“Пролетарская культура должна явиться закономерным развитием тех запасов знания, которые человечество
выработало под гнетом капиталистического общества”.

22
perestroika. That policy, with its appeal to bring Soviet official discourse close to social reality,

was meant to restore meaning to the official discourse—meaning that, by the 1980s, was slipping

through the cracks, no longer held together by the organizing metaphors of the Soviet state.

We can draw a parallel between the post-Soviet treatment of Socialist Realism and the

Socialist Realist treatment of the classic Russian literature of the 19th century, conventionally

labeled the Golden Age of Russian literature. Beginning with the creation of modern Russian

literary language, the history of Russian literature in the 19th century can be read as a story of

molding and tempering the principles of realist representation, as social and psychological

realism of the great 19th century Russian novelists becomes, in the course of the century, so

sophisticated that it eventually crumbles under its own weight, signaling the end of an era.

However, this history can also be read as a story of solidifying the myth of the power of literary

textuality. The Romantic notion of the “poet-prophet” explored by the first two major poets of

modern Russian literature, Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, carries over to the early

Russian literary criticism that perversely interpreted the realist mimesis as the quest for truth.

Literary critic Vissarion Belinskii was instrumental in installing [national] literature as a source

of profound cultural meanings, assigning it a nearly magical power to influence the reader. It is

this power that Socialist Realism appropriated, covering the gap of modernist semantic

uncertainty created by the revolutionary art.

Of course, the smooth, seamless, authoritative Russian textuality of the Golden Age, just

as the Golden Age itself, is a retroactive construct, a cultural myth largely solidified by the

prescriptive Soviet literary criticism, as Dobrenko shows. Socialist Realism’s construction of the

Golden Age elucidates the mechanism by which Soviet culture appropriated and made use of an

authoritative textuality to create a cultural continuity where none was to be had. Socialist Realist

23
fascination with the power of artistic teleological transformations of reality relies, then, on the

concealed fascination with the (imagined, re- and over-constructed) past. This “epic past”, to

borrow from Bakhtin via Clark again, becomes the imaginary source of stable cultural meanings

and foundational myths. In other words, Socialist Realism had its own historical gap to cover – a

gap in the magical belief in the power of the written word to carry the “truth”, the gap created by

the modernist disillusionment in the semantic capacity of the linguistic sign. One can draw an

analogy between this “gap” and the gap created as a result of the post-Stalin Soviet semantic

incongruity. It is the myth of authoritative, unproblematic, legitimized and legitimizing

textuality, then, that the post-Soviet culture lacks in its present and is all-too-eager to find in its

past.

Post-Soviet culture’s fascination with Socialist Realism is therefore a fascination with the

last instance in its national history where such textuality was possible; its compulsive return to

Socialist myths, tropes and clichés, however ideologically discredited they may have become in

the post-Soviet context, manifests a nostalgic desire to relive this type of authoritative textuality.

The post-Soviet poaching of past textualities for meaning, then, is, in a way, a repetition of the

path Socialist Realism once took in its quest to create a (mythic) Marxist historical continuity.

The post-Soviet texts that I examine in Chapter 3 stage a possibility of such historical

continuity through their (re)turn to folklore, with its peculiar ways of meaning-production. This

return parallels the Soviet revival of interest in Russian folklore55 coinciding with the beginnings

of Socialist Realism. The language of folklore, with its perverse ability to solidify meanings,

55
Reinterpreted by the Soviet folklorists of the 1930s as the “creativity of the masses”, as Frank J. Miller argues in
his definitive study of the subject. See Frank J.Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of
the Stalin Era. New York: M.E. Sharps, 1991, and Frank J. Miller, “The Image of Stalin in Soviet Russian
Folklore”. The Russian Review, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Jan., 1980), pp. 50-67, esp. 53.

24
used to sustain the paternal metaphor of “Joseph-Our-Light Vissarionovich,”56 and the post-

Soviet return to folkloric strategies to frame the mythic content is a search for the Russian textual

past that it shares with Socialist Realism.

In Chapter 4, I examine other attempts to relive and redeem Soviet mythologies by

looking at post-Soviet rethinking of the legacy of the Space Race, and specifically, at the way in

which the remnants of the Soviet heroic myth of the “conquerors of space” are used in post-

Soviet literature and film to create a set of heroic, escapist, meta-ideological fantasies. These

fantasies take place in the sublime, eerie outer space, which is staged, in Viktor Pelevin’s novel

Omon Ra and Aleksei Gherman’s film Paper Soldier, as a reverse side of a Soviet dreamscape57.

The post-Soviet nostalgic optic thus stabilizes the mythological space of Soviet culture,

providing contemporary Russian culture with a workable past. In her Common Places:

Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Svetlana Boym examines the power that everyday

Soviet mythologies held over the imagination of Soviet citizens; the very mode of Boym’s

exploration also demonstrates that these mythologies are a retroactive, nostalgic construct58. In

Yurchak’s words, “the imaginary worlds within the fabric of socialist society gradually changed

the very cultural logic of the Soviet system, deterritorializing it and rendering it increasingly

incongruous with the descriptions it made of itself.”59 With these imaginary worlds of Socialism

gone upon the system’s downfall, the Soviet past solidified into the retroactively-produced

Žižekian mythical object60, the object produced by the loss itself. In this imaginary and imagined

56
The phrase from a Soviet pseudofolkloric novina quoted in Miller 1991, 56.
57
For more on the Soviet dremscapes in Pelevin, see Rajendra A. Chitnis, “Learning to Live with Emptiness: Viktor
Pelevin, Vaclav Kahuda, Vlado Balla”, in Rajendra A. Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russian and Eastern
Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak fiction of the Changes, 1988-1998 (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian
and East European Studies, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 136-162.
58
See Introduction to Boym 1994).
59
Yurchak, 205.
60
For Žižek’s discussion of the retroactive production of the mythical object see Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the
Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 37.

25
past, the two meanings of myth merge: it is a “myth” in a sense that it never existed, its illusory

nature exposed by the collapse of Communist ideology and its post-Soviet deconstruction. Yet, it

is also a “myth” in the Barthian61 sense, in a sense that the post-Soviet imagination inflects and

expands the meanings attached to the signifiers of the Soviet state. The signs and symbols of the

(Soviet) past are invested with other, new meanings, (re)constructed and used to structure and

explain the country’s present, becoming a source of stable cultural meanings as a part of the

shared historical legacy incorporated into the emergent narrative of the new Russian state.

How exactly do the cultural texts work “around” the rupture in the time of national

history and in national mythology? How exactly is the cultural continuity created where the

rupture seems to be so complete?

Pierre Nora suggests that cultural memory and cultural memorialization work by creating

lieux de mémoire, explaining that “a lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material

or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a

symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community”62. These sites of memory are

crystallization of [national] history into the mythic space of cultural memory63, sites where

history is reworked and appropriated to create an imaginary cultural identity. In the post-Soviet

context, signifiers of the Socialist state provide a link to the mythologies of the national past,

serving as constant reminders of what was lost. However, post-Soviet sites of memory, I argue,

spread beyond the numerous Lenin Streets still endemic to Russian cities, beyond the Lenin

Mausoleum and beyond the still-glittering Friendship of the Nations Fountain in Moscow.

61
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972), esp. 129.
62
Pierre Nora, “From lieux de mémoire to realms of memory”, in Nora, Pierre and Lawrence D.Kritzman, eds.,
Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1: conflicts and divisions. New York and Chichester:
Columbia University Press. 1996, xv-xxiv, xvii.
63
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, in Representations 26, Spring 1989, 7-25,
7.

26
Cultural texts, too, become sites of memory, rhetorical topoi of memorialization in the scheme of

post-Soviet culture64, as they sift through the Lacanian cascade of signifiers and (re)organize

them, preserving them in their own textual space.

In the words of Nina Tsyrkun, post-Soviet culture builds a new mythology on the ruins of

the old one.65 As the 1990s gave way to the rise of nationalist rhetoric in the Russian public

discourse of the 2000s, it became evident that, as Kevin Platt puts it,

one dominant historical metaphor—that of historical rupture and social rebirth—has been

replaced by another—that of civilizational continuity—as the authoritative tool for the

construction of social identity. Neither of these public discursive formations accounts

well for the actualities of social experience and a political history that exceed both in

their complexity66.

This study traces the roots of the metaphor of civilizational continuity, seeking to show

that those same texts from the late 1980s and the 1990s that seemingly spoke only of rupture,

were also always speaking about continuity. I propose that, along with centripetal forces at work

in post-Soviet Russian culture, there were also always the centrifugal ones, which focused the

old mythologies to bring them together to preserve and shield them from destruction. This study

seeks to uncover the sites of memory that post-Soviet texts create in order to reflect on the Soviet

narratives that came to an end, and on those that can be put in their place. I ask, what kinds of

myths do post-Soviet texts rely on to construct a notion of continuity that overcomes what was

previously discarded or destroyed? What myths are persistent enough to survive the historical

gap?

64
I draw here on Derrida’s theory of “sites in language”. See Jacques Derrida, "Force and Signification", in Writing
and Difference, trans. Allen Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 3-30, 28.
65
Tsyrkun 1999, 62.
66
Kevin M.F. Platt, “The Post-Soviet is Over: On Reading the Ruins”, in Republics of Letters: A Journal for the
Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/41.

27
 The possibility of a historical continuity in literary and cinematic texts of the 1990s

paradoxically emerges out of the features of these texts that, at first glance, seem to signify the

symbolic collapse. The weak connections between events, the decontextualized signifiers, the

disorganized space and the purposeless movements break the narrative and cinematic

conventions, allowing for "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers… of

the prohibitions of usual life."67 Such temporary suspension, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, is

characteristic of the specific modality of culture expressed in carnival that "offers the chance to

have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a

completely new order of things”68. The new outlook is possible precisely because of the

estrangement of familiar social and (one can extrapolate) symbolic structures that the carnival

provides for its duration. This estrangement is achieved, according to Bakhtin, through the

creation of a new, liberated context for the carnival’s participants.

For Bakhtin, the enjoyment of observing a beggar playing the king at the carnival stems

from the collective memory of his status outside of the carnival, that is, from the memory of the

“authentic” context. This consideration brought about several anthropological studies that take

Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque and apply it to the functioning of collective memory that

is reactualized and reactivated during the carnival. The constant interplay of the social and

cultural contexts confined to memory and created anew (through defamiliarization) at the

carnival, emotionally imprint themselves on the subject through the affective power of laughter

that accompanies the carnival’s decontextualization. Joseph Roach formulates this cultural mode

67
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984), 15.
68
Ibid., 34.

28
of memorialization/establishing cultural continuities as “that mental space where imagination

and memory converge … at once remembered and reinvented—the otherwise unthinkable”69.

The Bakhtinian carnival, thus, is a cultural site where decontextualization can be a source

of enjoyment and simultaneously serve as a form of memorialization, a paradoxical source of

cultural continuity for a culture. Post-Soviet literature and film had done away with many of the

conventions of representation; yet, the controlled transgression of the law for which the

carnivalesque suspension of conventions allows, in the end sustains the law, its existence

illuminated by its very absence. In this way, the very cultural texts that examine the Soviet

legacy via its carnivalesque defamiliarization and attempt to map post-Soviet identity become

sites of memorialization. Carnival, for Bakhtin, “is a place for working out [italics mine.- DK]...

in half-real and half-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals.”70 An

exciting possibility then emerges: a possibility to read the 1990s as a pause that Russian culture

takes to reflect on what has been lost and what can be salvaged from the past, much like the

interpretative moment that Tzvetan Todorov describes in his theory of the fantastic as the

hesitation that the subject experiences when their frame of reference clashes with the unknown.

This interpretative moment “occupies the duration of [the] uncertainty”71 as the subject

repositions themselves in the relation to the event, the breakdown of the Soviet system.

Post-Soviet culture suspends narrative and historical time in order to reflect on the past,

to counter the ideological void of the late 1980s and 1990s. In Chapter 1, I examine post-Soviet

reassessment of the myth of classic Russian literature as a source of profound, universal

meanings, the myth of the Golden Age. As post-Soviet culture deconstructs the classic legacy in

69
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), 27.
70
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), 123.
71
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, (Cleveland:
Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 25.

29
the form of various cultural myths about literature and language, as it examines the Soviet

mythological imagination, it does so by means of literary texts themselves. These new textual

sites consolidate the myth of Russian literature, becoming Boym’s “common places”, sites and

loci of cultural mythologies72 that are persistent enough to survive the historical and cultural gap.

I use the term “imaginary places” to describe these textual sites; the “imaginary” here is

the Lacanian imaginary73, a foundational illusion of coherence and wholeness that underlies the

possibility of signification. The texts I examine structure their narrative spaces to recreate and

relive the illusion of the uninterrupted flow of historical time and of the possibility of meaning-

production, even if on the surface they seem to be doing the complete opposite.

In this study, I focus on the sites of memory that emerge as a result of the reworkings of

“domestic” mythologies. I concentrate on the diachronic dimension of the post-Soviet cultural

process, on the “diachronic Others” of post-Soviet culture because the generation of post-Soviet

writers and filmmakers who defined the field of culture in the 1990s are the carriers of the

cultural memory of the Soviet past, the driving force behind the reworkings of Soviet textuality.

The definitive figures of the post-Soviet literary landscape of the 1990s, Tatiana Tolstaia, Viktor

Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, along with the influential filmmakers like Nikita Mikhalkov,

Karen Shakhnazarov, and Aleksei Gherman grappled not just with the legacy of the Soviet past,

but more importantly, with the transformation they themselves had to undergo as former Soviet

writers and filmmakers. As this older generation gradually leaves the field of cultural production

in Russia, the younger generation’s relative lack of emotional investment in the cultural memory

of the Soviet state will lead this new cohort of writers and filmmakers to explore subjects beyond

72
Boym 1994, 4.
73
For Lacan’s discussion of this foundational illusion of unity, see Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative
of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London:
W.W. Norton and Co, 2004), 3-10.

30
memory and history, a process already underway. As the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, my

readings show, the construction of post-Soviet myths became more focused, leaving the younger

writers and filmmakers with a set of new, reworked cultural mythologies on which to build their

own.

One might conclude, following the narrator of Fyodor Sologub’s 1907 novel, Petty

Demon, in the epigraph to this Introduction, that the seemingly helplessly referential post-Soviet

Russian culture of the 1990s was only that – a traumatic repetition of the dead words of dead

discourses. However, it is possible to read “might” in Sologub as an expression of a possibility:

the repetition proved to be therapeutic as the 1990s drew to a close, as the seemingly dead Soviet

textuality gradually carved a place of its own among the myths of Russian culture.

31
 CHAPTER 1

The Writer, the Reader, the Character: Re-mythologizing Post-Soviet Literary

Space.

Yet,… modern mind is so sophisticated that it often keeps on thinking even after having

realized that it does not exist.

Viktor Pelevin, T

Однако… современный ум изощрен настолько, что нередко продолжает думать,

даже поняв, что его нет.

Виктор Пелевин, Т

The Unmaking of the State Reader.

“I’m not one of those people who mourns the good old times when the USSR

supposedly was the ‘most well-read country in the world’ [sam[aia] chitaiusch[iaia]

stran[a] v mire]. If you listen to those people, you might get an idea that every Soviet

citizen was an avid reader, and of only good books. But this was just another fiction of

the Soviet propaganda”, claims Nina Litvinets, the Editor-in-Chief of Moscow’s famous

Raduga Publishers. She continues:

We, publishers, remember that… a hundred thousand copies of every book in the

‘Masters of Contemporary Prose Series’ were published1, and the [Soviet]

distribution channels [still] worked… [but] the bookstores in the province

1
Mastera Sovremennoi Prozy Series (that included more than a hundred titles of 20th century fiction from
all over the world translated into Russian) was a series of Progress Publishers, transferred over to Raduga
Publishers in 1982. Litvinets’s assessment of readership in Russia, then, refers to the 1980s.

32
 received maybe a couple of copies, and that was it… [Good contemporary prose]

was read only by the intelligentsia who either used the library or paid an arm and

a leg for those books on the black market… For the mass reader, all these

“Masters” were just nonsense, its intellectual content was hidden [from the mass

reader]. Now [in 1997] the mass reader actually reads what we publish. Women

who used to only read “Woman Worker” [Rabontnitsa] magazine and wouldn’t

touch a book, now read romance novels, are happy and think of it as great “me-

time”. By the way, romance is appreciated not just by the female readers of a

modest intellectual potential. It’s a great way to relax, an escape from all the

ugliness that’s just outside your window, it’s a plunge into the other, much more

pleasant world, into a world of dreams…2

Litvinets’s comments on post-Soviet readership in this 1997 interview reveal an

interesting ambiguity. On the one hand, Litvinets, at the helm of a publishing house in the

six-year-old market economy3, is clearly excited about the expanding market for mass

literature; this excitement may also stem from a certain leveling of the traditional divide

between high and low culture that Russia experienced in the 1990s, a result of an influx

2
Galina Shulga. “Luybov’ i “Raduga”(Beseda s direktorom izdatel’stva N.S. Litvinets)”, Inostrannaia
Literatura 7 (1997) (online version available at http://magazines.russ.ru/inostran/1997/7/lov.html). “ Мы-
то, издатели, помним, что когда «Мастера современной прозы» выходили тиражом сто тысяч
экземпляров … то в провинциальный магазин … все равно доходило в лучшем случае 2 экземпляра
книги... Нас читала только интеллигенция, добывая книги либо в библиотеке, либо втридорога на
черном рынке, но ни в коем случае не через торговую сеть. Для массового читателя все эти
«Мастера» были полной мурой, интеллектуальный смысл их оставался скрытым. Сейчас нас читает
именно массовый читатель, «человек с улицы». Женщины, которые раньше читали только журнал
«Работница», а за книгу даже и не брались, теперь читают любовный роман, счастливы и считают
это замечательным отдыхом. Кстати, дамские романы любят не только читательницы со скромным
интеллектуальным потенциалом. Это прекрасное отдохновение, это уход от того неприглядного,
что ты видишь за окном, погружение в иной, более приятный мир мечты”.
3
Litvinets will later go on to be the Executive Vice-President of Russian Book Union [Rossiiskii Knizhnyi
Soiuz], the national association of Russian publishers)

33
of Western consumer-oriented culture, the runaway creative freedoms and the adoption of

a set of postmodern sensibilities.

On the other hand, however, the “modest intellectual potential” of the mass reader

who missed their chances to appreciate the “intellectual content” of Alejo Carpentier and

Chinua Achebe in the 1970s and 1980s still seems to ring somewhat bitter, which

Litvinets quickly covers up by stressing the social and psychological benefits of a mass

literature that allows the post-Soviet reader to escape the harsh socioeconomic reality of a

country in transition.

Litvinets’s claim that the Soviet reader hardly ever read “good” prose points to an

implicit assumption about the nature of Soviet readership operating in the discourse of

post-Soviet intellectuals. This assumption is predicated on what the National Association

of Book Publishers, the Russian Book Union, calls a myth4 - that the Soviet Union was

indeed the “most well-read” and that the books being read were “good.” Litvinets claims

that no serious readership studies ever supported the myth, but this myth might not be in

any need of support. In 2008, the nostalgic myth was alive and well in a major academic

study of post-Soviet readership, which, summing up the effects of a transitional economy

on readership in Russia, claimed that “Russian readers of nearly every gender, age and

education level have transitioned [pereshli, italics mine. - DK] to mass fiction.”5 The

starting point of this transition can be nothing else than the “good books” read by

everyone in the “most well-read country in the world.”

4
Among the stated goals of the Russian Book Union (Rossiiskii Knizhnyi Soiuz) is “to correct the myth of
‘the most reading country in the world’”. See: Rossiiskii Knizhnyi Soiuz, “Deiatel’nost Rossiiskogo
Knizhnogo Soiuza”, http://www.bookunion.ru/pages/mero.html.
5
B. Dubin, N. Zorkaia, Chteniie v Rossii 2008: Tendentsii i Problemy (Moskva: Analiticheskii Tsentr Iuriia
Levady, 2008), 25. “Коротко говоря, на массовую беллетристику более или менее перешли читатели,
принадлежащие практически ко всем половозрастным и образовательным группам российского
населения.”

34
 This study, “Readership in Russia, 2008: Trends and Problems” (Chtenie v Rossii

2008: tendentsii i problemy) was conducted by the Levada Center (Analiticheskii tsentr

Iuriia Levady) at the request of Federal Department of Print and Mass Communications6.

The results of the 2008 readership study were perceived in the media as shocking:

metaphors like “catastrophe of readership”7 abound in the press coverage of the study’s

release.

Indeed, the findings of the Levada Center (further referred to as the Levada

report) are grim if read from within the model of a culture that maintains a sharp division

between “good” and “bad” literature. “Even the most educated and progressive readers”,

the Levada report muses, “are clearly oriented towards a passive-adaptive type of cultural

behavior and consumption; [even these readers display] an absence of analytic interest in

the surrounding reality with its controversies, an inclination towards entertainment and

escapism, towards a leveling of [cultural] taste.”8

At first glance, the attitude towards mass literature expressed by Litvinets

(implicitly) and by the Levada report (explicitly) is predicated just on intellectual elitism,

a familiar stance for the Russian intellectuals: literature should be good, otherwise it is no

literature (significantly, the Levada report even argues that, in the Russian context,

“reading” means reading fiction9). However, the report’s nearly prescriptive demand for

6
The Levada Center’s nongovernmental status, its spotless reputation and its world-class staff analysts
ensure that the results of its studies are nearly automatically given a vote of confidence in contemporary
Russian public discourse (in a sharp contrast to those of RosStat, the Russian Federal Statistics Service)
7
See, e.g., Federal Portal of State Program of Readership Support (Federal’naia Programma Podderzhki
Chteniia). Ol’ga Frolova, “Katastrofa chteniia v Rossii”, http://www.chtenie-21.ru/p-19, accessed Jan 7,
2010
8
Dubin 2008: 29. “В чтении даже самых образованных и продвинутых читательских групп сегодня
отчетливы ориентации на пассивно-адаптивный тип культурного поведения и потребления,
отсутствие аналитического ин- тереса к окружающей современности во всех ее противоречивых
чертах, склонность к развлечению и эскапизму, усреднение вкусов”.
9
Dubin 2008: 27.“’Читать’ означает ‘читать художественную литературу’”.

35
“analytic interest in the surrounding reality,” magnified by formulating this interest in

terms of absence, makes one suspect that the issue at stake is not precisely “good

literature versus bad literature” (after all, the 1990s have somewhat leveled the divide, as

is evident in Litvinets’s interview). Or, rather, the definitions of good and bad literature

are hardly drawn along the lines of literary aesthetics proper. However different are the

attitudes expressed in Litvinets’s interview and in the Levada report towards the escape

provided by mass literature, they are nonetheless similar in their mode of assessing

literature in terms of its goals: both Litvinets and the Levada report are very interested in

what literature (and reading it) should do. Mass literature fulfilled its role of providing

escape from “real life” just as well in the 2000s as it did in 1990s. Yet the reader’s escape

into literary worlds was deemed “good” for the society in the tumultuous 1990s and

turned out to be “bad” in the 2000s, when escapism could no longer serve the needs of

Russia’s rediscovered statehood. The difference between Litvinets’s relatively favorable

assessment of mass literature and the Levada report’s condemnation thereof is then best

explained not by the sudden reversal of Russian intellectuals’ attitude towards mass

fiction, but by how well the objective literary and publishing trends are aligned with the

perceived social demands imposed on literature. What emerges from the comparative

diachronic analysis of Russian intellectuals’ assessment of Russian readership is the

obvious persistence of the intellectual model which assigns the task of moderating social

trends, whichever they are, to literature.

The Levada report reads as a work of mourning; the object of mourning is a

peculiar kind of interaction of literature with the reader and the state. Peppered by

phrases such as “no longer…” and “loss of…”, the Levada report traces a gradual decline

36
in the interest in reading back to (and at times outright blames it on) the disintegration of

state institutions that used to promote and support readership in the Soviet era. What the

report mourns is a particular sensibility, a mode of reception of literature that was shaped

by these state institutions and, the report concludes, was perhaps too quickly thrown

away together with other remnants of Soviet ideology. It is this sensibility that was at the

core of the myth of the Soviet Union as the “most well-read country in the world.”

In his seminal study of Soviet readership, Evgeny Dobrenko outlines the aesthetic

and ideological factors in Soviet literary production and reception that shape the peculiar

Soviet mode of reading. “In contrast to the “explanatory” passion of the Western

aesthetics of reception”, Dobrenko suggests, “Soviet aesthetic doctrine started out from

an assumption of the “transformational” nature of aesthetic activity (in accordance with

Marx’s eleventh thesis about Feuerbach).”10 The framework of this doctrine, Dobrenko’s

study convincingly shows, defines the representational principles of Socialist Realism

and its implicitly modernist goal11 of transforming life through art. However, such an

aesthetic doctrine also had implications for the reader of literary texts produced within it:

as the transformational nature of Soviet aesthetics is imposed not just on literary

production but also on literary reception, the Soviet reader, Dobrenko demonstrates,

acquires a set of responsibilities, the first and most important of which is to become a

reader.

The process of becoming, Dobrenko continues, is facilitated by state-controlled

institutions, the school and the library being the most significant of those. The term

Dobrenko suggests for such “transformation of aesthetics into aesthetic education” is

10
See Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception
of Soviet Literature. 1st ed. (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1997), 17
11
For more on the relationship between Socialist Realism and modernism, see Groys 1992, esp. 36.

37
“pedagogization of aesthetics.”12 Indeed, it is the post-Soviet lack of aesthetic education

in the absence of Soviet primary facilitators of readership, the school and the library, that

the Levada report concludes to be the reason for the post-Soviet “catastrophe of

readership”.

This particular post-Soviet catastrophe, the Levada report continues, is a symbolic

one. Among the reasons why post-Soviet readers flat out refuse to fulfill their

“obligation” to read (an unusually curt sentence in the otherwise elaborately phrased

report stands out by flatly stating, “46 per cent of adult Russians do not read books”13),

the report names “the external democratization, which largely resulted in a massive loss

of trust in social institutions in general, including the school and the library.”14 These

institutions “of literary culture lost not only their former symbolic value and authority,

but also their former role in structuring the reading of the masses, in providing and

disseminating influential models.”15

The mention of symbolic authority in the report needs to be given some

consideration. The Levada report concludes that the disintegration of Soviet

intelligentsia’s “ideology of enlightenment”, completed by the mid-1990s, eliminated the

role of intelligentsia as an important source of cultural authority. Before the fall of the

Soviet Union, this source was sustained through transmitting the “ideology of

enlightenment” through codified, legitimized, and stable channels of communication like

12
Dobrenko 1997, 17.
13
Dubin 2008, 21. “46 процентов взрослых россиян не читают книг”.
14
Dubin 2008, 5. “…внешняя демократизация, которая во многом повлекла за собой массовую
потерю доверия к социальным институтам вообще, включая, среди прочих, школу и библиотеку”.
15
Dubin 2008, 39-40. “Прежние институты книжной культуры – библиотека, школа, вуз,
литературная критика – утратили не только свое прежнее символическое значение, авторитетность,
но и свою прежнюю роль в структурировании процессов массового чтения, представлении и
распространении влиятельных образцов”.

38
“thick journals”16 and “literature-centric school education”17. The report deems

unsuccessful post-Soviet attempts on the part of the state to fill the void of cultural

authority with federal readership support programs18.

The Levada report, then, not just subscribes to the rather conservative definition

of culture as something promoted by the intellectuals. The report also mourns the lost

pedagogical value of literature, promoting (as intellectuals should) the controlled

pedagogization of aesthetics, which was characteristic, as Dobrenko shows, of the Soviet

cultural paradigm. The intelligentsia’s authority now in shambles and the state authority

over culture in general and readership in particular not living up to the expectations, the

Levada report does outline the steps that need to be taken on the state level to restore the

symbolic authority associated with literary culture. However, the report’s

recommendations, having resulted in some policy declarations to promote readership in

200919, are nowhere as interesting as the Levada report’s own unconscious search for the

source of cultural authority to fill the perceived void. The report suggests, or, rather,

wishes for, the void to be filled not by a social institution or a group. In the absence of

both state and intellectuals’ tangible authority over readership, an unexpectedly

mythological authority (“author-ity”) emerges from the report’s conclusions.

16
“Thick journals” (tolstyie zhurnaly), publishing literary criticism along with literary texts, were an
important channel of disseminating literary culture in Russia since late 18th century. The specific period in
the history of literary journals to which the Levada report refers is perestroika, when “thick journals”
become an arena for public debate not just about literature, but about Soviet political ideology.
17
See Dubin 2008, 6.
18
Like National Program of Readership Support and Development (Национальная программа поддержки
и развития чтения), launched in 2006.
19
Thus, a document titled “Declaration in Support of the Book” (“Deklaratsiia o podderzhke knigi”) was
signed by the member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, an umbrella organization for
the certain former Soviet Republics, in February 2009. Interestingly, in an unexpected logocentric move,
the text of the document uses the term “book” to encompass reading practices and cultural value of reading.
For the text of the Declaration, see Federal’noie Agentstvo po Pechati i Massovym Kommunikatsiiam,
“Deklaratsiia o podderzhke knigi”, http://www.fapmc.ru/files/download/696_file.pdf.

39
 “In [Russia of the 2000s], compared to the late-Soviet period, to the years of

perestroika and to the attempts of systemic transformation in the 1990s, there emerged, in

a certain sense, a different society [literally, “other society” [drugoie obschestvo]. –

DK]”, the Levada report claims;

Characteristic for this society is the sharp deficit of figures of authority, with the

exception of the state leaders. Thus [italics mine. - DK], the names of even the

most influential Russian writers of the 20th and 21st century were recalled by only

very few respondents [of the survey]. Among leaders here are [Sergei] Yesenin

(14%), recently departed [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn20 (10%), plus three or four

other authors – within the margin of statistical error. There are no recognized

public elites, there are no independent channels of transmission of their ideas,

examples and assessments, thus there are no symbols [shared by everyone]21.

The nearly careless automaticity of conflating social, symbolic, and literary

authority in this reflection speaks volumes about the model of culture that is often

deemed to be characteristically Russian. While Yesenin and Solzhenitsyn’s appearance in

the report is of course explained by the nature of the survey (which was, after all, focused

on what people read), the report’s own wording, nonetheless, hardly leaves any room for

conventional sources of symbolic authority other than the state and literature (like

athletes, entertainers, or other types of influential social players). Putting the state and

20
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in 2008.
21
Dubin 2008, 69-70. “B стране по сравнению с позднесоветским периодом, с годами перестройки и
периодом, попыток системной трансформации советского социума в 1990-е гг. сло жилось в
определенном смысле другое общество. Оно другое по структуре коммуникаций, по их
интенсивности (точнее, наоборот, их неинтенсивности), по содержанию этих коммуникаций. Для
него характерен, резкий дефицит общих авторитетов, за исключением первых лиц государства. Так,
имена даже самых влиятельных отечественных писателей ХХ–XXI вв. могут назвать лишь немногие
опрошенные. Лидируют Есенин (14%), только что ушедший Солженицын (10%), плюс еще три-
четыре автора – в границах статистической достоверности.Нет признанных публичных элит, нет
независимых каналов коммуникации их идей, образцов и оценок, поэтому нет и общих символов”.

40
literature in dangerously close textual proximity outlines the place of literature in the

Russian intellectuals’ prescriptive and pedagogical model of culture. Petr Vail’ and

Aleksandr Genis sum up this place in the following way:

For Russia, literature is a [universal] reference point, a credo, an ideological and

moral foundation… For such mutual understanding only classical literature would

do. Classical literature is a universal language based on absolute values… [One

can even speak] not about the unique nature of Russian literature, but about the

unique nature of the Russian reader, who is inclined to see the sacred national

property in their favorite books. Criticizing the classics is the same thing as

criticizing motherland22.

The reader Vail’ and Genis construct here is a nostalgically idealized reader: the

quotation comes from a collection of essays meant to reintroduce the post-Soviet reader

to Russian classical literature. In the 1990s, when the collection was put together, the

readers flocked, as Nina Litvinets reminds us, to the foreign, and newly-available

domestic23, mass literature, towards the escape that genre fiction provides. They may

have fled the pedagogized Soviet aesthetics of reception. Vail’ and Genis explain, in the

essay on the 19th-century Russian critic Vissarion Belinskii (a compulsory reading in the

Soviet “literature-centric school education”), that

22
Vail', Petr, and Aleksandr Genis. "Rodnaia Rech’: Uroki iziaschnoi slovesnosti", in Sobraniie
sochinenii v dvukh tomakh. Tom 1 (Yekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia, 2003), 6-271: 7-8. The essays were
originally published by “Nezavisimaia Gazeta” in 1991.“Для России литература -- точка отсчета,
символ веры, идеологический и нравственный фундамент. … Классика - универсальный язык,
основанный на абсолютных ценностях…Впрочем, с таким же -- если не большим - успехом можно
было бы говорить не об уникальности русской литературы, а об уникальности русского читателя,
склонного видеть в любимых книгах самую священную национальную собственность. Задеть
классика - все равно что оскорбить родину”.
23
On the emergence of domestic popular fiction, see Introduction to Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and
Violence in Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008).

41
 [Belinskii’s] judgments [about literature] had… drastic consequences for Russian

reader: they became a model for teaching literary criticism in schools.

[Belinskii’s] idea that “literature is a textbook of life” turned the study of

literature into a particular subject: “life-ology” [zhiznevedeniie]24. The characters

became role models, their fate was a model for [real life] relationships… In

essence, all of the [Russian] classic literature, as interpreted by the [Soviet]

school, is a type of moral doctrine, a peculiar surrogate of religion25.

While the mass reader seems to stop reading Russian classics and “serious”

literature in general in the 1990s, Vail’ and Genis still conclude that the imaginary

Russian reader treats (or at least should treat) the texts as an “encoded revelation”, which

needs to be decoded on the basis of the particular reader’s “individual spiritual

experience.”26 Such wishful, and nostalgic, thinking only attests to the fact that, for post-

Soviet intellectuals, there remains an unconscious attraction not just to Belinskiian “life-

ology” approach to reading literary texts, but also to the transformational and

pedagogized Soviet aesthetics of reception, even as Socialist ideology underlying both is

already discredited. By inviting the reader to look to the classics in their search for their

own identity, Vail’ and Genis preserve the pedagogical value of literary text, appealing to

the meta-ideological value of the Russian classics: “in order to read [the classics] there
24
Vail’ and Genis continue that the reader is supposed to “outgrow” Belinskii’s ‘proto-Socialist Realist’
approach (establishing a pragmatic connection between, if not outright conflating, art and life, Belinskii’s
literary criticism is undoubtedly an important source of the Soviet doctrine of transformational aesthetics
discussed by Dobrenko). Nonetheless, Vail’ and Genis still seem to have a particular affinity to Belinskii’s
“life-ology”. Thus, they continue to be Belinskian in spirit when, in another essay in the collection, they
reason about which of two characters is “better” (read: which of the two can serve as the most beneficial
role model).
25
Vail’, Genis 2003, 96. “Но куда более грандиозные последствия суды Белинского имели для
русского читателя… Идея ‘литература - учебник жизни’, к которой со временем свели творчество
Белинского, превратила словесность в особый учебный предмет - жизневедение. Персонажи стали
примерами, на судьбе которых разбирались модели взаимоотношений... По сути, вся наша классика
в школьной интерпретации - вид нравственной доктрины, своеобразный суррогат религии”.
26
Vail’, Genis 2003, 99.

42
was no need to wait for the next ‘thaw’27. We often forget that when schoolchildren in the

Stalin era learned something by heart, it was not just [the state-approved] Demyan

Bednyi’s poems, but Lermontov’s, too.”28

Now that Stalin comes into the picture, a return to Dobrenko’s discussion of how

the Soviet “state reader” was made might provide an insight into the reasons why

transformational and pedagogized aesthetics of reception retain their attractiveness in the

post-Soviet context.

Boris Groys discusses, in his Total Art of Stalinism, Socialist Realism’s late-

Soviet legacy, and notes this aesthetic paradigm’s exceptional conduciveness for

mythologizing not just the objects of art, but aesthetic practices themselves. Groys argues

that, in the late-Soviet context, “the devices of Stalinist indoctrination were [used to

demonstrate] the similarity of this myth to those of both the present and the past to

reconstruct the single mythological network in which the modern consciousness

functions.”29 The evident temptation of Stalinist mythology for late-Soviet art lies in the

figure of Stalin, the “artist-tyrant” in Groys’s words, who for Stalinist art becomes a locus

of symbolic, but also of aesthetic, authority. It is Stalin’s power to hold myths about the

state (but also myths about art) together that late-Soviet art, not anymore overseen by a

similar source of authority30, nostalgically seeks.

Thus, Stalinist mythology becomes especially relevant in the late- and post-Soviet

context; it is then not entirely surprising that part of it, the mythologized Soviet reader, is

27
Vail' and Genis refer to the “Khrushchev Thaw,” a period of relative democratization in Soviet history
(roughly 1956-64), associated with more creative freedoms; the name comes from the title of Il’ia
Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel, Ottepel’ (The Thaw).
28
Vail’, Genis 2003, 8.“А главное - чтобы читать Чехова и Толстого, не надо было ждать очередной
"оттепели". Часто забывается, что школьники сталинской эпохи учили наизусть не только Демьяна
Бедного, но и Лермонтова”.
29
Groys 1992, 95.
30
See Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of Stalin as the Soviet paternal metaphor.

43
a concept that has a potential to inform the post-Soviet reader. What exactly is this

mythologized Soviet reader, then, and what happens to him31 in the post-Soviet context?

As Dobrenko shows in his analysis of the Soviet reader’s politics of

interpretation, this reader is a paradoxical creature: he actively searches literary texts for

models of their own behavior, and actively negotiates, through a variety of state-

supported feedback channels, both the form and the content of literature. “Characteristic

[for the Soviet reader]”, Dobrenko concludes, “is the effort to explain an image while

overlooking its ‘literariness.’”32 In practice, however, this does not mean that the Soviet

reader fails to see a difference between literary characters and “real” people, boundary

between life and art thoroughly blurred by Socialist Realist method. Instead, the reader

has to adopt a paradoxical mode of reading which simultaneously reinforces and ignores

this boundary. To reformulate Dobrenko’s argument in the language of psychoanalysis,

this reader knows very well that what he reads is not “life” but, in a classic fetishist

move, very much wants it to be, to an extent that he sometimes forgets about ever

knowing the difference.

On the one hand, this reader is extremely pragmatic, trying to fit himself into the

character’s shoes, or to compare the representations of social phenomena with his own

experience of these phenomena. On the other hand, this reader still turns to the text as the

authorized source of socially and politically relevant models, as the state legitimizes the

controlled environment of the text to be a “better” source of such models than “real life”.

This reader emerges as a result of intensive soul-searching, to which reading serves as an

31
I intentionally use the pronoun ‘he’, following Dobrenko, as this reader is a variant of model Soviet
heroic masculinity.
32
Dobrenko 1997, 107.

44
occasion; he emerges a dutiful learner of channeled and sanctioned social meanings that

the text itself, interestingly, may or may not possess.

What happens to the author of the text, so promptly ignored by both the imaginary

Soviet and the post-Soviet reader so far? Is there a place for the author in the

mythological quest of the Soviet reader, beyond divining “what the author wanted to

say?”

“The [Soviet] reader does not want to read the author’s text”, Dobrenko argues,

“since he is entirely carried away by the reading of his own, second meaning of the text,

to which he gives birth in the process of reading.”33 By putting production and reception

into dangerously close proximity, such mode of reading, then, blurs the line between the

reader and the writer. Dobrenko illustrates the easiness with which a Soviet reader could

become a Soviet writer with several case studies. In a way, this is a “natural” move;

when, channeled through the prescriptive messages of the state institutions, literary

characters insistently serve as real-life role models, the reverse relationship in which real-

life models become literary characters flows from the mode of reading as “writing

oneself.”

When the Levada report insists that the Russian reader of the 2000s is passive and

dispassionate, it implicitly compares this reader to the Soviet model, to the reader who is

“’different from all the other readers in the world, a Soviet reader, a reader-builder, and a

reader-fighter’… This literary character is what the ideal Soviet reader is;”34 this reader is

essentially a Socialist Realist character35.

33
Dobrenko 1997, 111.
34
Ibid., 301-302.
35
Ibid., 258.

45
 This mythological figure may seem just a nostalgic post-Soviet conjecture;

however, Soviet literary production and reception were so deeply intertwined that a post-

Soviet return to the mythology of readership points to some of the processes in post-

Soviet literary production that aim to cover the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the

reader and the text staged by post-Soviet intellectuals.

The Unmaking of the State Writer: Literary Landscape in Ruins?

The fate of the book would decide Pavel's own fate. If the manuscript was rejected

that would be the end for him. If, on the other hand, it was found to be bad only in

part, […] he would launch a new offensive. His mother took the parcel with the

manuscript to the post office. Days of anxious waiting began. Never in his life had

Pavel waited in such anguished suspense for a letter as he did now. He lived from the

morning to the evening post. But no news came from Leningrad. The continued

silence of the publishers began to look ominous. From day to day the presentiment of

disaster mounted, and Pavel admitted to himself that total rejection of his book would

finish him. That, he could not endure. There would be no longer any reason to live.

[…] At last, when the agony of waiting had become well-nigh unbearable, his mother,

who had been suffering from the suspense no less than her son, came running into the

room with the cry:

“News from Leningrad!”

It was a telegram from the Regional Committee. A terse message on a telegraph form:

“Novel heartily approved. Turned over to publishers. Congratulations on your

victory”.

46
 His heart beat fast. His cherished dream was realised! The steel bonds have been

burst, and now, armed with a new weapon, he had returned to the fighting ranks and

to life36.

Nikolai Ostrovskii’s narration becomes clipped; time shrinks in the closing pages

of How the Steel Was Tempered (1930-32) as his protagonist, Pavel Korchagin, anxiously

awaits the state’s permission to become a Soviet writer, thus staging an “aesthetic

revolution from below.”37

Disabled by his war wounds, paralyzed and blind, Korchagin searches for a way

to rejoin the ranks of the builders of the new Soviet state; writing seems to be the only

option left. Having missed on much of his formal education, Korchagin understands that

his writing skills are lacking; he improves them by becoming a voracious reader and only

then emerges as a writer, “heartily approved” by the Party Committee.

This plot stages a model for the Soviet reader to become a Soviet writer, but it

also goes beyond just that, establishing a mode of “complete identification with the hero,

[…] a desire to replace a literary character, to turn life into literature.”38 The author of

Korchagin, Nikolai Ostrovskii, the Russian Civil War veteran, turned his own life into

literature, modelling the literary character on himself. Korchagin, in turn, became a

personal favorite (and a role model) for the Great Patriotic War youth resistance group

leader, Oleg Koshevoi; this diligent Soviet reader himself went on to become a literary

character, in Aleksandr Fadeev’s Socialist Realist masterpiece, The Young Guard (1946;

1951). The interaction between Nikolai Ostrovskii, Pavel Korchagin, and Oleg Koshevoi

36
Nikolay Ostrovsky. How The Steel Was Tempered. Translated from the Russian by R. Prokofieva.
Moscow: Progress Publishers (Progress Soviet Author Library), no year (1973). P.141-142.
37
Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary
Culture. 1st ed. (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2002), xx.
38
Dobrenko 1997, 289.

47
demonstrates that, as Soviet critics would put it, “before our very eyes, the hero crosses

from the pages of the book into life… the full cycle of interaction of literature and reality

is completed”39.

This is a disturbing aesthetic of reception, and it may seem surprising that the

ideal Soviet reader, packaged together with an unmistakably avant-garde call for total art,

is indeed the nostalgic object mourned by post-Soviet intellectuals. After all, this

aesthetic is defined by the “absence of the boundary between Konstantin Simonov40 and a

Kaluga tractor driver”41 (as Dobrenko succinctly puts it), and thus is inherently counter-

elitist. Can the ideal Soviet reader become a post-Soviet nostalgic object?

Stripped of Socialist ideology, however, the distilled myth of the adolescent42

Soviet reader can become a nostalgic object for both intellectual paternalist elitism and

for the post-Soviet writer. This reader does not resist, and even welcomes, the exceptional

porosity of the boundary between the reader, the character and the writer, while retaining

a deep respect for the work of art. This reader is everything the post-Soviet writer wishes

for, for a number of reasons.

In his Remaining Relevant After Communism, Andrew Wachtel examines the

post-Communist shift in the social perception of the role of writer. Socialist ideology not

informing aesthetic practices anymore, the change in the status of a writer in post-

Communist societies is intrinsically connected to the issue of Socialism eliminating the

39
S. Tregub and I. Bashelis, “Schast’e Korchagina”, in “Znamia”, 4(1944), 127 (quoted in Dobrenko 1997:
290).
40
Dobrenko refers here to Konstantin Simonov (1915-1979), an eminent Soviet poet, six-time Stalin Award
laureate and the functionary of the Union of Soviet Writers.
41
Dobrenko 2002:279.
42
“In principle, Ostrovskii’s novel [How the Steel Was Tempered] presupposes a child reader, either a child
or an infantile adult who “for his entire life connects his ideal of man with an image of a hero idealized by
him most often in his middle years of school. In his behavior he is guided by thoughts of how this hero
would act in his own situation. Pavel Korchagin was just this sort of ideal for Oleg Koshevoi” (Dobrenko
1997:151)

48
possibility of choice, Wachtel suggests43. In post-Communist societies, the formerly

monolithic audience segmented through the increase in the number of published titles and

the decrease in the number of copies of each title, Wachtel shows (and several publishing

industry surveys44, together with the Levada report’s findings, support this observation

for the Russian case).

