Context N°19
by Dmitry Golynko-Volfson
The best known and most talked about novels of the present day seem to me to be the products of social pessimism, which in the Putin era characterizes the mindset of the cultural elite. This elite (or several elites)—completely intolerant of the kind of oligarchy legalized under Yeltsin, and disgusted by the absolute impunity of Putin’s administrative despotism—feels that it’s been let down by the course of neo-liberal reform, and that it’s been failed by the right-wing Young Liberals in turn. While the bureaucratic power in Russia appears to show relative tolerance, in reality it’s only coming up with the new systems of control, and so contemporary literature tries to invent new zones of autonomy, places where a modern man can find himself, can find his independent, personal identity—even if only for a short time.
For many established writers or for their younger colleagues, the attempt to find “territories of freedom” becomes not only a cultural mission, but also a major ethical responsibility. The search for a “pure” humanity, beyond the control of any social models, has little to do with the actual political history of Russia or the Soviet Union. Today, the “territories of freedom” can be found in a reinvented, alternative Russia: a utopian Russia that allegedly existed “once upon a time.” Unlike the utopia of the Russian avant-garde, which looked into the apocalyptic future, the present-day utopia is looking to the past, trying to find a shelter from the catastrophic ’90s and the suffocating stasis of Putinism.
In most contemporary Russian fiction, we rarely encounter scenes of constructive social or political activism, but instead, inevitably, a leitmotif of escape, or more precisely, “happy endings” presenting fairer and more authentic existences to their characters. For the most influential authors, or for those who claim to be, the task is now to come up with more and better alternative models of past and present Russia, not to mention whatever plot twists are necessary to add to their heroes’ existential authenticity and ethical justification.
The new novel by Victor Pelevin, Svyashchennaya kniga oborotnya (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf), came out exactly a year after his previous outing, Dialektika Perekhodnogo Perioda iz Niotkuda v Nikuda (The Dialectics of the Period of Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere), both published by EKSMO, one of the biggest publishing monopolies in Russia. Pelevin is currently one of the hottest “stars” of Russian prose, and also an idol to many different urban subcultures—particularly programmers, hackers, and other computer intelligentsia.
In each of his new novels, Pelevin works a miraculous transformation: turning vulgar Soviet anecdotes into wise, instructive parables.
In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, all spheres of Russian life are portrayed as being a veritable werewolf-orgy, but the way out of this nightmare is not through silver bullets and the like, but through an elevated love. Werewolves in contemporary Russia are by no means just characters out of folktales. The mass media regularly draws attention to new unmaskings of so-called “turncoats” in the high ranks of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Federal Security Service, connected to criminal organizations and “grazing” off of these government institutions on behalf of the mafia. According to Pelevin, all the agents of political power—including law enforcement, the oligarchy, and the Kremlin—are either secretly or openly werewolves, diabolical creatures from the underworld. Thus, for these ruthless, modern-day monsters, love has changed from a positive, everyday value into something revolutionary.
Pelevin’s novel tells a moving story about love between two werecreatures, a little fox and a big wolf. The fox works as a prostitute in Moscow hotels, and becomes a mistress of the wolf Alexander Seryi, a lieutenant of the Federal Security Service, who with his magic wand has invigorated the Russian oil industry.
The intensity of his emotional experiences makes the wolf lose his supernatural abilities. Love transforms him into an ordinary dog, nicknamed Pes “Pizdec,” an ordinary State Security bureaucrat. But the fox achieves mystical enlightenment, dissolving in an iridescent luminescence right over Bitssevskiy Park, where Pelevin likes to ride his bicycle. The fox’s opinions on life are very close to the author’s: for Pelevin, even a contemporary author is a clever kind of werewolf, transforming himself to better adapt to the global market in order to win the right to an independent opinion.
The new novel by Vladimir Sorokin (another indisputable celebrity, and the “sacred cow” of Moscow conceptualism), entitled Put Bro (Bro’s Way) and published by Zakharov, is the second part—along with his preceding novel, Lyod (Ice)—of a promised trilogy concerning the “Brotherhood of Light.” Published in 2002 by Ad Marginem, Ice had the effect of a bomb exploding among Sorokin’s admirers and opponents both. In Ice, the members of a secret Gnostic sect hunt for “sisters and brothers” in dark Moscow streets and alleyways—and they do this by hitting the chests of their targets with hammers made of ice: the only way they can start to “speak from their hearts.” The number of brothers and sisters at large is limited: there are exactly 23,000, and all have blue eyes and blond hair (which opens Sorokin up to accusations of proto-Nazi sympathies).
