Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Duke University Libraries https ://arch i ve. o rg/detai ls/1 atesovi etcu Itu rOI u nse u CK LATE SOVIET ^CULTURE Late Soviet culture LATE SOVIET CULTURE From Perestroika to Novostroika Post-Contemporary Interventions Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson LATE SOVIET CULTURE ^ Perestroika to Novostroika Edited by Thomas Lahusen - with Gene Kuperman Duke University Press 1993 Durham and London © 1993 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper °° Designed by Cherie Westmoreland Typeset in Futura and Sabon by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Late Soviet culture : from perestroika to novostroika / edited by Thomas Lahusen. p. cm. — (Post-contemporary interventions) Includes index. isbn 0-8223-12.90-5 (alk. paper). — isbn 0-8223-1324-3 (pbk.) 1. Soviet Union—Intellectual life. I. Lahusen, Thomas. DK266.4.L38 1993 947.08—dc20 92-28051 CIP The text of this book originally was published without the present introduction or index and without the essays by Clark, Goscilo, Holquist, Lahusen, Leibin, Raleigh, or Turovskaya as Volume 90, No. 2 of the South Atlantic Quarterly. Contents Editor’s Introduction i Mikhail Kuraev Perestroika: The Restructuring of the Past or the Invention of the Future? 13 Boris Kagarlitsky A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 21 Sidney Monas Perestroika in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms of the 1860s 35 Paul Debreczeny “Zbitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo": Pushkin’s Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture 47 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth Century in the Mirror of Dystopia 69 Maya Turovskaya The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers during the 1930s 95 Evgeny Dobrenko The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon 109 Thomas Lahusen The Mystery of the River Adun: Reconstruction of a Story 139 vi Contents Michael Holquist Dialogism and Aesthetics 155 Valery Leibin Freudianism, or the “Trotskiite Contraband”: Soviet Psychoanalysis in the 1920s and 1930s 177 Valery Podoroga The Eunuch of the Soul: Positions of Reading and the World of Platonov 187 Helena Goscilo Domostroika or Perestroika ? The Construction of Womanhood in Soviet Culture under Glasnost 233 Mikhail Epstein After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature 257 Katerina Clark Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 289 Donald Raleigh Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg: Some Reflections on the August Revolution, Provincial Russia, and Novostroika 307 Index 323 Contributors 335 Editor's Introduction It appears today that positions, theories, and ideas become — obsolete almost at the moment of their utterance. Whether the cold war has been won or lost, what seems increasingly certain is the breakdown of both the past and the future in favor of an advancing present, where, simultaneously, euphoria and melancholy seem capable of neutralizing all powers of explanation. Moreover, today it seems fair to say that it is not only the Berlin Wall that has crumbled, but also the ideologies that made its construction possible. These introductory lines, written together with Gene Kuperman in the fall of 1990 for a Soviet issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly (Perestroika: Perspectives on Modernization, spring 1991, volume 90, number 2) still appear pertinent today, with the difference, perhaps, that the “new world (dis)order” is increasingly haunted by old phan¬ toms as well as by portions of the past which our century started from, and that the decrease of euphoria and melancholy has not been able to stir up a certain numbness of the mind. The present collection of essays is a considerably enlarged version of the South Atlantic Quar¬ terly issue. Seven new contributions have almost doubled the volume of the journal version and have naturally changed its profile. First of all, new themes have appeared: the history of aesthetics, of cinema, psychoanalysis, and literature seen from a “gendered” perspective. The completed version has also gained balance in regard to a certain ten¬ dency which seemed to prevail in the “ Perestroika ” issue, namely, an inclination toward “catastrophic” thinking. Indeed, some of the essays presented here have undoubtedly a flavor of fin de siecle; but what is expressed is not so much “apocalypse now” as the end of a history that is already behind us: gone is the Crystal Palace, gone Utopia, gone Dystopia. Thus the effort to reperiodize Rus¬ sian culture—which we encounter, for example, in Mikhail Epstein’s essay—appears no less urgent than the need for what Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya think of as the “unflinching analysis” of the “landscape after the battle.” And now gone also is the Soviet Union. 2 Late Soviet Culture All the articles were written before the formal disintegration of the USSR; one of them was conceived during the events of August 1991; only the editor had the privilege of rewriting his introduction several times. The reader will judge which one of the essays was the most—or the least—prophetic. As to the very purpose of this book, I hope that the variety of themes, of point of views, and of climates will contribute to an understanding, beneath the inflation of facts, of the debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s around what still and already may be called “late Soviet culture.” The debate is opened by two contributions focusing, above all, on the future. While for Boris Kagarlitsky, “A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right,” the analysis of the political situation at the end of the 1980s is inseparable from maintaining the “ability to go against the current,” for Mikhail Kuraev, “ Perestroika : The Restructuring of the Past or the Invention of the Future?,” democracy is on its way, the past needs no more restructuring, and the future needs no further invention. Kuraev sees the nation’s future returning to an “organic development” that leads toward self-consciousness. Kagarlitsky, on the other hand, advo¬ cates revolutionary reforms. He comes to the conclusion that “left” and “right” are terms that not only still have meaning, but also acquire new meaning within the context of market Stalinism. Persistence is the common denominator of the two following con¬ tributions. Shifting historical perspective, Sidney Monas, “Perestroika in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms of the 1860s,” explores analogues between the present time and the Great Reforms of the latter half of the nineteenth century, which modernized the Russian Empire, but also led to its final collapse. The words of Piotr Chaadaev (quoted by Monas), claiming that Russia “had no history” and “had contributed nothing but the occupation of space,” sound strangely actual in these days of decay, affecting not only the Soviet Empire, but also a Soviet identity from which even “Russia” seems to be anxious to escape. Threatened identity calls for great figures, guides, pilots, or for martyrs. Paul Debreczeny, “ ‘Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo': Push¬ kin’s Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture,” sees in the myth of Pushkin’s death and the development of his “martyrdom” from 1837 to the present time an archetype for national suffering and the anx¬ ious quest for national identity—a quest that may be ending with Russian history entering its “McDonald’s period” on Pushkin Square. Debreczeny’s anthropology of the death of “Aleksandr of Boldino” sheds new light on the development of collective mentalites in Russia— a history that is living and that counts because it defines the present of its actors. Editor's Introduction 3 “The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth Century in the Mirror of Dystopia” by Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya introduces a third series of essays that deal with the experiment of “total culture.” The “obstacle” reminds us of Kagarlitsky’s “ability to go against the current,” but this time another point of view prevails: not the one of the “masses” but the vantage point of the “chosen one,” that is to say, the one who did not choose to live in one of the Brave New Worlds of our century. Zamiatin’s We , Platonov’s Cbevengur, Nabo¬ kov’s Invitation to a Beheading , Orwell’s Animal Farm and, of course, his 1984, but also Grossman’s Life and Fate and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales all reveal the same “obstacle,” resisting depersonalization, homo¬ geneity, sterility, and transparency. This is the “I,” the ultimate “point of hardness,” encoded in human nature. The following three contributions deal specifically with the cul¬ ture of the Stalin period: the “forgotten” literature of the post-World War II era, Soviet film in the 1930s and 1940s, and the reconstruction of a lost referent through the “careful reading” of a Stalinist literary blockbuster. In the autistic and dislocated culture of late Stalinism, de¬ scribed in detail and with passion by Evgeny Dobrenko (“The Litera¬ ture of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon”), the realm of the “false order of things over past and future” in twentieth-century dystopia has become a “second reality,” has entered a “fundamental lexicon” of timeless values, and, according to Lysenko’s formula, no longer gives birth to “people,” but to “organisms.” One could ven¬ ture the following conclusion: people die, organisms only decay. This would explain why Dobrenko’s “lexicon” survived—and is still surviv¬ ing—the “death” of socialist realism. In any case, Dobrenko’s analysis demonstrates the urgency of reading the “unreadable.” In such conditions, the urge felt by Maya Turovskaya to search for figures reflecting the preferences of moviegoers during the Stalin period is all the more understandable; a task she compares to the “mining of radium”: “a yield in grams, a labor of years.” Obviously, “people” started to become scarce in the 1930s. The recovered fig¬ ures then serve to reconstitute the very fabric of Soviet film history, the “natural-heterogeneous structure” of its development, disrupted— and homogenized—by state policy since the 1930s. The effects of this disruption are felt until the present day. Strange flowers have been growing in the homogenized garden of Stalin’s culture: Turovskaya’s report tells us how the “generation of victors” was brought up on the products of Nazi cinema, anonymously recycled by the Soviet film industry between 1947 and 1949, because of a dramatic shortage of “mass culture.” 4 Late Soviet Culture My own “Mystery of the River Adun” deals with a well-known theme in literary sovietology: censorship, rewriting, repression, col¬ laboration, resistance. It completes Dobrenko’s rather extensive essay in offering an “intensive” case study from his “lexicon.” In investigat¬ ing the relation between the referent and what Dobrenko calls the “sec¬ ond reality,” the article attempts to transcend cold war thinking as well as the syndrome of the “martyred intellectual as tragic bearer of the cultural memory” (K. Clark). The “careful reading” of a Stalin prize— Vasilii Azhaev’s novel Far from Moscow —rehabilitates the text’s right to exist—oh horror!—for itself, beyond the gaze of “vigilance.” Kuraev’s call for the “organic” renewal of the nation; Galtseva and Rodnyanskaya’s recourse to “human nature”; Turovskaya’s reference to the “homogenization” of the “natural-heterogeneous structure” of film development; Dobrenko’s “false order,” which implies a “true” one; my own rehabilitation of “text”—all this recalls some sort of romantic nostalgia for the lost organic “whole,” which seems to per¬ vade more than one essay of our collection. If the “engineering of the human soul” turns out to be the wrong model, what about biology ? This brings us to the following section, where both body and soul are involved. The presence of biological and “body-thinking” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory as a model of cultural interpretation is pre¬ cisely what Michael Holquist attempts to demonstrate in his essay “Dialogism and Aesthetics.” Although a current reference of metacriti¬ cism, Bakhtin is not a disembodied and “stateless thinker,” and his concepts are not the result of an “inexplicable mutation.” The basic categories of dialogism, concepts such as the “chronotope” and, above all, of “situatedness”—not to speak of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival— are marked by the particular—and unavoidable—consciousness Bakh¬ tin had of his own corporeality (he suffered from chronic osteomyeli¬ tis.) They are also and above all deeply rooted in a specific tradition of aesthetic disputes: the nineteenth-century Russian obsession of how art can be related to life, along with the persistence, up to Bakhtin’s time, of a science of physiology contributing, also since the nineteenth century, to form a material, body-based systematics. Against the re- ductionism of the “mechanical whole,” lacking the internal unity of meaning, Bakhtin emphasizes dialogue and answerability, concepts that are similar to the “complexity,” “unfinishedness,” “uniqueness,” and “indeterminacy” of living organisms. The next of our essays, “Freudianism, or the ‘Trotskiite Contra¬ band,’ ” by Valery Leibin, reports on the promising, but soon arrested Freudian influence during the first two decades of Soviet power. After Editor's Introduction 5 the rapid and broad-based reception of psychoanalytic thought in the Soviet intellectual community of the 1920s, the scholarly discussion of whether Freud was compatible with Marx came to an end with the sup¬ port of the “wrong” political authorities. In 1931 psychoanalysis dis¬ appeared from the cultural scene, a victim of Stalin’s “struggle against Trotskiite contraband.” According to Leibin, this was more than a banishment. After Freud’s “reactionary” theory of the unconscious was purged, it became “unthinkable” and one of the consequences of Stalin’s campaign was that Soviet scholars became “immune” to any possible contagion from modern Western culture. In carrying on Leibin’s metaphor, one could say that the “immune system” is break¬ ing down with the falling apart of the whole body. Half a century after Stalin’s anathema, Freud is (re)translated and published in the Soviet Union, and psychoanalysis is currently undergoing a veritable renais¬ sance. Of special interest is of course the rediscovery of native works published during the 1920s, such as The Psychoanalysis of Commu¬ nism by G. Malis, or A. Zalkind’s studies, linking the neurotic with the political, proposing a . .. biological classification of party members in his “party member pathology.” Should we attribute the following contribution to the just men¬ tioned renaissance of Russian psychoanalytic thought? Its unquestion¬ able “post-Freudianness” symbolizes in itself the many accelerations occurring in Soviet culture: from “Freudo-Marxism” of the 1920s to an example of “schizo-analysis,” without transition. Valery Podoroga’s “rhizomatic” meditation on the work of Andrei Platonov can be con¬ sidered as an attempt to seize the very instant of history’s “rupture.” Podoroga calls it “mis-embodiment,” suggesting that Platonov might have undergone some sort of schizophrenic collapse during the process of creation of The Juvenile Sea , The Foundation Pit, and Chevengur. In any case, the “eunuch of the soul,” the “dead brother,” and “soli¬ tary inhabitant” of Platonov’s characters is the “witness and chronicler of catastrophe,” a catastrophe determining a space where the body is severed from its own “I,” its subjectivity. Podoroga thus defines the power of Platonov’s prose by referring to the creation of a new type of vision, a “pure gaze” which “sees,” but “does not comprehend organic, inherited links of life.” The author’s reflections on Platonov’s “ma¬ chine of vision,” on his language, on the “machine of light” and the “machine of death” can be considered an original contribution to the question of Platonov’s “otherness” and “untranslatability,” unless the reader forgets about the pre-text (Platonov) and engages in the text’s own “molecular” multiplicity. 6 Late Soviet Culture The following contribution, “ Domostroika or Perestroika ?” by Helena Goscilo, is devoted to the issue of women and literature. What is, indeed, the gender of Soviet culture? Has the image of Pushkin as “the universal arbiter of taste and guardian of the nation” (Debreczeny) been challenged by a feminine counterpart? Rarely, and only in ex¬ ceptional times. The poet Anna Akhmatova, for instance, performed a specifically feminine role, as “mater dolorosa of Stalinism,” to use the expression of Katerina Clark (p. 300). Goscilo outlines the concept of gender in Soviet society, full of the contradiction between the institution and reality, where women, once again, are losers, this time by “overemancipation” (full-time work and the full load of domestic responsibilities), by a negative balance of prestige within the scale of professions and other social activities, and, above all, by the internalization and naturalization of the traditional male system of prerogatives. The consequence is that Russian women resist the concept of femininity as socially constructed identity, which they confuse with the biological concept of femaleness. Hence, their often violent reaction against feminism, equated with masculinization and perversion. Glasnost has brought a new awareness of gender, but the changes are “far more cosmetic than systemic,” argues Goscilo. They are buried under the invasion of beauty contests, pornographic videos, sex for hard currency, in short, by the release of a new com¬ modity on the newly created “market”—the feminine body. Russian women writers are no exception to the overall resistance to feminism. But, for Goscilo, the rise of consciousness is not limited to program¬ matic declarations, or to a separate women’s section within the Writers Union. Taking the example of three contemporary women writers— Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, and Valeriia Narbikova— Goscilo attempts to show that the irreverent and, at the same time, innovative use of language, plot, and theme is able to overcome the stereotype of “ladies’ ” literature and “potentially rocks the founda¬ tions on which Soviet culture has constructed womanhood.” “After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature” by Mikhail Epstein and “Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Cul¬ ture” by Katerina Clark conclude what precedes with a global vision of Soviet culture from the perspective of the beginning 1990s. The con¬ tributions also offer two divergent answers to the question whether there exists a Soviet version of postmodernism. If for Goscilo the future of Russian literature is seen as a still possible subversion of ecriture, for Epstein, the “new [literary] consciousness” is a phenomenon of the “rear guard” defining the last stage of the lit- Editor's Introduction 7 erature of the 1980s generation. After meta-realism, phenomenalism, and conceptualism, there only follows “zero degree writing.” But all of this is only part of an all encompassing process of cultural cycles and phases. The reader is offered a sweeping reperiodization of Russian literature, from classicism to the present “post-future.” It is organized in cyclic phases, shifting from the social to the moral and the religious, and—with the turn of literature onto itself—to the aesthetic. Russia’s “last literature” represents the end of such a cycle. The lies of the past that distorted reality have been replaced by parody and glasnost —an inflation of voices whereby the signifier is devoid of the signified, and to which Russian literature of the “post-future” period cannot respond except with “the utterance of silence,” from a “rear-guard” posture which Epstein sees as “perhaps the most radical of all existing variants of postmodernism.” Katerina Clark’s essay can be considered, at least in part, as a “posi¬ tive” version of Debreczeny’s anthropology of myth: Soviet culture defining itself not through the martyrdom of its “national” poet, but searching to explain the present and the future by a “Great Time,” or by a particular historical figure. Soviet cultural history, despite its ori¬ entation on the future, is therefore “a text that is chaptered by different versions of the past.” Most often, each of these versions is organized by a triadic pattern. For instance, the genealogy of 1917 is, for the par¬ ticipants of October, Hellenic Greece and the French Revolution of 1789 or, alternatively, the Paris Commune of 1871. With the end of the Civil War and Lenin’s death comes a shift toward Russocentrism. The new triad becomes: 1825 (the Decembrist uprising), 1905 (the first Russian revolution), 1917. Models of genealogy are of course subject to variation: while the Bolsheviks celebrate 1905, the non-Bolshevik intelligentsia celebrates 1825, comparing 1925 to the Nicholaevan re¬ action. The era of Gorbachev’s perestroika, of political, economic, and cultural renewal is paradoxically an era of “memory,” of retrospectiv- ism. The first phase is characterized by an obsession with the 1920s and 1930s, a search for the “golden time” (the Avant-Garde, the cult of Akhmatova, etc.). It is followed by a second phase where the “Great Time to emulate” shifts toward the search for the “originary moment in a trajectory of aberration.” Is the inversion and destruction of the old canon leading toward a significant change of paradigm? Clark’s reading of the literature of the late eighties comes to a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to Epstein’s thesis of a Soviet postmodernity: even the most radical versions of deconstruction of 1917 are still using many of the same canonical models of history used in the 1920s, and the 8 Late Soviet Culture Hegelian model of historical necessity is still at work, acknowledged or not. Our volume concludes with Donald Raleigh’s essay “Beyond Mos¬ cow and St. Petersburg: Some Reflections on the August Revolution, Provincial Russia, and Novostroika." As the title indicates, Raleigh’s contribution already maps the reader in another chronotope: pere¬ stroika, or “restructuring” is gone, an era of “new building” (this is the meaning of novostroika) has begun; and gone also is the traditional space of reference of sovietology. The essay’s positive tone contrasts strikingly with Sidney Monas’s “reverse perspective.” 1 think that we have to read Raleigh’s almost rapturous discovery of “his province” symbolically, that is, at a second, more general, degree: beyond the useful information concerning the events of August 1991, given by an “eyewitness” who also happens to be a professional historian, what he has to say about the opening of Saratov-the-forbidden-city might help us to build new thinking. Raleigh writes toward the end of his article: “The Soviet text is more open than ever before, but they, and we, do not appear to be reading it any better because we’re still reluctant to read closely all the chapters.” When the author was writing these lines, he did not know how right he was: since then, as we know, the word Soviet has gone out of usage. With the exception of Raleigh’s essay (but this exception does not really count insofar as “Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg” belongs, as we just saw, to another “time-space”), the present collection suf¬ fers from an obvious flaw for which not only the sole editor is to be blamed. There is almost no mention of the “other” Soviet cul¬ ture, the cultures of the non-Russian peoples of the late Soviet Union who are now reminding the world of their existence in such a vig¬ orous manner. But perhaps it is this very incompleteness that gives a certain mimetic quality to our book. Could we not say that what was precisely Soviet in Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Estonian, and other “brotherly” cultures was a realized “nowhere”? Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich named it “utopia in power” 1 ; others qualify it as a “second reality,” marked by “zero time” (Dobrenko), a mis- functioning reality of a “catastrophic” order (Podoroga), a “simu¬ lacrum” (Epstein)? Could such a simulacrum have a future, even a democratic one? Whatever the answer—positive or negative—one could call it a pessimistic conclusion. One could postulate the existence of a state of equilibrium, reached by the notion of “democracy,” in Claude Lefort’s understanding, im- Editor's Introduction 9 plying the possibility of “freeing oneself from the attraction of Power and of the One,” the possibility of “resisting the temptation to ex¬ change the present for the future,” while still promoting the indeter¬ minate and necessarily imperfect struggle for human rights. 2 One could call this an optimistic conclusion. What about the future? The editor of the collection hurries to choose circumspection and leaves the reader with the closing remarks of his introduction to the “ Perestroika ” issue of the South Atlantic Quar¬ terly: Galtseva and Rodnyanskaya see utopia as a space that is “contem¬ plated from the outside”—“from a safe distance.” Dystopia, on the contrary, is a space that is seen “from nearby”—experienced by the “solitary inhabitant who has endured its laws” and who, in “utter help¬ lessness,” against all odds, affirms his selfhood. Should we not general¬ ize these observations and adapt them for our own positions, theories, and ideas? Within this context, the tone, the timbre of the essays are of crucial importance: in listening to the prophetic, the anxious, the ironic, and the detached, we perceive messages of “inside” and “outside.” But “inside,” “outside,” “near,” and “far away” are relative notions, de¬ pending on one’s own position, which, in our day, has become insecure. We urge our readers to understand the value of such insecurity and to reconsider their own positions. The essays collected in this volume were in part written for an inter¬ national symposium, held at Duke University in March 1990, en¬ titled “Soviet Culture Today: Restructuring the Past or Inventing the Future?” The symposium was sponsored by grants from the Interna¬ tional Research and Exchanges Board (Princeton), the Soros Founda¬ tion (New York), the Curriculum in Russian and East European Studies (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and the following insti¬ tutions at Duke University: the Center for Critical Theory and the Graduate Program in Literature, the Center for International Studies, the Center on East-West Trade Investments and Communications, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, and the Russian and East European Studies Committee. My thanks go to all the participants in the symposium, to those who contributed to organize it, to those who gave help and advice during the editing of the present collection, and, last but not least, to Gene Kuperman, who has translated those essays that were originally written in Russian. A Russian version of Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya’s 10 Late Soviet Culture “The Obstacle: The Human Being. The Experience of the Century in the Mirror of Dystopia” was published previously in Russian in the journal Novyi mir (The New World) (1988). An earlier version of Evgeny Dobrenko’s “Literature of the Zhdanov Era” appeared in Rus¬ sian as “Ne po slovam, no po delam ego” (Not by His Words but by His Deeds) in a collection of essays edited by the same author, S raznykb tochek zreniia: Izbavlenie ot mirazhei. Sotsrealizm segodnia (Differ¬ ent Points of View: Ridding Ourselves of Mirages. Socialist Realism Today) (1990). An earlier version of Thomas Lahusen’s essay appeared in German in the journal 'Wiener Slawistischer Alrnanach (1989). An earlier version of Valery Podoroga’s “Eunuch of the Soul” appeared in Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy) (1989). An earlier ver¬ sion of Mikhail Epstein’s essay was delivered at the Fourth Wheatland Conference on Literature, 11-16 June 1990, in San Francisco. Donald Raleigh’s “Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg” previously appeared in the 1992 summer issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. A Note on Translation and Transliteration With the exception of the contributions from Katerina Clark, Paul Debreczeny, Helena Goscilo, Michael Holquist, Thomas Lahusen, Sidney Monas, and Donald Raleigh, all the texts presented here have been translated from Russian by Gene Kuperman. In the case of Mikhail Epstein’s essay, an earlier translation by Jamie Gambrell and Catherine Nepomnyashchy (sponsored by the Wheatland Foundation) has been extensively revised. Unless otherwise indicated, all transla¬ tions of quoted Russian sources are by Gene Kuperman. In the case of references to texts that have been translated into Russian, the transla¬ tions are from the originals. In bibliographical references and when Russian words are used in the text, the Library of Congress transliteration system is used through¬ out (so that the reader will see, for example, the names Fedor Dostoev- skii or Lev Trotskii). This convention does not apply for the term glasnost , several well-known names such as Gogol or Yeltsyn, and the names of our Russian contributors, which appear in their commonly accepted English transliteration, unless quoted in the notes. Editor's Introduction 11 Notes 1. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (London, 1986). 2. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 272. Of special inter¬ est, in connection with our collection and some of its underlying motives, is chapter 9, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism.” Mikhail Kuraev Perestroika: The Restructuring of the Past or the Invention of the Future? Having heard this question posed to me, I have felt the ~ necessity to become either a prophet of perestroika or its historian. Neither role suits me—despite the fact that my personal fate has become intimately tied to the cardinal changes in terms of power and the ruling party, above all in questions of ideology and cultural policy. Ten (and even five) years ago, 1 had no illusions regarding the pos¬ sibility of publication of my works. If five years ago I had been told that Kapitan Diksbtein (Captain Dikshtein) and Nochnoi dozor (The Night Watch) would be published without a single alteration from the censors, and that with the first journal publication I would he accepted into the Union of Writers, all of this would have struck me as a nasty joke. Nevertheless, my works are being published, books are being prepared for introduction—the publishers even complain that I cannot offer a greater volume of material. In Russian, the word prizvanie (calling) has two meanings. One kind of calling is the pressure of creative forces within—musical, visual, artistic, etc. Driven by these forces, the person takes up a pencil, gets up on a stage, sits behind a piano. Yet “calling” is also the person’s summons from without. Social calling. Being called upon by society. In my own experience, and within the context of my literary activi¬ ties, I have had the opportunity to come to terms with the full energy of these words. While remaining a “thing in itself”—until publication and actual contact with the audience (unless he or she is a genius, in which case he could not care less about the crowd, or a vain peacock, who ignores the audience for other reasons)—the writer is inevitably plagued by doubts about the value of his or her work, full of doubt regarding one’s own calling. The fact that the writer’s situation in Russia is significantly different from that in the West is quite commonplace and needs no commen¬ tary here. It is simply that social calling, the society calling upon the writer, the reality of the concept of the “writer’s obligation” within the Russian culture—all of this creates a new psychological situation. 14 Mikhail Kuraev For some, this situation opens fairly good opportunities to secure, as they say, a solid situation for oneself, by means of flattery, catering to wishes, and serving social and political prejudices. For people of a different bent, who do not exaggerate their capabilities and constantly question them, outside interest in their work is not a call to change, to please, or to accommodate, but on the contrary, to acquire some mea¬ sure of inner confidence in the fact that the work to which one devotes both time and emotional energy is indeed of interest to others. In fact, it is impossible to qualify the society’s calling—one’s “social calling”—in any categorical way: for the way in which every person, even a writer, understands society determines the “calling.” For me, the fact that my works were not only published, but produced a cer¬ tain resonance and reaction, was a decisive factor in my life: I have left the cinema studio, where 1 had worked for twenty-seven consecutive years, and decided to risk concentrating on literary work. Thus, if I am to be seen as a writer, as such I am undoubtedly a child of perestroika. Can a “child” have pretensions to be either a prophet or a historian? If the latter role is hardly within my range, the former is quite frankly hardly appropriate for my age. After having shown (persuasively, I hope) my incapacity to answer the question posed in the title, nothing else remains but to proceed to answer the question to the extent allowed by the circumstances within which we currently live. Of all the slogans of perestroika —which in many ways recapitulate those of the October Revolution in 1917—it seems to me that so far the one that has been realized to the greatest extent has been that of glasnost. In a society that is in a near-revolutionary state, it is impos¬ sible to be satisfied with what has been achieved: one must consolidate the gains and pursue others. But here the movement forward and the gains appear before one’s own eyes. Even during the fall of last year, Novyi mir (The New World) was not allowed to acknowledge Solzhenitsyn’s birthday by publishing his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The speech was set, slated for an issue, taken out, the chief editor traveled for talks with the top party leadership—all without result. Today Novyi mir has completed the publication of chapters of The Gulag Archipelago and is in the process of publishing other works by the exiled author/ ''At the time of the first publication of this text, the shock value of Solzhenitsyn’s work had already become subject to a certain kind of “inflationary devaluation” within the Soviet Union. The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in Novyi mir was but one example of an ongoing competition among Soviet journals.—Ed. Perestroika 15 In connection with this, one cannot help recalling the position of those who observed our affairs from the side. Remember, they gave us conditions: “Well, when it will be possible to trash Gorbachev. . . .” “Well, when it will be possible to trash the kgb. . . .” “Well, when there will be a multi-party system. . . .” “Well, when you will print Solzhenitsyn. . . .” A sharp, intense battle goes on in this country: in a cauldron heated by passions, a new system of all interrelations among peoples, nation¬ alities, and professional, political, and ideological structures is being forged, sought out, tried out. The process is difficult, painful, and when others attempt to put us in the position of schoolchildren who must pass the exam “on glasnost," “on pluralism,” “on democratization,” the examiners’ own position seems naive, devoid of credibility. Today, the striking Soviet miner carries on a dialogue with power, caring little about how his speeches and actions will be judged by the “examiners.” When peasants refuse to accept land without having legal and economic guarantees regarding their work and income, they do not run to their radio sets in order to find out whether somebody likes this or not. It is not by accident that I speak of this. So that my semiserious tone does not become somewhat misleading, I must say that my theme and subject involve matters of utmost importance: the country's internal and external life. It seems to me that it is in fact in the consideration of the unprogrammed internal development in the country, as well as the external development that as a rule is programmed, that we can find an answer, or at least come closer to answering the question posed in the title. This question, to which I have not given any special thought before, is highly interesting: it is interesting in the dialectical mobility of these interrelated, mutually enabling and complementing categories: the in¬ ternal and the external. The oddity, fantasticality, unpredictability of these transitions prompts either seriousness and depth—or flight into skepsis or irony. History’s poetry is paradoxical. Pericles, who gave Athens its de¬ mocracy and tearfully begged the people’s council for the life of his friends, the rights of his own children. . . . The French Revolution, which began with the execution of the king and ended with the proc¬ lamation of the emperor. . . . The bloodless abdication of the throne by the heir to a three-hundred-year-long dynasty in Russia, and the history of the power that replaced him, written in blood. ... An ex¬ ample is not proof, one may collect and list the curiosities of history, 16 Mikhail Kuraev marvel at its paradoxes, having reduced this activity to an intellec¬ tual amusement of sorts. For me, the paradoxicalness of history is a lesson in humility, a reproach to our pride which claims, “grasp the future, create plans, prescriptions, instructions for the invention of this ‘future.’ ” Nevertheless, it is impossible to pass over one stunning historical paradox. I hope it is not necessary to prove that perestroika has become a reality due to the will of the state, as well as the political courage that was to be found in a place the most farsighted prophets could not predict. It was precisely within the party, in its highest echelons bear¬ ing the bulk of the responsibility for all that was taking place in the country during the long years in power, that a program for the politi¬ cal and social transformation of society was formulated and adopted for action. Without political competition, without prompting from the opposition, the party that has amassed vast amounts of power (which was essentially uncontrolled), the party that had the most effective means of defending this power, including repression, undertook to realize, or at least to create the preconditions for the development of processes of democratization, glasnost, the rebirth of the national cul¬ ture. Are these not the contradictions that Hegel called the irony of history? I can recall no instance in history when the ruling party, while pos¬ sessing unchallenged power, would set the transfer of power into other hands as its main political goal. It may be said that this was in the slogans of October—“All power to the Soviets”; yet it is sufficient to recall what happened when attempts were made to question the identi¬ fication of the power of the Soviets with that of the Bolsheviks—cases such as the Kronstadt and Tambov events of 1921/ I am convinced that the processes taking place in the country today are in fact democratic, that they evidence the fact that the society’s development is organic and not artificially prescribed—processes des¬ tined to reveal the society’s inner powers. In this respect, our reality is reflected not only by the “tumultuous process” in the Baltics, in the re¬ publics of the Caucasus and Middle Asia, but also by the conservatism ''This is a reference to the anti-Bolshevik revolt at the major naval base of Kronstadt near Petrograd in March 192.1 and the peasant uprisings in the Tambov province during 1920-zi. Both events contributed to Lenin’s introduction of the New Economic Policy (nep) in 1921. The Kronstadt events are depicted in Mikhail Kuraev’s story Captain Dikshtein , which was recently published in translation by Ardis Publishers (Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature under Gorbachev , ed. Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey [Ann Arbor, 1990]).—Ed. Perestroika 17 of the significant portion of the Congress of People’s Deputies, a prin¬ cipally new institution of government. The society is tired of building decorations: this has taken too much energy, time, materials; as if for a long time it was not let in on the fact of its reality, the internal life has finally burst into the open. Today the nation is subject to no “ex¬ amination”: it is beginning to get acquainted with itself, seeing itself in a mirror and not before an official holiday banner—seeing and not recognizing itself. It has no examination, but is rather engaged in a stubborn and ruthless process of genuine political self-education. And the strikes, which inflict great economic losses—this is the price that the people are willing to pay for such lessons. Could such a set of developments be predicted in 1984—such an explosion, the discovery of an internal life, hidden under seven seals? I think probably not. How can one learn to encounter the unforeseen? How can one be ready for the unforeseen, fantastic zigzags of history? It is not possible to become used to this even within the confines of private life. Returning to the literary sphere, I shall take an example from my private practice. In the journal Druzbba narodov {The Friendship of Nations ), the well-known critic Natalia Ivanova wrote of the writers of the “new wave,” in which I am included: The consciousness of this generation of writers shuns publicity. They write practically no publicist articles advancing the cause of the renewal of society, which is something that their older colleagues constantly do, there are no opuses exposing the country’s past, they do not take part in the heated discussion of the problems of de-Stalinization, they do not subject to analysis the economic and cultural state of the society. If one may put it this way, they have become the most “noncommitted” iTbespartiinye'"f of the contemporary literary and social process. Having read this judgment, I readily agreed with the critic, not sus¬ pecting that within a month I would be disproving the line of thinking that seemed fair to me at the time. I received a questionnaire from the journal Voprosy literatury ( Is¬ sues in Literature ), all of the questions being of a sociopolitical nature. And I answered. During the period my wife and I were visiting Swe¬ den, and because of the release of my book there, we had to deal with the press, radio, television, speak at the University of Uppsala, etc. So what about “noncommittedness”? ’■'The term “ bespartiinye ” literally means “the partyless”—with “noncommitted” being a more generic version.—Trans. 18 Mikhail Kuraev I had barely finished telling the audience in Uppsala about the free¬ dom achieved by the press in our country, when I returned and found out that at a meeting of the highest party level the editors of papers and journals which, in the leadership’s view, were overly disposed toward critical, negative materials, had been severely reprimanded. Words were followed by actions. Something else is significant. If in the conditions of the previous system, no argument, struggle, or questioning was possible, today a great deal depends upon ourselves. Zalygin, the chief editor of Novyi mir, could have let it go, having been forbidden to publish Solzhenit¬ syn in 1988: he did not let go and he won. Knizhnoe obozrenie ( The Review of Books), the paper that in recent years has become a notable forum for public opinion, turned out not to be ready for the struggle: here the conservatives won, while Novyi mir and others appear ready to struggle for their positions, and there are reasons to consider their chances for victory to be quite high. The point is that glasnost is the practical achievement of perestroika, but all the other realities are not that clearly defined. So one may won¬ der whether glasnost is capable of serving a renewal of the past way of life that is above all based upon enclosure, non -glasnost. On the whole, I do not believe this will be the case—I can think of no historical analogies. The restoration in France was not a rebirth of the monarchy of the feudal times, and indeed the Renaissance was not a rebirth of the ancient way of life, but rather a return to reconceptualized moral values of the past. It is understandable why the question of cosmetic improvements arises. It is not unfounded. Today we hear economists’ proposals to return for a time—tactically, so to speak—to the old system of organi¬ zation of the economy. Attributed to such acknowledged proponents of perestroika as the academician Abalkin,” such proposals appear to be prompted by the sense of the uncontrollability of the ongoing processes, the inefficiency of production, the worsening inflationary processes. It is already not a question of conquering new and greater frontiers, but rather of stabilizing the situation. While I am not an economist myself, I am convinced that here the economist is thinking too narrowly, taking no account of what is called the psychosocial con¬ dition of the society. The revolutionary state of mind does not heed the arguments of economists or the reasoned recommendations of sociolo- * Leonid Abalkin, Director of the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was one of Gorbachev’s leading economic advisers.—Ed. Perestroika 19 gists and historians: instead the logic of political struggle simply takes effect—the struggle for rights. Regardless of the logical and economic arguments (some of which are quite persuasive) offered to the people of the Baltic republics in favor of the preservation of their political and state dependence upon the Soviet Union, one may be quite certain that they will not be heard. It is amazing that the situation of 1917—19 is repeated: extremely persuasive arguments were offered that the Bol¬ sheviks must not take power, that the people would not follow them, that, having taken power, the Bolsheviks would not be able to retain it. All such arguments were not to be heard and could not be heard. Brought to the point of despair, the masses jumped behind the banners of the party, which promised a complete and immediate break with the accursed past life, as well as the immediate—within one generation’s lifetime—construction of an amazing new life. Why is this historical excursus necessary? Only to attempt to show concretely the impossibility of returning to the old ways in intra¬ national relations, economics, and politics—to show the revolutionary character of our contemporary life, as well as attempt to make a case for some healthy skepticism in regard to the fortune-tellers, prophets, and seers of whom there are always aplenty during the pivotal epochs. Within the context of the discussion of the “internal” and the “exter¬ nal,” another moment cannot be omitted. In the “Cologne Address” of the Russian emigres (March 1988), it is categorically declared: “There is no perestroika [reconstruction]—only building anew.” A paradoxi¬ cal demand. While the emigres who have signed this “address” have a critical, even negative attitude toward the socialist revolution, they adapt what is in my view one of its most destructive slogans. For those who are obsessed with “building anew” have wasted countless human energy, effort, material, and moral resources on trifles that ac¬ quired state proportions. The most telling in this respect is not even the “novyi byt" (“the new everyday life”), which produced a great number of nonsensical, uncomfortable-for-life commune buildings that have been reconstructed more than once since their appearance during the 1930s. The most telling—and it would seem to me, instructive of these trifles—was the invention and implementation of the “new life” for the peasant: indeed, here “anew” was really “anew”! Is it still not clear that history gives no blank pages to either revolutionaries, progressives, or reformers and managers of people’s lives? But one would think that there are still plenty of people who want to “invent the future,” to implement it through any means. Under Katherine II, potato harvesting was being introduced in Russia, and be- 20 Mikhail Kuraev cause it was introduced forcibly—by order, with a whip—there were revolts, resistance from the people. In the end, potatoes won out, but in the natural way, by way of the gradual acquaintance of an increasing number of people with the advantages of the foreign crop. But that was only potatoes! Later it was decided to implement a whole socialism! And quickly! Quickly! Force and the whip turned out to be insufficient means of imple¬ menting progress and the establishment of everyone’s happiness. The vast period of my country’s history, marked by terror, has passed. In the current circumstances, there has emerged a new possibility—the historic possibility to attempt to answer a question which is perhaps the most important for any society: Who are we? Who have we become during the past seventy years? In this respect, the tasks of historians, sociologists, jurists, and economists are clear enough: to incorporate the vast amount of the new, previously suppressed material into their research apparatus—to find new categories and definitions, to give their disciplines and spheres of knowledge new vitality. Within the sphere of moral culture, the most important questions, already posed by Nikolai Berdiaev,* seem to me to be exceedingly relevant today, demanding answers: No philosophy of history, whether Slavophile or Westernizing, has yet been able to discover why the most stateless people has created such a vast and powerful statism, why the most anarchical people is so sub¬ servient to bureaucracy, why a people free in spirit seemingly does not want free life. In answering these questions, posed more than half a century ago, we will not begin to live, think, or work “anew”: in all likelihood, we will simply return to the path that may be understood as the nation’s path of organic development, of free discovery of its spiritual powers, of national self-consciousness. ^Nikolai Berdiaev (1874—1948) was one of the most significant Russian religious philosophers of the twentieth century. He settled in France after having been exiled in 1922. His major works include The Meaning of History (1936), The Destiny of Man (1937), The Origin of Russian Communism (1937), and The Russian Idea (1937).