The post-Communist writers, Wachtel continues, found themselves negotiating

literary pluralism45: one single author could no longer capture the attention of every

reader, and their readers no longer shared a single (or at least comparable) social

experience46. In this light, Vail’ and Genis’s call in the 1990s for the return to the classics

becomes a social imperative: the classics provide the readers with a universal language47

just when, in Wachtel’s model of a post-Communist society, “great work[s] of literature

[that can] recapitulate the general truths of people’s experience48” are seemingly no

longer produced.

In the 1990s, the suddenly-post-Soviet writer had found him- or herself in the

situation where the universal language of Soviet ideology has revealed itself to be a

universalizing language. Michael Gorham, speaking about the 1990s, notes that

most of the major [literary] trends that have emerged in the past decade have done

so if not as a kind of linguistic revolt against the clichéd and tightly controlled

43
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern
Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. 217).
44
See, e.g., Irina Kabanova, “Sladostnyi Plen: Perevodnaia Massovaia Literatura v Rossii v 1997-1998
godakh”, in “Volga”, 10 (1999), online version available at
http://magazines.russ.ru/volga/1999/10/kaban.html.
45
Wachtel 217.
46
Wachtel 218.
47
Vail’ and Genis 2003, 7.
48
Wachtel 218.

49
 language of the Soviet state, then at least as an alternative source of linguistic

authority to fill the void created by that language’s wholesale de-legitimation49.

In other words, post-Soviet disillusionment in the formerly universal language

sanctioned by the Soviet ideology was negotiated on two levels. In terms of post-Soviet

language, the amount of linguistic and genre experimentation, and verbal innovation

readily observed across post-Communist literatures of the 1990s attests to Gorham’s

observation that “periods of radical social change tend to share a basic dynamic in the

evolution of language culture– one in which the rejection of old models of writing and

speaking lead to verbal innovation and the articulation of a new order.”50

On another level, the experimentation and innovation characteristic of the post-

Soviet literary landscape can be read as a paradoxical nostalgic mechanism. By searching

for the ways to articulate the reality, by coming up with ways to fix it in language, these

experimental texts seek to reestablish the authority of the written word over this reality,

that is, to return to the mythological possibility of having a universal language in which

to speak, to replace the dysfunctional language that Communist ideology formerly

provided. The runaway post-Communist textuality was, after all, navigating a void whose

boundaries were shaped by the Soviet institutions of literary production and reception.

To see how the processes of linguistic experimentation and articulation of the

renewed authority of language over social reality are intertwined, one is bound to turn to

the case of the Viktor Pelevin, the major figure of the contemporary Russian literary

49
Michael S. Gorham, "Language Culture and National Identity in Post-Soviet Russia", in Landslide of the
Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia, Ingunn Lunde, ed. (Bergen: Slavica Bergensia , 2006),18-
31, 19-20.
50
Ibid., 19.

50
landscape. Aleksandr Genis speaks of the “Pelevin phenomenon,” formulating Pelevin’s

contribution to the post-Soviet search for a new language in the following way:

Pelevin was often (and unreasonably) criticized for his inability to write

beautifully [pisat’ krasivo]. This is, of course, pure nonsense; Pelevin searches for

– and usually finds – the new linguistic strata. When asked, “what do you think

post-perestroika Russia is, linguistically,” he answers… : “The logos is tired of

being ‘preserved,’ it is tired of rotting in the mouth of a powerless intelligent –

and it has returned to life in the language of fighting demons. The speech of the

thugs [iconically associated with the early 1990s and often featured in Pelevin’s

prose. -DK] possesses an incredible power, because behind every turn of their

bazar [thug slang for “discourse”- DK] there is a very real flicker of life and

death. This is why it is very interesting to formulate the metaphysical truths [in

the language of the thugs] – in their language, these truths become alive.”51

Pelevin does not want to “write beautifully” because the notion of “harmonious,”

smooth textuality belongs to, as the Levada report would have it, the “ideology of

enlightenment” carried by the Soviet intelligentsia, who now ostensibly have their mouth

stuffed with the rotting logos. Pelevin looks, instead, for the kind of language that bridges

the gap between the signifier and the signified, the gap that was extensively widened by

the Soviet clichéd rhetoric, and fixed, Pelevin suggests, by the Russian intellectual

discourse which falls back on the “old” models of expression.

51
Aleksandr Genis. “Fenomen Pelevina”, http://pelevin.nov.ru/stati/o-gen1/1.html.“Пелевина часто и
несправедливо ругали за неумение писать красиво. Это, конечно, чепуха, Пелевин ищет — и
обычно находит — новые языковые пласты. … на вопрос, что для вас ‘постперестроечная Россия в
языковом плане’ Пелевин отвечает следующим образом: “Логос устал ‘храниться’, устал преть во
рту бессильного интеллигента — и возродился в языке сражающихся демонов. В речи братков есть
невероятная сила, потому что за каждым поворотом их базара реально мерцает жизнь и смерть.
Поэтому на их языке очень интересно формулировать метафизические истины — они оживают”.

51
 While the colorful speech of post-Soviet thugs may indeed bring [Russian]

language and the [social] reality it is supposed to reflect closer to each other, Pelevin’s

relatively early post-Soviet linguistic experiment suggests that what covers the gap

between the signifier and the signified created on the ruins of the Soviet language is the

language of immense, if schizophrenic, potential of signification—indeed the language of

power.

In Pelevin’s 1992 novella, Ukhriab, an aging retiree, Ivan Maralov, gradually

slips into insanity, slowly realizing that everything around him is ukhriab. The

nonsensical noun appears in Maralov’s consciousness together with a morning-after

headache, and he dismisses it as result of overindulging. However, he gradually starts

seeing ukhriab in surrounding objects. It is noteworthy that Maralov does not precisely

see ukhriab: a product of Soviet “readerly” culture, he reads it in the decaying urban

landscape dominated by banners featuring clichéd Soviet pronouncements like “We wish

success to the participants of the XI international festival for disarmament and nuclear

security.” Maralov’s third-person subjective narration claims that he does not see any

trace of ukhriab in the slogan, yet Pelevin’s newly post-Soviet reader, out of habit of

abbreviating longer pieces of state-sanctioned rhetoric, would readily see ukhriab in

“Uspekha uchastnikam XI mezhdunarodnogo festivalia za razoruzheniie i iadernuiu

bezopasnost’.”52 Sometimes, the names of the objects surrounding Maralov appear to be

in an onomatopoeic relationship with ukhriab, sharing a syllable or two; sometimes there

are no traces of phonetic similarity. Grasping for the remnants of his sanity, Maralov

theorizes that ukhriab is a blend (not precisely an acronym) of two Russian words,

khrebet (“ridge”, or “spine”) and ukhab (“pothole”). The conceptual opposition of “high-
52
X is the letter of the Cyrillic alphabet that denotes the sound [h].

52
low,”53 evident between the two “parts” of ukhriab, allows a reading of ukhriab as a kind

of a linguistic condensation of a gap (Maralov theorizes, at one point, that ukhriab is a

hole in his soul, but at the same time a symbol par excellence that is meant to cover this

hole).

Tracing ukhriab to its possible linguistic origin, however, does not help Maralov

at all. Instead, ukhriab is represented as a rupture in the canvas of Maralov’s life – first a

crack, then a canyon, then an abyss. He sinks deeper and deeper into his obsession with

ukhriab, reads it in more and more objects around him, and then comes to realize that he

was initially mistaken: it is not that the objects turn into ukhriab, but instead ukhriab

reveals itself to Maralov, formerly disguised in the shape of these objects:

[This something] … has become an ukhriab and was now shining over Maralov’s

inner world as a dim red flickering light. Before the dream, Maralov saw air as

air, and asphalt as asphalt, but it turned out that everything around was simply a

shape in which ukhriab temporarily molded itself – just like bronze remains

bronze whether it is molded into a toy soldier, or into a cross, or into a monument

to Kirov. So, there it was – a huge, immeasurable ukhriab, shining right through

Maralov… and Maralov knew that the most important thing for him now would

be to delay realizing that he, essentially, is also an ukhriab54.

53
See Vyacheslav Desyatov, “Viktor Pelevin mezhdu Ukhriabom i Uralom”,
http://lik.altnet.ru/Kritika/pelevin.htm.
54
Viktor Pelevin. “Ukhriab”, in Vse Rasskazy (Moskva: Eksmo, 2005), 176. “это что-то, мелькнув
сначала неясной точкой где-то на периферии души, вдруг с ужасающей скоростью понеслось с
самому центру личности и лопнуло там, превратившись в ухряб и осветив внутренний мир
Маралова тусклым красным мерцанием,- до этого сна Маралов видел воздух как воздух, асфальт
как асфальт и так далее, теперь же оказалось, что все вокруг – просто форма, в которой временно
застыл ухряб,- так же, как бронза остается той же бронзой, отливаясь и в солдатика, и в крестик, и в
памятник Кирову. Итак, огромный, безмерный ухряб, а в центре - просвеченный ухрябом Маралов,
осознающий, что самое главное для него - удержаться от понимания того, что и он, в сущности,
тоже ухряб”.

53
 As a linguistic gap, ukhriab has a paradoxical potential to be an all-encompassing

master signifier, as it possesses an uncanny ability to cover other linguistic gaps: when

Maralov reads, ukhriab manifests itself in both the Russian classics, separated by space in

phrases like “dvukh riabchikov” (“two grouses”), and in Soviet fiction, split into two by a

period: “… vozdukh. Riabaia…” (“… air. Pockmarked…”)55.

This ability of ukhriab also works on the intersection of the imaginary and the

symbolic, and more importantly, emerges in the process of reading Pelevin’s text: in a

movie theater, Maralov observes a mural depicting a mountain ash (riabina in Russian)

with two sunflowers (podsolnukh) on its sides, and readily sees ukhriab. Of course,

ukhriab emerges here not precisely for Maralov but for the reader who has no way of

seeing what Maralov sees except by reading the words that describe the image. The

reader of Pelevin’s text thus largely contributes to Maralov’s insanity by reading the

image for him.

No matter in which direction Maralov thus “reads” the mural, ukhriab effectively

provides a perverse continuity to seemingly disjointed symbols. Pairing sunflowers with

mountain ash was often favored by the Soviet genre of still life;56 it can be argued that

ukhriab, seemingly only a source of Maralov’s anxiety and a symbol of the failure of

language to account for the surrounding reality, nonetheless does create a perversely

continuous national landscape out of the remnants of the Soviet imagery of the mural.

Ukhriab finally removes any and all distinctions between the object and its name

in the protagonist’s psyche. A taxi trip is described in the following way: “The street

rushed towards him – that is, for the driver it was the street, but for Maralov… he knew

55
Ibid., 174.
56
Aleksandr Os’merkin’s 1952 painting, “Podsolnukhi i Riabina”, is a classic representative.

54
what it was; on its sides were separate gray vertical ukhriabs, on which other ukhriabs

were glowing, square-shaped and yellow.”57 Maralov completes the trip to “uncover the

symbol [ukhriab] with the help of the symbol itself,”58 hoping to understand ukhriab, so

to say, on its own terms. What ukhriab conceals is something unbearable, yet Maralov is

determined to see what it is, still hoping that there is, as Jacques Lacan would put it, a

metalanguage to understand a symbol that fails to “symbolize” by perverting the

relationship between the signifier and the signified.

Expectedly, Maralov’s final journey ends in encountering ukhriab, in the form of

a trench in the ground, into which Maralov promptly falls to his death, to become one

with the signifier that subsumed his world.

The intuitive reading of the short story would suggest that, as the symbols of

decaying Soviet landscape become ukhriabs in Maralov’s mind, the story is a metaphor

for the late- and post-Soviet linguistic failure manifested in the disconnect between the

signifier and the signified. However, the closing passage of the story suggests that it may

well be a very productive linguistic failure: the protagonist “determinedly… threw away

the useless big word, ready to see what was beyond it.”59 In other words, the story

explores the failure of language to account for reality, moves onto considering the

possibility that there is no metalanguage, and dismisses it. This restores, for the

protagonist at least, the ability of symbols to stand for something, even if this something

is accessible only in death. The story is disillusioned in the linguistic sign, metaphorizing

57
Pelevin. “Ukhriab”, (2005),180. “Улица понеслась навстречу - улица для водителя, а для Маралова
– известно что: имевшее по бокам отдельные вертикальные ухрябы серого цвета, на которых горели
другие - желтые и квадратные”.
58
Ibid., 179.“И вскрыть его надо с помощью самого этого символа, то есть ухряба”.
59
Ibid., 182 (“А затем решительно, с размаху, повалился в яму и, как сбрасывают покрывало с
памятника, отбросил ненужное большое слово, приготовясь увидеть то, что за ним”.

55
its detachment from the signified, but not in the mechanism of signification itself.

Ukhriab, having destroyed Maralov’s psyche, turns out to be a not an empty signifier but

a signifier of some higher order: it denotes a transcendental meaning which, of course,

“normal” language cannot hope to describe. The story ends there, seemingly

deconstructing language but in fact reinforcing its magical power.

It seems that logocentrism, traditionally associated with Russian culture,

intrinsically shaping literary practices60 and predicated on the belief in the nearly magical

power of language, determined the post-Soviet literary response to the collapse of both

the institutional structures and aesthetic practices of Soviet literature. Post-Soviet writer,

having glimpsed into the void where the signifiers lost their ability to be unquestionably

matched with their signifieds, had no real means to counter this void of language but with

language itself. The search for a language which will restore the chain of signification

continued in post-Soviet literature even after the relationship between the signifier and

the signified was shown to be irreparable (as the case of Ukhriab demonstrates).

Post-Soviet literature, I would argue, has seen something in the post-Soviet

symbolic void that it could not live with, as none of the Soviet cultural assumptions about

the role of literature carried over into the post-Soviet literary landscape. While Wachtel

suggests that a radical rethinking of the role of literature in the fabric of social life could

and should occur as a post-Communist society transitions to new models of cultural

production, I propose that this did not precisely happen in the Russian case. Russian

literature wanted to remain Literature with a capital L. Though the range of ideologies

supporting the myth of great national literature have revealed their mythological nature in

post-Soviet context, the myth itself was largely sustained as a function of cultural
60
For a discussion of Russian logocentrism, see Conclusion to Epstein 1995.

56
nostalgia for the institutional status of literature, and as a cultural defense mechanism

against the linguistic void.

As much as Pelevin would want one to believe that the old models of literature’s

functioning in Russian society are dead, his own writing suggests that this is not precisely

the case. Pelevin’s essay Zombifikatsiia (“Zombification”, 1990), mentions a banner that,

anecdotally, used to decorate the building of the Kazan’ train station: “Communism”, the

banner proclaims, “is pyzdyr maksymardysh pyzh!” In the essay, devoted to the Soviet

Union’s “magical practices” that socialize the citizen into the ritualized magic of state

ideology, Communism is defined as a string of nonsensical words with no grammatical

relation to one another61. However, it is worth noting that the essay does provide a

definition of Communism, even though the language responsible for the definition does

not do its job. In other words, the stated goal of Soviet/Russian literary textuality, -

production of profound, socially relevant meanings, - continues to be pursued, even if this

production is now met with certain difficulties.

In the same essay there appears an image of “lexical impact” [leksicheskii udar], a

peculiar feeling experienced when one is faced with the swarm of empty Soviet

signifiers: “All these… terms in the Martian language produce a sensation of some

inflexible, inhuman power – nothing human can be called thus.”62 Yet, the incessant

traumatic repetition of the empty, inhuman Soviet signifiers in Pelevin’s own prose is

also a “lexical impact” in its own right. The repetition is what validates these signifiers

61
The phonetics of the utterance are a conventionalized parody of the sounds of the Tatar language.
62
Viktor Pelevin, “Zombifikatsiia”, online version available at http://pelevin.nov.ru/pov/pe-zombi/2.html.
“Все эти... марсианские термины рождают ощущение какой-то непреклонной, нечеловеческой силы
– ничто человеческое не может так называться”.

57
because they are again included into the productive field of the literary text, a field whose

very existence is predicated on the functionality of linguistic expression.

Nearly twenty years later, one of the characters of Pelevin’s 2009 novel, T, will

say that “the modern mind… often keeps on thinking even after having realized that it

does not exist,”63 effectively summing up the nature of the problem the post-Soviet writer

faced as they formulated their responses to the linguistic and institutional void of post-

Soviet literary landscape.

It has to be said that Wachtel’s post-Communist literary pluralism is undoubtedly

a feature of this landscape. The explosion of domestic genre fiction towards the mid-

1990s, proliferated mainly by the younger generation of writers, attests to that. However,

the heavily mythologized status of Russian national literature continued to define not just

the nature of the literary innovation, but also the aesthetic and thematic inertia in the

work of those newly post-Soviet writers who retained many cultural assumptions about

literature formulated by generations of Russian intellectuals. As much as Pelevin

(jokingly) claims to have a goal of liberating the rotting logos from the mouth of an

intellectual, he, nonetheless, entrusts himself into its power.

Pelevin hardly has any other option; the absolute linguistic void (into which we

glimpsed together with the protagonist of Ukhriab and were relieved to dismiss)

completely denies the writer any ability to produce meaning. In the context of nearly two

hundred years of socially responsible, heavily pedagogized, high-status literature, the

attempts to articulate the post-Soviet void, so to say, on its own terms, like the one in

Ukhriab, find themselves in opposition to another kind of articulation. In these attempts,

63
Viktor Pelevin. T (Moskva: Eksmo-Press, 2009), 364. “Однако…современный ум изощрен настолько,
что нередко продолжает думать, даже поняв, что его нет”.

58
linguistic innovation is complemented by a compulsive repetition of the language that

was. Just as the protagonist of Ukhriab attempts to cover the void produced by an empty

signifier with the help of the signifier itself, the mythologized entity known as the

Russian language is used in the post-Soviet literary context to mask its own apparent

absence. This perverse operation aims to restore the stability of a national literary

tradition by providing a self-consciously illusionary linguistic continuity. This allows the

institution of national literature to face the paradigmatic shift that strips it of its former

status.

Pushkin pushkinski velik: Actualizing the Classics

Russian logocentrism is largely predicated on the mythologized status of national

language. Lara Ryazanova-Clarke sums it up:

The Russian language is seen as a national treasure, an encapsulation of national

history and culture… Usually, language cultivation falls back on the discourse of

the Great Tradition, which supports the symbolic status of the language and which

is based on a set of beliefs, often of a mythological nature, about the relation of

language to the history of the people. Generally, in the narrative of the Great

Tradition, the past is believed to be a realm of perfection, whereas innovation is

suspected of being corrupt. Evoking the image of the Golden Age of Russian

language, for instance, Lyudmila Graudina writes: “[In] the Russian language…

both form and content of that perfect language which we call the language of

Pushkin, Blok… Dostoievskii and Tolstoi, are distorted [narusheny].”64

64
Quoted in Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, “‘The Crystallization of Structures’: Linguistic Culture in Putin’s
Russia”, in Landslide of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia, Ingunn Lunde, ed. (Bergen:
Slavica Bergensia , 2006), 31-64, 49. ”Русская речь ведет свое существование [...] Но в ней давно

59
Graudina’s lament of the state of national language in this passage is something to be

expected; Gorham posits the necessity of some form of linguistic purism as a reaction to

the linguistic experimentation characteristic of the cultures in transition65. Linguistic

purism per se aside, however, there is something else that is distorted in the post-Soviet

treatment of the Great Tradition: its relationship with the classics themselves. This

relationship is predicated on a distinctly Soviet mode of reading, not just in terms of

normativity of interpretation but also in terms of the relationship between the author and

their text.

Dobrenko suggests that “[T]he notion of ‘the classics’… in Soviet times

became… the model and value standard for judging literary quality, and… reached a

‘maximal semantic purity, functionality, and inflexibility’.”66 The mechanism through

which such inflexible normativity of interpretation was possible is, of course, reading

literary texts from the premise of establishing authorial intent. It seems that the decades

of this mode of reading have left a pleasantly tingling scar on Russian literary culture: the

writers belonging to the classical Russian canon, as Vail’ and Genis so effectively

demonstrate, become indispensable characters in their text. In the process of “proper”

reading, the writers acquire the agency that consistently supersedes even that of the text’s

“conventional” protagonists. We remember that the Soviet reader (in Dobrenko’s

rendering) had an unmatchable, if perverse, creative power over the text; the extension of

this power is the creation of a whole new character out of the text’s author.

нарушены и содержание, и формы того совершенного языка, который мы зовем языком Пушкина,
Блока […], Достоевского и Толстого”.
65
Gorham 19.
66
Dobrenko 1997, 153.

60
 The problem with this new character in the post-Soviet context is that it should

not exist, as the mode of reading supporting its creation is seemingly completely

ideologically discredited. However, the “readerly power” to create literary characters

perhaps proved to be tempting for post-Soviet literature. A function of the Soviet porous

boundary between the reader and the writer, this distinctly “magical” power allows one to

maintain a conceptual connection between literary reception and literary production, a

connection no longer sustained by the institutions of literary culture.

Another of Viktor Pelevin’s early 1990s short stories provides an insight into the

post-Soviet literary treatment of the classics, which points to the fetishistic mechanism of

appropriating the national cultural heritage. This mechanism works, synchronically, in

order to maintain a semblance of a unified field of national culture; diachronically, it

manifests the desire to establish historical continuities when none are to be had.

Mardongi (“The Mardongs”) is a novella pretending to be a piece of cultural

criticism. It analyzes the history and ideology of a religious sect in Russia in the early

1990s. The sect, headed by a spiritual leader, Nikolai Antonov, follows Tibetan spiritual

teachings on life and death, summarized in the following passage:

It turns out there is no death, because it has already happened; every human

carries within a so-called ‘inner corpse’, which gradually overpowers the identity.

Life, according to Antonov, is not much more than being pregnant with a corpse

that develops inside, like a fetus. Physical death is a final actualization of the

inner corpse, and thus represents a delivery. A living human, being a fetus of a

corpse, is a defective and inferior being. The corpse, on the other hand, is thought

61
 to be the highest form of existence, for it is eternal (not physically, of course, but

conceptually)67.

Antonov’s teachings are acted out in magical rituals, of which the creation of a

mardong is the most important. A mardong is the actual (not the “inner”) corpse of a

prominent person that has to be preserved and exhibited upon death to commemorate the

person’s achievements.

The continuity of the eternal existence of the corpse, then, requires the adherent of

Antonov’s philosophy to conceptually reconcile two paradoxes. Firstly, continuity

emerges in Antonov’s framework only as a result of undergoing a rupture (death), a

paradox that the Antonovites resolve by claiming that death should be treated as birth into

eternal life. Secondly, eternal existence is achieved through the process of objectification,

with the resulting object bearing little resemblance to the “original” being; this paradox is

also resolved through claims of inauthenticity of the “original”. The paradox of

sacrificing “conventional” authenticity of the object in order to achieve an authenticity of

some higher order may seem to be just a clever satirical pastiche of quasi-religious

teachings68 until Antonov’s philosophy suddenly expands the notion of mardongs:

Antonov writes of spiritual mardongs, formed after the death of people who had

left a significant trace in the group consciousness … the unilateral interpretation

of the words and the thoughts of the deceased [metaphorically] serves as

bricks... According to Antonov, [Aleksandr] Pushkin’s spiritual mardong was

67
Mardongi is cited from: Viktor Pelevin, “Mardongi." (Viktor Pelevin - sait tvorchestva.
http://pelevin.nov.ru/rass/pe-mard/1.html (accessed September 8, 2010)).
68
Civil freedoms associated with perestroika included freedom of religion, previously guaranteed only de
jure. The 1990s saw numerous religious and para-religious philosophies, Christian and non-Christian,
competing to fill the void of religion created by the Soviet ideology. For more on this competition, along
with post-Soviet “preference” for mysticism, see “Dvadsat’ let religioznoi svobody v Rossii (Moskva:
ROSSPEN; Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, 2009)(«Двадцать лет религиозной свободы в России» (М.:
РОССПЭН; Московский Центр Карнеги, 2009).

62
 ready by the end of the 19th century, with Tchaikovskii’s operas served as the

final painting [of the mardong]. Cultural space, according to Antonov, is a

Communal Grave where the spiritual mardongs of ideologies, masterpieces and

great men repose; the presence of the living in this sphere is offensive and

inadmissible…

The obvious foreignness of the concept of cultural space for the potential rank-

and-file Antonovites aside (the essay even mildly discourages readers’ requests to reveal

the physical site of the Communal Grave), the space of Russian culture is thus infused

with the paradoxical continuity discussed above. After all, even if this space is “not the

culture itself, of course, but… its mardong,” the dead greats inhabiting it are in fact alive,

if inauthentic.

The creation of continuity out of compulsive repetition of discontinuities becomes

focused once Aleksandr Pushkin comes into picture. Pushkin is often credited to be the

father of modern Russian language, and his oeuvre has been, in Vail’ and Genis’s words,

“long ago overshadowed by the image [literally,obraz (icon). – DK] of Pushkin himself.

His writing itself has become the sole reason and the sole justification for the independent

existence of this masterpiece of harmony.”69

Pushkin, then, is to be understood, so to say, an sich: the author and his writing

conceptually merge (and become the signifier collapsing on itself). Pelevin’s text

provides an ironic commentary to that effect: one of the Antonovite practices is called “A

talk about Pushkin” and concludes in a mantra, “Pushkin pushkinski velik” (Pushkin is

69
Vail’ and Genis 2003: 76. “Образ Пушкина давно уже затмил самого Пушкина. Его творчество
стало поводом, оправданием для самостоятельного существования этого шедевра гармонии”.

63
pushkinesquely great)70. Pushkin[‘s greatness] is explained through Pushkin’s greatness,

the signified disappears as the signifier stands for itself (just as we have seen in Ukhriab).

What remains is a possibility of language sustained by an appeal to the (fantasy of)

national literary tradition. In other words, while the metaphoric connection fails (Pushkin

does not stand for anything other than himself), the repetition of the signifier provides for

the metonymic connection to the language itself.

Indeed, in Ryazanova-Clarke’s words, “The Pushkin myth, for almost two

centuries used as a symbol of Russian national identity, has also experienced a successful

transposition into [post-Soviet]… culture. The name as well as the image of Pushkin, […]

represents metonymically the Russian language itself.”71 The metonymic nature of the

connection is acutely felt in Tatiana Tolstaia’s The Slynx (1999), where, in the post-

apocalyptic Moscow, a group of intellectuals, in an attempt to “preserve the spiritual

heritage”, persuades the unwilling protagonist to carve out an idol to represent Pushkin72.

The naïve protagonist, Benedikt, born after the apocalypse which wiped out modern

Russian culture and threw the country back to feudalism, fails to understand the reason to

memorialize a person he has never heard about. He asks his mentor about Pushkin’s

70
The source of the mantra is Vladimir Mayakovskii’s misquotation of Russian ego-futurist poet Igor’
Severyanin. Severyanin’s 1923 volume, Nightingale (Solovei), includes a poem titled “Pushkin”, with the
final stanza: “Пускай он стар для современья, / Но современье для него / Ничтожно: ведь его
мгновенье - / Прекрасней века моего!” (He [Pushkin] may be old for the modern age/ But the modern
age is for him / Just nothing… etc.). Mayakovskii (intentionally?) misquoted this stanza in his 1930 speech
to the Moscow Krasnaya Presnia Komsomol organization, where he quoted the poem as: “Да, Пушкин
мертв для современья, / Но Пушкин пушкински велик” (“Yes, Pushkin’s dead for the modern age / But
Pushkin’s pushkinesquely great!”). Mayakovskii, then, “kills off” Pushkin where Severyanin only saw
slight redundancy. (See: Fond “Fundamental’naia Elektronnaia Biblioteka”. Vladimir Mayakovskii.
“Vystupleniie v dome komsomola Krasnoi Presni na vechere, posviaschennom dvadtsatiletiiu deiatel’nosti”
(http://feb-web.ru/feb/mayakovsky/texts/ms0/msc/msc-422-.htm). Fundamental’naia Elektronnaia
Biblioteka: Russkaia Literatura i Folklor. (Фундаментальная Электронная Библиотека: Литература и
Фольклор. Владимир Маяковский. “Выступление в доме комсомола Красной Пресни на вечере,
посвященном двадцатилетию деятельности”).
71
Ryazanova-Clarke 49.
72
In the novel, the idol is meant to replace the famous “Opekushin’s Pushkin,” a monument to the poet
erected on Strastnaia Square in Moscow in 1880 and, in the novel, ostensibly destroyed in the apocalypse.

64
significance and the answer he receives is, as per the Russian intellectual tradition,

“Pushkin is our everything.”73

In The Slynx, then, Pushkin too is an empty signifier – here, it stands not for itself

like in The Mardongs, but for everything else. Just how empty this signifier is becomes

apparent when Benedikt dutifully carves out “the pushkin” (now even being denied

capitalization of the last name). Six-fingered, legless, Pushkin is erected in someone’s

modest vegetable patch, and the birds promptly cover the idol with their droppings, while

the inhabitants of the post-apocalyptic Moscow are perplexed as to the reasons why

anyone would want to waste their time on memorializing something that has no

significance.

Such perverse memorializations of Pushkin, as a mardong in Pelevin or as a

wooden idol in Tolstaia, lend themselves to a question: do these texts satirize the Russian

myth of the classics which used to be reinforced in the Soviet era by the prescriptive

normativity of interpretation? They certainly seem to do so, exposing the reproduced

images of Pushkin to be simulacra, copies whose original is inaccessible if not precisely

nonexistent; the mardong of Pushkin reveals that what Vail’ and Genis’s “Pushkin

image” covers is not the meaning of the myth, but its lack.

Lyudmila Parts reads a range of post-Soviet texts that use the “image of Pushkin”

to critique late and post-Soviet cultural reality:

Each text centers on an attempt … to make a symbolic break to [Pushkin] through

the layers of ideological gloss… All of these attempts invariably fail, and instead

73
Literally: “Пушкин-наше всё”. This particular oft-repeated mantra comes out of a real Soviet high-
school-literature formula.

65
 of ‘the living Pushkin’ the characters are left with various versions of a

“mummy”: a ghost, a death mask, a blurred photograph, a monument.74

This conclusion certainly suggests that the master signifier of the national literary

tradition, Pushkin, may have lost most of its signification power for the post-Soviet

attempts to define contemporary social reality. However, what does the persistent attempt

to decorate the post-Soviet literary landscape with the mardongs of the classics mean,

then?

Some arguments propose that post-Soviet literature’s irreverence towards the

national literary heritage is a reaction to the “centuries of logocentrism.”75 The persistent

references to classical heritage seem to evidence the crisis of the author, which, as

Wachtel would have it, is indeed a feature of any post-Communist literary landscape.

Yet, the Russian canon writers (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov)

nonetheless76 constitute the “persistent myth of Great Russian Literature,”77 an

entrancing, bewitching78 symbolic cache. Russian classics

matter not as authors of actual works…; as cult figures, these writers are nothing

but symbolic entities by and through which culture identifies itself and on which

it relies to assure its identity and continuity… During the periods of cultural

instability, cult names served as pivotal figures who ensured the unity of culture.

74
Lyudmila Parts, The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic. 2 ed. (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2008), 29
75
Epstein 1995, 328.
76
Parts 11.
77
Ibid.,7.
78
Aleksandr Ageev, “Conspectus of the crisis: Sociocultural Conditions and the Literary Process” , in Re-
Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995),
170-189, 176, quoted in Parts 12.

66
 New texts congregated around them and created a productive field between texts,

allowing for interaction among writers of different epochs.79

In other words, while the attempts to articulate the contemporary social reality

through the master signifiers of national literary tradition fail in post-Soviet texts, the

persistent references to cult Russian writers in post-Soviet texts can be read as enabling

post-Soviet literature to (re)establish a diachronic unity of the national literary field.

However purposefully inauthentic this particular continuity may have become80, we have

argued that, for literature, an evidently empty signifier is always better than the absence

of any possibility of signification.

How is this “reaching out” to the classics accomplished? The classic approach to

the issue of intertextuality considers the ways in which the author’s text enters into a

dialogue with other texts. However, the persistent model of the national literary field,

with its peculiar distribution of the creative agency, the model shaped by the cultural

memory of the porous Soviet boundary between the writer, the reader, and the literary

character, complicates the Bakhtinian dialogic intertextuality. It is a surprisingly

monologic dialogue, as the post-Soviet texts address the symbolic entities of the Russian

classics, the master signifiers of national literary tradition who they know are already

dead, having become mardongs.

The illusion of dialogue with the classics, a dialogue which does not imply a

response, is connected to the peculiarities of the Soviet mode of reading. Of course, post-

Soviet writers read their classics; however, the Soviet reader, not really interested in

reading the author’s text because he was busy creating his own, shines through the

79
Parts 7.
80
Post-Soviet texts, after all, have to “reach out” to the classics through another constructed gap in the
national literary tradition, created by the Soviet period.

67
following (post-Soviet) description of the role of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin (1825-32) in

Russian public consciousness:

We all live with our personal Eugene Onegin – and it is an intimate relationship

[…] Everything is known about this novel, and in fact it is not necessary to read it

[italics mine. – DK] – it is with us even without reading, in the form of countless

quotes, be that on the level of the language itself, or on the level of the image or

an idea.81

If “reaching out” to the classics does not even mean reading them, how does

intertextuality, in a sense of a stylistic and thematic dialogue with other texts, work for

post-Soviet literature? What is the mardong of Pushkin: an intertextual reference, a

metaphor for the current state of Russian literature, or something else altogether? Does

the persistent post-Soviet return to the grotesquely distorted, inauthentic Pushkin signify

disillusionment in the myth of the Great Literature or an attempt to reinforce it?

We remember that Pelevin has “successfully” resolved the issue of a mardong’s

inauthenticity, and indeed the issue of its post-mortem existence itself. This post-Soviet

Pushkin may be dead and inauthentic to a casual (positivist) observer, but the

counterintuitive philosophy outlined in The Mardongs does not deny symbolic value to

empty signifiers—it just learns to work around this emptiness to create its own

mythological structure. It is able to do so by blurring the boundary between the writer and

the literary character, actualizing in the text the conceptual transition characteristic, as

Dobrenko suggests, of Socialist Realist aesthetics. Pushkin the writer becomes Pushkin

the character, and there is a good reason for it: Vail’ and Genis, for example, explaining

81
Vail’ and Genis 2003:81. “Все мы живем со своим личным “Евгением Онегиным” -- вполне
интимноВсе известно про этот роман, и на самом деле читать его совершенно не обязательно: и без
того он с нами в виде бесчисленных словесных, образных, идейных цитат.”

68
what “Pushkin” is, or at least should be, for the post-Soviet reader, propose to read a

tome of Pushkin’s poetry as a narrative of the protagonist’s evolution82. Of course, the

process of reading is thus metaphorized. However, this is yet another problematic

metaphor, as Russian cult authors become characters of Vail’ and Genis’s own book, of

the metatext of Russian literary tradition, thereby attesting to the persistence of the Soviet

legacy in the ways post-Soviet culture conceptualizes the relationship between the writer,

the reader, and the character. Why would both post-Soviet fiction and criticism want

Pushkin, along with other Russian cult authors, to become characters, to repeat the path

outlined for them by Socialist Realist aesthetics?

The Soviet reader, as we remember, was an idealistic, demanding creature. He

looked to literature for answers but the text he read meant little in comparison with the

text he created through the process of reading. Reading Russian classics through the

Soviet interpretative lens made this reader into the post-Soviet writer.

Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard: Russian Literature as a Textual Laboratory.

In 2002, the activists of a pro-Putin youth organization, “Iduschiie Vmeste”

(“Marching Together”), organized an infamous political event in Teatral’naia Square in

Moscow that bore all features of an avant-garde happening, complete with Duchamp

references. The group unveiled an installation, consisting of a foam plastic model of a

toilet bowl, and proceeded to fill it with brochures containing quotes from Vladimir

Sorokin’s 1999 novel Goluboie Salo (Blue Lard) soaked in chlorine bleach. In the course

82
Vail’ and Genis 2003:68-69. “И если читать эту книгу… в хронологическом порядке, то мы
обнаружим в ней один из самых сложных и увлекательных романов русской литературы. Черты
классического романа этой книге придает естественная последовательность -- от рождения поэта до
его смерти. Эволюция главного героя -- тема книги. От страницы к странице меняется герой, а
вместе с ним и форма, в которой запечатлены эти перемены”.

69
of the legal battle between “Iduschiie Vmeste” and Sorokin that followed this symbolic

cleansing of the post-Soviet literary landscape, “Iduschiie” alleged that the novel

contained obscenity and pornography and attempted to have it banned. The

“pornographic” episode “Iduschiie” mentioned in their lawsuit is a relatively short (for

Sorokin, at least) graphic description of a sexual act between two characters named Stalin

and Khrushchev. Though the characters bear little resemblance, physical or otherwise, to

the historical Stalin and Khrushchev in Sorokin’s phantasmatic alternative history of

Russia, there is little doubt that the young Russian nationalists were unhappy not

precisely with the graphic sex but with Sorokin’s political “audacity” that ran against the

Putin government’s effort to put a stop to the widespread “desecration” of Soviet symbols

underway in 1990s.

The novel contains equally controversial, episodes of child rape and elaborate

sexualized torture; furthermore, Sorokin’s prose featured taboo vocabulary and explicit

descriptions of sexual acts for quite some time before Blue Lard. However, the Blue Lard

scandal was significant in that it illuminated a kind of a “reverse shift” of the role of

literature in the post-Soviet consciousness. One single book, again, could hold the public

imagination, even if it happened via “pornography’s” engagement with ideology (to

borrow from Eliot Borenstein)83. Sorokin’s “pornography” of the 1990s was not yet able

to do the trick; his infamous Tridtsataia Lyubov’ Mariny (Marina’s Thirtieth Love, 1982-

84, first published in Russia in 1995) hardly produced any public outcry. Putting Stalin

and Khrushchev in bed together in the early 2000s, however, led to a paradoxical effect:

the very dense, if beautifully so, experimental novel acquired an unexpectedly large

83
See Eliot Borenstein, “Stripping the Nation Bare: Russian Pornography and the Insistence on Meaning”,
in International Exposure : Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800-2000. New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 2004. Ed. Lisa Z. Sigel, 232- 255, 234.

70
audience84, cementing Sorokin’s status as a cult Russian writer, a status he continues to

openly resist in his numerous interviews.

The plot of Blue Lard, too, resists summarizing, but can be generally outlined: in

the future, somewhere in the northeast of what used to be Russia, a group of scientists are

locked in a secret laboratory. The narrator, Boris Gloger, a self-described

“biophilologist”, explains in letters to his young male lover that he is responsible for an

important part of the experiment: the research group clones Russian writers. The clones

then enter a “script-process,” during which they ostensibly produce clones of the classic

texts. The researchers, however, are not interested in these texts; they are after blue lard,

which deposits in the clones’ bodies after they finish writing. Blue lard, complex quasi-

scientific explanations suggest, promises eternal life and potentially allows solving the

problem of perpetual motion.

The first narrative break occurs when the narrator is killed: the narration shifts

from first to third person as the lab is destroyed (and blue lard stolen) by a nationalist

religious sect of Zemleioby (“Earthfuckers”). A description of the history of the sect and

its entertaining magical practices follows, while the sect leaders decide to send blue lard

to the past. The Earthfuckers want the magical substance to end in the hands of the 20th

century Soviet government.

Another narrative break occurs, and the reader is transported into a perversely

decadent version of Stalinist Russia, complete with the Khrushchev/Stalin scene, cocaine

snorting and pedophilia. Stalin’s best friend in this universe is Hitler, who expresses a

desire to partake in the use of blue lard. After several plot twists, Stalin battles Hitler for

the last remaining syringe of lard extract. The syringe pierces Stalin’s eye and the lard is
84
By 2009, at least four editions of Blue Lard were published.

71
injected directly into his brain, making it grow larger than the universe itself. Yet another

narrative break, and Stalin (a “different” Stalin) wakes up as a servant to the young man

who was Boris Gloger’s addressee in the opening part of the novel.

The plot of Blue Lard is entertaining, not just ironically commenting on Soviet

history, but also tickling the (Russian) reader’s fascination with taboo subjects and

language. Sorokin’s prose is a little too experimental to be a bestseller, however.

Characterizations like “nasiliie nad iazykom” (literally, “violence over language”) and

“blowing the text up with a blast of narrative”85 abound in critical responses to Sorokin’s

prose. Before the reader gets to the infamous sex scene in the middle of Blue Lard, then,

they would have to deal with a staggering amount of linguistic experimentation in the

midst of a protean narration.

The Russian language of the future in Blue Lard is a mix of Russian, German,

Chinese and English, topped with invented and outright incomprehensible words86.

Sorokin is kind enough to provide two separate glossaries (one for Chinese words,

another for “all other words and expressions”) in the appendix, but, of the five opening

lines of the novel, each already features one or two neologisms and/or non-Russian

words, tucked between oxymorons and unexpected paragraph breaks. Ingunn Lunde

argues that the mixture of different linguistic elements in Blue Lard is “a kind of

commentary on the language situation in Russia today.”87 We have touched on the

85
Viktor Erofeev, “Russkie Tsvety Zla”, in Russkie Tsvety Zla: Sbornik, ed. V. Erofeev (Moscow, 1997),
7-30, 10-12: “[Sorokin is] the leading monster of the new Russian literature.. he blows them [the texts] up
with a blast of narrative”. Quoted in Dirk Uffelmann, "Led tronulsia: The Overlapping Periods in Vladimir
Sorokin’s Work from the Materialization of Metaphors to Fantastic Substantialism" in Landslide of the
Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia (Bergen: Slavica Bergensia, 2008). 100-126, 102.
86
As Ingunn Lunde shows in her reading of the novel. See:Ingunn Lunde, “Language Culture in Post-
Soviet Russia: The Response of Literature”, in Landslide of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet
Russia (Bergen: Slavica Bergensia, 2008), 64-80, 68.
87
Lunde 69.

72
challenges the Russian language faced when the formulaic Soviet discourse failed to

support the production of meaning. It may seem, then, that Blue Lard indulges in a

linguistic experiment, so to say, with a purely mimetic purpose: in a classic dystopian

move, the novel outlines the present state of national language through a temporal

displacement. To continue with this line of thought, the novel’s deconstruction of classic

narrative conventions may indeed even be a similarly negative commentary on the

present state of Russian literature.

However, while it is tempting to read the novel as a lament of the state of national

language and literature, it seems that Blue Lard also offers a strong protection to the

seemingly disintegrating Russian language by shaping it in the form of a novel, however

distorted this form may have become. Lunde notes that

[I]n Sorokin’s novel… the limits, challenges and potentials of language are

investigated within a closed linguistic environment… in Sorokin’s literary

universe there are no problems of communication between the characters, while

the reader is constantly challenged by non-comprehension and the potential

meaningless of what he or she is reading88.

In other words, within the novel, and on its own terms, there is nothing wrong with the

[Russian] language. It is only when the reader comes into picture that Sorokin’s “textual

violence” becomes apparent.

The reader, then, is an indispensable component of Sorokin’s “method,” which

may at the first glance seem to purposefully ignore the reader to indulge in the pure

artistry of linguistic experimentation. The shifts in the narrative perspective, and the

incomprehensibilities resulting from the linguistic combinations and narrative breaks,

88
Ibid., 70.

73
paradoxically, create the reader by demanding a response from them. Rajendra Chitnis,

examining the narrative breaks in Sorokin, suggests that

Sorokin’s writing may be understood as an attempt to restore to literature Roland

Barthes’s notion of jouissance…Barthes argues that the pleasure of

reading…‘proceeds from certain breaks…’ resulting from the redistribution of

language89… [Breaks in Sorokin’s texts] seek to teach this hesitation, a sudden

awareness of helplessness…90.

In Chitnis’s analysis, the novel takes a pedagogical function: it shapes and molds the

reader, demanding that the reader possesses an agency, even if it manifests in an

emotional response like that of “Iduschiie Vmeste”, thoroughly disgusted by the

grotesque blend of ideology and pornography. Blue Lard, thus shaped to elicit reader’s

response, makes (concerned) citizens out of “Iduschiie”. While creating the reader

through making the process of reading difficult may seem a complete ideological and

stylistic break from the principles of Soviet art, the Socialist Realist mode of producing

state readers is thus paradoxically re-launched.

Dobrenko describes concerned Soviet readers who demanded “more realism,” or

simpler language, in their letters to the publishers. The Blue Lard scandal convincingly

demonstrates that just such a concerned “Soviet reader” became possible again, rising

from Sorokin’s post-Soviet linguistic abyss. Though the path towards (re)making the

Russian reader was increasingly circuitous in Sorokin’s case, within the linguistic

ruptures of Blue Lard there lives a nostalgic desire to have the kind of literature which

89
Rajendra A. Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russian and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech
and Slovak fiction of the Changes, 1988-1998 (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European
Studies, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 127.
90
Chitnis 129.

74
elicits response, and which overcomes the post-Soviet reader’s passivity outlined by the

Levada report - even if literature has to drastically change its methods to achieve this

effect.

In Chitnis’s reading, the violated reader experiences hesitation because of the

narrative and linguistic breaks, thus emerging as a paradoxical subject who acquires

power by being rendered helpless. In Sorokin’s prose, however, not just Sorokin’s own

text produces this paradoxical subject: textuality in general seems to have this kind of

power, as Sorokin appropriates other “texts” to expose the breaks in conventionalized,

“classic” textuality.