Bro’s Way is a prequel to Ice, and concerns the formation of the Brotherhood of Light. Exploiting his usual method of combining methods from disparate narrative traditions, Sorokin starts his Bro’s Way in the style of a novel of the gentry, continues in the mode of a revolutionary memoir, and finishes with a dark, aphoristic apocrypha. The book follows the biography of the Brotherhood’s founder (“Bro”) from his childhood to after the Second World War, when he dies from spiritual exhaustion. At the time of his death, the Brotherhood of Light—having already permeated the highest echelons of Bolshevik and Nazi power—is now secretly governing both the country of Ice (this is what Sorokin calls Russia) and the country of Order (Germany). Everybody who isn’t capable of “speaking from their hearts”—that is to say, who isn’t a brother or sister—falls into the category of “meat machines,” and this is practically 100% of Russia’s population. In Sorokin’s novel, the alternative model of Russia is similar to the purifying Gnostic Nothing. The exit into such an alternative existence is possible only through one’s transformation into pure spiritual energy.
The territory of freedom in the new Edvard Limonov novel, Torzhestvo metafiziki (The Triumph of Metaphysics), published by Ad Marginem, is found on a bed in the barracks of a prison camp. A better, or even a perfect version of Russia—a Russia in which a man can breathe freely and happily—can only be found, following the paradoxical logic of the inmate Savenko (Limonov’s birth name), inside the strict regime of the colony where he’s serving his sentence.
The Triumph of Metaphysics is autobiographical. In April of 2001, Federal Security arrested Limonov as a leader of the National-Bolshevik party. Limonov was charged with attempting to overthrow the regime, and of dealing in arms trafficking. After he had served two years in Lefortovo prison during the time of his protracted trial, Limonov was sentenced to four more years of penal servitude and transferred to Zavolzhsk colony No. 13. He spent several difficult months there, before his early release, and this is where the dry and steely plot of The Triumph of Metaphysics takes place. The restrained, documentary style of the novel is reminiscent of the tradition of “camp writing,” which reached its apogee in Shalamov and Aleshkovsky.
Alexander Goldstein’s second novel, Pomni o Famaguste (Remember Famagusta), was published by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Review). The perfect, alternative Russia in Goldstein’s novel is equated with a lost empire. For Goldstein, this empire is an imaginary historical-cultural commonplace, nowadays surviving only in the collective memory. Stylistically complex, resembling the patterns of a Persian rug, this book might be a Russian version of Finnegans Wake. But unlike Joyce’s fresco, the predominant motif in Goldstein’s novel is mourning—sorrow at the metaphysical dimensions of empire. Famagusta, from the title of the book, is the name of a Greek harbor in Cyprus, which, in 1974, as a result of a territorial conflict, fell under Turkish rule. A slogan: “Remember Famagusta!” reminds the nation of its painful losses while supporting its heroic efforts at consolidation. For Goldstein, it’s only through the accumulation of a kind of commemorative grief that a utopian Russia can be achieved.
Venerin volos (Maidenhair), recipient of the National Bestseller award, written by Mikhail Shishkin (the author lives in Zürich), was published by Vagrius in the summer of 2005. The literary qualities of Shishkin’s book are distinguished even in comparison to the other outstanding novels listed here. What we find in this book are clarity of language and skillful stylistic shifts that range from reportage-like descriptions of atrocities in Chechnya, to the sentimental diary entries of a high-school girl, to multilayered metaphors reminiscent of Milorad Pavic’s writing. In fact, the impeccable brilliance of Shishkin’s writing not only distinguishes his novel, but does it harm: after finishing the book, one feels a certain disparity between its stylistic decorations and its piercing, misanthropic subject.