—Ed. Boris Kagarlitsky A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right ‘We must defeat the forces of the right!” an orator deci- - sively proclaims at a meeting of the People’s Front in the Luzhniki/ The press has begun a mysterious lean to the left, a country writer complains on the pages of a newspaper. “We are pressured both from the right and from the left, but we will firmly follow our course,” a state leader solemnly assures his audience. Within the context of a sharpening political struggle, the concepts of “right” and “left” have become an integral part of our daily life. They are used everywhere, whether appropriately or not. Sometimes samizdat journals make efforts to define these terms: thus, for ex¬ ample, in Nevskie zapiski Dmitrii Shubin categorically declares that the Western left is “utterly not the same as ours” and analogies are simply out of place here. Adam Michnik, who in the recent past was a “dissident” in Poland and is now a deputy in the Sejm,* persistently demands that the terms left and right be completely taken out of use, for they contradict the reality of Eastern Europe. Yet this is not so easy. Language lives according to its own laws. What is it, then, that com¬ pels us again and again to use terms that seem to have come to us from a “foreign” political civilization and a different epoch? Actually, difficulties with political concepts have arisen not only for us and not only in our times. In a book by British journalist Anthony Sampson, The New Anatomy of Britain , I came across the following passage: “Left” is never easy to define in British terms, for it is essentially a Con¬ tinental concept dating back to the French Assembly in 1789, when, in the debate on the Royal veto, the different groupings arranged them¬ selves in different parts of the Chamber: the idea of “left” only became current in Britain early in this century, and could never altogether be equated with the Labour party. There have been many attempts to try “The Luzhniki is a stadium in Moscow.—Ed. tThis term refers to the Soviet unofficial press.—Trans. tThe Polish parliament.—Ed. 22 Boris Kagarlitsky to pin down the difference between left and right; these are some of the characteristics that have, from time to time, been implied: Left Right Public ownership Free enterprise Change Tradition Egalitarianism Elitism Compassion Toughness Tolerance Discipline Doves Hawks Democracy Aristocracy Intervention Laissez-faire 1 From my point of view, three components are missing in such a classification. First, though the interpretation of the socialist idea may have varied a great deal, throughout the twentieth century the left has traditionally proclaimed socialism as its ideology. Second, the char¬ acteristic notable feature of the left movement in the West has always been the struggle for the democratic participation of the workers in the management of the economy. In other words, at stake is a challenge to the rights of the privateer, regardless of whether it is the private firm or the state. In both cases democratization means the inevitable limitation of the rights of the propertied. Naturally, it is not only the left that has relied on the slogans of socialism. During the 1930s and 1940s, in certain Western circles it was fashionable to say that “we are all socialists now.” Both the liberals and the fascists flirted with socialist terminology, as did the nationalist leaders of Latin America, whose bourgeois outlook could hardly be in doubt. As with any popular word, this term has been abused. Yet the ideology of the left always presupposed a conception of socialism that invariably included the primacy of society over the state, firm social guarantees for the workers —guarantees and not handouts, granted by the good faith of the generous rulers—and workplace democracy. From this point of view, Stalinism always fit rather poorly into the traditions of the left movement. At one time, the Stalinist ideologues completely avoided the use of the term left, though in the periods of the United Front and the Union of the Left, when it was neces¬ sary to ally with socialists, they proclaimed themselves to be part of the “left camp.” Perhaps in their own way these ideological contra¬ dictions reflected the internal contradiction of Stalinism itself, which was struggling against “limited bourgeois democracy” in the name of A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 23 the interests of the workers, while simultaneously denying democratic rights to the workers themselves. Third, the left are those who are on the side of the workers and against the ruling classes and oligarchies. This crucial stance predeter¬ mines all the others. If it is not clear “who is left and who is right,” that is because the movement of the masses themselves is not yet fully developed, because the final arrangement of class forces in society has not yet crystallized. But let us return to Sampson. The 1960s, he writes, brought con¬ fusion “to what is really meant by left.” 2 Both of the major parties in Great Britain held similar views on the fundamental questions of national life. Compromise predominated in society. Alas, the words written by the British journalist about the Britain of the 1960s and 1970s are already no longer able to describe the 1980s. With Prime Minister Thatcher’s accession to power, no one could have any further doubts about the difference between the left and the right in Britain. A polarization of forces took place and the struggling camps clearly defined their positions. The radically right-wing course of the reforms carried out by the conservative government caused a corresponding leftward shift in the opposition. The battles between the miners and the police during the strike in 1984 showed clearly that vital interests and not abstract ideals were at stake. If even in Britain, with its ancient political culture, the question of the left and the right caused confusion in certain periods, it is easy to imagine what kind of mix of conceptions may predominate in our Russian minds after the totalitarian experiment conducted on us. By definition, a totalitarian regime can be neither right nor left. It always occupies the position of common interest and the greatest benefit; it stops leanings to the left and to the right, without acknowledging itself, however, as the center. A totalitarian regime cannot occupy some por¬ tion of the political spectrum because it replaces the entire spectrum. Its logic is one of global balance. If at any point there developed a right- ward tendency, then for the sake of symmetry a leftward one would also be discovered and destroyed. The logic of totalitarianism is en¬ capsulated by the camp wisdom: “a step to the left ora step TO THE RIGHT IS CONSIDERED ESCAPE. THE GUARDS SHOOT without warning !” Obviously, a totalitarian regime may use left or right terminology, depending on which “works” better in a given situation. As a rule, though, the political language of totalitarianism is mixed. Stalin staged himself as both the heir of the revolution and the embodiment of the idea of Russian statehood. He invoked proletar- 24 Boris Kagarlitsky ian principles and insisted on national priorities, proudly proclaiming revenge for the Japanese defeat of the Russian Empire. In any case, however, the concepts of right and left acquire meaning only when actual political struggle emerges—when the most elemen¬ tary conditions for political pluralism develop. Under the conditions of totalitarianism there could be no room for opposition, and there¬ fore there was no place for politics as a competition among various political groupings. Only in the 1960s did there begin to emerge a civil society in our country, which resulted in the emergence of groups and currents which are already not controlled by the authorities. And not accidentally it was then that we began to speak of the left and the right. But the 1980s “thawed” political life. Seemingly out of nowhere there appeared (emerged from the underground?) the most varied group¬ ings, from anarcho-syndicalists to monarchists. And naturally confu¬ sion began. It is characteristic that in different cultures the terms left and right tend to carry varied emotional charges. In France, the right is not ashamed to call itself right. In Russia, on the contrary, it is precisely the term left that appears especially attractive. The left opposes authority, creates opposition, and, in a country that has not known political free¬ doms, this may be considered a great benefit in itself. It does not follow from this, however, that any opposition is to be regarded as left. A large portion of the popular critics and public figures comprising the core of the Moscow (and then the interregional) deputy group by no means fits the concept of left. Their position is classically liberal, and on the spectrum of today’s political life they clearly represent the center. The fact that the liberals consider themselves a part of the left is in itself not new for Russia: the situation was exactly the same with the Constitutional-Democratic party in the period of the 1905 Revolution. Though many of the current slogans sound quite radical, in looking more carefully at the programs and the political practice of the Russian liberals it is easy to find that little has changed during eighty-odd years. The demand to transfer everything possible into private hands—or to replace planning by market relations everywhere—in no way under¬ mines the positions of the ruling circle: at stake is only the redistribu¬ tion of power and privilege within it. For the masses of the population, who are granted the role of waged workers, such changes will improve little. One may argue over whether the proposed market reforms will increase the effectiveness of the economy as a whole—the experience of Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland shows that under conditions of structural crisis such a policy does not bring any benefit. Nevertheless, it is clear that the liberal strategy will inevitably lead to the rapid de- A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 25 terioration of the already far from remarkable living conditions of the poorest portion of the population, as well as the intensification of the exploitation of the workers and the appearance of unemployment— about which the proponents of reform speak quite candidly even now. The enrichment of a small portion of the “dynamic people” is already visible. The prospect is clear: power is exchanged for money, money for power. Socially “illegitimate” bureaucratic privileges are replaced by “legitimate” ones—privileges that are earned and bought. In an obvious way, the freedom of private initiative becomes a free¬ dom only for those who have money. And who has money in our actual society of today? Those very privileged layers that are so loudly de¬ nounced by our fashionable critics: the apparatchiks * the mafia, their relatives, and those who are close to their circles. At stake is really not the restoration of capitalism, which so frightens the zealots of totali¬ tarian virtuousness: even with the greatest possible desire to do this, these social layers are not able to “build a developed capitalism” in our society. Civilized capitalism is possible only with the existence of a civilized bourgeoisie, which it took the West more than three hundred years to evolve. One may talk as long as desired about the prosper¬ ous life in Sweden, one may repeat an endless number of times the Lenin quote about socialism being a social order of “civilized coopera¬ tors,” yet this will not make our “cooperators” (in actuality, our small and middle private entrepreneurs) civilized en masse—and the Soviet economy will not come to resemble the Scandinavian one. Even if they are organized by democratic principles and are conscious of their re¬ sponsibility to society, a limited number of advanced cooperatives, aspiring to the incorporation of new technologies, cannot qualitatively change the situation. They only reveal once again the barbarity and the anti-democratism of the rest. In the realistic conditions of our country, the “inoculation” of capi¬ talist methods means only the restructuring of relations within the privileged minority, with the preservation of the main features of the system in place. This course is not very compatible with democracy. As the first experience of the cooperatives shows, not only is the over¬ whelming majority of the population not overly thrilled about them, but they openly demand their closing. It is not difficult to guess what will become of the liberal economic reforms if their fate is made de¬ pendent upon the will of the majority. It is this circumstance that explains the odd inconsistency and "This term refers to those who are associated with the Communist party appara¬ tus.—Trans. 26 Boris Kagarlitsky timidity of the liberals on political questions. They insisted on greater freedoms, yet did not dare to take an oppositional stand. They criti¬ cized the government on the particulars, yet did not wish to offer alter¬ natives. In theory, they supported free trade unions, but in practice they called for the abandonment of strikes and the transfer of the decision¬ making process in all questions to the “parliamentary” organs of the Supreme Soviet—which they themselves recently called “Stalinist- Brezhnevist.” In practice, the existing semidemocratic organs and pro¬ cedures are the most consistent with the liberal project. Efforts are made to perfect them, to rationalize them, but not to replace them by newer and more democratic ones. Recently there have appeared more and more authors who openly speak of the necessity to install a strong authoritarian regime to ensure the success of the reforms. The popu¬ larity of articles by Andranik Migranian and Igor’ Kliamkin, who have become the chief ideologues of “enlightened authoritarianism” among the liberal public, is far from accidental. When Migranian and Kliam¬ kin say in the pages of Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Gazette) that the reforms proposed by them will not be accepted by the people and cannot be realized without a “strong hand,” they are perfectly right. Along with this, however, they do not dare to admit the anti-popular and anti-democratic character of their position and fully reproduce the traditional Stalinist schema: for the sake of the people and of democ¬ racy, the people’s rights must be curtailed. Even if people do not want our bright future, we will drive them into it. In the new conditions, this market Stalinism appears as the natural continuation and development of “classical” Stalinism. In essence, history is repeated: the liberals of the end of this century act in relation to the system that has emerged in exactly the same way as did the liberals of the past in relation to czarism. At first glance, this similarity seems even more striking because the conservatives of those times and those of today differ to a sufficient degree. While in both cases the conservative forces relied on the bureaucracy, with all its characteristic qualities, in the old Russia there nevertheless existed a landed nobility and a substantial bourgeoisie. Today’s conservatives are clearly foreign to the bourgeois worldview. They invoke proletarian values, though actual mass protests are perceived by them as “revolt” and “intolerable deterioration of discipline.” Yet it must be remembered that the “classical” Russian liberals were en masse not bourgeois. Above all they included privileged, elitist in¬ telligentsia, parts of the management apparatus of industry and the enlightened portion of the officialdom: in other words, the very layers A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 27 comprising the base of support of current liberalism. As is the case today, they perceived then that within the context of Western society the position of their counterparts was significantly better and more solid, and hence, not being capitalists themselves and not about to undertake the practical task of “building of capitalism,” they dreamed of the transition of the country to a Western path of development. However, in the absence of a developed bourgeois class, this transi¬ tion could be facilitated only by coercive power that would spread new social relations from above, by methods that would be far from democratic. The difference between the liberalism of those times and the current one is that at the beginning of the century there was at least some limited group of civilized bourgeois, while today there are only “cooperators” and mafiosi—who are not even civilized. The necessary components of the liberal project—then and now— include the presence of firm authority capable of carrying out transfor¬ mations. On this point the Russian liberal has always found common ground with the conservative. The problem is that, due to a changed social base, the current conservative is not too receptive to the idea of a Western course. Within the sphere of ideological production, those who have become disillusioned with perestroika have already begun to organize United Fronts, attempting to find support from workers— and in fact proclaiming themselves to be the opposition and seek¬ ing to occupy that political space where the left would logically be located. Alas, the United Fronts, with their thundering mix of revo¬ lutionary rhetoric, anti-democratism, and hatred of any changes, are unable to offer the masses an attractive prospect of social develop¬ ment, and hence they cannot become a realistic alternative. Neither can they become a real threat, for they represent the conservatism of yesterday. Intelligent and competent conservatives have long opted for market Stalinism. Cumbersome and poorly oriented in the changing conditions, the United Fronts can in no way compete with the more “in¬ formal” groups, who have acquired considerable political experience during the 1987—89 period. In general, if one looks at the nonofficial organizations that have emerged around the country in recent times, the richest political spec¬ trum may be discovered. It is exactly here that we find the greater part of the left wing of our public life. Yet one should not be taken in by illusions. The experience of informal political organizations shows that many of the groups that are unquestionably radical are by no means left. The concepts of radicalism and conservatism hardly coincide with 28 Boris Kagarlitsky those of left and right. In the former case we are confronted by two ways of perceiving reality; in the latter, with two sets of values. Inci¬ dentally, the case is similar in the West. The British Labour party, despite an indisputable adherence to the values of the left camp, has shown astonishing conservatism, a complete inability to change any¬ thing in society—or in its own practice. This entrenchment predeter¬ mined the Labour party’s catastrophic defeat in 1979, from which the British socialists still cannot recover: at the very time that the left was becoming more and more conservative and pragmatic, the right was becoming increasingly radical and ideological. The Thatcher govern¬ ment has indisputably proved to be one of the most radical in postwar Britain. And the farthest right. Returning to our own context, we may easily discover, for example, that in many ways the Democratic Union (D s) is more radical than the Moscow or the Iaroslav People’s Front (nf). Yet in its program and ideology the ds is precisely a party of the right, inspired by the values of private enterprise and free competition (for a “DS-er,” the belief in an ideal society, purportedly already built in the West, is as unshakable as was the Western Stalinist-communist’s belief in the Red Russia in the 1930s). On the other hand, the People’s Fronts of Russia, having raised the banner of self-government, may undoubtedly be attributed to the left camp, though this movement too is far from homogeneous. Inside every camp and every grouping there emerge its own moder¬ ates and its own radicals. While psychologically they may have a great deal in common, their ideological positions ultimately prove incom¬ patible. It is characteristic that the most radical members of the Mos¬ cow People’s Front (mnf) —like the activists of the ds— are inclined toward confrontation with the authorities, going out to demonstrate on any occasion. Ideologically, however, they stand the farthest from the leaders of the DS: as a rule, they are socialist, often Marxist. It is sufficient to compare the newspaper of the radical wing of the mnf, Nashe delo (Our Cause), with an edition of the ds Svobodnoe slovo (The Free Word), in order to see the incompatibility of these two types of radicalism. In the mid-1980s, when above all it was being decided whether any transformations would be carried out at all in our country, and whether these changes would be sufficiently thoroughgoing to actually “restructure” society, it was precisely the opposition of the conser¬ vatives and the progressives that was foremost. The proponents of change comprised a united liberal-radical-left bloc of sorts, giving little thought to the contradictions among themselves. But from the moment A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 29 when the changes became a reality, when the tumultuous process of de¬ molishing old structures began, the contradictions among the various interests and values in the initially progressive camp became apparent and rapidly sharpened. The left supports school reform that would give students diverse, free access to quality education, while retaining the principle of full equality. Such reform also includes various forms of teacher self¬ management and the radical reorganization of the entire system of state education. But what is really at stake for the liberals are coopera¬ tive (and ultimately private) schools for gifted and wealthy children, cooperative kindergartens, and the development of elite educational institutions. The situation with health care is analogous. The principle is simple: quality services for those who are able to pay. Appeals to relatively accessible prices change little. First, prices can be raised, and second, if education for money is supplemented by medicine for money, if prices are fixed for living space according to the conditions of “the free mar¬ ket,” if subsidized industry is made “commercially rentable,” if what¬ ever free services become paid services—in short, the socioeconomic reforms proposed by the ideologues of liberalism around the world— it will turn out that not only quality education, but also the elementary maintenance of health will become the luxury of the chosen. In our country, Sviatoslav Fedorov—a talented surgeon who has turned his practice into a brilliantly organized and profitable busi¬ ness—has become the hero of the liberal popular press. For some time Feodorov’s firm has been proffered to society as the model of the new health care system. And it does not occur to anyone that the very fact that the quality of medical care is made contingent on payment evi¬ dences an utter abandonment of any humane principles. Health should be neither a privilege nor a commodity to be bought or chosen. From the point of view of the left, it is the inalienable right of the individual, and the quality of medical care should not be contingent on the amount of money in one’s pocketbook. While the market may allow the possi¬ bility of choice among goods, the turning of health into a commodity implies utter contempt for the individual’s human worth. The right to choose a doctor should not be limited by our finan¬ cial capacities. The crisis of the old system of social guarantees—one that was ineffective and bureaucratized, leaving a vast sphere to the mercy of management and corruption (“What may be given may be withheld”)—compels us to struggle for radical reform in this area. But reform may take various directions. Of course it is simpler to follow 30 Boris Kagarlitsky the route proposed by the liberals: to create special structures for the chosen; to provide special, effective, and expensive medicine or edu¬ cation for the wealthy; and to leave everything more or less the way it is for the majority (in practice, however, with such an approach con¬ ditions would become even worse, for all the quality specialists would be “drained” into the privileged institutions). This is much simpler than creating a system that would guarantee equal opportunities for all. This path is safer and more convenient for the traditional appara¬ tus. No one challenges its power. In reality, the liberal circles by no means aspire to break the system of the ruling apparatus, but to cre¬ ate “special zones” for themselves outside this system—in exactly the same way as “special zones” in the economy will be formed for foreign capital. In any given case the interests of “the select minority” and the bureaucratic circles coincide. In exactly the same way as mixed enter¬ prises, special economic zones, and so on, these “radical” measures are in actuality crutches for the old system—structures created in order to maintain its viability under the new conditions, and as a substitute for the deeper and more comprehensive democratic transformations. Only revolutionary reforms advocated by the left can become a genuine alternative to the liberal reforms. On the whole, the program of the left bloc may be defined in the following way: (1) Market relations are necessary, but they cannot become the chief regulator of social and economic life; the market can play the role of a regulating mechanism, facilitating the responsiveness of the economy, but its action cannot extend to the extra-economic sphere; (2) It is necessary to create an integrated system of self-government and democratic planning, facilitating mass access to the process of making the decisions touching their lives, a democratic mechanism of reconciliation of interests—-within the context of such democratic planning, a place for a certain kind of market development will inevi¬ tably be found; (3) It is necessary to create an integrated mechanism for ensuring social guarantees—one that would replace bureaucratic handouts with inalienable and legally guaranteed citizens’ rights: education, health care, and living space must be accessible to all; (4) Political democracy is the highest value: in those cases when interests of some social group or party come in conflict with the inter¬ ests of democratic development, preference must be given to democ¬ racy; if some economic projects do not enjoy the support of the ma¬ jority, they should not be carried out; the combination of economic and political democracy will create conditions whereby all the participants A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right 31 of the political struggle and all the interest groups will be compelled to take into account the interests of the other segments and to seek to develop a strategy that would be acceptable to the majority; and (5) Wherever the principle of “national rights” diverges from that of “individual rights,” preference must be given to the rights of the individual; the right of the nation to self-determination and national rebirth should not be realized at the expense of the rights of the mi¬ norities or the violation of democratic norms. The left opposes the conversion of state enterprises into private or stock-based ones (which essentially amounts to the same thing). The current form of state property is clearly incapable of solving the problems facing society and has nothing in common with socialism: czarist Russia had state-owned factories of the same kind, and even in ancient China and Egypt the state owned the greater part of the economy and centrally planned it. Yet democratic transformations are impossible without the conversion of this state property into various forms of socialized property. Associations of self-managing enterprises may be created in place of old ministries, and a significant part of the economy may be municipalized. Finally, conditions must be created for the emergence of democratic cooperatives—of free associations of workers, working through joint means of production and oriented toward the satisfaction of social needs. The thoroughgoing reform of the system of governance from below will inescapably lead to the collapse of the old bureaucratic structures. Such reform cannot work without free elections, independent trade unions, democratically elected organs of self-management of produc¬ tion, and Soviets (local councils) of all levels. These democratic struc¬ tures are vitally necessary in order to facilitate a new decision-making system. Precisely because of this, the “left model” advances to the fore¬ front of its agenda the full realization of all political freedoms for the people—which is clearly not a necessary precondition for the carrying out of liberal reform. It is easy to see that the program of partial liberal reforms within the context of the system is not only less threatening for the old bureau¬ cracy (moreover, the more radical the proposed market program, the more obvious the orientation toward the “advanced experience” of capitalism, the more there will be a necessity for a strong hand—and therefore for the old apparatus), but it is also much more carefully developed. This is not surprising. Of course Marx and Engels exag¬ gerated when they said that the ruling ideas of every society are the ideas of the ruling class. Yet it is also indisputable that the privileged 32 Boris Kagarlitsky layers—and this includes our country as well—always possess greater capabilities for the development of their political strategy. During the first three years of the Gorbachev reforms, the liberal circles completely controlled mass media. They also obviously predominated in the upper levels of official science. The dominance of liberalism was a necessary stage in the transition from the all-compulsory official dogma to genuine ideological plural¬ ism. In this sense liberalism has played a very positive role, having demolished the existing stereotypes. Initially, leftist ideas were formed precisely within the context of a unified liberal-progressive bloc. Yet as the situation changed, the liberal ideological monopoly was be¬ coming increasingly dangerous. On the other hand, after having split with the liberals, it was as if the left was driven away from the organs of mass media at the very time when the credibility of the newspapers and television sharply increased. Under the conditions of glasnost, the situation of alternative thinkers, for whom the press and television re¬ mained inaccessible, was turning out to be in its own way more painful and dramatic than in the past times. Yet the liberal monopoly in the press has led to an impetuous de¬ valuation of words. In Russia, the belief in the mighty power of the word has persisted throughout centuries. The persecutions that became the writer’s fate, the violence done to Pasternak, Grossman, and Sol¬ zhenitsyn, people’s heroic struggle for their works, Bulgakov’s famous “manuscripts do not burn”—all of this attests to the fact that both the persecutors and the persecuted believed in the power of the word. From now on this faith has collapsed. In three years glasnost has erased the preconceptions of ages. Pasternak, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn are being printed and this does not change anything. Very much in the spirit of Western liberalism, in place of the faith in the might of the word comes repressive tolerance? Different things may be said, but what changes life is not the word but organization and action. Quite naturally, the liberal circles have had a stake in the official press, in making appearances at the tribunes of the various congresses and conferences, in writing speech notes for the authorities; at the same time the left, temporarily forced into a marginal position, has been trying to create an alternative press of its own (as is known, for Lenin the newspaper is also a “collective organizer”) and to work in mass movements. The development of People’s Fronts in various cities in Russia became the first manifestation of this tendency toward demo¬ cratic self-organization. The political face of the People’s Fronts is not fully defined, the fissure with liberalism is in many cases still ahead, A Step to the Lett, a Step to the Right 33 political experience is missing, and there is a shortage of competent cadres. Yet all leftist movements confront such problems in the first stages of their development. Many representatives of the liberal camp right away perceived a threat in the People’s Fronts emerging in Russia. Moscoiv News pub¬ lished a series of articles attacking the mnf and refused to allow its members the opportunity to reply. The emergence of the Boris Yeltsyn movement caused even greater anxiety in the liberal circles. There was neither unified organization nor a clear program in Yeltsyn’s speeches. In many cases Yeltsyn’s demands resonated with the statements of the liberals. Nevertheless, “Yeltsynism” has caused anxiety for the pro¬ ponents of the liberal project: because of Yeltsyn’s name, the masses came out into the streets. Even before there emerged a mass movement in Moscow and other cities under the banner of support for Yeltsyn, the term “populism” appeared on the pages of newspapers. In the traditional political vo¬ cabulary, populism is understood in terms of socially heterogeneous mass movements, with no clear program or established organizational structure, and unified only by the most general slogans or by the per¬ sonality of the leader. Despite the predominance of the workers within it, Poland’s Solidarity was a typical populist movement. The People’s Fronts are also populist organizations—as is also unquestionably the case with the Yeltsyn movement. The liberals rightly see in populism the chief threat to their project, but when they talk about populism they notice only one aspect of it— its mass character. Actually, not every mass movement is populist— far from it. Yet in a country that lacks political experience, where old social structures are to a significant extent destroyed and new ones are not entirely formed (a significant percentage of our workers and in¬ telligentsia is comprised of the “proletarians of the first generation”— and the peasantry is in turn declassed), initially a mass movement can¬ not arise in a form other than that of populism. Then, in the process of the development of this movement, structures of a different type begin to emerge—organizations more or less capable of carrying out a consistent strategic line, working out their own ideology and pro¬ gram. In Moscow, for example, such an organization is the committee of New Socialists that has emerged within the People’s Front, and has quickly managed to become the center of gravity for the supporters of the socialist project, including those outside the mnf. Populism is a transitional stage in the formation of an organized leftist movement—in exactly the way that the liberal-progressive bloc 34 Boris Kagarlitsky was inevitable in the transition from the Brezhnev ideological stagna¬ tion to pluralism. The instability of such groupings is clear. The appeals to the existence of a “common enemy” in the face of the bureaucracy retain supporters from various currents only until it becomes obvious that a significant portion of the progressive bloc is seeking not so much the opportunity to dethrone the bureaucracy but to accommodate it. As conservative sentiments increase among the liberals and some of the populist leaders, the principal mass of political activists is faced with a choice: a turn to the left or one to the right. In the final analysis the program of market Stalinism, in one or another version, resembles the ideas of the right-liberal and neoconser¬ vative politicians of the West and the third world. In turn, the ideol¬ ogy of the socialist left in the East corresponds to the main aspects of the conceptions of the Western left. To the extent that conditions are different, the degree of radicalism may also be different. Yet the commonality of values is apparent. It is also not accidental that the Western right applauds the “courageous liberal reforms” in the East, while the left seeks to establish contact with the emerging socialist and self-government movements. Like ours, Western society is going through a period of changes. And the choice here is analogous: either partial reforms for the chosen, carried out by a strong hand at the ex¬ pense of the masses, or greater democracy for all. But in this country, with the complete absence of real democratic traditions or institutions, the stakes and risks are much greater. Market Stalinism, carried out with all the necessary consistency, may turn out to be many times more cruel than British Thatcherism. The choice is obvious. Either “ pere¬ stroika for the elite” will develop into a dictatorship for the masses or revolutionary reforms will put us on a path toward democracy. Our place in the political life of the country will depend on which path we will choose: from the left or from the right. Notes 1. Anthony Sampson, The New Anatomy of Britain (New York, 1972), 36. 2. Ibid., 34. 3. This term is a reference to Herbert Marcuse’s writings, most notably the essay by the same name (“Repressive Tolerance”), in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, with Robert Paul Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr. (Boston, 1965). Sidney Monas Perestroika in Reverse Perspective: The Reforms of the 1860s Reference to the year 1921 has become a touchstone in the ~ political language of perestroika. Gorbachev and his asso¬ ciates use it often as an analogue to their own situation. Since it serves less as an explanation than as a legitimation for radical departures from established party orthodoxy, it inevitably involves a reinterpretation of Lenin’s, the founder’s, long-term intentions. In 1921, after war, revolution, and another three years of devastat¬ ing civil war, the economy was a shambles, famine stalked the land, industry was severely depleted, and the future of the Bolshevik regime looked bleak. In these circumstances, Lenin proclaimed his New Eco¬ nomic Policy (nep), a program intended to encourage individual enter¬ prise in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry, while retaining what Lenin called the commanding heights of the economy and the long-term goal of socialization. What Lenin’s long-term political and economic intentions were with regard to democratization and indi¬ vidual incentive remain somewhat problematic, but they are clearly being reinterpreted in the light of the present situation. The proponents of perestroika invoke as well the recently rehabilitated Bukharin line of advocacy of Lenin’s ideas. 1 Understandably, and I believe to some extent productively, references to 1921 have become a commonplace in the Soviet press. In the West, another historical parallel has suggested itself, espe¬ cially in the context of those who advocate support for the Soviet efforts at perestroika, and that is Weimar Germany. 2 The points of com¬ parison here are of political configurations rather than economic and social policies—the collapse of a political “center” and the consequent polarization between extreme left and extreme right of political life. I believe these analogies have a certain usefulness if one holds clearly in mind the points that are being compared and the purpose of the comparison, which is generally to illustrate and dramatize an inter¬ pretation already conceived. There exists in Russian history, however, a more striking and a deeper analogy, one that is not mentioned by Gorbachev. Given the projected scope, inherent dilemmas, and thorny 36 Sidney Monas paradoxes of perestroika, a more instructive comparison is to the Great Reforms of the latter half of the nineteenth century under Alexander II, beginning with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and ending with the abortive plans for a constitution in 1881, or perhaps one might even say ending only with the end of the old regime itself in 1917. To make such a comparison in the USSR carries certain inhibitions, since the regime does not like to base its legitimacy on czarist precedents, though it is hard to believe that the comparison is not fairly obvious to those involved in perestroika. That it has occurred to Soviet historians is witnessed by the prominence of the subject in the scholarly journals, second only to the topic of the nep and the 1920s. 3 But the analogy is generally implied rather than stated directly. In any case, the results of the Great Reforms were, at the least, ambivalent. On the one hand, they launched a legal revolution from above that brought Russia into the modern world. On the other, the discontent that accompanied the reforms was what launched the revolutionary movement that finally toppled the old regime in 1917. 4 Historical analogies are by their nature imperfect. Nothing is ever exactly the same. One cannot step into the same river twice. Yet there must be a certain sameness, or rivers never would get crossed, let alone bridged, and history would hardly be taken seriously as a study that offered some understanding of the world, let alone one that aspired to be a science. Some intelligent use of analogy is indispensable for the historian. No doubt Alexander II saw the problems of creating individual in¬ centive and encouraging capital formation in terms somewhat different from Gorbachev. The economy was at a different stage of develop¬ ment, and differences of scale and phase are obvious. Yet if one focuses on those aspects of the situation that posed a dramatic problem for policy, the analogies are many, striking, and instructive. The Crimean War had destroyed Russia’s military prestige and had as well dramatized the potential volatility of the serf system and the military disadvantages of technological backwardness. From its status as the greatest land power in Europe, Russia’s military reputation plummeted to that of a giant with feet of clay . 5 The Soviet experi¬ ence in Afghanistan had similar, if somewhat more muted and more gradual results. It was only one of a number of events, the nuclear fiasco at Chernobyl among them, that highlighted Soviet technological backwardness, economic rigidity, managerial ineptitude, and centrifu¬ gal political tendencies, and their implications for the Soviet Union’s status as a world power. The Crimean War also left the Russian state Perestroika in Reverse Perspective 37 in debt and in fiscal trouble to the degree that it could not financially aid or provide much support for the major reforms it was beginning to feel were politically and economically necessary. Nevertheless, Alex¬ ander II was determined to modernize his country and to maintain its status as a great power. His reforms were extremely far-reaching and genuinely transformed the country. It is not too much to call them a revolution from above. One of the first changes he introduced, after having accepted the terms of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War, can readily be compared to Gorbachev’s glasnost. Indeed, the terms glasnost and perestroika first came into wide public use in the 1860s. 6 Under the stern previous rule of Nicholas I, public expression had been sub¬ ject to rigid and restrictive censorship. Indeed, Nicholas I’s “garrison state,” with its restrictive practices sometimes carried to the point of absurdity, provided intellectuals of the time with their image of “the gendarme of Europe.” 7 Under Nicholas I, the country’s most basic and most deeply trou¬ bling social institution, serfdom, could not be mentioned in the press. True, writers sometimes managed to evade the censorship by using a kind of Aesopian language, calling covert attention to some of the problems of serfdom while overtly writing about slavery in North Africa or in the United States. But a thorough and open discussion of serfdom as it existed in Russia was impossible. The almost acci¬ dental publication of Piotr Chaadaev’s essay on the Russian past— that called into question whether Russia even had anything that might legitimately be called a “history”—earned for its author long-term house arrest and an official imperial certification of “insanity.” The case is worth a brief digression. Chaadaev was one of the most brilliant Russian intellectuals of his time. After a spectacular career in the army, he resigned his colonel’s commission, having found the brutal garrison discipline imposed on the Russian army of the 1820s in¬ tolerable. He was thoroughly at home in European culture and carried on an important and intense correspondence with the German philoso¬ pher Friedrich Schelling. He was a religious man, conservative, with strong Catholic leanings, deeply influenced by Joseph de Maistre and by Schelling. For him, history, at least as far as Europe was concerned, was a process of unification, a movement toward unity from which the institution of serfdom, and the repressive militarized system it re¬ quired to maintain it, had excluded Russia. As a result, Russia had contributed nothing to the common store of human culture. In that sense, Russia “had no history,” had “contributed nothing but the occu- 38 Sidney Monas pation of space.” He thus became an officially proclaimed “madman” and spent the rest of his life isolated, at home, without employment. 8 The atmosphere of gloom, frustration, confinement, and often genu¬ ine despair into which Chaadaev was plunged became characteristic of the intellectual atmosphere, especially during the latter years, of the reign of Nicholas I, and was shared even by some high-ranking civil servants, such as, for instance, the censor and university professor Nikitenko. 9 This atmosphere changed almost as soon as the Crimean War ended, when Alexander II encouraged an intensive public discus¬ sion of serfdom and its abolition. The late 1850s became a time of fervent discussion, an opening out of intellectual spaces, with a heady feeling of liberation and expansion in the air. After the emancipation decree of 1861, a substitute for the governing and juridical powers that the landowners had in the past exercised over their serfs had to be constituted. In 1864, Alexander II created a system of jury courts (in which former serfs sat as members of a jury), a rela¬ tively independent judiciary, and an independent bar. That the Russian bar very quickly lived up to the standards set by its Western European counterparts, as many expert witnesses attest it did, was a tribute to the spirit and competence of the reform. It also suggested some of its limitations. The standards of professional competence were, after all, European, where they operated in a social context long attuned to notions of legality. Russian notions of legality, on the popular level, were radically different from those of Western Europe. In Russia it was often the case that judges had not only to adjudicate but also to educate. It was part of the mission of the district courts to “raise” and change the level of legal consciousness. At this they were not always successful. 10 Problems of education, public health, agronomy, and public engi¬ neering (roads and waterways) were also considered. Trained profes¬ sional personnel were badly needed, and enrollment at the universities more than doubled. Nicholas I’s decrees of the late 1840s limiting en¬ rollment to members of the landholding nobility were annulled, and stipends, however meager, were offered to qualified students from all classes. Alexander II decreed a considerable amount of university au¬ tonomy. A statute creating organs of local government (the zemstvo) was also enacted in 1864, and though its powers were uncertain, great hopes were invested in it as a possible instrument for attending to local problems and mitigating the rigidity of the central bureaucracy." Finally, the military reforms of 1874 introduced universal conscrip¬ tion on the European model, with more limited terms of service and Perestroika in Reverse Perspective 39 a far more democratic and “fair” mode of conscription. Schools were introduced into garrison life, and these army schools played an impor¬ tant role in the considerable increase in literacy that took place during the reign of Alexander 11 and his two successors. 12 Even in the ethnic borderlands of the Russian Empire, rules were relaxed and a more lib¬ eral policy with regard to the use of minority languages and rights of movement (especially important for the Jewish population restricted to certain locales, the so-called Pale of Settlement) seemed to loosen old shackles. A great deal of talent, competence, passion, and energy went into carrying out these reforms, which were literally unprecedented in their scope and ambition. Certainly, one cannot say bluntly and simply that they did not work. Russia changed, and the threat that it might cease to exist as a European power, or that it might suffer the kind of de¬ cay, breakup, and subjection to imperial domination witnessed in such countries as Turkey and China, was averted—the era of reforms was a necessary prelude to the spectacularly rapid industrialization of Rus¬ sia that took place in the 1890s. But just as certainly they did not work as had been hoped and intended, and the political instability that ac¬ companied them might well have confirmed Nicholas Es worst fears of the political consequences of liberalization. 