To explore the issue, let us go back to the clones of Russian writers diligently

producing blue lard in the underground lab. Appropriately for the dystopian, magical set-

up, there are seven clones: Tolstoy-4; Chekhov-3; Nabokov-7; Pasternak-1; Dostoevsky-

2; Akhmatova-2; and Platonov-3. Tended to by Boris Gloger and the rest of the staff, the

clones perform their “script-process,”91 and promptly hibernate to produce the lard. The

texts they produce are seemingly a mere byproduct92 of the operation93.

The texts the clones produce have been popularly read as a stylistic

deconstruction of Russian classics94. Dostoevsky-2, for example, produces a text titled

“Count Reshetovskii”, appropriately set in that gloomy version of St. Petersburg which

appears across (the original) Dostoevsky’s texts so often that it has come to be popularly

91
The term used to describe writing seemingly eliminates any traces of creativity from the practice.
92
For a representative reading of this kind, see Dirk Uffelmann, "Led tronulsia: The Overlapping Periods in
Vladimir Sorokin’s Work from the Materialization of Metaphors to Fantastic Substantialism" in Landslide
of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia (Bergen: Slavica Bergensia, 2008), 100-126.
93
As evident in Boris’s businesslike attitude when he sends the texts to his lover, to be kept in a “script
collection” Boris maintains.
94
See, e.g., Erich Poyntner. Anderswelt: Zur Struktur Der Phantastik in Der Russischen Literatur Des 20
Jahrhunderts (Europaische Hochschulschriften: Reihe 16, Slawische Sprachen). New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2007.

75
known as “Dostoevsky’s Petersburg.” The arrival of two visitors to Count Reshetovskii’s

mansion culminates in a scene where the numerous characters experience a range of

extreme emotions as a reaction to the Count’s proposition to spiritually unify humankind

by physically sewing the humans together. This amusing (and disturbing) scene is a

parody of numerous Dostoevskian scenes that explore the interactions between sublime

emotions and human irrationality, most notably the money-burning scene in The Idiot

(1868).

Not just the plot, but the style too becomes the subject of the parody in Sorokin.

The disjointed dialogue, unexpected movements of the characters, narration going on

tangents, complex sentence structure, italicizing, as well as indirectly addressing the

reader by adding a polite postposition to the end of the sentence, all parodically

exaggerate the distinctive features of Dostoevsky’s narrative style.

The text that emerges from this exaggeration is undoubtedly disturbing: it

provides little context to the characters’ emotions, and is confusingly catachrestic. One of

the Count’s visitors has a “dead, yet extensively long snake” as a belt; ever-expanding

metaphors exhaust themselves in repetition: people flock to the Count’s famous

receptions “like bees to the beehive, yes, like little swift fussy bees to a new, sturdy

beehive, though beehives can be of different structure there are ones that look like

houses…,yessir” etc.95 It seems that the stylized “Dostoevskian” language is thus

recreated to bring it down: none of the features of Dostoevsky’s style are left unattended

95
Vladimir Sorokin, Goluboie Salo, in Vladimir Sorokin. Sobraniie Sochinenii v trekh tomakh. Tom 3
(Moskva: Ad Marginem, 2002), 7-302, 33. “[К]ак пчелы к улью, да, как проворные, хлопотливые
пчелки к новому, добротно обделанному улью хотя ульи имеют разную конструкцию есть колоды
есть домики и борть и земляные ульи-с”.

76
to, and each, as if deliberately, presents a frustration as to either its role as an element of

the narrative, or to its very meaning.

The clones’ texts have been thus read as a deconstruction of the type of textuality

associated with the Russian classics.96 Indeed, the parodic texts blow up the smoothness

of Tolstoy’s narrative when Tolstoy-4’s text compulsively recreates the characteristically

Tolstoian sprawling description of a hunt – the digression from the “original” being that

the 19th-century Russian aristocracy in the clone’s text uses serfs instead of hounds. Or,

the harmony of poetic sublimity is deconstructed when Pasternak-1’s poem turns out to

feature not (the original) Pasternak’s favorite image, a star, but a cunt, based on the

phonetic similarity of the two Russian words.

Does “Sorokin [feed] … on authoritative discourses,”97 as Mark Lipovetsky

suggests? Does this de(con)structive parodying represent a radical breakdown of the

“classic” textuality by stripping it of dignified authority, or by demonstrating through

exaggerated, yet surprisingly faithful, stylistic imitation that the classic masterpieces of

mythologized textual harmony are not (and never were) in any way “harmonious?” Of

course; yet, if we consider that the classic texts in our analysis of post-Soviet engagement

with the classic legacy so far mattered less than the mythologized entities of the classic

writers themselves, we can argue that Sorokin’s deconstruction of the classics’ style(s)

has a paradoxical effect.

96
Poyntner 111-112.
97
Mark Lipovetskii. “Goluboie salo pokoleniia, ili dva mifa ob odnom krizise.” Online version available at:
http://www.srkn.ru/criticism/lipovetskiy.shtml. “Классики русского модернизма подверглись
канонизации только в последние годы, обросли мифами и легендами, стали героями школьных
сочинений. А значит — созрели для Сорокина, который питается авторитетностью и ничем
другим”.

77
 The string of catachreses in Dostoevsky-2’s text (the device that seems to be

favored by the rest of the clones, too) creates incomprehensibilities in the text, but instead

of reading the deconstruction of the “metaphoric ability” of classic textuality as a

symptom of the post-Soviet breakdown of the myth of Russian literature, we may read it,

in view of the resurrection of the engaged reader in Sorokin, as something else entirely.

Valentin Asmus, the Soviet critic who was instrumental in theorizing the aesthetic

paradigm of the Soviet art, maintained that “what is called ‘incomprehensibility’ in art is

perhaps simply an inexact name for reader laziness… his lack of desire to exert

himself.”98 This notion, which shaped the idealized, sacrificial nature of Soviet reading, is

picked up by Sorokin’s text. The amount of exertion required of the reader of Sorokin is

staggering, but out of it, paradoxically, emerge the distilled versions of Russian classic

textualit(ies).

The peculiarities of Dostoevsky’s style emerge from Sorokin’s parody precisely

because the clone’s text magnifies the elements of Dostoevsky’s style, and reactualizes

these elements by making them visible in the text which, as we have seen, already

demands the reader’s undivided attention. This insistent reconstruction achieved through

estrangement, then, reinvests the text with significance. Sorokin explains what

Dostoevsky’s text is by showing what it is not.

The classical texts mutate in the dystopian setting of the novel, metaphorizing

post-Soviet literature’s necessity to mutate in the (in its own way post-apocalyptic) post-

Soviet context. This mutation is a complex reaction to the Soviet aesthetics of reception,

which froze Russian classical texts into their respective fixed interpretations. The

98
Quoted in Dobrenko 1997: 17-18.

78
classical texts became frozen words, just like the words Pantagruel throws to his

companions in an episode from Rabelais that is an epigraph to Blue Lard:

He then threw us on the deck whole handfuls of frozen words, which seemed to us

like your rough sugar-plums, of many colours… and when we had somewhat

warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow, and we really heard

them, but could not understand them, for it was a barbarous gibberish.99

While it might seem that the classic texts become in Blue Lard “barbarous gibberish”,

deconstructed and stripped of meaning, a byproduct of blue lard, the epigraph to Blue

Lard also metaphorizes a concurrent process: Sorokin’s text, in a way, “melts” the fixed

interpretations, allowing the reader to “hear” the Russian classics again.

Mark Lipovetsky argues, in conjunction with Sorokin’s treatment of the clichés of

Soviet discourse, that

In … Sorokin’s works…two parallel processes occur simultaneously: the

remythologization of the discourse, the reconstruction of its ritual semantics, is

combined with the consequent revelation of the discourse’s contradictions – in a

word, with the deconstruction of the discourse, which brings it into a state of

absurdity of complete chaos. But since both of these parallel processes take place

simultaneously, the result of any text by Sorokin is the mythology of the

absurd.100

Transferring this argument to Sorokin’s treatment of another authoritative

textuality compromised in the post-Soviet context - the classical literary heritage - we

99
The epigraph to Blue Lard is taken from Chapter LVI, Book Four of Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and
His Son Pantagruel, quoted here from Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel (Project
Gutenberg) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1200/1200-h/p4.htm#2HCH0055.
100
See Mark Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue With Chaos (Armonk, New York: M.E.
Sharpe, 1999), 214-15.

79
may argue that Sorokin’s own text accomplishes what the “frozen” classics themselves

failed to accomplish. It insists that while the mythologized status of Russian literature is

challenged by a variety of social and aesthetic factors, literature remains a functional

medium, if not precisely for meaning-production, then at least for production of the

mythological “textual magic.” This magic is promptly conserved in the controlled

environment of the laboratory (and, by extension, in the environment of the (literary) text

of Blue Lard itself), preserved in Boris Gloger’s “script collection,” and substantiated in

the metaphor of the magical blue lard101.

Blue Lard is another example of post-Soviet “literary fetishism.” The novel

knows very well, and does not conceal the fact, that literature can no longer be what it

used to be: a universal frame of reference; a powerful avenue of identity production.

However, the desire for these kinds of myths is evident in that, for deconstructing these

myths, Sorokin appeals to, and makes use of, the Soviet model of literary production and

reception. Gleb Shul’piakov discusses the violence Blue Lard inflicts on the myth of

Russian literature, suggesting that

[Sorokin proves] that even after all his experiments [Russian literature] remains

alive. It turns out that Russian literature is still “fireproof”: it’s just that in the

present conditions it needs a new method of tempering… Blue Lard is a novel

about how the steel was tempered, [tempering Russian literature as] the steel.102

101
For the detailed discussion of Sorokin’s substantiation of metaphors in Blue Lard, see Dirk Uffelmann,
"Led tronulsia: The Overlapping Periods in Vladimir Sorokin’s Work from the Materialization of
Metaphors to Fantastic Substantialism" in Landslide of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia
(Bergen: Slavica Bergensia, 2008), 100-126, esp. 115.
102
Gleb Shul’piakov, “Potselui menya v zvezdy”, http://www.srkn.ru/criticism/shulp.shtml. “Что делает с
[русской литературой] Владимир Сорокин? Доказывает, что даже после всех его экспериментов она
остается живой. Оказывается, что русская литература все также огнеупорна: просто в нынешних
условиях ей требуется новый метод закаливания...”Голубое сало” - роман о том, как закалялась
сталь, где в роли металла выступает великая русская”.

80
 Here, Shul’piakov notes an unmistakably Socialist Realist aesthetic at work in

Sorokin’s experimentation. He compares the novel to the epitome of Socialist Realism,

Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, which, as we have seen, provided a model for

the interaction of literary production and reception for Socialist Realism. Sorokin’s avant-

garde experiments with literary language, conventions, and heritage in Blue Lard, while

representing a radical break with Socialist Realist aesthetics on the formal level,

nonetheless conceptualize the interaction between the reader and the text in a way that is

surprisingly similar to the Socialist Realist model.

On the one hand, by illuminating Russian classic textuality through its

deconstruction, Blue Lard mocks the mode of reading the classics installed by the Soviet

pedagogized aesthetics of reception, where the “ideological enjoyment,” filtered through

the mythologized author figure, proscribed enjoying the language and the style, the

enjoyment of reading the author’s text.

Yet, on the other hand, while the novel thus “depedagogizes” the fixed

interpretations of the classics, it does so through proscribing the reader’s access to the

“authentic” classical text. Just as the Soviet aesthetics of reception allowed the reader to

effectively ignore the author’s text to create his own, Sorokin’s text makes the reader not

read the classics, again. Sorokin, rather violently, hijacks the creative agency from the

congealed symbolic authority of the classics. The reader, of course, ends up reading not

Dostoevsky, but Sorokin, who comes to complete, metaphorically, the Soviet

“hermeneutic circle” of production and reception. A diligent reader of the Russian

classics (as evident from the beautiful stylistic mimicry of the parodies), Sorokin

demands of the classics that which they can no longer offer in post-Soviet context, that is,

81
symbolic authority. In a way, Sorokin thus “becomes” a writer by taking it onto himself

to shape and mold the reader through linguistic and narrative experimentation, and by

sustaining, if perversely, the mythologized status of Russian literature.

The ambivalent treatment of the symbolic authority of the writer in Blue Lard

elucidates the reasons for Sorokin’s emphatic denial of his cult status. On the one hand,

literary textuality, as we have seen, is reinvested in the novel if not with conventional

symbolic authority, then at least with the power to influence the reader’s mind. The

classical texts are to be preserved in Boris Gloger’s collection, even if they had to

undergo a drastic mutation to be perversely re-actualized for the reader. On the other

hand, however, the figure of the author himself becomes in Sorokin’s text yet another

mardong, a speechless lab monster described, in the case of Dostoevsky-2, as “a

specimen of indeterminate gender, of medium height and with pathology of chest

development.”103

What do we make of this “split” of symbolic authority? Textuality itself

reacquires it as a result of Sorokin’s experimentation; the figures of the authors are,

conversely, stripped of it. The “alternative Stalinist Moscow” segment of the novel

features characters with names AAA (easily recognizable as Anna Andreevna

Akhmatova), Osip (Mandel’shtam), and Iosif (Joseph Brodsky). The culmination of the

plot line (complete with drinking urine, yelling obscenities and others of Sorokin’s

shock-value favorites) occurs when AAA gives birth to a mysterious black egg, to be

swallowed by the “next big poet.”

103
Vladimir Sorokin, Goluboie Salo, in Vladimir Sorokin. Sobraniie Sochinenii v trekh tomakh. Tom 3
(Moskva: Ad Marginem, 2002), 7-302, 22. “Особь неопределенного пола, среднего роста, с патологией
грудной клетки”.

82
 A number of children, recognizable as 1960s Soviet poets Robert

(Rozhdestvenskii) and Zhenya (Evgenii Evtushenko) among them, fail to swallow the

disgusting object, and AAA laments that “the golden chain will be broken… and you

won’t know what the stars are,”104 in a mocking reference to trite metaphors used to

describe the continuity of Russian poetic tradition. Another child, Iosif (Brodsky)—in

Sorokin’s depiction an excessively unpleasant young man — manages to swallow the egg

and is envied by the rest of the phantasmatic poetic circle.105

The episode is as physiologically detailed and disgusting as it is elucidative of

Sorokin’s ambivalent treatment of the writer’s symbolic authority. What do the acid

pastiches of this group of (Soviet) writers,106 and the fact that none of them merited a

parody of their texts, mean? Certainly the parodies of the texts of some Russian canon

writers in Sorokin still can potentially be read as (dialogically) intertextual references,

signifying that post-Soviet literature cannot quite let go of the mythological riches of the

Russian/Soviet literary heritage. Yet how do we deal with the symbolic entities of the

writers who are thrown outside of the field of conventional intertextuality by being made

into stick-characters, their connections with their texts irreparably severed?

104
Vladimir Sorokin, Goluboie Salo, in Vladimir Sorokin. Sobraniie Sochinenii v trekh tomakh. Tom 3
(Moskva: Ad Marginem, 2002), 7-302, 217. “Разорвется цепь златая…Будете прыгать по земле, как
блохи, и не знать, что такое звезды...”
105
The episode mockingly metaphorizes the circle of young poets who congregated around Anna
Akhmatova in her later years, and the symbolic “transfer of the poetic lyre” from the older poet of national
stature to the younger. The “transfer of the lyre” is modeled on the famous episode of Russian literary
history, popularized by Yurii Tynianov’s fictionalized biography of a German-Russian romantic poet,
Wil’gelm Kukhel’beker, Kukhlia (1925). In the novel, the Russian classicist poet, Gavriil Derzhavin,
comes to a poetry recital in St. Petersburg Lyceum where adolescent Aleksandr Pushkin is a student. Upon
listening to Pushkin reading his own poems (and running away in embarrassment), Derzhavin cries and
goes to look for Pushkin, which the subjective narration from Kukhel’beker’s perspective interprets as the
“transfer of the lyre.” In Blue Lard, Anna Akhmatova’s relationship with Joseph Brodsky and her
continuous support during Brodsky’s trial and exile is interpreted as such symbolic “transfer of the lyre.”
106
Mark Lipovetsky suggests that this group was “canonized” relatively recently, thus entering the cultural
space where Sorokin “feeds on authority.” See: Mark Lipovetskii. “Goluboie salo pokoleniia, ili dva mifa
ob odnom krizise.” Online version available at: http://www.srkn.ru/criticism/lipovetskiy.shtml.

83
 To trace the issue, we will need to go back to the “clone text” which stands out

from the rest: while all of the clone texts are relatively faithful stylistic parodies, this one

is not. The clone of Anna Akhmatova, Akhmatova-2, produces two pastiches of

Akhmatova poems, and then another text, a sprawling Soviet folk ballad.107 The source of

the poem is one of the forgotten masterpieces of Soviet folklore, the Tatar ballad “In the

Spring of 1930” (“V tridsatyi god vesnoiu”), narrating an all-too-familiar108 story of

collectivization and martyrdom: a pro-collectivization woman is murdered by the kulaks,

the criminals are brought to justice, and the Soviet collective farm workers triumph. The

broken iambic foot, the unusually long (for poetry in Russian) lines and couplet rhyming

produce an entrancing effect, which Sorokin’s parody picks up, magnifying the ritualistic

modality of folk poetry and making visible the structure(s) of symbolic authority upon

which Soviet mythology relies.

In the “clone poem”, set against the background of 1930s collectivization, three

female Tatar collective farm workers plead with the local Party official, Comrade

Akhmat, to help them against the village’s wealthy kulaks, who wish to interfere with the

women’s plans to build a school. Comrade Akhmat helps the women; grateful, they

spend the night with him, in due course giving birth to three sons. The narrative

continues, interspersed by poetic interjections: the sons, each named Akhmat, become

107
For a thorough survey of Stalinist folk ballads, see Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore
and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (New York: M.E. Sharps, 1991). The ballad in question was published
in Russian translation in the 1937 volume Folk Arts of the Peoples of the USSR (Tvorchestvo narodov
SSSR), edited by Maksim Gor’kii himself and commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution
of 1917. “V tridsatyi god vesnoiu…”, in Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR, M. Gor’kii, ed. (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo
redaktsii “Pravdy”, (1937?)), 408-409.
108
The most famous of the collectivization inspirational tragedies, the murder of a youth (Pavlik Morozov)
in Tavda, Siberia, was fictionalized in Vitalii Gubarev’s 1933 short novel, Pavlik Morozov. Morozov was
killed, in the official version, by his relatives who detested the fact the youth supported collectivization.
Morozov became an (ethically suspect) role model for the members of Young Pioneers organization: he
denounced his own father to the authorities after learning that his father, a local minor Party official, forged
documents and sold them to the kulaks, who fought compulsory relocation during collectivization.

84
great Soviet citizens, and are noticed by the “Great Lenin-Stalin” himself, who asks the

three Akhmats to join him in his “Invisible Kremlin” in “Heavenly Moscow”, where they

live in complete unity with the mythical (and magically zoomorphic) entity of “Lenin-

Stalin”, in fact on Lenin-Stalin’s sacred body parts that each rule a particular aspect of the

universe: chest, horns, and genitalia.

While this amusing story does little to reconstruct the textuality of Russian

classics through its deconstruction (as the rest of the clones’ texts do), it does illuminate

the mechanism by which symbolic entities of Russian writers become loci of symbolic

authority. Grammatically, Russian last names are possessive adjectives referring to the

father’s name (“Akhmatova” means, literally, “Akhmat’s”); simultaneously, the Russian

last name is homonymous to two case forms of the father’s name. The three sons of the

collective farm workers by the name Akhmat become, through their names being used in

a variety of case forms, a ritualistic repetition of Anna Akhmatova’s last name. This

sacrally multiplied Anna Akhmatova goes on to join the all-encompassing, omnipotent

“Lenin-Stalin”, the master signifier of the Soviet symbolic order, a benevolent father who

validates all kinds of symbolic authorities (the Akhmats’ sublime citizenly qualities and

Anna Akhmatova’s writerly authority) by subsuming them.

Such metaphorization of Stalin in Sorokin is, of course, another ironically

grotesque exaggeration. Yet, in view of the way that exaggeration functioned for Sorokin

so far, we may argue that Stalin as Groys’s “artist-tyrant” re-emerges from Sorokin’s

deconstruction. It is through this paternal validation that the (Soviet) writer can enter the

space of intertwined literary production and reception, to cross the boundary between art

and life and to become a character. Sorokin not just magnifies this aspect of Socialist

85
Realist aesthetics by metaphorizing, in Akhmatova-2’s poem, the way in which Russian

writers can become characters; Sorokin compulsively recreates it for post-Soviet

textuality by allowing the Russian writers to exist as literary characters in Blue Lard

itself.

Repetitively examining “Lenin-Stalin’s” “mighty horns” and “hairy balls” in

Ahkmatova-2’s poem, along with making Stalin the object of Khrushchev’s lust in the

novel may look like a transgression of symbolic authority, and it is. So is making Joseph

Brodsky swallow the disgusting black egg, and the rest of Sorokin’s grotesque portrayals

of the Russian classics. Yet, we can argue (in the Bakhtinian vein) that controlled

transgression of the law affirms and sustains the law. Sorokin’s own text becomes an

occasion to dissect the laws governing the myth of Russian literature, and while these

laws do not work for the duration of the text, their existence is illuminated by their very

absence. To follow in the same vein, Sorokin’s text then becomes a site of carnival, a site

of legitimized (and tightly controlled) transgression of the symbolic authority of the

mythologized Russian literary tradition.

Blue Lard demonstrates that the continuum of literary production and reception

staged by Socialist Realist aesthetic paradigm remains a lucrative space for post-Soviet

literature as it mourns the magical porosity of the boundary between art and life. This

porosity used to ensure the functionality of the myth of Russian literature by allowing the

reader, the writer, and the character to seamlessly transition between these “states of

matter” in the field of literary production and reception. This is a seemingly dead magical

space: it is validated by the already-dead symbolic Father, its magic destroyed and its

language dysfunctional; it is populated by the monstrous caricatures of Russian writers-

86
cum-characters. And yet, the real existence of a mardong of culture begins after its death,

Viktor Pelevin reminds us: in the controlled textual environment of Sorokin’s monster

laboratory, the congealed symbolic entities of the Russian classics melt under the “lexical

impact” of Sorokin’s linguistic experimentation, both Russian classical textuality and its

symbolic authority thus re-actualized in the post-Soviet cultural field.

Conclusion: The Writer, the Reader, the Character: The Post-Soviet Politics of

Textual Appropriation.

In 2009, Lev Tolstoy makes a grand re-entrance into the post-Soviet literary

landscape as the protagonist of Viktor Pelevin’s most recent novel, T. What at the onset

looks like historical crime fiction, a genre popularized in the early 2000s by Boris

Akunin’s bestselling imperial nostalgia series,109 introduces an image of Tolstoy familiar

to every school-educated Russian: the Count-turned-peasant ploughs the fields in search

of spiritual revelation. The novel then makes a series of sharp plot turns, revealing Count

T. to be, first, an accomplished martial artist suffering from amnesia, and, later on, a self-

aware character in the not-yet-completed post-Soviet historical crime fiction bestseller.

The creator of Count T., Ariel, his Shakespearian origins mockingly apparent, is a cynical

writer for whom writing is a commercial project, controlled by mysterious (and very

powerful) investors. Ariel reveals himself to his protagonist, and Count T. has to follow,

dumbfounded, the twists and turns of the complex politics of post-Soviet publishing as

the investors reject one plot line and demand another.

109
Boris Akunin’s continuing Fandorin series, an experiment in genre fiction by eminent Georgian-Russian
literary critic Grigorii Chkhartishvili, includes fourteen books (1998-present). Akunin’s highly engaging
prose is stylized to resemble fin-de-siecle Russian language, and features an intelligent, attractive
protagonist detective, an exoticized sidekick, romantic love stories, and political and social commentary
that posits the last years of the Russian Empire as a beautiful, diverse, exciting space of cultural stability.
Four of Akunin’s novels were adapted for screen in 2000s, with A-list cast, affirming the continuing
popularity of the genre.

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 Instead of following the original plan to send Count T. on a quest to find the place

of great spiritual significance, Optina Hermitage (little to no relation to the actual

Orthodox monastery which historical Lev Tolstoy visited), Ariel puts the Count into

excessively random tight spots, which allows the Count to showcase his impressive

martial arts skills as he contemplates his identity as a self-aware character. Crossing the

media boundaries on the whim of the publishing executives, Count T. meets another

action hero, Fyodor Dostoevsky, a protagonist of a video game and a skilled

sharpshooter.110

The bewildered Count tries to reacquire some agency in the story where he is the

powerless protagonist, and begins to write, real landscapes emerging before his eyes from

the words he puts on paper. Several complicated, Dan Brown-like conspiracy theories,

many philosophical discussions about the nature of reality, and a multitude of clever puns

later, Lev Tolstoy dreams about the novel Pelevin’s reader is currently reading and

concludes that the writer has to pretend that he is a character in order for the character to

appear. Immediately, we are back to Count T., who in the course of his quest has

acquired greater understanding (and mysterious powers). These powers enable him to

eventually collapse his creator’s world, annihilating Ariel and leaving Count T. in the

textual space of Pelevin’s text, complete with references to earlier Pelevin novels. The

appeased protagonist rides into the sunset, while the narration switches, for the first time,

from third person subjective to objective, claiming that all words are but a dream.

110
This video game character has to navigate a post-apocalyptic, sun-less landscape of, ostensibly, St.
Petersburg. Ariel explains to the puzzled Count that the first-person shooter game will be marketed as
“Dostoevsky’s Petersburg” (re-branding the already-mentioned gloominess associated with the notion as a
post-apocalyptic landscape), and that the branding decision is based on rock-solid market research, attesting
to the persistence of this imaginary literary space in the post-Soviet public consciousness.

88
 By 2009, Pelevin has cemented his status as the “most influential Russian

intellectual”111 and has become a cult Russian writer with websites, discussion forums

and a series of mockingly “deep” web comics112 devoted to his carefully cultivated,

enigmatic public persona. The publisher’s description of T ironically comments on the

cult of Pelevin through a reversal of authority: “T is the new novel by [Viktor Pelevin].

[During his reign], Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Putin served the people.”113 The blurb

omits Boris Yeltsin from the sequence of Russian leaders, thus positing the 1990s as a

gap in Russian statehood, a gap whose edges are held together by the figure of Pelevin.

The 2009 return to the figure of the writer sustaining a mythological continuity of

national history is significant: in the 1990s, we have seen thoughts about the place that

national literature occupies in the public consciousness scattered across the collections of

short stories (in Pelevin) and tucked between the deconstruction of Soviet master

discourses (in Sorokin). However, no single novel dealt with the post-Soviet challenges

to the mythologies of Russian literature as extensively and as directly as Pelevin’s T.

The Russian writers-turned-characters in T are, at the first glance, stick-figures

produced by the “literature-centric school education,” reduced to formulas like “Tolstoy

ploughed the land,” operating in similarly formulaic space like “gloomy, deserted St.

Petersburg” as it “always” appears in Dostoevsky. These formulas are piled on top of

other formulaic tidbits of globalized popular culture imagery, like martial artist-cum-

superhero shooting zombies. Making Lev Tolstoy do back flips is a strategy more fit for a

111
See “Samyi Vliiatel’nyi Intellectual Rossii. Opros v detaliakh” (ArtMedia Group, December 12, 2009),
OpenSpace.Ru (http://www.openspace.ru/society/russia/details/15155/)
112
For some amusing examples, see Pelevin’s fan site: Pelevin.nov.ru, “Viktor Olegovich”
(http://www.pelevin.nov.ru/victorolegovich/)
113
The publisher’s description of T: “Т – новый роман писателя, в эпоху которого служили народу
Брежнев, Горбачев, Путин”.

89
media fandom in a post-industrial society than for the otherwise surprisingly traditional

Russian novel of ideas, which makes me propose that the intertextual strategy staged by

Sorokin and fully developed in Pelevin is what Michel De Certeau calls “textual

poaching.”

De Certeau argues that the consumer of culture, marginalized by the cultural

industry (as the post-Soviet writer, the reader of the classics, was marginalized by the

post-Soviet economic and cultural transition) appropriates the authoritative text through

reading it, to simultaneously transgress and reinforce its symbolic authority.114 Textual

poaching ultimately produces a derivative textuality aimed to cover a perceived lack in

the original text. However, it also produces a transgressive enjoyment at the intersection

of textual production and reception, blurring the boundary between the reader and the

writer. Such a blurred boundary sustained the myth of Socialist Realist total art, and

continues to sustain contemporary Russian literature as it negotiates its place in the post-

Soviet cultural field.

In Pelevin’s novel, there exists a kind of “total textuality” where the boundaries

between text and life are impossible to define. And of course, this totality emerges as an

outcome of the act of reading. Pelevin allows Count T. to start out as a conventional

character, and then to become a developed, self-aware character who questions the nature

of the creative process and possesses as much free will as a character of such an

ironically self-aware novel could. Count T., then, openly acts out the process to which

Sorokin’s not-less-formulaic, reductive pastiches of the Russian classics pointed: he

constructs a textual fantasy of an inseparable creative unity between the writer, the

114
Michel De Certeau, “Reading as poaching”, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 165-176, esp. 171,174.

90
reader, and the character. “The Writer, You [Count T.], and the Reader – that [is] the

Trinity,” Count T. learns. “It seems that there is a difference between these three notions.

But in fact they point to one and the same thing, and there is nothing else beside that

thing.”115 Of course, as Pelevin’s earlier texts demonstrated, the one who “learns”

something here is the reader of Pelevin’s text, who has so far been a little lost as to their

own place in the interplay of creative agency in the novel. Now that this metaphor for

total art comes into picture, let us dwell on this suddenly magnified the role of the reader

in T.

Before T, Pelevin has already sketched his extensively complex vision of the

interaction of creative agencies in literary production and reception.116 In T, the woes of

post-Soviet readership discussed in the beginning of this chapter finally come to be

articulated. On the plane of the novel that is a satire of post-Soviet society (the genre

which brought Pelevin most of his success), Pelevin outlines the somewhat frightening

monetary power that the consumer of culture wields in the post-Soviet context, and the

reader’s ability to influence (albeit indirectly) the decisions of production.

On another level, Pelevin’s inquiry into the nature of the creative process and into

the amount of a reader’s participation in it yields a theory of creativity which appeals to

the principles of Soviet art as much as it grounds itself in the mysticism associated with

the magic of the written word, with the same logos that was rotting in the mouth of the

Russian intellectual roughly fifteen years before.

115
Viktor Pelevin. T (Moskva: Eksmo-Press, 2009), 365. “Автор, Ты и Читатель – таким было его
[Соловьева] понимание Троицы. Кажется, что между этими тремя понятиями есть разница. Но в
действительности они указывают на одно и то же, и кроме него нет ничего вообще”.
116
In an earlier short novel, Numbers (Chisla, 2003), Pelevin’s jaded protagonist kills time by flipping
through pages of a wildly imaginative postmodernist intellectual journal, learning through the nearly
Derridean pun based on rearrangement of syllables that the conventional dichotomy “writer-reader”
(pisatel’- chitatel’) apparently does not take into account the other two agents of the “creative rectangle”,
“the scratcher and the feeder” (chesatel’ – pitatel’).

91
 Count T. learns (together with Pelevin’s reader) in the course of (their) spiritual

quest that:

When a person practices mysticism, he should as if divide himself into two parts:

the book, and its reader. The book is all the movements of our soul…all our

thoughts, fears, and hopes… We are unable to let go of these black pages. But,

instead of flipping through these pages day after day, one ought to find the reader.

To be joined with this reader is the utmost spiritual goal.117

Now that the reader takes on the function assigned by contemporary monotheistic

religions to none other than God himself, the problem of post-Soviet literature’s inability

to enter into a dialogue with the Russian literary canon is, to an extent, resolved. What

looked like a unilateral dialogue with silent classics, reduced to idols, was always a

dialogue with the reader, filtered through a fetishistic appeal to the symbolic authority of

the classics. The mardongs of the classics populating the post-Soviet literary landscape

are there to join forces with the post-Soviet writers in order to sustain the fantasy of the

ideal reader who, as we have seen, makes the very existence of literature possible.

117
Viktor Pelevin. T (Moskva: Eksmo-Press, 2009), 210. “Его учение заключалось в том, что человек,
занимаясь мистическим деланием, должен как бы делить себя на книгу и ее читателя. Книга – это
все содрогания нашего духа, все порывы и метания, все наши мысли, страхи, надежды… мы не
можем оторваться от этих черных страниц. Но, вместо того, чтобы перелистывать их день за днем,
следует найти читателя. Слиться с ним и есть высшая духовная цель”.

92
 CHAPTER 21

National Past, Lubok-Style: Post-Soviet Cinematic Construction of the Historical Past

Glasnost’, Chernukha and the Emergence of the Past

In one of the earliest post-Soviet monographs on the theory of cinema, Semen Freilikh

notes an acute structural similarity in cinematic representations of the Bolshevik Revolution of

1917 and of late-perestroika and early post-Soviet experience. In Freilikh’s view, these historical

moments are represented in cinema as points of rupture, when “the historical ties are broken.”2 In

the 1990s, this breaking of historical ties looked definitive, not in the least because it was,

primarily, metaphorical.3 When scholars metaphorized the disappearance of the Soviet Union as

“fall” and “collapse,” the very discourse that described the socio-cultural shift underway in post-

Soviet culture became the first conceptual step on the way to distancing Russia’s present from its

past.

Yet, late-Soviet cinema was already preoccupied with the past, uncertain about language

and reliant on the absurdist aesthetics as far back as the early 1980s. The Soviet films of the

period already searched for a new aesthetic that pushes outside of the boundaries of the

conventional, teleological Soviet narratives. In the words of Lily Avrutin:

an artistic model capable of arriving at new meanings … represents not a forward

movement along a straight road—as in traditional narrative—but a wandering, roaming

1
Parts of this chapter appeared in: Daria Kabanova, “National Past, Lubok-Style: Post-Soviet Cinematic
Construction of the Historical Past”. In honour of Peeter Torop 60. A Collection of Paper from Young Scholars.
Olvasatok/Readings 2. “Russian Literature and Literary Studies”. University of Tartu: Department of Semiotics.
Tartu and Budapest, Eötvös Loránd University, 2010. 36-65.
2
This is probably one of the first uses of the term “rupture” in relation to the tropes of late Soviet cinema by Russian
scholar Semyon Freilikh, Teoriia kino: ot Eizenshteina do Tarkovskogo (Moskva, Iskusstvo, 1992), 270.
3
I am drawing here on the argument put forward by Kevin Platt in Kevin M.F. Platt, “The Post-Soviet is Over: On
Reading the Ruins”, in Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1
(May 1, 2009): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/41.

93
 exploration in a space of collage, where the labyrinth of closed time-space is the most

suitable chronotope for searching out new post-totalitarian meanings.4

The search for new meanings in late-Soviet cinema was facilitated by glasnost’, the

policy of “openness” and transparency that Mikhail Gorbachev promoted along with economic

restructuring, the perestroika, in the late 1980s. Glasnost’ is almost universally acknowledged to

be a failed policy,5 on the one hand not radical enough, yet on the other too radical and therefore

responsible for the collapse of the system that it was meant to reform.

Something interesting happened in the way late-Soviet culture absorbed glasnost’.

Officially a policy to reduce corruption and increase social accountability in government

institutions,6 glasnost’ almost immediately acquired an additional cultural meaning: it became

quickly associated with freedom of speech and freedom of information. In turn, this ensured that

glasnost’ opened a space for freedom of artistic representation. In the late eighties, the horrific,

the absurd, and the bleak aspects of Soviet reality become the representational focus of film and

literature, reversing the prescriptive representational cheerfulness previously required by official

policy.

Fig. 1, Glasnost! by Andrei Komoltsev, is one of the most well-known posters

proclaiming the advent of the new state policy. An emotional face, brow furrowed and mouth

slightly open as if in the beginning of an utterance, in tinted black-and-white evoking an old

newsreel, dominates the white poster. Under the face, which expresses concern and

determination, the word glasnost’ is in red, followed by an exclamation mark. On the left and

4
Lily Avrutin, “The Soldier, the Girl, and the Dragon: Battles of Meanings in Post-Soviet Cinematic Space.”
Cinema Journal 38, no. 2 (Winter 1999), 72-97, 75.
5
See Edward Hewett, Viktor Winston, Milestones in Glasnost’ and Perestroyka: Politics and People (Washington,
DC, Brookings Institution Press, 1991), esp. 6-7.
6
For a comprehensive account of the social and political processes that brought about glasnost’, see Chapter 1 in
Hewett, Winston 1991.

94
right, the face is framed by what looks like the remnants of a shabby bluish-gray brick wall,

inlayed with crumbling words like “slander” (kleveta), “forgery” (podlog), “bribe” (vziatka),

“bureaucracy” (burokratiia) and “lie” (lozh’).

Fig. 1. Glasnost’! (V. Komoltsev, 1988)

<http://plakat-ussr.blogspot.com/2007/01/1.html>

We are invited to read the poster as if these words are crumbling under the power of the

emotion in the face that breaks the shabby wall with the newly-acquired force of free speech.

However, only two of the five words the poster uses to describe the pre-glasnost’ state of public

affairs belong to the sociopolitical discourse per se (“bureaucracy” and “bribe”), while the rest

refer to broader moral evils. It was effortlessly, then, that the initially strictly governmental

policy acquired the new set of meanings, as it expands in the poster from bettering the

government system and towards the need to improve core social and cultural values.

Further, the poster represents the current state of affairs for the Soviet Union as

something dark, shabby, and crumbling. This kind of cultural trope is indicative of a whole

95
genre, spreading across several media,7 but most often used to refer to a peculiar cinematic

aesthetic, the chernukha (literally, the darkness, the bleakness), which comes to define Russian

art cinema of the late eighties and early nineties. Chernukha8 concerned itself with, primarily,

representing that which formerly could not be represented due to strict control over cinematic

production. Films like Kira Muratova’s Asthenic Syndrome (Astenicheskii Sindrom, 1989), Pavel

Lungin’s Taxi Blues (1990), and Vassilii Pichul’s Little Vera (Malen’kaia Vera, 1988) are the

most often-cited examples of the genre, all dealing with existential hopelessness and the

absurdity of late-Soviet existence as the filmmakers explore it against the background of bleak

everyday reality.

Chernukha was far from being a non-problematic aesthetic.9 For the party functionaries,

these films were obviously anti-Soviet; for the film critics, they were too pretentiously artistic.10

The Russian national cinema felt the impact of the chernukha films in the 1990s: George

Faraday explores the “decline” of Soviet cinema in the late 1980s and early 1990s, tracing the

post-Soviet transition from a state-controlled institution to a producer cinema.11 While

acknowledging the negative impact of state ideological control on the spectatorship during the

Soviet time, Faraday also notes the effect that the filmmakers’ “liberated… creative

aspirations”12 began to have on spectatorship once state control was eliminated. Neither state-

controlled cinema nor the now-possible art cinema, Faraday argues, could meet the spectators’

demand for entertainment, as “the abolition of directly political forms of censorship [during

7
First used in reference to Ludmila Petrushevskaia’s prose. See Andrei Zorin, “Kruche, Kruche, Kruche… Istoriia
Pobedy: Chernukha v kul’ture poslednikh let”, “Znamya”, #10, 1992, 198-204.
8
For a survey of chernukha, see Seth Graham, “Chernukha and Russian Film”, “Studies in Slavic Cultures”, vol. 1,
2000, 9-27.
9
Ibid, 11.
10
Ibid, 11-12.
11
George Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall of the Soviet Film
Industry. (University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State UP, 2000).
12
Ibid., 17

96
glasnost’] contributed to the marked deterioration of both ‘artistic’ and ‘professional’

standards.”13

Chernukha, the aesthetic which comes to symbolize the era of glasnost’, complete with

crumbling buildings, puddles and hungry stray dogs dominating the visual field, was a

compensation mechanism14 for the prescribed celebratory aesthetic of Soviet cinema.15

Chernukha was, at least in intention, a naturalist16 representational paradigm, based on

conventionally mimetic principles of representing social reality, and it indeed was able to get

closer to social reality than any Socialist Realist text could. Paradoxically, it could do so only by

using the same politics of hyperbolization as Socialist Realism: chernukha exaggerated the

bleak, the macabre and the absurd elements of late-Soviet and early post-Soviet culture, just as

the Socialist Realist texts hyperbolized the festive, the celebratory, and the optimistic aspects of

Soviet life. In chernukha films, the slow progression of cinematic narrative, the claustrophobic

mise-en-scene, and the camera’s lingering on elements of space that are preferably barren or

crumbling17 create an effect of static, unmoving time; in the words of Eliot Borenstein, in

chernukha everyone “lived unhappily ever after.”18

13
Ibid., 131. The term chernukha is connoted negatively in Russian: this negativity, together with the films’
preferred tragic subject matters, prompted the viewers to turn to Hollywood entertainment cinema. Faraday
describes the early 1990s as a time when “the theater audience for Russian films shrunk hundredfold” (Faraday 2).
By the later 1990s, then, the national cinema’s role as an instrument of state ideology was diminished precisely at
the moment when the search for the new national idea was officially sanctioned and cinematically launched.
14
As suggested by T. Khlopliankina, “Vsio Razresheno?”, Iskusstvo Kino, #7, 1989, 49-51. A similar idea is voiced
by Helena Goscilo, “Body Talk in Current Fiction: Speaking Parts and (W)holes,”, quoted in Graham 12.
15
The Carnival Night, a 1956 film by El’dar Riazanov, is a prime example of this aesthetic, as evident already from
the film’s title.
16
For a discussion of chernukha as artistic naturalism, see Mark Lipovetsky, “Rastratnyie Strategii, ili Metamorfozy
Chernukhi”, in Novyi Mir, 1999, #11, online version at <http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/1999/11/lipowez.html>,
accessed Sept 19, 2009.
17
See, e.g., a review of Taxi Blues: Herbert Eagle, “A Review of Taxi Blues”, “Slavic Review”, Vol. 52, No. 2
(Summer, 1993),353-354, esp. 354.
18
Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2008), 7.

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 Chernukha dominated Russian cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s so effectively

that in the 1992 film, Prorva (Moscow Parade, dir. Ivan Dykhovichnyi), reviewers are struck by

a sudden reversal of the chernukha aesthetics. According to Alla Efimova,

In the film [Moscow Parade]… the charms of Soviet power are recreated with

straightforward clarity. The intensely beautiful visual clichés not only form a background

for the film’s narrative but almost seem to be the object of the film, its main characters.

The sparkling gilded stations of the Moscow metro, the sun-drenched Fountain of

Friendship at the Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition, the tanned athletes clad in white

and waiving red banners – these are now the cliché images of Stalinist Russia that are

replacing images of the Gulag or communal apartments.19

Why, on the cusp of 1990s, amidst the tragic dreamscapes of Russia’s present constructed

by the chernukha films, does there emerge the intense beauty of Stalin’s Moscow? In this

chapter, I will trace visual and narrative strategies which the Russian films of the 1990s employ

to construct Russia’s national past out of the historical rupture that the end of the Soviet state

produced, mythologizing the past of the country that seemed stuck in its present.

Perestroika and Beyond: Establishing the Past.

Karen Shakhnazarov’s City Zero: Musealization.

Late-Soviet cinema’s mode of “roaming exploration” (as Avrutin calls it) characterizes

Karen Shakhnazarov’s City Zero (Gorod Zero, alternative title Zerograd) that appeared in 1988,

amid the gradual disillusionment with glasnost’. Glasnost’s relative freedom of speech and

information almost immediately opened a cultural field too vast to be readily navigated. Soviet

19
Alla Efimova, “Touch on the Raw: The Aesthetic Affections of Socialist Realism” in Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 1,
Aesthetics and the Body Politic (Spring, 1997), 72-80, 72.

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values now had to be negotiated within the stream of Western cultural products and commodities

pouring into USSR. The early reviews20 of City Zero appear on the pages of the Sovetskii Ekran

(The Soviet Screen) journal among articles that confusedly attempt to make sense of the new

names, titles and trends to which they now have access.

City Zero received mixed reviews: the reviewers either blamed Shakhnazarov for creating

a film with an unclear ideological message, or criticized the film’s absurdist aesthetics. Every

reviewer, nonetheless, acknowledged Shakhnazarov’s directorial skill.21 Indeed, City Zero is

ideologically suspect:

In Karen Shakhnazarov’s Zero City, a flip-flop paraphrase of [Gogol’s] The Inspector

General, a Soviet yuppie inspector comes to a remote Russian town only to find himself a

part of a ludicrous puzzle without a clue, a labyrinth with no way out. The secretary of

the plant office that he has been sent to inspect appears in full nude before him. In a

restaurant, he is served a cake in the shape of his own head for dessert. A psychic boy

tells him that he will never escape…22

In fact, the protagonist, Varakin, manages to escape the city after a series of bizarre and

meaningless encounters; however, his fate is still unclear: “In the end, the hero is left in a small

rowboat in the middle of the lake, shrouded in a thick fog.”23 The rowboat has no oars,

allegorically denying the protagonist any mastery of his own fate.