The novel is structured in a question and answer format, allegedly the transcription of an interrogation recorded in the office where illegal immigrants are detained at the Swiss border. The interpreter, the author’s alter ego, is translating the testimonies of the refugees from Russia applying for a political asylum in Switzerland. The applicants “wail” about the barbarities and torments in Russian schools, prisons, or army barracks. But the interpreter is convinced that their confessions are fabrications, horrors invented simply so that they can get visas: his job should be to “recognize the truth,” but instead he slants their stories so that the immigration bureau in Bern can decline their applications. Gradually, the petitioners’ descriptions turn into a ruthless account of the hopeless horror of contemporary Russia.
Employing intimate, confessional tones, young writers Linor Goralik and Stanislav Lvovskii use the themes of childhood and times past in their collaborative work Polovina neba (Half of the Sky) published by New Literary Review. The action of the novel unfolds in the passenger section of an Air France plane, with Mark, a successful photojournalist, returning to Russia after visiting Masha, his old love from school who has since emigrated to the United States and settled there. Mark is thinking in the airplane about the things that bind him to Masha, and reviewing the events of his journey. Mark had gone to America to find out whether his childhood attraction to Masha was genuine, but their meeting was a crushing fiasco: Masha is very happy in her marriage, and has wisely forgotten their vague childhood infatuation.
It seems initially like a trivial story about the impossibility of returning to the illusions of the past. But the paradox of the book lies in the fact that, for both Mark and Masha, those trifling and partially forgotten elements of their serene childhoods are the only things in them that are really alive, that are really valuable. According to the authors of this novel, existential authenticity can only be achieved through exactly these kinds of mistaken memories, which allow you to drift off into a happy, imaginary past where you can at last be in harmony with yourself.
In the comic, grotesque novel Grachi uleteli (Rooks Flew Away), by Sergei Nosov, published by Limbus Press in St. Petersburg, a sad trio of forty-something losers (a mediocre school director, a watchman at a deserted factory, and a poor German immigrant) unexpectedly gets a chance to revitalize their faded past. A young German art historian publishes an article in which she enthusiastically asserts that their act of hooliganism twenty years before, when the three men urinated into the Neva from the Dvorcovyi Bridge, was actually a work of brilliant conceptual art.
As a result of this, the heroes find themselves feted in the eccentric circles of St. Petersburg bohemia, and start living their lives to the fullest. Needless to say, their newfound popularity quickly degenerates into outright farce. Nosov—in a somewhat edifying manner—suggests that even seemingly harmless masquerades attempting to rehabilitate the past will eventually exact a grave price from the pretenders. But such attempts are inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, since they add the texture of authentic experience to quotidian life.
An exaggeratedly gloomy version of the “outcome” of such ventures is suggested in Seraya slyz (Gray Goo), a novel by Riga journalists Aleksandar Garros and Alexei Evdokimov, also published by Limbus Press. According to the authors, for people from provincial postcommunist regions, like their native Latvia, caught up nowadays in the exigencies of global capitalism (the “gray goo” surrounding them on every side—the comfortable standards of life in the now sterile and standardized capitalistic society), the only really noble route an honest man can take is suicide.
Zakhar Prilepin’s documentary novel about a Chechen military company, eloquently entitled Patologii (Pathologies) and published by Andreevsky Flag, became the succès de scandale of the year. For Prilepin, the pathologies he is addressing are not only the Russian military occupation of an autonomous republic and the genocide committed there. First of all, the pathology here is the apathetic cynicism with which post-Soviet society views the inhuman brutalities committed by the out-of-control Russian army. “Pathology” is also the name of a punitive operation undertaken by a subdivision of the Russian special forces, who throughout the novel are busy with the methodical extermination of the entire male population of occupied Grozny. The novel takes the form of a diary written by the main character, who, instead of being tortured by feelings of remorse on account of the atrocities he’s taking part in, only worries about what his sexy mistress back home is getting up to in his absence.
Because of its neutral colloquial language and the density of its plot, Prilepin’s novel reminds one of a medical chart, diagnosing the incurable “pathologies” of Russian society. The society suffers not from simple indifference but from a sad insensitivity. It recognizes the “pathological” injustice of the present political regime, but isn’t ready to give up its comforts in order to present a unified front of resistance.
After Prilepin’s novel, it’s crystal clear: a private withdrawal from the social “pathologies” isn’t possible. But admitting the impossibility of this escape is a condition for new aesthetic and ethical breakthroughs.
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Translation by Ana Lucic
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