13 Alexander Herzen 1 supported the reforms. He was aware of their limitations, and often from the immunity of his refuge in England bit¬ terly criticized their flawed execution. Yet he would not withdraw, even at the urging of his more radical followers, his basic support. Serf¬ dom, censorship, and the infliction of corporal punishment, for him the closely intertwined evils of the old regime, were on the way out, and he refused to cry betrayal as long as that process continued. But he lost a significant part of his following among the less finely tuned radical intelligentsia of the 1860s by that support. 14 Fedor Dostoevskii, arrested and exiled as a young radical in 1849, and permitted to resume his writing career ten years later by Alex¬ ander II, consistently supported the reforms, so that, contrary to his reputation as something of a “reactionary,” he has to be classified in Russian terms, in the context of Russian history, as a liberal. 15 Sup¬ port for the continuation and deepening of the reforms launched by ''Alexander Herzen (1812—70) was a writer, journalist, and editor. One of the most important representatives of “Westernism” and liberal thought in Russia, he founded the emigre journals the Polar Star and The Bell, which had a crucial impact on Russian public opinion during the 1850s and 1860s.—Ed. 40 Sidney Monas Alexander II indeed became the touchstone of Russian liberalism and remained so until the end of the old regime. While Alexander II certainly intended changes, there were two pil¬ lars of traditional autocratic rule in Russia he not only had no intention of changing but was determined not to change. One was the great power status of Russia among the European powers that had been put in jeopardy by the Crimean War. The other was the nature of autoc¬ racy itself—the integrity of the conception of its unlimited powers, which he felt he had inherited as a sacred trust. The Russian Empire had traditionally seen a government of men and not of laws, and there was a mystical sense attached to this tradition. The ruler, placed on his throne by God, had a better sense of what Russia needed and in what direction it had to move than any set of faction-torn representa¬ tives or body of laws, however useful these might be for consultation or normative reference. Furthermore, Alexander II believed autocratic powers indispensable to the very project of massive reform that he had undertaken. Directly or indirectly, these two pillars of autocracy weighed down upon, limited, and rendered problematic every aspect of the reforms themselves. The maintenance of great power status foregrounded the fiscal needs of the state. Simply put, it cost a lot to be a great power, and the sources that had to pay for it had to have a certain stability, a certain guarantee. All states have a tendency to get into fiscal trouble. Their competition with other states as much as their responses to the needs and desires of their own populations lead them to it. For Russia, with its enormous state apparatus and slender, impoverished economic base, it was deep trouble indeed. Money came from the peasantry, and its collection had been en¬ abled through the ingenious device of imposing responsibility for it on the peasant village community rather than the household or the individual. Taxes were assessed and collected by the community. If a peasant did not pay, his neighbors had to pay his share. In a vast country with many hiding places and poor roads, this was a simple, relatively inexpensive way of making evasion difficult. When the peas¬ ant’s status changed from that of a serf to that of a citizen, the authority of the village community nevertheless remained. This imposed a brake on peasant movement and a dampener on initiative, but it provided an agency of control for the collection of what he owed the government. And since the peasant had to pay the government for the land he re¬ ceived with emancipation, he owed the government a lot. And he owed the government a lot in spite of the fact that he had on the whole rather Perestroika in Reverse Perspective 41 less land for his own immediate use after the emancipation than he had had before. The problems posed by the poverty of the peasant and rural backwardness were thus not solved by the emancipation; indeed, the peasants became “locked in” to economic hardship. The zemstvos, organs of local administration, carried the implicit hope that they might some day become local and perhaps even pro¬ vincial and eventually national government. They became meeting grounds of and forums for discontent and disappointment with the reforms. The more liberal landowners who played a prominent part in zemstvo politics soon became disillusioned with government policy and eventually formed the Constitutional Democratic, or Kadet party, a party of complex membership, but an important component of which came to see the imperial government as the main obstacle to liberal progress, and conversely saw “no danger from the left.” 16 The pro¬ fessionals who worked for the zemstvo —the so-called “third element men”—became radicalized and were soon accused of using the zem¬ stvo as a cover for revolutionary activity. The peasants themselves were probably the least contented, though the political significance of their discontent has received quite different interpretations. The zem¬ stvos were distrusted by both the Orthodox church and the central bureaucracy and constantly found it difficult to finance even minimal activities. They never did provide the alternative to the centralized bureaucracy some of their founders had hoped for at their beginning. The land settlements that accompanied emancipation, no matter how much they seemed to favor the landowner, did not make him rich either. He was paid for the land he gave his peasants not with cash but with certificates provided by the government, which were rapidly dis¬ counted. Since the landowning class was already deeply in debt to the government before emancipation, the value of the certificate a land- owner received, even before discounting, was subtracted from what he owed the government. This did not encourage capital formation. The economic position of the landowning class began to deteriorate at an accelerating pace after emancipation. The reforms marked the beginning of the end of the dominance of the landholding class. By the turn of the twentieth century, although the nobility retained some legal privileges, and its traditional lifestyle a good deal of social prestige, it could hardly be called a ruling class. 17 Amelioration of ethnic unrest in the borderlands and elsewhere did not work either. Alexander II removed some of the restrictions on Jewish settlement and occupation. He also made some motions in the direction of restoring the Polish Constitution. In 1863, however, 42 Sidney Monas a massive Polish revolt erupted. In its early days, one of its leaders in Warsaw, Marshal Wielopolski, broke into the Russian garrison at night and a number of Russian soldiers were killed in their sleep. This was considered an atrocity by many Russians, including liberals, and roused a great deal of patriotic and reactionary fervor. After the re¬ volt was violently suppressed, it served as a pretext for a policy of Russification. 18 The young intellectuals who came of age during the 1860s were the least happy with the reforms. Having come of age during the heady days of Alexander IPs glasnost, the young men and women of varied social origins who had entered the universities under the new regime identified themselves and their careers with a mission both to lift up and learn from the Russian peasant. As the terms for the emancipa¬ tion settlement became known, they were quick to cry fraud. Herzen was no longer radical enough for them. Small underground groups were formed whose aim was the complete overthrow of the czarist regime. In 1866, a mentally deranged ex-student attempted to assassi¬ nate Alexander II. It was not an act typically advocated by the groups formed at that time, but ten years later it became an avowed aim of the revolutionary movement by then underway. Open season was declared on high officials of the regime, and political terrorism be¬ came a formidable fact of life in Russian politics from that time until the Bolshevik Revolution. The peasant orientation of the intelligen¬ tsia shifted somewhat in the 1890s, with the rapid industrialization of Russia and the accompanying marked influence of Marxism, to the industrial proletariat of the rapidly growing towns and cities. But the dialectical interplay of radical, revolutionary movements and the spo¬ radically reactive repressive actions of police, bureaucracy, army, and censorship-apparatus was well under way, and led eventually to the complete overthrow of the regime. So the glasnost that had originally been introduced by Alexander II to bring public pressure to bear on a recalcitrant ruling class turned out to hasten the demise of that class. What were the effects of liberalization on Russian culture? Certainly it was a great age. In 1865, new, more liberal censorship laws were introduced, eliminating preliminary censorship for belles lettres. 19 Given the greatly expanded nature of the “public” and the circulation of printed matter, the old repressive system would clearly not have worked, if indeed it ever really did. Periodically, however, as government policy reacted and sometimes distinctly overreacted to manifestations of radical activity, the new liberalized laws worked in a way that was hardly less repressive than the old. Russian science and Perestroika in Reverse Perspective 43 applied science flourished in the era of Alexander II as they had not under Nicholas I. The golden age of Russian poetry belonged, oddly enough, to the reign of Nicholas I, whereas the novel and Russian prose came into its own under Alexander II. Yet the reign of Nicholas I cre¬ ated a certain mind-set shared to varying degrees by all members of the intelligentsia—a kind of morally obligatory sense of alienation from and opposition to the regime as such. The fits and starts and backward turns by means of which the Alexandrine reforms proceeded did not dispel, but rather aggravated, this intelligentsia mind-set. While one should not press the analogy too hard for precision, something of all this is clearly visible in the present situation in the Soviet Union. The intelligentsia that was Gorbachev’s prime benefi¬ ciary and, at first, his most enthusiastic source of support, has, under the pressure of events, gradually turned sour. As Herzen in a much more limited and restricted way gave back to the Russian intelligentsia via the Free Russian Press much of its previously repressed literary- philosophical heritage, so under Gorbachev the repressed domestic and foreign literary classics of the past half-century have reappeared to some extent drowning out and muting—it is, alas, true—younger, struggling talent. But poets as legislators act at best remotely and indi¬ rectly. Institutions have proved surprisingly recalcitrant and resistant to change in spite of manifest popular will to change them. Unfortunately, the transformation envisaged by Gorbachev’s pere¬ stroika is strung along a paradox that is strikingly analogous to the one that tripped and tangled the Great Reforms. Alexander II had pro¬ claimed and promoted his reforms as necessary to sustain and reani¬ mate the highly centralized and absolute powers of autocracy and the status of Russia as one of the great European powers—the same con¬ ditions that made the reforms necessary in the first place. Gorbachev, at the unusual Party Conference of June-July 1988, proposed to decen¬ tralize authority, paradoxically, by increasing it—by creating a new presidency to be filled by himself, and by using his own augmented powers to sponsor further changes, including somewhat more demo¬ cratically elected officials at lower echelons. At the moment, it is far from clear what degree of control he still exercises over the entire pro¬ cess. It at least seems probable that the attempt to augment Communist party authority by democratizing it will not succeed. The new presi¬ dency may provide an alternative institution, but it rests on new and very shaky ground. All the problems that plagued the reign of Alexan¬ der II would now seem to have risen again in an intensified form. Two decades ago, Andrei Amalrik anticipated the present situation 44 Sidney Monas with almost uncanny insight. But even he overestimated the steadfast¬ ness and staying power of the “old” Bolshevik regime by suggesting that it would take a war with China to plunge the regime into its final crisis. 20 He assumed a continuation of the inept leadership of the “era of stagnation” that would not be able to resist or prevent the drift toward such a war, manifest at the time of his writing. He did not foresee the exceptional political adroitness and diplomatic skill of a leader like Gorbachev. But he located very accurately the sources of division and decay in the Soviet system, and foresaw and predicted not rejuvenation but fragmentation and collapse. He did not contemplate the degree of national and world chaos that might attend such a col¬ lapse. In any event, the present essay is not intended as a funeral dirge for the policies of perestroika, which are still the world’s best hope, a hope which should not, however, be mindless of the limits with which history and the past encircle it. Notes i. See “O Staline i Stalinizme, Beseda s D. A. Volkogonovym i R. A. Medve¬ dev” (On Stalin and Stalinism: A Conversation with D. A. Volkogonov and R. A. Medvedev), Istoriia SSSR 4 (1989): 89-108; and B. L. Mogil’nitskii, “Al’ternativnost’ v istorii sovetskogo obshchestva” (Alterity in the History of Soviet Society), Voprosy istorii (November 1989): 3—16. z. Alexander Yanov, The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000 (New York, 1987), esp. 155-65; the basis for the comparison is a situation of political polarization between right and left, in which centrist and moderate positions are eroded to the point of ineffectiveness. 3. L. G. Zakharova, “Samoderzhavie, biurokratiia i reformy 60-kh godov XIX veka” (Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Reforms of the 1860s), Voprosy istorii 10 (1989): 3—Z4, and “Velikii kniaz’ Konstantin Nikolaevich i ego dnevnik” (The Great Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich and His Diary), Voprosy istorii 5 (1990), 107—Z9; A. V. Shel’skii and E. Bauer, “Tainye soobshcheniia o evropeiskoi emigratsii v Londone, 185Z-1861” (Secret Reports on European Emigration in London, 185Z-1861), Voprosy istorii z (1990): 146-47; V. G. Chernukha, “Bor’ba v verkhakh po voprosam vnutrennei politiki tsarizma” (The Struggle at the Highest Levels over the Czarist Domestic Policy), Isto- richeskie zapiski , The Institute of History, vol. 116 (Moscow, 1988); V. Ia. Lavervchev, “O nekotorykh liberal’nykh tendentsiiakh v politike tsarizma po rabochemu voprosu v nachale 7okh godov XIX veka” (On Some Liberal Tendencies in Czarist Policy on the Labor Question in the Early 1870s), The In¬ stitute of History, vol. 115 (Moscow, 1987); and V. F. Antonov, “N. G. Cherny- Perestroika in Reverse Perspective 45 shevskii o poreformennoi Rossii” (N. G. Chernyshevskii on Post-Reform Rus¬ sia), Istoriia SSSR 2 (1989): 20-38. The influence of American historians on research in this field is attested to by the frequent interviews appearing in Soviet scholarly publications with visiting American researchers; see “Beseda s Amerikanskim istorikom” (A Conversation with an American Historian) (Terrence Emmons), Istoriia SSSR 5 (1989): 208-iz; and B. N. Mironov, “Amerikanskie istonki ob urbanizatsii poreformennoi Rossii” (American His¬ torians on the Urbanization of Post-Reform Russia), Voprosy istorii 6 (1989): H 5 - 57 - 4. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (New York, i960), 204—331; Abbott Gleason, in Young Russia (New York, 1980), stresses certain similari¬ ties between movements of young Russian intellectuals in the 1860s and 1870s and the countercultural movement in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. The implied comparisons are not without foundation, but the com¬ parison with the Soviet youth movements of today would in many respects be more striking. 5. The last important major study of the Crimean War from a Russian perspective was E. V. Tarle, Krymskaia voina (The Crimean War) (Moscow, 1950). Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, and the social unrest, from the in¬ telligentsia of Petersburg and Moscow to peasant revolts and mutinies (both preceding and accompanying that defeat), have often been pointed out as powerful motivating factors for the Great Reforms. 6. This point was raised once at a conference held at the Center for Soviet and East European Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, 1 May 1989, “The Great Reforms in Russian History, 1861-1874.” Publication of confer¬ ence papers is forthcoming; see especially the article by Larissa Zakharova, presented in Russian, “Samoderzhavie i reformy 60-kh godov XIX veka v Rossii” (Autocracy and the Reforms of the 1860s in Russia). 7. See Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). 8. See Raymond McNally, Chaadaev and His Friends (Tallahassee, 1971); and The Major Works of Peter Chaadaev , ed. Raymond McNally (Notre Dame, 1969). 9. Diary of a Russian Censor: Aleksandr Nikitenko , ed. Helen S. Jacobson (Amherst, 1975). 10. F. B. Kaiser, Die russische Justizreform von 1864 (The Russian Juridical Reform of 1864) (Leiden, Holland, 1972); V. P. Bezobrazov, “Mysli po povodu mirovoi sudebnoi vlasti” (Thoughts on Judicial Power around the World), Russkii vestnik (October 1866): 369, 373. 11. See The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-government , ed. Wayne Vucinich and Terrence Emmons (Cambridge, 1982). 12. See W. Bruce Lincoln, Nikolai Miliutin, an Enlightened Russian Bu¬ reaucrat (Newtonville, 1977). 46 Sidney Monas 13. Alexander II would seem to have become frightened of his own inten¬ tions even before they were properly in place. See Otto Bismarck, Die Poli- tiscben Berichte des Fuersten Bismarck aus Petersburg und Paris, 1859-1862 (The Political Reviews of the Count Bismarck from Petersburg and Paris, 1859—1862), ed. Ludwig Raschdau (Berlin, 1920), 2: 130. 14. Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revo¬ lutionary (Cambridge, 1979). 15. Aileen Kelly, “Dostoevskii and the Divided Conscience,” Slavic Re¬ view (Summer 1988): 239-60. Joseph Frank, in his monumental biography of Dostoevskii, makes essentially the same point; see his Dostoevsky (Princeton, 1976—1988). 16. Michael Karpovich, “Two Types of Russian Liberalism: Miliukov and Maklakov,” in The Transformation of Russian Society, ed. Cyril Black (Cam¬ bridge, Mass., i960). 17. See Russian Offialdom, ed. Walter Pintner (Chapel Hill, 1980). 18. Alexander Kornilov, Modern Russian History (New York, 1952), 2: 86. For Herzen’s responses to events in Poland, see his Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), vol. 27 (Moscow, 1963). 19. See Charles Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Rus¬ sian Press, 1804-1906 (Toronto, 1982). 20. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (New York, 1970). Paul Debreczeny 'Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo"-. Pushkin's Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture Pavel Ivanovich Mel’nikov-Pecherskii, the future writer, ~ was a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Kazan in 1837, at the time of Aleksandr Pushkin’s death. He relates in his memoirs that his professor of literature, Grigorii Stepanovich Surov- tsov, had devoted most of his lectures to Lomonosov and Derzhavin. From Pushkin he had read some passages but refused to comment on them, arguing that the time had not come to assess the poet’s achieve¬ ment. Yet on 5 February 1837, when he received news of Pushkin’s death, he showed full awareness of the loss Russian literature had suffered. Mel’nikov writes: Surovtsov, as always, entered the auditorium when the clock struck.... [He] stepped up on the platform and, without taking his seat, pulled a newspaper from his pocket—it was the Russian Invalid, as I recall. He raised it high and, surveying the auditorium with a quick glance, said in a loud voice: “Stand!” We stood up, looking at our professor with surprise. His voice quivering with emotion and barely concealing deep- felt, bitter tears, he read us the news—a mere few lines. I recall vividly the first words he uttered: “The sun of our poetry has set—Pushkin is no more!” The whole audience cried out in one voice; sobs could be heard. . . . The professor himself sat down and, leaning his head, white as silver, on his desk, burst into bitter tears. 1 Russian memoir literature of the nineteenth century abounds in rec¬ ollections of public grief upon Pushkin’s death. The difficulty the re¬ searcher encounters in connection with such memoirs is that they were written years after the event described and therefore they often reflect cultural attitudes of later periods. One wonders, for example, whether Mel’nikov’s professor, who had refused to pass judgment on Pushkin before, had indeed come so suddenly to appreciate the nation’s loss as fully as Mel’nikov recollects. It is possible that Mel’nikov’s chrono- * Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo is a travesty of Zhitie Aleksandra Nevskogo (The Life of Aleksandr Nevskii). Boldino is the name of an estate belonging to the Pushkin family where the poet spent several productive periods.—Ed. 48 Paul Debreczeny logical perspective colored his description to some extent. But even if his recollection is slightly distorted, it remains valuable for the stu¬ dent of cultural semiosis, for it reveals that Pushkin’s death had be¬ come an archetype for national suffering. The phrase “the sun of our poetry,” which the professor had read out of Vladimir Odoevskii’s obituary for the poet, conjured up the lives of Russian princely saints. When Aleksandr Nevskii died, for example, the Metropolitan Kiril told the people, “My dear children, you should know that the sun of the Suzdalian land has set.” 2 Similarly, the widow of Dmitrii Donskoi bewailed his passing with the words, “O my Sun, thou hast set too early.” 3 Odoevskii’s use of a hagiographic trope in connection with Pushkin’s death signaled that the poet was to be viewed as a saintly sufferer. This played an important part in transferring the poet’s name from the world of everyday experience to the realm of myth. Documents dating from the time of Pushkin’s death itself do not contain distortions of chronological perspective, but they present a different problem—a clash of points of view. If we study Pushkin, D’Anthes, and their contemporaries as players acting out their destiny on stage, it becomes obvious that each of them had his own script. Pushkin’s scenario, as Leslie O’Bell has argued, was that his rival would first lose his honor as a ludicrous schemer and womanizer, then would be conveniently dispatched. 4 Some people close to Nicholas I saw Pushkin as an insufferable bully; some friends thought he was tragically driven into irrational behavior. At that existential moment the question was, who would write the canonical “text” of the poet’s tragedy. As it turned out, fellow poets, like Mikhail Lermontov, were to sway public opinion. Before examining what eventually emerged as definitive history in the eyes of the Russian public, let me make a digression. First, it must be remarked that the phenomenon I am dealing with has only a tenuous connection with literature proper. Those interested in the aesthetic effect of a literary text would have to isolate the reader “in the garden or in the fields with book in hand all day,” as Pushkin envisioned her. 5 Letters, diaries, memoirs might give a more or less accurate sense of how the reader responds to the text in an immediate, intimate engagement. But the reader’s individual receptiveness—as Pushkin well knew—depends on his or her education, cultural milieu, and preparedness to decode certain types of discourse. The ripples of reader-response criticism inevitably spread outward from the central event of the text, and can eventually lead to such concerns as myths surrounding authors. Myths may be perpetrated by people who have "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo" 49 barely read the writer’s actual works; moreover, the subject of the myth may not be a literary figure at all. In American culture, George Washington and John F. Kennedy have generated more powerful myths than any writer ever could. Anthropologists originally defined mythmaking as society’s attempt to come to grips with those realms of experience that are beyond rational or technological control. More recent studies have tended to argue, however, that symbolic activities of society—mythmaking among them—are not simply irrational attempts to provide orienta¬ tion in an incomprehensible world but have cognitive value, leading to viable forms of social organization. 6 “In all their irrationality and even perversity,” argues Michael Cherniavsky, “myths are created by men in response to challenges and questions posed by the conditions of their lives; thus, myths reflect reality or, what is the same thing, the history of a society—even if the reflection is distorted.” 7 What gener¬ ates a nation’s system of myths, Clyde Kluckhohn has demonstrated, are its deepest anxieties. “Among the Navaho,” Kluckhohn writes, “the ‘type anxiety’ is certainly that for health.” By contrast, Pueblo myths and rituals “are concerned predominantly with rain and with fertility.” 8 The question for us is whether a basic anxiety type can be as readily defined for a large and complex society like that of Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is plenty of evidence to show, I suggest, that the deepest con¬ cern of Russian society since Pushkin’s time has been the question of national identity. The Napoleonic War and the Decembrist Uprising inevitably raised the question, what kind of nation was Russia?—so powerful as to chase the world’s most feared aggressor all the way to Paris, yet socially so backward that its peasantry was withering under the yoke of feudal serfdom and even its nobility had to en¬ dure total subjugation to an autocrat. Martin Malia has convincingly argued that the search for national identity led Russian thinkers of the post-Decembrist period to embrace German idealist philosophy. 9 One might add that projecting Russian destiny against the broad can¬ vas of the idealist philosophers’ universal schemas was an exercise in mythmaking. The less the opportunity for achieving practical political change, the more urgent was society’s need for a symbolic response. The myth-making process eventually produced Slavophilism on the one hand, and revolutionary socialism on the other—trends that might have seemed contradictory on the surface but were in fact offshoots of the same anxiety. And the anxious quest for national identity naturally gave rise to a search for a national poet. 50 Paul Debreczeny The first attempt to elevate Pushkin to the status of poet laureate of Russia was Ivan Kireevskii’s i8z8 essay “On the Nature of Push¬ kin’s Poetry.” 10 Kireevskii, however, talked exclusively of the poet, not of the man. The next, crucially important step toward creating a Pushkin myth, as Iurii Mann has recently emphasized, was taken by Nikolai Gogol in his article “A Few Words about Pushkin,” included in his Arabesques (1834). Here Gogol declared that Pushkin’s “very life is entirely Russian,” and proceeded to explain that the poet had evolved from a romantic lover of exotic heroes and landscapes into a mature observer of simple Russian life. 11 Uncannily anticipating—or indeed launching—the critical thought of subsequent decades, Gogol implied that a taming of passions was a quintessential Russian quality. It meant a voluntary resignation, a mental capacity Apollon Grigor’ev * was to term smirenie. Most significantly, Gogol attached this quality not just to Pushkin the author but also to Pushkin the man, blurring the distinction between the poetic text and the myth of the poet. A certain resignation or voluntary submission to fate is ascribed to Pushkin also in the most influential poem written on the theme of his duel, Lermontov’s “Death of a Poet.” In stanza 4 Lermontov laments that the late poet had voluntarily exchanged his true friends’ trusted company for the treacherous haut monde and, even though he should have known better, offered his hand to slanderers. Despite the fact that Pushkin fell fighting and actually managed to wound his opponent, Aleksei Kol’tsov describes him in his 1837 lyric entitled “Forest” as though he had exposed himself to attack unarmed: Why do you, mighty Prince Bova, Stand under a spell, Without your helmet, In the battle? Why have you hung your head, Refusing to fight? Doubtless, in your sleep, When you were unarmed, Did your enemies Attack you with might. 12 Nikolai Ogarev also claimed in his “Death of a Poet” (1837) that Pushkin’s demise had been caused by “perfidy.” * A well-known Slavophile-oriented critic of the 1860s.—Ed. "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo" 51 I would like to suggest that the model for poeticizing Pushkin’s duel was “The Martyrdom of Boris and Gleb”—the story from the Primary Chronicle whose traces can be found in all Russian hagiog¬ raphy. These two saintly brothers, not wishing to subject Kievan Rus’ to fratricidal war, meekly submitted to their elder brother Sviatopolk when he seized power after their father’s death. They did not put up resistance even when Sviatopolk, doubting their loyalty, sent out his henchmen to murder them. Gleb, the chronicler says, “was offered up as a sacrifice to God like an innocent lamb, a glorious offering amid the perfume of incense, and he received the crown of glory.” He was buried “beside his brother Boris in the Church of St. Basil. United thus in body and still more in soul, ye dwell with the Lord and King of all, in eternal joy, ineffable light, bestowing salutary gifts upon the land of Russia.” What appealed to the religious imagination was the meekness with which the brothers faced their death. Their humble submission to fate—a quality which the Slavophiles were to declare a quintessentially Russian trait—elevated them so much on the scales of divine judgment that they became patron saints of their country. “Ye are the protectors of the land of Russia,” the chronicler continues, “shining forever like beacons and praying to the Lord in behalf of your countrymen. ... Ye have appeared amid bright rays, enlightening like beacons the whole land of Russia.... Ye glorious ones, with the sacred drops of your blood ye have dyed a robe of purple which ye wear in beauty, and reign forever more in Christ, interceding with him for his new Christian nation and for your fellows, for our land is hallowed by your blood.” 13 It is true that the genesis of the Pushkin myth had a great deal to do with the fact that he had been killed by a foreigner (Lermontov ham¬ mers this in, calling d’Anthes a fugitive who had come to Russia as a fortune hunter), but an equally important factor was the perception that the poet had been betrayed by Nicholas I and his court. In much of the poetry devoted to the event, reproach is showered on the czar as though he had been a latter-day Sviatopolk sending his henchmen to murder his brother Pushkin. Ogarev, whose term “perfidy” is aimed at the Emperor, bursts into a tirade in a later stanza of his lyric against the tyrant who strangled the poet with his iron fist. An association with Sviatopolk was all the more likely since Decem¬ brist poets, only a decade earlier, had widely used the legend of Boris and Gleb for castigating tyrants. Poems entitled “Sviatopolk” by K. F. Ryleev (1821) and by V. K. Kiukhelbeker (1823) both show the frat¬ ricidal prince fleeing into the Bohemian wilderness tormented by his conscience and pursued by an angel of revenge. 14 Indeed, the identi- 52 Paul Debreczeny cal response to Pushkin’s death by a whole coterie of poets can be regarded as a revival of the spirit of Decembrist poetry. Innocent blood—“the blood of the righteous,” as Lermontov put it—brought redemption, somehow, to the whole nation. Medieval saintly princes, Cherniavsky has explained, could accomplish this pre¬ cisely because they were princes and thus represented the people. The shedding of their blood, like baptism, cleansed them of sin and at the same time purified the nation. “Through his death the prince,” writes Cherniavsky in connection with Andrei Bogoliubskii, “not only ex¬ piated his own sins but, with the other saintly princes, also became an intercessor before Christ, a protector of the Russian land.” The voluntary nature of the princes’ martyrdom was always stressed in the chronicles. “The sacrifice was voluntary, by definition,” continues Cherniavsky, “and, equally by definition, inevitable. It would be as unreasonable to postulate the Grand Prince’s avoidance of his passion as to question the inevitability of Christ’s.” 15 By Pushkin’s time, how¬ ever, princes and czars had lost their capacity to represent the nation. With the publication of Piotr Chaadaev’s * sixth philosophical letter, with the Slavophiles’ quest for national identity, and with the incipient radical movement’s rejection of Russia’s tyranny-ridden past, the way was open for a new kind of prince—a cultural one—to stand for the nation. Having expressed the spirit of his people through his divinely inspired poetry, and having submitted to martyrdom, Pushkin could intercede with the romantic philosophers’ Universal Spirit, securing an honorable role for Russians in the forward march of world history. Once Pushkin had been perceived as a saintly sufferer, attributes of the sacred began to attach themselves to his name. The religious ref¬ erences—such as the crown of thorns, used by both Lermontov and Ogarev—could of course be understood simply as poetic metaphors for a secular narrative, but in some cases the realized metaphor took on the contours of the divine. Fedor Tiutchev, in his lyric “January Z9th, 1837,” designated Pushkin “a living incarnation of gods, / With human blood—southern blood—in his veins”; Ogarev imagined Pushkin’s spirit hovering over Russia; and Mel’nikov’s professor declared that it was actually Pushkin speaking from the grave through Lermon¬ tov’s poem. 16 The poet as sacrificial lamb had become the nation’s patron saint. ''Piotr Chaadaev (1794-1846) was a Russian philosopher whose Philosophical Let¬ ters (1829) harshly criticized the Russia of his time and caused a scandal: the journal Teleskop that had published Philosophical Letters was suspended and the author de¬ clared insane.—Ed. "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo" 53 This first phase of creating a mythical figure out of Pushkin was concluded with Dostoevskii’s speech made during the 1880 Pushkin celebrations. “Humble yourself, you man of pride,” Dostoevskii ad¬ monished, “subdue your arrogance. . . . The truth is not outside you, but inside; find yourself in yourself, subjugate yourself to yourself, take control of yourself—and you will see the truth. . . . When you have conquered yourself, humbled yourself, you will become as free as you never imagined you could be.” 17 Pronounced apropos of Aleko of The Gypsies, this dictum has little connection either with Pushkin’s text or with Pushkin as a person, but it brings full circle the endeavor, begun by Gogol, to endow the nation’s poet with noble resignation. For the psychologist, it is not difficult to understand why a mar¬ tyred poet would appeal to the imagination of a suffering people. For the social historian, myth can function (among other possible roles) as an integrative force. In Kluckhohn’s formulation, myths and rituals “promote social solidarity, enhance the integration of the society by providing a formalized statement of its ultimate value-attitudes.” 18 Claiming to discern national patterns, one runs into the difficulty of trying to determine just how far the attitudes of the cultural elite “fil¬ tered down” to the masses. In this context it needs to be stressed once more that a person did not have to read Pushkin to be enthralled by his myth. And the evidence indicates that over the decades ever-wider social groups became engrossed in his legend. As Marcus Levitt has pointed out, by the time the 100th anniversary of the poet’s birth came to be celebrated in 1899, the czarist government had embraced him as a national symbol. 19 His image became both petrified into a monu¬ ment and at the same time vulgarized. In that centennial year Pushkin cigarettes, Pushkin candy, and Pushkin vodka were sold; bowdlerized editions of his works were distributed among schoolchildren at gov¬ ernment expense; and popular prints showing either the poet’s portrait or illustrating his best-known poems circulated among the uneducated. A 1909 lithograph represented him with a halo around his head and angels over each shoulder (all traces of an African physiognomy having been laundered out). At the same time, the Symbolists tried to rescue him, reshaping his image for their own purposes. It would be futile to try to conjecture what would have happened to the Pushkin myth if World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution had not interfered with the direction of Russian social and cultural life. The Revolution certainly created new political and social conditions under which Pushkin was not likely to continue as the centerpiece of a 54 Paul Debreczeny national myth. The first impulse was to destroy all past culture as an at¬ tribute of czarism. An iconoclastic attitude was embraced especially by the Proletcultists and Futurists. “In Tambov Province in 1919,” Richard Stites reports, “local Proletcultists planned to burn all the books in the libraries in the belief that the shelves would be filled on the first of the new year with proletarian works.” 20 For the Futurists, it was symptomatic that Vladimir Maiakovskii and his companions had de¬ manded, already in the 1912 manifesto “Slap to the Public’s Taste,” that “Pushkin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, etc. must be thrown overboard from the steamer of the Present Time.” 21 The Bolshevik government soon adopted a policy of preserving the cultural treasures of the past, but in the eyes of many the classics had turned into museum pieces with little relevance to contemporary life. By 1924 Maiakovskii had come round to appreciating Pushkin, but he still treated him in his lyric “Jubilee” as a relic of the past, mummified and petrified, needing to be revived. The obvious person to become the central figure of a new national myth was the leader of the Revolution, Vladimir Ilich Lenin. His wife records that for some time after the Revolution he was still just one of the Bolshevik leaders, not a legendary figure; he could even walk down the street without being recognized. What brought about an enormous change was the attempt on his life by Fania Kaplan on 30 August 1918. He recovered from his wounds in two weeks, but the public re¬ action, encouraged by the Party, amounted to adulation. “The popular avowals of Lenin’s martyrdom,” writes Nina Tumarkin, “were prob¬ ably not responses to institutional directives. At this time no apparatus existed to indicate appropriate epithets and images, although the press of Moscow and Petrograd was making an attempt in this direction. Some historical process was turning Lenin into a ‘passion-sufferer’ re¬ sembling the medieval saintly princes whose sanctity derived from the tragic ends they met as princes.” 22 In his speech of 2 September 1918, Lev Trotskii claimed that Lenin had been brought forth by Russian history as the “embodiment of the courageous thought and revolutionary will of the working class,” and that his greatness lay in his perspicacity, his acute “revolutionary gaze.” Grigorii Zinov’ev described him as the “apostle of world commu¬ nism,” and a “leader by the grace of God.” The proletarian poet Iona Brikhnichev wrote that Lenin welded together peasants, workers, and soldiers “in the flame of crucifixions,” and although he was “crowned with the thorns of slander,” he “plunged his sword into the vampire” like a latter-day St. George. 23 But the most enduring formulation of Lenin’s immortality, one that was to become the ubiquitous slogan of "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo" 55 the 1960s and 1970s, came from the pen of the journal editor Lev Sos- novskii: “Lenin cannot be killed . . . because Lenin is the rising up of the oppressed. Lenin is the fight to the end, to final victory. ... So long as the proletariat lives —Lenin lives.” What relates Lenin particularly clearly to saintly princes (and to Pushkin) in Sosnovskii’s description is his refusal to defend himself: “A thousand times [we] tried to con¬ vince him to take even the most basic security precautions. But Ilich always rejected these pleas. Daily, without any protection, he went to all sorts of gatherings, congresses, meetings.” 24 The Lenin myth reached its height after his death in 1924. It is proof of the spontaneous nature of the myth-making process that Maiakov- skii and other artists, like Sergei Eisenstein, were anxious to contribute to it. Maiakovskii’s chief contribution was his major poem Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, composed like a dirge for the Bolshevik leader’s funeral. Edward Brown analyzes this poem in a way highly relevant to our discussion: Lenin is elevated to an image that is essentially “religious” in the sense that greatness, goodness, and glory are his by native right, and there is no questioning the justice of his cause. For the conventional God we may substitute History, which in the fullness of Time brought Lenin to redeem the world and point the way to salvation: he is a kind of predes¬ tined savior who appeared according to history’s law at the moment of capitalism’s decline and violent fall. . . . The Lenin of Mayakovsky’s poem is a myth. He is the messiah foretold in the scriptures of Marxist prophecy, and the story of his great deeds begins far back in human history. . . . And he was just an “ordinary fellow,” unpretentious as the common human kind; he might even have been born in a stable. 25 Yet, in the long run, the Lenin myth was not going to meet the needs of Russian society. Maiakovskii’s next major poem, Very Good! (1927), already shows the strain of mythmaking. By this time the poet could not help but have serious doubts about the direction the Revolu¬ tion was taking; and despite the general sincerity of the poem’s tone, some references, to the Cheka * to collectivization, to the deportation of the wealthy, and so forth, ring false. More importantly, the poet unmistakably reveals what deep anxiety fuels his poetry. Section 9 presents a number of objections raised by enemies of the Revolution. Foremost among these is the accusation that the Bolsheviks had turned * Cheka refers to the Special Committee to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabo¬ tage.—Ed. 56 Paul Debreczeny the fatherland into some kind of Comintern community, discarding even the name “Russia.” In an attempt to answer this accusation, the poet appends a coda about patriotic feeling to each of sections 13, 14, and 15. Let me just quote the first two: A land where the air’s sweet and heavy, a fruit juice, you leave, for new places panting, but a land you froze with will stay forever deep in your heart implanted. My love for my land is boundless! You can forget when and where you stuffed your craw and your belly, but the land you hungered with you can never as long as you live and breathe forget! 26 An ordinary person might argue that it is best to quit the place where you have experienced so much pain; but Maiakovskii’s logic resembles that of the chronicler of the “The Martyrdom of Boris and Gleb”: suffering is sacred, for it brings redemption; and the Russian nation can be best defined by the pain it has lived through. Since new forms of mythology almost invariably arise out of a preexistent cul¬ tural matrix, it is not surprising that Maiakovskii’s vision of his nation is close to the myth built around Pushkin. "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo" 57 Individuals’ anxieties are inseparable from those of the social groups they belong to; in fact, group anxiety only exists as a sum of the feelings of individuals. If an individual’s psychological needs coincide with those of his social group, his private mythmaking may gain social acceptance. In Kluckhohn’s words, “when ... changed conditions hap¬ pen to make a particular type of obsessive behavior or a special sort of phantasy generally congenial, the private ritual is then socialized by the group, the phantasy of the individual becomes the myth of his society.” 27 Maiakovskii’s tragedy was, as he painfully realized faced with his audience at the Plekhanov Auditorium five days before his sui¬ cide, that his private vision could not become a national one. The most immediate reason was that his complex poetic language could not be understood by his semi-educated listeners. But beyond that there was the more fundamental fact that Lenin and the Revolution could not be turned into a national myth. What was causing the anxiety engen¬ dering a new quest for a national self was a new iron rule, this time by the Bolsheviks, and it could not be assuaged by the legend of the Bolshevik leader himself even though he had already died. At this point a few words need to be said about the relationship be¬ tween myth and ritual. One of the founders of modern anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, wrote that “myth is a constant by-product of living faith which is in need of miracles; of sociological status which demands precedent; of moral rule which requires sanction.” Another formulation, by John Greenway, is that myth is “the narrative charter of religion.” Ritual, on the other hand, is an acting out of the verbal symbols of myth with the purpose of “recharging the belief.” 28 Rulers, both religious and secular, have understood over the centuries what a great force rituals can be in manipulating the behavior of a people, and have therefore tried to impose them from above. “The case of Nazi Germany,” writes Kluckhohn, “is an excellent illustration of the ideal patterns (‘the myth’) being provided from above almost whole cloth and of the state, through various organizations, exerting all its force to make the behavioral patterns conform to the standards of conduct laid down in the Nazi mythology.” 29 Actually, the mythologies imposed by the ruler on the ruled are rarely created from above “whole cloth”; in order to be functional at all, they must correspond to some extent to the society’s deep-seated anxieties. The Soviet novel of the Stalinist period, for instance, which Katerina Clark has described as performing a ritualistic function, was not just created by fiat. As Clark has argued convincingly, it drew on the radical fiction of the 1860s, on revolutionary lore, and on the 58 Paul Debreczeny political rhetoric of Bolshevism. It gave expression to certain genuine concerns of society, such as the relationship between technology and the human being. 30 Moreover, in some rituals such as the Pioneers’ initiation ceremony, the distinction between induction into a politi¬ cal group on the one hand and passage into adolescence on the other tended to be blurred and therefore the rite carried some meaning. 31 Yet Soviet ritual, including the exercise called socialist realism, was largely imposed on the population from above and lacked the deep myths that could have given it meaning. “Rather than having evolved slowly through the gradual accumulation of new layers of meaning,” writes Christel Lane, “the new ritual symbolism . . . lacks emotional depth. In contrast to popular ritual, where a large variety of asso¬ ciations and meanings reflect the variety of popular contributions to the shaping of ritual symbolism, the new Soviet ritual has not bene¬ fited from such a democratic process.” 32 A ritual is most effective if it is organized around a symbol—cross, crescent, plumed serpent— that resonates with a complexity of ideas and beliefs; and its power to release emotion lies not only in its evocative nature but also in its multi¬ valence. 33 Ceremonial discourse, according to Barbara A. Babcock, “by means of a surplus of signifiers paradoxically both questions and reaffirms social, cultural, and cosmological orders of things.” 34 As Victor Turner’s studies have shown, rituals—especially rites of pas¬ sage—that are spontaneous products of a people’s emotional needs contain a “liminal” phase: that is, a phase in which thresholds of social norms are at least temporarily crossed and antisocial behavior is re¬ leased. Although the social norms are reaffirmed in the final phase of the ritual, the liminal phase lets loose energies inimical to the existing social order and pregnant with the seeds of potential change. 