City Zero is a direct, though complex, reaction to the public disillusionment with the

policy of glasnost’: “In… Zerograd … the alleged bright hope of glasnost’ is seen as an open

20
See “Igra Pustogo I Porozhnego”, “Sovetskii Ekran”, #9 (1990), 5.
21
See P. Cherniaiev,“Gorod Zero”, in “Sovetskii Ekran’, #22 (1988), 12-13; also, A. Shemiakin, “Po tu storonu
zdravogo smysla”,” Sovetskii Ekran”, #16 (1989), 14-15.
22
See Michael Brashinsky (1993),“Closely watched drains: Notes by a dilettante on the Soviet absurdist film”, in
Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter With a Lash, ed. Andrew Horton (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1993), 58-65, 61.
23
Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 223.

99
Pandora’s box of death, destruction, betrayal, failure and hostility.”24 However, the “bright hope

of glasnost’” was precisely the reason why a film like City Zero was made in the first place; just

a few years earlier, the state’s strict financial and ideological control of film production would

have made this kind of artistic experimentation impossible. Shakhnazarov himself later lamented

the end of censorship system that, in his view, eliminated the only institutional selection

mechanism within Soviet film production (in the absence of market economy).25 In 1988,

however, the dangers of “artistic autonomy” to the institution of national cinema and to

spectatorship were not yet felt clearly. Shakhnazarov readily used the opportunities of glasnost’s

new semantic regime to criticize the unexpected consequences of this very regime, his absurdist

critique of the late-Soviet disintegrating public space de(con)structing this space further.

Michael Brashinsky’s theory of Socialist absurdism is largely based on his reading of

City Zero as he claims that “Socialist absurdism, unlike existentialist absurdism… creates

models of the oppressed society, not of the universe.”26 Indeed, in the context of Soviet cinema’s

narrative model that propels the protagonist towards the (preferably ideologically sound) goal,

the protagonist’s impassive rambles through a chain of meaningless, disconnected encounters

comment upon (and negate) Soviet cinema’s compulsory ideological charge. The plot of the film

is “not the point in this inventive dark allegory without a punchline. It is enough to know that

Varakin is both the hero and victim of various narrative strands.”27 As they serve Varakin a cake

in the form of his own head as a dessert that he did not order, as they accuse him of being

accomplice to the suicide of a restaurant chef who everyone believes to be Varakin’s father, there

is no sense of progression, Anna Lawton suggests, continuing that

24
See Horton and Brashinsky 1992, 210.
25
Ibid.
26
Brashinsky 1993, 61.
27
Horton, Brashinsky 1992, 210.

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 In Zero City … dystopia is conveyed in the form of a personal nightmare… The emphasis

[is] on the search for a breakthrough into the future, which does not seem to exist.

Without being solemn, the film raises the ontological question: do we still exist? […]

Zero City is a city without coordinates, a zero on the world map, existing only as a visual

expression of Varakin’s inchoate fear. On the other hand, Varakin’s predicament is

absolutely real and, what is worse, shared by millions of Soviet citizens. The whole

country, the film suggests, may very well end up in a big, round zero.28

Varakin’s wanderings are the only thing that holds the cinematic narrative together, but

the protagonist is often effectively removed from it.29 The camera tends to leave him to

concentrate on static objects or slowed-down movements. In the opening sequence, when

Varakin arrives to the city, the camera eagerly leaves him to look at the train that is slowly

leaving the station; yet, the camera does not even bother following the train, clinging to its

position on top of the bridge over the tracks, “forgetting” to suture the viewer with the character.

Later, the camera seems to be more interested in the dark corner of a hotel room than in the

protagonist washing his hands. Further, the setting is often presented from unexpected angles and

the shots are extensively long, allowing the characters to move in and out of the frame of the

disinterested camera.

These techniques create the “frozen time”30 of the film, with no sense of narrative

progression. The film’s peculiar temporality, magnified by the absurdity of the protagonist’s

encounters, invites a reading of the film as a social commentary: Soviet reality has no future; its

inhabitants are bewildered and lost. This is not just a social commentary, however; it is also a

commentary on the Soviet aesthetics. City Zero’s protagonist is as much locked in the frozen

28
Lawton 1992, 221-222.
29
Horton, Brashinsky 1992, 211.
30
The term is used in Lawton’s essay.

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time of the late Socialism as the new Soviet men were locked forever in the epic Great Time of

Socialist Realism, in the never-ending carnival night of high Socialist culture that portrays life as

it should be, “already there”, already utopian.31 City Zero dystopianizes this narrative temporality

by laying bare the character’s aimless wanders, no longer sustained by ideological illusion.

While the never-ending present of Soviet narratives, then, loses all of its utopian

celebratory charm and acquires instead the quality of existential tragedy in City Zero, one of the

most commented-upon scenes in the film deals not with the Soviet Union’s present, but with

history. In this scene the protagonist is lost during another fruitless attempt to escape the city; he

finds himself in a museum in the middle of the woods. A talkative custodian offers to show

Varakin the museum collection and leads him through a bizarre museum of living waxworks: the

waxworks’ bodies are immobile but their eyes watchfully follow Varakin’s movements. The

waxworks portray events of Soviet history up through the late 1970; a dashing waxwork version

of a younger Stalin, too, dutifully watches Varakin. In the museum sequence, the protagonist, a

common Soviet citizen, becomes an object of history’s gaze – yet, this history is perverse.

The Russian/Soviet history becomes in the scene “a carnival gone wrong, a mishmash of

images, statues, heroes real or fabricated… with seemingly no connection between them.”32 The

most peculiar characteristic of the exhibition is its seeming randomness and artificiality, or, as

another critic puts it,

[Varakin’s] tour of the exhibition… is a journey through Russian-Soviet history; actually,

a grotesque parody of it. Events and figures are placed in phony contexts, chronology is

31
For a discussion of this temporality, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (U of Chicago Press,
1981), 40-41.
32
Ibid.,149.

102
 distorted by odd juxtapositions, and cheap embellishments-cum-hyperbolic-ornaments

degrade history to the level of a fairground attraction.33

Indeed, when the custodian cheerfully recites the impossibly absurd “historical events,”

his speech is a set of ideologically charged clichés, which Shakhnazarov’s late-Soviet viewer

would immediately recognize as the party-sanctioned discourse of Soviet history. However,

when the custodian mentions the “heroes of the Trojan War” who supposedly played a vital part

in the local history, it becomes apparent that the authority of the Soviet discourse is seriously

compromised. The “real” events of national history become as much of a fiction as the presence

of Trojans in (presumably) European Russia, precisely because the discourse used to talk about

both is virtually the same.

The museum sequence of City Zero nearly begs to be (and was34) read as a postmodernist

pastiche of national history. Anna Lawton claims that “[o]bviously, in Zero City history is dead,

and so is the collective memory of the past. In the end, the hero is left in a small rowboat in the

middle of the lake, shrouded in a thick fog. Because where there is no past there cannot be any

future.”35

However, in the final sequence of the film, long after Varakin is gone, the museum

custodian takes a long time going around the museum, switching off the lights. The shapes of the

waxworks are visible in the dark, waiting for their next visitor. What is dead is not precisely

history but a conventional assumption of its authentic quality; by deconstructing Soviet history

and putting its bits and pieces safely underground, the film leaves a conceptual space for

history’s overall possibility of existence amid the never-ending late-Soviet present. Of all

33
Lawton 1992, 222.
34
For a close reading of the museum scene as an associative pastiche, see Gerald McCausland, “The Post-Soviet
Condition: Cultural Reconfigurations of Russian Identity” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2006), 156-157.
35
Lawton 1992, 223.

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Varakin’s journeys, his grotesque tour of the museum is, paradoxically, the most coherent one;

the film builds up a site to store the symbols and images associated with the Soviet state, truth

and lies alike - the museum.

Musealization of history, the creation of distinct places where the artifacts of the past can

be (seemingly) safely preserved, is a compensatory mechanism that, in the words of Andreas

Hyussen, “acknowledges a loss of national or communal identity but trusts in our ability to make

up for it.”36 Musealizing history, Huyssen warns, contains an amnesiac possibility, as the

artifacts of the past lose their “authentic” contextual ties and thus their authentic meanings

through being preserved.37

Yet, while City Zero lays bare the risks of musealized national history, it also makes use

of these risks. The very decontextualization of images in the museum sequence provides if not an

authentic Soviet history, then at least an unexpectedly genuine one. In the film, the museum is

the only “alternative” to the bleak, desolate landscape of City Zero. While early reviews of the

film read the sequence as signifying that Soviet history is dead (just as Huyssen warns that no

“true” history can arise from musealization), the film does not search for a true history; rather, it

attempts to assess and preserve the symbology associated with the past, magnifying the

exaggerations and outright lies of Soviet history in the museum setting.

City Zero acknowledges the impossibility of history’s authenticity and yet proceeds with

recreating it amidst the cultural obsession with the never-ending late-Soviet present. The past, in

the film, is sufficiently removed from the bleakness of the present, and, however bizarre and

absurd, is safe: it can be visited, and it is organized rationally (far from being Horton’s “complete

36
See Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia”, in Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization (Duke
University Press, 2001), 57-78, 71.
37
The article version of the above: Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia”, in Public Culture
12.1 (2000), 21-38, 24

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mishmash of images”, the exhibition is arranged in a conventional historiographic way from past

to present). The film creates a fetishistic modality of representing national history that will be

picked up by later Russian cinema. The fetishist’s “I know very well [that this is not the real

object of desire] but all the same” attests to the dilemma that a musealizing culture faces in

Huyssen’s argument. A muzealizing culture has to reconcile the desire to ward off cultural

amnesia with the understanding that there will emerge no “authentic” past. Russian films of the

later 1990s and early 2000s will treat national history in a way strikingly similar to that of City

Zero: history will again be confined to a cinematic space where objectively verifiable facts are

interspersed with complex symbolic fantasies and historical falsifications, all equal in potential

mythopoetic (and thus ideological) value.

The museum sequence of City Zero stages the divide between the late-Soviet eternal

present and the Soviet past, simultaneously warding off the amnesia that the unmoving late-

Soviet national time produces, however “imperfect” the mode of doing so may be. The museum

of City Zero is already a nostalgic creation, preserving not the national past per se but the

representational modality used to speak of history in the Soviet Union, a modality that was

seemingly quickly disappearing together with the celebratory aesthetics of Socialist Realism. The

museum is, in the film, a defense against cultural amnesia: its existence ensures that there is a

place for the past, a place that can be visited and which safely holds all the symbols associated

with the past, truth together with lies, horrors together with celebratory posters.

Furthermore, while the sequence denies history its authenticity, it also provides for an

unexpected source of enjoyment, however perverse. Horton examines the film through

Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque, arguing that the film leaves open the possibility “in the

105
future of a carnival that again finds its roots and its liberating laughter, both joyful and satiric.”38

The source of the carnivalesque in the film is its absurdist take on the reality: the weak

connections between the occurrences in the film, the disorganized space and the purposeless

movements break both narrative and cinematic conventions, thus allowing for the Bakhtinian

"temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers… of the prohibitions of usual

life."39

The Bakhtinian carnival is a cultural space where decontextualization can be a source of

enjoyment and simultaneously serve as a form of memorialization. City Zero imagines precisely

this kind of space: the protagonist’s existential tragedy is, through its sheer absurdity,

transformed into a cinematic carnival. Boris Groys notes in his "Between Stalin and Dionysus"

(1989) that the thin line between tragedy and comedy is only too penetrable in the carnival:

…no one is given the democratic right to shirk carnival, to not take part, to remain on the

sidelines. On the contrary, precisely those who try to do so are the first to be subject to

well-deserved “cheerful vilifications and beatings.” According to Bakhtin, this nightmare

is transformed into carnival thanks to the laughter that accompanies it.40

Horton’s assessment of the film as “a carnival gone wrong,”41 then, can be,

paradoxically, read as a carnival going exactly right. City Zero looks for the means to transform

the horrifyingly bleak and hopeless everyday reality into a spectacle of defamiliarization. In

order to do so, it turns to totalitarian aesthetics.

The most striking shot of the museum sequence shows a museum installation in the shape

of a red rotating platform vaguely resembling a multi-tiered layer cake, crowned by a red star.

38
Horton 1993: 148-149.
39
See Bakhtin 1984, 15.
40
Boris Groys, “Mezhdu Stalinym I Dionisom”, in “Sintaksis” # 25 (Paris, 1989), 92-97, 95, quoted in Caryl
Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, (Princeton University Press, 2000), 171.
41
Horton 1993:149.

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The “cake” is laden with wax figures that represent peasants in traditional dress, workers holding

their instruments, but also with the newer additions to the late-Soviet landscape like a stilyaga, in

a tailored skinny suit and sunglasses, complete with Elvis-like brilliantined hairstyle - a figure

that was a subject of many accusations of anti-Sovietism in the 1960s and 1970s. The installation

evokes the way Stalinist culture conveyed the message of unity by putting together images of

various “typical” figures, preferably in circular order, in the mesmerizing excess of the mass

ornament, to borrow from Siegfried Kracauer.42

Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of art is the Friendship of Nations

Fountain at the Moscow Exhibition Fair (built in 1954). The fountain features sixteen golden

figures encircling a sheaf of wheat, representing sixteen43 Soviet republics. The architecture of

the fountain elucidates two aspects of totalitarian ideology, order and inclusiveness (of course,

“within bounds”), which are parodied in the museum installation of City Zero by being taken to

the extreme: everyone, even the “anti-Soviet elements” like stilyagi, is included into the mock-

celebration of Soviet culture, arranged in a distinct pattern but in no meaningful order.

This satiric take on the Soviet dominant aesthetic is what prompted the earlier readings of

the film to argue that Soviet history is highly disorganized in the film’s interpretation. However,

the museum installation, satirical as it is, does not quite let the totalitarian aesthetic go: the “layer

cake” becomes a locus of the late-Soviet absurdist aesthetics of glasnost’ just as the Friendship

of Nations Fountain is a locus of high Soviet ideology. The principles of Soviet art, seemingly

completely rejected in late-Soviet era, are thus already put to use; the museum installation takes a

totalitarian pattern (which is in the late-Soviet era already dysfunctional in its ability to project

42
See Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin
(Harvard University Press, 2005), 75-89, esp. 83, where Kracauer argues that the mass ornament “reveals itself as a
mythological cult”, also 84.
43
The sixteenth republic is the Karelo-Finnish SSR, which later was integrated as an autonomous republic into
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1956.

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Soviet ideological meanings but not in its structure and composition), and invests it with a new

meaning, that of anti-totalitarian (and liberating carnivalesque) inclusiveness.

City Zero creates a vault out of Soviet history and musealizes the Soviet symbols that

have lost their authentic meaning in the late-Soviet cultural milieu.44 It is paradoxical that this

becomes possible only through evoking the aesthetic of high Stalinism, yet in some way this is

not entirely surprising. The key to this representational continuity is totalitarian art’s celebratory

defamiliarization of reality.

The Friendship of the Nations Fountain will prominently reappear in Ivan

Dykhovichnyi’s 1992 film Prorva (Moscow Parade), which explicitly returns to the celebratory

festivity of Stalinist culture. This return, while it has surprised the critics amidst the bleakness of

the chernukha’s cinematic landscapes, is not as surprising as it may seem at the first glance: late-

Soviet cinema never let the Socialist Realist aesthetic go even as it critiqued and deconstructed it.

The deconstruction revealed the “sentimental value” of Stalinist culture as a place of nostalgia

where life is bright and beautiful even as it is fake, as a place where the Soviet paternal metaphor

is functional.

Moscow Parade and the Undead Stalin: Nostalgic Idealization of the Past and

the Resurrection of Paternal Metaphor.

The disappearance of censorship over cinematic production during glasnost’ is one facet

of a larger symbolic shift at work in the late-Soviet culture. In Lacanian terms, the outcome of

glasnost’ marked the definitive disintegration of the Soviet version of the Name-of-the-Father,

embodied in the figure of Stalin.

44
For more on the mechanism of this process, see the discussion of Aleksei Yurchak’s theory (in his Everything
Was Forever until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation) in Chapter 3.

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 Critics often note the dependence of the Soviet narrative of the nation on the figure of

Stalin.45 Yana Hashamova notes a “particular [Russian] political tradition of upholding the leader

as the father of the nation,”46 a tradition that weakens after Stalin’s death and especially in the

last quarter of the 20th century. Anna Lawton examines the role of Stalin as a master signifier of

the Soviet narrative, arguing that the return to symbolic representations of Stalin as well as the

heightened (if negatively colored) interest in the historical figure itself during perestroika

signified not only the impending collapse of the narrative of state, but also was an attempt on the

part of the filmmakers to hold together the Soviet narratives falling apart. Lawton suggests that

the subsequent “trivialisation of the demon”47 is among the mechanisms of the collapse itself.

She reads the repetitive appearance of the “ghost of Stalin” on screen (like the one in City Zero –

a waxwork with no real agency but nonetheless taking time to watch the protagonist) as a

delayed reaction to the historical trauma of Stalinism.

This ghost dominates the 1992 film Moscow Parade (Russian title, Prorva, “Abyss”).

The film narrates a story of a (former) noblewoman, Anna, who marries a top-tier NKVD (State

Security) officer in the 1930s. Anna’s hate towards the Soviet ruling elite needs to be contained,

because Anna does not want to let go of the luxurious lifestyle this elite enjoys. Her love for a

young porter, Gosha, develops against the backdrop of omnipresent paranoia (“who is to judge

the traitor of the state better than his friend,” says one of the characters) and the ruling elite’s

excesses and violence. The love story has an unhappy ending, but along with torment and

45
The collection Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, the first post-Soviet study of the figure of Stalin as Soviet Russia’s
Big Other,45 not just explores implications of Stalinism affecting all the levels of cultural production and the role of
Stalin’s figure in shaping the cinematic narratives of nation in the films of 1930-40s, but also analyzes the “Stalin
legacy” in the Soviet cinema of glasnost’.
46
Hashamova 116.
47
Lawton 1993, 200. The metaphor refers to the title of Russian modernist writer Fyodor Sologub’s novel, Petty
Demon (1902), which depicts the protagonist’s gradual descent into madness as he is terrorized by a little
hallucination which, though seemingly insignificant, is able to torment and manipulate the protagonist.

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paranoia – the definitive tropes of assessing Stalinism in late-Soviet and early post-Soviet culture

– there emerges something unexpected.

The film’s subplot is a preparation for a parade in Moscow’s Red Square, in which

Anna’s husband takes part. The Red Square parades, besides showcasing the military might of

the Soviet Union, were in the Stalin era also an excuse to showcase the New Soviet Man. The

opening sequence of the film shows supposedly documentary footage of a pre-WWII Red Square

parade. Repeatedly shown is one rotating parade float that looks like a giant wheel, with athletes

as the wheel’s spokes. The wheel’s imperially slow movement conceals the large billboard that

the float passes on its way through the Red Square. The billboard features a portrait of Stalin; he

looks slightly to the side, which, together with the angle of the shot, creates the impression that

Stalin looks at the camera in those brief seconds that his face is visible in between the athlete-

spokes. This is not a direct gaze, and Stalin is sufficiently concealed from clear view, so that his

presence at the parade is a phantom presence, hardly registered visually because of the wheel’s

rotation. Yet, the opening shot sets Stalin’s presence throughout the film, as the camera

repeatedly lingers on the Kremlin towers, looking upwards on the raising towers from roughly

the same angle as in the opening sequence. Though there is no Stalin per se in these shots, the

camera focuses on the symbols of Russian statehood assuming the same vaguely subservient

position as it did when it looked at the image of Stalin.

The most prominent trope of the film is constant juxtaposition of the private, dark though

luxurious spaces of the security officers’ apartments with brand-new, grand buildings of Moscow

of the late 1930s, brightly lit by the sun. The gilded sculptures of the Friendship of the Nations

Fountain dominate those several scenes in the film which examine the possibility of friendship

and love under Stalinism. However, the prominence of this totalitarian masterpiece in the film

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perhaps inadvertently reveals the degree of historical manipulation that went into constructing

the paranoid, yet strangely tempting, atmosphere of Stalin-dominated Moscow. The appearance

of the fountain in the film (perhaps deliberately) destroys all pretense the film might have had for

any kind of historical accuracy: the fountain was built fifteen-odd years after the events of the

film take place, as (to borrow a Freudian turn of the phrase) the director, Dykhovichnyi,

obviously knows very well, but his representational goals lie elsewhere. What the film creates is

a panorama of an historical era not rooted in the conventional principles of (objective) historical

representation. Instead, the Stalinist era acquires in the film a phantasmatic quality, constructed

as a site of memory: the film brings together, in the same cinematic space, symbols, concepts and

artifacts associated with totalitarianism, allowing the celebratory aesthetics to coexist with

paranoia, violence, and betrayal. Stalinist Moscow becomes a space that contains all of

Stalinism, irrespective of the symbol’s place in “objective” history.

This mechanism seems to be very productive in creating the usable simulacrum of a

national past that is the function of post-Communist nostalgia48. The nostalgic current of the film

emerges from its evidently uneasy position towards Stalinism. Stalinism was repeatedly

condemned in Soviet (and post-Soviet) public discourse from the XX Communist Party Congress

of 195649 up to the 2000s when in the context of the move towards authoritarianism50 there

48
As discussed by Svetlana Boym: see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
49
The XX Party Congress (February 14-25, 1956) is known for the first open discussion of the “cult of personality,”
in the context of Nikita Khruschev’s Report to the Congress, first published only in 1989 (in Izvestiia CK KPSS,
1989, #3). The Congress outlined a resolution to eliminate the consequences of this cult in all spheres of social and
political life.
50
For more on authoritarian tendencies in Russian society of the late 1990s, see Chapter 3. The process manifested
itself clearly in the early 2000s, when the scope of Putin’s policies aimed at centralization of government and at
control over media became apparent. For a comprehensive survey of Putin’s move towards authoritarianism, see,
e.g., Leon Aron, “Putinism” (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Outlook Series), AEI Online
(May 2008), online version <http://www.aei.org/outlook/27958>, accessed May 7, 2009.

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emerges an apologetic trend.51 On the one hand, the horrors of Stalinism, like inhumanity,

paranoia and betrayal, seem to be the primary ideological focus of the film. On the other, it is

impossible to miss the camera’s loving, lingering treatment of the exceptionally dynamic public

space that is dominated by flowing water, interplay of light and shade, bright colors, waiving

banners, and people constantly traversing the camera’s scope.

The (imagined) festivity of Stalinist everyday culture (which is a no less important

subject of the film than the peculiar mindset of the characters under totalitarianism) is juxtaposed

in Moscow Parade not just with the private tragedies of the characters, but also with a

conceptualization that one of the protagonists, a talented young writer, unexpectedly offers.

During a stroll, he asks the female protagonist, Anna, for a synonym to the word prorva (the

Russian title of the film; the approximate translation is abyss, with the connotation of the abyss

possessing an agency). The writer thinks prorva to be the best word to describe that which

everyone is afraid of in Russia. He says, “that which everyone is afraid of is just nothing, but this

nothing sucks [one] in and destroys.” While the writer is saying this, the camera follows his gaze

to look at the Kremlin towers yet again, which establishes a striking connection between the

“nothing” he speaks of, Russian statehood, and Stalin. Stalin, thus, comes to occupy a markedly

ambiguous position within the film, on the margin of existence and non-existence. This

assessment is reinforced in one of the film’s striking final sequences.

51
I would not venture here into citing every Russian historian, legitimate and otherwise, who offer apologetic
opinion of Stalin’s legacy. Symptomatic is the trend in Russian public discourse: in 2004, the speaker of the Russian
House of Representatives, the Duma, Boris Gryzlov, offered a characteristic of Stalin as an “exceptional man”
(nezauriadnyi chelovek), citing the victory in Great Patriotic War and industrialization as Stalin’s accomplishments.
Gryzlov noted that the social attitude to Stalin “changes with time”, therefore in essence outlining the new official
position on Stalinism, as Gryzlov himself is a prominent member of the Yedinaia Rossiia Party that was at the time
known as Putin’s party (See Izvestiia, 21 December 2004). In a recent development (2009), another prominent
Yedinaia Rossiia member, Sergei Shoigu proposed a bill that essentially prohibits negative assessment of Great
Patriotic War.

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 In that sequence, the Parade that took so much effort on the part of Anna’s husband has

successfully taken place, and the security officers join other high-ranking members of the

military for a ceremonial photo with Stalin in one of Kremlin’s majestic halls. Stalin, wearing a

snow-white uniform with no insignia, is immediately visible in the front row as everyone is

preparing for the picture to be taken. When everyone is finally settled down, one of Stalin’s aides

approaches him and whispers something to his ear, upon which Stalin immediately leaves, and

the gap in the row is quickly filled by one of the security officers. The frame then freezes for a

split second, suggesting that the picture has been taken, with no Stalin in it. The temptation to

read the episode through Barthes is too tempting: the film does not allow Stalin to be fixed in a

photograph, that is, does not allow him to die.52 Just as Anna hates her milieu yet cannot let it go,

the film itself exposes the evils of Stalinism but at the same time wallows in the Stalinist

culture’s celebratory magnificence.

The peculiar festive visuality of Stalinist culture is predicated on the peculiar

interpretation of mimetic principles of representation, as evident from the iconic Stalinist poster

(Fig. 2), “Thank you, dear Stalin, for our happy childhood.”

52
As Barthes puts it in his Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (NY:
Macmillan/Hill and Wang, 1983)), “all these young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon
the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. This is the way in which our time assumes
Death; with the denying alibi of the distractedly ‘alive’” (92), and, earlier, “I am neither the subject nor object [being
photographed], but a subject who feels he is becoming an object… I am truly becoming a specter. The Photographer
knows very well and himself fears this death in which his gesture will embalm me [italics mine. – DK].”

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 Fig. 2. “Thank you, dear Stalin, for our happy childhood” <davno.ru>

In the poster, two children, a boy and a girl, give the benevolently smiling Stalin bunches

of roses, Stalin half-embracing the happy boy; immediately apparent is the glossed-over

representation of both Stalin and the generically happy and healthy children. Furthermore, the

painting style, evoking pre-revolutionary Russian marketing art with slightly disproportionate

figures, softened edges of objects and flattened perspective, projects the image’s ideological

goals with innocent, nearly instinctual subtlety. Indeed, while on the surface a realist painting,

the poster does not attempt realist representation in the least: both Stalin’s and the boy’s hands

are in the wrong positions for either being given roses or holding the bouquet. Stalin, then,

projects the festively bright red roses or, otherwise, wears them as medals on his uniform. The

poster showcases the Socialist Realist representational principle in action: mimetic principle is

easily sacrificed for the sake of creating an ideologically relevant paternal allegory. Though the

red roses in the poster “objectively” cannot be in the boy’s hands, they are nonetheless exactly

where they should be, projecting a set of stable ideological meanings of celebration and paternal

authority as they emanate from Stalin’s figure. Such non-mimetic visuality, paradoxically, is a

source of relatively clear ideological messages, and the “effortlessness” of meaning-production

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in totalitarian art, as it seems, is at the core of the post-Soviet nostalgia, if not for Stalinism then

at least for its artistic method.53

Moscow Parade’s nostalgic recreation of the simulacrum of a culture long gone,

dominated by the figure of the undead Stalin, is one of the modes which post-Soviet cinema

adopts for resurrecting the lost paternal metaphor. This mode consists of rearranging bits and

pieces of the Soviet grand narrative,54 or, as Nina Tsyrkun puts is, “[building] the new

mythology from the ruins of the old [one].”55 Tsyrkun argues that the essence of this national

mythology remained virtually unshattered in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, while

the arrangement of its components has undergone substantial change. The existence of this

mythology is predicated on the functional paternal metaphor.56

The desire to resurrect the paternal metaphor and the nostalgia for a place structured by

ideologically unambiguous symbols come together in post-Soviet cinema when it is asked once

again to become “the most important of all arts” (in the words of Vladimir Lenin57) to serve the

perceived needs of the emergent, state-sanctioned Russian nationalism. A distinct, temptingly

beautiful and ideologically charged simulacrum of national past emerges in the films of the later

53
I am elaborating here on the opinion voiced by Svetlana Boym, who, using a Bakhtinian discussion of the
carnivalesque to talk about the festive nature of everyday Soviet (that is, Stalinist) culture in its cinematic
representation, argues that the social change brought about a kind of solidification and mythologization of the Soviet
space, thus creating a place of nostalgia. See Boym 1995, 75-94.
54
Making the past a “safe place” shaped by a functional paternal metaphor runs concurrently (and complements) a
range of hypermasculine, violent and xenophobic tendencies in post-Soviet cinema. These trends have been read as
indicative of the culture’s attempts to compensate for the loss of the paternal metaphor. Importantly, Susan Larsen
traces the effort to reaffirm national identity within the post-Soviet cinema, arguing that it is realized through
conflation of national authority with heroic masculinity that is the major structural trope of the films under her
scrutiny. See Susan Larsen, “National Identity, Cultural Authority and the Post-Soviet Blockbuster: Nikita
Mikhalkov and Aleksei Balabanov”, in Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Autumn 2003); and Nina Tsyrkun, “Tinkling
Symbols: Fragmented Society – Fragmented Cinema?”, in Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet
Cinema. Ed. Birgit Beumers ( London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
55
Tsyrkun, 1999, 62.
56
The desire to reaffirm the functionality of paternal metaphor is a continuous current in post-Soviet cinema and
sometimes becomes disproportionate: thus, Yana Hashamova, in her analysis of Koktebel (2003, dir. Boris
Khlebnikov), demonstrates that “film [Koktebel] insists on the resurrected father even if it contradicts the logic of
the narratives and the characters” (Yana Hashamova, Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-
Soviet Film (Bristol/Chicago, Intellect, 2007), 120).
57
Lenin’s famous maxim states that “Of all the arts, the cinema is for us the most important”.

115
nineties and early 2000s, its way paved by the mechanisms of musealization and problematic

nostalgic idealization discussed above. Populated by larger-than-life characters, visually

stunning, seemingly ideologically sound, this cinematic model of the past is hyperreal because,

in an attempt to recreate a teleological version of national history, it looks for the points of

contiguity between the imaginary Russia of olden days and the Soviet culture.

In its late-nineties cinematic construction, Russian national history reacquires some

continuity because the strategies associated with representing the Russia of the old and the

representational strategies of Socialist Realism have a number of striking similarities. The

idealized national past is allowed to emerge in its peculiar, ideologically charged visuality

because it is filtered through the conceptual legacy of Socialist Realism.58

The Rise of Ornamental Nationalism: Russia, Lubok-Style, in Nikita Mikhalkov’s The

Barber of Siberia.

The Debate on the Role of Cinema.

Russian cinema of the 1990s, of course, was not homogeneously indulging in the

aesthetics of chernukha. There was another trend in early post-Soviet cinema that Julian Graffy59

calls the “[cinema of] healing myths for an age of uncertainty,”60 featuring compelling narratives

and “catering to popular taste.”61 While scholars of post-Soviet Russian cinema uncover the

centripetal62 forces at work in cinema in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Graffy

58
The hyperreality of Russian national past in the cinema of the late 1990s and early 2000s has another source: aside
from having to juggle the “domestic” sources of symbols associated with the past, this cinematic model of the past
attempts (and fails) to digest a number of visual and narrative conventions offered by contemporary Hollywood
cinema.
59
Graffy 1999,161-179.
60
Ibid., 176.
61
Ibid., 161
62
I am borrowing this extremely lucky term from Birgit Beumers, "To Moscow! To Moscow? The Russian Hero
and the Loss of the Centre." In Russia On Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (KINO - The Russian

116
notes that younger filmmakers like Dmitrii Askrakhan turn, in their popular “amusing dramas,”

to the traditional Russian myths responsible for identity formation (self-sacrifice, resourceful

self-help) and to the metaphor of family to provide a boost of “vital energy” for their spectators.

However, the cinema of Astrakhan, as well as a number of films from the early and mid-

1990 that do not bother raising existential questions and provide for honest and relatively

mindless entertainment (like Vladimir Men’shov’s Shirly-Myrly (1995) and Aleksandr

Rogozhkin’s Osobennosti Natsional’noi Okhoty (Peculiarities of the National Hunt, 1995)),

seem to be nonexistent in the arguments put forward at the Third Congress of the Filmmakers’

Union in 1997. These arguments portray Russian national cinema as unnecessarily artistic, too

experimental, too serious and viewer-unfriendly.

Film director Daniil Dondurei addressed the Third Congress,63 speaking of the economic

progress that the industry had made since 1991 in a celebratory fashion. Nevertheless, Dondurei

criticized the Russian filmmakers, essentially, for their inability to cater to the tastes of the

public. The total absence of state control in post-Soviet cinema, for Dondurei, had created a

situation where filmmakers indulged in the newly-found artistic freedom, experimenting with

modes of representation and violent and/or depressive content.

Why does Dondurei overlook films like those of Astrakhan, Men’shov, and Rogozhkin?

Cinema, for Dondurei, appears to need to have a “serious”, socially relevant message, which

“low-art” slapstick comedies like Shirly-Myrly evidently lack. This is the most surprising part of

Dondurei’s address; after nearly a decade when Russian cinema had no “goals” (such rhetoric

having been firmly associated with party-sanctioned Soviet public discourse on art), Dondurei

Cinema) (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999. 76-91). 87. In this essay, Beumers explores fragmentation of national space in
post-Soviet cinema.
63
See Daniil Dondurei,“The State of National Cinema” (December 1997), in Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in
Post-Soviet Cinema. Ed. Birgit Beumers (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 46-50.

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communicates the need to establish these goals. He turns back to a purely Socialist Realist

formula to speak about art and cinema: “art, above all, is a means to model future successfully,”

Dondurei says. This retort to Soviet rhetoric is symptomatic of the problems the institution of

Russian national cinema had to face. Identifying the industry’s goals, for the Congress, was not

an unexpected “blast from the past”, but instead a way to cope with a number of challenges,

ranging from economic (decline of viewership, little to no government support) to ideological

(acutely perceived “Americanization”, absence of national ideology) that post-Soviet cinema

encountered in the 1990s.

What was wrong with chernukha’s undoubtedly serious, socially relevant messages? The

problem was that by the later 1990s, these messages were ill-suited for contributing to the

emergent ideology of the new Russian state. Chernukha films reflected the post-Soviet reality

too well, yet not only the bleakness of chernukha was the issue in the debate about the goals of

national cinema of the late 1990s. The identity-reasserting cinema of Astrakhan and the post-

Soviet slapstick comedy that gently satirized the post-Soviet social reality did provide for both

“positive” messages and viewer’s entertainment. Nonetheless, these films could contribute as

little to the project of reconstructing the Russian national(ist) ideology underway in the later

1990s as chernukha could. This is because their subject, too, was contemporary post-Soviet

reality: while the chernukha approached it critically and philosophically, films like Shirly-Myrly

presented a panorama of post-Soviet culture, with iconic markers of social change (like criminals

in posh suits driving expensive cars) and markedly Western additions to Russian urban landscape

(like Coca-Cola billboards).

Shirly-Myrly juxtaposes these markers with the satirized remnants of the Soviet past, like

boorish servers in restaurants, corrupt police and drunken hospital personnel. The exceptionally

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diverse post-Soviet panorama in Shirly-Myrly is overflowing with seemingly disconnected

symbols: post-Soviet social reality in general proved to be too eclectic, devoid of clear

dichotomies, and unmanageable, to provide cultural tropes for building up a new national(ist)

ideology. The post-Soviet present, no matter whether it was presented in films in its existential

chernukha incarnation or in its abysmally carnivalesque absurdity, was not exactly what the

functionaries of Russian cinema had in mind when they spoke about the need to produce a

socially relevant and positive message. The post-Soviet present, suspended between the Socialist

past and the uncertain future, could not function as a setting for such a message, because there

was nothing certain about it, nothing that could be made into an easily interpretable message, and

thus nothing that could serve as a basis for a solid ideological construction.

This “unsuitability” of the country’s present for the emergent national(ist) ideology

explains Russian cinema’s eventual programmatic fallback to the representational principle that

sounded suspiciously Socialist Realist: social reality now had to be constructed, not “reflected.”

What should Russian cinema show now that it, again, has a goal?

Any national(ist) ideology understandably turns to the national past in search for the

continuities of culture. The importance of national cinema in Russia’s search for the national

past— the cinema’s ability to, essentially, construct a national ideology— was evident already in

1992, when the title of Stanislav Govorukhin’s documentary, The Russia That We Have Lost

(Rossiia, Kotoruiu My Poteriali) became “the mantra for a widespread sense of nostalgia for a

Russia that is imagined to have existed as an organic whole before it was betrayed by the

Bolsheviks.”64 Govorukhin’s documentary imagines pre-revolutionary Russia to be a prosperous,

64
See McCausland 23.

119
culturally rich place,65 mapping Russia’s potential ways of economic and cultural development.66

Govorukhin’s film imagines what would have been if World War I and the Revolution of 1917

had not happened, outlining and largely solidifying the nostalgic sentiment in post-Soviet

culture.

When the (arguably) most influential contemporary Russian film director, Nikita

Mikhalkov addressed the Extraordinary Congress of the Filmmakers’ Union (1998),67 his speech

was a manifesto of strengthening governmental control over cinema and of the revival of

nationalist rhetoric surrounding film production in Russia in the late 1990s. In the address,

Mikhalkov stressed the political reasons to produce “positive” films instead of economic ones.

That Mikhalkov is more concerned with the issues of nation-building than with the industry’s

profits is significant: by 1998, the Russian government, with which Mikhalkov has long been

firmly associated,68 thought it was ready to invest in cinema, having rediscovered the value of

cinema as an ideological tool just as it sought to “strengthen the vertical of power” (the

government rhetoric of the time69).

65
However idealizing Govorukhin’s vision is, the last ten years of the XIX century (and up to the First Russian
Revolution of 1905) were indeed a period of relative economic stability; furthermore, the Silver Age of Russian
culture falls roughly into the same period. Similar nostalgic sentiment towards the late XIX century will be seen in
Mikhalkov’s The Barber of Siberia.
66
There emerges a whole trend of cultural texts operating on the same premise of “what would have been,”
prompting what I call post-Soviet “nostalgic potentiology” and manifested in the heightened attention to the genre of
alternative history. For more on this, see Chapter 4, esp. the analysis of the film First on the Moon.
67
See Nikita Mikhalkov, “The Function of National Cinema” (May 1998), in Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in
Post-Soviet Cinema. Ed. Birgit Beumers (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 50-56.
68
Mikhalkov, a son of the author of the Soviet national anthem, came to national prominence at the age of 18, when
he played the sweet young boy Kolya in Georgii Daneliia’s I Step Through Moscow (Ia shagaiu po Moskve, 1963).
The title song from the film is known by virtually every Soviet (and post-Soviet) citizen. In the early nineties,
Mikhalkov, by then a successful actor, director and businessman, became president of Russian Cultural Fund
(1993), and since then the list of his government affiliations exponentially expands to include more than twenty
government-affiliated positions. He then became the President of Russian Filmmakers’ Union.
69
The “vertical of power” refers to hierarchy of executive branch of Russian government, which was the focus of
reform immediately upon Putin’s ascent to power. The most significant of those reforms were the reform of the
Upper House of Russian parliament, the Duma, in 2000-2002, whereby elections into this House were eliminated, its
members to be appointed by the President; and consolidation of Russian regional governments into larger “federal
districts”, their heads too appointed by the President.

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 In the address, Mikhalkov, spicing up the Socialist Realist formula with some Cold War

rhetoric, calls cinema “our most powerful weapon” and even warns that this weapon can be

“seized by our enemies and turned upon us.”70 For Mikhalkov at least, Russian cinema now

identifies itself with state power. The role of national cinema within such a framework can only

be to explore all things national, from identity to history to landscape.

Mikhalkov had little doubt about the mode of such exploration. His 1999 film, The

Barber of Siberia, creates a cinematic mode of (re)constructing Russianness through nostalgic

idealization of pre-revolutionary Russia. Mikhalkov’s film infuses the mythical vision of Russian

history with the tropes and visual strategies that it imagines to signify Russianness. These tropes

and strategies bind several (“real” or imaginary) periods of Russian history together into an

unexpected aesthetic continuity. This allows The Barber to create a nostalgic cinematic space

where the modern viewer can wallow in “larger than life” characters, emotionally charged plots,

and, most importantly, visually striking imagery that all come together to project a variety of

ideological messages. In the words of Yana Hashamova,

Historical time in this film [The Barber of Siberia]… is constructed as linear time, as

progression, project, and teleology… [T]he film attempts to advance a national identity

that is rooted in the certainty of a celebrated mythical past presented as reality, thereby

avoiding the dilemmas confronting the present.71

Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Barber of Siberia: Imagining a Cultural Continuity.

The Barber is perhaps the most extensively studied post-Soviet film; mentioning it, even

if in passing, is seemingly imperative for any study of post-Soviet cinema. This is not in the least

due to the project’s sheer magnitude in terms of production, distribution and reception. In 1999,

70
Mikhalkov 1999, 52.
71
Hashamova 69.

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The Barber was the most expensive film in the history of Russian cinema, with a budget of

around $40 million (only nine years later to be matched by Fyodor Bondarchuk’s sci-fi

blockbuster The Inhabited Island (Obitaiemyi Ostrov, 2009)). With a sprawling runtime of 180

minutes, an unprecedented promotional campaign72 (with a tagline, “He’s a Russian. That

explains a lot”), and an international cast featuring the Russian A-list ageing heartthrob Oleg

Men’shikov and Hollywood’s own Julia Ormond as star-crossed lovers, the film attracted much

critical attention because the film’s production was immediately deemed to be full of excesses.73

These excesses directly translated into the film’s equally excessive content, both in terms of

visuality and of the ideology that this visuality projects.

The opening shot of The Barber shows vast stretches of presumably Siberian coniferous

forest filmed from above, while the opening credits reveal an interesting (and most likely

intentional) “mistake.” While many post-Soviet films mention their government agency sponsor

in the opening credits,74 the credit in The Barber simply says “The film was made with the

support of Russian Federation” (“fil’m sniat pri gosudarstvennoi podderzhke Rossiiskoi

Federatsii”), presenting the film as a result of a collective national effort. The film’s

unmistakably populist and nationalist message is thus conveyed on the meta-cinematic level. If

the viewer does not catch this, as I did not the first several times I saw the film, the message still

72
Stephen M. Norris, “Tsarist Russia, Lubok Style: Nikita Mikhalkov’s Barber of Siberia (1999) and Post-Soviet
National Identity”, in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Vol. 25, No. 1, March 2005, 101-118, 110-
112.
73
For a discussion of the film’s “excessiveness” through Peter Brooks’s theory of melodrama, see Susan Larsen,
“National Identity, Cultural Authority and the Post-Soviet Blockbuster: Nikita Mikhalkov and Aleksei Balabanov”,
in Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Autumn 2003), 494. For a survey of “excesses” of production and distribution, see
Norris 2005.
74
Most often, the Russian Federation’s State Committee of Cinematography.

122
lingers in the old (pre-Revolution) spelling of the film’s title: the iota and the yer, letters that fell

into disuse after the early Bolshevik spelling reform, feature prominently in the title.75

One critic writes, “[Mikhalkov] tells a love story without a happy ending, one that runs

counter to Hollywood films, but he tells it in the most Hollywood-like film ever made in Russian

history.”76 Indeed, a perceived artificiality77 of the film’s plot is likely a result of simultaneous

denial of and reliance on the plot conventions of classic Hollywood narrative cinema. The

Barber’s dramatic plot, complete with secret children, phantasmagorical forest-shaving machines

and vast panoramas of the Imperial Russia, provides for Hollywood-style entertainment, at the

same time concerning itself with the “eternal questions” that are a marked departure from the

entertainment paradigm. Mikhalkov, nonetheless, steers the plot between a compelling narrative

and a conventional Russian critique of Hollywood as mere entertainment.78

It was not the film’s relationship with Hollywood, however, but its “message,” that was

strikingly unusual for the time. In the words of Stephen Norris, “Mikhalkov presents a more

positive look at Russia and its values, morals and heritage than other films of the 1990s, which

tended to portray the bleakness that had set in after communism’s fall.”79 Indeed, in a seemingly

straightforward attempt to reclaim the national past, the film turns to the reign of Alexander III

(1881-1894), which in post-Soviet historiography is perceived as the last relatively stable period

75
This evokes the public interest in pre-Revolution spelling which emerged in Russia in the 1990s. Such spelling,
associated with national tradition and historical continuity, prompted in the 1990s a social phenomenon of
“Slavianizing” the spelling of many company names. Of these, several prominent ones remain to this day, most
importantly, the Kommersant newspaper that crowns its final “t” with a silent yer, adding a traditionalist flavor to a
markedly “capitalist” notion.
76
Norris 2005, 103-104. The article is written before Timur Bekmambetov’s explicit adoption of Hollywood
blockbuster model (in terms of visuality and production/distribution, and, to a lesser extent, of the film’s themes) to
Russian cinema with his Night Watch and Day Watch (2004-06).
77
See, e.g., Tat’iana Moskvina, Ne govori, chto molodost’ slubila, in Iskusstvo Kino, 1999, #6, online version
available at: <http://www.kinoart.ru/1999/6/4.html>.
78
A common anti-Hollywood sentiment in Russian cinema is predicated on the dichotomy of high and low art and
contains claims of Hollywood cinema’s shallowness in its pursuit of profit. For a case study of Russian cinema’s
“denial” of and dependence on Hollywood, see Nancy Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema
(Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 233-236.
79
Norris 104.