35 What Soviet ritual lacked, as it evolved during the Stalin years, were richness of resonance and multivalence of symbolism. All elements of spontaneity—still observable, for instance, in May Day parades dur¬ ing the first years of Soviet power—were eventually bleached out. The Lenin myth became the core of a hollow ritual aimed at establishing legitimacy for the reign of his “heir,” Stalin. It was revived during the post-Stalin years chiefly because the vacuum left after the elimination of the Stalin cult had to be filled; and it reached ludicrous proportions in 1970, when the 100th anniversary of his birth was celebrated. His statues, with finger pointing toward a futuristic Mecca, came to sig¬ nify to the Soviet public a person trying to hitch a ride. “From now on furniture factories will be building beds for three,” went the joke. “Why?” Because “Lenin is always with us.” 36 "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo" 59 The less the official mythology was able to allay the nation’s anxi¬ eties, the greater became the need for a genuine one. Under these cir¬ cumstances it was natural that the Pushkin myth should arise once more. It should be emphasized again that the response to a national poet is complex and varied. During the Soviet period Pushkin’s works reached a readership much broader than ever before; and the evidence suggests that the individual reader’s appreciation of his texts has been rich and diverse. At the same time, serious Pushkin scholarship made tremen¬ dous strides. These forms of response to the national poet may overlap somewhat with a myth-making process but are nevertheless different in nature. The building of a Pushkin myth itself was complicated by the atti¬ tude of the Soviet government, which, like its czarist predecessor at the turn of the century, tried to expropriate the poet for its own ideo¬ logical purposes. In their distortions and simplifications of Pushkin’s image the commemorative celebrations of 1937 and 1949 resembled the centennial of 1899. It seemed as though commemorating the national poet’s anniversaries was becoming just another Soviet ritual, like the May Day parades and the November 7 celebrations. But there was a great difference. The Communist party’s official occasions were rigidly structured events leaving no room for unplanned release of emotions and inducing boredom to such an extent that, in order to bring the people out, they had to be accompanied by sports events or other enter¬ tainments. 37 By contrast, Pushkin celebrations brought forth a spon¬ taneous response. The government might have thought these events served its own purposes, but the masses used a different key for de¬ coding the signals that were being conveyed. The multivalence of Pushkin celebrations is described very inter¬ estingly by Kaverin in his 1964 short story “Pushkin’s Death Mask.” The story’s protagonist walks around Moscow with a friend, and they happen to approach Pushkin Square. To their surprise, a large crowd is gathering there. This was taking place, as it turns out, “during those unforgettable weeks preceding the poet’s jubilee [of 1949]. The very air of the country was infected with love that filled hearts to the brim! Each person had his or her own Pushkin; he was dear to each in a special way. And behold, they were marching and marching to his bronze monument, marching, not even reflecting on the reason. Their hearts drew them.” There follows a description of how the crowds bring not only flowers to the Pushkin statue but also manuscripts of poems dedicated to the poet, school exercise books with essays on 60 Paul Debreczeny “Why I Love Pushkin,” paintings illustrating themes from his works, and portraits more or less resembling him. The most revealing detail, though apparently unintentional on Kaverin’s part, is his depiction of the policeman’s behavior. One can assume that under different circum¬ stances this Gogolian Derzhimorda * would have known how to order the people about, but the occasion was most confusing—officially per¬ mitted yet full of impermissible spontaneity. In his embarrassment he tries to keep order, whispering: “Please, comrades, give way. Let the little one bring his gift to Aleksandr Sergeevich.” 38 If we want to discover the sources that were feeding the Pushkin myth, we will probably be best advised to listen to voices that gave expression to the nation’s anxieties spontaneously. Such spontaneity is most likely to be found in writings by authors like Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Bulgakov, who were on the fringes, if not entirely outside, the literary establishment. Platonov wrote two essays commemorating the iooth anniversary of Pushkin’s death—“Pushkin and Gor’kii” and “Pushkin, Our Com¬ rade”—both published in the journal Literaturnyi kritik (Literary Critic) and both attacked in the press. 39 At the same time that he was working on the essays he also jotted down the first outline of a play about Pushkin’s youth, Ucbenik litseia (A Student of the Lyceum). He intended it for a children’s theater, but did not complete it until 1950, a year before his death, and to my knowledge it has never been performed. The designation Platonov gives Pushkin several times in his essays is “prophet.” In “Pushkin and Gor’kii” Platonov claims that Pushkin alone (and none of his famous successors in nineteenth-century lit¬ erature) was able to anticipate twentieth-century history, because he alone was endowed with an instinctual sense of the spirit of the Rus¬ sian people. The burning coal with which God’s angel had replaced his heart was allowed by later nineteenth-century writers to dwindle to a flicker until it flared up anew in the bosom of Lenin. Thus the Bolshevik leader appears as an heir to Pushkin. It is significant that Platonov’s Pushkin is as much a product of historical forces as Maia- kovskii’s Lenin was; and Platonov endows his legendary hero with the same kind of clairvoyance that Trotskii attributed to Lenin. (“Pushkin divined the ‘secret’ of the people,” writes Platonov.) It is not clear how serious Platonov was, designating Lenin as Pushkin’s heir; but it is sig- * Derzhimorda—literally, “Keep-Your-Mouth-Shut,” the name of a policeman in the famous comedy The Inspector General. —Ed. "Zhifie Aleksondra Boldinskogo" 61 nificant that as soon as he had made his statement he seemed to forget about Lenin and proceeded to declare Pushkin the driving force, not only of Soviet social development, but also of world history. Plato¬ nov describes mankind in 1937 as a body felled by Nazism, lying in the desert, tormented by “spiritual thirst,” and awaiting its deliverer, Pushkin. 40 “A people (and mankind deciding its own fate),” writes Platonov, “cannot become conscious of all its qualities and all its dignity, it can¬ not become inspired and therefore mighty, unless it can find expression to its true essence in a central image, burning like a red-hot coal.” For Platonov, as for his nineteenth-century predecessors engaged in building a Pushkin myth, this central image of nationhood is bound up with a wise acceptance of fate, with an understanding that you have to preserve your strength under the most trying circumstances. Push¬ kin understood, according to Platonov, that “simple people have their own hidden, ‘secret’ means for obtaining spiritual nourishment and for shielding life from annihilation by ‘those above.’ ” 41 The idea, originating from German idealist philosophy, that a poet, merging with a universal spirit through his art, can divine the essence of his nation is given even stronger expression in Platonov’s other essay, “Pushkin, Our Comrade.” Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, Platonov claims, foretells that Peter the Great’s ruthless drive to build a nation and Evgenii’s quest for simple human happiness will eventually be reconciled in socialism. 42 This wistful view of socialism reminds one of Pushkin’s 1826 lyric “Stanzas,” in which he praised Nicholas I for his humaneness. In any case, it is interesting that Platonov’s claim for Pushkin’s clairvoyance is echoed in recent Soviet scholarship: Paliev- skii has argued, for example, that by reconciling contradictory quali¬ ties (such as those expressed in The Bronze Horseman) Pushkin in¬ stinctively sensed the basic characteristic traits of his nation and the historical path it would take. 43 Not performed as intended, and not even published until 1974, Platonov’s play about Pushkin’s lyceum years cannot have exerted any influence, but it is symptomatic of a certain kind of populist percep¬ tion of the poet. Its hagiographic qualities are quite striking. Platonov shows the young Pushkin as alienated from his own family, which is reminiscent of the way St. Theodosius of Kiev was mistreated by his mother in his youth. Pushkin’s adopted mother is his old nurse Arina Rodionovna—the very incarnation of the Russian people—who predicts his future greatness in much the same way as the priest baptiz¬ ing Theodosius recognized the future saint in him. Pushkin is “God’s 62 Paul Debreczeny child,” says Arina Rodionovna, “who will bring joy to the world . . . and will be a consolation to every soul.” 44 As though in order to illus¬ trate his healing powers, act 2 contains a scene in which a grieving peasant woman comes to him, seeking consolation, just as the mis¬ used widow came to St. Theodosius. Pushkin calls both this woman and Arina Rodionovna his muse. Indeed the old nurse, as a mediator between him and the common people, seems to be the source of all his ideas. Her repeated advice to those around her is “Have patience!”— which Pushkin learns to accept by the end of act 5, when he is being sent into exile and when—anticipating the moral strength of Tat’iana —he voluntarily renounces the love of Karamzin’s wife, who would have been willing to run away with him. Vasilii Zhukovskii appears in the play as a kind of John the Bap¬ tist, bearing witness to the advent of the savior. He tells the younger poet, “God has sent you to us and gave you your mission: obey his command.” The poet as emissary of heaven is further elaborated by Zhukovskii when he says, “My dearest one! What gift you have! . . . You torment me with your talent. You frighten me like an apparition from a far-away world, a world better than ours. . . . Look at nature with her wonders: she is the path which leads us to that other world, a world much more beautiful than ours. . . . We all strive to reach it, and you have been sent to us from there.” 45 A much more complex and aesthetically far more satisfying play about Pushkin is Bulgakov’s Poslednie dni (Last Days), begun in 1935 and scheduled for its first performance in 1937 but banned by the au¬ thorities until after the author’s death. (It was first performed in April 1943.) It is Bulgakov’s contribution to the large body of literature, both scholarly and popular, that had been published about Pushkin’s death since the 1920s. In addition to utilizing all the obvious elements of tragedy that attended Pushkin’s last days, the play demonstrates the tragic frailty of a writer’s heritage. Pushkin himself does not appear on stage—only his shadow is seen flitting by a couple of times at the back—but he is present in quotations from his poetry. This would seem to imply, consolingly, that he will survive in his work; but Bulga¬ kov puts a curious twist on the theme. The person who quotes Pushkin most—reciting, especially, his “Winter Evening”—is the police spy Bitov. Moreover, in act 2 we hear Nicholas I court Pushkin’s wife, trying to persuade her to run away with him, using strikingly Push- kinian lines. “The quiet babbling of springs, the shade of oaks,” he says. “If only I could throw off my tiresome costume and escape into the solitude of forests, into valleys of tranquillity! Only there, in earth’s 'Zhitie Aleksandro Boldinskogo” 63 sole company, can the tormented heart rest.” A little later he claims that an “unknown force” draws him under her window. To these dis¬ torted echoes of Pushkinian lines, sounding somewhat like the letter Chichikov received from a provincial admirer, Natal’ia responds more favorably than she had ever done when she heard the genuine thing from her husband. The ultimate insult to Pushkin the author is that in act 3 of the play even his rival d’Anthes complains of the snow and boredom of the northern winter as though he were quoting Pushkin’s fragment “Autumn.” 46 Bulgakov, who was working on Master and Margarita while he was writing the play, brings out the tragedy of the author whose words can be twisted around and put to any kind of use by personal enemies or tyrants. As Nyota Thun has noted, one important stimulus for reviving the Pushkin myth was the opening of the czarist government’s secret archives after the Revolution. 4 Many facts regarding the police sur¬ veillance of Pushkin and his relations to the imperial court came to light, reinforcing the image of the poet as victim. Be that as it may, the conclusion is inevitable that the Russian people suffering through Stalin’s reign sought, once more, a national poet whose greatness lay in martyrdom. For Bulgakov, for instance, was it not a comfort to think that even his great predecessor had been subject to persecution and misuse yet survived as the symbol of the nation? The myth of Pushkin the martyr supplied to a suffering nation, to use Kluckhohn’s phrase, a “fixed point in a world of bewildering change and disappointment.” 48 Translating this anthropological definition into the language of poetry, we might say with Pasternak: “Rock and gale. Rock, raincoat, and hat. / Rock and Pushkin.” Not only did the martyr’s suffering bring catharsis to a suffering nation, but it also identified a heartless ruler and his entourage as the sources of evil. The treatment of Pushkin in popular poetry, fiction, and biography entailed a number of formulaic elements, the chief of which were a conspiracy against him in the highest social circles, his red blood spilled over white snow, and his spirit remaining with the nation. There is no space in this contribution to survey the vast lit¬ erature on Pushkin that has been published since the appearance of Avenarius’s popular biographies in the early 1900s, but at least a few typical examples should be mentioned. Marich’s 1937 story “By the Black Creek” ends with the phrase “red blot on the snow-covered field”; Antokol’skii’s “Four Guests” (1971) brings Pushkin back from the dead for a conversation with Lermontov (reminding one of Mel’¬ nikov’s professor); and “Pushkin’s Death Mask” by Kaverin, which 1 64 Paul Debreczeny have already mentioned, shows Pushkin helping a contemporary actor portray the death of a communist hero. One of the most interesting documents relating to the Soviet Push¬ kin cult is a report entitled “The Pushkin of Pinega” by the writer Shergin, published in 1967. Shergin relates that around the time of the 1937 commemorative festivities he talked about Pushkin to a num¬ ber of illiterate peasants in the town of Pinega (in the Arkhangelsk district). What the peasants heard from him was passed around the community by word of mouth like a folktale and eventually came back to him in a distorted form. This folk narrative raises the obligatory phrases about Pushkin’s death to a hyperbolic level, claiming that his blood so copiously flooded the Black Creek that its water became unusable for a week and that, although his genius fertilized the Rus¬ sian land at large, nothing ever grew on the spot where he had been killed. D’Anthes, the “vagrant knight,” says the narrative, had been sent to Natal’ia Nikolaevna by the czar in order to seduce her on his behalf; and the Frenchman won the duel by shooting at Pushkin “out of turn.” 49 The folk narrative also contains all the formulaic elements about the young Pushkin having been “handsome, of a good figure, who always sang and made merry, led a riotous life, and becharmed many a woman, which he was good at.” He led a happy life “like a horse set free,” and there was no need for him to marry, “but no, he married, stuck his head in the noose,” and got himself a wife who kept complaining that he “made her ears ring with verses.” 50 What is important about these details—widely, though perhaps not quite so crudely, used in all popular Pushkin biographies—is that they make the martyr a colorful figure. His marriage, especially, has exercised the public imagination, giving rise to pro-Natal’ia and anti-Natal’ia parties and factions. 51 If the official version of Lenin’s personality presented to the public for adoration lacked the complexities of a human being, Pushkin’s image was not flattened out and thus provided an opportunity for vicarious enjoyment of vivid images in the midst of gray Soviet reality. Unlike Lenin’s, the cult of Pushkin has been able to loosen social attitudes as well as bind the nation. The Pushkin myth, it seems, has retained its force past the Stalin era. A cursory look at the tribute paid to the poet on the 150th anni¬ versary of his death reveals that his name is still being evoked in ha- giographic terms and that his image as a martyr still appeals. Let us take as a sample the poems devoted to him in the special January 1987 issue of Novyi mir {The New World). One poem, by the Byelorussian "Zhitie Aleksondra Boldinskogo" 65 poet Rygor Borodulin, is entitled “A Triptych,” and it is just that, not only in a metaphorical sense but with explicitly religious symbol¬ ism. Pushkin’s duel is termed a “conflict between good and evil”; the living stanzaic line is seen as overcoming death; the Byelorussian lan¬ guage has been sanctified by Pushkin’s passing interest in it; and the poet’s death was a special Slavic sorrow that eventually acquired world significance. Poems by Vladimir Mikhanovskii and Igor’ Puppo both emphasize martyrdom and pain; and a lyric by Gennadii Serebriakov ends with the phrase “stigmata of still fresh blood,” which, though it refers to the field where Pushkin fell, could be read as the verbal equivalent of the Shroud of Turin, denoting the undying significance of Pushkin’s blood. Anatolii Peredreev invokes Pushkin’s “divine word” to ring out across the ocean of today’s godless vulgarity; and Gennadii Gots brings Pushkin even closer to contemporary life by commenting that no computer can chart the future for us better than can the sublime rapture of the poet’s soul. 52 Pushkin has been embroiled even in the controversy surrounding the location of McDonald’s new fast-food restaurant in Moscow. Some have indignantly commented that it was vulgar to put this establish¬ ment on Pushkin Square, next to the poet’s monument; others have claimed that the poet, were he alive, would enjoy a glass of Coca-Cola. Pushkin is still used as the universal arbiter of taste and guardian of the nation. Today’s rapidly changing Soviet society, with all its uncer¬ tainties, is fertile ground for mythmaking, but since national identity is being openly debated it may eventually lose some of the anxiety at¬ tached to it. Pushkin will always be read and studied as the first poet of Russia, but it is quite possible that as we enter the McDonald’s period of Russian history some Soviet Elvis Presley will gain ascendancy, and Pushkin’s image will lose a little of its mythical glow. Notes 1. P. S. Usov, “Etnograf-belletrist” (The Belletrist-Ethnographer), Isto- ricbeskii vestnik 17 (1884): 506. 2. See Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed. Serge A. Zen- kovsky (New York, 1974), 235. 3. Ibid., 321. 4. Leslie O’Bell, “Pushkin’s Last Epistolary Novel,” an essay delivered at the 1989 national convention of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, Washington, D.C. 5. In Letter 3 of A Novel in Letters, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (The 66 Paul Debreczeny Complete Works), ed. V. D. Bronch-Bruevich et al. (Moscow, 1937-59), 8: 47. 6. See Clyde Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals: A General Theory,” Harvard Theological Review 35 (1942): 58; and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 140-41. 7. Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven, 1961), 3. 8. Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals,” 72—73. 9. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-18yy (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 69-98. 10. Ivan Kireevskii, “Nechto o kharaktere poezii Pushkina” (On the Nature of Pushkin’s Poetry), Moskovskii vestnik 8 (1828). 11. lurii Mann’s remarks were delivered at the Second International Sym¬ posium on Pushkin at Bonn, 15-16 December 1989. See Nikolai Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works) (Moscow, 1937-52), 8: 50. 12. Aleksei Kol’tsov, Sochineniia (Collected Works) (Leningrad, 1984), 105-7. 13. Zenkovsky, ed. Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, 103-5. 14. For a survey of references to Sviatopolk in romantic poetry, see M. Raab, “Obraz drevnerusskogo cheloveka v poezii pushkinskogo vremeni” (The Image of the Ancient Russian in the Poetry of the Pushkin Period), in Drevnerusskaia literatura i russkaia kul’tura XVIII—XX vv. (Ancient Russian Literature and Russian Culture of the 18th to the 20th Century), ed. D. S. Likhachev et al., Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi literatury (Proceedings of the Department of Ancient Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences and Letters) (Leningrad, 1971), 26: 25-28. 15. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, 13—14,16. 16. Fedor Tiutchev, Lirika (Poetry) (Moscow, 1965), 1: 88; and Usov, “Belletrist-Ethnographer,” 507. 17. Fedor Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works) (Leningrad, 1972-), 26: 139. 18. Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals,” 71. 19. Marcus Levitt, “The Centennial Celebrations of Pushkin’s Birth,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: Prom the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov, et al. (Berkeley, 1992), 183-203. 20. Richard Stites, “Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution: De¬ stroying and Preserving the Past,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason et al. (Bloomington, 1985), 11. 21. Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, trans. BoleslawTaborski (New York, 1970), 47. 22. See N. K. Krupskaia, “Lenin v 1917 godu” (Lenin in 1917), Izvestiia, 20 January i960; and Nina Tumarkin, “The Myth of Lenin during the Civil War Years,” in Gleason, ed., Bolshevik Culture, 81. "Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo" 67 23. See Gleason, ed., Bolshevik Culture, 79, 81. 24. Lev Sosnovskii, “K pokusheniiu na tov. Lenina” (On the Occasion of the Attempt on Comrade Lenin,” Petrogradskaia pravda, 1 September 1918; emphasis mine. 25. Edward Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, 1973), 20. 26. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Selected Works , trans. Dorian Rottenberg (Moscow, 1985-86), 2: 250, 254. 27. Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals,” 53. 28. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York, 1926), 92; and John Greenway, Literature among the Primitives (Hatboro, Penn., 1964), 40. 29. Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals,” 53. 30. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 3 - 2 - 4 , 93 -H 3 - 31. See Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society — The Soviet Case (Cambridge, 1981), 89-99. 32. Ibid., 193. 33. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 127. 34. Barbara A. Babcock, “Too Many, Too Few: Ritual Modes of Significa¬ tion,” Semiotica 23 (1978): 296. 35. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chi¬ cago, 1969), 128. 36. Lane, Rites of Rulers, 153-80, 71, 218-19. 37. Ibid., 23. 38. F. Kaverin, “Maska Pushkina” (The Mask of Pushkin), in Rossii per- vaia liubov’: Povesti i rasskazyo Pushkine (Russia’s First Love: Narratives and Stories about Pushkin), ed. V. V. Kunin (Moscow, 1983), 177—78. 39. For a summary of the controversy surrounding Platonov and the jour¬ nal Literaturnyi kritik, see Nyota Thun, Puschkinbilder: Bulgakow, Tynjanov, Platonow, Soschtschenko, Zwetajewa (Berlin, 1984), 131-42. 40. Andrei Platonov, Razmyshleniia chitatelia (Thoughts of a Reader) (Moscow, 1980), 34, 41. 41. Ibid., 37. 42. Ibid., 8—22. 43. P. Palievskii, Literatura i teoriia (Literature and Theory) (Moscow, 1978), 41-62. The mystical quality assumed in Pushkin by such discussions of his historical insights has been commented on by Armin Knigge in “Les contradictions chez Pushkin,” Revue des etudes slaves 59 (1987): 109-18. 44. Andrei Platonov, Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works) (Moscow, 1985) 3 = 3 J 9 - 45. Ibid., 3: 334, 332. 46. Mikhail Bugakov, P’esy (Plays) (Moscow, 1962), 310-11, 330. 68 Paul Debreczeny 47. Thun, Puschkinbilder, 14. 48. Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals,” 68. 49. Kunin, ed., Narratives and Stories, 168. 50. Ibid., 165—67. 51. An interesting contribution to this theme is A. Kuznetsova’s “I Love Your Soul,” which presents Natal’ia on her deathbed, thinking back on her life with Pushkin. See Rasskazy o Pushkine (Stories about Pushkin), ed. V. and A. Logvinenko (Kiev, 1986), 359-67. 52. See the special anniversary issue of Novyi mir (January 1987): 126-27, 167, 224,236. Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth Century in the Mirror of Dystopia . . . one should not become so stupefied as to become used to everything.—Franz Kafka, The Castle The landscape after the battle. . . . When it finally arrives, the long- awaited has a tendency to disappoint. Already printed in our journals are Zamiatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World , Nabokov’s Invita¬ tion to a Beheading, Kafka’s The Castle, Orwell’s Animal Farm, as well as his 1984, which has entered our cultural vernacular. These are books that were used as monsters to frighten children for an entire half century. But the children who grew up during this time—those among them who could not then manage to acquire the forbidden— quickly glanced over the undocumented fantasies and eagerly turned to the actual, documented historicopolitical sensations of the century. For the rest of the world, having read them at their own proper mo¬ ment, these books played the role of prophecies—which was the extent of their relevance. Could it be, then, that we, having lived through the 1980s—we, for whom the prophesied future has partially become the past—acquired the suppressed texts only to lose them once again? Our belated acquaintance with the classical dystopias nevertheless has an advantage of its own: these visions of the “new world” no longer shock us, they do not strike our sensibilities; after more than one generation has in some sense actually lived through these visions, the presumed fantasticality of this literary genre enables today’s read¬ ing to concentrate on unflinching analysis: How could all this turn out to be so close to the truth? What had passed along the surface of historical events in fact has a root, and the time has come to extract it. We have another somber privilege—one that lends dystopian phan¬ tasmagorias an added dimension of reality: today we read these be¬ latedly acquired books alongside others—belated for the same well- known reasons. It is not intellectual experiments that comprise the latter, but personal experience of real events and circumstances. It is only a demon of history who could find the connection—inter¬ twined within the minds of the “generation of grandchildren”—be- 70 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya tween Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and 1984, Platonov’s Chevengur and Brave New World, Dombrovskii’s The Faculty of Unnecessary Things and the novel We, Grossman’s Life and Fate and Invitation to a Be¬ heading, Iampol’skii’s A Moscow Street and Kafka’s The Castle. What seems to have been brought together only by the external conditions of a suddenly granted glasnost has betrayed notable kinship to an identi¬ cal vision of the world. A “landscape after the battle” of sorts—with dwellings in ruins, unattended corpses, still audible moans. The unity of this panorama manifests itself not only in a similarity of traits within an existence in unfreedom and depersonalization, but in the coincidence of specific details. It is as if the positioning of the service buildings of Kafka’s imagined Castle reappears in the smallest of details on the pages of Dombrovskii’s Faculty —a work of an en¬ tirely different genre and feel—where the mysterious business of the punitive agencies of 1937 in the town of Alma-Ata is captured: the same counterintuitive routine, the nightly interrogations (a procedure that Kafka had predicted) and the daily whirlwind of paperwork, the pastoral amusements of the functionaries, mixed with the execution of grim responsibilities; the beautiful assistants decorating the gloomy functioning of the establishment; the benign merging of the private and the official spheres for those who are the masters of this environment, along with the utter obliteration of any signs of private life for the victims. Trifles are turned into matters of great import by the Castle’s chancellery—by the same laws as are used in Dombrovskii’s novel to turn a petty bureaucratic snag of chancellorists of the jail cell into a “saboteur plot” of regional dimensions. There is no less commonality in the paradoxical situations of Zybin (the autobiographical hero of The Faculty of Unnecessary Things), Rubashov (a type of “defendant figure” of the “open” trials of 1937 and 1938, modeled by Koestler in Darkness at Noon), and the almost fleshless Cincinnatus C. in Nabokov’s allegory. The executioners de¬ mand “conscientious” cooperation of all of them—a kind of recipro¬ cating resourcefulness in satisfying the needs of the very machine of their humiliation and annihilation, turning jurisprudence itself into an “unnecessary” thing, as suggested by the title of Dombrovskii’s novel. It is notable that in Nabokov, the advocate and the prosecutor, as it turns out, must not only be twin brothers, but also the executioner’s direct accessories—forming, so to speak, a notorious “special troika,” headed by the executioner. Everywhere—both in the realistically de¬ scribed solitary confinement cells in Dombrovskii and Grossman, in 1984, as well as in Invitation to a Beheading —the one who is being The Obstacle 71 tortured must demonstrate complicity with power and the willingness to be reformed, even on the doorstep of annihilation. And another example. The dystopian world, in light of its break with the natural and the organic, has a decidedly industrial face. The society of We was born out of the victory in the war of the city against nature and the country: the village died of hunger, and the city estab¬ lished artificial, “petroleum” nourishment, having thus acquired in¬ dependence from the land. Yet even in Chevengur, which follows in reality’s footsteps, the lyrically poeticized hero—the builder of a new life—experiences a similar hostility toward the peasant economy and mode of life: he is frightened off by the suspiciously comfortable smell of warmed milk and mutton. The stylistic similarities, the identical turns of speech, are no less capable of astounding—in scenes taken from life by writers, as well as in experiments in literary-philosophical thought. In Chevengur , the commune of “Poorman’s Friendship” decided to construct a monu¬ ment to its own glory “amid an estate, upon an old windmill stone, which has awaited the revolution for many long years. The monument itself was ordered from a blacksmith, to be made out of thin strips of steel”—in its deliberate primitivism and empathetic humor, this sounds like a quote from Orwell’s animal farm fable. Having flashed by in Platonov, the “homogeneous comrade” reminds one of a slo¬ gan from Huxley’s world: “sameness.” And once again, the Orwellian term “Big Brother” (an early synonym of the “cult of personality”), having acquired currency in political science around the world, figures in Chevengur —in fact its very meaning is exactly anticipated. Moreover, as if to acknowledge the dependence of the depicted reality on the contradictions of utopianism, the novels of life and fate incorporate in the plot the almost outlandish encounters of intellectual opponents—which is in fact typical for the deliberately constructed world of the dystopias. This is the inevitable conflict of the noncon¬ formist hero, who has not adjusted to the “happy” world, with the creator and apologist of the new way of life—whose genealogy may be traced to the figure of the Grand Inquisitor, the devil’s advocate in Dostoevskii’s last work before his death. Both Grossman and Dom- brovskii introduce similar situations, apparently conscious of the ne¬ cessity to come to terms with the ominous foundations of the victorious reality. In The Faculty of Unnecessary Things , Neumann, who is the eloquent agent of security services, plays the same role as O’Brien, the inspired guide through the horrors of 1984; and as Mustapha Mond, the Controller from the “brave new world,” and as the Benefactor from 72 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya We; and as the old chekist * in Life and Fate , the poet of the Katzenel- lenbogen camp system, who never stops perfecting it even after having ended up behind bars. Since we are persuaded that both the realists and the creators of fantasy have a common subject, there is that much more reason to recognize the outlines of a single basis through the relatively homoge¬ neous samples of representational art. Max Weber, with whose works our countrymen, unlike the readers throughout the rest of the world, can acquaint themselves only through a rare and limited edition, pro¬ posed the concept of the “ideal type.” This is something that cannot be observed directly in social history, but only as a generalization de¬ rived from a number of manifestations, and unified by one logic and one principle. Of course, we understand the difference between a “genre-strict” dystopia of Zamiatin (who set a standard of sorts here), as well as Huxley (who consciously followed him)—and, on the other hand, the fables of visionaries like Kafka and Nabokov—or, finally, Orwell’s realistic phantasmagoria. However, we believe that it is possible to look at these works not in their particularity, but rather as valuable materials for the extraction of an “ideal type” of a society of unfree¬ dom. For example, by juxtaposing the Sole State Science in Zamiatin’s world with Ingsoc (“English socialism”) in the Orwellian Oceania, we may conclude that in the given type of society there must be present a teaching that organizes the citizens’ consciousness in toto, while at the same time not being a religious doctrine. And it is not important that in Zamiatin the action takes place in the next millennium, while in Orwell it is in the year 1984 (which, one way or another, humanity has already survived): the typology remains in force. Likewise, whichever opus is considered, the relation of the “new world” to the old, bookish, individualist culture, is the same through¬ out. In We, historical monuments perish and “ancient” books are not read; in Huxley’s novel, books of this kind are locked up in the Chief Manager’s safe, for “safekeeping” of sorts; in Invitation to a Behead¬ ing they are concentrated in a jail library and classified in such a way that the necessary items could never be found; in Bradbury’s Fahren¬ heit 4Ji —a dystopia that has long been known to us—which depicts *The term chekist is derived from the acronym “ Cheka which refers to the “Spe¬ cial Committee to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage,” established in 1917 and later reorganized and renamed GPU (State Political Direction). The reference to the “old chekist ” is a coded reference to the shift from “ Cheka ”—still a “revolutionary” organization—to GPU —already becoming a state secret police.—Ed. The Obstacle 73 a consumer society that has “peacefully” arrived at totalitarianism, books are burned for the sake of the citizens’ mental hygiene; in 1984 they are translated into “newlanguage,” their meaning being forever destroyed. Incidentally, about “newlanguage” (or “newspeak”): it helps to overturn all concepts that are of significance for the person in order to subordinate people to an official view of the world. While in Orwell’s state, these devices are developed with the consistency of a blueprint, fragments of the same method are unexpectedly discovered among the other writers mentioned here, who have never posed the Orwellian analytical problem. “I shall restore Amalia’s honor,” says the father of a young woman in The Castle, who has disgraced herself before her fellow townspeople; the father hopes to atone for her “misdeed” with his own humiliation. Here “disgrace” and “honor” are interchange¬ able in precisely the same way as 1984 's “war” and “peace,” “hate” and “love,” etc. There is no need to tire readers with attempts to exhaustively define dystopia as a genre. One thing is significant for our task: the dysto¬ pian novel is a response to the pressure exerted by the “new order”— a response that has found literary expression. If utopias are conceived in relatively peaceful, precrisis times—when the future is to be antici¬ pated—then dystopias appear during the break periods, in the epochs of the unexpected, what is in fact brought about by that very future. Of course, at the beginning of the succession of twentieth-century dys¬ topias stands Dostoevskii; it was he who polemicized against utopias that were still dominating people’s minds (though not lives) against the vision of the “crystal palace,” and especially against the metaphysical lies of the Grand Inquisitor, the most imposing herald of the reorder¬ ing of mankind “according to the new order.” As in Dostoevskii and under the influence of his thought, an intimate link with the utopias of the past still shines through for the creators of the early dystopias— even if they are put into question. Yet there is still no doubt about the material well-being and splendor of the future possible society, the “crystalness” of the crystal palace, so to speak—of air too scarce for living (as in a “chicken coop,” or an “army barracks”), but nevertheless a society well built and offering its wealth to all. Zamiatin and Huxley depict a sterile and, in its own way, comfortable world of “aesthetic subordination” and “ideal unfreedom” (the formulations of We). Yet, as it turns out, unfreedom can be neither comfortable nor abundant— it can only be dismal, squalid, garbage-filled, and gray. The world is immiserated by it, “matter tires” of it (Invitation to a Beheading ), it is 74 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya accompanied by cheerless rationing and scarcity—even those who are in the service of “the apparatus” are powerless to obtain razor blades or a handful of real coffee (1984). However, the notable difference in the prognoses does not prevent any of the dystopian constructions from retaining their main gist. As a rule, utopias depict “everyone’s” world, appearing before the aston¬ ished gaze of an outside observer and explicated for the visitor by the “instructor” guide. This is a world that is contemplated by the guest from a safe distance and populated by “distant ones.” In the dystopias, a world constructed on the same premises is presented from the inside, through the feelings of its solitary inhabitant who has endured its laws and is presented to us in the capacity of the “near one.” To put it in a language of classification, the utopia is sociocentric, while the dysto¬ pia is personalistic. It is not without reason that in the ancestor of the contemporary dystopias, the Poem about the Grand Inquisitor,” it is in fact the individual of individuals who turns out to be both the prisoner and the judge of a predesigned world of unfreedom: Jesus Christ. Let us then question the creators of the dystopias as to what hap¬ pens to the human image and human being under the conditions of such a “project.” The peculiarity of the dystopian society—a world without tears*— which by its own admission exists for the sake of human happiness, is that in his previous shape the person is incapable of making use of happiness—all forms of his life are unfit building material for the construction of the new societal edifice. As it turns out, in order to make the human being happy, he has to be radically remade. In this case, the utopian would begin to talk about “reeducation.” But the caustic dystopians show that the logic of remaking is such that mere education, mere inculcation of skills of “consc(ient)iousness” will not suffice. The landmarks of human life—birth, education, work, chil¬ dren, death: now all this must happen in a new way. You need shelter, food, clothing? Now this will become different. So different, in fact, that you will not recognize yourselves. First of all, it will be necessary to become reconciled to the fact that we are entering a society of centralized eugenics, for since it values stability as the basis of communal happiness and seeks to prevent “This is a reference to Dostoevskii’s Brothers Karamazov. —Ed. This might be a reference to Huxley’s Brave New World , where the Controller Mond says “Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”—Ed. The Obstacle 75 the unexpected future, the management will not allow the quantity and quality of its members to go unchecked. Population control had been imagined as early as Platonov (the creator of the arch-utopia, The State )—while in the case of Zamiatin, Huxley, and particularly Orwell, we have the occasion to read how this can actually be realized: by means of granting permission for marriage through a special party mandate—a moderate version of regulation of the kind described by Orwell; or by means of weeding out and handpicking parents (the touching 0—90—one of the heroines of the novel We —was refused permission to have a child because she was ten centimeters short of the “motherhood norm”). In his “brave new world,” Huxley has the ironic courage to follow through to the end: the production of offspring is technologized, put on a conveyer, and, by the incubator principle, com¬ pletely separated from the human couple. Huxley understood that, for a society that is totally planned, it is plausible to place a “state order” for personnel even before their embryonic stage, without com¬ punction hurrying future workers into a place within the production process—so as not to be troubled by individual whims or displea¬ sures. In the wittiest way, the English satirist has stretched the limits of planning, designed to rid our imperfect world of sins and dispropor¬ tions. This is the reason that, if the rosy classical utopias usually open with images of flourishing fields and gardens, as well as with gleam¬ ing glass and aluminum phalanstery, Huxley’s dystopia maliciously directs our attention to this harmony’s (if one is possible) source: the Center of Hatchery and Conditioning—where, through the suppres¬ sion and precrustacean formation of fetuses, production-ready proto¬ humans are mass-produced. Only at the end of the novel does it dawn on Zamiatin’s society to protect itself against shock the bioengineered way: by means of invading the organism with the scalpel. It is as if in Huxley, the oversights of the Zamiatin system are taken into account and the human being is rendered harmless at the initial moment of existence. For a world that has carried out the “nationalization” of childbirth, it is also necessary to tame the Eros, to disarm passion. For a couple in love, the risk and responsibility in connection with the prospect of the arrival of a child can be eliminated pharmaceutically—and here Huxley, who published his novel in 1932, has turned out to be an as¬ tonishing prophet (considering the advances of genetics, will not the more ominous of his predictions also come true?). But the love between two people—which “drifts freely for an age,” yet at the same time is “powerful like death”—turns out to be even more difficult to manage. 76 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya Here the benefactors of humanity must resort to direct sanctions and prohibitions. Enduring ties are construed as a violation of order and an affront to public morality—and sexual freedom (in Zamiatin and Huxley) is encouraged as the best cure for love’s passion; in the stag¬ nating, declining world of Invitation to a Beheading, the thoughtless, automatic depravity of Marthe (the hero’s wife) may be seen as a sign that deep, individual feeling has already been dispensed with. As for Orwell’s 1984, at the stage of the aggressive assertion of new customs, the erotic drive is punished as if it were a criminal offence. For if these measures are not taken, if the dreaded Lex sexualis is not put in effect, then everyone belongs to the rest [We). If principles of nonorganic “mutual utilization” (a term from Brave New World ) are absent, then it will not be possible to standardize the fate of citizens. Some will inevitably be happier than others, and envy will threaten the ideal of stability. And most important: each one will be loyal to his or her chosen one, thereby diverting part of the loyalty from the Indivisible State. Of course, “home” and “family,” in the old sense of these words, are not possible here—the human being has no right to be special and has no room for becoming special. Collective labor takes streamlined conveyor forms (after all, Zamia¬ tin and Huxley wrote in a time of general fascination with Fordism and Taylorism) and, at the same time, pathetic/ritual forms—as a means of absorption of the individual by the whole. It is presumed that labor has ceased to be a damnation (“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”) and has turned into a biological necessity, as told in the legend of the sad end of three “releasenicks” absent from work in the novel We. There is no trace of worker initiative, of independent, creative con¬ ception—it is no accident that in Huxley the Controller Mond admits that science had become a “list of [culinary] recipes.” And art. . . . Here is what happens with art. It is finally rid of its autonomy—the “hated freedom” it seemed to have acquired during the “neo-European” times—returning to the “theurgist”-symbolists’ dream: an all-national function. State Poets (this is their official title in Zamiatin)—these Pindars of the future shake the square of a giant city with “divine copper iambs” and captivating chorales, at the “celebra¬ tion of everyone’s victory over the one.” In Nabokov, creative artist- decorators stage spectacular fireworks at a mass public merrymaking. One may say that the dream of art transcending its own boundaries (and becoming “the art of life”) has come true. With only one caveat. The central occasion of these celebrations, serviced by artists, is the execution of the wretched madmen who have fallen out of step with The Obstacle 77 the common unity. In other words, art, having become a cynical “tech¬ nology of feelings” (in Huxley’s phrase), and as if parodying the ar¬ chaic, assumes pseudoritual, pseudocarnival, pseudofolklore forms— whose main goal is to mobilize spiritual powers for the sake of the monolith and to drown out the voice of the individual human soul. It would seem that the “new world” would be forced to retreat before the phenomenon of death; even the wonders of utopian admin¬ istration would seem powerless to thrill someone who is headed for another world. But the dystopian world attempts to master the situa¬ tion—to disallow any gap in its totality. In We, the horror of death is opposed to the enthusiasm of merging in a collective march; in Brave New World, the fear of death is anaesthetized by the comfort of “Hos¬ pitals for the Dying” and is purposefully dulled from childhood; in An Invitation to a Beheading death is ignored through an utmost vulgar¬ ization—it turns into a trifle that always happens not “to myself” but to another. (However, in the most lifelike of the dystopias, 1984, life is so terrible that death is no longer frightening—and coercion must rely on something whose horror surpasses the ordinary fear of death.) Death is followed by the utilization of corpses. (And it is no sur¬ prise that today’s critics compare the kinds of projections that are made by the planner Vermo in Platonov’s Juvenile Sea with the societal deeds of the Nazis.) From a rational-positivist point of view—which in fact must be adopted in a totally “rationalized” society—such an industrial procedure does not entail anything inhuman or immoral. In Huxley’s world, with its lenient and far from destructive regime, loyal citizens are earnestly happy that it is finally possible to chemically re¬ cycle human remains without any losses. (In Dombrovskii, there is a notable concurrence with Platonov and Huxley: based solely on con¬ siderations of efficiency, a doctor working in the camp system, far from being a sadist, proposes to utilize corpses as donors of blood—luckily there are enough supplies.) In this way the human being is not only guaranteed a new type of death, but also a postmortem existence— with utility for the society. One may conjecture in advance that, having altered all the constants of human existence, this society is dominated by a pathos of arbitrari¬ ness: it must be proud of having created itself. And indeed in the worlds outlined by the dystopians, the parental principle is eliminated—one way or another. Orwell’s hero, like the countless multitude of his con¬ temporaries, loses his mother in early childhood, at the time of the great purges; a “back-alley” child by birth, Cincinnatus C. from Nabo¬ kov’s novel senses the “illegitimacy” of his mother, when, as if out of 78 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya nothingness, the latter appears before him on the eve of his execution. In the novel We, the upbringing of children is of course done by the state: children do not know their parents, unwarranted motherhood is punished by death; as we know, in the most smoothly functioning brave world of Huxley, children appear not from the mother’s womb but “out of a bottle,” and even the words “father,” and especially “mother,” are considered indecent. Truly a “homeless cur”—such is this, and not the old world. While each of these cases has its own reasons for the break with the parental roots, the same scheme is behind them: to begin from zero, breaking with blood tradition, tearing away organic heredity, for parents are the nearest link with the past—its “birthmarks,” so to speak. “What are we to do with fathers and mothers under future communism?” ask the heroes of the Chevengurean utopia. An almost mystical instinct seems to have told Orwell that, contrary to his historical experience (in 1948, when the novel was being writ¬ ten, Stalin was called the father of peoples), the supreme totalitarian of 1984 should still not be called “father.” Nothing patriarchal is to enter this system of principled kinlessness. Yet a maternal basis is also sub¬ ject to abolition at the highest, symbolic level. The traditional esteem of the earth as everyone’s mother is deliberately forgotten, and a cult of synthetic products, born of neither the earth’s entrails nor her fer¬ tile cover, is asserted. It is only “the savage Christians who stubbornly held on to their ‘bread’ ”—contemptuously observes a representative of the society in We that is forever severed from Mother Nature by a wall of impregnable glass. The new society, recreated by the authors of the dystopias, rejects heredity in every possible way—neither the eternal nor that which is born in time is acceptable. Yet there is one cardinal borrowing which this society would happily conceal, but cannot. This is the old idea of “salvation.” 