123
in Russian history.80 The highly moral and very attractive protagonist is inscribed into the

landscape that repeatedly assures the viewer that it is a national landscape. The film insistently

flaunts nearly every symbolic marker of Russianness: the church cupolas, the golden-leaved

birches, Russian flags and double-headed eagles, and peasants in traditional dress and folk

festivities all dominate the visual field. The past to be reclaimed by The Barber, however, is far

from being unproblematic. Yana Hashamova argues that

Mikhalkov, […] disappointed in the dark and hopeless filmic representations of Russia’s

current reality, certainly offers aspects of the past, but he does so only to idealize it […]

Mikhalkov creates a mythic visual world, in which viewers cannot conceive of the

present and the future without the symbolic configuration of the past.81

The film mythologizes Russian history: this is evident from the inconsistency between

The Barber’s implicitly proclaimed historicity (evident from the film’s panoramic approach that

inscribes the characters’ stories into a detailed reconstruction of everyday life) and the little

effort that went into concealing the act of mythmaking. Indeed, scholarship on The Barber notes

that “viewers have had numerous difficulties with the representation of history in this film.”82

Critics and historians have noted a myriad of historical inaccuracies in the film’s portrayal of the

era.83 Hashamova mentions that

Mikhalkov constructs the historical mystification as reality and transforms illusion into

truth. Such transformations of selective and manipulated historical episodes into real

80
As discussed above, the late XIX century is a period in Russian history particularly prone to idealizing;
interestingly, Mikhalkov goes against the grain of his own idealization project by including an (inaccurate) historical
reference to terrorism (Norris explains that by the time the events of the film are claimed to take place, the wave of
domestic terrorism (by Socialist anarchist organizations like Narodnaya Volia) has already subsided) in order to be
able to emphasize the protagonist’s acquisition of heroic masculinity through the set of challenging encounters, one
of those with terrorists.
81
Hashamova 69
82
Hashamova 67.
83
In and of itself, this is a somewhat unexpected consideration, given that film’s main plot vehicle is a phantasmatic
contraption of a logging machine.

124
 history and the insistence on truthfulness and credibility underlie the ideological discourse

of the film and its teleological orientation.84

While the film’s claim to historical objectivity, then, falls apart upon any attempt at

verification, it seems that The Barber’s portrayal of the era is in a way “truthful”, if not

objective. The “genuine” nature of historical representation in the film stems not from its

mimetically accurate reconstruction of the era (just as it was the case with City Zero and Moscow

Parade). Instead, the film builds up on a set of visual tropes that appeal to the imaginary

construct of “genuine Russianness” without explicitly defining what this “Russianness” might

mean.

The representation of history in the film, as early critics noticed, bears a striking

conceptual similarity to the traditional genre of Russian popular art, the lubok: an early review of

the film notes that it is a “Mercedes 60085 pretending to be a lubok.”86 The lubok, a unique

Russian popular print featuring allegorical images with short texts squeezed in often-rhyming

formulas,87 according to Norris, who studies The Barber in the context of the lubok,

[became] a source of propaganda and a means through which Russians began to conceive

of their place within Russian nation [in the seventeenth and eighteenth century]… [T]he

lubok was one of the most important cultural products that entered into a large percentage

of Russian’s [sic] homes… the popular prints helped a largely illiterate population to

understand Russia’s [wartime] conflicts, and they also helped Russians to imagine

84
Hashamova 68.
85
The automobile that has become an iconic marker of post-Soviet culture’s period of “wild capitalism” of the early
1990s.
86
Norris 101.

125
 themselves to be part of Russia… Ultimately, the tsarist print provided ideas about what

made Russia ‘Russia.’88

The lubok conveyed its message through simplified, allegorical figures; it was this

simplification of complex social and political notions that prompted the nineteenth-century

Russian intellectuals to resent the lubok, perceived as “a synonym for anything coarse and

cheap… a source of propaganda that shaped the masses and made them compliant.”89 This

position largely shapes the negative domestic reviews of The Barber that characterize the film as

“a Russian souvenir.”90 In Norris’s reading, Mikhalkov’s glossed-over representation of Russian

history shares with the lubok an implicit goal of popularizing ideology. Norris writes, “Many

believed that Mikhalkov was attempting to sell an outdated patriotism that glossed over the

tsarist past… this fear corresponds with similar feelings among Russian elites in the nineteenth

century about the lubok, who often referred to it as ‘artistic garbage.’”91

The similarities of The Barber and the lubok do not end here. Russian film theorist Neia

Zorkaia calls the lubok “the first post-folkloric stage of mass art, first evidence of folklorism [in

Russian culture].”92 For Zorkaia, folklorism, the rediscovery of what is perceived to be a body of

genuine cultural heritage (folklore itself), becomes particularly relevant for the cultures in

transition looking to redefine their identities,93 like late-Soviet and early post-Soviet culture.

While, according to Norris, Russian intellectuals tend to use the term lubok as a negative label

for cultural products, Zorkaia’s argument is concerned not with the judgment of lubok’s artistic

value but with examining the relationship of the lubok art to the system of artistic genres and to

88
Norris 102.
89
Ibid., 102.
90
Ibid., 108.
91
Ibid., 112.
92
See Neia Zorkaia, Fol’klor, Lubok, Ekran (Moskva, Iskusstvo, 1994), 17.
93
This is in opposition to many Western folklorists who define folklorism as a “fake-lore,” a
commercialized/popularized use of folklore. For a survey of definitions of folklorism, see Guntis Šmidchens,
"Folklorism Revisited", in Journal of Folklore Research (Vol. 36, # 1), 51-70, esp. 51-52.

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cultural chronologies. The lubok art, Zorkaia claims, “constantly [mixes] genres and types of

[texts], transplants and transforms them into one another… [A]nother important feature is… its

eclecticism, formed by bringing together different chronological layers [of culture].”94

Lubok’s eclecticism and semantic compression are strategies that The Barber applies to

the Russian national history. The “goal” of a lubok print is to communicate an ideologized

message by simplifying this message, complemented by a set of manipulative rhetorical

strategies. No matter how “inaccurate” the representation of national history is in The Barber, the

film does not bother to conceal this inaccuracy because it is not after the authentic history. Out of

the film’s manipulation of history arises a solid, mythological space of pre-revolutionary Russia,

a vast country of subdued beauty where not only is the paternal metaphor functional, it is also

unquestionably appealing. An often-discussed scene in the film features a graduation ceremony

in the beautiful Kremlin inner plaza: the protagonist, with his cadet friends, listens to the Tsar

giving an inspirational speech, the shots of the Tsar’s benevolent face intercut with those of the

cadets who look like they are madly in love with the Tsar. Whether or not the Tsar’s speeches at

military academy graduations are an accurate, verifiable historical detail is, of course, irrelevant.

While the historical detail may or may not be “fake”, the mechanism of cinematic identification

ensures that the spectator partakes in the illusion of a genuine feeling (achieved by the actors’

very convincing performances) and, by extension, in the illusion of a functional paternal

metaphor.

The Barber does not just make use of the lubok’s rhetorical strategies. The lubok’s

peculiar visual aesthetics, too, provide a potential source for a post-Soviet nationalist

iconography. Norris notes that “among certain members of the Russian educated classes… the

94
Zorkaia 50.

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prints became associated with peasant culture and the search for ‘authentic Russia.’”95 This is

because the lubok relies heavily on Slavic (pre-Christian) art in its ornamentality, infusing it with

the conventions of Russian Orthodox iconography. An Orthodox icon is not supposed to

represent its subject truthfully, instead attempting to capture God’s essence. This implicitly anti-

mimetic, allegorical aspect of Orthodox iconography is picked up by the lubok and directly

translates into The Barber’s representation of history. The lubok’s use of elaborate, ornamental

detail that makes its imagery “larger than life,” literally as well figuratively, explicitly invites one

to read the lubok image not by “matching” it with real-life objects but by assuming the image is a

metaphor for something and thus needs to be unpacked.

In this way, Russian cinema functionaries’ appeal to return to Socialist Realist principles

of representation of life as it should be – bright, beautiful, populated with characters who are

“better” and certainly more inspiring than whatever Russian social reality of the late 1990s had

to offer – intersects with and makes use of the principles of lubok popular art. This art is

accessible, allegorical, ornamental, not pretending to be a truthful reflection of “reality.” In the

set of scenes in The Barber depicting Shrovetide festival (Maslenitsa, Pancake Week), the

female protagonist, Jane, and her companion have to navigate the vast space on the banks of

Moskva River peppered with semi-permanent wooden kiosks where people in peasant dress sell

blinis (pancakes) with caviar, vodka, and crafts. The Shrovetide festival is chosen as a setting to

showcase the excess of “Russianness,” complete with half-naked men on the ice of the river who

are about to engage in the customary group fistfight. Their blood is so bright and their bodies so

prominent against the white snow that the 19th-century Russian peasants consuming caviar along

with the aristocracy stop presenting any conceptual problem for the spectator. Everything being

shown is taken to the extreme – the too-bright colors of clothing, the elaborate pyrotechnics that
95
Norris 102.

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find some unexpected way to the festival and mark a high point of the celebration, the more-

aggressive-than-usual montage that attempts to capture simultaneity of many movements, the

running children, the close-ups of smiling faces and bloody mouths in the fistfight scene etc.

When the female protagonist of The Barber first arrives to Moscow, she offers the

following opinion: “It looks like a Turkish mosque, but brighter and cleaner.” Her observation

sums the film’s mode of dealing with pre-revolutionary Russia’s iconography: the cadets’

uniforms are wrinkle-less and spotless even after the shootout in one of the earlier scenes of the

film; the general’s shot glass is sparkling; the teeth of the fistfighters in the Shrovetide sequence

are snow-white in their bloody mouths. Even the scene where the male protagonist is sent to

Siberia features a grand, orderly, spotless hall of a train station, filled with prisoners in overalls

of a distinctly flattering fit.

Borrowing visual conventions from the lubok aesthetic allows The Barber to take a

circuitous path in its return to the principles of representation informed by Socialist Realism. The

discredited Communist ideology no longer able to back up the mythological construction of the

historical era, the film appeals to what is perceived to be the genuine “roots” of Russian culture.

The lubok iconography in The Barber compresses multiple ideological messages into the festive

cinematic space in a manner very similar El’dar Riazanov’s 1956 classic Carnival Night - though

no historian would venture to argue that either the folk festival of Shrovetide, the centerpiece of

The Barber, or the lavish New Year celebration in Carnival Night are accurate representations of

their respective historical periods. The carnivalesque festivity of Socialist Realism is replaced in

The Barber by another type of carnivalesque festivity; as one aesthetic is substituted for the

other, a certain Soviet-post-Soviet cultural continuum emerges as the Socialist Realist aesthetic

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is nostalgically lingered upon in Moscow Parade and then exchanged for another one with

strikingly similar conditions of visuality and representational goals, in The Barber.

Mikhalkov’s visual version of pre-revolutionary Russia most resembles the nostalgically

glossed-over version of Russia as it appears in paintings of Boris Kustodiiev (1878-1927).

Kustodiiev’s contribution to Russian art is popularly known as “Kustodiiev’s Russia”

(kustodiievskaia Rossiia), a rubric for his series of portraits and landscapes of a peculiar,

nostalgic festivity. Russian art historians generally assess Kustodiiev’s art, rediscovered in the

late 1980s, as utopian,96 noting the discrepancy between “real” life in pre-revolutionary Russia

and Kustodiiev’s representation thereof. Kustodiiev’s paintings, for the critics, are naturalist

reflections of people’s dreams about happy fulfilling life.97

Kustodiiev described his artistic method as follows: “I never paint from life, my paintings

are a fruit of my imagination, of my fantasy. They are called “naturalist” only because

[stylistically] they produce an impression of real life, which, however, I have never seen and

which never existed.”98 Kustodiiev’s apologetic remark reveals that the mimetic illusion is

perhaps too successful in his paintings, the excess of staged festivity concealing the non-

naturalist elements like flattened perspective, too-clearly-shaped objects and too-bright colors.

This was why Soviet art critics initially eagerly accepted Kustodiiev’s unmistakably

modernist art, dealing, thematically and stylistically, with the mythological representation of

Russian culture. Though only one Kustodiiev’s painting, Bolshevik (1920), can fit the thematic

mold of revolutionary art, his “Festivals” series too was in line with the mythmaking machine of

the nascent Socialist Realist project. The ease with which Kustodiiev’s modernist panoramic

96
See N. Dokuchaieva, “Kustodiiev I Russkaia Narodnaia Utopia”, in Iskusstvo, 1985, # 12, 59-67.
97
Interestingly, this opinion carries over from Soviet to post-Soviet art historians: Mark Etkind (Mark Etkind, Boris
Kustodiev: paintings, graphic works, book illustrations, theatrical designs (Leningrad, Avrora, 1983)) and V.
Kruglov (V. Kruglov, Kustodiiev (Moskva: Zolotoi Vek, 2007)) express very similar opinions.
98
S.P. Ostanina, Entsiklopediia Naturmorta (Moscow, OLMA-Press, 2002), 137.

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“dreamscapes” were accepted as a reflection of Russian tradition attests not only to Boris

Groys’s observation about the inherently modernist nature of Socialist Realist project,99 but also

to the conceptual interconnectedness of modernist visual mythmaking, Socialist Realism, and the

lubok.

Indeed, in a famous historical snippet, when one of Kustodiiev’s most recognizable

pieces from the “Festivals” series, Maslenitsa (Shrovetide Festival, 1916) was considered for

purchase by Russian Academy of Art, the arguments against the purchase called the painting a

lubok, deeming it artistically unfit to grace the Academy’s collection. In these exact same words,

the film critics of the late 1990s would lambast The Barber, a film that evokes not only

Kustodiiev’s manner of arranging figures and objects in the space of a folk festival, but also the

painter’s bright, somewhat garish color palette in staging its Shrovetide scene.100

Fig. 3. Portrait of Fyodor Shalyapin (Boris Kustodiiev, 1922), detail

99
Boris Groys proposes in his The Total Art of Stalinism that the “Stalin era satisfied the fundamental avant-garde
demand that art cease representing life and begin transforming it by the means of a total aesthetico-political project”
(see Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton
University Press, 1992), 36. Groys, then, establishes a continuity between Russian modernism and Socialist
Realism.
100
Consider Fig. 3 and 4. The structural element that connects the two images is, of course, the bright balloons (in
the colors of Russian flag). Similar balloons are the centerpiece of one of the versions of Kustodiiev’s Maslenitsa.

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 Fig. 4. Shrovetide Festival in The Barber of Siberia

The excess of visuality in The Barber, borrowed from the Russian lubok tradition and

used to advance the politics of representation similar to those of Socialist Realist art, becomes a

vehicle to ground Russian national history in a concrete, elaborately detailed, ornate space. Even

if this space is a cinematic illusion, in it the mesmerizing ornamentality of Russian folk art

finally meets Socialist Realist mythmaking. This is possible because the excessive visuality of

the film allows for actualizing national history in the cinematic space. The Barber clings to a

panoramic representation of various facets of everyday life and makes these facets look

beautiful, thus materializing the time of Russian history in the cinematic space. This Bakhtinian

move,101 in Hashamova’s reading, “transform[s] the small and the insignificant of everyday life

into profound history, [therefore making] national time … concrete and localized,”102 ready to

enter into the post-Soviet figuration of national history.

Catherine Merridale, an historian of contemporary Russia, argues that

101
Bakhtin’s term means a unity of spatio-temporal elements “makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on
flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins….Thus the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing
time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the
novel’s abstract elements … gravitate towards the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the
imaging power of art to do its work” (Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes
Towards a Historical Poetics", in Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 250).
102
Hashamova 68.

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 Even when Communist power had gone and even as some Gulag camps were turning into

tourist destinations, the old Soviet mentality …, Soviet language … and Soviet

expectations of the future … thrived within people's minds. There was never a decisive

turn away from these values and nothing has emerged since that competes with them.

Stalin's ghost still walks, in other words, and, though it is easy to condemn the Kremlin's

new occupants for invoking it in their pursuit of power and wealth, the strategy could

work only because a large proportion of Russia's people was ready to welcome the old

villain home with open arms.103

It is not Stalin per se, but what he stands for in the cultural memory, that becomes the

structuring metaphor of post-Soviet nostalgia for a utopian vision of history. The strategies of

representation that the films discussed here employ,musealization, idealization and ornamental

excess, reaffirm the mythic existence of the utopia by actively constructing the national past as a

cinematic space that behaves “as if” it was genuine. It is in this “over-constructed” space,

paradoxically, that the non-existence of “genuine” Russianness, the non-existence exposed by

the gap in national history that the end of the Soviet state created, can be happily forgotten for

the duration of the cinematic illusion.

103
Catherine Merridale, “Haunted by Stalin”, in History Today, Vol.59 (9), 2009, online version available at
<http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33607&amid=30288428>.

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 CHAPTER 31

The Future-in-the-past: Post-Soviet Dystopia.

Situating Post-Soviet Dystopia

The “overconstruction” of the past at work in post-Soviet film is, as we have seen,

a function of post-Soviet nostalgia. In this chapter, I will trace the post-Soviet treatment

of another historical category, the future. The starting point of my argument is that the

historical future, a source of Soviet utopian fantasies, is seemingly (and expectedly)

deconstructed in post-Soviet texts as the Soviet teleological model of history falls apart in

the 1990s. The scarce visions of the future of Russia produced in the 1990s and beyond

attest to the shift in the mode of imagining the future from utopian to dystopian. Yet, the

nostalgic memory of Soviet utopia makes post-Soviet texts craft extremely ambivalent

fantasies of the future of Russia, creating textual sites that metaphorize the tension

between the “good” and the “bad” parts of the Soviet legacy characteristic of the post-

Soviet imagination. Nostalgia for the illusionary stability of the Soviet state counteracts

the horrors of totalitarianism in post-Soviet dystopias: metaphorizing the workings of the

Soviet state, these texts imagine places where the totalitarian regimes violently punish

transgression (as they should), but also, unexpectedly, offer symbolic (and magical)

protection to the subjects within the dystopian milieus.

Two major dystopian post-Soviet texts, Tatiana Tolstaia’s 2001 novel, The Slynx,

and Vladimir Sorokin’s The Day of the Oprichnik (2006), are both set in the future, after

a more or less apocalyptic event. In The Slynx, the dystopian premise is the nuclear Blast

1
A version of a part of this chapter appeared in: Daria Kabanova, “The Animal Watches You: Identity
‘After’ History in Tatiana Tolstaia’s The Slynx”. In The Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian
Culture and History, Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, eds. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2010.
219-234.

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that produces a range of genetic mutations, while in The Day of the Oprichnik it is the

restoration of authoritarian monarchy in Russia, accompanied by rapid globalization, that

radically reshape society. Both Tolstaia and Sorokin’s novels describe totalitarian

societies where the secret police reigns supreme, and thus at first glance conform to the

classic model of dystopia that has become a staple of European and American literatures

in the 20th century. However, upon closer look, a very important difference becomes

apparent: though the texts claim to be set in the future, just like the classic dystopias of

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, this future turns out to be modeled on recognizable

periods or episodes of the Russian national past. In The Slynx, Russian society after the

Blast is thrown back to feudalism; in The Day of the Oprichnik, the new Tsar of Russia

reinstalls the viciously violent Secret Police of Ivan the Terrible, the oprichnina, as the

all-controlling state institution. These dystopias seem to relive the national past; yet, in an

interview, Sorokin offered a revealing comment on The Day of the Oprichnik, claiming

that it is "of course a book about the present."2

Are post-Soviet dystopias “about” the past, the present, or the future, then? Why

should the cautionary tales of the future coming out of post-Soviet Russia be so utterly

non-futuristic? Where does the compulsion to repeat history come from? In this chapter, I

will attempt to trace the reasons for this unlikely conceptualization of what the future

should not be. I will read three representative dystopias from the early 1990s to the mid-

2000s, examining the mechanisms and sources of post-apocalyptic chronotopes of post-

Soviet dystopias. In order to explore why post-Soviet dystopias recreate the past rather

than conventionally construct the future, I will start by building up on the argument put

2
“’Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire’: Spiegel Interview with Author Vladimir Sorokin,
Spiegel”, trans. Christopher Sultan, in Spiegel, Feb 2, 2007.
< http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,463860,00.html>, accessed Jun 10, 2009.

135
forward by Mikhail Epstein and complemented by Dragan Kujundzič. In this argument,

the collapse of the Soviet Union put post-Soviet culture in its own “post-apocalyptic”

context, destroying the Soviet teleological model of history and the notion of a common

national future3 with its utopian meanings. In this context, post-Soviet Russian culture

loses not just the utopian future, but the future altogether, because it is, so to speak,

situated “after” the ultimate point of the future, the apocalypse, on the conventional

historical timeline.

Is the genre of dystopia at all possible in this context? Sorokin’s “of course” refers

to the classic convention of dystopian fiction: by moving the setting to the future, the

dystopian text creates a textual space for social commentary that is conceptually safe

from allegations of being a social critique of contemporary society, because, after all,

what is being critiqued is not the sociopolitical milieu contemporary to the text, but a

fictional society of the future. The utopian sentiment, then, is constitutive of the very

genre of dystopia, because the existence of the genre is predicated on the idea that there

can be a textual space (conceptualized as a temporal category, the future) that will be

politically safe enough so that the much-needed social critique can be provided from it.

Though the concealed utopian sentiment is the implicit premise of dystopian

fiction, the Soviet Union was no place for dystopia: the scarce texts that portray

dystopian societies either predate Socialist Realism (Yevgenii Zamyatin’s We, 1920) or

are associated with Socialist science fiction (most notably, Arkadii and Boris

Strugatskii’s Prisoners of Power, 1969), which uses a dystopian society as a counterpoint

to the utopian Communist society of the future (which is the primary subject of its scope).

3
As shown by Epstein 1995 and Dragan Kujundzič “After: Russian Post-Colonial Identity”. MLN, Vol.
115, # 5, Comparative Literature Issue. (Dec., 2000), 892-908.

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It was only in 1986 that an explicitly dystopian text, Vladimir Voinovich’s Moscow 2042,

was published outside of Russia. The absence of dystopia from “mainstream” Soviet

literature was the result of the tightly controlled Soviet literary production on the one

hand, and of the utopian nature of Socialist Realism,4 on the other. The post-Soviet

dystopia, then, should theoretically find itself in the opposition to utopian, perennially

optimistic implications of the Socialist Realist method. The Socialist Realist maxim to

represent “reality in its revolutionary development”5, proclaimed by Maksim Gor’kii at

the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, opened, perhaps unexpectedly for

itself, a textual space for utopian fantasies by constructing an implicitly anti-mimetic and

teleological representational modality.

Interestingly, the ideological collapse of the 1991 did not bring about an

explosion of dystopian texts as a straightforward reaction to Soviet cheerful utopianism.

1990s saw chernukha instead: the genre where, in the words of Eliot Borenstein,

everyone “lived unhappily ever after,”6 preoccupied with the country’s gloomy, dreary

present. Yet, in the 2000s, critics note, “there appeared, before our own eyes, a whole

stream of literature, where the authorial imagination is focused on the immediate future

of Russian society, primarily – the political aspects of this future.”7 The reason for the

4
For a discussion of Socialist Realism’s utopian nature, see the Introduction to Clark 1981; for a very
thorough discussion of the aesthetic implications of Socialist realism’s “methodology”, see Part 1 of: Robin
1992.
5
For a discussion of the implications of this maxim for the realist method, see Brandon Taylor, “Socialist
Realism: “To depict reality in its revolutionary development”, in Adventures in Realism, Ed. Matthew
Beaumont (Hoboken, NJ, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 142-157.
6
Borenstein 2008, 7.
7
See Aleksandr Tchantsev, “Fabrika antiutopii: distopicheskii diskurs v rossiiskoi literature serediny 2000-
kh”, in Novoie Literaturnoie Obozreniie, 2007, No. 86. Online version,
<http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2007/86/>, accessed Jun 10, 2009. “Буквально на наших глазах возник
целый поток литературы, в которой областью авторского вымысла становится близкое будущее
российского общества, преимущественно – политические аспекты этого будущего”. Tchantsev cites
Dmitry Bykov’s Evakuator (2005), Sergei Dorenko’s 2008 (2005), Ol’ga Slavnikova’s 2017 (2006) and
several other novels among texts that exhibit this “tendency”. Tchantsev suggests that, while on the surface

137
“gap” in the post-Soviet attempts to imagine the future is that the representation of a

more or less totalitarian society and setting in the future constitute the dystopian genre.

However, in the 1990s, representations of a totalitarian society in the future could hardly

be cautionary tales for post-Soviet Russian culture. Totalitarianism in the post-Soviet

context was not of the future but of the past, associated with the Soviet state that ceased

to exist in 1991.

Yet, the visions of the future were brewing in post-Soviet culture of the 1990s,

hidden in the midst of the representations of the country’s tumultuous present. Viktor

Pelevin’s 1999 novel Generation P makes an ironic prediction about the immediate

future of Russia:

The first point that must be taken into consideration, is that the situation that

exists at the present moment in Russia cannot continue for very long. In the very

near future we must expect … the collapse of the financial system and serious

social upheavals, which will all inevitably end in the establishment of a military

dictatorship. Regardless of its political and economic programme, the future

dictatorship will attempt to exploit nationalistic slogans: the dominant state

aesthetic will be the pseudo-Slavonic style. (This term is not used here in any

negative judgmental sense: as distinct from the Slavonic style, which does not

exist anywhere in the real world, the pseudo-Slavonic style represents a carefully

structured paradigm).8

the texts in question preserve the dystopian mode of a cautionary tale and are “directed into the future”,
they nevertheless deal with the
8
The English text is cited from Andrew Bromfield’s translation: Viktor Pelevin, Babylon (London, Faber
and Faber, 2000), online version at <http://lib.rin.ru/doc/i/26414p.html>, accessed March 1, 2009. The
Russian text is cited from Viktor Pelevin, Pokoleniie P, online version at <http://pelevin.nov.ru/romans/pe-
genp/>, accessed March 1, 2009. “Необходимо в первую очередь учитывать… что ситуация, которая
сложилась к настоящему моменту в России, долго существовать не может. В ближайшем будущем

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 Pelevin’s protagonist, Tatarskii, proposes that the ideology that is supposed to

replace the current ideological disarray of the 1990s will support itself on the semiotic

system that it itself will consciously construct, the “pseudo-Slavonic style”

(“lozhnoslavianskii stil’”). As we have seen in Chapter 2, Tatarskii was correct – in the

late 1990s, the ornamentalized national past, the foundation of the emergent nationalist

ideology, emerged from the pseudo-folkloric aesthetics of the lubok that anchored the

post-Soviet reality in the illusory legibility of the Russian pseudo-folklore.

Tatarskii makes it a point to not use the term as any sort of value judgment: it is

precisely because he makes this a point that the attribute “lozhnyi” (fake) stands out.

While Tatarskii could have possibly used a much more neutral term “pseudo,”

psevdoslavianskii (which Andrew Bromfield’s translation does), he uses the negatively

connoted “lozhno.” It is this “wickedness” of the simulacrum that is picked up by the

post-Soviet fantasies of the future that use this artificial cultural repository in constructing

their dystopian milieus.

The dystopias that will be examined in this chapter know very well that the

symbolic system associated with the Russian national past (which they utilize for

constructing the future) does not quite “work,” yet they still enjoy using it. The source of

this enjoyment is the possibility of semiosis, meaning-production, at the core of this

symbolic system. The effortless production of meaning was, as we have seen, one of the

losses post-Soviet culture experienced in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union.

следует ожидать … финансового краха и серьезных социальных потрясений, что неизбежно

закончится установлением военной диктатуры. Вне зависимости от своей политической и
экономической программы будущая диктатура попытается обратиться к националистическим
лозунгам; господствующей государственной эстетикой станет ложнославянский стиль. (Этот
термин употребляется нами не в негативно-оценочном смысле. В отличие от славянского стиля,
которого не существует в природе, ложнославянский стиль является разработанной и четкой
парадигмой)”.

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Pelevin’s cautionary episode elucidates the fetishistic, and nostalgic, longing for the

possibility of semiosis that the simulacra of the national past provide. Post-Soviet visions

of the future dwell on these simulacra of the past because they seek to rediscover the

country’s future that was, too, lost with the end of Socialism. It is not surprising, then,

that post-Soviet dystopias turn to the past, the time when the future was still possible, to

rediscover the utopia within the post-Soviet pessimistic vision of national history.

Viktor Pelevin’s Bulldozer Driver’s Day: A Parallel Reality

An early post-Soviet text that attempts a dystopian representation of society

launches a trend in post-Soviet dystopias that deal with post-apocalyptic ahistoricity and

irrationality of existence. The 1991 novella by Viktor Pelevin, who was then yet to

emerge as the major figure of the Russian brand of postmodernism, is titled Bulldozer

Driver’s Day. The novella portrays a day in the life of Ivan, a factory worker, who wakes

up one morning and realizes he has forgotten everything that is really important about his

life. Together with Ivan, the reader rediscovers his world, a bleak urban milieu evocative

of the chernukha genre that on many levels is a hyperbole of a Soviet state. We learn that

Ivan works at a secret factory that produces weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) but

officially is known to produce plush toys. It is at this factory that Ivan was hit on the head

with an A-bomb stabilizer, whereby his amnesia is conveniently attributed to a head

trauma. We discover that everyone in the city is working at a WMD factory, of which

there are several; that everyone drinks; and that many people of the city are mutants

because of nuclear radiation. The city is extremely isolated and has been so since the

apocalyptic event, the Revolution. We learn that the three revolutionary leaders,

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caricatures of the Soviet trinity of Marx-Engels-Lenin, prohibited entering and exiting the

city in their first decree.

The milieu Pelevin describes is a satire of the Soviet state, with the easily

recognizable proliferation of slogans, scarcity of consumer goods and the familiar

archenemies who are encouraged, in a drunken conversation, to “[jerk off] in their

skyscrapers.”9 However, this is not just a satire of the Soviet material culture; it is also

the satire of the Soviet temporality of the eternal present discussed in Chapter 2. Here, a

parallel is drawn between this narrative temporality, and the post-apocalyptic “after”:

Ivan’s head trauma and his amnesia affect the subjective third-person narration in a

peculiar way. Ivan’s constant struggle to remember anything about his former self

produces narrative stops during which Ivan muses on his feelings. As Ivan and his friends

aimlessly wander the city, the narrative unfolds with no sense of progression. The effect

is emphasized when the reader learns about the extreme predictability of existence in the

city: in one episode, it is revealed that everyone in the city knows the exact time of the

day when vodka shortages are to begin in the city’s stores. In the post-apocalyptic milieu,

in the raw “after history,” historical time does not move forward.

The rest of the story follows Ivan becoming more and more dissatisfied with his

life as he learns more about it; he understands eventually that his feelings did not betray

him – he remembers, through a complex phonetic association, that he is, in fact, a foreign

spy. The details of his mission are unclear, and the story ends with him walking towards a

9
The English text is cited from Viktor Pelevin, “Bulldozer Driver’s Day”, in Viktor Pelevin, A Werewolf
Problem in Central Russia, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York, New Directions, 1998), 126-158, 130. As
mentioned below, expletives in the text are modeled on Soviet ideological clichés “Ну что, вымпелюги
майские, схавали в своих небоскребах?” The expletive here is formed by adding a derogatory suffix to
the root for vympel, “pennant”, a common Soviet symbol of labor achievement and/or winning a
productivity competition displayed at the factories. The Russian text is quoted from: Viktor Pelevin, Den’
Buldozerista, online version at <http://pelevin.nov.ru/pov/pe-buld/1.html>, accessed January 30, 2009.

141
railway station. While the reader is not sure whether Ivan will ever leave the city, there is

still some hope that he would be able to, because he finally knows who he is.

The story bears most of the marks of a classic dystopian text, featuring a society

with an unmistakable totalitarian feel. Furthermore, the story concentrates on the

everyday practices that are, to the reader, monstrously distorted; yet the people inhabiting

the society are oblivious to these distortions. Moreover, the story provides a sharp

political and cultural commentary on Soviet society. However, the text lacks one of the

most important explicit markers of a classic dystopian text, that is, any reference to it

being set in the future. Therefore, the story does not explicitly create a “safe place” from

which it can provide a social critique of the society contemporary to itself. Instead,

having been written during the last years of the perestroika, the story critiques what at the

time of its creation is still supposed to be a utopian present, or, rather, what is rapidly

becoming a “dystopian past.”10

Pelevin’s dystopian subjects inhabit a peculiar, ahistorical temporality, which,

paradoxically, becomes that “safe place” from which the story can provide its social

critique. Such temporality owes its existence to Socialist Realism. Dealing with “reality

in its revolutionary development,” Socialist Realist texts adopted an implicitly futuristic

modality of representation in their utopian conceptualization of reality.

Interestingly, on the level of narratives, Socialist Realism did not produce any

futuristic tales where Communism has already come, with the exception of Socialist

10
The unexpectedly optimistic outcome of the plot seems to attest to this: by examining the hopelessness of
the Soviet existence and providing a way out of it, the story is representative of the general feeling of
hopefulness that was associated with relative cultural and economic openness of the late-Soviet society
during perestroika. Furthermore, the plot expresses a common perestroika sentiment that associates the
West with hopes for democracy and freedom, sociopolitical notions that, at least among Russian liberals,
were meant to undo the “totalitarian” legacy of the Soviet state.

142
science fiction.11 Instead, this utopian impulse produced a perhaps unanticipated effect on

the nature of narrative temporality in Socialist Realist texts that, in Katerina Clark’s

words, are set in the mythic Great Time.12 Clark explains that the messianic societies like

the Soviet Union under Stalin locate their Great Time, a source of transcendent reality, in

the past and the future. In Socialist Realism, the Great Time is the reality that “should

be,” that is, the “Communist reality.” Importantly, this reality is located “after” the

advent of Communism on the historical timeline, that is, after the ultimate point in the

Marxist vision of the historical process. Thus, the narrative temporality of the Socialist

Realist texts halts historical time.13 Socialist Realist novels nearly uniformly produce the

impression of being set in the never-ending present (at times, paradoxically, like Valentin

Kataev’s Time, Forward (1932) where one day does not seem to end); however, this

never-ending present is exactly what the post-historic Communist future should

theoretically feel like.

So, the ahistoric narrative temporality of Pelevin’s story, with no real sense of

progression, is, however satiric its incarnation, a temporality common to Socialist Realist

texts. Pelevin, then, satirizes and thus subverts one of Socialist Realism’s own methods,

working against the non-progression of historical time by emphasizing its effect on the

characters. In other words, the utopian Communist society turns in the text into a

dystopian one not only because of the shift in cultural attitude towards social mechanisms

of the Socialist state during the perestroika. There seems to be another shift underway in

the late-Soviet culture: the utopian eternal present of Socialist Realism becomes a

dystopian temporality as the positive (utopian) value attached to it is reversed. The

11
For more on Socialist science fiction and its alignment with Socialist realist principles, see the Chapter 4.
12
Clark 39-40.
13
Katerina Clark considers this utopian temporality in: Clark 1981, 36.

143
utopian stability of the Soviet state becomes a stability of absence in Pelevin’s story: it is

the absence of vodka in the stores that firmly structures the certainty with which the

city’s inhabitants face the next day.

How exactly does Pelevin’s text manage to create a satire of the eternal present?

The appeal of the past as a cultural repository for conceptualizing the future lies not only

in the post-Soviet inversion of historical temporality as theorized by Mikhail Epstein.

This appeal also comes from the extrapolation that joins the past as an historical category

yet to be defined, to the genres associated with this past, and the peculiar way of semiosis

that these genres provide. While in Socialist Realism the underlying ideology implicitly

ensured that the narrative temporality is devoid of flow of (historical) time, Pelevin’s text

turns to folklore. The folkloric treatment of historical time is, paradoxically, very similar

to that of Socialist Realism; while Socialist Realism, to an extent, denies history, folklore

is yet unaware of it.

A very important feature of Pelevin’s dystopian milieu is that it is permeated with

oral culture with unmistakable roots in Russian folklore. Thus, the protagonist’s best

friend, Valerka, aspires to achieve the rank of “People’s Nightingale.” The rank is a satire

of various Soviet awards, and in this case, the award reflects the person’s ability to curse

poetically.14 In Pelevin’s satirized Soviet society, “cursing” means faithfully recreating

the party slogans and clichés of Communist discourse, adding derogative suffixes. The

Soviet clichés are then compiled into a flow of nearly meaningless yet exceptionally

14
This ability, too, is a satire of the value that Russian culture places on one of the performative aspects of
the traditionally conceived masculinity, for which the creative use of Russian obscene language, the mat, is
arguably elevated to the level of art For a discussion of Russian mat in conjunction with masculinity, see
Vadim Mikhailin, "Russian Army Mat as a Code System Controlling Behaviour in the Russian army". The
Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 2004 (1), <http://www.pipss.org/index93.html>
Accessed Jun 10, 2009.

144
emotional speech, teeming with phrases like “five Stakhanovs [Soviet labor hero. – DK]

up your exchange of experience” and “shove the weak link up your Rot-Front and a

superstructure in behind.”15

Additionally, the party secretary in Bulldozer Driver’s Day is able to “tune in his

mind for the faultless exposition of the party line,”16 thus finding common ground with

the workers by appealing to the people’s folk “roots.” The party secretary adopts a

specific “mode,” achieved by series of breathing exercises, upon which he is able to

speak in what sounds like a vaguely comprehensible Slavic dialect, full of parallel

constructions, repetitions and mildly offensive references to mysterious entities. The

meaningless words combine,17 the in party secretary’s speech, into phrases that due to

their repetitive syntax sound like incantations.

The reasons why the performativity associated with oral genres permeates

Pelevin’s satire of a Soviet utopia can be found in the Alexei Yurchak’s18 discussion of

late-Soviet loss of the language’s constative dimension, i.e. the ability of signifiers to be

unquestionably and “naturally” attached to their signifieds. This radical break between

the signifier and the signified, a function of the endless repetition of the official discourse

that had little to no relation to experiential reality, in the end made sustaining the

ideological illusion impossible.

What is left of a language that is, according to Yurchak, stripped of its constative

element? If this is, indeed, pure performance, then a turn to genres that have the

15
Pelevin 1998, 140.
16
Pelevin 1998, 143.
17
Through prefixation and suffixation.
18
See Yurchak 2006, 21-26.

145
performative element of language at their core, namely, to folklore, becomes less

surprising.

Folklore’s expressive nature, tied to the beliefs in the power of language that

assigns magic properties to words, plays into the project of “dystopianizing” the eternal

present of the Soviet history. Russian folklore is a vast body of texts that, as we will see,

will continue to serve, for the post-Soviet dystopia, as a symbolic and paradigmatic

source of the post-apocalyptic temporality. Folkloric time, pre-national and pre-historical,

is “timeless” time, and thus is metonymically related to both the Soviet “national time” of

the never-ending present, and to its direct heir, the post-Soviet suspended temporality of

Epstein’s “after the future.”

Furthermore, the peculiarities of language in folklore, as it seems, answer the

concerns that late-Soviet and early post-Soviet culture experiences in relation to the

relationship between the signifier and the signified. In a perverse twist on the Russian

logocentric paradigm of culture, post-Soviet dystopia picks up on one of folklore’s most

salient features,19 namely, the spoken word being assigned magical properties. The

language of folklore exerts control over the world not by the means characteristic of

modernity, i.e., by active interpretation of meaning (a failed attempt in the case of

compromised Soviet discourse, as Yurchak showed), but instead by an extension of

Althusserian interpellation, where the signifier becomes equivalent to its signified.

19
Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, in his Coral Gardens, discusses magical language’s pragmatic
aspects; when words equal acts, Malinowski argues, the outcome is far from being just imaginary. Instead,
magical formulae, like Sorokin’s “incantation” against the grim future happening, are meant to instill
individuals with hope, make them feel they are actively shaping their futures and are, in a way, in control of
their fate, all of which are relevant social and cultural concerns in the post-Soviet context. For
Malinowski’s pragmatic theory of magical language, see Bronislaw Malinowski, Collected Works, Vol.
VIII: Coral Gardens and their Magic (London and New York, Routledge, 2001),esp. 50-54.

146
Magical thinking, as theorized by structuralist anthropology,20 posits symbols as

complete equivalents of their referents. It is via this perverse reconnection, paradoxically,

that the equally perverse gap between the signifier and the signified that the Soviet

authoritative discourse produced can be closed. The return to folklore (folklorism), then,

can be deemed a defense mechanism, however dysfunctional and problematic, against the

late-Soviet disintegration of the definitive system of signification, i.e., the Soviet master

narrative.

Tatiana Tolstaia’s The Slynx: The Future of Nostalgia.

An ahistoric temporality with no sense of progression, similar to the one Pelevin

associates with the Soviet eternal present in Bulldozer Driver’s Day, operates in Tatiana

Tolstaia’s 2001 novel, The Slynx (Kys’). The novel was written over a period of more

than ten years, and thus arguably exhibits the late-Soviet sentiment characteristic of

perestroika that we have seen shaping Pelevin’s 1991 novella. The novel deconstructs the

very notion of functional history, focusing on creating the feel of a post-apocalyptic

temporality. In the novel, the post-historic (and post-apocalyptic), never-ending present

becomes the only possible temporality after the movement of history has stopped.

The Slynx is a variation on the philosophical novel about the fate of Russia: thus

its obvious references to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed; nearly direct quotations

from Nikolai Gogol’s The Dead Souls (“And they come closer and closer and the clatter

goes louder … There’s heat and whistles …and clods of mud fly up from the runners…

20
For the theories of magical language, see Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive
Languages”, supplement to C K Ogden and I A Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London, 1923), and
M. Mauss, A general theory of magic, trans. R. Brain (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1972)

147
and then they’re gone. … [I]n the distance the dull thud of felt boots dies down;”)21 and,

most prominently, its play with the simulacrum of “the sun of Russian literature,”

Aleksandr Pushkin who, expectedly, comes to symbolize in the dystopian milieu of the

novel that which does not exist anymore, namely, culture.22 However, The Slynx subverts

the traditional messianic content of the myth of “the fate of Russia,” because unlike

Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s bright 19th-century fantasies of a utopian Socialist future that,

in his What Is To Be Done?, are still just the protagonist’s dreams, in The Slynx the future

has arrived and is here to stay.

Rather than attempting a conventionally futuristic dystopian representation of the

fate of Russia (either by introducing “progressive” ideas or a new technology gone

wrong), The Slynx proposes the future of Russia to be the easily recognizable intellectual

construct of its historic past, with feudalistic social structures and pagan cosmology. The

national space that the novel creates is a complex simulacrum of “Russia” as mediated

through the constructs of history and culture.

This Russia of the future in the novel is a hybrid construct: it is recognizable as

Russia (as Tolstaia’s readers know it) because of its overwhelming bureaucracy, bleak

everyday life and the strict control that the unchallenged state executes over its subjects.

As I have theorized earlier, post-Soviet texts struggle with the temporal setting of a

dystopia (Pelevin’s text did not offer any explicit indicator of being set in the future); in

The Slynx, the bureaucracy and the bleakness of everyday life, again, refer to the legacy

21
The English text is cited from: Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx, trans. Jamey Gambrell. (Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, 36. Further quotations refer to this edition. The Russian text is
cited from Tatiana Tolstaia, Kys’ (online version), <http://www.lib.ru/PROZA/TOLSTAYA/kys.txt>
(accessed February 15, 2009): “А они все ближе, а топот все громче, - вот, накатило! Жар, и свист, и
хрипло дышит шестерка, и комья грязи из-под полозьев... и пронеслись. Тишина. Только вдали
затихает тупая дробь валенок”).
22
For more on Pushkin’s role in The Slynx seeChapter 1.

148
of the Soviet past which becomes a model for the future. Thus, a circular version of

history is created, akin to Epstein’s “temporal loop” of Russian history. The Soviet past,

in the novel, returns to haunt the people of the future, channeling the folkloric Russia

which, at a first glance, shapes this future exclusively. This type of “layered past” is at

work even in those late-Soviet and post-Soviet dystopian texts which do not make heavy

use of the “pseudo-Slavonic aesthetics” in creating their simulacra of dystopian national

space: in Vladimir Voinovich’s Moscow 2042 (1986), the dystopian Russia of the future

is shaped by an explicitly proclaimed blend of Stalinism and feudalist Orthodoxy.

The Slynx, too, exhibits the simultaneous tension and similarity between the

parodic Soviet state and the pseudo-Slavonic folkloric space it occupies. Far from being

an explicit political satire, however, the novel is preoccupied with the exploration of the

post-apocalyptic milieu on a very intimate level, as it delves into the consciousness of the

post-apocalyptic subject.

The novel is set in an ahistoric space that is, technically, the Russia of the future.

This Russia barely exists as a state, being just another “consequence” of the event that

structures this space: the Apocalypse (presumably, an atomic “Blast”) that paradoxically

catalyzes the mutation of not only the human subjects inhabiting the space, but also of the

linear progression of time. The Blast, aside from being an obvious reference to the

Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and a conventional Cold War metaphor for the Apocalypse,

turns out to have more “consequences” than just the genetic mutations of the characters,

as it can provisionally be read as a metaphor for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Multiple references to the post-Soviet nostalgia for the material cultures of Socialism

149
point to the fact that the post-apocalyptic society of The Slynx is at least partly a nostalgic

society, mourning that which has been lost.

While the nostalgia of the novel’s characters is, in a way, conventional, directed

towards the lost system of signification and material culture associated with the past, the

novel itself is nostalgic in a different way. Svetlana Boym discusses one of the

mechanisms of nostalgia, namely, its ability to create an identifiable place for itself by

solidification and mythologization of the national space.23 The Slynx undertakes a similar

conceptual operation in its own textual space, through positing Russia as an imaginary

place which is structured by a signifying system associated with pre-modern period in

Russian history.