1 A utopia proposes to consider its immutable and final decisions in everything regarding the person and the world as not sub¬ ject to appeal in the court of history (for, as was said by the Cheven¬ gurean communards and undersigned by the ideally motionless world of Huxley, world history itself had ended)—that is, as salvationary. This is heaven: achieved in the new, last eon (century) and revoking the flow of time. More prominently than all the travesty of Christianity, the link with the newly sacred promise of the heavenly kingdom may be seen in the creation of the religiously atheist Platonov in his Chevengur. Here The Obstacle 79 there emerges a desire for nothing less than a transition to a life that is not governed by the laws of this world, as well as the deliverance of matter and the human being from the torments of the burdensome yoke of being. The worked-for is supplanted by the gifted (or, more precisely, by the spoiled—and hence inevitably consumed—property of the defeated classes left over after “the sorting out of the civil war”). Unsown fields grow crops by themselves, and it is no longer a burden for them to feed people: under the rays of the “universal proletarian,” the sun, wheat, goosefoot, and poison ivy “grow in fraternity,” be¬ come an “International of grains and flowers,” give a new, natural kind of food to the Chevengurean settlers. And in a certain sense they ap¬ pear as the chosen people of sacred history, knowing no respite (“In the heart of each, the force of melancholy gathered with even a day of rest”) until having settled in the promised land, having purged it of aboriginal “ burzbui .” * In their own way, the conquerors of Cheven- gur embody the evangelical parable of those invited to “the feast of the Kingdom,” summoning the squalid and the homeless from every road. It may be thought that these cross-resonances are so persistent be¬ cause Cbevengur has absorbed traits of the Russian folk utopia, which has in turn reworked church legends. Yet, upon a closer look at edi¬ fices that have been constructed on entirely different ground, the same basic framework may be noticed with little difficulty. Thus, the idea of a new, second birth and of “christening” with new names is present everywhere. We find it in Cbevengur in a straightforward, naive form that manifests itself in the “re-christened” communards who wished to affirm their acquired eminence, naming themselves Christopher Columbuses and Fedor Dostoevskiis; and in a philosophically sugges¬ tive form, for it is as if Platonov’s hero Dvanov had been reborn out of a previous character, Ivanov—like the biblical Abram who is renamed as Abraham at the moment of being chosen.* And it is almost the same in Huxley. The inhabitants of the brave new world have “renewed” names, referring to the celebrities living in the era of the industrial and proletarian revolution, as well as to those who, in the author’s think¬ ing, were creating the foundations of the scientific might of the future (Darwin, Helmholtz, Bernard*) and its ideological armaments. 2 *The term “ burzhui" is the Russian-appropriated “equivalent” of “bourgeois.”— Trans. tGenesis 17.—Ed. ♦Baron Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-94) was a German physi¬ cian, physicist, mathematician, and philosopher. Claude Bernard (1813-78) was a French physiologist who studied the nervous and digestive systems.—Ed. 80 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya The most extreme variation of the same symbolic act is the rejec¬ tion of one’s own name as such, which in the novel We is substituted by “numerals.” For us, this method of registering people inevitably evokes the memory of the bookkeeping practices of the Stalinist and Hitlerian “archipelagos.” Nevertheless, such anticipation of reality by a writer’s imagination is striking only at the first glance. It is not so much historical clear-sightedness that is taking place here, but rather a logical deduction from the deliberate renamings that were well-known to Zamiatin. Their logical fruits are then revealed. By means of volun¬ tarily renouncing one’s previous self and assuming attributes of a dif¬ ferent guise, the individual prepares for namelessness—for becoming identical with a numbered place in a collective formation. It turns out, of course, that the new society of Zamiatin-Huxley- Orwell cannot do without a reworking of the central Christian mys¬ tery. For the sake of unifying its members and extinguishing their metaphysical melancholy, it organizes mandatory mass revivals, bring¬ ing the participants to a state of ecstatic self-oblivion. This is in fact the way Zamiatin’s hero, D-503, describes Easter. Something similar is also provided for in Huxley’s pragmatic and comfortable world: groups of twelve people (the apostolic number) gather for “last sup¬ pers” of sorts, where they consume a narcotic “soma” and undergo enchanting withdrawal. Orwell soberly understood that in these orgies of unity “total love” is less likely than total hate: his people lose them¬ selves and merge in the collective surge of the “Two Minute Hates”— united only by the “image of the enemy.” Even after having stepped onto the path of revolt, D-503 still ex¬ periences the bliss of dissolution into “we” as he is carried along by the common current. It is this Active bliss—alongside the revocation of risk to life—that allows the “benefactors” and the “big brothers” to recommend the social order headed by them as heaven on earth. In ex¬ change for such a heaven they propose to sacrifice freedom—a source of disorder and discord. As a rule, at the moment of the culmination of his revolt, the hero of the dystopia is presented with alternatives, as heard from the lips of the new world’s chief ideologue: freedom or happiness. And as soon as he believes this false dichotomy, he be¬ comes a prisoner of the unbearable order—not only physically but also intellectually. If this is heaven, he chooses hell and hellish means of liberation. Unlike Dostoevskii, whose Aliosha Karamazov listens to the poem about the Grand Inquisitor and immediately detects deceit, Zamiatin and Huxley, having taken up the same plot line, do not dispute this The Obstacle 81 devilish argumentation. In Zamiatin, the last word remains with the hero who has equated heavenly condition with stagnation, boredom, entropy; all the living bases of life—dynamism, unpredictability, fas¬ cination, “the sunny blood of the woods”—fall in the domain of hell. Freedom, which is preferred to the cheerless heaven, is exclusively thought of as “hellish,” destructive, leading toward world cataclysm. Those who struggle against the Benefactor’s power and his Heaven unite in the novel under the motto “Mephi,” declaring themselves to be the descendants of the splendid young man—Mephistopheles, the demon, Lucifer. Confronted with the “mathematical proof” of the world’s finitude —and hence of the limitations of his dynamic powers—D-503 experiences a virtual intellectual collapse, opposite in its reasons to the one experienced by the “logical suicide” in Dostoev- skii’s Writer's Diary. The latter becomes convinced of the pointless infinitude of the universe, and he decides that it is not worth living in such a hellishly meaningless world. Like Zamiatin, Huxley also disputes the incompatibility of “freedom” and “happiness” when he condemns his hero (who has opted for freedom) to annihilating de¬ feat—in the role of a lover, in his endeavor as a political militant, as well as in his ascetic undertaking. And by this very action he reinforces the cunning maneuver of the Controller Mond, who, in the decisive dialogue with Mr. Savage, keeps silent about the living and creative joys that are impossible without freedom—representing it, rather, as something of a key to a Pandora’s box which, we are to believe, is filled with diseases, miseries, defects, social upheavals that could burst into the world. But Orwell explained the kind of a trap that awaits someone who comes to hate totalitarian society while remaining under the hypnosis of its ideology. 1984 's rebellious heroes take the “hellish oath” not to refrain from any crime in the struggle for freedom from the hated Ingsoc—and, in the figure of its theoretician O’Brien, Ingsoc demor¬ alizes them, when, at the decisive moment, it seizes upon their own words: you are no better than us. Thus the militants against the brave new world in fact share that world’s philosophy. Like their opponents, they do not conceptualize an alternative well-being, other than one of unfreedom, or an alternative “I” besides the isolated and the rebellious, or an alternative conciliar- ism other than one of a camp coexistence. And this is a regression from humanism, conquered by the Christian civilization—to the archaic, massive, pre-individual epochs of human history. It is not without rea¬ son that the working masses in We move with the gait of Assyrian war- 82 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya riors. (Almost simultaneously with Zamiatin, the poet Mandel’shtam was turning to the image of the Assyrian world, wishing to convey the threat hanging over the age: “dragonflies with Assyrian wings, vibra¬ tions of the noded dark.”) * Even so, the collectivism represented in dystopias is based more on security searches and mutual surveillance than on the cult-like monolith quality characteristic of ancient despots. If the civilizations of the gray-haired antiquity still have not dis¬ covered the idea of human brotherhood—as they never developed the idea of personal worth of each of the brothers, the sons of one father— then the Chevengureans, the “orphans of the earth’s globe,” despite the amazing closeness of their communal life, already no longer con¬ sider themselves brothers. It is impossible to overstate the significance of the remark uttered by the Chevengureans’ leader, Chepunov: Comrades! Prokofii called us brothers and a family, but this is an out¬ right lie: any brothers have a father and many of us . . . are fatherless. We are not brothers, we are comrades; for we are the goods and the price for each other, because we have no other stock of movable or unmovable property. This is not merely a dispute over words. It is not accidental that the commune which has in other ways undertaken to fulfill maximalist expectations inherited from the psychology of faith offers such a sub¬ stitution. And it is not accidental that, in his melancholy sympathy for the Chevengureans, Platonov, a follower of many of Fedorov’s ideas,+ rejects the central concepts of the Fedorovian “Philosophy of the Com¬ mon Task”—rejects “son-hoods” and “brotherhoods.” What, then, follows from this? Having no “father,” the Cheven¬ gureans (as “goods”) completely turn each other into property: with nothing left over, each is entrusted to another. In the name of fellow¬ ship, not only is each person’s life (presumably “one’s own for the sake of one’s friends”) estranged, but so is the “self-ness” that constitutes the human image. In the Chevengurean community, mutual belonging- *This is a reference to a 19ZZ untitled poem by Mandel’shtam. The full stanza reads: “The wind brought comfort to us. / We could feel in the azure / dragonflies with As¬ syrian wings, / vibrations of the noded dark.” See Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York, 1974), 43. —Ed. tThis is a reference to the well-known work by Nikolai Fedorov, The Philosophy of the Common Task (Moscow, 1907—13). See G. M. Young, Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Intro¬ duction (Belmont, Mass., 1979), as well as M. Hagemeister, Nikolaj Fedorov: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Munich, 1989).—Ed. The Obstacle 83 ness functions directly, without intermediaries: nobody oversees the distribution of this kind of property. Such unorganized and immediate “communism of lives” was dreamed up by the creator of Chevengur, who could not reconcile himself to property as a barrier that divides people, and who carried this sentiment to the ultimate level of intensity. In contrast to Platonov, the authors of dystopias outline a type of society which is possessed by a mediating level—what Orwell calls an “inner party.” It oversees not only the material benefits, but first and foremost the “live goods,” putting each one into the hands of a neighbor, yet reserving for itself the power over everyone. And so at the stage that follows the Chevengurean idyll, in the epoch of the “great terror,” the right of everyone over each is realized—not along the lines of the intimate and the psychic, but within the sphere of mass political reports and denunciations ( Invitation to a Beheading: “The jailers ... were everyone”). As a handout from the administrative fund, a share of power over each other’s life and well-being is doled out to the ruled—though this handout is more than recovered at the high¬ est level and supplements its might. As depicted in Nabokov’s novel, everyone becomes the “property” of the executioner and not of one’s comrade. The appearance of this mediating level is inevitable, because abso¬ lute equality and socialization—when the individual ceases to belong to himself—can be neither voluntary nor customary: for this condition to be retained, somebody must maintain a regime of oppression. Even in the Chevengurean commune, Platonov charts the self-generation of the beginnings of organized coercion: “Organization is a most in¬ genious thing,” muses a candidate for a local inquisitorship, Prokofii Dvanov, “everybody knows themselves, but nobody possesses one’s self." Such “organization” is then demonstrated in Platonov’s The Barrel-Organ: here, no less than in the case of Orwell’s “inner party,” a group of power grabbers is starving an entire region as they exercise ideological control over it. “With organization, many extras may be taken away from the per¬ son,” we hear further from Prokofii—though his formula should not be understood in a strictly literal sense. For Prokofii also points out the exalted (sacrificial, so to speak) side of the position he desires. “It is only the first one who is bad off,” he thinks. The sweetest thing of all is to take away the person’s independence, a “superfluous” thing under the Chevengurean order; besides, to pretend that the greatest sweetness of domination over the individual is in fact a disinterested carrying-on of a burden—this is a trick which is in fact regularly re- 84 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya peated by all the “firsts,” beginning with the self-justifications of the Grand Inquisitor. While the proclaimed goal of social utopias is the general well-being, the remaking of the individual, undertaken for this purpose, soon re¬ veals itself as the only real goal. This remaking has a consistency of its own, which may be seen as rationality. In the pursuit of organized good, along the way utopia turns the chaotic and nonsystematized presence of evil in the world into a unified world of organized evil. This is apparently the way we must understand the epigraph to Huxley’s dystopia, taken from the writer and philosopher Berdiaev (and for some reason lost by the Russian translator): utopias are in fact fright¬ ening because they come true. Along with many others, Huxley is ready to believe that the brave new world, with its planned system, is built upon scientific-technical reason—by technology’s irrepressible drive toward the realization of its possibilities. However, it was not engineers and rationalist philoso¬ phers who built this world, but in fact the ideologues of power. On the surface it appears ideologically neutral (nothing like Zamiatin’s soci¬ ety, with its devotion to the idea and the pathos of cosmic conquests) but in Huxley’s world, facilitated by progress, the idol of hedonistic well-being rules—with no fanaticism whatsoever. Let us imagine how such a commune could have arisen. In order to be able to knead the human clay with such impunity, forming the necessary “prefabricates” out of it, a coup of values must take place, which would sweep out of the way the obstacles that limit power’s encroachments on the individual; as they appear in Huxley, these are obstacles such as Christianity, liberalism, and democracy. Once they are removed, the way is clear for the “rational” utilization of the human being: he is born as labor power and utilized as raw material after death. But can such treatment of the human being be called rational, reasonable, consistent with one’s bodily and spiritual bases? As we see, the end result has turned out to be irrational in every sense of the word. And while we may not read this in Huxley, the absurdity that emerges here must necessarily be explained by libido dominandi (this was commented on as early as Augustine): the irrational will to power over the world has never appeared in as pure a form. The usual ascendence up the social ladder occurs in the presence of certain attributes and qualities, independent of the desire to occupy the top position. Power or prestige can be a matter of hereditary right, competence, the ability to win over the people (or the masses), past The Obstacle 85 achievements, including military ones, the readiness to defend the interests of this or that social strata, or, finally, the contagious obses¬ siveness of ideas. Under the “new order,” all such criteria are swept away; selection and advancement begin to take place according to one and only one principle: the one who ends up at the top is the one who wants to end up at the top more than the rest. The boar Napoleon of Orwell’s Animal Farm , for example. Constructed in such an irrational manner, power appears legitimate neither in the spirit of the traditional authoritarian state, nor that of the contemporary juridical one. Though it is formed from within, it appears as if it is imposed from without, and it is experienced as an utmost contradiction—like a self-invasion. This “dialectic” emerges in the title of Zamiatin’s novel: “we” signifies both the masses and the collective subject who dictates its will over them. The filter that prevented the selection of aspirants by any criteria other than the infamous Wille zur Macht is described by Orwell in the shape of the already mentioned “inner party” (a synonym for “party apparatus”)—and was anticipated by Kafka in the image of the Castle’s Central Chancellery. It is customary to think that what is reflected in The Castle is in fact the system of the Austro-Hungarian Empire— a land-owning administrative “clique”—and that having carried its representation to a grotesque extreme the writer predicted the emer¬ gence of the future’s great bureaucratic structures, which would man¬ age masses of people in their work and everyday life. Yet the advantages of our recent experience enable us to dispute this truism anyway. Even if in The Castle there is something like a traditional bureaucracy, it is a caste of the bureaucrats’ servant-functionaries who mediate like drive-belts between authority and the people. It may be that when they carry out their raids on the Castle’s dependent, the Village, they shamelessly abuse the privileges of an official post—but their influence emanates from the highest source of sovereignty. While, like proper bureaucrats, they act on assignment, the absence of restraint increases their arrogance. As for the functionaries themselves, they are akin to the “ nomenkla¬ tura * which after reading Kafka cannot be mistaken for the dumbest bureaucracy. First, this new social formation precludes any reciprocal link from those who are ruled—a link without which even the least "This term refers to the privileged class of the Soviet society. See M. S. Voslensky. Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York, 1984).—Ed. 86 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya effective bureaucratic organization could not work. All business flows only in one direction—from the Castle to the Village—“entirely ratio¬ nally,” since no advocate for the latter could exist. Second, despite the ceaseless issuing of instructions, the functioning of the bureaucrat is not formalized here and not made contingent upon keeping to the let¬ ter of the law; he feels his official function to be his life’s function, his private property. The practice of working at night in the mighty chancelleries—caustically portrayed by Kafka and known all too well in real life—is preferred not only because of the veil of secrecy, but as a strictly private, nonbureaucratic business. Therefore, the word “bureaucracy”—which more and more often appears as the solution to the riddles of today’s dramas—is not particularly appropriate within the context of the Castle’s reality: the law of the letter and the law of the bureau would in fact be salvation from it. Third, power is not limited to the spheres accessible to the bureau¬ cracy, even if corrupt and sinking into a mire of abuses. The Castle captures the entire individual. We remember how in Puccini’s opera Tosca a major foreign bureaucrat from the Austrian police must re¬ sort to buying the heroine’s love with the promise to free her lover. In the world of The Castle, “women are not able not to love bureau¬ crats when the latter suddenly turn their attention to them—in fact they already love the bureaucrats in advance.” The model bureaucrat Karenin could not be loved; nevertheless, for the members of the mys¬ terious Kafkaesque corporation—who modestly call themselves “offi¬ cials”—“unhappy love does not exist.” “We belong to the Castle” (the words of a native of the Village)—this is not a relationship between the managers and the managed, neither is it a peasant-estate relation¬ ship: this is slavery. But since we are talking about the chattel of the Central Chancellery—that is, a system where every member in and of himself is nothing, yet as a whole it is everything—we are faced with a new type of slave owning. 3 Fourth, while the Castle easily lives off the Village, its anonymous and transcendent power, as described in the novel, really does not regulate the living arrangement there—that is, it carries no order¬ keeping responsibilities of a bureaucracy. Its voice is heard through the telephone receiver as a kind of undifferentiated, though powerful rumble—like otherworldly singing without words. Its paperwork is a mystified activity, with no meaning other than the reinforcement and glorification of the existence of the ruling group. The purpose of this phantasmagoric boom: to instill fear and submissiveness. What to the land surveyor who comes from the outside seems like an “inborn” The Obstacle 87 trembling before administration, is in reality not inborn but rather in¬ ternalized through methods of concealed terror, perpetuated by the universal certainty that “one is constantly being watched.” It is useless to attempt to decipher the utterances of this kind of power. They are not designed for comprehension, but for intimidation. In the very anonymity of the one who stands at the top of this pyra¬ mid—the Count, the Benefactor, Big Brother, Genialissimus (from the most recent satirical dystopia by the dissident Voinovich)—a kind of inhuman power appears, with which the human being cannot and should not enter into dialogue. The Castle's inexperienced hero, fooled by the interconnectedness of the signals that emanate from there, wastes his life in vain, in the hopes of establishing contact with those in control of the situation. One thinks that the tried and tested antagonist of such a system would be guided by the motto “do not trust, do not fear, do not beg”—about which we have been told in Solzhenitsyn’s “camp” cycle, and following which Zybin prevails in Dombrovskii’s The Faculty of Unnecessary Things. In The Castle, the land surveyor K. is surrounded by “an almost un¬ canny world”; in Invitation to a Beheading , to Cincinnatus C., some¬ one with a unconquered soul, the environment appears as a poor copy of the real world. There are two reasons for that: the degeneration of the world’s matter under the yoke of false ideas, and the necessity to shield the true cosmos with a fictitious reality, without which these ideas could not reign over minds. Cincinnatus sees before him “weed- blurred outlines of the ancient airport and the structure where they kept the venerable, decrepit airplane, with motley patches on its rusty wings, which was still sometimes used on holidays, principally for the amusement of cripples.” Cut off from the spiritual source, and having lived through a brief stage of a kind of muscular-technical daring, ma¬ terial civilization becomes dilapidated and transparent. Yet (as we find out from Borges’s “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” created in the early 1940s) this transparency is precisely what is required for the needs of the utopian reorganization of life. In Borges’s story (it is named after an imaginary planet that is sub¬ stituted for Earth), an international society of conspirators gradually introduces a conception of matter as something illusory—and, having imposed such a (counterintuitive) view of being, they advance toward power over humanity. According to Borges’s clever invention, reality itself, having succumbed to the temptation of a “human-divine” re¬ ordering, yields to the invasion of the fantastic element and gradu- 88 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya ally abolishes itself. This extreme case—of reality’s capitulation, so to speak—sheds light on totalitarianism’s gnosiological roots. According to the “plot” hatched by Borges’s philosophersolipsists, it is necessary for them to inculcate a conception of a nonexistent reality, not because they are supporters of idealism, but because they are in fact plotting against life. It is not necessary to be either a subjectivist idealist or a Marxist in order to seek such a result; it is in fact sufficient to be a utopian of a totalitarian bent . 4 Of course, the rulers of the rather realistic Orwellian Oceania are not capable of displacing the individual’s pregiven reality with their own, as it happened in Borges’s intricate philosopheme. Yet this is not even necessary: it is sufficient to “redouble” reality. The objective status of ordinary reality is admitted to the extent that it is necessary for the practical needs of existence—or, to put it more simply, so that the spoon is not carried past one’s mouth. But the highest regions of being—the historical and the cultural—are replaced by arbitrary fic¬ tions, a second reality that may be manipulated by those at the top, and must be believed by those at the bottom. In order to become familiar with the system of “doublethink” and principles of “newspeak” in 1984 , it is necessary to master the entire dialectic in detail. For the time being, we will note the principal mecha¬ nisms here: the liquidation of collective memory, the control of the past, the manipulation of time. “The state’s might created a new past, moved the cavalry in a new way, appointed anew the heroes of already transpired events. . . . The state possessed sufficient might to replay what had occurred once and for all eternity, to transform . . . the past sounds and speeches, to change the arrangement of the people in the documentary photos”—so writes Grossman, notably coinciding with Orwell, who described similar devices in Animal Farm , while in 1984 he depicted the tireless activity of a Ministry of Truth occupied by the ceaseless rewriting of history. (It may be remembered that the Plato¬ nov character from Chevengur also “considered the past ... to be a fact forever abolished and futile.”) “You live by a painted time,” thinks Cincinnatus, the prisoner, in Nabokov—as he sees how every half hour the jail guard washes off the clock’s drawn hands and draws new ones. Such a clock, with a nonfunctional face, may be considered a symbol of a stopped present, which under a false order of things reigns over both the past and the future. It represents the past as its own inevitable prehistory, writing off its own contradictions and defects along the way. It projects its own indestructibility and rightness into the future, representing itself as the The Obstacle 89 immutable present, only increased in quantity and power. The past is a zone of waste; the future is the zone of final achievements. Though he was not the first, Orwell probably understood and described it best. In Huxley, one of the pillars (of society) impresses upon the young how terribly people lived before; just think of it: they were settled in families, locked in their own houses, entangled in degrading bonds of kinship. Is not the repulsive image of the capitalist in a top hat simi¬ larly constructed to symbolize the unjust world before the victory of Ingsoc in the consciousness of the Orwellian Oceania? In this way, utter miracles occur in the world of dystopia: for to turn “slavery” into “freedom” without ameliorating it a bit, and “war” into “peace” without ceasing to wage it—this is perhaps no less a miracle than turning water into wine. And to turn the past into nonpast, an ac¬ tivity that occupies every minute of the already mentioned Ministries of Truth—isn’t this (as, for example, Dante thought) in the power of God alone? Such miracles, however, were promised by the Grand Inquisitor from Ivan Karamazov’s “poem,” who proclaimed that the new order would rest on three powers: magic, mystery, and authority. The magi¬ cians of dystopian narratives cannot create a real-life miracle (if one does not count turning being into nothing, akin to the way in which in the novel We, the Benefactor, with the help of a special machine, pulverizes the person who is being executed into atoms). It is the de¬ fenseless human consciousness that is the testing ground for inquisito¬ rial miracles. It is only here that fictions sent from above may find a place for themselves and affirm themselves. The plots of dystopias coincide in that for a complete victory over everyday experience and common sense, for a complete recharging of the consciousness, a propagandist-pedagogical blitz alone turns out to be insufficient. This is why in the plots of this type—in We and in Brave New World, as well as in Kesey’s novel. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest —the theme of bioengineering (of surgical intervention into the brain, as well as narcotic hypnosis) is emphasized. Likewise in The Futurological Congress, a story by Lem recently published here, multistage pharmaceutical drugs also facilitate a complete substitution of catastrophic reality with enchanting hallucinations. But whatever the possibilities presented by the miracles of science, those who wish to possess the person’s inner world cannot avoid the old tested methods. So the chief “miracle” of the societal followers of Dostoevskii’s Grand Inquisitor still turns out to be fear —or, more pre¬ cisely, intimidation, terror—which is what guarantees both the “mys- 90 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya tery” and the “authority.” It is fear that draws the person into “the false logic of things,” as suggested in An Invitation to a Beheading. Let us not fool ourselves in this regard: without terrorizing power, the rest of the “pedagogy” remains ineffectual. As a high gestapo official in Grossman’s novel reasons, the basis of the party’s rightness, of the victory of its logic or illogicality over any logic, of its philosophy over any philosophy, was the work of the state secret police. This was the magic wand! It was enough to drop it and the magic would disappear—the great orator would turn into a prattler, the expert in science into a popularizer of others’ ideas. For our part, we will add: without this magic wand, war would once again become war, and not peace, hate would once again become hate, and not love, dishonor would become disgrace and not honor; every¬ thing would gradually fall into its own place. Tortures and executions are the dystopian world’s inevitable fellow travelers. If they are unnoticeable at the surface of life there, that is because they had been experienced in the past. In The Castle, from the viewpoint of the newly arrived land surveyor K., a fresh person, it was as if the inhabitants of the Village “had deliberately distorted physiognomies. . . . [I]t seemed as if their skulls had been pounded- upon, to the point of flattening, and their facial features were formed under the influence of pain from this pounding.” And we may believe that the production of their currently submissive state had consisted of exactly that. “The soul and the body are connected vessels,” reflects Grossman about the vulnerability of the human spirit, which may be stealthily aoproached through the bodily gates. In the final scenes of 1984, O’Brien’s victorious rhetoric would have no effect if at that moment its recipient were not strapped into the torture chair and if the ora¬ tor did not reinforce his theses with painful electric shock. In camp jargon, the figurative expressions “to reach” ( dostat’) and “to crack” ( raskolot’) were born out of the literal meaning of these verbs: as the soul is being reached, the person is physically cracked. In Zamiatin’s and Huxley’s dystopias, which depict a scientifically perfected and established society of the distant future, it would seem that durability is achieved by way of absolute agreement of everyone among themselves, as well as with the tablet of directives. But as the narration proceeds, the authors let us know that here, too, there exists a multitude of means of instilling fear and subverting the conscious¬ ness, wounding human flesh. The spy, the surgeon, and the executioner follow alongside any upstanding conformist. The Obstacle 91 In An Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov introduces a symbolic theme of “nontransparency” in the main hero—the only real person amid “ghosts.” It is possible that this image was brought on by Nabo¬ kov’s favorite writer, Gogol. In A May Night, among the transparent drowned water nymphs, only one criminal young lady has an evil soul, revealed as an opaque spot. The world of An Invitation to a Be¬ heading overturns this metaphor according to its own perverse optics, which see nontransparency as an anomaly, a defect. But it is not ill will that is considered to be the defect, but rather the soul’s depth, its three-dimensionality, the presence of an “inner person,” of “a soli¬ tary opaque obstacle in this world of souls which are transparent to each other.” It is against this defect that the struggle goes on in utopian soci¬ eties which seek to make everyone “transparent,” to use Nabokov’s word, permeable to one another, as well as to power. In We, every¬ body lives in rooms with transparent walls; moreover, the greater part of the day is devoted to public activities. In Brave New World, soli¬ tude is of course not encouraged. In Orwell’s novel, every person is under the round-the-clock surveillance of an all-seeing and all-hearing device. In the Chevengurean commune the same principle is expressed in the wish that everyone become the “property” and the “goods” of another—and settlement in separate houses is perceived as a forced compromise. The figures that surround Nabokov’s Cincinnatus: these reborn people are already “permeable,” completely devoid of their human kernel; they force out of life the true individual who is imper¬ meable to their gaze. The crime of Cincinnatus C.—the “gnoseologi¬ cal vileness” perpetrated by him—consists of the fact that he is not completely knowable to society, that he does not submit and commit himself to being known. “Nontransparency” is the synonym for the soul’s uniqueness and resilience. When love, fantasy, reflexivity, and the desire for solitude and freedom are awakened in D-503, the hero of We, the doctor involved in the prevention of deviations tells him: “Your case is bad! Apparently a soul has formed within you.” It may be said about this patient, in the words of a rebellious heroine: “The person is like a novel: you do not know how it will end until the last page. Otherwise it would not be worth reading.” But the executioner, who wields the last and most terrifying argu¬ ment of the totalitarian world, knows how everything will end in ad¬ vance. And it is he who has the greatest number of reasons to imagine having reached that “last, indivisible, hard, shining point . . . the I am!”—which the hero of An Invitation to a Beheading senses in him¬ self. The executioner begins to have the illusion that through the “final 92 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya solution” of the victim’s fate he completely conquers the contents of the victim’s soul—so uncomplicated in the last seconds, so easily reducible to fear of pain and death. The SS man Kaise, in Grossman’s Life and Fate , who liquidates prisoners with the bullet and the syringe, is cer¬ tain that this elementary manipulation reveals the secret of humanity to him. In exactly the same way, in Nabokov’s novel it seems to be the executioner Ms’e Pierre, an artist of his trade, who, after several sessions of sadistic working over of the condemned (after staging an escape, throwing the prisoner from hope to despair, after the insult¬ ingly vulgar lectures on the pleasures of life, of which the condemned is to be deprived) finally reaches Cincinnatus’s core, his sacred “point.” “The structure of Cincinnatus’s soul,” he declares, “is as well known to me as the structure of his neck.” And he assures his ward: “Not the slightest shade of feeling on your part escapes me. ... To me you are transparent as—excuse the sophisticated simile—a blushing bride is transparent to the gaze of an experienced bridegroom.” Thus the executioner-gnoseologist claims that it is exactly he who has come to know the unknowable, transparent human soul. In fact, this “analysis” does not extend beyond the utilitarian tasks dictated by the society he represents: terrorizing, obtaining confessions and renunciations of previous views. The corpse of the soul remains in the hands of the exe¬ cutioner: it may be used for ideological purposes—just as the corpse of the body destroyed by him may be used for utilitarian purposes. But to seize the human soul, to possess its unique mystery without destroying it—no executioner is able to do this. The maxim remains in force even in the torture chamber: the per¬ son suffers from circumstances but does not depend upon them. As a rule, in the inescapable world of the dystopias that were written through the middle of this century, the one who is being persecuted is incapable of avoiding his fate—unable to escape not only death but also humiliation, forced remorse, displays of obedience. 5 However, the final surrender—the capitulation of the “inner person”—remains in his will (which itself may be lacking). Winston Smith, the hero of 1984, gave up and betrayed his essence precisely because he could not over¬ come piety when faced with the intellectual executioner O’Brien, who never ceases to be his teacher even while he has become his torturer. The point where the victim retains “contempt for violence” is also the end point for the power of those doing violence. Frail and alone, trembling in anticipation of the terrible moment, Cincinnatus C. still refuses to accept the “service” of the executioner who is putting him on the block, and says “[1 will do it] myself In utter helplessness he af- The Obstacle 93 firms his selfhood, his nontransparent “I”—and recovers his individu¬ ality. This “I”—this “point of hardness”—is in the person’s nature; it is also reinforced by culture and memory. It is no accident that the new “brave” civilization’s opponent—the one whom it has called Sav¬ age—is represented in Huxley as someone driven by both nature and nurture. The tribal ritual of the Indians among whom he has grown up brings him closer to the world of nature, while Shakespeare, on whom he has had the fortune to be brought up in the reservation, brings him closer to Christianity and the world of old European values. Whereas the Voltairean savage—the simple-hearted Huron, in a spirit common among French Enlighteners—signified the natural life and a reproach to a civilized society which has broken with nature, in the image of Huxley’s Mr. Savage the natural forms an alliance with the supernatu¬ ral—against the unnatural and the inhuman. Naive as a child, Savage is the only adult among the inhabitants of the civilized nursery. After he has gone through initiation, the induction into spiritual life, “Time, Death, God were revealed to him”—all the things about which the infantile consciousness of the domesticated people has no clue. He is free. Individual freedom stands squarely across the path of all utopias that seek to reorder life. And all of them, each in its own way, from the scientific incubator to the close-knit Chevengurean commune, at¬ tempt to circumvent this human obstacle. Having become accustomed to the absence of freedom, the theoreticians of utopianism reassure themselves, in the manner of O’Brien, by the fact that “the individual is infinitely malleable,” that “we create human nature.” However, the ominous and fruitless practice revealed by the dystopias of the twenti¬ eth century is evidence that this is an unrealizable task: human nature remade in a preset direction is in fact already not human. The human being may be spoiled, but not remade. Notes i. According to the Philosophical Encyclopedia (Moscow, 1979), salvation is “the most desirable condition of the person, characterized by deliverance from evil—moral ... as well as physical.” z. In Huxley’s novel the emblematic names are highly principled along the lines of a “convergence theory.” It appeared to Huxley that temporarily an¬ tagonistic forces must work for the coming future: “Ford, Our Lord” gets production going, and “Marx” poses the problem of forming the new man. From here there follow two equal tiers of names celebrating the technological 94 Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya and ideological saints of the new society. Unfortunately, the reader of the Rus¬ sian translation published by Inostrannaia literatura will not be able to discern this conclusively. Missing in the first tier of names is our physiologist Pavlov (during the 19ZOS his reflexology had aroused world attention, and in the origi¬ nal novel the hall where reflexes are developed in trained infants is called the “Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Room”). In the second tier, the anglicized tran¬ scription distorts the young heroine’s name to a point that it is unrecognizable: for she is not Linaina but Lenina. 3. In real life, such domination over bodies and souls would be impos¬ sible without total economic alienation, whose signs are not visible in the industrious Village. But in the anti-utopia—as in a social experiment in one’s thought, whether deliberately or inadvertently—either one or another parame¬ ter is omitted, without which the modeled world cannot materialize. However, the tendencies chosen for analysis are carried to the extreme. 4. We note this, partially in contrast to the view on this subject expressed in A. Gangius’s article, “Na ruinakh pozitivnoi estetiki” (On the Ruins of Positive Aesthetics), Novyi miry (1988). 5. If one considers books that have gained world recognition, it seems that for the first time the anti-utopian fabula gets a happy ending in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 4J1: the hero, in armed rebellion against a completely indifferent world, saves himself from the pursuit of its progeny, the Mechanical Dog, and having washed himself in the waters of a border river, steps onto free and living earth. The novel with this symbolic ending came out in 1953, as if signifying a turning point from hopelessness to hope for those fated to live in the second half of the century. Maya Turovskaya The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers during the 1930s The bad taste of the public is more deeply rooted in the con- ~ ditions of existence than the taste of intellectuals. . . . The public’s taste will not be improved if films are cleansed of bad taste, but the films will become worse. For who knows what gets thrown out along with the bad taste?—B. Brecht Research on viewer tastes in the cinema of the 1930s represents an extremely complex problem, for two reasons of unequal significance. It was the 1930s that were in fact the years of a virtual monopoly on the production and distribution of films, within a context of almost complete autarchy. Both the import as well as the export of films was reduced to a minimum; the USSR had dropped out of the interna¬ tional film circulation process, and within the country Soviet film had almost no competition. Film exhibition ceased to be “localized,” be¬ coming more unified and “linear”: the number of titles per week had been sharply reduced, as the number of theaters grew. Thus the viewer would be given almost no choice, being compelled to watch whatever is “out there.” In this connection we can summon statistics on the changes in distribution and exhibition over a decade: Year 1927 1937 Number of theaters 17 3 i Number of titles per week 3 i 11 Soviet 11 11 Foreign 20 - State demand, which during the 1920s was still not specifically eco¬ nomic (amounting essentially to club screenings of revolutionary films, “workers’ ” theaters, discounted tickets, directed, collective showings etc.) had become uncontestable during the 1930s. Coverage of the pub¬ lic became more comprehensive, while choice was hindered. We have formulated the situation of the viewer during the 1930s as follows: within the context of a general shortage of entertainment (cafes, dance halls, “culture parks,” sports facilities, etc.) it was not film, but movie- 96 Maya Turovskaya going in general that was to become the object of increased demand. In this sense, it is objectively much more difficult to isolate indices of viewer preference as such within a context where “everybody was watching everything.” The second problem is somewhat more particular, though unfor¬ tunately likewise not easily soluble. It has to do with the permanent “secrecy” of statistical data, the chaotic manner in which archival documents had been preserved, the “purges” of archives, as well as simply their poor work. The search for figures becomes something like the mining of radium—“a yield in grams, a labor of years”— and depends above all on the investigator’s random success. Therefore our data for the 1930s are still very much incomplete. These are the preliminary methodological notes on the subject. The phenomenon of the Soviet cinema of the 1930s as “the most mass- scale of the arts” did not originate in a vacuum but was preceded by more generalized processes. It rode on a sweeping shift in the cultural paradigm: from the avant-garde of the “roaring twenties” toward a stabilizing form of consciousness—in other words, toward narrative, “accessible” structures in art in general. Also the industry was boosted by a technological coup: the advent and adaptation of sound had made this process particularly inevitable and pronounced in cinema. In a number of ways, however, the beginning of the decade was spe¬ cifically pivotal in the USSR. In social terms, the rout of the peasantry had been concluded. Economically, the process of monopolized indus¬ trialization of the country had begun. Politically, the course toward an autocratic seizure of power was set in place. Ideologically, ideas of revolution were to yield to the idea of an imperial form of statehood. It is within this context that the new paradigm of Soviet cinema was to emerge. As early as 1927, it was formulated in an anonymous report, in a manner suitably programmatic for the monopolized structure of the future: [In our country] criticism tears down films that thrill the workers as well as the progressive portion of the bourgeois intelligentsia . . . The motto of Soviet film studios: “Our films will be 100% ideologically consis¬ tent and 100% commercially profitable.” Soviet film ought to be quite profitable. It is only when it is received with pleasure by the moviegoer that it may function as a tool of communist education. Therefore, we declare [that] a “commercially profitable film” and an “ideologically consistent film,” do not contradict, but in fact supplement each other. The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers 97 “Full service to the film market” demanded, in the opinion of the re¬ port’s author, no fewer than two hundred motion pictures per year, but since there would be sufficient resources for only fifteen to twenty well-produced films, these would have to be ideological blockbusters; the remaining bulk of the films—the cheaper ones—would have to be “primarily entertainment-oriented.” This—at the outset of the New Economic Policy—is how the future “model” of an “economically profitable and ideologically efficacious cinematography,” as we say today, looked to the speaker. This model envisaged not only basic principles and quantitative indices, but also a hierarchy of different types of films: Heroic pictures are to occupy the principal place. The purpose of these pictures is the mobilization of the masses’ consciousness. Pictures deal¬ ing with problems of daily life during the epoch of transition are to occupy second place . . . The third place—of lesser significance, but greater quantity—is to go to pictures of an entertaining nature, whose goal is to combat the more harmful urges of the population (drunken¬ ness, hooliganism, etc.) ... by attracting the masses to the movies. 