The pre-modern, folkloric, magical milieu where the novel is set is an ironic

pastiche of Russian cultural heritage. Given this fact, the issue of whether or not The

Slynx’s turn to the past is a nostalgic move is an important one. In the novel, the past

itself is a highly problematic category: though Russian culture of the future turns out to

be modeled (again) on the recognizable period of the national past (or, rather, on its

simulacrum), the experiential past, so to say, is not accessible to many of the inhabitants

of Tolstaia’s dystopian society. The third-person subjective narration belongs to the

young, neurotic, naïve and exceptionally honest Benedikt, a protagonist who has no

memory of life before the Blast; thus, for him, the past hardly bears any significance.

Other social groups in the novel, discussed below, do have the memories but are stripped

of narrative power, which is why the novel problematizes nostalgia via diversifying the

levels of access to memories.

23
See Boym 1995, esp. 76-80.

150
 The nostalgia in The Slynx, so to say, initially has no real agency, because the

reader is compelled to follow the protagonist as Benedikt unconsciously attempts to shed

his primitivized, non-nostalgic self by rediscovering the lost culture, symbolized by the

books that are banned in the post-apocalyptic Russia of the future. Benedikt’s quest for

reading, then, exposes the inner workings of nostalgia, demonstrating that he longs for

that of which he hardly has conscious memory and for what he can hardly call his own.

Indeed, Benedikt’s love for books turns out to be a perverse love, because when he gains

access to his father-in-law’s private library, it turns out that whether to read Lermontov or

agricultural manuals makes no difference for Benedikt: he reads for the process, not for

the ideas, as he should have been had the novel been more of a conventional

philosophical Bildungsroman.

Yet, even as the novel exposes the conceptual pitfall of nostalgia by questioning

the protagonist’s right to be nostalgic, it still clings to nostalgic sentiment. This sentiment

appears in the novel because of the inversion of historical linearity that it performs in

creating the post-apocalyptic milieu, and consequently, because of the “identification

split” that the reader has to undergo to be able to read the novel as dystopian. The post-

Soviet reader’s allegiance to the characters in the novel is split between the protagonist,

whose very intimate perspective the third-person subjective narration ensures, and

another class of the inhabitants of world of The Slynx, with whom this reader shares not

only the memories of the past, but also an ability to conceptualize history.

The post-apocalyptic society in which The Slynx is set is exceptionally diverse.

This diversity is on the surface structured along the susceptibility to genetic mutation

and/or, metaphorically, along the lines of class; on a deeper level it turns out to be more

151
determined by access to the memory of the past than by anything else. Thus, the Oldeners

(Byvshiie) have no physical “consequences” (mutations), except for their seeming ability

to live forever and become, in this eternal existence, the keepers of the “spiritual

heritage” that is of interest only to them. The mutants (pererozhdentsy) have mutated

after the Blast; many of them keep the memories of the life before the Blast, but these

memories are limited to the clichéd recollections of worldly possessions, i.e., for them

nostalgia becomes precisely the cultural fetishism that Boym theorizes to be a major post-

Soviet nostalgic mechanism. Finally, golubchiki, the common folk, constitute the

majority of the population, and the narrator is one of them. They have no conscious

memory of the life before the Blast.24

The diversity of the population in the world of The Slynx ensures the parallel

existence of the two discourses, one knowledgeable of the inversion of the linearity and

another oblivious to it. While Byvshiie, the Oldeners, are the carriers of the former, the

narratorial power (to the extent that the third person narration allows for it) is given to the

carrier of the latter. Benedikt measures time through a subjective distinction between

childhood and adulthood, and up to a certain point his own life’s milestones are the death

of his mother, his “nervous breakdowns” and his marriage. While the Byvshiie struggle

with the past and the future having exchanged places, which is quite possible to conceive

of on the conceptual level, but creates only aporias being put into words (“It will come,

everything will come [Budet, vsio budet]! The most important thing is to preserve our

24
Interestingly enough, nobody seems to have an actual memory of the Blast itself, which proves our initial
assumption of the Blast being the moment of trauma.

152
spiritual heritage!”25, Benedikt is in some ways luckier, as his subjective time is folkloric

in a sense that it is not organized into historical temporal categories.

The reader, then, is forced to look at the dystopian Russia through the eyes of

Benedikt the narrator, whose ahistoric and atemporal position shapes the perception of

the post-historic temporality of the novel. The reader is invited to experience this

temporality on a very intimate emotional level through identification with the narrator.

On the other hand the identification on the intellectual level happens not with Benedikt,

but with the Oldeners, who are easily recognizable as Russian intellectuals because of the

discursive patterns they employ and because of the constant attention they pay to the

issues of culture. So, together with the Oldeners, the reader feels the effect of a “temporal

loop” that history has made in the world of The Slynx.

Benedikt’s narratorial power, however, ensures that the temporality that he

unquestionably inhabits diminishes the effect of the “temporal loop” of which the

Oldeners are aware. The reader, therefore, is nearly lured on the emotional level into

sharing the timeless temporality with the protagonist/narrator. Thus, instead of being

presented with the conceptual, highly abstract and intellectualized “after-history” (as it

emerges in post-Soviet theorizations of Epstein and Dragan Kujundzič26), Tolstaia’s

Russian reader gets the “after-history” in the raw, with little to no intellectualization. The

narrator does not knowingly or consciously contribute to the readers’ discovery of the

fact that “history” used to exist in Tolstaia’s dystopian milieu.

25
Tolstaya 111. “Будет, все будет! Главное же - сберечь духовное наследие!”
26
Consider the level of abstraction in Kujundzič’s musing in his "After": Russian Post-Colonial Identity:
“Russia is after history in a sense that it is "outside history, before history occurred, in the realm where the
temporality of the World History has not even happened: in the realm of Messianic promise that will alone
hurl Russia towards the historical, its full teleological fulfillment, 'after' it and beyond”. (See Dragan
Kujundzič, Dragan. “After: Russian Post-Colonial Identity”. MLN, Vol. 115, # 5, Comparative Literature
Issue. (Dec., 2000), 892-908, 892).

153
 The genuine “after” that Benedikt’s perspective provides turns out to have limited

and distorted connections to the “before” with which the Oldeners are preoccupied.

While the two have to be connected on some level (the existence of one is determined by

the presence of another), the “after” that Benedikt represents is simultaneously dependent

on the “before” and voiding it, denying its significance, having never known the

“before.” Paradoxically, given the amount of attention the text pays to the views of the

Oldeners, and thus to the “before,” the “after” seems to be the temporality in which the

text is really interested: by making the character who has no memory of the pre-

Apocalypse narrate the text, it is as if the novel wants to make sure that the reader forgets

the “before.” And to facilitate forgetting, it employs the mind-numbing narrative

techniques of retardation and parallel constructions, not uncommon in the folkloric large

form:

Aye, aye, aye, but we poor small folk have to stand on our porches at night,

inhaling the freezing darkness, exhaling a slightly warmer darkness. We stomp

our feet, turn our faces to the distant heavenly Spindle, listen to tears tinkling like

frozen peas, rolling into the thickets of our beards, we listen to the silence of the

black izbas [peasant huts. – DK] on black foothills, the creak of high trees, to the

whine of the blizzard, which brings in gusts – barely audible, but still clear – of a

distant, pitiful, hungry northern wail.27

27
Tolstaya 60.“Ох-ти, охтеньки, а нам, малым да сирым, в ночи на крыльце стоять, вдыхать
морозную тьму, выдыхать тьму чуть теплую, переступать с ноги на ногу, задирать личико к
далекому небесному Веретену, слушать, как слезы мороженым горошком шуршат, скатываются в
заросли бороды, слушать, как молчат черные избы на черных пригорках, как поскрипывают
высокие деревья, как ноет метельный ветер, как доносит порывами, - чуть слышно, но явственно, -
далекий, жалобный, северный голодный вой”.

154
 What goes on in this paragraph is hardly distinguishable behind the

conglomerations of parallel constructions, a traumatic repetition where the meaning is

lost in the fissures between the words and the text fails to be identified as anything but a

repetition of constructed “Russianness” by the virtue of its recognizable folkloric roots.

So, in The Slynx, too, we see “pseudo-Slavonic” aesthetics and ritualistic

repetition put to use for creating the dystopian milieu. To see how these fit into the

novel’s reconceptualization of historical temporality, we will need to look at the role that

language plays in Tolstaia’s dystopian milieu and what transformations the very notion of

language undergoes therein.

Nearly every scholar of Tolstaia has noted The Slynx’s focus on logocentrism as

one of the essential features of the Russian culture.28 The ways the novel approaches

Russian logocentrism (and deconstructs it) elucidates why “pseudo-Slavonic aesthetics”

and genres associated with it become such a productive cultural repository for the post-

Soviet dystopia; they provide conceptual mechanisms that reflect on the shift in

conceiving historical temporality in the post-Soviet context.

Tolstaia’s Russia of the future is surprisingly logocentric, but the dystopian

premise of the novel ensures that this logocentrism is a pastiche of itself. Mikhail Epstein

argues that postmodernism in Russia is about “a parodic unmasking of centuries of

logocentrism in Russian culture, of captivity to the word and the ideological principle.”29

“The captivity to the word” that the world of The Slynx manifests speaks to Epstein’s

28
A succinct characteristic of Tolstaia’s love-hate relationship with logocentrism in The Slynx is given in
Mark Lipovetskii, “PMS (Post-Modernism Segodnia)”, in Znamya, 2002, No. 5. Online version at
<http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2002/5/lipov.html>, accessed February 12, 2009.
29
Epstein 1995, 328.

155
observation very well. Nearly every golubchik is an avid reader, even if Brandis’ (sic)

trigonometric charts are among their favorites.30

However compromised logocentrism thus might be in The Slynx, it is not denied

its power either over the characters or over the text itself. The Slynx is structured around

the Old Russian alphabet, as reflected in the chapter titles, which makes it possible to

read it as a Bildungsroman that narrates the story of the acquisition of knowledge.31

Yet, Russian logocentrism in the novel is not without its dangers: on the level of

the plot, persecution awaits those who possess the “old-print” (i.e., pre-Blast) books.

Furthermore, Benedikt’s developing passion for reading does not bring him much besides

moral anguish, as he ends up killing for reading, as if reading were a narcotic. The book

in the world of The Slynx is indeed comparable to a mind-altering substance, as it

acquires magical qualities and is personified:

You, Book! You are the only one who won’t deceive, won’t attack, won’t

abandon! You’re quiet – but you laugh, shout and sing; you’re obedient – but you

amaze, tease and entice; … Nothing but a handful of letters, that’s all, but if you

feel like it, you can turn heads, confuse, spin, cloud, make tears spring to the eyes,

take away the breath… Sometimes a kind of wordless feeling tosses and turns in

the chest, pounds its fists on the wall… I’m suffocating! Let me out!... What

words can you dress it in? We don’t have any words, we don’t know! Just like

wild animals, or a blindlie bird, or a mermaid – no words, just a bellowing.

30
Interestingly, the reading preferences of the Russians of the future have an unmistakable postmodern
quality, as the texts of all sorts have equal value (and, by the same token, no value at all).
31
This reading is reinforced by the name of the main character, alluding to Spinosa, and by his heritage (his
mother is an antelegent, a bastardized spelling of intelligent, an intellectual).

156
 [italics mine. – DK] But you open a book – and there they are, fabulous, flying

words.32

The novel’s problematic treatment of logocentrism, however, is best seen in the

way it constructs post-apocalyptic reality. As per genre convention, the fantasies that the

dystopian fiction creates require new language to describe the new social and cultural

notions. In the world of The Slynx, a range of neologisms is introduced to name the

mutated flora and fauna (chervyr’ the maggot, vertizubka the fish, slepovran the blind

raven, bliadunitsa the pigeon, etc.). Yet, due to the fact that part of the population has

access to the memories of life before the Blast, they possess the pre-Blast vocabulary that

denotes both abstract notions and items of everyday material culture, which contributes to

the effect of the “temporal loop” in the novel. Thus, a “regular” word like ‘miasorubka’

(meat grinder) is a complete neologism for Benedikt and the rest of the golubchiks, yet

for the Oldeners it is a nostalgic notion.

However, the system of designation in the novel is somewhat dysfunctional,

which is an unexpected move for dystopian fiction that should theoretically strive to

make its constructed world as “believable” (and thus as coherent) as possible. This, too,

is the result of the diversity in Tolstaia’s universe. At least for the Oldeners (and thus for

the reader, whose intellectual and/or conceptual allegiance to this group was discussed

above), the language in the novel is seriously discredited in its ability to account for

changed reality.

32
Tolstaya 189.“Ты, Книга! Ты одна не обманешь, не ударишь, не обидишь, не покинешь! Тихая,— а
смеешься, кричишь, поешь; покорная,— изумляешь, дразнишь, заманиваешь; малая — а в тебе
народы без числа; пригоршня буковок, только-то, а захочешь — вскружишь голову … дыхание
захолонет, вся-то душа как полотно на ветру взволнуется…! А то чувство какое бессловесное в
груди ворочается, стучит кулаками в двери…: задыхаюся! выпусти!— а как его, голое-то,
шершавое, выпустишь? какими словами оденешь? Нет у нас слов, не знаем! Как все равно у зверя
дикого, али у слеповрана, али русалки,— нет слов, мык один (italics mine. - DK)! А книгу раскроешь,
— и там они, слова, дивные, летучие”.

157
 To illustrate the point, consider the following exchange between the two Oldeners

who are unable to find a proper designation for one of the Degenerators, the mutants:

But he’s not human! Humans don’t have felt boots on their hands! – You have to

look at it more broadly! ... We won’t argue about definitions… Who are you and

I…? Bipeds without feathers, with articulate speech… Let me out, I’ll go and

invite him… What is his name?33

The problem with the definitions that the Oldeners encounter and are too eager to

dismiss is at the core of the text's concerns about what happens to language in the

aftermath of the destruction of culture. As the conventional dichotomy of human/non-

human fails in a world inhabited by a wide range of mutants, so do conventional

linguistic designations. The Oldeners then have to turn to the performative aspects of the

identities of the subjects they seek to classify: they have to consider whether the

Degenerators wear felt boots on their hands, and, beyond the quotation above, whether

they are fine with their fate to serve in the place of the extinct horse to transport those

who are considered “people”). The problem here is that the linguistic milieu in which the

characters of The Slynx function allows for a coexistence of two irreconcilable

discourses: one subscribing to the old, conventional dichotomy between human and

animal, and another, attempting to account for the reality that is already non-dichotomic

(hence the terms, the Oldeners, the Degenerators and the golubchiks). The Slynx, then,

occupies an ambivalent position towards logocentrism: on the level of the plot, it exposes

the mutation of the (supposedly) devalued and misinterpreted concept, while on the level

of the text’s own structure it supports the value of logocentrism.

33
Tolstaya 199. “Дак он и не человек! У человека валенок на руках нету! - Шире надо смотреть! И
без него народ неполный! — назидал Лев Львович. - Не будем спорить о дефинициях…— Мы-то с
вами кто… Двуногое без перьев, речь членораздельная…”

158
 There seems to be two temporalities simultaneously operating within the world of

The Slynx. The first is the subjective time of the characters, with a seemingly

conventional position of past, present and future, which ensures the functioning of the

novel’s subset genre, that of Bildungsroman. The second temporality is the time of

national history, paradoxically inverted as the Russia of the future becomes the Russia of

the past. In Epstein’s words, historical temporality is thus “turned inside out.”34 One of

the characters, as if illustrating Epstein’s theory, laments: “Why, … why is it that

everything keeps mutating, everything? People, well, all right, but the language, concept,

meaning! Huh? Russia! Everything gets twisted up in knots [vsyo vyvernuto].”35

Moreover, the individual time of the characters is not nearly as “normal” as it

might initially seem. Though the reader is able to identify what happens to the characters

first and what happens next, the category of historic time is not operational in the

folkloric realm, and thus the modern distinctions of past, present and future do not hold;

the protagonist is therefore stuck outside of historic time as known to the readers. This

problematizes the reader’s own temporal position, and thus, along with adding to the

dystopian feel of the novel by making the text’s temporality exceptionally alien,

simultaneously compromises the genre convention by failing to define the reader’s

position in relation to the temporal location of the dystopian society.

Epstein suggests that “culture is an anti-time machine built into history.”36 Indeed,

the end of history in The Slynx is what compromises the perceived historical linearity of

culture by inverting it:

34
Epstein 1995: xi.
35
Tolstaya 196.“Отчего бы это, — says Nikita Ivanich, the protagonist’s mentor, — отчего это у нас все
мутирует, ну все! Ладно люди, но язык, понятия, смысл! А? Россия! Все вывернуто!”).
36
Epstein 1995: xiii.

159
 Moreover, friends, material culture is being restored hour by hour. The wheel has

been reinvented, the yoke is returning to use, and the solar clock as well! We will

soon learn to fire pottery! Isn’t that correct, friends? The time of the meat grinder

will come. Though at present it may seem as mysterious as the secrets of the

pyramids… as incomprehensible… as the canals of the planet Mars – the hour

will come, friends, when it will start working!37

Marina Balina’s “absolute pause… and the void (i.e., anti-time)”38 discussed in

the Introduction, the halt to which the late-Soviet texts brought the time of Socialism, is

the pause to which historical time has come in The Slynx: both Benedikt and his pre-

modern, folkloric space are suspended in time. As a traumatic and nostalgic text, The

Slynx creates a pre-modern, ahistorical temporality which provides yet another (and

elegant) way to manipulate the “absolute time” of the Soviet symbolic order, by attaching

the absolute quality lost by the Soviet narrative to the timeless, folkloric time of the text.

By moving her characters out of historical time, then, Tolstaia suggests a way out

of the paradox of inverted historical linearity by establishing a pause in the flow of

history, even as this pause is relegated into the future and is otherwise problematic on

many levels. The folkloric timeless temporality of The Slynx compulsively recreates the

Soviet temporality of never-ending present in the textual space of the novel.

This textual space is constructed as a dystopia, and thus is “of course… about the

present.” Being such, it becomes a textual site where the confusing vectors of post-Soviet

37
Tolstaya 121.“Материальная культура, друзья, ежечасно восстанавливается. Вновь изобретено
колесо, возвращается коромысло, солнечные часы! Скоро научимся обжигать горшки! Верно,
друзья? Придет черед и мясорубки. И пусть сейчас она так же загадочна, как тайна пирамид, - стоят
ли они еще, мы не знаем, - так же непостижна уму, как каналы Марса, - но пробьет час, друзья, и
она заработает!”
38
As discussed in Balina, 2000, 60.

160
historical temporality come together, by providing a distinctly utopian possibility for the

post-Soviet subject. To deal with the post-Soviet collapse of the organizing categories of

history, the novel puts history on hold, allowing the unmoving time of the narrative to be

spent reflecting on the lessons from the past, and on the methods to be used to navigate

the post-collapse cultural milieu.

In The Slynx, such timeless, post-historic temporality is largely a “result” of the

title “character,” the slynx,39, as its existence, on the level of the plot, ensures the

impossibility of ‘progress’ in a conventional sense: the slynx is the primary villain in the

folk mythology that guides the post-apocalyptic society. It is the fear of the slynx that

makes the golubchiks extremely cautious, close-minded and therefore insusceptible to the

beauty of the symbol of progress, the meat grinder so celebrated by the Oldeners.

Simultaneously, the integral role of the slynx for the formation of the protagonist’s

subjectivity, as we will see, attests to the anxieties of identification (and a certain

enjoyment derived from them) that the inhabitants of such temporality have to face.

Interestingly, the slynx not a “species” in the way all other mutant creatures of the

text are, with the exception of Ptitsa Paulin, the slynx’s chief antagonist in Benedikt’s

fantasies. Presumably, there exists only one slynx, which right away makes it possible to

read it, through Derrida, as human, because the slynx cannot be reduced to a multitude.40

At the initial encounter with the slynx, however, it is “obvious” that it is an animal, as the

39
Kys’ (translated as ‘slynx’ from the Russian) is ostensibly a phonetic clipping of koshka (cat) and rys’
(lynx). The interpretation that builds a chain of phonetic associations between kys’ and Rus’ (Old Russian
word for “Russia”) has been proposed in an ideological reading of the text. See Boris Paramonov,
“Russkaia Istoriia Nakonets Opravdala Sebya v Literature”, Vremya MN, October 14, 2000 (online version
at <http://www.guelman.ru/slava/kis/paramonov.htm>, accessed Jun 12, 2009).
40
Derrida observes that humanity prefers its animals in the plural, as the single animal (the other) can be
fixed as the Other, Other-as-Human, which threatens the constructed dichotomy. For Derrida’s discussion
of the human/non-human dichotomy, see Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’, or The Calculation of the
Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”, E. Cadava et.al., eds., in Who Comes After the Subject? (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 96-119.

161
reader’s perception by that point is conditioned, in the exposition, by a variety of flying

hares and figs that glow in the dark. The slynx, against this dystopian background, seems

to be just another item in the monster gallery.

Interestingly, kys’ is both the creature’s name and the only ‘discourse’ available to

it, in the form of a sound it makes. The phonetic connotations of the word kys’ may be

interpreted as introducing the motive of temptation, deceit and obstruction.41

Notwithstanding the possibilities of interpreting the slynx’s “name,” the range of

interpretations is too wide,42 which is why it can be argued that in the text slynx stands for

that which cannot be named. This reading is supported by another “property” of the

slynx: it is invisible. In the conceptual mapping of the folkloric space of the text, the

slynx belongs to the North, to the night, to the lack of “civilization,” to absence

(invisibility).

As the narrative progresses, the slynx gets more and more detailed descriptions, as

if acquiring a body while moving from the periphery of the narrative to its center. The

image develops along the lines of primal fear, existential anguish, and anxiety of

identification:

[You’ll] start thinking… listening to …the wail just outside the window, begging

to be let in; something white, heavy, cold, unseen. You suddenly imagine your

izba far off and tiny, like you’re looking down at it from a treetop [italics mine. –

DK] … The branches rock in the northern trees, and on the branches, swaying up

41
Russian kis-kis as a call for a cat; also, the lynx that blocks Dante’s way in the beginning of The Divine
Comedy comes to mind.
42
As the slynx ostensibly “stands” for the “message” of the novel, the critics tend to try unpacking the
range of meanings its name contains: for an ideological reading, see, e.g., Paramonov 2000; for a more
existential take on the novel, see V. Kuritsyn’s review of Kys’ in Vremya MN (2000): V. Kuritsyn,
“Retsenziia na Kys’ T. Tolstoi”, Vremya MN, 2000, online version available at
http://www.guelman.ru/slava/kis/kur.htm, accessed March 10, 2009.

162
 and down, is the invisible Slynx… [it] presses its invisible ears against its flat

invisible head, and it cries in a hungry cry, and reaches, reaches … for the warm

blood pounding in the people’s necks: SSSLYYYNXXX! Fear touches your heart

like a cold draft or a small paw, and you shudder… as if you don’t know who or

where you are (slovno ty sam sebe tschuzhoi). Who am I?43

The slynx here functions as a nearly perfect gaze of the Other, as Benedikt for a

split second is able to see through the slynx’s eyes. This initial effect wanes and is

forgotten in Benedikt’s subsequent “spiritual encounters” with the slynx, as his anxieties

are up to a certain point manifested by the feeling that “one has the slynx on one’s back,”

literally “the slynx looks at you from behind”, kys’ v spinu smotrit). This paranoid

sensation, for the time being at least, contains and conceals Benedikt’s split subjectivity:

Benedikt seems to have happily forgotten that he was already transformed into the object

of the slynx’s gaze and saw himself through its eyes just pages before.

The paradox of the slynx is that, as its body acquires more and more detailed

description, it nevertheless remains invisible. This invisibility is not a physical property

of the slynx’s body; Benedikt’s concession, “One can’t see it [the slynx], one can’t see it”

(182) (a videt’-to ee nel’zia, nel’zia videt’-to) seems to be as much about the physical

invisibility as it is about the prohibition to see. Moreover, it turns out that its body is at

least partly anthropomorphic: it has a face instead of a muzzle and is able to grimace.

43
Tolstaya 45.“[З]адумаешься, … слушая, как шуршит под полом, как трещит в печи, как воет,
подступает, жалуется за окном, просится в дом что-то белое, тяжелое, холодное, незримое; и
представится тебе вдруг твоя изба далекой и малой, словно с дерева смотришь [italics mine. – DK],
… и качаются ветки северных деревьев, и качается на ветках,— вверх-вниз,— незримая кысь,— …
прижимает невидимые уши к плоской невидимой голове, и плачет, голодная, и тянется … к теплой
крови, постукивающей в человечьей шее: кы-ысь! кы-ысь! И тревога холодком, маленькой лапкой
тронет сердце, и вздрогнешь …словно ты сам себе чужой: что это? Кто я?”

163
 By moving closer to Benedikt, the slynx becomes more and more “human,” not

only on the level of physical body, but also on the level of the “language” that it

possesses. This is not surprising, having in mind that the oppositions of human/non-

human do not work properly in Tolstaia’s text. The closest the reader comes to

understanding what the slynx “wants to say” is the following passage: “its invisible face

grimaces, its claws quiver. It’s hungry, famished. It’s tormented, tormented!

Slyyyynnnxxx!” 44

To see what the slynx may “mean” we have to examine, essentially, Benedikt’s

interpretations of what he gets from the communication. While in the beginning of the

novel Benedikt’s fear of the slynx does not differ very much from his fear of other post-

apocalyptic mutant monsters, as the slynx searches for Benedikt and comes closer, he

becomes attracted to it. This attraction is masochistic and voyeuristic in nature: the

passages where the slynx is described become longer, more frightening, and more

detailed, as if Benedikt savors the ominous presence of the slynx.45 Moreover, Benedikt

acquires a claw (kogot’) when he becomes his father-in-law’s subordinate in the secret

police: the police’s weapon is a hook used to pick up the “old-print” books.

Finally, Benedikt commits a murder, which is described in the words that the text

up to this point reserved for the slynx:

…His arm could still feel the crunch up to the elbow, the way you squash a

beetle: instead of just grabbing the book, jerking it, tearing it away, he caught the

Golubchik right on the neck, on the vein [italics mine. - DK], and since he whirled

44
Tolstaya 90. “и кривится невидимое лицо ее, и дрожат когти,— голодно ей, голодно! Мука ей,
мука! Кы-ы-ысь! Кы-ы-ысь!”
45
Benedikt’s desire for the slynx is sublimated in his love for his colleague Olen’ka and in connection to
Olen’ka’s family; the only creatures who have claws in the text are the slynx and Olen’ka’s family.

164
 the hook with unpracticed fingers, the vein snapped and something streamed

out… 46

In the same scene, a sudden shift of perspective, similar to the one in the

beginning of the novel, takes place:

…it (the robe) blinded Benedikt for a moment, but the slits settled right over his

eyes. He could see everything through this crevice, all human affairs, trivial,

cowardly, fussy… but the wind howls, the snowstorm shrieks, and the Slynx is in

flight; it soars, triumphant, over the city [italics mine. – DK].47

Here the border between Benedikt and the slynx, again, collapses for a moment

and is later reinstated as Benedikt childishly blames the slynx for compelling him to kill.

However, the internalization has already taken place, because Benedikt has committed an

act as the slynx and consistent with the “cultural expectations” of the slynx.

Finally, Benedikt “becomes” the slynx when he is labeled as such within

language, by his father-in-law. Though in this scene Benedikt does not see himself as the

slynx in the mirror, he is both assigned a linguistic label and commits an act as the slynx.

Therefore, rather than overcoming the cultural and moral constraints of his dystopian

milieu, Benedikt is instead subsumed by it: he is tempted by, and falls prey to, something

that does not belong to language or humanity and, moreover, effectively voids these. The

dystopian milieu of the novel can become so ahistorical, so reliant on superstition and

irrationality because it is, in a way, predicated on the existence of the slynx, at least for

46
Tolstaya 184.“…рука до локтя чувствовала хруст, вот как жука давишь: вместо того чтоб захватить
книгу, да дернуть, да вырвать, — попал голубчику прямо по шее, по шейной жиле [italics mine. –
DK], а как крюк-то повернул неловкими пальцами, — жила и выдернись, и потекло…”
47
Tolstaya 183.“…оболокло Бенедикта, ослепило на мгновение, но прорези сами пали на глаза, все
видать как через щель, все дела людские, мелкие, трусливые, копошливые; им бы супу да на
лежанку, а ветер воет, вьюга свищет, и кысь — в полете; летит, торжествуя, над городом [italics
mine. - DK]”.

165
the protagonist whose perspective the reader is given. The slynx becomes the (empty)

master signifier that structures the symbolic order of Tolstaia’s universe.

Language’s ability to account for reality—material, socio-cultural, or political—

comes to the forefront of intellectual discussions whenever the reality in question rapidly

changes, which makes this ability especially relevant in the post-Soviet context. It seems

that The Slynx denies this ability by facing the non-linguistic, non-cultural void that the

slynx represents. At first glance, The Slynx is an über-pessimistic, Orwellian, dystopian

narrative as it lets its protagonist be subsumed by the reality he inhabits. The novel

provides Benedikt with the means of escape (symbolized by his access to culture), yet

does not let him make full use of these means as he confronts the “essence” of his

dystopian milieu, the slynx.

Yet, the frightening void that Benedikt faces contains a powerful temptation. The

eternal present, the ahistorical temporality that the existence of the slynx in the world of

the novel produces, undoubtedly creates an anxiety of estrangement for the reader: such

temporality is something that modernity has firmly forgotten about. Nevertheless, this

temporality contains a potential that becomes an exciting prospect in the post-Soviet

context: the possibility to put the historical (and reliant on the notion of history)

framework of modernity on hold to reflect on the possibilities of signification as the

former system of signification demonstrates the extent of its dysfunctionality. As The

Slynx demonstrates, these “other” ways of meaning-production are hardly language-

oriented, because of how little language is able to describe the post-apocalyptic reality.

However, unable to shed the constraints of textuality,48 The Slynx launches a search for

48
For a discussion of this impossibility, see Chapter 1.

166
another language, a language that produces meanings in a way that is radically different

from the analytic models of modernity.

Thus we find the reliance of Tolstaia’s dystopian milieu on the traumatic

repetitiveness of incantation. As tempted as one might be to read the floating temporality

of the novel (structured by the folkloric, seemingly senseless, linguistic repetition) as only

traumatic, staging the rupture in the time of national history, another argument can be

made. The eternal folkloric present in which the Russia of the future exists in The Slynx

may well be the post-Blast mutation of the eternal Soviet present. The novel, therefore,

does not simply put history on hold to examine the lessons of the past, but simultaneously

covers the temporal gap that the collapse of the Soviet narrative produced by recreating,

in its own textual space, the illusion of continuity that the Soviet eternal present used to

sustain.

Vladimir Sorokin’s The Day of the Oprichnik: A “Book about the Present”?

Vladimir Sorokin’s iconic status in contemporary Russian literature is a sum of

his strikingly phantasmatic (and often exceptionally graphic) conceptualist prose and of

its remote social effects. Though Sorokin explicitly denies to literature any value except

an aesthetic one, he is nonetheless best known in the West as a post-Soviet writer

persecuted for his writings, most significantly, for his 1999 novel, Blue Lard.49 Despite

proclamations of art-for-art’s-sake, however, Sorokin’s texts that followed Blue Lard are

progressively more engaged with issues of Russian national history as they search for the

49
The pro-Putin youth organization, “Marching Together” (Iduschiie Vmeste) brought charges of
pornography on Sorokin in conjunction with one of his novels, Blue Lard (Goluboie Salo, 1999). Sorokin’s
ideas about the value of literature, as well as the pornography charges episode, are thoroughly examined in
Chapter 1.

167
hidden meanings of historical events by creating metafictional and/or alternative accounts

of Soviet history (in his Ice trilogy, 2004-2005).

In 2006, Sorokin comes back to the subject of Russian national past, approaching

it from a different perspective. Instead of creating another historiographic metafiction,50

Sorokin offers his take on the dystopian genre with a short novel, The Day of the

Oprichnik. Russia’s future, just as it was the case with The Slynx, is modeled in the novel

on the intellectual construct of national past. If we recall Sorokin’s comment about the

novel being "of course a book about the present"51 quoted in the beginning of this

chapter, his understanding of Russian national history becomes all the more surprising:

the “country’s present,” which is supposed to bear the seeds of a warning (which a

conventional dystopian text communicates) is suspiciously absent from another of

Sorokin’s musings in the same interview. The view of Russian history that Sorokin

conjures ignores the present altogether: “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 will

be our future.”52 The fact that Sorokin so desperately wants his book to be about the

Russian “present” of the 2000s (in which autocracy and national(ist) traditionalism are

prominently featured in the context of Putin’s presidency) is counteracted by his

discursive inability to fit the present as a historical category into his schema of Russian

history. Nevertheless, the novel itself becomes a site for this present, as it constructs that

50
See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York, 1988), esp. 289,
294.
51
“’Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire’: Spiegel Interview with Author Vladimir
Sorokin, Spiegel”, trans. Christopher Sultan, in Spiegel, Feb 2, 2007.
< http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,463860,00.html>, accessed Jun 10, 2009.
52
“’Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire’: Spiegel Interview with Author Vladimir
Sorokin, Spiegel”, trans. Christopher Sultan, in Spiegel, Feb 2, 2007.
< http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,463860,00.html>, accessed Jun 10, 2009.

168
which Sorokin’s words in the interview lack: a kind of “present tense temporality” that

defines the dystopian milieu of the novel.

At first glance, The Day of the Oprichnik indeed suggests that history is bound to

repeat itself. The short novel is set in 2028, and portrays the dystopian future of Russia

where the premise for radical social change is a set of the mysterious “Red, White and

Grey Turmoils.”53 The last Turmoil is followed by the restoration of absolute monarchy

in Russia. A wall is then erected around Russia, whose only international partner

remaining is China.

It is this extreme isolation that makes the national past the only accessible cultural

repository from which to borrow in order to create a new totalitarian society. Indeed, the

new Tsar of Russia reinstalls the oprichnina, the paramilitary 16th century organization

created by Tsar Ivan the Terrible,54 as the all-controlling state institution. Furthermore,

the new regime is based on the ideology of “self-determination, Orthodoxy and tradition”

(based on slightly mutated, but still recognizably catchy 19th-century nationalist slogan

proposed by Minister Uvarov for Tsar Nicholas I55). Sticking to the slogan, however,

53
Ostensibly standing for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, for the collapse of 1991 and for the
subsequent move towards autocracy.
54
A comprehensive account of the history of oprichnina is given in S. B. Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po
istorii oprichniny (Moscow, 1963). Throughout the twentieth century, historians’ assessment of the
phenomenon varied from condemnation to, importantly, praise for the role of oprichnina in Russia’s
unification under Ivan the Terrible, which was the official historical assessment during Stalin’s era. For a
post-Soviet historiographic assessment, see A. Karavashkin and A. Yurganov, “Oprichnina i Strashnyi
Sud”, in their Opyt istoricheskoi fenomenologii: Trudnyi put’ k ochevidnosti (Moscow, 2003), 68-115.
55
The original slogan is “Absolute monarchy, Orthodoxy, orientedness towards the people”
(samoderzhaviie, pravoslaviie, narodnost’). The role of Count Uvarov’s report in Russia’s search for the
“national idea” in the late nineteenth century is assessed in Richard Worthman, “Ofitsial’naia narodnost’ i
natsional’nyi mif rossiiskoi monarkhii XIX veka”, trans. O. Maiorova, in Rossiia/Russia: Vyp. 3(11):
Kul’turnyie praktiki v ideologitcheskoi perspective. Rossiia, XVIII – nachalo XX veka (Moscow, 1999),
233-244.

169
proves to be impossible in Sorokin’s dystopian future, as Russian language turns out to

be peppered both with archaisms and Chinese words.56

On the other hand, many of the unmistakably futuristic elements of the dystopian

milieu, like various spins on communication technologies, remain highly visible (all

traditionalist ideology notwithstanding) and are used by the regime to exert various forms

of control over the population. To reconcile traditionalism with the futuristic aspect of the

dystopia, the names for the technologies are archaized and/or Russianized, so that the

oprichniki are constantly seen chatting on their “mobilo”57 or watching “puzyr’”

(“bubble”), supposedly a cross between a 3D-television and an Orwellian telescreen.

The protagonist is a middle-ranking member of the secret police, whose day at

work the reader follows. Andrei Komiaga goes about his usual day, executing those who

are not loyal to the regime and raping their wives (not because he is in any way “evil,”

but because it is a custom); taking on a delivery task on the orders of the Tsarina; sorting

out the money issues that the oprichnina has with Customs; ensuring that the new show

performed for the Kremlin’s aristocratic elite is ideologically sound; taking a steam bath

with other members of oprichnina; taking part in another execution; and finally getting

home, exhausted. He then falls asleep to face another day just like the one the reader

witnessed.

We can assume the extreme predictability of Komiaga’s existence for two

reasons. Firstly, the title of The Day of the Oprichnik is a pun on the actual content of the

56
For more on Sorokin’s imagining of the future of the Russian language, see Chapter 1.
57
The archaization/Russianization occurs here by adding a neuter gender ending to the transliteration of an
English word, with the resulting neologism morphologically resembling pattern of forming nouns to denote
instruments from past participles of the verbs, characteristic of Old Russian.

170
novel;58 while the novel depicts one day in the life of an oprichnik, the title can be read in

two ways – either referring to a particular day in the life of a particular oprichnik, or to

the fact that the “day,” the era depicted in the novel belongs to the oprichniki, as the

Russian possessive construction allows for both interpretations. The sense of an era of

doom, conveyed by the second interpretation, contributes to the effect of post-

apocalyptic, and, in a way, post-historic temporality.59

Secondly, the novel opens with a dream sequence, the same dream sequence that

it will fade into in the end. This dream sequence establishes the mode of narration which

the rest of the novel is to follow, overloaded with folk motifs, repetitions and parallel

constructions. In the dream, the first-person narrator, yet unknown to the reader, follows

a magical white horse that for the narrator comes to symbolize “everything, all of my life,

all of my destiny, all my luck.”60 The dream, the narrator says, is “the same again”: he

goes after the horse, but it does not notice the narrator, or anyone else for that matter, and

“goes away, leaves me, goes away forever, goes away, for all eternity it goes away, goes

away, goes, goes away.”61

When the narrator awakens and the dystopian milieu is painstakingly established

in great detail in the next several pages, the meaning of the dream becomes suspiciously

58
It is also an evident pun on the title of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous One Day in Life of Ivan
Denisovich (1962): Sorokin’s protagonist can be read as a satire of Ivan Denisovich (they both possess a
kind of uncanny honesty, which in the case of Sorokin’s protagonist is perverse as he is committing
monstrous acts and still remains honest and even likeable).
59
In opposition to this striving towards genre conformity stands Komiaga’s constant analysis of the
sociopolitical situation in the year 2028, which suggests that historical time does not come to a complete
halt in this dystopian milieu (as was the case with Tolstaia’s The Slynx). This supports Tchantsev’s
argument about Sorokin’s dystopia being a more immediate reaction to the current political situation, as the
political dynamics of Sorokin’s dystopian society ostensibly mirror (and/or extrapolate on) those observed
in Russia in the 2000s.
60
The Russian text is cited from Vladimir Sorokin, Den’ Oprichnika, online version at
<http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/sorokin_vladimir/sorokin_vladimir_den_oprichnika/>, accessed March 10,
2009. “вся жизнь, вся судьба моя, вся удача”.
61
Ibid. “а он все так же неспешно удаляется, ничего и никого не замечая, навсегда уходит, уходит от
меня, уходит навеки, уходит бесповоротно, уходит, уходит, уходит…”

171
obvious: the narrator experiences, unconsciously, some loss of great significance

(“everything”), but in his conscious state he is sure that everything is perfectly well as he

goes about his day with very little hesitation. Thus, the dystopian milieu is established not

only on the level of detailed descriptions of distorted everyday practices that blend

futuristic motives with old Russian cultural customs, but also on the level of the “moral”

attitude that the reader is supposed to adopt, as we come to know on a very intimate level

that something is wrong with the world (and the psyche) that repeatedly produces such

dreams. In any case, on the purely stylistic level, there seems to be very little difference

between the way Komiaga frames his conscious and unconscious content, as his musings

about the fate of Russia, just as his thoughts about the everyday issues, are organized

along the same stylistic lines of repetition, parallelism, and excessive synonymizing.

The obsessive attention to detail in the exposition reveals a tension between the

method of creating an alternative reality, which is supposed to be dystopian, and the effect

the first-person narration produces. This narration produces an interesting twist on the

cautionary tale: the reader is to an extent caught in between the dystopian premise of the

novel and the inescapable identification with the protagonist’s non-critical, even positive,

attitude to his dystopian society. Thus, the following description in the exposition, slow-

paced, filled with stylistic inversions in the original, hardly contributes to creating a

dystopian milieu:

They bow from the waist to me. I nod to them, passing. The floorboards crack.

They open the door for me, the door coated with iron. To the yard I go. Sunny day

it is, with a bit of frost. More snow fell during the night – on the firs, on the fence,

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 on the little guard tower it lays. Snow is good! The earthly shame it covers. And

the soul is cleansed by it.62

For the protagonist, then, his milieu is definitely not dystopian. His attitude

towards the winter landscape is structured by classic tropes of Russian Romantic

nationalism.63 Such idealized descriptions suggest that for the protagonist his milieu is

utopian; this is a drastic departure from classic dystopian narrative dynamics, where the

protagonist is either already or about to be disenchanted with his environment. The

reader, then, is put into an impossible position, identifying with something with which

they should not be identifying.

Read from the premise that the novel is dystopian and socially critical towards the

reality it creates, Komiaga’s obsessive mode of narration is supposed to cover over the

ugly truths about the society portrayed in the novel. However, if we assume that the

subjective narration opens up a utopian space in the middle of dystopia, the structure of

the novel predicated on repetition may mean something entirely different: the repetitive

elements’ main function then is to blur the line between the protagonist’s personal utopia

and the reader’s dystopia. Komiaga’s discursive repetitiveness accomplishes two things

simultaneously: for him, it structures and legitimizes reality (which he is unaware is

dystopian). For the reader, it serves as retardation as it conceals the monstrous social and

cultural practices of the Russia of the future. Because of the excessive repetition (and

62
In the translation, I made an attempt to preserve the stylistic inversion. “Кланяются в пояс. Киваю им,
проходя. Скрипят половицы. Отворяют дверь кованую. Выхожу на двор. День солнечный выдался, с
морозцем. Снега за ночь подсыпало — на елях, на заборе, на башенке сторожевой. Хорошо, когда
снег! Он срам земной прикрывает. И душа чище от него делается”.
63
Russian Romantic nationalism favored the inversion of word order to add folk flavor to sentence
structures, and eagerly found philosophical and emotional meanings in the elements of nature. A discussion
of Russian Romantic nationalism and its political and ideological implications is given in Susanna Rabow-
Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (New York, State University of New
York Press, 2006).

173
because of the almost inevitable identification with the protagonist), it becomes

exceptionally hard to perceive the hangings, dismemberments and political oppression in

the novel at their conventional moral value.

This is one of the main reasons why The Day of the Oprichnik, which is supposed

to be a cautionary tale, is, paradoxically, nostalgic. The proclaimed warning about the

authoritarian future of Russia is simultaneously constructed and concealed by the first-

person narration, through which the text revels in an idealized (national) past. The

identification with the protagonist indeed proved to be powerful enough: Sorokin’s

“sequel” to, or rather an expansion of, The Day of the Oprichnik, Sugar Kremlin (2008),

is vaguely apologetic. Sorokin’s comments upon publishing Sugar Kremlin (a collection

of dystopian short stories set in the same universe as The Day) suggest that the collection

was, in a way, written to prove that The Day was indeed a dystopian novel:

The Day of the Oprichnik still was monological, not enough for me, I was lacking

polyphony from the other inhabitants [of this universe]. Sugar Kremlin is a frame

of sorts. Perhaps, for me this frame was even more valuable than The Day of the

Oprichnik: I just enjoyed the details of the picture.64

The cautious formulas, “was not enough for me” and “perhaps…” frame the

notion that the enjoyment that Sorokin derives from creating the dystopian milieu turns

out to be based on the text’s polyphonic quality. This is significant, because the choice of

a compliant insider as protagonist and narrator of a cautionary tale undoubtedly

64
Vladimir Sorokin, “V Mavzoleie dolzhen lezhat’ Ivan Groznyi”: Vladimir Sorokin o svoiei novoi knige”,
in Kommersant, 2008, No. 149 (3966), <http://www.kommersant.ru/doc-rss.aspx?DocsID=1014309>,
accessed March 12, 2009. “День опричника” все же был монологичен, мне не хватало многоголосья
других ее [этой вселенной] обитателей. “Сахарный Кремль” — некая рама. Может, она была для
меня даже ценнее “Дня опричника”: я просто наслаждался подробностями”.