1 In fact, the change of the paradigm, within the context of an announced sharpening of the class struggle, took on the ominous character of a “rout of formalism,” which was concluded in cinema by the time of the All-Union Artistic Conference of Workers in the Soviet Film In¬ dustry, in January 1935. In a situation of a finally realized monopoly in production and exhibition, this meant a decisive predominance of the ideological criterion over the economic one. Qualitatively, this was manifested in the displacing of “popular film” into the periphery and gradually from the process as a whole. Quantitatively, it was expressed in an overall reduction of the number of titles. If the late 1920s and beginning-1930s yield the maximal production of motion pictures per year—119 for 1927, 124 for 1928, and 128 for 1930 (a record number)—the year 1933 shows a significant downward jump, to only 29 films. 2 Never again until 1953 (the year of Stalin’s death) would the number of films reach one hundred, varying on aver¬ age, between forty and fifty. In this sense, the fateful year 1937 yields the classic figure: forty films. In the postwar years, production fell to about twenty films on average, reaching an absolute minimum during a period of yet another “intensification of the class struggle” and the so-called “low production” ( malokartin’e) years: 23 in 1947,13 in 1950, and 9 in 1951 (also a record number). The reduction of the quantitative index was taking place at the ex- 98 Maya Turovskaya pense of the elimination of the second (“daily-life”) and third (“enter¬ tainment”) film types, as defined by the 1927 theoretical model of a 100 percent ideologically consistent and economically profitable film industry. In fact, this model was never to have been achieved. In the borderline year of 1933, at the All-Union Conference on Thematic Planning, the head of the State Directorate for the Cinema and Photo¬ graphic Industry (gukf), Boris Shumiatskii, branded the “chase after quantity” as “leftist errors,” even “sabotage,” and named a number of films where “the [element of] entertainment . . . was divorced from principled idea content and became an end in itself.” 3 These films were pulled from distribution. As a result of an arbitrary decision of the State Directorate, even such a relatively commercial studio as Mezh- rabpom * did not manage to recover its production costs, and took a loss on “entertainment” ( Prosperity —163,100 rubles; Kuleshov’s The Horizon— 312,900 rubles). Thus the balance between ideology and profitability had been resolved—practically and for a long time— in favor of ideology. Shumiatskii’s dream of creating a Soviet Holly¬ wood under these conditions could not be realized, and withered with his deaths Nevertheless, “entertainment” became a significant element of the new paradigm, though this was to have no relation to communicativity (in other words, attendance). After the discussion, the film Counter¬ plan , shot “by the special assignment of the Party Central Committee for the Fifteenth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” was recog¬ nized as “a leading example of an entertaining film” (“dealing with the problems of daily life during the transitional period,” in the ter¬ minology of 1927). The same report by Shumiatskii in fact provided a definition: “By entertainment must be understood the great level of a film’s emotional effect, the great simplicity of a high mastery, which brings the principled idea content and the story line more quickly and easily to the mass viewer ” (emphasis added). Whether Counterplan actually became a mass favorite, we still do not know. Therefore, let us consider the case of A Path to Life —the veritable blockbuster of the Mezhrabpom studio. It provides a sketch, a preliminary outline, of the special relations emerging during the 1930s between the viewer and the realm of cinema. * “Mezhrabpom” is an acronym for “Mezhdunarodnaia rabochaia pomoshch’” (Workers’ International Relief).—Ed. tShumiatskii was in fact shot in 1938. See Richard Taylor, “Boris Shumiatskii and the Soviet Cinema in the 1930s: Ideology as Mass Entertainment,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 6 ,1(1986).—Ed. The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers 99 The Mezhrabpom studio was founded in 192.4 as “Mezhrabpom- Rus’,” with mixed Russian and German private capital, and from the outset was oriented toward profitability and export." To some extent, it retained this image (as a “joint-stock company”) under the new condi¬ tions. During the “Rus’ ” period, it claimed commercial records such as M/ss Mend (in three parts) (3,201,000 rubles), The Lame Gentleman (1,346,000 rubles), Dina Dzu-dzu (1,056,000 rubles). The Two Biddis (863,000 rubles), The Man from the Restaurant (852,000 rubles), and The Bear’s Wedding (829,000 rubles). 4 This was the negative balance of the success of “petty bourgeois films.” But there was also an ideo¬ logical surplus, with fairly good commercial results: such classic Soviet films as Mother (556,000 rubles), Storm over Asia (537,000 rubles), and The Forty-First (516,000 rubles). Technologically the studio was the best equipped (including sound), and was the first to enter the new decade having realized the new paradigm: ideology plus profitability, plus sound. Nikolai Ekk’s The Path to Life , produced by order from the Cheka, 5 earned the studio 2,883,500 rubles by 1935. 6 In analyzing this exceptional success, however, the studio was compelled once again to separate the wheat from the chaff: “The unheard-of success of The Path to Life was not based on a few vulgar songs or a bungled drinking scene, as some have tried to explain it, but rather on the theme, the enormous power of situations that are infused with idea content that is simple, but intensely dramatic.” The social drama of homeless children depicted in The Path to Life entailed a multitude of possibilities for film, a multitude of story lines and elements of spectacle needed for the creation of a massive “pack” of films of the same genre, even if didactic in content. Not to mention the fact that The Path to Life was the first sound film—a fact that undoubtedly determined the exceptional scale of its success. It is true, however, that in 1934, out of 30,000 projectors throughout the coun¬ try, only 300—that is, 1 percent—were equipped for sound. Either silent films or silent versions of films had to be made (the well-known example of Romm’s Boule de Suif being no exception). But the path opened up by Nikolai Ekk’s film remained empty: no pictures about homeless children were to follow it. The possibilities of the story line as well as elements of spectacle already “discovered” by the film were neither adapted nor refined: they were to remain charac¬ teristic of a single case. This was typical for the noncommercial model of cinema: along with unearned income, the immense socio-critical It was replaced in 19x8 by Mezhrabpomfilm.—Ed. 100 Maya Turovskaya charge of the theme vanished in the sand. This is particularly evident in contrast with the productionist, commercial practice of the U.S. film industry in a similar context. During Prohibition, bootlegging became the same kind of social malady in America as the problem of homeless children in postrevolutionary Russia. An entire branch of the “gang¬ ster film” was constituted on material related to bootlegging, and with Little Caesar (1930), as well as its successors, Warner Brothers not only earned capital, but also worked out the principles of the genre. A genre-based, mass cinema cannot develop without continuity and the refinement of canons and devices, a star system, and so forth— that is to say, without everything that comprises a “film industry.” It cannot consist of individual cases of auteur films. Who knows what kind of classics and what possibilities the Soviet film industry lost by not taking advantage of the lesson of The Path to Life? The only exception in the practice of noncommercial, primarily ideological Soviet cinema were films about the Revolution: as early as 1927, it was declared that “the major place in the repertoire must be occupied by heroic films”—the goal of these films being “the mobiliz¬ ing of the consciousness of the masses.” For in the first place, heroic films directed the principal socio-critical charge at the past (the numer¬ ous “enemies of the people” would thus acquire the status of “birth¬ marks of capitalism”); secondly, these films would replace actual his¬ tory with a particular legend—they mythologized it. It was precisely in the legend genre that Soviet cinema was to be most successful, creating both a canon and a continuity, working out stereotypes and methods that could then be transplanted into any chronotope (one could take as an example biographical films about military leaders). Indeed, it was in this genre that the typical “seriality” of mass cinema was to emerge (the Maxim trilogy, Leniniana, then Staliniana), and the desired “heroic image,” as well as the “image of the enemy” necessary for its canonization, was to have been created. It is for this reason that we feel that the historical-revolutionary film represents not merely a permanent segment of the production plan, but more a genre in the full sense—indeed, the “fateful genre of the Soviet cinema,” to use Andre Bazin’s term. Here ideology and profit could finally meet, and cinema would devote its best efforts to them. For all of the following decades, through the 1980s, it was Chapaev (1934) that was to have discovered the formula for viewer success. 7 The history of Soviet cinema usually approaches Chapaev in terms of historical-revolutionary film, without addressing its genre characteris- The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers 101 tics. However, in its structure (from original chaos to order) as well as its narrative devices Chapaev in fact approximates a foolproof West¬ ern. In this sense, it might be called an “Eastern.” 8 Both structures are based on the adventure-story canon refined over centuries. It was the combination of a document (Furmanov’s book) and a genre canon that created the Chapaev phenomenon. Although by no means conceived as a “hit” (it was designated as an average “defense film” in the 1934 production plan), Chapaev in fact became the first experiment with totalized state demand, as marked by the well-known lead story in the newspaper Pravda (zi November 1934): “The Whole Country Is Watching Chapaev.” The spontaneous viewer response to the lucky find of a genre formula was used for an extensive propaganda campaign: “The film Chapaev develops into a political phenomenon . .. The Party has been given a new and power¬ ful means of educating the class consciousness of the young ... Hatred of the enemy, combined with a rapturous admiration for the heroic memory of the warriors who fell for the Revolution acquires the same strength as a passionate love for the socialist motherland.”” A new distribution policy was in fact also worked out, which would comprise part of the foundation of the new structure of the cinematic process, far beyond the 1930s. Supply was to take precedence over demand. “The Whole Country Is Watching Chapaev. It is being reproduced in hundreds of copies for the sound screen. Silent versions will also be made so that Chapaev will be shown in every corner of our immense country: in the towns and the villages, the collective farms and settle¬ ments, in barracks, clubs and the squares.”* This should be read with the knowledge that in 1934 theaters equipped for sound comprised only 1 percent of the total number. Perspective is also gained from the fact that, for quite some time, preference would be accorded to the num¬ bers of copies per title—determined in an arbitrary, administrative manner—over the number of titles. The question of the export of Soviet films, as well as the import of a few films, against a background of almost complete autarchy, has yet to be studied; the surviving viewers from the 1930s count the latter on their fingers. Two films by Chaplin ( City Lights and Modern Times) aside, importation was fairly random. The level of popularity of any foreign film is attested by an everyday fashion: the cut and Translation quoted from The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Docu¬ ments 1896—1939, Richard Taylor and lan Christie, eds. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 334 - 35 -—td. tlbid. 102 Maya Turovskaya name of a woman’s hat, popular until the beginning of the war— Little Mamma —were borrowed from the film starring Francesca Gaal.* As with vodka, the transformation of film into a state monopoly, en¬ dowing it with a propagandistic, primarily didactic status, the whole¬ sale “indoctrination” of even residual genre structures (occasional, piecemeal comedy, individual musical films, etc.) that had been driven toward the periphery of the cinematic process, and finally, the prece¬ dence of arbitrarily determined supply over demand in a situation of a generalized shortage of entertainment toward the end of the decade: all of this had an effect on viewer demand—more so than could have been expected. In principle, the viewers’ “other taste” (a term we adopt in place of what art history calls “poor taste”) is fairly stable. If the quasi¬ market situation of the 1920s in Soviet cinema is taken as the norm, the end of the 1930s shows the greatest departure from it, not only in terms of cinema policy, but also in terms of an overall destabilization of public consciousness. 9 By the next anniversary of the Revolution, the parameters of viewer demand reveal a noticeable shift. This was the only time that films recognized as exemplary in their artistry— and, by force of circumstance, having become the ideologemes of the time—would turn out to be circulation leaders: 1937 —Lenin in Octo¬ ber (M. Romm); 10 1938 —Alexander Nevsky (S. Eisenstein); 1939— Lenin in 1918 (M. Romm). The ideological, aesthetic, and box-office criteria coincided, reveal¬ ing a rather genuine “politico-moral unity” of the society. 11 Here, how¬ ever, it is necessary to specify the concept of “mass demand.” It is in fact mass ( massovyi ), insofar as it meets box-office ( kassovyi ) cri¬ teria—that is, insofar as it is manifested in economic indicators. At the same time, however (particularly within the context of a noneco¬ nomic structure, where marketing is not a factor), demand represents that which is among what is most private, serving the most personal, even intimate, needs. Therefore, even under a totalitarian regime, it cannot be made completely identical with state supply, regardless of the extent to which it is imposed. For this reason, we have tried to specify one more differentiating index, which introduces a correction into the popularity index of a film, namely, distribution per copy. It is significant insofar as it designates only demand, independently, and sometimes at odds with, supply, and shows that, even in the most mo¬ nopolistic model, supply and demand—however close they approach This is a reference to the film by Henry Koster, Kleine Mutti (1935).—Ed. The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers 103 each other—are still not identical. The viewer still has a private need, however microscopic, that cannot be equated with the state one. According to this index, titles almost anonymous for film history are often in the leading position. For example, in the anniversary year of 1937, the little-known film Karo turns out to be far ahead of Lenin in October: Title of film Receipts Distribution Receipts per copy Lenin in October 774,600 rubles 955 767 Karo 355,900 rubles 198 i ,797 Karo was the Armenian screen adaptation of Gaidar’s The School. This is an average historical-revolutionary film, with a Western-like plot line, magnificent “adventure-story” mountain landscape, recognizable references, most of all to Chapaev, right down to the machine-gunner. But also with a young hero, so suitable for identification. Surely the film’s repeat audiences were his age-mates—if only because, in dis¬ tribution per copy, Karo is followed by another youth film, A Lonely White Sail Gleams.* Thus the youth audience, which is the most active in all periods, ap¬ pears to be faithful not to fashion, but to nature, and to generic human values, reinforced in genre stereotypes. In 1938, the highly ideologi¬ cal film Alexander Nevsky leads by both indices (this is Eisenstein’s only box-office success), while during the same year the comedy Volga- Volga, as well as films like The Vyborg Side and The Man with a Gun appeared. Yet it was Vas’ka Buslai and Gavrila Oleksich—costumed, fairy tale heroes of a battle film—who became the same kind of char¬ acters in boys’ games as Chapaev. Once again, this indicates that, for any film, being a “blockbuster” has to do with satisfying the more subterranean, nonaesthetic needs. The phenomenon of the late 1930s—that is, the maximal conver¬ gence of three criteria: the ideological, the aesthetic, and the mass— would never be repeated in the history of Soviet film. The war (in keeping with Vasilii Grossman’s paradoxical thought that the inner world of a Soviet person is liberated under extreme conditions) yielded a noticeable “privatization” of demand. In the notable year of 1945, the top place was held by Guilty without Guilt , a classical theatrical 'Film by Vladimir Legoshin (1937), based on Valentin Kataev's 1936 novel of the same title.-—Ed. 104 Maya Turovskaya melodrama entirely unrelated to the war.* In distribution per copy, it was surpassed only by the artistically weak adaptation of the operetta SilvaA Films of all genres which were connected in one way or another with the war, such as The Great Turning Point, Invasion , and even adventure films like Sigmund Kolosovskii and comedies like The Heav¬ enly Sloth, were left behind. Never again would mass taste coincide with state demand. In the years 1947 to 1949 the autarchic regime in cinema was bro¬ ken up in the most paradoxical manner: the so-called “trophy” films from the Goebbels archives were thrown into Soviet distribution— without subtitles and often under different titles. Sometimes these were American pictures ( What Happened to a Soldier in America ,* Tarzan ), though the bulk were German. If the number of domestic titles is re¬ called, the proportion seems huge: Soviet German Year pictures pictures % German 1947 23 4 17 1948 17 14 82 1949 18 1 7 94 Thus it happened that the “generation of victors” was brought up on the products of Nazi cinema. 12 The majority of the films, of course, was of the nonideological, entertainment genre— Snow Fantasy, yet another Indian Tomb, The Road to the Gallows, and so forth—but there were also ideologeme films, such as The Transvaal in Flames (the Soviet title for the famous Ohm Kruger) or The Poet’s Calling (for Friedrich Schiller). Alas, they were to be received without qualms: the selection of ideologemes (the denunciation of British imperialism, revolutionism) was similar. In 1947 the unforgettable The Girl of My Dreams, starring Marika Rokk, s surpassed in distribution per copy Boris Barnet’s hit, The Patrol’s Exploits —which held the top place in receipts—by more than five times! (22.2 to 103.8). Strange as it *Based on the historical play by Aleksandr Ostrovskii (1884).—Ed. tFilm by Aleksandr Ivanovskii (1945), based on the operetta Silva (19x5), by the Hungarian composer Imre Kalman (1882—1953).—Ed. ^Russian title of Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939).—Ed. SThis is a reference to the German musical Die Frau meiner Trdurne (1944). Bulat Okudzhava’s story “Devushka moei mechty” (“The Girl of My Dreams”) is precisely referring to the Soviet version of this “trophy” film in the context of the “difficult post¬ war years.” B. Okudzhava, lzbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakb (Selected Works in Two Volumes) (Moscow, 1989), 2:286.—Ed. The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers 105 may seem, this has to be considered a relative normalization of mass demand. The success of The Girl testified to the extreme shortage of a commonplace prosperity, a European standard of living (even if in a kitsch style), and, finally, the erotic value of women. When there is a catastrophic shortage of domestic “mass culture,” it is borrowed wherever possible. By the time of yet another “intensification of the class struggle”— this time against “rootless cosmopolitans”—the unity of the three cri¬ teria (ideological, aesthetic, and box office) within the same model was sharply disrupted. The state, the intelligentsia, and the mass viewer began to select different favorites. This laid the foundation for the long-drawn-out war between aesthetic criticism and the official one (through the Fifth Congress of the Film Makers’ Union—alas, in the backrooms), and the “poor taste” of the public, on the pages of the press. The situation has not changed even now. With the incorpora¬ tion into the global film process (neorealism, the new wave) the “other taste” has become all the more manifest. The 1970s passed under the box-office sign of the anonymous Mexican Esenia ,* the previous, Western model of the blockbuster evidently being replaced in the pub¬ lic’s taste by the “Eastern” model. This speaks to the overall condition of the society. Thus monopolization, autarchy, the creation of a single model of the quasi-popular, propagandistic film, as well as a unifying interpretation of the principle of “socialist realism,” in addition to arbitrary state decision making with respect to cinema during the decisive decade of the 1930s, were to produce a dislocation in the film process. Today we are still dealing with the consequences of this dislocation. Its major signs are: (a) The ignoring of the natural—heterogeneous—structure of needs, and the replacement of the natural—heterogeneous—model of cinematic development, based on aesthetic (spiritual), political, enter¬ tainment, and other functions, by a homogeneous model of a propa¬ gandistic (didactic), quasi-popular cinema. The ideal embodiment of this model is in fact the great cinema of the 1930s. (b) The fostering of a one-dimensional, didactic perception, based from the outset upon the postulate of “socialist realism,” with the demand to “test film against life,” regardless of genre. This didac- *The title is transliterated phonetically from the Russian and its origin could not be established.—Ed. 106 Maya Turovskaya tic one-dimensionality paradoxically brings together two extremes— state/party criticism and aesthetic criticism, against the “other taste,” rendering it illegitimate. (c) The artificial eradication of the development of “popular cinema” as a branch of industry, which began during the “market era.” But since the structure of demand remains heterogeneous, and the bases of the “other taste” apparently run deeper than we think, ulti¬ mately the actual functioning of the cinema in society is not subject even to the most willfully imposed supply. As a result: (a) most often, the mass viewer chooses favorite films from a pool of foreign cine¬ matographies where popular film is firmly established (an “American film,” an “Indian film”); (b) neither the state/party power nor aes¬ thetic criticism and the film community possess instruments for study¬ ing the “other taste”; (c) the actual situation in Soviet cinema during the moment of transition to a new model remains unknowable and unknown. 13 Notes An earlier version of this article was presented at a symposium, sponsored by the International Research & Exchanges Board (irex), on Soviet and American cinema of the 1930s at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., December, 1990). 1. In fact, such a “model” was implemented in Nazi Germany. Within the context of comprehensive “indoctrination” and rigid party control, only a small number of films would be actually “ideological.” The bulk of the pro¬ duction was oriented, as under the former UFA [Universum-Film Aktiengesell- schaft.—Ed.], toward entertainment: the old economic structure was still at work. The monopolization of the German film industry was to be completed only in 1943—similarly, it had taken a decade. But it was already too late. 2. The drop from 74 films in 1932 to 29 in the following year was not accidental: it was the result of a party “dressing-down.” 3. These films were The Path to Life, The Glory of the World, Rote Fahne, The Horizon, Heil Moskau, and Prosperity. 4. The figures for receipts are not per year but in toto. 5. It was precisely the Cheka (see p. 72), under Dzerzhinskii’s leadership, that took upon itself the task of rooting out the vagrancy of homeless children. 6. In another source, we have found mention of the fact that The Path to Life produced a record figure for gross receipts for all Soviet films—about 15 million rubles (by the end of 1931 and 1932). This figure apparently includes the expenditures by the theater network, which were not included by the studio in its report. The Tastes of Soviet Moviegoers 107 7. Unfortunately, we do not yet have statistical data at our disposal on the film Chapaev. 8. A direct connection with American mass cinema is evident in the history of the adventure film The 13 (1937), produced by Stalin’s personal order, on the model of the film The Last Patrol (John Ford, 1934), and carried out by the dramatist Iosif Prut and the director Mikhail Romm. Statistics on this film have not been found. 9. The system of contexts we have elaborated, against the background of which the film process takes place, consists of a number of contradictory factors which created this destabilization at the end of the 1930s. 10. In analyzing this box-office success, one should not underestimate the viewer’s interest in the embodiment of the legendary figure, or Boris Shchukin’s quasi-authentic method of doing this. This remarkable actor offered a humane, almost everyday version of him. n. Something similar in those years could be observed in Germany’s film industry. Der grosse Konig (The Great King) and Jud Suss (The Jew Suss), which also were ideologemes of the time, yielded high distribution figures, showing the level of “indoctrination” of the population. Nevertheless, the absolute champion of the Third Reich was the melodrama Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Love)—a product of the supply governed by the market. 12.. For that matter, the basic mass films in everyday circulation up to the 1950s were films of the 1930s. 13. This paper is based on material assembled by a group of researchers. Nevertheless, the following sources may be mentioned: Za bol’shoe kinoi- skusstvo (For the Great Art of Cinema) (Moscow, 1935); E- Lemberg, Kitio- promyshlennost’ SSSR. Ekonomika sovetskoi kinematografii (The Cinema In¬ dustry USSR. The Economics of Soviet Cinematography) (Moscow, 1930); B. Shumiatskii, Kinematografiia millionov (A Cinema for the Millions) (Mos¬ cow, 1935). Evgeny Dobrenko The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon How you were both in a dimension ~ Outside the laws of space and time— —Anna Akhmatova, Poem without a Hero * * Foundations were bent there In the window not a single glass Like Goya’s bats At times the darkness came through. —Nikolai Gumilev, From Theophile Gautier + Socialist realism, as its proponents say, is a “method that is living, de¬ veloping”—“an historically open aesthetic system.” As a “transitional method,” socialist realism is not dead: in speaking of the twentieth century, a century filled with terrible social cataclysms—revolutions, totalitarian regimes, autarchies, fascist dictatorships, irrational sys¬ tems—we constantly feel its breath. It is probably for this reason that we turn again and again to the research of totalitarian culture, which reminds us that antitotalitarian art is not free from the culture by the negation of which it lives. I think that it is not possible to understand the Russian post-avant- garde of the late twentieth century without knowing the initial, pri¬ mary language in which it works (in this respect, the “sofs-art”* is the most characteristic example). That primary language, socialist realism, represents an ongoing past, which, paradoxical as it may seem, has *Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, trans. D. M. Thomas (London, 1985), 113.— Ed. TThis stanza is from Theophile Gautier’s collection Emaux et camees. Here is the French text: “Un vrai chateau d’Anne Radcliffe, / Aux plafonds que le temps ploya, / Aux vitraux rayes par la griffe / Des chauves-souris de Goya. ...”—Ed. tThe term “sots-art” (sots being short for socialist) was coined by the Soviet artists Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid in conjunction with a 1976 exhibition of their work at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. Seen as a variation of pop art, this was to be a means of “deconstructing the shrines of Soviet ideology.” See Margarita Tupitsyn’s Margins of Soviet Art (Milan, 1989). 110 Evgeny Dobrenko also become the future—not only because it is being realized by con¬ temporary art (in the same “sofs-art,” for example), but also because, as far as the Soviet mentality is concerned, it reflects the catastrophic time of the homo sovieticus in a concentrated way. For me, such a time is one when the present is in principle absent. All that is present is an enduring past projected into the future: in the process of building communism, our bright future, the present is missing. Such a naive teleology has its own mechanics: the past is justified by the future, and therefore it cannot be connected with the present; on the other hand, the future is understood as the absolute past, and in this way it also bypasses the present. Such is the time of catastrophe, when there is something before and something after the event, while the event itself seems to be absent—it is not actualized and is not really thinkable as anything having substance. It is as if there is no life itself, no experi¬ encing of real time. In such a situation, it is possible to do anything with the past (for example, to falsify it in all its moments); it is pos¬ sible to think the future in whatever way (a communism of some kind). A fundamental monument to Sovietism is before us. Soviet literature has verbalized the entire Soviet mentality. The literature of totalitari¬ anism expresses the language of power. It could even be said that the discourse of power is the discourse of Soviet literature. It should be understood right away that this literature cannot be studied by tradi¬ tional methods. It has a different code; different keys are needed to describe its peculiar yet important system. To understand the mecha¬ nism and language of this literature is to understand the mechanism and language of totalitarian power. Roland Barthes’s well-known conception of language as a mytholo¬ gizing phenomenon, and of literature as that which liberates us from myth, is important for the understanding of totalitarian literature. In a totalitarian state, literature becomes, in Barthes’s terms, a vast system of mytho-production and recoding of reality in the direction necessary for power. The concept of a “fundamental lexicon” is not a metaphor. We are indeed faced with a kind of linguistic reality, and it may be studied using models that describe linguistic reality: it has a lexical order of its own, its own lexical units and modules, its own syntag- matics and paradigmatics. The mechanisms of numerous systems of ideological action upon the individual are at work here: for example, the mechanism of myth, with respect to the image of the supreme leader, demonology, and a pantheon of heroes, or mechanisms of clas¬ sical rhetoric that run through the text from the beginning (the organi¬ zation of the plot line) to the end (extending as far as the speech order and the utterances of the heroes). The Literature of the Zhdanov Era ill Postwar literature, the literature of the “Zhdanov period,” has a unique and complex relation with time. This literature reflects a re¬ flected light, an image of thought and the world, for it had never been contemporaneous. From the outset, it is nontemporal , it reflects the catastrophic, zero Soviet time—time that does not exist. A law of double reflection functions here (the world is reflected in the institu¬ tions of power and only after that in literature), which is universal in the Soviet mentality—for Soviet time too has a double reflective sur¬ face: in the zero crystal of the non-present, the past is reflected in the future and the future in the past. Extraordinarily quickly, postwar literature became removed, a thing in itself. The sharp break in the social and the literary situation, for which it is difficult to find analogies in Soviet history, was so tan¬ gible, and the popularization of the views of the recent past became so sharp, that both the proponents and the opponents of the systematic views asserted by postwar literature already saw it from the outside, as a tradition of socialist realism. While some completely opposed it and others just as actively defended it, both sides did this with re¬ spect to a “thing in itself” that was already closed and finished. In any event, such rapid externalization of what only yesterday was a living mass and the “matter of existence”—for both the future detractors and apologists—was hardly conducive to a scholarly, sober approach to things. It was that rare enough case when a rapid birth is more harmful not to the child hut to the mother. Neither was the very in¬ tensity of the literary development of the 1960s and the subsequent years conducive to an understanding of this literature. The distancing of postwar literature was as rapid as the acquisition of new thematics, views, forms, the turn to a new problematic as well as the attaining of a new level of its comprehension. It is also quite understandable that the researchers’ interest is concentrated on these innovations. The new also consisted of variety: the literary process ceased to be monolinear. Some immediately turned away from postwar literature as from a ter¬ rible nightmare, beginning with the famous Novyi mir (New World) articles of Pomerantsev and Abramov. 1 Until recently, others continued to speak of postwar literature as a “great literature,” from Ovcharenko to Petrov, from Metchenko to Ershov, from Novikov to Vykhodtsev. The latter continue to speak of it in a more or less similar way. 2 This is neither the time nor the place to engage in these arguments. 1 will only note that postwar literature lacked an internal self-regulator: criticism. This is one of its peculiarities. It is not possible to speak of postwar literature in terms of a literary process; this is a kind of internally static phenomenon, which by its nature is incapable of self- 112 Evgeny Dobrenko development and reacts only to external impulses. Hence, the utter absence of actual movement. This stasis was built into and fine-tuned by a system in which literature diligently functioned; criticism did not serve as a self-regulator, but rather as both a means and the object of various external manipulations. So the postwar period in literature has left us practically no criticism of its own. Neither “face to face” nor “at a distance”: this literature was essentially never grasped. The polemic was conducted approximately at the following level: To what extent “are elements of charm or sentimentality” present in Babaevskii’s The Knight of the Golden Star ? For well-known reasons, it was not possible to exit this closed circle. The argument (a large number of such “arguments” is to be found on the pages of the peri¬ odicals during the late 1940s) was circular: “to a greater extent,” “to a lesser extent,” and finally, there really are no such “elements.” As I say this, I recall one of the discussions on the pages of Novyi mir, when Danin’s criticism of Gribachev’s poem “The Kolkhoz Bolshe¬ vik” was declared to be “mistaken”—while in regard to the polemic around The Knight of the Golden Star , it was said in an editorial article that Riabov’s assessment of the novel was “accurate” (in the latter’s article entitled “The Truth of Life,” and later “The Light of Our Life,” Babaevskii’s work was declared “paradigmatic”) because “[Riabov] knows the kolkhoz * life so well”—but not Motyleva, “who has never studied kolkhoz life.” 3 Even this level of “argument” passed quite soon. In 1949, there erupted a campaign against the “critic-cosmopolits,” “antipatriotic criticism”—which, while “kissing up to bourgeois culture,” “poisoned the healthy atmosphere of Soviet art with the stench of bourgeois hurrah-cosmopolitism, aestheticism, and aristocratic snobbism.” 4 At fault, in particular, was criticism of “patriotic plays” such as Roma- shov’s The Great Force and Surov’s The Green Street. All those who in any way opposed the existing state of things—Uzovskii, Gurvich, Borshchagovskii, Boiadzhiev, Al’tman, Kholodov, Varshavskii, Subo- tskii, Danin, Erlikh, and many others—were subjected to devastating criticism. While the history of all these ideological campaigns still awaits research, what is apparent here is literature’s utter dependence upon ideological exigencies: nothing else could have occurred in the case of a literature that had become a function of the totalitarian sys¬ tem. As a result of a permanent campaign against “malicious, rootless fault-finding,” literature was left completely without criticism. De- * Kolkhoz is an acronym for “collective farm.”—Ed. The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 113 prived of the ability to express social self-consciousness, literature did not have to “notice” this “loss”—it also had to be deprived of the consciousness of itself, that is, criticism of its self. These frightening pages of domestic history were hardly turned to later. First, “it is sometimes slippery to walk upon different stones” (for everyone concerned was still left in place, some even to the present day—while little by little even values themselves began to be par¬ tially reborn), and second, this literature of course well deserved such treatment. The blatantly obvious fruitlessness of an entire decade in literature—artistic fruitlessness, as well as the moral and ideologi¬ cal decline—may vindicate the critics, yet it cannot vindicate literary scholars and historians of literature. Culture tolerates no lacunae— they simply cannot exist there. And no matter how much we try to walk away from the terrible past, to overcome it, there is no substitute for a historico-humanist analysis of this past. Attempted flight avenges itself: the postwar “black hole” in the history of literature—which ex¬ plains a great deal about contemporary social consciousness—remains uncomprehended and unrecognized. What do 1 mean? Books are of course not statues, buildings, or streets—much less cities. While it is possible to take the Girl with the Oar and Pavlik Morozov off the pedestal/ it is pointless to take down the “Stalin apartment buildings”—for there are not only streets, but whole cities whose centers consist entirely of such buildings, while in other cities there are the obligatory monumental “inserts.” Thinking incarnated in stone is before our eyes at all times; for lack of demand, books have died on the shelves—though this is a delayed-action bomb. It seems good that these dusty, yellowing, unread books have died. It is good that they have died for the reader. It is bad that the same is also true in the case of the literary historians. For these books reveal, more fully, more visibly, more precisely, the fundamental lexicon that stands in opposition to the philosophy called “new thinking” (it is new only in relation to this lexicon)—a lexicon that the society must now over¬ come, that must be “squeezed out of oneself drop by drop.” It is in the *“The Girl with the Oar,” or what is often described as “the Soviet Venus,” is a sculpture of a muscular girl without much expression on her face, which may be found in many parks in cities throughout the USSR; Pavlik Morozov is a martyr of the Col¬ lectivization and subsequently was declared the “Hero of Soviet Children”; at the age of twelve he reported his father for hiding grain. He was murdered in 1932., together with his younger brother, by “anti-revolutionary kulaks.” Gor’kii urged Soviet writers to glorify Morozov, “who, regardless of blood kinship, discovered kinship of the spirit.” See M. Gor’kii, “Literatura i kino” (Literature and Cinema), in Sobranie socbinenii (Collected Works) (Moscow, 1953), 27: 440.—Ed. 114 Evgeny Dobrenko postwar literature that this lexicon is verbalized. But is it possible to speak of what is not comprehended and not even recognized? We often hear today that it is necessary to overcome the mythologism of thought. Human consciousness is indeed subject to hateful myths. Yet it is neces¬ sary to understand and come to terms with the myth-producing system itself, its basis and means of existence and self-reproduction. It would seem that the most favorable circumstances for such under¬ standing exist today. Yet with the passing of time it becomes clear that our old thinking has played a nasty joke on us: even against the back¬ drop of general interest in postwar history, scientific, historical interest in postwar literature is not to be found. The following principle is at work: there is no interest in what is not interesting. While at the level of everyday consciousness this is explainable and understandable (why should the reader prefer what is now simply impossible to read to Bul¬ gakov, Platonov, or Zamiatin, who have finally become accessible?), at the level of scholarly consciousness this is unforgivable. I am looking at what is undoubtedly one of the best historico-literary works of the past year—Chudakova’s article entitled “Without Anger or Bias: The Forms and Deformations in the Literary Process of the 1920s and 1930s.” In the course of the present discussion it will be necessary to return to it (to some extent I am continuing its theme), but here is its conclusion—a characteristic one: And looking carefully at the literature between the 1960s and 1980s— a small grove having grown up, stems having timidly risen—we notice its present condition, which has appeared surprising for many. The lax¬ ness of creative will, spiritual stupefaction, becoming hysterical. This is a signal of a tragic situation: all the living fluids that the barbarically plowed, forcibly exhausted earth could yield, are gone. And we begin to understand what really happened during the 19ZOS and 1930s. 5 The dates themselves are telling: the 1920s and 1930s, and then on to the 1960s through 1980s. When will we finally come closer to under¬ standing “what really happened” between the river’s source and its outlet? Given the actual Soviet history developing today, its postwar period appears as a link of utmost importance. Obviously, in history all links are of equal importance and magnitude: it knows no “bad” or “good” periods. Yet the postwar period is a kind of a nerve center of our his¬ tory. Indeed, it is precisely here that we witness the culmination of an entire stage of literary development, as well as the emergence of the preconditions for a qualitatively new stage. Clearly, in order to under- The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 115 stand the processes occurring in literature between the 1960s and the 1980s, as well as the current literary and ideological situation—pro¬ cesses whose interconnections are at times complex and mediated—it is necessary to turn to the sources. And they are to be found not only in the 1920s and 1930s, but also in postwar literature, which contains both the “beginnings” and the “ends” of Soviet literary development. Chudakova has shown the way in which a literary process occurred during the 1920s and 1930s. This was indeed a process—a complex, torturous, tragic process of breakdown of societal consciousness and artistic thinking, a process of introducing social order into the most delicate process of creativity—from conception to realization and in¬ fluence. “During the 1930s,” writes Chudakova, for those literary figures whom we have identified as possessing an in- destructable creative core, leaps from hope to horror to new hope now began not only to define their social behavior but also to influence their creative acts. 6 Leaps, influence—all of this constituted a dynamic, a process. There is no other way to conceive of the 1920s and 1930s: they are move¬ ment itself, process itself. It is also true that by the 1930s “the spec¬ trum of possibilities was forcibly narrowed and the literary dynamic was severely slowed.” 7 By the end of the decade, the deceleration had ended—the process exhausted itself, completed itself, and immediately after the war (and partially during the war—the literature of the war period still awaits objective research) literature followed along the pre¬ set rails of a stopped time. This is why in principle postwar literature cannot be seen in terms of literary process: it is all stasis. The phe¬ nomenon of the completed cycle of the creative act became the first sign of such stagnation: the social order did not have to be inculcated; all the paradigms were already pregiven. In this sense, the censori¬ ous decree regarding the journals Zvezda and Leningrad became road signs for movement only in the existing direction. This “movement,” of course, has a sociopolitical explanation. In characterizing the pecu¬ liarity of the postwar period in Soviet history, Gefter speaks of “the war against a resurrected equality, still not having manifested itself, having inhabited the Image and not having reached the Concept.” 8 Actually, the formulations and decrees, both in Zhdanov’s speeches and the subsequent campaign in criticism in 1947, contained nothing new: the demands made of literature (and by this time it had learned the language of demands in the terrible cauldron of the 1930s, when the 116 Evgeny Dobrenko rules of the game were introduced, and it was also then that the stakes in this game were established) remained the same, the system of co¬ ordinates was completely confirmed. This is the most important thing: literature could no longer exist without such coordinates, since it was oriented toward a reflected light, and it was precisely the “governing directions that would adjust the focus of the gaze.” The severity of the formulations and assessments, above all with respect to Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, only confirm this: not only were they unjust, but also undeserved—in the sense that the charges, made against authors who were silent at the time, were completely random. The choice of the “objects” of disgrace was not accidental. Yet all the researchers of the art of, say, Zoshchenko, draw a decisive line between the stories and the feuilletons of the 192.0s and what had been created by him during the 1930s and 1940s. Having changed, as Zoshchenko himself put it, “the course of the literary ship,” he changed the hero himself into an object of satire, and hence he changed the language, the style, the plot- compositional system of his prose. These were basic transformations at the level of poetics, within the sphere of artistic thinking itself. There was also a qualitative change in his satire, whereby overt didacticism took center stage. Therefore the surprising (for the author himself) publication out of context of a children’s story cannot be taken in any way other than as a provocation and a pretext for persecution—which was of course not an end in itself but rather a prologue to a more sig¬ nificant ideological measure. Its goal: the conclusive transformation of the societal order into a superhuman duty and commandment. This goal is clearly indicated in the Zhdanov speech: We are put on the front line of the front of ideology, we have great tasks that have international significance, and this must increase every true Soviet literary figure’s sense of responsibility before one’s people, state, party—the sense of the importance of the duty that is being fulfilled. 