174
diminishes the impact of the social critique that the novel performs. Sorokin cautiously

admits as much, and he theorizes this “unintended effect” in another interview:

When I was writing The Day of the Oprichnik, this was largely a search for a

metaphor for contemporary Russia. On the other hand, this was a cartoon, a

grotesque. And I managed to create a warning, too – a friend of mine told me

about it. He said, “you wrote an incantation of a kind, an incantation against all of

this happening.” But by the time of writing Sugar Kremlin, I got a feeling that

everything [that I was writing about] can really happen, that the path Russia

chooses may well end [the way I imagined]. And the first readers of Sugar

Kremlin, apparently, felt that: nearly everyone said that this is a much scarier

book than The Day of the Oprichnik.”65

Sorokin’s “friend,” real or imagined, pinpoints the most striking feature of the

text: the novel is an incantation against this [future] happening (“zagovor, chtoby etogo

ne sluchilos”). That the novel becomes an incantation, in a way, denies Sorokin’s

assurance that it is a political satire of the present. Instead, the present that the text is

“about” emerges not only as a current sociopolitical reality containing a warning about

the future, but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a textual site where incantations

hold the power to change the world. It is a temporality Komiaga already inhabits and

Sorokin would desperately want to have in his own present: if the Russian sociopolitical

65
“Vsem lizat’ Sakharnyi Kreml: Interv’ju s Vladimirom Sorokinym o novoi knige”, in Stringer Portal,
August 2008. <http://www.stringer.ru/publication.mhtml?Part=49&PubID=9852>, accessed March 12,
2009. “Когда я писал ‘День опричника’, это во многом было поиском метафоры для современной
России. С другой стороны, это был и шарж, и гротеск. И предостережение из этого получилось - об
этом мне сказал один мой друг. Ты, говорит, написал такой как бы заговор, чтобы этого не
случилось. Но к моменту написания ‘Сахарного Кремля’ у меня появилось ощущение, что все это и
вправду может быть, что путь, который выбирает Россия, может именно этим и кончиться. И
первые читатели ‘Сахарного Кремля’, видимо, это почувствовали: почти все они сказали, что это
более страшная книга, чем ‘День опричника’”.

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reality of the 2000s bears the seeds of authoritarianism, in Sorokin’s interpretation it also

bears seeds of utopia, predicated on the power of the spoken word. This is also a literary

utopia, where the literary text has the power to influence history.66

The pre-modern belief in the powers of interpellation, in the magic language,

paradoxically, finds a parallel in logocentrism that is traditionally associated with modern

Russian culture.67 The cautionary nature of the tale that The Day of the Oprichnik tells,

then, is predicated not just on the relatively recent Russian notion that literature is meant

to be a guiding force for social change (as formulated by the preeminent 19th -century

Russian scholar Vissarion Belinskii68 and later reinforced by Stalin’s characteristic of

writers as “engineers of human souls”69 that will come to define the ideology of Socialist

Realism). The early 19th-century Romantic notion of “poet as a prophet”70 is resurrected

here in its original meaning, stripped of any metaphoricity.71

The scholars of Sorokin note his texts’ exceptional preoccupation with ritualistic

practices.72 While The Day of the Oprichnik is less concerned with formal

66
For more on the changing role of literature and the writers’ struggle with the change in the post-Soviet
context, see Chapter 1.
67
Logocentrism is conventionally posited as a characteristic of cultural production that is “endemic” to
Russia. In the post-Soviet context, logocentrism often becomes a subject of both fascination and critique: as
evidenced by an opinion expressed by Mikhail Epstein in a conference presentation cited below: “Russian
logocentrism [is] the love for verbal expression which remains strikingly indifferent to the world of
objects” (for a discussion of philosophical implications of logocentrism, see Mikhail Epstein, "The
Philosophical Implications of Russian Conceptualism," paper delivered at AAASS Annual Meeting
(Washington, D.C.), 29 October 1995). For more discussion of logocentrism, see the section above on The
Slynx.
68
See esp. Belinskii’s Vzgliad na Russkuiu Literaturu 1846 (Vissarion Belinskii, Vzgliad na Russkuiu
Literaturu 1846 goda (Moskva, Goslitizdat, 1955)). The mythologizes status of Russian literature is
discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
69
Stalin borrows a formula from writer Yuri Olesha and first uses it at a 1932 meeting with Soviet writers
at Maksim Gor’kii’s residence.
70
Prominently featured in the poetry of major Russian Romantic writers, most importantly, Aleksandr
Pushkin and, to an extent, Mikhail Lermontov.
71
This is in line with constant dismantling of metaphors that is a prominent feature of Sorokin’s literary
style.
72
Galina Nefagina, Russkaia proza kontsa XX veka (Moscow, Flinta-Nauka, 2003), 268. Also see Svetlana
Beliaieva-Konegen, “Khorosho zabytoie, ili Rasstreliat’ bez suda (o prose V. Sorokina)”, in Strelets, 1992,

176
experimentation with stylistic and narrative conventions than earlier Sorokin texts, its

“universe” is nevertheless exceptionally dependent on ritualistic repetition, and not only

on the conceptual level. Beside the text being an “incantation” against history repeating

itself, the dystopian society is also structured by repetitive, highly mysticized everyday

practices. On the stylistic level, the text is not only obsessed with details of the dystopian

milieu, which is an anticipated effect of the genre, but also structures the dystopian

psyche as completely dependent on the belief in the power of repetition.

Sorokin’s oprichnina must be one of the most obsessive “secret brotherhoods”

ever depicted in literature. The work of oprichnina acquires mystic qualities very early

on, as every action of oprichnina is accompanied with elaborate rituals. If the novel is to

be read as an unproblematic cautionary tale, these rituals are supposed to legitimize the

violence that the oprichnina commits. The oprichniki behave like model illustrations of

Vladimir Propp’s folk-tale lack that can be only covered by compulsive adherence to a

magical structure manifested in magic numbers.73 Thus, they are required (and,

seemingly, feel compelled) to cry out three times before entering the compound of a

disloyal boyarin, walk around it three times clockwise and proclaim “woe to this home,”

also three times, before they are “allowed” to enter.

Being, of course, a satire of police procedure, this elaborate ritual is, nonetheless,

much more than mere satire; the sheer amount of rituals that govern the work of

oprichnina suggests an excess of performativity that, in the dystopian reading, masks the

morally compromised meaning of the acts that the oprichnina commits. However, this

excess is perhaps a little too “excessive”. The excess reveals itself not only on the level of

No. 2, (Paris, New York, Moscow), 150-153. Also, see Svetlana Beliaieva-Konegen, “Khorosho Zabytoie,
ili rasstreliat’ bez suda (o proze V. Sorokina)” (Paris-New York, Strelets, 1992, #2), 150-153.
73
See esp. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (University of Texas Press, 1968), 25.

177
content (the immense violence and depravity that nearly all the deeds of oprichnina

exhibit), but also on the level of linguistic organization of this content. Thus, a

boyarin’s74 compound is surrounded “so that not even an evil mouse can sneak through,

so that not an insidious mosquito can fly through.”75 This extension on a trite Russian

metaphor (“chtoby mysh’ ne probezhala”, “so that a mouse can’t sneak through”) is not

only excessive because the metaphor takes more space in the text. Through reactivating

the actual metaphoricity of the expression by juxtaposing the trite metaphor with a made-

up one, the scene acquires a surprisingly paranoid quality, so that mice and mosquitoes

that are not supposed to get through become very real enemies. This fits very well,

however, into the undercurrent of the pagan, folkloric mindset by which the oprichnina is

guided.76

The reliance on ritual that Sorokin’s dystopian milieu exhibits plays into the

predictability of existence in Sorokin’s Russia of the future, the predictability that, as we

have seen, operates on many levels of the text. The predictability of the future, in the

Russian context, is an especially relevant social concern, a concern that complicates the

dystopian premise of the novel. No matter how “bad” the future of Russia turns out to be

in Sorokin’s text, the very fact that it is allowed to appear there is significant. The

“explosion” of dystopian texts in Russian literature of the mid-2000s, mentioned in the

beginning of this chapter, may signify the end of the pause where Russian culture found

itself in the 1990s. Sorokin’s dystopia, among other dystopian texts of the period, makes

74
In the Middle Ages, the term boyarin denoted a Russian noble; the term is used in the novel to indicate a
member of new Russian aristocracy.
75
“Обложена усадьба со всех сторон еще с ночи... Чтобы мышь зловредная не пробежала, чтобы
комар злокозненный не пролетел”.
76
The oprichnina is also fervently religious (Orthodox Christian), which reiterates the perennial tension
between Christianity and paganism in the conventional Russian belief system.

178
predictions about the relatively immediate future of the country; by satirizing current

sociopolitical reality, it not only begins to feel comfortable about making sociopolitical

and cultural predictions, but also, implicitly, resurrects the future as a functional category

of history. Sorokin’s own Ice Trilogy, an arc of novels from the 1990s that are arguably

dystopian, is set in a “parallel reality” of sorts, without explicit references to any temporal

category of history. The Day of the Oprichnik, on the other hand, by formally and

explicitly being set in the future, signifies the reemergence of the future as a conceptual

category of historical temporality in Russian culture, no matter how perverse this

resurrection comes to be in its reliance on the national past.

Still, the future of Russia in The Day of the Oprichnik is imagined to possess the

temporality that is, in essence, devoid of the flow of time, and structured by magical

beliefs, which we have observed in two incarnations in the earlier post-Soviet dystopias.

Sorokin’s text, while undoubtedly reacting to sociopolitical changes and therefore

establishing a certain immediacy of its vision of the future, nevertheless borrows the

system of signification that is supposed to describe this future from the legacy of the

1990s. In the 2000s, the new set of fantasies about what the future should (not) be still

relies on the eternal, never-ending present, the time of the Soviet epic (to borrow from

Bakhtin via Clark again), and on the system of signification associated with this time.

This sort of cultural “inertia”, as it seems, lies in the perverse (and, in the Russian

context, nostalgic) appeal of a utopian “no-place” that, at least from within, for the texts’

protagonists, is devoid of a characteristically post-Soviet anxiety about the nature of

historical process. Disillusioned with the compromised teleologically Marxist model of

history in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the texts nonetheless cling to the

179
memory of functional teleology, and, paradoxically, do so by crafting their versions of

the future as places possessing a radically different temporality. This temporality ignores

the conventional framework of past, present and future because it denies the flow of time

itself. As post-Soviet culture maps the semiotic and temporal similarities between the

folkloric imagination and Soviet mythology, both the eternal present of magic fairy tale

and the Great Time of Socialist Realist text quell the post-Soviet uncertainties about the

historical process by being nostalgically recreated in the space of a literary text.

180
 CHAPTER 41

The Dead Cosmonauts: Soviet Hero in Post-Soviet Space.

News from the Russian Mission Control Center: Today, the Russian Space Agency

de-orbited The Mir Space Station. Large fragments were scuttled in the Pacific. Smaller

fragments burned upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Tomorrow, our cosmonauts are

planning… Fuck! Our cosmonauts! (A Russian anekdot)2

Soviet Science Fiction’s Dead Cosmonauts: the Foundations of the Myth

On March 23, 1961, less than a month before Yuri Gagarin successfully orbited

the Earth, a Soviet cosmonaut-in-training, Valentin Bondarenko, died in a training

accident in a pressure chamber at the Institute for Biomedical Studies in Moscow. In the

incident that will in 2008 become one of the plot lines for Aleksei Gherman’s film about

the Soviet space program, Paper Soldier, Bondarenko burned alive in the oxygen-rich

atmosphere of the chamber. No mention of this incident appeared in press before 1986,

when Yaroslav Golovanov’s article in the “Izvestiia” newspaper was published to give

what he called a “truthful” account of the events3. Golovanov’s struggle for truthfulness

pertains, perhaps, less to the actual circumstances of the incident than to the fact that he

takes a stand against the corpus of conspiratorial publications that can be called “the tales

of the lost cosmonauts,” launched by a Readers Digest article, published in April 1965 in

the US. The article claimed that several cosmonauts were lost in space during secret
1
A version of a part of this chapter appeared in: Daria Kabanova, “Mourning the Mimesis: Aleksei
Fedorchenko’s First on the Moon and the post-Soviet Practice of Writing History”, Studies in Slavic
Cultures X, “Postmodernism” (2011).
2
“Репортаж из ЦУПа, ведущий берет интервью у руководителя ЦУПа: "Сегодня Российское
Космическое Агенство затопило станцию "Мир". Большие осколки станции были сведены с орбиты
и затоплены в Тихом Океане. Малые осколки сгорели при входе в плотные слои атмосферы. Завтра
наши космонавты планируют...б*ять!!!.... Наши космонавты!!!”
3
The incident is later mentioned in Golovanov’s book (Yaroslav Golovanov, Kosmonavt # 1. Moskva:
Izvestiia, 1986).

181
training flights; “strange” radio signals received by Italian amateur space watchers were

cited in the article as proof of the fact that Soviet Union had several space missions

stranded in orbit, intentionally or unintentionally. This story of “lost cosmonauts”

undermined one of the Soviet myths upon which the state’s symbolic validation was

built.

The Space Race gave birth to tens of songs, hundreds of books and thousands of

monuments to Yuri Gagarin (a process that, significantly, intensified after his accidental

death in 1967), as well as metaphorization of national pride through the images

associated with the Soviet space program.4 The Space Race, a crucial site for the

competition of ideologies during the Cold War, created an important part of Soviet

mythological framework: the story of the Soviet space program and its successes, just as

its American counterpart during the Cold War, goes beyond any military applications and

comes to be a source of national pride, as it literally translates technological achievement

into an ideological one. The Space Race exemplifies the uneasy relationship the Soviet

state had with the legacy of Leon Trotsky’s dreams of world revolution.

Even after Stalin effectively put an end to these dreams, the dream of space

exploration is a function of an unmistakably revolutionary (and Trotskyite) desire to

ideologically appropriate outer space itself. An example of the romantic revolutionary

sentiment at work in mythologizing the dream of space exploration is the 1936 film,

Kosmicheskii Reis (Cosmic Journey or Space Voyage), a silent feature directed by

Vassilii Zhuravlev. In the film, outer space becomes an important site for Socialist

“colonization.” Kosmicheskii Reis’s (critically acclaimed) special effects are mostly

4
Thus, a 1960s song sums up the Soviet cultural and technological achievement as “We build rockets, and
also in the sphere of ballet we’re ahead of all the planet.”

182
focused on creating the illusion of weightlessness and freedom of movement that the first

space travelers experience on the Moon. The film thus can be read as the romantic

interpretation of Communism as freedom, in line with the ideas of early Russian

revolutionary discourse.5

The invalidation of the significant Soviet myth that the conspiracy theory of lost

cosmonauts performs will make the corpus of cultural fantasies that deal with lost or dead

cosmonauts particularly pertinent in the post-Soviet cultural context, when the Soviet

mythology becomes a subject of deconstruction. The Reader’s Digest article introduced

the image of the dead body in orbit that must remain there for all eternity: “There is an

eerie possibility that a long-dead Russian astronaut is today hurtling silently through

space at thousands of miles an hour - the victim of a Soviet space shot that went wrong.

His body perfectly preserved by intense cold, he may be a lonely wanderer in space for

centuries to come.”6 Readily observable in this paragraph are the motifs of the peculiar

temporality of outer space, devoid of measurable time, and of the immutable nature of the

objects that are forever suspended in that space. All of this creates a set of images that

contribute to a fantasy that is powerful because of the “natural” metonymic connection

between the images of the body, the eternal questions of life and death, and the

ideological notions upon which the myth of the “conquest” of the Cosmos is predicated.

5
In a post-Soviet film, First on the Moon (2004, dir. Aleksei Fedorchenko), outer space becomes a critical
site for Socialist expansion in the 1930s, with the offscreen narrator informing the spectators that “it was a
time where people lived by the idea of planetary revolution, dreamed of the Cosmic Soviet Republic”
(mechtali o kosmicheskoi respublike Sovetov).
6
J.T. Ratcliff, “Italy’s Amazing Amateur Space Watchers”, in Reader’s Digest, April 1965, 115-117.
Online version available at
<http://web.archive.org/web/20031002125716/lostcosmonauts.com/readers.htm>, accessed April 1, 2009.
Also on this conspiracy theory see: James Oberg, Uncovering Soviet Disasters (Random House, New York,
1988).

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 This conspiracy theory and its paranoid structure provide a surprisingly accurate

insight into the mechanisms of the myth’s functioning, exposing the structures that the

ideology behind the myth would technically want to conceal but cannot help making

visible. While the Soviet media and official discourse were, of course, extremely hesitant

to acknowledge any kind of accident involving cosmonauts, in space or on Earth,

socialist science fiction,7 on the other hand, produced a substantial number of texts that

feature images and motifs of dead, dying, or mutilated cosmonauts. Following Katerina

Clark’s suggestion to treat Socialist Realist texts primarily in their mythological

function,8 I will now look at the ways in which the fantasy of the cosmonauts dead and

forever lost in space elucidates the ideological content of the myth of the conquest of the

Cosmos.

Already in the “proto-Socialist Realist” novel, Aleksei Tolstoi’s Aelita (1923),

outer space becomes the place to long for, an object of desire for the protagonist Mikhail

Los’. Los’ goes to Mars because outer space holds a promise for him: he hopes that there,

“beyond the threshold of Earth and the threshold of death,”9 he will be able to forget the

7
A note is in order about the place of science fiction within Soviet cultural production. While some
scholars, like Matthias Schwarz, argue that Socialist science fiction goes against Socialist realist method by
depicting the remote future when Socialist Realism’s main focus is the immediate future, I rather side with
others like Elana Gomel. Following her, I treat science fiction as a paradoxically logical development of the
Socialist Realist method. Science fiction produces an “excess” of realism by creating an entirely new
reality, thus taking the Socialist Realist utopian and futuristic modality to its ultimate point. Science fiction
takes the call of the Congress of Socialist Writers made in 1934 to depict reality not as it is, but as it should
be, literally, by creating this reality. Escapist as science fiction is, it nevertheless uses the Socialist Realist
method while seemingly distancing itself from its conventional subject matter. See Matthias Schwarz, Die
Erfindung des Kosmos: Zur sowjetischen Science Fiction und popularwissenschaftlichen Publizistik vom
Sputnikflug bis zum Ende der Tauwetterzeit (Berliner Slawistische Arbeiten, no. 22. Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
2004). A similar opinion is held by John Glad (John P. Glad, Extrapolations from Dystopia: A Critical
Study of Soviet Science Fiction ( Princeton: Kingston Press, 1982); and Elana Gomel, “Gods like Men:
Soviet Science Fiction and the Utopian Self”, in Science Fiction Studies, 2004, Vol. 31, No. 3, Soviet
Science Fiction: The Thaw and After, 358-377.
8
Clark 1981, 252.
9
Aelita is cited from Aleksei Tolstoi, Aelita. <http://az.lib.ru/t/tolstoj_a_n/text_0160.shtml>, accessed
April 1, 2009.

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loss of his beloved wife. Yet, Los’ is unsure whether outer space will hold true to its

promise, because he realizes that he, the living being, has no place in outer space: to truly

belong here he has to become “slumbering ice crystals that fly there, unawakened.”10

Fear prompts him to ask somebody to accompany him to Mars; he is afraid that if his

calculations are incorrect, he will remain in space for all eternity. He describes this

through a striking image of a “chilled corpse in the dark,” thus problematizing his own

feeling for the “slumbering ice crystals” that have the same fate of flying in space

forever. Los’’s longing for outer space is, then, ambiguous: tempted by its atemporality

and the promise of forgetting, Los’ is nonetheless fearful of this temptation.

In the later examples of Ivan Efremov’s The Andromeda Nebula (“Tumannost’

Andromedy”, 1957) and Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii’s The Land of Crimson Clouds

(“Strana Bagrovykh Tuch”, 1959), ideological meanings are explicitly attached to death

in space. In an episode of The Andromeda Nebula, the crew discovers a long-lost

spaceship from Earth with nobody inside. The recorded message in the captain’s log

forewarns the crew of the dangers that they are about to face. The moment of the crew’s

death inside the lost spaceship is recorded on tape, too, providing the present crew with

all the necessary tips to eventually be able to capture the deadly alien life form and

transport it to Earth for further research. While the crew that perished is, of course,

mourned by the present crew, their death proves to be actually useful not only for the

present crew’s research mission, but also in their soul-searching: they leave the planet

assured that they are able to face any adversity, having refueled their spaceship using the

10
Ibid.

185
other spaceship’s fuel supplies that are conveniently available now that the original crew

has little use for them.11

In The Land of Crimson Clouds, the space crew lands on Venus, which in the

novel’s universe has become a critical site of the human conquest of outer space. The

(Communist) society of the future is in an energy crisis due to the rapid development of

technology; the society is ready to mine the radioactive ore reserves Venus is said to

possess. The crew of the present mission is stunned to intercept a radio signal on Venus;

upon approaching the source of the signal they discover a mangled spaceship with a lone

(and dead) space explorer inside: “The transmitter was working, little green and blue

lights behind the broken dials trembled. And at the transmitter there sat a dead man, his

shaggy head, bandaged by grey rags, on his chest.”12

The contrast between the personification in the description of the transmitter and

the dead body of the space explorer is striking; the functional interchange between the

lifeless body and the “alive” transmitter turns a dead body into a beacon that establishes

the presence of humans on Venus by constantly transmitting the radio signal.13 The dead

body in the spaceship becomes a symbol of a stage in the conquest of Venus, forever

11
In another episode of Andromeda Nebula, the spaceship crew discovers a dead planet, the inhabitants of
which were ostensibly frozen to death because they did not listen to warnings about misusing the planet’s
natural resources. The crew observes a “glass grave” where, among others, a man is sitting “with insane,
scary eyes looking into the distance.” The frozen people (“not Earthlings, but definitely human”), though
they do not fall very neatly in the core narrative of the myth of the cosmonauts lost in space, nonetheless
introduce a very important feature of the myth: they become eternal symbols, in this case of stupidity and
carelessness, which the captain of the spaceship confirms. These people are bound to stay in their glass
grave forever, forever fulfilling their didactic function, cautioning people against misusing natural
resources. Interestingly, it is precisely through their death that they are able to play such an important role
in (and for) the Communist society of the future that Efremov’s novel is set in.
12
The Land of Crimson Clouds is cited from Arkadii i Boris Strugatskii, Strana Bagrovykh Tuch.
Strugatskii, Arkadii, and Boris Strugatskii. Strana Bagrovykh Tuch (The Land of Crimson Clouds)
(Moskva: Ast, 1999), 239.
13
This runs parallel to the present crew’s mission to install the radio transmitters so that the future
spaceships can safely land on the planet’s surface.

186
installed as a perverse and immutable monument to this conquest, transmitting its death

for every space traveler to reflect upon.

The crew is deeply moved by this death, pondering the extent of the feat that they

themselves need to perform. This death is inspirational, but what exactly it inspires

becomes evident when one crew member gives a little eulogy, saying that the space

explorer died “like a Real Man” (nastoiaschchii chelovek). Here, the actual content of the

fantasy of dead bodies in space is revealed: the crew member refers to the space explorer

using the same metaphor that Boris Polevoi used for Aleksei Meres’iev, a World War II

pilot who lost his legs but persevered in rejoining the ranks after having learned to pilot

with artificial limbs.

Polevoi’s A Story about a Real Man (Povest’ o nastoiaschchem cheloveke, 1946)

follows the events of Meres’iev’s life, narrating the circumstances of his trauma, his

despair upon losing his legs and eventual spiritual recovery, followed by a physical one.

The inspirational example that Meres’iev (Mares’iev in Polevoi’s novel) follows is, of

course, the iconic hero of Socialist Realist literature, the avant la lettre Real Man, Pavka

Korchagin from Nikolai Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalialas’ stal’,

1932). Like Pavka, Mares’iev becomes physically disabled while in the service of the

Soviet state, and, like Pavka, he is compelled to be again useful to the state. And, as it is

the case with Pavka, Mares’iev’s ability to overcome all sorts of adversities, surprisingly,

does not make him a hero: it is his mutilated body that does.

In her How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made, Lilya Kaganovsky suggests that

Pavka Korchagin’s mutilated body, paradoxically, is what makes him into the ideal

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subject of the state.14 Kaganovsky’s argument is based on Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of

what the political regime wants from its subjects. The regime, Žižek argues in a Lacanian

development on the social contract theory, demands that its subjects forego jouissance,

i.e., the desire for pleasure beyond the limit imposed by the Law,15 in the name of the

greater good. However, according to Žižek this is not enough. While the Law explicitly

asks the subject to sacrifice something, it also implicitly asks them to enjoy repressing

jouissance, i.e., to consent to (and be content to) forego it, which, Žižek suggests, results

in a perfect ambiguity of pleasure and pain.

Pavka’s mutilated body represents the ultimate sacrifice that the state requires of

its subjects. Pavka’s Communist spirit is reinforced as his body becomes progressively

more disabled. The pure spirit, which is distilled out of the noncompliance of Pavka’s

body with his mind’s revolutionary aspirations, is what destroys the conventional reliance

of subjectivity on the physical body. Pavka is able to overcome the challenge that the loss

of bodily ability presents to him by becoming a symbol of pure spirit, as evidenced by his

career as a writer, i.e., a figure that in the Russian cultural context has been invested with

spiritual (and inspirational) meanings since the 19th century.

The next “Real Man” in the line-up, Mares’iev, does not get as close to becoming

a pure, disembodied spirit of Communism as does Pavka. Yet, it is his injury that

transforms him from a common pilot into a truly heroic one. The famous episode from

Aleksandr Stolper’s 1949 film adaptation of A Story about a Real Man, where Mares’iev

14
Lilya Kaganovsky, “How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made”, in Slavic Review, 2004, Vol. 63, No. 3, 577-
596. For a discussion of Mares’iev, see also: Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade:
Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008),
esp. 119-145, 174.
15
The Lacanian term jouissance refers to the enjoyment that is beyond the pleasure principle. See Jacques
Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, in
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (NY, W.W. Norton, 2006), 671-703, esp. 696.

188
performs, on his artificial limbs, a Russian folk dance to convince the doctors that he is fit

to fly again, attests to the excess of what he has set out to accomplish. The dance

Mares’iev performs is not a physical requirement for flying; however, the joyful display

of excessive devotion is. Whether Mares’iev is more successful as a fighter pilot after his

injury than before is immaterial; it is not the degree of actual usefulness to the state that

matters, but rather Mares’iev’s symbolic value as a person who less respects the needs of

his body than the interest of the state in having as many pilots as possible, even (and

more so) if those are “damaged” pilots.

For the Soviet cosmonauts, it seems, “just” bodily injuries and disabilities are not

enough to turn them into ideal subjects of the state. They have to die because they are

supposed to perform the most symbolically important task that the Soviet power can

require of its subjects: the conquest of a space that transcends the more-or-less

conventional ideological considerations of revolutionary struggle or of defending the

country from external and internal enemies. Thus the requirements for the greatness of

the feat that the cosmonauts are asked to perform are stricter, as are the obligations

imposed on their bodies and subjectivities to be in full service of the state. This is

because they enable the power of the state to transcend the limits of space (and, as we

will see, time); their feat takes place in a space that is nothing but sublime. This (outer)

space lends a sublime quality to their feats.

Thus, the eulogy by the crew member from Land of Crimson Clouds pinpoints the

nature of the problem: the space explorer had to die to perversely validate the quest for

the planet’s natural resources, and consequently, to become a didactic and inspirational

symbol of this quest. He had to sacrifice himself for the greater good, be that the demands

189
of the Communist civilization on Earth, or the spirit of scientific exploration that

characterizes Strugatskii’s Communist universe. His death fixes him forever in his

function as the symbol of progress and of Communist spirit.

Unlike other deaths for the cause, however, the dead cosmonaut is probably much

more suited to the inspirational goals of Communist ideology than the vast range of

sacrifices of life and body that it commonly utilizes.16 This is because of the peculiar

property of the body in space that Aleksei Tolstoi already notes and the Readers Digest

conspiracy theory savors: it is there to remain for eternity. Therefore, the inspirational

story that the dead body tells always has a very physical referent, even if it floats in the

dark and is invisible to the people on Earth. The body of the dead cosmonaut is thus

simultaneously concealed and revealed.17 The ideological meanings attached to the body

that floats in space are thus exceptionally stable, because the body will be there when the

need to refer to it arises. The perverse ideological stability of meaning that the body of

the dead cosmonaut provides makes it into the perfect building block for creating myth.

Let us go back to Tolstoi’s novel and Mikhail Los’’s ambiguous attitude towards

outer space. Los’ is torn between the longing for peaceful, atemporal amnesia that he

thinks outer space will provide, and the fear of the sublime eternity. In other words, he

longs for and is afraid of one and the same property of outer space, namely, the absence

of conventional historical temporality that measures and makes time discrete, assigning a

temporal frame to the events that happen within it. The temptation and fear that the

16
Numerous examples can be cited here, from Arkadii Gaidar’s Military Secret (“Voiennaia Taina,” 1935)
to the explosion of novelized biographies of primarily young (and almost invariably dead) heroes of the
Great Patriotic War in the late 1940s and early 1950s, like Aleksandr Fadeev’s Young Guard (“Molodaia
Gvardiia”, 1951), Lev Kassil’s The Younger Son Street (“Ulitsa Mladshego Syna” , 1949), Lyubov’
Kosmodem’ianskaia’s A Story of Zoya and Shura (Povest’ o Zoie i Schure, 1953), V. Smirnov’s Zina
Portnova and many others.
17
Through radio signals, as we have seen in the Strugatskiie’s novel, or just through the awareness of the
cosmonaut’s accomplishment.

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“atemporal” temporality of outer space evokes can be explained if we consider

similarities between this temporality and the temporality in which the Communist state

has to theoretically exist, a temporality “after” the final point of historical process, after

the history stops, strikingly similar to the epic “Great Time” of the Soviet novel as

Katerina Clark discusses it.18 It is, in a way, a space of radical alterity, the most

appropriate “no-place”, u-topia, due to a temporality it is imagined (not) to possess.

The ideal, immutable, eternal symbol of the dead body in space becomes more

than a beacon that signals the ideal (even as, or precisely because, it is dead) Soviet

subjectivity to the rest of the state’s subjects and to the rest of the world. In a space that

possesses what can be deemed a perversely ideal Communist temporality, the dead body

serves as a constant reference to the ideal Soviet subject in the ideal Soviet space.

Post-Soviet Deconstruction of the Myth

All of the features of the corpus of fantasies about dead cosmonauts, namely: the

fantasy’s potential of becoming a powerful symbol of the Soviet state’s accomplishment;

the fantasy’s appeal to the desired ahistorical temporality that both Communism and

outer space promise; the dead cosmonaut’s status as an ideal subject of the state that has

to undergo an ultimate ordeal (death) to be installed as such; and the perverse nature of

all of these that is manifested in the excess of the required sacrifice and the excess of the

subjectivity that results19 – all of these become subject to deconstruction in post-Soviet

literature and film. On the one hand, this deconstruction is a result of exposing the

18
Clark 40.
19
Though the dead body is of course devoid of “conventional” subjectivity, it is invested with a symbolic
subjectivity that maintains an infinite existence.

191
mythological nature of the Communist grand narrative in the aftermath of perestroika and

of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its structuring narratives.

On the other hand, film and fiction’s very turn to this corpus of fantasies signifies

that they still hold an imaginative potential as post-Soviet culture works with the Soviet

material to create its own mythological content. Several important post-Soviet texts in the

1990s and 2000s turn to the fantasies of the dead cosmonauts, as it seems that for post-

Soviet culture outer space holds another promise, predicated on the nostalgia for its

Soviet value – of being a place where the concerns of the now-post-Soviet subjectivity

can be examined.

Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra: the Soviet Cosmos and its Discontents

Viktor Pelevin’s short novel, Omon Ra (1991) reveals the structure of the fantasy

that is formally similar, but ideologically strikingly different from what we have already

seen in the Soviet texts; here, the fantasy’s structure is exposed, not concealed,20 which

radically changes the “message” of the novel.

Sally Dalton-Brown contends that the text’s main theme is (Soviet) propaganda

and its exposure/deconstruction.21 This indeed seems to be the case, as the plot would

suggest: a boy, Omon, dreams of becoming a cosmonaut; is able to join the Space

Program; is instructed by his superiors that he needs to sacrifice his life for the sake of

the mission’s success; is getting ready to die because the details of the mission do not

include the return of the cosmonauts (indeed, officially it is an automatic flight that does

20
The novel’s dedication supports the argument that the ideological fantasy in question is the same Soviet
fantasy. Omon Ra is dedicated to the “heroes of the Soviet Cosmos” (“geroiam sovetskogo kosmosa”). The
formulation demonstrates the dynamics of symbolic appropriation that structured the Space Race: the outer
space here becomes a Soviet territory.
21
Sally Dalton-Brown, “Ludic Nonchalance or Ludicrous Despair? Viktor Pelevin and Russian
Postmodernist Prose Author(s)”, in The Slavonic and East European Review, 1997, Vol. 75, No.2, 216-233,
228.

192
not include any human space travelers at all); and finally goes to the Moon only to

discover that the whole mission was an elaborate set-up and he had never left Earth. The

Soviet space program turns out to be a simulation, an attempt to invent itself in order to

be able to compete with the “enemy,” the USA, in the Space Race, all the while lacking

financial and technological resources to do so.

As much as the text’s “message” is indeed the dismantling of the elaborate web of

Soviet propaganda through a postmodernist deconstruction of ideological simulacra, it is

nonetheless not its only focus. While the Soviet space program in the novel turns out to

be a sham, the deaths of its participants, at least as far as the narrator can tell, are not

being simulated: the cosmonauts have to die “for real,” in an uncanny post-Soviet

reiteration of the heroic path of becoming “Real Men.” If the phantasmatic content of the

myth of the Real Man is taken into account in the reading of the text, it becomes a novel

that deals with “metaphysical and eternal concepts”22 even as it deconstructs the Soviet

propaganda.

Omon Ra’s eponymous protagonist and narrator, Omon Krivomazov shares his

dream of going to space with the flight school admission committee and is asked to join

the cosmonaut squad in a “space school.” He is then explicitly asked to sacrifice his life

for his country. He becomes a part of the lunar mission, but in a bizarre capacity: Omon

is supposed to drive the lunar module that is touted as the achievement of Soviet space

automatics. In the course of training, Omon learns that the Soviet automatics is

nonexistent, and all the automatic systems, like intercontinental ballistic missiles and

spaceships are in fact operated by humans, who are in the novel very appropriately called

22
As Sergei Kostyrko suggests in his early review of the novel. See Sergei Kostyrko, “Chistoie Pole
Literatury”, in Novyi Mir, 1992, 12, pp. 250-59. A similar opinion is expressed by S. Chuprinin,
“Sbyvsheesia Nebyvshee”, Znamia, 1993, 9, p. 181-188.

193
“Real Men,” a designation that penetrates the actual content of the romanticized Soviet

concept: operating a sustainer rocket engine in the novel invariably results in the death of

the human who performs this task. Omon is required to die (to shoot himself, as there is

no means of return to Earth), too, after he installs a transmitter broadcasting Soviet

slogans on the lunar surface. The actual content of the mission of Strugatskiie’s space

explorer is thus made explicit in Pelevin’s text, as Omon’s (eventually) dead body is

precisely what will ensure the proper functioning of the symbol of the Soviet

appropriation of outer space, the transmitter.

Omon Ra engages with the myth of “Real Men” by exposing the implications of

what the hero of How The Steel Was Tempered is transformed into by the requirements

imposed on his subjectivity by the state. Where Ostrovskii’s character became the ideal

Soviet subject “despite” (or precisely because of, as Kaganovsky argues) his mutilation,

in Pelevin’s novel the mutilation becomes an explicit, and officially sanctioned,

prerequisite to being useful to the state. The text’s constant strategy is the schizophrenic

literalizing and legitimizing of Soviet mythology’s most emotionally charged metaphors.

When Omon, taking his first step on the way to space, enters the flight school (named

after Aleksei Mares’iev), a high-ranking member of the admission committee speaks to

the incoming class, saying that the class will not train to become just pilots in the school,

but first and foremost – real men.23 This sounds like just another lofty Soviet formula

peppering the novel’s parody of the Party-sanctioned discourse– but only until after the

meeting, when the class goes to the mess hall, where their food is spiked with sedatives;

they wake up in the morning to find their feet amputated, to repeat Aleksei Mares’iev’s

23
Viktor Pelevin, Omon Ra. Trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996).This
sentence is omitted in the Bromfield translation (31). Further quotations refer to this edition.

194
journey towards being the Soviet hero pilot in shockingly exact detail. Omon and his

friend escape this fate because the state has another one in mind for them (for which they

must yet remain able-bodied). Yet, Omon still has a chance to observe a graduate of the

flight school at his final examination, consisting of performing the folk dance for the

exam committee. The graduate passes with flying colors, which on the surface attests to

the effectiveness of his transformation into a Real Man. However, while for Polevoi’s

Mares’iev, at least, dancing was a way to persuade the medical board to let him fly again,

in the phantasmatic version of the Soviet Union constructed by Pelevin’s novel, the

performance is a means to its own end. The novel associates the Soviet State with the

excess of ritualistic performativity: Omon learns that the graduate has never flown, nor

would he ever fly, because this Soviet Union possesses only a couple of planes that patrol

the border.

Further, on his way to the Moscow secret “cosmonaut school” Omon hears shots

from afar; his driver explains that the shots come from the Aleksandr Matrosov infantry

school. No further explanation is given, but, amputated feet still fresh in mind of

Pelevin’s reader familiar with Soviet heroic narratives, they can imagine that the cadets at

the Matrosov school are trained to throw themselves on pill-boxes, blocking the machine-

guns with their own bodies to allow their units to escape the fire, repeating the feat of

historical Aleksandr Matrosov, another martyr in the Soviet war pantheon, during the

Great Patriotic War.

Pavka Korchagin, too, appears in the text; attesting to the excess of the heroic feat

that the state requires of him, he is split in two. Omon’s two political instructors in the

secret cosmonaut school are named Urchagin and Burchagin: these alliterative copies of

195
the first Real Man graduated, Omon learns, from the Pavel Korchagin School of Higher

Political Education24 that manufactures Pavkas on a large scale. The mass production of

heroes, the reader is led to believe, works quite well for the ideological goals of the state

in the novel’s universe. Omon cannot help being inspired by the mechanically reproduced

copies of Korchagin, whose everyday life is also a literal reproduction of the inspirational

setup given in the Ostrovskii’s novel:

I was amazed at the positive optimism of this man [Urchagin], blind, paralyzed,

chained to a wheelchair, but nonetheless carrying out his duty and never tiring of

life. […] [He] would lie silent and motionless, propped up on his elbow on the

bed in a tiny room on the fifth floor, wearing his uniform jacket and covered up to

the waist with a blanket that hid the bedpan from probing eyes. The poor

furnishings of the room – a map case for writing on, with narrow slits in the sheet

of cardboard laid over it, a glass of strong tea permanently on the table, the white

curtain and the rubber plant – all touched me so profoundly I almost wept, and at

those moments I stopped thinking that all Communists were cunning, mean, and

self-serving.25

In this parallel universe of literalized metaphors, Omon is, to an extent, an

outsider: he retains some degree of skepticism towards the symbolic excesses of the

Soviet state. That he himself is ready to become one of the Real Men is inconsistent with

24
This is omitted in the Bromfield translation.
25
Pelevin (Omon Ra), 56.The Russian text is cited from: Pelevin, Viktor. Omon Ra. <
http://pelevin.nov.ru/romans/pe-omon/>. Accessed Apr. 2, 2009. “Меня поражал оптимизм этого
человека, слепого, парализованного, прикованного к инвалидному креслу - но выполняющего свой
долг и не устающего радоваться жизни. [Он] молча и неподвижно полулежал в кровати в крохотной
комнате пятого этажа - в кителе, до пояса прикрытый одеялом, скрывавшим от постороннего
взгляда судно. Бедная обстановка комнаты, планшет для письма с узкими прорезями в
накладываемой сверху картонке, неизменный стакан крепкого чая на столе, белая занавеска и фикус
- все это трогало меня почти до слез, и в эти минуты я переставал думать, что все коммунисты -
хитрые, подловатые и основательные люди”.

196
this skepticism. He manages to be, simultaneously, a dissident and an already-ideal,

unquestioning Soviet subject. To see how Omon, in a feat of Orwellian doublethink,

manages to reconcile his admiration for the simulacra of Korchagin with an

understanding that the Communists are, in general, not very nice people, we need to

examine the source of his surprising compliance with all and everything that the state

requires of him.

Upon seeing the flight school cadets that have undergone the required

“transformation,” Omon notices “how pale and unhealthy their faces were; they seemed

to bear the imprint of long days of interminable torment, to have been recast in a fixed

expression of readiness”26 and recalls the Young Pioneer’s organization traditional

greeting, “Always Ready!”. Where the Bromfield translation would have him say, “ [I]

realiz(ed) what frauds we’d been… loudly assuring ourselves… that we were always

prepared”27, in the Russian text he realizes, literally, “what it was that we were assuring

ourselves and everybody else of when we shouted out, ‘Always ready!’” Omon does not

think he was a fraud when he shouted the Young Pioneer’s greeting; on the contrary, he

seems to have always known the “it” for which he formulaically and not entirely

consciously claimed he was ready as a boy.

Omon is surprisingly compliant with all the requirements of his training, as well

as with the necessity to eventually die. His emotions upon learning about the inner

workings of the Space Program and the deceit that it is predicated upon are very subdued.

He experiences very little shock when he is told he will need to die and, though the

thought of dying does not please him at all, he still proceeds with his training. The key to

26
Pelevin 34.
27
Ibid.

197
the text lies in this lack of emotion that is best approached through examining the

structure of narration.

The previously discussed Soviet space crews discovered the bodies of other

cosmonauts to learn their ideological and moral lessons. Omon, on the other hand, is

supposed to become this body; yet, he cannot become it, because he is also the narrator in

the text, and his never-slipping first person subjective narration is already a proof that his

story of being a Soviet cosmonaut and dying to become a hero will not end the way

Socialist Realist formula would have it. Where the Socialist heroes are retrospectively

heroic, Omon is only potentially so. To use Aleksandr Fadeev’s The Young Guard as an

example, Oleg Koshevoi and his friends go towards their ends without knowing them:

they are ready to die for their Motherland, of course, but they do not know that they will,

much less how or when. The ideological impact of the story, then, is achieved through the

constant interplay of the reader’s historical knowledge that the members of the Young

Guard perished, and the narrative’s own (seeming) unawareness that this will happen.

The narrative perspective in The Young Guard belongs to the characters, with little to no

didactic digressions on the part of the subdued omniscient narrator, who chooses to

withhold his omniscience in respect of the young people’s fate until the very last chapters

of the novel.

In the case of Omon Ra, the mechanism is reversed: the Soviet ideology’s

unwillingness to conceal, in the novel’s universe, its inner workings, ensures that Omon

firmly believes that he is going to die as a result of his heroic feat (and, as we have seen,

may actually want to, because of more “personal” reasons), yet he does not. Thus, he is

hardly a Soviet hero in retrospect; he is able to become a pastiche of a Soviet hero

198
because he performs, in the course of his life, the actions that would eventually make him

a hero in retrospect. This performance is conscious, or so the narrative logic would have

it: Omon the narrator, already “omniscient,” selects the episodes in the life of his

temporal Other, the younger Omon, doing what the narrator of The Young Guard did

when he selected the episodes of Oleg Koshevoi’s childhood that pointed towards

dormant heroism. However, because these two Omons pretend to be one and the same for

the reader, the structural elements of the heroic narrative lack a critical distance from

which they can be observed (which Fadeev-the-narrator’s position in relation to the

Young Guard allowed).

In this way, Omon spends the novel preparing to become a dead cosmonaut, a

symbol of the Soviet achievement in space, while it is quite obvious that he will live, as

he is still able to narrate. The tension between what we are led to believe by the formulaic

nature of the narrative (which in its conceptual structure repeats the Soviet

Bildungsroman) and Omon’s narratorial position makes proper functioning of such a

narrative impossible. In other words, Omon cannot be living and telling the story within

the context of the Soviet formula, though all of the structural elements of the formula are

present. The narrative perspective, then, lends a sort of retroactive logic to the narration;

the narrator’s present, his status as a cosmonaut who stayed alive, shapes all the previous

events of his life.

The novel starts with outlining the steps through which Omon’s childhood dream

of going into space crystallizes. At the outset, the account pretends to be just another

Soviet Bildungsroman: Omon begins by reminiscing about his formative years, and the

somewhat clichéd style of reflection deceivingly structures the beginning of the novel as

199
a (slightly more lyrical than usual) story about the Soviet boy who wants to become a

cosmonaut. However, upon closer examination, Omon’s account of his childhood dream

turns out to be very inconsistent with the standard Soviet model of such accounts.

Consider, for example, Viktor Dragunskii’s Deniskiny Rasskazy (“Deniska’s

Stories”) from the early 1960s,28 narrated from the perspective of a little boy, Deniska,

who describes how his dream to become a cosmonaut came into existence. Deniska hears

about the Nikolaiev-Popovich first group flight29 on the radio, sees the elation of his

parents and other adults (who are so happy that they let Deniska’s pranks go unpunished),

and is especially excited about the cosmonauts’ romantic call signs, Sokol (“Falcon”) and

Berkut (“Golden Eagle”), which he and his best friend immediately adopt in their play.