9 A duty, even more so a commandment, must be carried out and under¬ stood: it is not something that should need to be inculcated—and this fact is quite significant. From here on out, the various ideological cam¬ paigns and revampings no longer demanded any extraordinary mea¬ sures in order to be carried out in literature. If the societal order is to enter the creative act—and this “entrance” demanded an internal re¬ vamping, which is what defined the tragic dynamics of the creative pro¬ cess during the 1920s and 1930s—then in postwar literature there was nothing to inculcate, and therefore the entire “process” was reduced to the changing of ideological campaigns, which meant nothing more The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 117 than the changing of thematics (a special investigation could show, for example, the way in which the thematic of the struggle against cosmo¬ politanism had formed and functioned). Even the recently ended war, a horrible wound that continued to bleed, was immediately externalized and became yet another thematic. In postwar literature the process of the 1920s and 1930s became both the result and the outcome. It was not only concluded and trans¬ formed into something qualitatively new, but under the new conditions it overcame and exhausted itself and its own forms. There was noth¬ ing to rupture: literature was already struck down. For the first time, blatant marketability (kon”iunkturnost’)* became the impulse for the creation of literary work (apparently it is pointless to speak of the cre¬ ative act here). One of the recent examples of this impulse is the history of the creation of a number of Konstantin Simonov works from his recollections (if we were to turn to the archives of the writers of those years, the true scale of this phenomenon would be revealed). Every¬ thing that did not fit this “creative method” was harshly suppressed or simply never reached societal judgment. The revamping of the mecha¬ nism of art, from the investigation of reality to the apology for it, was thoroughgoing and absolutely destructive for any art, since the orien¬ tation toward marketability is by its nature opposed to art. Postwar literature was based on an absence of stimuli toward progress, though the stimuli toward uniformity and stasis became extremely strong. To clarify: when one tries to grasp postwar literature, one always sees it as a single mass of works. And this is not merely a question of the absence of process as such, or of strict regulation of thematics, but of the atrophy of the searching creative impulse: it became impossible to cross the bounds of the thematics or the strictly delineated scale of valuations. The golden cage had shut. When it is said that the postwar decade saw the publication of Nekrasov’s In the Trenches of Stalingrad , Grossman’s In a Good Cause , or Platonov’s Ivanov’s Family , it is healthy to understand that before us are exceptions (though on the whole Grossman’s novel re¬ mained within the mainstream of the dominant tradition of the “pano¬ ramic novel”) which only confirm the rule of stasis. Likewise, a year after it was awarded the Stalin Prize of 1947, Nekrasov’s novel became the target of an open attack, precisely for its “trench-ness” (and it must ’'Literally, "kon”iunkturnost"' means “being oriented strictly by demand”—and although “marketability” is the closest English approximation of such a meaning, the reader should keep in mind that, at least until recently, the Russian original carried no “market” connotations in the Western sense.—Trans. 118 Evgeny Dobrenko always be remembered that in the criticism of these years there was nothing accidental—“private” opinions were practically absent here). Nekrasov’s notion that in “war you never do anything except whatever is happening under your own nose” in no way fit what was demanded on the pages of Novyi mir in 1948. 10 One critic declared that there is a lack of vision in such a principle of selecting materials, while the position of another, who gave the story a positive evaluation, was dis¬ missed as “objectivist.” Yet the most conclusive proof of the fact that Nekrasov’s novel was completely out of line with postwar literature is the character of the kind of literature that was being written about the war during the period, and the fact that, as the 1960s began, Nekrasov became the banner for the writers of the new wave of war prose. In 1989, one of them, Bykov, would say: Viktor Nekrasov saw the intelligent in the war, in contrast to the per¬ vasive view of him in our literature as a weakling. . . . [H]e asserted his rightness and his significance as a carrier of moral values. . . . This was probably not easy: in a country where the peasantry is destroyed [and] the initiative of the working masses is suppressed, the intelligentsia has become the only possible agent of moral progress. ... Of course, to a great extent Nekrasov turned out to be ahead of his time, and as it often happens ... in the end he paid dearly for this. 11 Grossman’s novel, too, was met with ammunition aplenty: it is suf¬ ficient to recall the blasting 1953 articles of Bubennov in Pravda and Lektorskii’s article in the journal Kommunist, with the characteristic title “A Novel That Distorts Images of the Soviet People.” The ap¬ pearance of such denunciatory articles in two central official party publications means a great deal in itself. As for Platonov’s story, after the famous article by Ermilov, its publication was actually disavowed, and could not be seen as anything other than a “major political error” on the part of the editorial board of Novyi mir —which, once again, only confirms the rule. On the whole, however, postwar literature knows neither peaks of any kind, nor valleys"—and the fact that the stories of, say, Panova 'This formulation is strikingly close to Marc Slonim’s “classic” judgment on Zhdanovite literature: “The landscape of Russian literature between 1945 and 1953 looked like a monotonous plain, with just a few low hills emerging from gray overcast skies. This rather desolate scene made it difficult to suspect that secret forces were active underground, awaiting a change of climate to burst into bloom.” See Marc Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems (New York, 1964), 292. In regard to the “forces” that were “active,” Dobrenko’s analysis of this “landscape” comes to quite different—and less optimistic—conclusions.—Ed. The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 119 are “more psychological” than the production novel is not so much their great achievement as an indicator of the range of the possible, the admissible level of psychologism within the given system. This sense of the uniform (unclear, yet at the same time amazingly monotonous) stream remains with anyone who decides to become immersed in post¬ war literature. I suspect that even the critical “method” of speaking of literature “by cartridgefuls” of writers’ names finally consolidated itself at the time. This is no surprise: the similarity of works was pre¬ determined in this system of prose. And while most of the works are unknown to a wide audience, this “unknown” literature lives on in our consciousness, defining the system of values that is often so difficult to relinquish. It must also be noted that we are talking about a “mas¬ sif” that is very extensive—these are thousands of works of all kinds and genres, even novels in verse. We are faced with a vast unexplored frontier, lands long abandoned: this literature is deeply ingrained in social consciousness and controls it, producing and reproducing autis¬ tic (mytho-producing) thinking, since the “fundamental lexicon” that it reinforces is based on a general cultural dislocation that affects prac¬ tically all spheres of social consciousness during this epoch. In this broad view, this “fundamental lexicon” was the child of the epoch when “arithmetic humanism” (“let a million people die, yet the rest will live in a bright world,” “as they chop the wood, the chips fly,” “hang them like vile curs,” “if the enemy does not give up, he is to be destroyed”—all of this is from the same lexicon) became tangible to the point of being touchable, indeed ossified after the bloody “dy¬ namic” of the 1930s, when the struggle ended and out of the fog there emerged an entire social model, in which the individual—the measure and the scale of “social architecture”—was already worthless. Stalin’s toast at the 1945 Kremlin reception in honor of the participants of the Victory parade is well-known: Do not think that I want to say something extraordinary. I have the simplest of common toasts. I would like to drink to people who are considered “screws” of the great state mechanism, but without whom we, the marshals and commanders of fronts and armies, are, to put it bluntly, not worth a darn. Some “screw” is out of order—and all’s fin¬ ished. I raise a toast to people who are common, ordinary, modest—for “screws” that keep our large state mechanisms in a state of readiness in all areas of science, economics and the military. These are modest people. No one writes anything about them, they have no titles, no great ranks, but these are the people who hold us up, as the base holds up the peak. 120 Evgeny Dobrenko In only a few sentences the person is described as a screw three times— which, while revealing, is nevertheless overly verbose. The artist is to express himself by aphorisms, “poetic formulas,” in order to make a mark on the consciousness. As Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi put it: “Individuality is a function of the epoch.” 12 Not too poetic, though with utmost brevity and exactitude. With precision. While in a certain way, individuality is always tied in with a super¬ individual basis of some kind, such a basis is not a unified and closed- off phenomenon: it has two limits which define “the boundaries of the individual’s aesthetic completion” within any creative world—the infra-individual and the ultra-individual. 13 “The infra-individual is one or another form of the individual’s belongingness to the world order: the individual’s place or functions, some kind of external directed- ness in relation to which the human T emerges as ‘inner givenness,’ called upon to realize its own directedness. The individual acquires this boundary as something that is ready-made, as a ‘unit’ of sorts of the world order, which it must fill with its existence.” 14 On the other hand, the ultra-individual is “one or another nonrole-based form of the individual’s belongingness to the event of life, as the co-existence with others, to the incomplete unity of life, the perpetually becoming manner of life.” 15 Thus, the balancing of the individual with the infra¬ individual, when the former is dissolved in the latter, becomes the key act of a heroic self-definition. It is then in the infra-individual, in the existing world order, a system of already existing values, that heroic individuality finds itself (this tradition defined itself quite clearly as leading within the literature of the 19x0s and 1930s). The orientation is toward the hero —which is the duty of literature (which sheds special light on the song line: “here anyone can become a hero”). In order to become a function, individuality must not arrive at values that are all-human, humanist, above class, beyond roles, for its way of life is all ready. Individuality, having to do with the “perpetually becoming way of life,” cannot be a function, for it has “already known of this tree.” This is the way in which literature acquires an orientation toward the heroic, for in all other types of individual self-definition (the tragic, the elegiac, the ironic) there is a route to “another” life, one beyond rules. In this way, the beachhead of self-consciousness had been shrunk to a small bit. But this small bit was not too cozy (like a chilly apartment with rented furniture); hence the desire to brighten it, fill it with light, joy, cheerfulness, optimism. This injunction became fixed in the titles. Not being able to stop to consider these works, I give only the titles—a sampling of a vast wave: Light over the Earth, Light The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 121 over the Fields, Light over Lipsk, The Sun of Altai, The Earth in Bloom, Happiness (Pavlenko), Happiness (Baialinov), The Azure Lights, The Azure Fields, Youth Is with Us, Song over the Waters, Life’s Sum¬ mits, The Happy Day, Winged People, The Future Begins, The Star of Happiness, Our Youth, The Rise, Youth, Always Ahead, The Stars Never Pale, The Road to Happiness, The Dawn, Toward the Dawn, The Moscow Dawns, The Sun That Never Sets, In the Happy Path. There is an amazing amount of a kind of feeling of spring, breadth, spaciousness (“a spring wind blows over my country”). The small bit is narrow, yet “broad is my beloved country”; the person is a func¬ tion, yet “with every passing day it is a greater joy to live.” Here they are, passing before one’s eyes: The Spring Winds, Spring-time, The Spring Streams, Spring, Spring on the Oder, The Big / Spring] Flood, What Airiness, The Wind of the Century, The Sea Breeze, The Wind from the South. And where there are winds and the spring, there are also roads: The Road to Frontiers, The Road Within, The Road to the Ocean, Roads That We Choose, Roads. Spaces also define the optics: The Great Fate, Great Kin, The Great Ore, The Great Family, The Great Art, The Great Day. Even someone who has never touched any of the books mentioned must sense a certain kind of disposition and understand that everything here is not accidental. These titles have a semantics of their own. There is an effort here to broaden the horizon, but to do so in a certain direction—obviously not one of a system of commonplace humanist values, but in the direction of some kind of an abstract continuum. Remaining for many years in a state of a humanist spasm—an acute shortage of humanism that has resulted in a coma— literature sought to humanize the fabula, at least externally. Yet it is not a question of the titles, but of the fabula itself. “Happi¬ ness” is ephemeral. Everything depends on the standpoint. The post¬ war Crimea is seen in one way by, say, Pristavkin, while for Pavlenko it is quite different: “a delight of bountifulness.” It is difficult to believe that, as secretary of the Crimean writers’ organization from 1945 to 1951, Pavlenko did not see reality or did not know it. It is also naive to suppose that his imagination was clouded to such an extent that the writer could not distinguish the clearly black from the clearly white. One last guess remains: the lie is in fact conscious. There is always some discrepancy between ideals and interests. In postwar literature, it was cynicism that became firmly entrenched in this gap. This situation was still not that pronounced in the litera¬ ture of the 1920s or early 1930s. The deformations that took place were tragic precisely because there was still some pocket of resistance, 122 Evgeny Dobrenko the resisting creative spirit, the position of the artist, albeit weakened in uneven struggle. When this last bastion was also taken during the middle 1930s, the entire fortress collapsed. It is from its ruins that the great empty glitter of postwar literature grew—the literature of non¬ creators. Thus was completed the process that Chudakova noted in the literature of the 1930s, in speaking of the “bleaching undergone by the ‘societal order’ ”—which had become homework assigned from above. This deadening of the social, the amplification of the note of dutifulness was perceived with alarm by everyone who sought to con¬ tinue their own “organic path.” 16 And within these conditions, the event that is murderous for all art had occurred: it became clear that the “inspiration is not for sale but a manuscript may be sold” formula had collapsed. It turned out that what defines the creative act was not necessary—it was sellable along with the manuscript. This had been the case before (and it exists to the present day), yet on this kind of a scale, extending to all literature published in the country—this was a first-time occurrence. The artist can exist only by resisting reality, by overcoming it in the creative act. When such resistance and overcoming are broken, the creative act degenerates into moral prostitution. When we speak of the conflictlessness of the postwar literature (and as a rule nothing more is said about it, the word “conflictlessness” suf¬ ficing as a satisfactory explanation), it is necessary to understand the ideological background and context for this phenomenon. Everything is interconnected. In the Zhdanov speech already quoted, the duty of Soviet literature is formulated quite clearly: “to select the best feelings and qualities of the Soviet person,” “to reveal tomorrow for him.” The clearly posed objective began to be “pulled off” in criticism: toward the end of the 1940s, a discussion took place on the relationship of realism and romanticism in Soviet literature. It was then that Cherny- shevskii’s idea that the beautiful is life was finally amended. In the Ermilov formula there appeared a new accent: the beautiful is our life. It is possible to trace all the stages of the birth of this famous formula. Within the context of a discussion in the pages of Oktiabr’ (1947), Grudtsova maintained that peaceful reality offers the artist no ma¬ terial in order to develop the character of the hero in struggle, in the overcoming of difficulties. In a review of the film The Rural Doctor, Virta would assert with pathos that “Soviet life does not allow con¬ flict between the remains of capitalist consciousness and communist consciousness to develop into a complex and prolonged dramatic col¬ lision” (even the contemporaries understood the results of such state¬ ments in dramaturgy, as they spoke of its “lagging”). Finally, Ermilov The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 123 himself, in an article entitled “The Poetry of Our Reality,” definitively asserted the confluence of the beautiful and the real in our life . 17 All of these are derivatives of a conception of the human being as a function. The simplification and reduction of the view of the human being, the devaluation and depersonalization of the individual, the ex- ternalization of the hero, the primacy of the world that is external to the hero—all of this is produced by a distorted, sociocentric vision of the individual’s place in society and history. The positive and negative figures of heroes derive from thinking in terms of roles rather than persons; in literature the definition of the hero as positive or negative is the last stage of the hero’s externalization, beyond which any path toward an individual basis simply becomes impossible. This definition of the hero consists of the imposition of functional limits, which means the impossibility of going beyond the boundaries of function. The hero as the function of some superindividual process, the person who has found himself in the existing world order—at work, within produc¬ tion—has defined the production novel through himself. While today we tend to underestimate it, in the postwar period the production novel was a meta-genre. In the production novel one may find just about anything: fisher¬ men (Zakrutkin’s The Village Afloat) and metal workers (Popov’s Steel and Slag , Ocheretin’s First Daring ), irrigators (Kozhevnikov’s Living Water), furnace workers (Ziv’s The Hot Hour), furnace build¬ ers (Vorobiev’s The Height), and—it is important to name the names —Avdeenko’s Work, Vek’s The New Profile, Laptev’s The Way is Clear, Andreev’s The Broad Stream, Rychagov’s Toward the Summits, Boldyrev’s The Decisive Years, Igishev’s The Miners, Shebunin’s The Stakhanovites, Bylinov’s The Metal Workers, Perventsov’s The Sailors, Leberekht’s The Captains, Rybakov’s The Drivers, Pavlov’s The Build¬ ers, Slonimskii’s The Engineers, Trifonov’s The Students, Kotenko’s The Kolkhoz Members. There are also Wheat Farmers and Combine Drivers, as well as The Sons of the Factory, Comrade Agronome, The Secretary of the Party Bureau, The Secretary of the District Commit¬ tee, The Junior Adviser on Law, or simply a High Post. The post and all: and this is a meager portion of such books which evidence the basic lexicon. It cannot be said that all production novels are identical. They are of course very different—though not in their level (here they are all close), and not in the conception of the individual (it is the same through¬ out: a conception of depersonalization), but in the way in which the fabula turns. The well-worked model turns, as on a metal-working ma- 124 Evgeny Dobrenko chine tool: the same parts are strung on. The background changes, the general scheme is somewhat displaced (sometimes the family plays a greater role than others; in some places, the generational problem is posed in one way, and in some it is posed in another way; at times the “intimate line” is present, while at other times it changes shape). To illustrate, I could take any work at random—Pavlov’s The Builders, for example. According to “the laws of the genre,” the production thematic is at the center—in this case the development of a boiler of a new design. The problem: the engineer Shabalov is hesitating. Should he transfer to the institute in Leningrad and develop his project there, or remain at the factory and work on the project here? The working conditions are better at the institute, but the environment at the factory is healthier: there are wonderful people, plain workers—which makes leaving dif¬ ficult. There is even an “instrumental arrangement”: friends with their advice (true friends, of course, urge that he stay at the factory). Also worked in is the generational line, presented in the learning competi¬ tion between father and son. And finally the intimate line: Shabalov’s wife suddenly realizes that, having left work, she is lagging behind in life. This “suddenly” is somewhat explainable, but the other “sud¬ denly” indeed appears quite strange: in the twenty-third year of mar¬ riage, she suddenly realizes that, engrossed by his work, her husband devotes no attention to home life. A series of reproach dialogues fol¬ lows, after which the husband realizes his fault, reinforces the family order which has existed for twenty-three years, and remains at the fac¬ tory. In the course of the novel, other heroes appear, then disappear when they have fulfilled their functional duties. This novel is no worse and no better than other production novels of its time. It is relatively light: there is not the impossible number of terms and descriptions of production processes found in other novels of this type. True, everything depicted is a kind of imitation of life— there is not even any effort to present the heroes’ psychology or to supply the motivation for the key plot moves in any way. And this is worth noting. The flatness of the “nonresident” background characters is typical, yet the unaccountability of the behavior of the central characters indi¬ cates that they too are to a great extent functionary and secondary with respect to what is most important: the system wherein they function (the factory, the shop, the institute, the field, the farm). The motiva¬ tional sphere is narrowed to such an extent that motivation comes not from the hero but from something outside him. The external—the functional—and the internal become one, inseparable. The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 125 This inseparability is especially evident in postwar poetry. Not the usual lyrics, or epics, or lyrico-epics, but literally packs of such works appear—Zamiatin’s collective farm ( kolkhoz) poems, for example, or Lukonin’s poem “The Work Day,” in which a day at the Stalin¬ grad tractor factory is depicted and even the process of production is rhymed. In the same way, it is possible to rhyme a series of roles, as, say, in Simonov’s cycle of poems “In Our District,” where “poetic images of the heroes” pass before us: the forest ranger, the gardener (“an industrious woman”), a husband and wife who are tractor drivers, and even an entomologist. What is curious is the effort to present something that is quite re¬ moved from life (and consequently from poetry) to sing praise to “our life” that is infinitely distant from actual life. The paradox consists of the fact that the Ermilov formula became filled with quite specific meaning when “our life” and our life came into irreconcilable contra¬ diction. The hero (whether of the novel, the poem, or the drama) began to think about utterly incredible things. In the middle 1950s, several novels in verse appeared at the same time; the reader who would even so much as touch them would be struck by the utter confluence of the individual with the infra-individual, the person with his definition, the role function within the existing world order. I rose And I fell... But always in the glorious collective Gained my priceless experience— And became harder, more obstinate. And if at times the factory lagged behind, Lost the pace of the fighting course, I agonizingly sought a word in my heart, Able both to burn and spur forward. I cite these lines from Avramenko’s novel in verse, entitled The House on Moika, by no means to demonstrate the “poetic culture” (inciden¬ tally, here we encounter classical instances of what is now called “mass culture”), and not to show, to put it mildly, the imperfection of style (a discussion of these matters follows; in any event, this is by no means im¬ perfection, as it may seem to today’s reader: as one becomes immersed in postwar literature, one begins to understand this style’s profound regularity and commensurability with the rules and style of the kind of thinking that is entrenched here), but rather to show the confluence of the person with beloved work (the factory, the blast furnace, the truck, the combine—with a role, a function). The person’s character 126 Evgeny Dobrenko (the luck, the downfalls, personal biography, living experience, char¬ acter traits, integrity, obstinateness—even the “agonizing search for a word in one's heart”), his “matter of existence” is completely and undividedly devoted to the factory. He disappears in his beloved work without a trace. All of this is our “fundamental lexicon.” We will never find even one character in this literature who is unmarked, nondesig- nated by this sign. There is no person here—this is a kolkhoz worker, an engineer, a designer, a pioneer, an oktiabrionok * a sportsperson (and only such in order to be ready “for work and defense”). This is a creature that is defined, inscribed within a ready-made world order, and who cannot be any other way. On the basis of this thinking, Panferov was quite consistent when in 1958 he wrote in the journal Oktiabr We have such zealous critics, who oftentimes ridicule scenes where two lovers would “meet under the moon” and inevitably begin to talk about the work of the factory or the workshop. Yes. Certainly. This cannot be any other way, since work, work processes, socialist indus¬ trial relations have become the basis of bases of the life and activity of the Soviet person. 18 Whether art wants to or not, it is compelled to answer the eternal ques¬ tion. Leo Tolstoi formulated it in this way: “Telegraphs, to transmit what?... Books, newspapers, to circulate information about what?... Railroads, to go where and for whom? . . . Hospitals, doctors, phar¬ macists, for whom, to lengthen life, but why lengthen it?” In various ways, art always answers these eternal questions; yet perhaps never has it abandoned them so frankly—for, to reply that there are telegraph workers, railroad workers, and passengers, writers and newspaper¬ men, doctors and pharmacists in the world, all of them identical with their function, is essentially to abandon the question—for in this case, to whom and by whom are such questions posed? A scene from Katerli’s novel, The Road that Goes Far (1956): Tonia, the novel’s heroine, “ran, humming a song they were just playing on the radio.” In the song, a young girl was talking dear Seriozha into going out, and he replied with very conscientious words: He said: forgive me, dear, Now is a hot time After the harvest We will kiss until morning. ''The term “ oktiabrionok ” refers to a child of the elementary school age, who is preparing himself or herself to be inducted into the Pioneer organization.—Trans. The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 127 In the kolkhoz novels, poems, and plays of the time, this had become a stamp: anything that is at all human is delayed until a better time— one that is not “hot,” after the completion of the functions, “after the harvest”; then it is possible to go out and “kiss until morning” (“like in a movie!”)—but now, “forgive me, dear!”—“now is a hot time” (The Hot Times, The Hot Hour, The Hot Time, The Hot Earth —all of these are titles of those years). And in hot times there is a need to re¬ lieve pressure, and therefore, as El’iashevich stated, “We need a festive literature!” * We are faced with a closed system: at one pole is “high lit¬ erature”— the hero; at the other pole is “light” comedy that is entirely operetta-like in style and plot line (of the Kuban Cossaks variety)T Yet there is plenty of happiness for everything: it flows out, filling both poles to the rim—the holiday, joy, the happy ending. Comedy fit into the system, it stabilized it—while the high, functional-productive pole remained principal. It must be said that postwar literature never did what it was not sup¬ posed to do, while criticism, in all seriousness, would write that “the subject of the novel is technical progress in agriculture and the new technology that has entered the everyday life of the village. The writer has told of the difficulties of the task of mastering this technology. He emphasizes the problem of mastering the electrical motor” (this is the way Riabov puts it in speaking of Babaevskii’s novel Light Over the Earth, in a 1950 article entitled “The Light of Our Life”), or “here, a problem of outstanding national economic significance is worked out by artistic means”—namely: “the struggle for the creation and introduction of new advanced technology of the production of coal.” 19 Something similar, though on an even greater scale, occurred in dra¬ maturgy. Even Korneichuk, speaking at the second All-Union Congress of Writers about plays like Kozhevnikov’s The River of Eire (com¬ prised of endless disputes among the heroes on the methods of smelt¬ ing iron), or Rozhkov’s Moscow’s Sons (where the fine points of the blacksmith’s craft are at the center of the discussion), was compelled to acknowledge that such a play “would become a reference guide to the various spheres of agriculture and industry, though hardly an im¬ passioned story of human fates .” 20 1 say “even Korneichuk” because it was he who created the classical model (he was followed by countless others) of the play based on the conflict between “the good” and “the better.” In his The Cranberry Grove, this is the way it takes place: a conflict develops between chairman Romaniuk, who advocates “the *A. El’iashevich, Zvezda io (1954): 184.—Ed. tThis is a reference to the film by I. A. Pyr’ev, The Kuban Cossaks, 1950.—Ed. 128 Evgeny Dobrenko average level,” and the leading kolkhoz workers, who do not want to be satisfied with this “good.” To paraphrase Bulgakov’s professor Preobrazhenskii, it may be said, “Would you care for a conflict?” * The simplification of the individual, as well as the simplification of conflict—these are two points on the same line: the scale of the hero and the level of conflict are “two things” which are inseparable. This simplification could not be not realized from within the literary situation. Already in 1953, Nikolaeva 1 would write of Zakrutkin’s The Village Afloat that the author has concentrated all of his attention on the problem of fish. He has studied in detail and showed the habits of fish in an interesting and fascinating way, while the features of human beings are shown only along the way, to the extent that it is necessary to “illustrate” the fish problem. . . . Fish have overshadowed the human beings in the novel. Fish have overshadowed the human beings in the novel. Even fish\ The uninitiated reader may think that I am speaking of a kind of gray literary stream that is ever-present (graphomania has always been lit¬ erature’s companion), but this is the point—and here is one of the key features of postwar literature: the stream has in fact displaced literature. For literature cannot be functionary —it is different by its nature. What is there to be said of the thoroughly false war prose, infused with fiery-eyed soldiers, political workers who give correct speeches, if even the works of Panova and Nikolaeva—which are traditionally dis¬ tinguished from the flow—have this kind of a threshold for veracity? In Nikolaeva’s famous The Harvest , in a brief span of time, a lagging kolkhoz becomes a leading one. And if at the beginning it takes Vasilii Bortnikov a great deal of effort to force the kolkhoz members to go to work, by the end he forbids them to work during the lunch break. The simplification of the situation needs no commentary (this is pre¬ sumably a work that is distinguished by a different, higher level of veracity), which, for that matter, is also the case with the way in which life appears in Panova’s The Bright Shore, where the main event that arouses the entire district is the unlawful sale of a pedigree calf to a Byelorussian collective farm. It is customary to note the psychologism of Panova’s prose (in The ''This is a reference to M. Bulgakov’s novella, Heart of a Dog. —Ed. tG. Nikolaeva is the author of The Harvest, first published in the journal Znamia 5 (1950)-—Ed- The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 129 Companions or in Kruzhilikha). But one must also note an aspect of Panova’s psychologism, which corresponds in an odd way with the system within which this prose diligently functioned. Everything is relative, and therefore Panova’s psychologism is not something that is in any way comparable to the production novel. Yet we are faced with the kind of psychologism where instead of psychological analysis, in¬ stead of examining the character’s inner world, a trial of the character is carried out by the author. In fact, little depends upon the author here: the preset scale of values is firm and compulsory. The advantage of such a psychologism is that it allows for more “convincing” glori¬ fication or vilification of the hero. This tendency did not originate in postwar prose. Its origins are in the 1930s, when “psychology” became the exclusive domain of the characters who were close (dear) to the given author—and “until the present, we are still compelled to learn in-depth depiction of the hero who is different from the author.” 21 Such psychologism not only allowed one to call the hero a scoun¬ drel, for example—that is, to simultaneously define and identify him— but also to somehow lead the reader up to such a valuation. The psy¬ chologism of The Rout* was brilliantly mastered by Panova in The Companions , where we have the well-cared-for, self-enamored hero, Suprunov—someone who is a stranger on a medical train. One scene is sufficient for the “indirect” (by the standards of postwar prose) char¬ acterization of the hero: at dinner time, as an animated nurse bursts in and informs him that a heavily wounded woman has prematurely gone into labor, he leisurely asks her questions, chewing pork with mustard spread on it. It is not only nurse Smirnova, but the reader too who is to look with disgust at the fork with the piece of meat “which Supru¬ nov held blissfully still before himself”—and the reader is to have the desire to “kick the plate out from under his nose.” It is important to understand that this is not a question of “the mastery of molding a character,” in its presence or absence, but of the system for the evaluation of the hero—evaluation that is inevitable and open. However, even a system of prescribed compulsory directions could guarantee against mistakes only at first sight. When in Panova’s Kruzhilikha , for example, the director of the factory, General Listo- pad, appears before the reader, there can be only one evaluation of the hero: he is a boss who loves power, insults his subordinates, accepts This is a reference to A. Fadeev’s well-known The Rout (1927)—one of the impor¬ tant Civil War novels of the 1920s, as well as one of the first to explicitly use some of Leo Tolstoi’s stylistic formulas of the “dialectics of the soul.” Fadeev’s work later became a model for “psychological socialist realism.”—Ed. 130 Evgeny Dobrenko with pleasure the crude flattery of his inferiors. Clearly, an unsym¬ pathetic portrait; yet talk of “Listopadovshchina” (the grim period of Listopad’s power) would come later. But the author herself, quite frankly, admires her character. The beginning of the 1950s was marked by the appearance of a large number of novels centering on the young hero. It is only at first sight that this hero’s brilliant path may appear as a harmless inven¬ tion. Anton Kornilin is an unexperienced factory hand and hero of Andreev’s The Broad Stream (1953). Kornilin not only eventually be¬ comes an advanced blacksmith, but the recipient of a State Prize. Even more odd things happen to the hero in Permiak’s 1951 novel The Pre¬ cious Inheritance-, in his second year of trade school, he invents a blast furnace-conveyer and gains national fame; by the end of the novel he (a trade-school student) sits down to write his memoirs: he must share the experience of his achievements with his people.” Where do the people who cheerfully “march through life with a song” reside? The trade school, for example, where Permiak’s heroes dwell, is a kind of luxurious palace, with endless, two-story halls, where during holidays the most amazing—distinguished, brilliant, magnificent—society (ordinary Soviet people, of course) gathers. One immediately recalls Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s salon. f The hero’s home village is some kind of agri-city, literally swimming in earthly goods (exactly as in Babaevskii’s novels, or in Pyr’ev’s film, The Kuban Cos- saks): there is everything that one could find in a prosperous city, even a great artificial reservoir where a gleaming white yacht rocks upon the azure surface. People are so happy and prosperous (the storehouses are literally bursting) that an older brother of one of the craftsmen keeps for him a special sailing ship, named “Dear Brother”—and, in terms of being well-provided-for, the rest of the inhabitants of the village see him as an entirely ordinary figure. When one reads this about the postwar village (and this is following Pomerantsev’s “On Sincerity in Literature”),* it is difficult to under¬ stand which predominates here, simplemindedness or cynicism, for such visions seem utterly profane. It is pointless, however, to seek to discredit postwar literature with the kind of truth that has surfaced in *Here it should be added that Permiak’s novel was criticized for exaggeration and bad taste. The “fundamental lexicon” had its limits. See Iu. Karasev, “O chuvstve mery” (On Moderation), Novyi mir 9 (1952).—Ed. tSee the opening scene in Tolstoi’s War and Peace. —Ed. tV. Pomerantsev, “Ob iskrennosti v literature” (On Sincerity in Literature), Novyi mir iz (1953).—Ed. The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 131 the war and village prose of the 1960s and 1970s. It is important to understand something else: in principle, postwar literature bears no relation to the truth, because its functioning consisted of something else, and it was not created to do anything except to function. This was indeed not only a literature of abstract humanism, but also of a kind of abstract realism—quite a special method indeed. The function and the duty of postwar literature is reduced to the fact that it had to make conscious that which was made known in the language of decrees. Moreover, in some way it had to formalize and systematize disparate ideological acts, introducing them into con¬ sciousness, verbalizing them, translating them into the language of situations, dialogues, speeches (“a textbook of life”). The time of art¬ ists had passed: literature had become what it had to become within the system of a totalitarian state—“a little wheel” and “a screw,” a power¬ ful instrument of “brainwashing.” In the act of “socialist creation,” the writer and the functionary had become one. As Gefter writes, the postwar situation is characterized by the fact that under the banner of One’s Own, which is threatened by the Foreign (threaten¬ ing precisely because it is “foreign”), an invisible remaking of the very stimuli to live went on, from the bottom up. And the apparatus [even without any post in the writers’ union, and only because the character of his activity—writing—had become a function within the totalitarian society, the writer-functionary is a key figure of postwar literature] was to become an instrument of a new internal war—and obviously there was an increase in the demand for those capable of “brainwashing.” ... Somewhere there already loomed a substitution, on a broader scale, of “drive belts” running from a sole leader to the single people—for those who have already come to know the consequences of the inequality of blood. 22 New circumstances, a new semantics controlling people’s lives: the di¬ rective for a confrontational ideological regime, within and without (since the 1930s, literature had rich experience in creating an image of the enemy), became a point of departure. Here is a dialogue of the brothers Basaragin from Simonov’s play The Smoke of the Homeland: —When I read newspapers, especially lately, I constantly have the feel¬ ing as if now we are rebuilding under fire, even learning under fire. —To many of us it seemed, especially toward the end of the war, that, yes, the last shot will have been heard and everything would change. 132 Evgeny Dobrenko Of course, in a way, people are right: everything has changed, there is peace, the cannons are silent.... But they thought that there would be friends all around for the rest of their life. And all around there are enemies. Variations on the “enemies all around” theme occur as early as the 1920s. In Bagritskii’s famous poem, “TBC,” before the words that are often quoted today (“And if it [the age] will say ‘Lie!’—then lie! If it will say ‘Kill!’—then kill!”) there are a telling two lines: “Look about—enemies all around; stretch out your hands and there are no friends.” In the postwar years, Simonov himself (among count¬ less others) broadcast this theme “abroad.” The Friends and Enemies collection * includes the poem “The Red and the White,” with the following well-known lines: The world is not divisible into black, colored, yellow, But only the reds—us, And the whites—them. Friends and enemies, they and us, the red and the white, the positive and the negative heroes: this is the basis of our lexicon, attributes of a role-based, confrontational, mythologized consciousness. This the¬ matic acquired truly fantastic dimensions within the context of internal political campaigns: literature was literally full of saboteurs and spies (is it not revealing, incidentally, that at the beginning of the 1980s, the highest State Prize was awarded to a war novel that was completely constructed from postwar recipes from the wise leader to the saboteurs who would become central to the plot line?) 1 Enemies from within and enemies from without, in many versions: infiltrating, recruiting, plant¬ ing hidden “enemies of Soviet power” (judging by one very popular novel and film, these shadows did not disappear even during the 1970s). In short, most everyone hurried to register a presence (and by doing so, to demonstrate their loyalty) within the thematic—whether the subject was the coal mine, the factory, the research institute, or the kolkhoz where the kulaks and the pseudo -kulaks functioned, and the entire conflict had to do with uncovering hidden enemies (this scheme is im¬ pressively reinforced in Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned)} Azhaev, *K. Simonov, “Druz’ia i vragi” (Friends and Enemies), Novyi mir n (1948).—Ed. +This appears to be a reference to Ivan Stadniuk’s “trilogy,” Voina (The War) (Mos¬ cow, 1970—80), awarded the State Prize in 1983.—Ed. IThis is M. Sholokhov’s famous collectivization novel. The first volume was pub¬ lished in 1932 and the second in 1959. The English translation of the two volumes is to be found under two different titles: Seeds of Tomorrow (New York, 1935) and Harvest on the Don (New York, 1962).—Ed. The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 133 for example, having exhausted the plot line of his novel Far from Mos¬ cow, finishes the third part with events surrounding Kovshov’s trip to give a report in Moscow, as well as the saboteur epic along the way. The enemy is not merely an attribute, but a part of the general etiquette— without which there could be no feigning of a playing out of events on the pages of the book. The rules of the game are programmed into the enemy. In fact, there is a particular kind of poetics for depicting the enemy: not as placated like Tit Borodin in Virgin Soil Upturned, but as someone who is treacherous, necessarily masked, concealed (like Iakov Ostrovnov in the same work). It is as if history had stopped: the directions of twenty years ago serve as living guidance for action. Here are the directives (within the agricultural context): The class enemy is to be sought outside the kolkhozes, in the guise of people with beastly physiognomies, with huge teeth, thick necks, and a sawed-off shotgun in their hands. . . . Yet the time when kulaks were at the surface had long passed. Today’s kulaks and pseudo -kulaks, today’s anti-Soviet elements in the village—these people are for the most part “quiet,” “sweet,” almost “holy.” They need not be sought far from the kolkhoz: they are within the kolkhoz itself, as storeroom workers, accountants, secretaries, etc. They would never say “down with the kolkhozes.” The kind of sabotage and damage they carry on within will not be to the kolkhozes’ health.... In order to discern such an agile enemy and not succumb to demagoguery, it is necessary to possess a revolutionary vigilance—it is necessary to possess the ability to tear the mask off the enemy and show the kolkhoz members his true counterrevolutionary face.* In the course of the two decades that followed the war, these ex¬ haustive (even to the point of naming the specific posts occupied) in¬ structions were consistently realized by literature. It is impossible to find a single work of postwar literature where there are no clear or concealed enemies: the black-and-white scheme of those years simply could not exist without them. The literature of the beginning of the 1950s was engulfed by variations on the “enemies all around” theme, in the anticosmopolite rendition. In reading Romashov’s The Great Force, Shtein’s The Law of Flonor, Surov’s The Green Street, Simo¬ nov’s The Foreign Shadow, it is difficult not to feel that the mass psychosis has reached its apogee: one may encounter all sorts of con- *I.V. Stalin, “O rabote v derevne, Rech’ n ianvaria 1933 g.” (On the Work in the Countryside. Speech of January n, 1933), in Sochineniia (Works) (Moscow, 1951), 3: 2.29—30.—Ed. 134 Evgeny Dobrenko texts in the struggle against bourgeois “false science.” Here there is espionage, the theft of “defense” secrets and the intrigues of foreign agents. Spy mania, as well as a general suspicion which is at one with a militant anti-intellectualism of sorts, envelops many of the works of those years. Yet the true pinnacle of this system of asserted values was of course the deified exclusive personality, as in the novels by Permiak and Andreev, whose endearing young heroes “march through life with a song.” It would be naive to suppose that cult consciousness is con¬ nected only with Stalin, who entered postwar literature in many ways, all of which enacted the ritual of the “leader’s appearance before the people.” He could be present through the whole novel (as in Per- ventsev’s The Sailors ); he could appear as a kind of embodiment of an ideal, the resolution of all conflicts, a culmination, a blessing (as in Pav¬ lenko’s Happiness)-, his name could simply flash by (necessarily with piety, of course); finally, he could simply be a demiurge, the creator of the heavenly life in which the heroes of those years lived. Of course, there are examples that are simply odious—like Vishnevskii’s play The Unforgettable Year 1919, where, time and again, Lenin asks Stalin for advice, and all but obligingly lights Stalin’s pipe. I tend to think that such authors knew no artistic torments of the kind experienced by Bulgakov, Pasternak, or Mandel’shtam. It was all pettier, cruder, more cynical—and at the same time a great deal more refined: traits of exclusivity began to define the image of ordinary mortals. Super¬ individuality became the answer for the person “contemplating living, thinking over whom to emulate.” And literature supplied answers: it was to be the heroes who marched through life with a song. This was not only falsehood, but the height of literature’s irresponsibility to life. I am looking at Boldyrev’s The Decisive Years. Grigor’ev, the young hero, comes to work at the Donbass (the industrial complex at the Donets Basin). From the outset, we encounter a kind of Monte Cristo: his image, thoughts, behavior—all of this is surrounded by mysterious¬ ness, filled with significance; an atmosphere of omnipotence envelops the hero; he is handsome, noble, a great enthusiast in work, as well as a partisan of progressive technology. At work, a cult of Grigor’ev is created. The engineer Seredin, whom, despite his degree, Grigor’ev as¬ signs as the fourth furnace-tender, is so overwhelmed by the grandeur and principles of his manager, so “fascinated” by him, that in response to being advised to help Grigor’ev, “He laughed: Why help him? This is Grigor’ev. He knows everything. Try and help him—this is a giant!” Matiushina, an old worker, cannot understand—she is simply unable The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 135 to grasp the scale and breadth of Grigor’ev’s innovations (who sees no need to explain anything to her); she sees him as a literal superman, not accessible to her mind: “ ‘So, who is he, then?’