Significantly, it is the heavily theatrical and heroic setup, together with validation

from adults and “such pretty call signs!” that prompt Deniska and his friend to start

dreaming of becoming cosmonauts (they even build a “rocket ship” in the playground

and “launch” it). Even more significantly, to prepare for their careers they decide, before

they are accepted to the “cosmonaut school” (which is not going to happen for quite some

time - they are eight years old), to “condition themselves like steel”, a pun on the title of

Ostrovskii’s novel introduced in the song from the Stalinist film Vratar’(The Goalkeeper,

1937). The song, Sportivnyi Marsh (“Sports March”), encourages to “temper yourself like

steel” in order for body and soul to remain “young.” Deniska and his friend, inspired “not

to be afraid of heat or cold,” take the song’s recommendation at face value: they begin

taking cold showers and fall ill, promptly taking the first step on the sacrificial way of the

Soviet Real Man.

28
See Viktor Dragunskii, The Adventures of Dennis. Trans. Fainna Glagoleva (Moscow, Progress
Publishers, 1981).
29
On August 11, 1962.

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 While Deniska and his friend acquire their dream through paternal validation and

acutely, if not totally consciously, feel the need to transform themselves, symbolically as

well as physically, into “Real Men” to become cosmonauts, Omon Ra subverts not only

the content, but also the structure of the Soviet Bildungsroman by laying bare the death

drive that underlies the Soviet heroic narrative.

Peter Brooks, in his application of Sigmund Freud’s theory of death drive to

narrative dynamics, argues that the narrative desire, the desire of reading is a desire for

the end, reached through the detour of the plot of narrative.30 Brooks argues that this

consideration ensures the sort of anticipatory logic that the narratives must follow:

The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the

sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments—in

literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only

because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings

that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot.31

Brooks mentions the “retrospective knowledge”32 that the narrative seeks, which

is precisely the knowledge with which the older, wiser Omon the narrator invests the

events of his previous life. The narrative’s desire for its own death, then, is too realized in

retrospect; in the case of Omon Ra, it is the retrospection that makes apparent the content

of Omon’s dream to go to space. As a boy, even as Omon thinks about space, he never

imagines any detail of his own experience in the space beyond liftoff, and this moment of

30
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984), 52
and 104.
31
Brooks 1984, 94.
32
Brooks 1984, 95.

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symbolic crossing of a threshold marks the death of the dream’s narrative, the actual end

of the dream.

Luckily, for the time being the state’s desire to make a Real Man out of Omon

coincides with Omon’s own desire to belong in space by radically changing his plane of

existence: both acts require a death, if not physical, then at least symbolic. Katerina Clark

suggests that all Stalinist novels involve

some kind of death [as a formal] element in the traditional rite of passage […]

because death is involved not only in the preparatory or liminal phase of the rite

[of passage] but also in the moment of passage itself. […] When the hero sheds his

individualistic self at the moment of passage, he dies as an individual and is reborn

as a function of the collective33

Though Omon Ra is not an outright pastiche of a Stalinist novel, it nevertheless

makes visible the inner structures of Socialist Realist heroic narrative which more often

than not does “kill” its heroes to fix them forever in their heroic capacity.

Furthermore, laying bare the requirements for the Soviet brand of heroism, Omon

Ra tackles the source of the subject’s compliance with the demands of the State, finding it

in the State’s eagerness to utilize its subjects’ death drive to its own ends. In the ideal

Soviet heroic narrative, the State would “read” Omon’s desire and single him out as a

potential (dead) hero; Omon would comply with the requirement because that would be

exactly what he would have wanted all along. Indeed, this is what the admission

committee does when they accept Omon into flight school: the committee member listens

to the story about a spaceship model with no door inside (so that cosmonauts cannot

escape) and, precisely because Omon chooses to tell this story to explain why he wants to
33
Clark 178.

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be a cosmonaut, interprets it as an early indication of his capability of becoming a Real

Man, i.e., an already-dead hero.

According to Peter Brooks, though narratives long for their ends, the circuitous

path towards that end, a function of the Freudian pleasure principle, is nevertheless

imperative for the proper functioning of a narrative. There is no possibility for such a

circuitous path in Omon’s case because this path is made hyper-linear by the will of the

state. Yet the balance between the death drive and the pleasure principle tips towards the

latter when Omon discovers that his desire to be a “heavenly body,” i.e., to belong in

space, is betrayed by the space itself.

The (outer) space where Omon’s death drive and the state’s desire for dead

subjects were supposed to be perfectly aligned turns out to be structurally inappropriate

to make the Real Man myth happen. The “outer space” where Omon (supposedly) goes,

in short, fails to live up to his expectations. The vast sublime void of outer space that

Omon dreamed about earlier in the novel turns out to be a very ordinary, mundane place:

“I was on the moon. But I had no feelings about the fact at all; I was wondering how to

put back the chain that had slipped off the cog wheel”34. The metaphors that he is able to

find for his experience are, again, far from lofty: he says that the Earth seen from space

resembles is a large school globe. Where Socialist Realist narrative would over-utilize

pathetic fallacy for properly structuring the space where the feat is to be performed

(thunderstorms, severe frost and wind all abound in the episodes of heroic deaths in the

34
Pelevin 121.

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stories of Pioneer heroes, for example),35 in Omon Ra the heroic feat is supposed to

happen in a “narrow, black, stuffy space”36 of the lunar module.

The state, in other words, in its already-much-exhibited carelessness, fails to make

the heroic space happen, as Omon comes to realize in the very end of the novel when it

becomes apparent that he in fact never left Earth. The sublime vastness of the cosmos

turns out to be an ideological construction put in place to become the object of desire for

the eager potential hero, Omon. The state, then, preys on Omon’s fantasy, but, in

accordance with the general logic of the parallel universe where the events of the novel

take place, the state never conceals that the space for heroism is far from sublime.

The phantasmatic Soviet state of the novel promptly puts every ideologically

relevant signified in place: it sets up the training school, it kills off the operators of

sustainer rocket engine; in a perverse nod to the didacticism of the figure of a dead

cosmonaut in the Socialist science fiction, it even conveniently provides the bodies of the

former “space crews” on the “Moon” for Omon to discover in the course of his mission.

Yet, the state fails to provide the signified that would justify the core of ideological

meanings that it expects to produce out of Omon’s death: it fails to provide outer space

itself. In other words, the sublime void of outer space that technically should “be there”

for the proper Soviet hero to uncover the ideological meanings associated with this

35
There seem to be two main modes of using pathetic fallacy in the stories of young Soviet martyrs: in
Povest o Zoie i Schure by Luybov Kosmodem’ianskaia, the morning of the young woman’s hanging by the
Nazis is accompanied by a severe frost the likes of which the villagers cannot recall; lightning flashes
consecutively on the faces of each member of the Young Guard in the scene of their execution in the
cinematic adaptation of the Fadeev novel; on the other hand, in Lev Kassil’s Younger Son’s Street, the
morning of the boy’s death is the most beautiful morning, peaceful and bright, which contradicts the
tragedy, yet signifies that this death is not in vain because the boy’s heroism in the Crimean resistance
enables the defeat of the Nazis and thus restores the much-longed-for peace in his hometown.
36
Pelevin 123.

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sublimity (those of ideological appropriation and the sublime post-historicity of

Communism), is not there.

In the end of the novel, Omon exits the module only to discover that he is in the

Moscow Underground. Instead of the “above” of outer space, he is literally “below.” The

novel leaves him as he tries to figure out where he needs to go from there. By making the

“heroic” narrative open-ended, the text performs the final stage of this narrative’s

deconstruction, denying it its limit. Furthermore, that outer space itself turns out to be not

just unreachable, but also, for all practical purposes, non-existent, signifies the failure of

the ideological fantasy of the cosmos to sustain its impact on the Soviet subject as the

subject learns that the cosmos is just that – the fantasy, with no physical referent. Omon’s

heroic feat, then, is not properly structured not just because the heroic narrative’s

conventionally linear structure fails due to his ambivalent position as an undead hero-

narrator. Also, the space where the finiteness (death) of the narrative has to happen with

maximum ideological impact is, in the novel’s universe, non-existent. The fantasy has

gone too far in ripping the signifiers from their signifieds, and it seems that even in

Omon’s unmistakably postmodern subjectivity the connection should be maintained.

Does this mean that the Soviet myth of space exploration is dead? It certainly

seems to be the case as the novel exposes the sacrificial nature of Soviet heroism and the

carelessness of the state in sustaining the fantasy. Yet, Omon is no victim: his status as a

cosmonaut who survived makes him “own” his death drive. In one episode, Omon recalls

the slogan on the wall of his training hall, which says “Life always has room for

heroism.” He theorizes that

205
 It was not just romantic nonsense but a precise and sober statement of the fact that

our Soviet life is not the ultimate instance of reality but only, as it were, its

anteroom. I imagined it this way: there is no space anywhere in America, between

the glaring shop window and the parked Cadillac, for heroism, and there can be

no space for it – apart, of course, from that rare moment when a Soviet spy passes

by37.

Omon theorizes space’s potential for acquiring ideologically relevant meanings in

a way that is surprisingly similar to the conventional Soviet heroic narrative. The

presence of a hero is supposed to transform the space in which he performs his feat; this

is why in the formulaic heroic narrative, nature eagerly provides extreme weather to echo

the executions of Soviet heroes. In the mock-Socialist-Realist universe of Omon Ra any

and every one of the mass-produced and nameless heroes is expected to have the “special

powers” to transform the world around them.

While rejecting the notion of the dead hero, the novel does not deny the notion of

Romantic heroism altogether, as Omon possesses these “special powers” even as he

realizes that he is creating an illusion. As Omon’s younger self cannot help but admire his

political instructor, as this younger Omon convinces himself that he is in space during the

“flight,” we recall an early episode from Omon’s childhood, carefully placed by the older

Omon-the-narrator in the beginning of the narrative. In this episode, the boy Omon was

able to imagine that he flew a plane, surprised at how convincing the illusion was. The

mock-Soviet state did not provide Omon with the object of his desire, outer space, yet

Omon did not need it because he had it all along. In his childhood, he was able see outer

37
Pelevin (Omon Ra), 61.

206
space amidst the bleak Soviet landscape, even if (and even as) he realized it was an

illusion.

The fetishist’s simultaneous “knowing” and “not knowing” underlies the novel’s

reflection on the Soviet symbolic legacy: Omon Ra borrows the framework of the

Communist sublime ideological fantasy, and on this framework builds another one.

While the Soviet fantasy of space ceased to function properly for Omon, Omon’s ability

to transform the space around him recovers some measure of authenticity to the notion of

[Soviet] heroism. In a nostalgic move, the novel borrows the sublimity of the Soviet

subject’s experience in space to redeem the notion of heroism that is stripped of its

ideological underpinnings, leaving only its Romantic core. Omon did not go to space, but

he did not need to: he was there all along, as the unmoving, atemporal, tempting and

frightening outer space comes to metaphorize the post-Soviet nostalgic object, the Soviet

Union. As Omon sees himself in space while surrounded by the garbage cans of a Soviet

courtyard, the swarm of deconstructionist and satirical moves in the novel conceals its

return to traditional Russian cultural concerns in an attempt to find a metaphor for the

Soviet experience that does not rely on ideology.

Aleksei Fedorchenko’s First on the Moon: Resurrecting the Dead

Cosmonauts.

Aleksei Fedorchenko’s 2004 film, First on the Moon, follows Omon Ra in carving

out a post-Soviet niche for the Soviet myth of the conquest of space. The film introduces

207
Russia to the first full-fledged incarnation of the mockumentary genre38 by narrating the

“secret history” of the Soviet space program in the late 1930s.

Exploring the post-Soviet tension between the nostalgic and the critical

representation of Soviet history, the film inverts a familiar negative mechanism of

conspiracy theories associated with Space Race. Where the “flapping” flag in the Apollo

11 moon landing footage has become “proof” that the mission never landed on Moon,39

First on the Moon demonstrates, with the same degree of conspiratorial conviction,

filmed evidence of the fact that Russians were on the Moon as early as 1938, in a playful

nod to the Cold War cultural dynamics. The film explicitly does what the American

conspiracy theorists claim was done in respect of the Apollo landing: it fakes

documentary footage to create a historical event, and the explicitness of deconstruction

becomes for the film a source of reclaiming and reconstructing history.

38
Aleksander Prokhorov, in his review of the film, traces the experiments of the nascent mockumentary
genre in post-Soviet cinema, but posits First on the Moon to be the first production that consistently fits
into the genre scheme. Prokhorov argues that mockumentary is an exceptionally productive genre to close
the “gap between Soviet reality and its representation in Soviet culture”. See Aleksander Prokhorov, “The
Redemption of Lunar Reality: Aleksei Fedorchenko’s First on the Moon (Pervye na lune)”, 2005. Kino-
Kultura 2006: 11.<http://www.kinokultura.com/2006/11r-firstmoon2.shtml>, accessed May 29, 2009. To
extrapolate from Prokhorov’s argument, mockumentary uses the representational techniques conventionally
associated with “telling the truth” for dealing with fictional subjects. Thus, the gap between “fact” and
“fiction” is formally exposed because the fictional subject matter of the film is presented as objectively
verifiable. In the post-Soviet cultural context, permeated with the remnants of Soviet signifiers that have
proved to be empty, such representational mode, paradoxically, can potentially become a functional model
of working through the past, because it ironically, yet compulsively uses the same techniques of
fictionalizing social reality that were used (with little irony in mind) in creating Soviet master narrative. As
a result, the constant awareness of the fictional nature of the object of representation (i.e., historical event)
ensures that the mockumentary functions just like this narrative, with limited connection to social reality. In
other words, the mockumentary’s mode of treating the event is very similar to the mode in which the Soviet
official discourse is perceived, in the post-Soviet context, to have treated Soviet social reality. That is, by
using representational politics of the mockumentary genre, the film, on one level, examines the creation of
the Soviet myth, but, by the very fact of this examination, it conceptually solidifies it, by consciously
narrating it as a myth, which enables the film to find a “proper place” for the important part of the Soviet
grand narrative (i.e., Space Race) in the post-Soviet context. That it does so by ironically deconstructing the
past is in fact a nostalgic move; the nostalgia here is not for the lost culture, but for the lost modality of
representation.
39
Several reviews explicitly compare and contrast First on the Moon with Capricorn One.

208
 Further, First on the Moon blends nostalgia for the time when the Space Program

was a source of national pride and the hardly nostalgic representation of the grotesque

atmosphere of the Soviet cultural milieu that brought the myth into existence. This

ambivalence of assessment of Soviet history prompted early domestic reviews of film to

be obviously confused as to what exactly it “says.” An anonymous online reviewer

muses, “Unfortunately, just the post-Soviet viewer and a handful of Western intellectuals

can get wild about the film.”40 Indeed, the representation of the Soviet space program in

the film is conceptually strikingly similar to that of Omon Ra, just as the program itself is

equally phantasmatic.41

Fedorchenko happily shares in his interviews the great lengths to which his crew

went locating and obtaining the unused caches of older film to give the footage an

“authentic” feel. Pretending to be a journalistic investigation (a documentary genre that

swelled on Russian television in the 1990s), the film “locates” and “interviews” the

surviving “witnesses.”

40
Anonymous review of First on the Moon, 2004:
<http://project.insysltd.ru/pls/ivan/movies.htm?action=1&value=5&p_value2=3782>, accessed May 29,
2009: “К сожалению, реально протащиться от фильма может только постсоветский зритель и
горстка западных интеллектуалов”.
41
The motives of appropriation of space, simulation, and death (readily observed in Omon Ra) re-emerge in
First on the Moon’s treatment of Space Program. Thus, the repetitive clips literally show simulation of the
cosmonauts’ training in flight simulators. Just as we have seen in Omon Ra, this simulation dangerously
borders reality: in an episode where the cosmonauts are shown to train in rarefied atmosphere, the
technician acts as flight controller and his commands follow liftoff and landing routines; meanwhile, the
cosmonauts, progressively less and less conscious, are shown sitting in a crude simulator that looks like a
shed. What the film seemingly shows is just that space training does require some amount of physical
discomfort, which the offscreen commentary cheerfully asserts. However, in a move that the film would
repeatedly use, that of mismatched soundtrack and visuals, the cheerfulness of the commentary that
immediately follows the clip is undermined by the camera’s lingering on the faces of visibly suffering
cosmonauts and later on their unconscious bodies. The footage being shown comes, we are lead to believe,
from several surveillance cameras in the training module, all looking at the crew from different angles and
differently zoomed, yet footage from these different cameras is edited into one sequence, which nearly
eliminates the “documentary” feel of the sequence. Instead, it strikes the viewer as camerawork
characteristic for the narrative cinema, where camera pans and close-ups tell a story, in this case – of bodily
suffering.

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 The mission of the first Soviet cosmonauts, according to the investigation, is in

line with the rest of unmistakably utopian aspirations of Stalinist Russia: the program

shoots right for the Moon, skipping the human orbit flight and much of the animal

testing. The launch is scheduled for March 16, 1938. Upon failure of the mission several

minutes into launch, the program is quickly wrapped up, the chief engineer disappears,

the substitute members of the crew are assassinated, and the cosmonaut Ivan Kharlamov

is presumed lost. However, he resurfaces, badly injured, with brain damage that allegedly

prevents him from “telling the story.” Ivan, then, the logic of the investigation suggests,

manages to return from space under undisclosed circumstances and travel back to Russia.

However, due to the mission’s failure, the state does not appear to need Ivan

alive, and, repressive psychiatry always in the background of the film, he is

institutionalized so that the possible tales of his space journey can be officially construed

as a delusion of a madman. Ivan’s cosmonaut training was allegedly rigorously

documented on video by the NKVD (the KGB’s predecessor); the constant surveillance,

to which nearly every aspect of the cosmonaut’s life is subjected, installs Ivan as,

literally, the subject of the state(‘s total observation). In the end, Ivan, like Pelevin’s

protagonist, Omon, is able to escape the Soviet panopticon: his later life, we are told, is

officially a mystery.42 Even as he “dies” officially, on the visual level, Kharlamov is

“dead” even earlier, before the launch, as his immobile body, eyes closed, is loaded into

the spacecraft. This is very appropriate: after all, he is about to become a Soviet hero.

42
Though we manage to get a glimpse of Kharlamov’s later years and find out that he, in a way, did
become a hero, and very “Russian” at that. He performs in the circus under the stage name, Aleksandr
Nevskii, historical Prince Aleksandr Nevskii (13th century) being perhaps one of the least disputably heroic
figures in early Russian history. Thus Kharlamov metonymically partakes in the glory of the “Russia’s
Sun”, “solntse zemli russkoi”, as the chronicle calls Aleksandr.

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 This brings us to the reemergence of the motif of “Real Men” in the film. The

film already treats the production of the ideal Soviet subject as a distinct part of the

Soviet mythology (together with associated symbolic structures and images).

Furthermore, the impression that the Real Men for this 2004 film are already something

firmly associated with the imaginary Soviet cultural landscape arises from the film’s

surprisingly analytical (and ambivalent) treatment of the topic. While First on the Moon’s

whole representational premise is predicated on the ambivalence of historical

interpretation, the film seems to be especially uneasy with the issue of producing the

Soviet subject, simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by it, thus translating the

“pleasure-pain” that is at the core of the myth of the Real Man into its own

representational politics, which the surviving member of the cosmonaut squad sums up,

reminiscing: “All this training, all these G-forces, twelve hours a day… Hard… Nice.”43

However, while the film has been called “a thoughtful look at the casual brutality

of Stalinist Russia,”44 the subjects of this brutality, in an already familiar move that the

“documentary” format easily allows, many years after the events claim to have enjoyed

this brutality quite a bit, while the look on their faces in the “documentary footage”

attests to the contrary. When Fedorchenko says in an interview that he made a film about

“the titans of spirit,” he is pinpointing the nature of the problem: the Communist heroes,

though beautified by the temporal distance and nostalgia, are disembodied, to remain

forever as a cinematic illusion.

43
Thus, many playful jabs at the symbology associated with the ideological descendants of Pavka
Korchagin are readily observed in the film. The Soviet cultural milieu of the film is peppered with
blacksmiths who can still work, injured, even after the machinery they operate gives up. In a satirical
extrapolation from the popular song of the Stalin era, the Aviators’ March, where the aviators acquire arms
of steel to be used as wings and a “fiery engine” for a heart, the film introduces in the exposition a footage
of a fascinating (and fantastic) project of replacing the bony skeleton of humans by a metallic one
44
IIFF 2007: First on the Moon review, Jun 1, 2007: <http://twitchfilm.net/archives/010243.htm>, accessed
May 29, 2009.

211
 The opening shot of the film establishes the modality of representation that the

rest of the film would follow. After the title, the long shot of what appears to be a lunar

landscape, together with craters and mysterious geologic formations, turns out to be a

close-up of the ground that is being dug by a spade as the camera zooms out. What is

being shown is not what it seems but rather is what the camera made it look like, the

opening shot suggests. A legitimate question then remains: why does the fantasy of outer

space become so conceptually productive for mourning (and recreating) the Soviet utopia

in the post-Soviet culture even as it is explicitly posited to be fake? Fedorchenko himself

believes that “the Moon is not a goal, but just a motive, just a pretext [to show] that the

film really is about real heroes, titans, strong, smart, honest people, who, for their

Motherland, are expendable.”45 As much as this reading is perfectly valid, it still has to be

said that the Moon (and outer space in general) for post-Soviet culture is not just the

pretext to nostalgically muse about the past Soviet glory, but an outright starting premise

of such musings; the cosmos as a conceptual space is a premise that holds enormous

signification potential.

As mentioned earlier, outer space in Soviet mythology is associated with utopian

meanings, both experiential and ideological; yet, this utopia tends to turn into a dystopia,

because of the inherent ambivalence of conceptualizing the cosmos as the sublime. Outer

space thus holds a potential for exploring the tension between the positive and negative

readings of Soviet (utopian) mythology, allowing to mythologize and demythologize,

“utopianize” and “dystopianize” the Soviet culture.

45
“Pravda” review, <http://www.pravda.ru/world/europe/52114-luna-0. 28.09.2005>: “На самом деле,
этот фильм о том, как настоящие герои, титаны, сильные, умные, честные люди, оказываются
расходным материалом для своей Родины. Луна в фильме, конечно, не цель, а лишь мотив,
средство”.

212
 Where in Omon Ra the protagonist never left Earth, thus being denied the “real”

signified of the sublime Soviet heroic narrative, in First on the Moon the situation is

problematized further. The final sequence of the film is footage that, we are led to

believe, comes from a camera mounted on the visor of Ivan Kharlamov’s spacesuit

helmet, having magically survived the catastrophe. Notwithstanding the fact that we have

already seen a lunar landscape that proved to be fake in the opening shots of the film, in

this sequence the viewer is sutured with Kharlamov. Kharlamov, battered by his flight

experience, muted by his head trauma and by Soviet forced psychiatry, we are told

earlier, was desperately trying to get healthy, to be able to “tell the story.” However, we

are left wondering about the circumstances of his incident until the final sequence, which

does what Kharlamov could not: it does tell, in the first and only instance of suture with

the character occurring in the film, that Russians were on the Moon in the year 1938. This

formal suture uses the power of cinematic identification even as it has exposed the inner

workings of the cinematic apparatus many times in course of the film, not to cathartically

return to the “belief in make-believe,” but to create an interpretative moment that Tsvetan

Todorov describes in his theory of the fantastic:

In a world [that] we know....there occurs an event which cannot be explained by

the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must

opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the

senses, of a product of the imagination - and the laws of the world then remain

what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of

reality--but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us… The fantastic

occupies the duration of this uncertainty....[it] is that hesitation experienced by a

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 person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural

event [italics mine. – DK].46

The film holds the viewer within this uncertainty for its whole duration,

constantly contradicting itself both in respect to its “historicity” and the ability of cinema

to represent history. In a way, this allows the film to keep the interpretative field open,

without the necessity to assign one single reading to Soviet history. It is possible to argue

that, no matter how aware the film is of the Soviet grand narrative being a myth, the

film’s nostalgia for Soviet mythology prompts it to create its own. At the first glance, it is

evident that verifiability of every event in the film is consistently, though not always

explicitly, questioned if not outright denied. Thus, the film stresses the unavailability of

many “witnesses” who mysteriously “vanish” in another euphemism describing Stalinist

purges; those “witnesses” who are available insist that they do not remember a thing. The

phrase, “there was nothing” (nichego ne bylo) repeats as a compulsive refrain in the part

of the film narrating the aftermath of the launch. Yet, after proclaiming that, in the

absence of witnesses, it might even seem that “there was no such era” (literally, “no such

time,” kazhetsia, chto i vremeni togo ne bylo), the narrator pauses and dreamily says,

“But the rocket – it was there” (a raketa - byla), squeezing the whole narrative of the

Soviet achievement into one exceptionally appropriate symbol (earlier in the film the

rocket was described being “higher than Kremlin towers,” thus, in an allegorical reading,

something above and beyond the symbol of the state and ideology).

In an interview, Fedorchenko shares an emotional experience he had at one of the

film’s screenings: he tells about being approached by “one man” and being told that “it

46
Tzvetan Todorov, Trans. Richard Howard, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 25.

214
(the events in the film) was really so, and everything very closely resembles the truth.

Not factually, but we managed to portray the spirit. This was the man who operated the

lunar rover [this likely refers to the Lunokhod 1 mission of 1970. – DK] from Earth…

This was the greatest praise I could have received.”47 The readily observable

inconsistency between “it being really so” and “closely resembling the truth” in fact

mimics the problematic relationship to mimesis that is built into the mockumentary

genre. The film sums up its supposed relationship to the issue of historical representation

through the voice of an archive worker, who says, guiding the “journalists” through the

dusty labyrinth of secret KGB archives: “Everything that happened must be filmed. And

if it was filmed, then it happened,”48 which cannot help but sound like a perverse

conclusion the film makes out of the Barthian "on the one hand, it [the object in a

photograph] is not there, on the other, it has indeed been."49

First on the Moon self-consciously does not do a good job pretending to be a

documentary feature. The title sequence has opening credits that clearly show that the

film has a cast; yet, none of the actors engaged in the film are on the Russian A-list,

which ensures that the face recognition effect does not interfere with the suspension of

disbelief that the film attempts to create. The narration varies between non-diegetic

voiceover (most of the film) and diegetic voiceover, in some scenes where the narrator

acts as the journalist interviewing the witnesses. The authority of the non-diegetic

voiceover ensures proper framing of the illusion of mimesis, as, before any “action” starts

47
The “Pravda” review,<http://www.pravda.ru/world/europe/52114-luna-0. 28.09.2005>: “На меня
большое впечатление произвел один человек, который подошел ко мне и сказал, что действительно
всё так и было и все очень похоже на правду. Не фактически, но мы передали тот дух. Это был
человек, который управлял с Земли Луноходом. Вся грудь в орденах, пожилой. Для меня это была
высшая похвала”.
48
In Russian: “Все, что было, должно быть снято. А если снято, значит, было”.
49
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: MacMillan (Hill and Wang),
1982),115.

215
in the film, it already apologizes for the quality of the archival footage used in the film

that is “not up to the standard” but is still used because of its “uniqueness.” There will be

many more such apologetic revelations in the film that in fact does, albeit ironically, the

same thing as Pelevin’s protagonist, Omon, saw the Soviet Space Program’s staff

cinematographers do when making fake footage of the space walk, with similar

revealingly apologetic remarks.

The argument of many cinema theorists who examine what happens to the issue

of representing history in the postmodern cinema is that in postmodernity, history gets

reinterpreted as an “experience” rather than as a chain of events. To that end, Vivian

Sobchack discusses the representational immediacy of twentieth century technologies

that, in terms of history, creates a possibility of attaching another dimension to the

historical events that are traditionally presented in the form of linear (and, importantly,

verbal) narratives. This representational immediacy, beside enabling one to think of

history in terms of experience, has a very interesting implication for the whole structure

of historical process as conceived by the film viewer: “By virtue of their increasing

representational immediacy, these new twentieth century technologies of representation

and narration (most significantly television) have increasingly collapsed the temporal

distance between present, past, and future that structured out previously conceived

notions of what we call history.”50 The visual experience of history in First on the Moon

is created out of the uncannily Eisensteinian montage through metonymic associations,

where the footage of cosmonauts’ training is complemented by the equally fake footage

of Young Pioneers’ outings and of everyday life in the Russia of 1937, where people

50
Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event.
(Routledge, 1995), 4-5.

216
stroll in the parks, buy newspapers, eat ice cream and so forth. Another reviewer tackles

precisely that, saying that

[i]t is not the plot that makes his film stunning, but the subtlety with which each

fragment of the action conveys not just the historical time, but also its refined

gradations, all of which are totally clear to [Fedorchenko’s] contemporaries and to

every Soviet person. Every decade has its own colors, odors, nuances, and

between its beginning and its end there is an historical abyss.51

The “purposelessness” of the archival footage then becomes not just the function

of the film’s critique of national history, realized through showing the obsessive desire on

the part of the Soviet state to put itself in control of the events by filming and thus

appropriating them. It also becomes a work of memorialization, an attempt to capture the

experience of history, to bridge the “historical abyss”, for which documentary footage

seemingly has great potential.

Surveillance footage, by definition, is presumed to represent the event as

objectively as possible, because the camera in such footage is, literally and figuratively,

disembodied, often immobile, capturing the events that happen to cross its scope. The

arguably most famous piece of documentary footage in the XX-century, the Zapruder

film showing Kennedy’s assassination, for the theorists of the documentary has become a

perfect example of the documentary’s ability to simultaneously show and not show what

“really” happened52 (it does show the moment of assassination yet fails to provide any

51
The Kovalyov review, <http://www.kinokultura.com/2006/11r-firstmoon1.shtml>.
52
For a discussion of the Zapruder film, see Marita Sturken, “Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of
History: Oliver Stone's Docudramas”, in History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 4, Theme Issue 36: Producing
the Past: Making Histories Inside and Outside the Academy (Dec., 1997), 64-79. Also, Robert Kolker pays
attention to the issue in his chapter on Oliver Stone’s cinema, in Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness:
Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

217
answers as far as to who might have done it). The Zapruder film compromises the belief

in the possibility of “objective” historical representation, yet it continues to be viewed

because the belief that documentary footage is the representation of historical events is

too temptingly ensured by the workings of the cinematic apparatus to be completely

abandoned.

Such is the nostalgic desire on the part of First on the Moon for the camera to be

able to be the objective, dispassionate recorder of the truth, that the film fakes the

surveillance footage of the cosmonauts’ road to the Moon because it wants such footage

to really have existed. The film creates a fetish out of the surveillance footage, knowing

perfectly well that it is not “it,” not the objective representation of events, and yet so

temptingly close.

First on the Moon, then, crafts a peculiar place from which it can look at the

Soviet mythology from a distance, temporal as well as interpretative. As First on the

Moon painstakingly recreates and mythologizes its perfect nostalgic object – the past that

never existed, it uncovers the Soviet utopia that allowed the myth of the conquest of

Cosmos to appear, and uses the model verbatim to salvage the remnants of Soviet

mythology.

Aleksei Gherman’s Paper Soldier, the Last Cosmonaut

Post-Soviet culture’s fascination with all things cosmic is evident in that it does

not seem to leave alone the corpus of myths surrounding the Soviet Space Program. In

2008, Aleksei German’s Paper Soldier presented a fictionalized account of the

Bondarenko accident. This account serves in the film as the background to the story of a

physician who monitors the cosmonaut squad’s training. The physician, Daniil, once

218
wanted to become a cosmonaut himself, but due to medical issues is left to participate

only in ground operations. Daniil spends time worrying about “young boys who we send

towards sure death,” and is still dreaming about “us going to the place where there was

only God before.”

Daniil witnesses the oxygen chamber incident, fails to save the burned young man

and plunges into the depths of depression, together with hallucinations of his dead parents

who are calling him to join them in heaven. Daniil’s ambivalence about the space

program is mirrored by his love life as he is torn between his wife and his lover, and his

health becomes progressively worse. In the film’s climax, the two women watch Daniil

fall off his bicycle and die of a heart attack as the launch of the rocket (which, we are lead

to believe, carries Yuri Gagarin) is visible over the rural landscape, followed to the

heavens by the camera’s languid movement. Daniil is reunited with his parents in heaven

(which looks very much like a nostalgic recreation of the iconic messy coziness of a

Soviet apartment of the 1960s-70s) where the rocket “carried” him.

Daniil’s failure and simultaneous triumph is summed up in the iconic voice of the

1960s Soviet generation, Bulat Okudzhava: “He wanted to change the world/So that

everyone could be happy,/But he himself was hanging by a thread,/For he was a paper

soldier.”53 Even as the ‘thread’ of ideology seems to hold the cosmonauts-in-training

firmly in place as they prepare for the first human spaceflight, Daniil is able to sever this

thread as the film metaphorically takes him where he wanted to be.

In the film, the familiar motifs of ‘iron men,’ who created the Soviet state and

desire to appropriate outer space (‘our men will go to the stars, and we’re going to build a

huge base on Mars’, goes the staunch prognosis) run along the equally familiar themes of
53
Okudzhava 1989, 45.

219
outer space as a source of transcendent, utopian meanings yet also of fear and uncertainty

(‘all sorrows will be gone when we get there,’ promises one of the characters, but the

Space program is called ‘a difficult and poignant step’). Yet, these themes only serve as a

frame to the faithfully nostalgic recreation of the Soviet cultural landscape. The

notoriously slow-moving camera lingers on objects of everyday life, leaving the

‘likeable, but pointless’ characters (Daniil’s self-designation) to converse off-screen. The

events of the film unfold against landscapes that lack color and seem to consist of

puddles, broken tree branches and patches of mud, which is reminiscent of the ways the

late 1980s Russian chernukha films set up their narrative space, contributing to the

impression that the film does not truly belong in the year 2008 when it was made.

The opening sequence, with soldiers walking through the Kazakh steppe and the

rocket being transported to the launch site, looks like a dream because of the camera’s

slow, slightly wobbly movement constantly changing elevation. Indeed, when we

encounter the protagonist, he wakes up, yet the dream continues on the visual level

because the technique does not change. Furthermore, Daniil is shown waking up so often

in the film that the viewer is left wondering whether the preceding sequence was not also

a dream sequence.

Thus, in the film, the faithfully recreated Soviet urban milieu and landscapes are

formally and authoritatively posited as dreams. The film’s vision offers the fleeting and

“unreal” dream that the Soviet Union of the 1960s must indeed look like from the

nostalgic post-Soviet vantage point. This vision taps into the nature of nostalgia as a

longing for the place and time that never existed. However, the same cinematic technique

allows for a different reading: the camerawork creates the disembodied, nearly

220
disinterested point of view that is, in a way, akin to the “objectiveness” of the

“documentary” footage of First on the Moon. The gaze of the camera in the film is

largely depersonalized as the camera looks at the space from unusual angles, its motions

fluidly slow, not allowing itself to adopt the perspective of any of the characters. The

viewer, then, is not invited to look at the history of the Soviet space launch through the

perspective of the events’ participant. Instead, the camera is interested in the visual

structure of the historical era it attempts to record, wherein the history of the space launch

is inscribed as a structuring narrative. This pinpoints the place of the complex of the

“dead cosmonauts” myths within post-Soviet culture’s attempts to come to terms with the

Soviet past.

Lyubov’ Arkus observes that the film is “not about the era, but instead about its

unconscious”54. As Paper Soldier continues the post-Soviet examination of the Soviet

‘space mythologies’, the rocket carries Daniil not to the vast expanse of Cosmos but

instead to a kind of nostalgically peaceful Soviet heaven. Daniil, too, becomes a dead

cosmonaut, radically changing his plane of existence not in order to conquer outer space

for the Communist State, but instead to stay forever in the Soviet past, signaling it to

anyone watching. At one point in the film, Daniil reads from Aleksandr Blok’s 1910

poem, “The Demon”: ‘Yes, I will take you with me/And raise you up where/The earth

seems like a star/And the star seems like earth’ (Blok 2001: 197). As the film displaces

the Soviet past into this eerie space structured by ambivalence, it is possible to locate

Arkus’s ‘unconscious of the era’ in outer space that is staged as a reverse side of the

Soviet dreamscape. For post-Soviet film and fiction that engage the Soviet ‘space

54
Lyubov’ Arkus, “Besplodnye usiliia liubvi k Otechestvu” (interview with Aleksei German). Seans 35-36
(2008) <http://seance.ru/n/35-36/sborka-3536/bumsoldat/> Accessed October 12, 2010.

221
mythologies,’ outer space becomes a kind of experiential metaphor for the Soviet past

that encompasses the sublime and the mundane, pleasure and pain, pride and shame

associated with this past in the cultural memory.

222
 CONCLUSION

“То есть я просто-напросто хочу сказать, что Ленин был грибом. Грибом, более

того, он был не только грибом, он был еще помимо всего радиоволной”.

Сергей Курёхин, «Ленин-гриб»

“That is, I just simply want to say that Lenin was a mushroom. A mushroom, yes;

moreover, not only was he a mushroom; he was also a radiowave.”

Sergei Kurekhin, “Lenin Was a Mushroom”

On May 18, 1991, according to the TV host Sergei Sholokhov, a group of “old

Bolsheviks” came to the [Leningrad] Regional [Party] Committee. Their only question was, “is

this true?”1 The “old Bolsheviks” reacted to the segment in the “Fifth Wheel” (Piatoie koleso), a

Leningrad TV program, which aired the previous day. In the segment, Sholokhov interviewed

Sergei Kurekhin, an avant-garde musician who, in a series of brilliant lapses of logic,

convincingly argued at length that Lenin was a mushroom, and that his mushroom-ness directly

led to the October Revolution of 1917. Though by the end of the broadcast neither the host nor

his guest could contain their giggling, Sholokhov later noted that the theory Kurekhin and he had

put forward “was an answer to many questions.”

Kurekhin’s way of theorizing the Soviet era is in line with the absurdist aesthetics of the

time. Yet, behind the formally sacrilegious hypothesis that Lenin abused hallucinogenic

mushrooms to the extent that he himself finally became one, there is explanatory pathos: by May

1991, the October Revolution looked exactly like an outcome of a hallucinatory delusion.

1
Dima Mishenin, “Tsennyie Bumagi: Sholokhov – klassik russkogo televideniia” (Mikhail Sholokhov’s interview to
Krestyanka), in Peremeny (online, 2008), http://www.peremeny.ru/column/view/873/, accessed September 20, 2010.

223
Kurekhin’s project does deconstruct Soviet history; yet, the aesthetics of the absurd, in a way, are

an honest answer to a genuine question late-Soviet culture had about its beginnings. Even though

the “old Bolsheviks” did not think Kurekhin’s answer was a good one, they nonetheless took the

trouble to double-check, and probably not only because of the blind belief in the infallibility of

Soviet TV broadcasts. Kurekhin’s answer was truthful, if not true: his theory rationalized and

explained the irrational in the late-Soviet culture through staging this culture’s irrational

beginnings.

The absurdist, de(con)structive tactics that Russian cultural texts of the 1990s too-often

employed to represent both the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present are the reason why, in the

words of Eliot Borenstein, “in the first five years of the twenty-first century… the 1990s

[became] the despised decade… [characterized by] persistent negativity and hostility….”2

Contemporary Russian culture seemed to be relieved when the 1990s were over; studies of recent

Russian culture like Borenstein’s “point to a growing emphasis on order, structure and domestic

harmony”3 in the cultural production.

This shift in the tactics of representation points not just to the stabilization of both

sociopolitical discourses and everyday life in post-Soviet Russia in the 2000s. The cultural desire

for order, structure and comfort that recent Russian culture comes to articulate is not only a

reaction to the cynical aesthetic of the absurd and the bleak – such an aesthetic had always

concealed this desire. We can then read the trends described by Borenstein as an eventuality of

the semantic uncertainties of the 1990s, as an articulation of the ordering, structuring pathos that

underlied post-Soviet de(con)structive cultural production of the 1990s. This articulation

becomes possible because the search for a metaphor that would legitimize post-Soviet culture

2
Borenstein 2008, 226.
3
Ibid., 238.

224
finally achieves a modicum of success in the context of Vladimir Putin’s presidency.

For Borenstein, the 1990s condense into the figure of Russia’s first President, Boris

Yeltsin, the “flabby and weak…absent father.”4 Against this absent father is juxtaposed the

“manly man,” Putin, who, Borenstein convincingly shows, comes to define the landscape of

“recent [Russian popular] culture [that] is attempting to move beyond male insecurity (Yeltsin)

to a manly grip on power (Putin) while… rejecting the violent excess and bleak cynicism of the

previous decade in favor of domesticity, comfort, and the continuity of family ties.”5 Putin, then,

replaces Yeltsin the absent father, to legitimize and support the articulation of the desire for

continuity in the cultural texts from the 2000s.

The post-Soviet is over, as Kevin Platt proclaims, arguing that

whereas authoritative visions of [Russian] history and identity during the 1990s were

predicated on the notion that 1991 marked a moment of radical social transformation…

the “end of the post-Soviet” is the culmination of a gradual reemergence over the last

decade or so [2000s] of a vision of political history and social identity based in

continuities, at various historical depths, linking the Russian present with the Soviet and

pre-Soviet eras.6

As the metaphor of historical rupture comes to be replaced by the metaphor of continuity,

the “despised decade” of the 1990s thus might look like a gap in Russian cultural mythologies,

marked by the absent father and an absent teleology, much like the 1920s must have looked like

to the founding fathers of Socialist Realism who attempted to cover a gap of their own created by

the semantic uncertainty of the Russian revolutionary art. Yet, Borenstein makes a revealing

remark when he discusses Putin’s rise to power and its symbolic implications. In a cheesy pop

4
Ibid.
5
Borenstein 228.
6
Platt 2009

225
song, the girl singer, weary of her unreliable, drinking boyfriend (who in Borenstein’s reading

stands for Yeltsin) wants a new one, “someone like Putin,” an ideal boyfriend. Borenstein points

to the song’s “unintended” wisdom: “the new president filled a perceived need not necessarily

for Putin himself, but for someone like Putin.”7 Post-Soviet Russian culture’s desire for the

stability of myth is thus satisfied: the father returns to cover over the metaphoric lack, but this

father only does so because he hears the call coming from the historical gap of the 1990s. In a

perverse reading, Putin is an exceptionally suitable national symbol, alliteratively very close

Pushkin: “not Pushkin, but still,” Putin was, in a way, the culmination of the fetishistic desire for

the continuities of Russia’s paternal mythologies outlined in this study. I consciously make this

metaphor dangerously supple, as its malleability alludes to the multitude of implausible

extrapolations and analogies in the texts I have discussed, in the texts that stretch and bend the

continuum of Russian/Soviet mythologies, making it “work” for post-Soviet culture.

The very “Project Putin,” as Borenstein calls it, is a culmination of the post-Soviet

attempt to articulate the continuity of Russian cultural mythologies. The “cult of Putin” emerges

not as a response to the 1990s’ void of state ideology and cultural mythologies; rather, it emerges

as a response to the attempts of the culture of the 1990s to assess, restructure and relaunch the

Soviet myths about culture, identity and textuality.

In this way, though the metaphors that come to stand for the 1990s and 2000s in the

historiography of Russia are opposites, the cultural desires that define these two decades are not.

When, with the end of the Soviet era, Lenin ceases to be the grandfather of every Soviet child, he

becomes a mushroom. This transformation certainly stages a break between the Soviet myth and

its post-Soviet interpretation. Yet, Lenin cannot remain just a mushroom: he has to be a

radiowave, too. As the 1990s appropriate the existing rhetorical and mythological structures that
7
Borenstein 227.

226
the Soviet Union left behind,8 the excess of meaning with which the figure of Lenin continues to

be invested provides a structural link between the hyperboles of Soviet mythology and the post-

Soviet mode(s) of organizing meaning.

To draw on Platt again, “revolution, transition, or transformation … can only be

metaphors that mask inevitable continuities of social organization, practical life, and everyday

experience - basal linkages that persist through even the most radical moments of social

change.”9 Russia’s most persistent continuity is the role of its culture in shaping public and

political life; in Nancy Condee’s words, “Russia’s culture… has historically served… as

historian and augur, cartulary and politician [in the] narration of public conscience.”10 Yet,

linguistic and visual signs, bread and butter for the scholars of culture, are but a symptom of

these linkages, which exist on the level of repeating patterns of culture, on the level of practices,

habits and rites of everyday life. Condee has precisely these continuities in mind when she

discusses the structures of representation and practices of production in post-Soviet cinema:

Russia will not resolve its imperial legacy, she argues, because it is its imperial legacy.11 In this

argument, the “imperial trace” in recent Russian cinema (which Condee cautiously avoids calling

post-Soviet) has to do not only, and not primarily, with the themes, images, and ideologies that

the filmmakers construct and draw upon; it also has to do with the representational modes and

tactics through which these themes, images, and ideologies are approached.

Russia’s [imperial] past, then, is not the lost object for the culture to ponder, mourn, and

to be eventually reconciled with; instead, it is that part of the pondering subject which organizes

and structures the very mode of exploration of Russia’s [imperial] past. It is, in a sense,

8
Condee 2009, 5.
9
Platt 2009.
10
Condee 2009, 20.
11
Condee 2009, 47.

227
contemporary Russia’s unconscious, a concealed structure that underlies the production and

articulation of culture.

The unconscious is structured like language, Lacan reminds us, and the linguistic

conception of time in the modern Russian language is prohibitive of attempts to place an event in

time. The beginnings of the modern Russian state lie temptingly close to the historical moment

when the linguistic conception of time changed imperceptibly in Russia, with the loss of Old

Russian tenses which blurred the distinctions between the different “pasts” to emphasize the

“how” of the event rather than the “when,” the modality rather than the moment on the

conceptual timeline. This is not to say that the Russian language is prohibitive of the writing of

history – only that the history that emerges should be a history of representational modalities of

culture.

228
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