—she loudly exclaimed, having changed the expression of her face during the first conversa¬ tion. ‘Who is he—isn’t he human, or what?’ ‘This is Grigor’ev, you know’—others reply.” An effect of reversal is the inevitable fate of postwar literature: everything is reversed, everything is counterintuitive and contrary to any humanist system of values. It has been noted before that today everything is read in reverse here: what was denounced at the time is now worthy of respect, and vice versa—what was seriously asserted at the time, now only causes laughter. The scale of values has turned up¬ side down. What do we see in this “collapsed house”? Only paradoxes: utopias and anti-utopias are intermixed. Everywhere, “the chief ob¬ stacle is the human being.” * In an anti-utopia the attitude toward this “circumstance” is sharply negative; in postwar “utopia” the opposite is the case: the social anti-utopia denied the antihumanist social sys¬ tem, while the postwar “utopia” not only asserted it, but became this system’s most important ideological function. Everything has turned upside down, including the person raised within the great height of the Stalin high rise and put inside the “magical” world of the novels and poems of those years (the yacht, “Dear Brother”). It is not only the old worker Matiushina who exclaims “What is he, not a human being?”—for she is also derived from this strange world. It seems the time has come to reply seriously: “not human, of course.” It is not human beings who are placed in the Stalinist high rises at the cen¬ ter of Moscow and other Soviet cities. It is functions, inhabitants of units of a fundamental lexicon. One finds the key, begins to move amid these boxes and units, compiling them—and “plot lines” appear— not plot lines of life, and not plot lines of free artistic consciousness, but, precisely, plot lines on the subjects that have been assigned by power. At the same time, power created a new type of individuality. It was perhaps Lysenko—truly a unique figure in Russian history, and characteristic of the totalitarian state in his drive to forcibly remake nature and the human being—who best described this new type of individuality. In August 1937, Lysenko made a statement on the pages of a children’s magazine, The Pioneer, where, in particular, he said, “In our Soviet Union people will not be born; organisms will be born, *See R. Galtseva and I. Rodnyanskaya’s “The Obstacle: The Human Being,” Novyi tnir 12 (1988), included in this collection. 136 Evgeny Dobrenko and here people will he made, as tractor drivers, motorists, mechanics, academicians. I was not born a person and ... feel more than happy in such a context.” The emphasized words—that people are not born but made, about a new conception of happiness—perhaps best attest to the limitations of individual existence (for “organisms will be born”). In its nontemporality, late-Stalinist literature finished a life cycle: time ceased to be cyclical and became discrete. And only within the context of such a temporal aphasia did the prediction of the “people’s aca¬ demician” (Lysenko) come true: people will not be born—organisms will be born. This was their power and their literature. Notes 1. V. Pomerantsev, “Ob iskrennosti v literature” (On Sincerity in Litera¬ ture), Novyi mir 12 (1953); and Fedor Abramov, “Liudi kolkhoznoi derevni v poslevoennoi proze” (The People of the Collective Farm in the Postwar Fiction), Novyi mir 4 (1954). 2. Eventov, in Literaturnaia gazeta 45 (1988), says that the “fruitful devel¬ opment of the artistic process . . . could not be interrupted ... by either the decrees of 1946—48—whose adoption was accompanied by public scoldings of important figures of the artistic intelligentsia—or frenzied attacks on ‘com- parativism’ and ‘cosmopolitism,’ or the artificial inculcation of the theory of conflictlessness, or the persecution of satire, or scholasticist demands for ‘bal¬ ance’ in the depiction of the positive and the negative aspects of everyday life. Literature has fulfilled its duty.” 3. B. Solov’ev, “Za bol’shevistskuiu partiinost’ sovetskoi kritiki” (For the Bolshevik Party Spirit in Soviet Criticism), Novyi mir 12 (1948): 198. 4. From A. Sofronov’s speech at the party meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers, reprinted in Pravda, n February 1949. 5. M. Chudakova, “Bez gneva i pristrastiia: Formy i deformatsii v litera- turnom protsesse 20—30-kh godov” (Without Anger or Bias: The Forms and Deformations in the Literary Process of the 1920s and 1930s,” Novyi mir 9(1988). 6. Ibid., 256. 7. Ibid. 8. M. Gefter, “Sud’ba Khrushcheva: Istoriia odnogo neusvoennogo uroka” (The Fate of Khrushchev: A History of One Unlearned Lesson), Oktiabr’ 1 (1989): 176. 9. A. Zhdanov, Doklad o zhurnalakh “Zvezda” i “Leningrad” (Report on the Journals “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”) (Moscow, 1952), 27. 10. See B. Solov’ev, “Zametki o kritike” (Notes on Criticism), Novyi mir 3 (1948). The Literature of the Zhdanov Era 137 11. V. Bykov, “Pod znakom peremen” (Under the Sign of Change), Litera- turnaia gazeta 3 (1989): 4. 12. Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, Russkie pisateli o literaturnom trude (The Russian Writers on Literary Work) (Leningrad, 1956), 4: 495. 13. Here I am relying on what 1 think is one of the best recent theoreti¬ cal works on literature—the book by V. 1 . Tupa, Khudozhestvennost’ litera- turnogo proizvedeniia (The Artistic Content of the Literary Work) (Kras- noiarsk, 1987). 14. Ibid., 53. 15. Ibid., 54. 16. Chudakova, “Bez gneva i pristrastiia” (Without Anger or Bias), 256. 17. V. Ermilov, “Poeziia nashei deistvitel’nosti” (The Poetry of Our Reality), in Novye uspekhi sovetskoi literatury (The New Successes of Soviet Literature) (Moscow, 1949). 18. F. Panferov, “Chto takoe sovremennost’?” (What Is the Contempo¬ rary?) Oktiabr’ 11 (1958). 19. FromS. Kozhevnikov’s review of A. Voloshinov’s novel The Blacksmith Land , Pravda, 25 August 1951. 20. A. Korneichuk, Vtoroi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchet (Minutes to the Second All-Union Congress of Writers) (Moscow, 1956), 186. 21. Chudakova, “Bez gneva i pristrastiia” (Without Anger or Bias), 248. 22. Gefter, “Sud’ba Khrushcheva” (The Fate of Khrushchev), 176-77. Thomas Lahusen The Mystery of the River Adun: Reconstruction of a Story The present essay is devoted to one of the most unworthy ~ periods in the history of Russian literature. It is devoted to the literature of the “Zhdanov era,” in other words, Soviet literature after World War II, from 1946 until Stalin’s death in 1953, or, if one prefers, to Soviet literature of the “first cold war.” Wolfgang Kasack notes in his Russian Literature 1945—1988: From 1946 onwards, Soviet literature underwent an extraordinary de¬ cline . . . Famous writers were condemned to silence; insipid and un- talented authors poured out quantities of schematic works, intended to endorse the political process and to glorify the leader (vozhd’), Iosif Stalin. Literature was characterized by the “positive hero”—the exem¬ plary ideal figure who solves all problems, treats all obstacles as child’s play, overfulfills all norms; who knows no private life, but only ser¬ vice to the Communist society; who (naturally) belongs, not among the simple workers, but among the Party officials. The cult of the leader reflects, in miniature, the cult of Stalin. 1 This anticlimax of literariness can be seen to coincide with the cli¬ max of the literary-artistic method that marked the Stalinist period of Soviet literature from the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 until the first “thaw” in 1954—56, and perhaps beyond that time: the method of socialist realism. “Socialist realism—we read in the bylaws of the Soviet Writers Union of 1934—is the basic method of Soviet imaginative literature and literary criticism. It demands from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time this truthfulness and historical con¬ creteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of the ideological molding and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism.” A few years later, this definition was completed by the Leninist call for the “party spirit” in literature, for a principled “optimism,” for “closeness to the people,” or “revolutionary romanti¬ cism.” The overcoming of the “personality cult” after Stalin’s death in 1953 140 Thomas Lahusen and the zoth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 was paralleled by the overcoming of the concept and the literary practice of socialist realism. Ultimately this led to recent definitions of socialist realism as “a chain of models” leading to the “degradation of art,” the history of an “erosion,” “an odious name .. . that people did not want to reject,” “an obsolete and empty expression which was impossible for some time to give up,” a term “which virtually ceased to exist.” 2 Has the time come to say farewell to this literary “method”? We know that the method of socialist realism did not die with Stalin, that, indeed, “people did not want to reject it,” and that it even blossomed during the Brezhnev era, and beyond. Socialist realism will survive the Soviet state, as it has developed its own dynamics, surviving Stalinism. It is an important part of what still has to be called “Soviet culture.” This is what Evgeny Dobrenko writes in 1988 about the postwar period: I am presently writing a larger work, which deals with the development of Soviet postwar literature, and I have plunged into the atmosphere of those years—into the newspapers, journals, books, a mass of thick novels, plays . . . This was a descent into “hell.” For me, a member of the younger generation, this was not easy. But how much did I dis¬ cover, in this completely unexplored and important period of Soviet literature! What a terrible world of inversion, what drama, what sad¬ ness, what rupture did I discover in these contracted faces encouraging themselves: “life has become better, life has become happier!” Did all this never happen? Did it “dry out”? Did it disappear for ever? No, it did not disappear, it has come up to us. Not long ago I read The War by Ivan Stadniuk—it did not disappear . . . The moral duty of histori¬ ans of literature is to prevent the “drying out” of this terrible drama, of this paralysis and dying of our great Russian (and not only Russian) literature, which lasted a quarter of a century. Here, in this period, lies buried the central nerve of Soviet literary history ... As long as our students do not know about it, they will not understand the logic of Soviet literary history. Because during this period, not just the end was fastened, but also the very beginning. 3 A lot, indeed, has been written in the West in order to prevent the “grass of forgetting to grow.” In a certain sense—to mix metaphors— it was our bread and butter to say what was not possible to say “over there.” But did we really do our moral and scholarly duty ? Marc Slonim describes the Zhdanov period in his classic Soviet Russian Literature in the following terms: “The landscape of Russian literature between The Mystery of the River Adun 141 1945 and 1953 looked like a monotonous plain, with just a few low hills emerging from gray overcast skies .” 4 We shall see that such a landscape has its secrets, its mysteries. To prove it, is actually the purpose of this article. A typical product of the Zhdanov era will serve my purpose: it is the once famous novel by Vasilii Azhaev, Daleko ot Moskvy (Far from Moscow), published in the journal Novyi mir (The New World) in July through September, 1948 (Nr 7-9). In the Dictionary of Russian Literature Since 1917, by the same Wolf¬ gang Kasack, we read under the heading “Azhayev” (I am quoting in ex ten so): Azhayev, Vasily Nikolayevich, prose writer (born Feb. 12 [Jan. 30], 1915, in the village of Sotskoye, prov. Moscow—died April 27, 1968, Mos¬ cow. Azhayev worked in the Soviet Far East for 15 years (from 1935); in 1944 he earned a degree from the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow by correspondence. In 1937 he began writing short stories that, like Obyknovennaya pila (1946: A Common Saw), were difficult to read because of their artificial plot, obtrusive didacticism, and length. His major work, the novel Daleko ot Moskvy (1948; Eng. tr., Far from Moscow , 1950), appeared in Novy mir-, it was edited by K. Simonov, who evidently made considerable stylistic revisions in the work. The novel received a Stalin prize (for 1948, 1st class) and was intensively publicized. Azhayev belonged to the board of the Writers Union of the USSR from 1954 until his death. Daleko ot Moskvy is a typical “pro¬ duction novel,” a work intended to illustrate the heroic effort involved in industrial construction. For his plot, Azhayev chose the extremely rapid construction of a petroleum pipeline in Siberia at the start of World War II. The work is in complete accordance with the tenets of Socialist Realism in its interpretation of the period: the main char¬ acters are idealized in their function as positive heroes, the conflicts are artificial, and their positive outcome is predestined. The fusion of the novel’s character into a unified collective is illustrated by the fact that the most important technological ideas always occur to the various characters simultaneously. The characters are always shown in exceptional situations and the commentary on their actions always serves the author’s own purposes. The fact that these pipelines were constructed by concentration-camp prisoners is of course passed over. After Stalin’s death the glorification of this work, translated in its time into 20 languages, abated somewhat. Azhayev’s second major prose work, Predisloviye k zhizni (Foreword to Life), was completed only in 1961. In this retrospective look at the period of the first Five-Year Plan, 142 Thomas Lahusen he remains true to the production theme with all its technological de¬ tail. His attempt to educate the reader in the ideas of the Party leads him to the point where (as Soviet critics have remarked), “as if fearing that the reader will not understand him, he formulates his thoughts in unnecessary detail” (Grudtsova). [Here follows a short—and exclusively Soviet—bibliography] 5 After this, there is not much to say about Azhaev and his novel Far from Moscow. Two traditional questions seem nevertheless appropri¬ ate: the relation between the work and the biography of the author, on one hand, and the relation between fiction and reality, on the other. Ac¬ cording to the Dictionary of Russian Literature Since 1917, “Azhaev worked in the Soviet Far East for 15 years.” What did Azhaev actually do there? Was he perhaps busy “constructing” an oil pipeline? In regard to the place of the action, the journey of the construction engineers can be localized in “reality” at the beginning of the book: we have Moscow, Kirov, Danilov, Sverdlovsk. At the end of the jour¬ ney, however, where the very action of the novel takes place (the con¬ struction of a pipeline), only Active names occur. They are not to be identified on any map, not even on the map of the U.S. Army Topo¬ graphic Command. 6 There is the island Taisin, the city of Konchelan at the northern edge of the island, where the oil fields are situated, Cape Gibel’nyi. On the other side of the strait of Dzhagda, that is to say, on the mainland, there is Cape Chongr, the small town of Ol’gokhta, and the city of Rubezhansk, which is also the capital of the district. The construction site is situated in a place called Novinsk, on the shore of “the mighty and powerful river Adun,” “father Adun” ( Adun batiusbka). Fictive toponyms are no rarity in fiction, but one might wonder about “socialist realist fiction.” Moscow, Kirov, and Sverdlovsk are “real”; Cape Gibel’nyi, Rubezhansk, and the river Adun are not. One might wonder whether this division in fiction and reference does not violate one of the basic principles of socialist realism, namely, the “truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality.” The (Soviet) publishers of Far from Moscow in English translation acknowledge, in their foreword to the novel, that Azhaev had recourse to fiction, but they fail to pursue the question any further: Azhayev does not give the actual geographical location of the construc¬ tion site. Neither the Adun River nor Taisin Island can be found on the map. The names of the builders of the pipe line too are fictitious. Everything else in the novel, however, is based on fact. The writer did The Mystery of the River Adun 143 not observe his characters from the sidelines, he lived among them, he was one of them. A note of the translator of the novel, R. Prokofieva, mentions some¬ thing that we do not find in the Russian text: the relation between the Amur Valley and a Cossack expedition of the seventeenth century, whose footpaths the present pipeline builders are following. 8 Is “Father Adun” perhaps “Father Amur?” Let us have a closer look at the toponyms; let us do some speculative Soviet Far-East geography: the island Taisin could be Sakhalin; there is a chance that the small town Ol’gokhta is identical with the real Oglon’gi; there is no Cape Gibel’nyi on the island of Sakhalin, but there is a Cape Pogibi; and on the northern edge of Sakhalin we find the town of Kolendo, in the novel it is Konchelan. Another clue for us to situate the “real” action of the novel in the Amur region, between the mainland and the island of Sakhalin, is the fact that an ethnic minority group, the Nanai, participates in the con¬ struction of the pipeline. The Nanai live on the shores of the lower Amur; in other words, they populate places such as Nanaisk, Kom- somol’sk, and Kur-Urmiisk of the Khabarovsk region of the Russian Soviet Federative Republic, as well as the region between Sungari and Ussuri in China. If we have a look at an economic map, we find an oil pipeline be¬ tween the island of Sakhalin and the mainland. Its construction started at the end of the 1930s and was finished in 1942. Why all these changes? Was there a strategic reason to refer to Active toponyms? The answer to this question may be buried in the very text of the novel, or, more accurately, in the texts. Indeed, Far from Moscow has not only been translated into twenty languages; the novel has had more than thirty editions. There was also a film adaptation of it (A. Stolper, Mosfilm 1950, Stalin Prize, 1st class, 1951) as well as an operatic adaptation (by I. Dzerzhinskii, 1955), and even three (Soviet) dissertations—a fact which should not astonish us; after all Far from Moscoiv had been awarded the Stalin Prize, 1st class. Fiere is a tally of the publishing record of Far from Moscow in Russian: 1949: Sovetskii PisateP, circulation 150,000. 1950: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Detskoi Literatury, circulation 50,000. 1954: Molodaia Gvardiia, circulation 75,000. 1956: Goslitizdat, circulation 30,000. 1957: Goslitizdat, circulation 150,000. 144 Thomas Lahusen 1961: Goslitizdat, circulation 75,000. 1966: Izvestiia, circulation 100,000. 1967: Molodaia Gvardiia, circulation 150,000. (32nd edition) 1974: “Kareliia,” Petrozavodsk, circulation 100,000. 1975: Leninzdat, circulation 100,000. 1978: Sovetskii Pisatel’, circulation 100,000. and more recently: 1985: Sovremennik, circulation 300,000. 1989: Moskovskii Rabochii, circulation 50,000. Evgeny Dobrenko was right: “It did not disappear, it has come up to us.” Curiously, the fact that Azhaev’s novel was awarded the “Stalin Prize” is mentioned in the 1949 and 1954 editions, but not in the 1950 edition “for children.” In the 1974 edition the Stalin Prize receives the name of “State Prize,” retroactively, which is the rule: all Stalin prizes have become “State Prizes” after 1956, the year of official “destaliniza- tion.” According to the socialist realist principle of “Party spirit,” the writer has to give the correct interpretation of the “historical-concrete reality” in its “revolutionary development.” Azhaev’s novel undergoes, therefore, an appropriate evolution. If we take, for instance, the first three chapters of the novel, we find in comparison to the 1948 and 1949 edition about thirty-two changes in the 1954 edition; in Far from Moscow 1967 we count eighty-eight. Concerning the qualitative side of rewriting, there is, for example, the name of Stalin. In a conversation between the director of the con¬ struction site Batmanov and the engineer Aleksei Kovshov, “comrade Stalin” becomes in the 1967 edition “commander in chief” (verkbounyi glavnokomanduiusbchii). But in the following lines, we read in the same edition that: “ ‘Comrade Stalin can’t show every man personally to his place in the firing lines.’ ” 9 The name does not disappear; it is only “weakened.” And this “weakening” turns out to be the overall tendency of the novel’s re¬ writing. In the same edition of 1967, the obvious signs of the “struggle against the rootless cosmopolitans” are done away with. One of the “negative” characters of our story is Lieberman, in charge of the sup¬ plies of the construction site, and one who does not do his job properly. He is opposed to Zalkind, the party organizer, one of the positive heroes of the novel. The former is depicted in very negative terms. He is the “bad” Jew of the story; Zalkind is the “good” Jew. We know The Mystery of the River Adun 145 that the 1949 “struggle against the rootless cosmopolitans” had obvi¬ ous anti-Semitic components. Far from Moscow of the years 1948, 1949, and 1954 expressed obviously the “right” interpretation. But in the 1967 edition, the name Lieberman systematically disappears from the political context. Now, anti-cosmopolitism (i.e., anti-Semitism) no longer corresponds to the “truthful representation of reality.” In later versions, analogous “historical concrete realities” are weak¬ ened as well. For example, the theme “struggle against the internal enemy.” Zalkind, our “good Jew,” converses with the engineer Aleksei Kovshov: If the Japanese take advantage of this to snatch the Far East away from us, that’s nothing to worry about—we’ll manage without the Far East. . . What would you call this kind of reasoning? —Disgusting! I wouldn’t have much patience with people who ar¬ gued like that. 10 The last sentence, la by s takimi rassuzhdeniami ne stesnialsia, which could also be translated as “I have a way of handling those arguments,” is missing in the 1967 edition of Far from Moscow. The aspersions toward Western influences, the superiority of the Soviet Union in all domains, and other themes of the years 1947-53 lose their edge, or simply disappear in later editions of the novel. What is often considered merely cosmetic revision has a deeper motivation. We know that the positive hero of socialist realism exchanges his private life for his duty to the socialist society. This aspect also under¬ goes a significant evolution in the metamorphoses of the novel. In the Stalin Prize version of Far from Moscow (third chapter) the lonely and positive hero Aleksei Kovshov pulls out a folded slip of paper from his pocket, written by his wife Zina, who is now active behind the German lines where she works for the partisans: “I’ve gone for my exams. Think of me. Only don’t worry too much— I’m sure I’ll pass. Zina.” How much it had meant to him, this brief note which Aleksei had chanced to find in the drawer of his desk after discharge from hospital! He could spend hours reading it over and over again." In Far from Moscow 1954 and 1967 the slip of paper has not been left in the drawer of the desk. No, Zina gives it to Aleksei, during the last minute before they part, when he has to leave for the front. “These were words of incantation, a naive and heart-breaking expression of a love which did not have the time to blossom and was already torn off”: 146 Thomas Lahusen Alesha, my darling Alesha, 1 want that this letter be always with you. You must never, never forget that 1 am in this world and that I love you . . . Alesha, my dear husband, I believe in our happiness. Because it is just that we be happy. And we will be happy, we will, we have to. If this war would only stop . . . 12 From the laconic words of a partisan, the wife of a positive hero, to the incantations of a love “which did not have the time to blossom and was already torn off,” and who cannot wait until the war is over, the metamorphosis is impressive. Incidentally, speaking of war, this is what we read at the beginning of chapter 6: Nature was the battle field of two seasons. Winter was on the offensive, autumn on the defensive. The assailant began by conducting reconnais¬ sance, sending out brief frosty spells, biting winds and whirling snow storms. The bays and side arms of the Adun were covered by thin, rustling ice. 13 V prirode shla voina says the Russian text of 1948. Literally: “In nature war was going on.” V prirode shla skhvatka says the Russian text of the later, “destalinized” versions. Skhvatka can be translated by “skir¬ mish,” “fight,” “encounter,” a word that is in any case weaker than “war.” 14 We could say that after Stalin’s death, the class struggle is diminishing even in nature. The painstaking analysis of the variants of the novel Far from Moscow seems to be worth the effort. The 1974 edition contains an afterword by Konstantin Simonov entitled “This Is How We Remember Him.” “Him” is Azhaev. Simonov, editor in chief of the journal The New World during the postwar period, remembers the writer in the year of 1948. We learn that Azhaev was working during the summer of that year “intensively and passionately” to achieve the final version of his novel, which, eventually, with the help of Simonov and the whole crew of editors of the journal, became what we now know as the Stalin Prize version. We also learn about something else: Azhaev came from the Far East and in his suitcase there was no manuscript, but an already pub¬ lished Far from Moscow which had appeared earlier in the peripheral Khabarovsk literary journal The Far East ( Dal’nii vostok ), in install¬ ments between 1946 and 1948. 15 This first version of the novel is very different from the Stalin prize edition of 1948. One rediscovers, for instance the “heart-breaking ex¬ pression of a love which did not have the time to blossom and was already torn off,” of which only a tiny part was “reawakened” during The Mystery of the River Adun 147 the post-Stalin era. The discussions of the many changes that the Far East version of Far from Moscow underwent would lead us too far afield. Concerning the mystery of the Adun, there is only disappoint¬ ing news to report: the river Adun, the island Taisin, Cape Gibel’nyi, etc.—all this remains the same. Perhaps this search for the “real” names of the action of our novel is not worth the effort. Perhaps the theoretical requirement by the method of socialist realism of the “truthful, historically concrete de¬ piction of reality” should not to be taken too seriously. Alas, this re¬ quirement has to be taken very seriously. “The fact that these pipelines were constructed by concentration-camp prisoners is of course passed over” writes Kasack in his dictionary without pursuing this disturbing fact. Some other—Soviet dissident—sources, such as Roy Medvedev’s book on Stalinism, Let History Judge (1971), or Grigori Svirski’s A History of Post-War Soviet Writing: The Literature of Moral Opposi¬ tion (1981), give some more evidence. Svirski knew Azhaev personally: A whole team of “Simonovites” (N. Drozdov, prose editor on Simo¬ nov’s Novyi mir, together with his associates) rewrote from scratch the rather loosely written manuscript of V. Azhayev, a former prisoner. It had been published by a provincial publishing house. The author had turned the real-life concentration-camp commandant Barabanov, greatly feared by both prisoners and guards, into Batmanov, hero of a freedom—Soviet style. Simonov eagerly lent his support to the lie: after all the corrections that were made, the major pipeline as before is laid not by wretched, starving, half-dead political prisoners, whom the author betrayed, but by exceptionally happy Soviet citizens. Simonov looked through the completed manuscript with a vigilant eye, on the look out for any remaining allusions to camp life, unnecessary psycho¬ logical associations and so on. Vasily Azhayev, the quiet, sickly political prisoner was praised to the skies for his silence. For his silence and his timidity he was appointed editor-in-chief of the show-case journal Sovetskaya literatura ( Soviet Literature) which was published in vari¬ ous foreign languages and where, as is well known, the editor-in-chief made no decisions. Thanks to Konstantin Simonov, Azhayev’s “Gulag Archipelago” became a world-famous apotheosis of free labor in a free country in the form of the novel Far from Moscow , which caused quite a sensation and was awarded the Stalin Prize (First Class). 16 What is then the “literature of moral opposition”? Svirski recalls another writer, Lidiia Chukovskaia, who wrote a novel about the drama of the written word during the reign of Stalin, and about writers 148 Thomas Lahusen like Azhaev. Spusk pod vodu (Going Under, London, 1972) was writ¬ ten in “internal emigration” and first published in 1972 in Paris. It is the story of a woman working on a translation during the year of 1949 in a so-called dom tvorchestva —a place writers may retreat to in peaceful surroundings, not far from Moscow. There she gets to know a certain Bilibin, a writer who just works on a novel that takes place in Siberia. From time to time, Nina Sergeevna is “going under,” toward herself, or rather, toward her husband, Alesha, who was sentenced to ten years without right to correspondence. One night the radio reports on the “struggle against the rootless cosmopolitans.” Some guests im¬ mediately leave the house. A writer who writes war poems in Yiddish is arrested. The rumor goes that people who had been previously de¬ ported are arrested only because they had been previously deported. Nina Sergeevna learns from Bilibin—who also had been “there”— that “ten years without right to correspondence” means execution. Bilibin becomes the only link between her and her dead husband. She wants to know what “there” was like, and Bilibin tells her. Toward the end of the story, Bilibin has completed his novel and gives it to Nina Sergeevna to read. And this is her response, quoted in Svirski’s book: “You’re a coward,” I said. “No, you’re something worse. You’re a false witness.” He started to get up. “You’re a liar . . . Good-bye. Why did you not have the dignity to keep silent? Just not say anything. Surely out of respect for the people you buried you could have found some other way of earning a crust of bread. Without resorting to your forest and your mine and that child, and your friend’s stutter?” He went out . . . 1 once counted how many paces it was from his door to mine. It was nineteen. But now it had become nineteen miles, not one less, nineteen centuries. 17 Bilibin had obviously reworked his terrible concentration-camp ex¬ perience into a euphoric production novel. Svirski concludes: Lydia Chukovskaya rose to do battle for the Word. The Word had de¬ ceived millions and is still a terrible weapon, possibly even more terrible than the atomic bomb or nerve gas. She attacks not only the hangmen, but also those of their victims who have become their accomplices. They are no different from the hangmen, and she hates them just as fiercely, and has even more contempt for them than she has for the hangmen. 1X One cannot but applaud. However, and unfortunately, Svirski does not quote Nina Sergeevna’s thoughts, which we find a few pages later, at the end of the book. She asks Bilibin to forgive her, internally: The Mystery of the River Adun 149 “Forgive me!” I wanted to say. “I didn’t have the right to judge you; least of all I, for no dogs ever threw themselves on me and I’ve never seen the wooden tag on the leg of a dead man . . . Forgive me! You wouldn’t wish to go back there: to felling trees, to the mines. Go back for a second time! The story you wrote is your weak shield, your un¬ reliable wall.” 19 “The most important feature of Soviet censorship: it forbids silence” wrote Andrei Siniavskii in “Samizdat and the Rebirth of Literature .” 20 In order to survive, one has to keep talking, or keep writing. What really happened to Vasilii Azhaev? Did he participate in the construc¬ tion of the pipeline? As a victim, as the hangman, or as an accomplice? And what about our Active toponyms? What about “father Adun”? During these last years, within and outside of the Soviet Union the Stal¬ inist past has been revised as never before. Incredible and also contra¬ dictory things have been published. For instance, in 1987 a new edition of Azhaev’s Foreword to Life , with its Five-Year Plan theme: circu¬ lation 200,000! “I go to work—take me, factory. Take my muscles, take the love of your son.” 21 One recognizes in these words, printed in the middle of the perestroika era zhdanovite socialist realism in its purest expression. Foreword to Life has appeared in the Sovet- skii Pisatel’ Publishing House. At that moment Sovetskii Pisatel’, the publishing house of the Soviet Writers’ Union, was controlled by the “conservatives,” such as Markov, Proskurin, and Bondar’ev. The answer came one year later by the “liberal” journal Druzhba narodov, which published in his June, July, and August issues of 1988 an unknown novel by Vasilii Azhaev, The Boxcar. Date of conception: 1964. A note at the end of the novel says: “Edited and published by I. L. Liubimova-Azhaeva.” 22 The Boxcar describes the deportation of a young worker and stu¬ dent, Mitia Promyslov, who is arrested in 1934 “without any reason.” The story, written from the perspective of a remembering narrator living during the 1960s, deals almost exclusively with his deportation from Moscow toward the Far East. The action takes place within a boxcar: Mitia describes for the reader his comrades in misery, reveal¬ ing the paragraphs of the penal code, the length of the sentences, the organization of a communist “prisoners’ collective.” The author of the introduction confirms what we already know, from “dissident sources.” The Boxcar contains many autobiographic elements. Like his hero Mitia Promyslov, the nineteen-year-old Azhaev 150 Thomas Lahusen was arrested in 1934 after the assassination of Kirov and the subse¬ quent massive repressions. He was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for “anti-revolutionary agitation.” In the camps, he “passed the test” and was liberated before the end of his sentence. He remained on the construction site as “free laborer” and worked with such intensity that even his “record” was “cleaned.” Later, he asked to be sent to the front, without any results. He built roads and pipelines, and started his studies by correspondence. At the moment when he published his first book he was in charge of a large construction site. This is what we learn from the introduction. In The Boxcar the journey ends in a place called Svobodnyi (literally “free”). This is also the site of the labor camp. We see that in the Soviet Union of the 1930s also, “Arbeit macht frei.” It turns out that the author of the introduction to The Boxcar is Konstantin Simonov! The afterword of the 1974 edition of Far from Moscow has become the foreword to The Boxcar. Or, one should say rather the reverse. Simonov wrote this introduction to The Boxcar at the time when it was submitted for publication at the beginning of the 1960s and then the novel was rejected. The introduction (part of it), then, was used for a new edition of Far from Moscow . 23 We know that after the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, the publishing houses and editorial boards of Soviet journals were flooded with “prison camp” literature. The subse¬ quent fate of Solzhenitsyn, of “prison camp” literature is well known: it went underground, or into exile. And this is how Azhaev’s secret became unofficially public. Simonov asks himself the (legitimate) question why Azhaev wrote his novel Far from Moscow although he knew that he could not say the truth. He answers for the author, and of course also for himself: Azhaev felt the profound need to describe in one way or the other what he had been witnessing: “In this book he wrote about prisoners as if they had been free, about Soviet citizens, who had contributed pay¬ ing with their person, under inhuman conditions, for the victory over Fascism .” 24 What is the role of the writer in a totalitarian state? On one hand, it goes without saying, he has to be in “moral opposition.” On the other hand, we cannot dismiss the answer given by Simonov, which was, as we saw, also addressed to himself. “We never ceased for one minute to be communists,” explains Mitia Promyslov, the hero of The Box¬ car, on his journey to Siberia. This also was true for Azhaev. During The Mystery of the River Adun 151 an interview that I conducted in 1988 with Maya Minoustchine, the French translator of Far from Moscoiv, who considered this transla¬ tion to be one of her sins of youth, 1 was informed that Azhaev was a man who had remained very “close to the party line.” 25 In The Boxcar he also remained close to the party line. Here are the words of one of the prisoners, Zimin, a Bolshevik of the Old Guard, who shares the fate of his companions for “antirevolutionary agitation”; he com¬ memorates the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death: “Our boxcar is far from being the whole country, it is far from being our whole life; it is only a drop of water. But the country, the infinitely large family, lives and works.” 26 In another passage, Zimin “organizes” the passengers of the boxcar: —We have to elect a headman,—said Fetistov . . . —Lets vote!—proposed Zimin. The vote turned out to be carried unanimously, even with applause. Everything was like in a decent collective. 27 Who is speaking here? The writer? The state? The Party? In the last decades a lot has been written in literary scholarship about the “authoritarian” word, about the ice period of the Stalinist monolith. No, the ice has not disappeared, it “has come up to us.” And one can be sure that the “authoritarian word” will still live on for some time, because it gives its users some security, the security of the cog in the great wheel of history. Whether Vasilii Azhaev was a “good writer” or not is not at stake here. More important is the fact that he knew about one thing, and shared this knowledge, this training with all his colleagues: he knew that every word has its weight. The capacity of adaptation as the orga¬ nizing principle of literature and art can therefore be considered as the main characteristics of socialist realism in particular, and of Soviet cul¬ ture in general. This culture can therefore he defined as a particularly open system, permanently adapting itself to its context. 28 As a result, it is, on one hand, a very “unified” culture. On the other hand, it is a culture in flux. It is a “monolith” with an inherent tendency to frag¬ mentation and isolation. All this explains the propensity of this culture for change while still remaining “the same.” Vasilii Azhaev’s Far from Moscow shares this “double quality” with many products of Soviet culture, with the exception that this book was indeed a “best-seller,” if we think about the twenty translations, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies produced until our time. One can of course argue that all the re-editions of the novel have a purely entropic quality, that 152 Thomas Lahusen they are nothing more than “ritual.” We saw, for example, that the author has been used recently as an instrument for political struggle, after his death. But for the reader of the 1940s Far from Moscow was not a Stalin prize like any other. It caused “quite a sensation.” Literary scholarship looks sometimes for the “deep structure” of a text. In our case, we have to look at the very surface. Because it is the very surface of our novel which reveals to us the secret of “Father Adun.” Whether Svobodnyi of The Boxcar is identical with the “real city,” bearing the same name, and situated not far from the Chinese border, remains unanswered and is finally unimportant. What is important is that svobodnyi means “free.” This is the place where Mitia Promyslov and his comrades in suffering are sent. Let us give the word, once more, to Vasilii Azhaev: “The boxcar—says Mitia at the end of his story— was only the beginning of the “journey.” The year 1934 had just struck at the watchtower. The heart runs cold at the thought of what hap¬ pened here, at the same place, a few years later, when I was already beyond the zone.” 29 Did Azhaev “code” the names of his localities in the Far East} The text gives an unambiguous answer: the city of Rubezhansk is the city of the “borderline,” the “boundary” (rubezh ). Beyond this limit, you come to Cape Gibel’nyi, the cape of “death” ( gibel ’). The Taisin Island reveals in its form—except its association with the taiga —something “mysterious,” “secret” ( taina, taikom). The town at the northern edge of the island is called Konchelan: this is the town at the “end” of the world ( konchatkon- chit’). And what about the river Adun? It is situated v adu, it is the river of “hell.” One must just read carefully. I would like to insist on the root of the word that I am using: it is full of care. It obviously has nothing to do with the “vigilant eye” of the party loyalist Simonov, or perhaps even the “vigilance” of the dissident Svirski. And beyond socialist real¬ ism, Soviet culture, and whatever follows, this kind of careful reading might help us to read our own reading, and therefore, to reconstruct our own story . 30 Notes 1. Wolfgang Kasack, Russian Literature 1945-1988 (Munich, 1989), 11—12.. 2. Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from i9iy to the Present (London, 1988), 116,165,169. 3. Evgenii Dobrenko, “‘I, padaia stremglav, ia probuzhdalsia . . .’ . Ob The Mystery of the River Adun 153 istorii sovetskoi literatury.” (“And, Falling Headlong, 1 Awoke . . On the History of Soviet Literature) Voprosy literatury 8 (1988): 48—92. 4. Marc Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems (New York, 1977), 319. 5. Dictionary of Russian Literature Since 1917 (New York, 1988), 31-31. 6. U.S. Army Topographic Command ( Official Standard Names. Gazetteer No. 42, zd edition), U.S. Board on Geographic Names, Geographic Names Division, U.S. Army Topographic Command, Washington, D.C. (1970). 7. Vasili Azhayev, Far from Moscow. A Novel in Three Parts (Moscow, 1950), 1: 8. 8. Far from Moscow , 1: 71. 9. I quote from the English translation. Far from Moscow , x: nz. 10. Far from Moscow , 1: 71. 11. Ibid., 1: 56. iz. My translation. 13. Ibid. 14. In the “official” English translation of 1950 we read: “Two seasons were grappling with one another.” Far from Moscow , 1: 133. 15. Vasilii Azhaev, Daleko ot Moskvy, roman (Far from Moscow, a Novel), Dal’nii vostok 1, z (1946); 3 (1946); 4, 5 (1947); 1, z (1948). The circulation of Dal’nii vostok at that time was almost “confidential,” i.e., 5,000 copies per issue (in comparison to the central “thick journals”; for example, the cir¬ culation of Novyi mir in 1948 was 64,300). The foreword to the “official” translation of the novel deliberately passes over in silence this Far East publi¬ cation, with, however, an imbedded contradiction for the “knowing” reader. Here is the passage: “[The novel] has gone through several editions since it was first published in 1948 (Azhayev worked on it for four years), and large new editions are planned.” Far from Moscow, 1: iz. 16. Grigori Svirski, A History of Post-War Soviet Writing: The Literature of Moral Opposition (Ann Arbor, 1981), 58—59. 17. Ibid., 220-21. 18. Ibid., 221. 19. Lydia Chukovskaya, Going Under (London, 1972). zo. Index on Censorship 9, no. 4 (1980). zi. V. N. Azhaev, Predislovie k zhizni: povesti i rasskazy (A Foreword to Life: Novellas and Stories) (Moscow, 1987), 6. 22. The novel has since been published twice in book form. Once by Sovre- mennik: Vasilii Azhaev, Vagon. Roman. (The Boxcar. A Novel) (Moscow, 1988) , circulation 200,000; a second time by Moskovskii Rabochii: Daleko ot Moskvy. Vagon. Romany (Far from Moscow. The Boxcar. Novels) (Moscow, 1989) , circulation 50,000. 23. Besides a (new?) foreword by D. Granin, the 1989 publication of Mos¬ kovskii Rabochii (see note above), which unites in one book the two novels by 154 Thomas Lahusen Vasilii Azhaev, includes also the foreword that Konstantin Simonov wrote for The Boxcar in 1966. 24. Konstantin Simonov, Foreword to Vasilii Azhaev, Vagon. Roman (The Boxcar. A Novel) Druzhba narodov 6 (1988): 164. My translation. 25. She had met the author during his visit in Paris in the 1960s. 26. Vasilii Azhaev, Vagon. Roman. (The Boxcar. A Novel) Druzhba naro¬ dov 8 (1988): 151. My translation. 27. Ibid., 130—31. 28. The concept of socialist realist culture as an “open system” has been elaborated in recent years by a group of scholars at the University of Lau¬ sanne. For a presentation of their theses, their methodology, and first results, see Antoine Baudin, Leonid Heller, Thomas Lahusen, “Le realisme social- iste de l’ere Jdanov. Compte rendu d'une enquete en cours” (Socialist realism of the Zhdanov Era: An Account of a Current Enquiry), Etudes de Lettres (Lausanne) 4 (1988): 69—101. 29. Vagon. Roman (The Boxcar. A Novel), Druzhba narodov 8 (1988): 174. 30. During a research trip to Moscow in the summer of 1992 ,1 had access to the personal archives of Vasilii Azhaev. These materials bring new evidence about his published and unpublished work, and about his public—and less public—role in Soviet culture. Further reading of Azhaev’s “story” will be available in a forthcoming monograph. Michael Holquist Dialogism and Aesthetics Recent discussion about literary theory has been remark- able for its avoidance of cultural specificity. At a time when mainstream literary studies are marked by an increased attention to historical and social detail, metacriticism is being practiced as if it were one of the natural sciences, in which it doesn’t matter whether a new idea is offered by an American or a Japanese physicist. Revela¬ tions about Paul De Man’s wartime journalism proved so disquieting to many, I suspect, because (among other reasons) it forced them to rethink their prejudice that literary theory is a world of disembodied ideas. They were reminded, in other words, that literary theorists are also authors. Mikhail Bakhtin, too, has been treated as if his utterances were a mere writing, as if he were simply one more name in the deracinated ecriture of current metacriticism. For those who know Bakhtin’s work best, it is difficult not to perceive a particular inappropriateness in the fact that he, of all people, is also being treated as a stateless thinker. Bakhtin never ceased to theorize responsibility and situatedness; he continued to deepen our understanding of the complex problem of authorship while others stopped at the trivial level of personal inten¬ tions, where it was possible almost literally to bury the problem by announcing the “death of the author.” Bakhtin’s work is exceedingly diverse, but remarkable as well for its consistent adherence precisely to those principles of historical and cultural specificity that are increas¬ ingly honored in American academic circles, but still flouted in most metacritical discussions of his own work. At a time when the whole fabric of life is coming unraveled in the Soviet Union, it is more urgent than ever that we not lose sight of the Russian bases of one of the greatest Russian thinkers of the Soviet period. In this article, then, I’d like to highlight some of those features in the history of Russian disputes about aesthetics (especially as they are present in the work of the nineteenth-century Civic Critics and the Opoiaz group) that help illuminate Bakhtinian dialogism, especially as it relates to the question of the material base of aesthetics. I do so 156 Michael Holquist not only to add a historical dimension to our present-day appropria¬ tion of Bakhtin in the West, but to suggest as well why the concept of “embodiment” should play so large a role in the antitheoretical tenor of his theory. To do this, we shall have to examine Bakhtin’s relation to the European heritage of classical aesthetics as it was rethought in Russia beginning in (roughly) the 1840s. If we understand aesthetics to mean the study of those features in an art work that define it uniquely as a work of art, and not something else, then it may be said that it is a study that is at least as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. But of course it was only in the eighteenth century, in the work of Baumgarten, and his student Kant, that aesthetics as a separate discipline was “invented.” Enlightenment Germany is felt to be originary not only because it gives rise to the very term aesthet¬ ics, but because the formulation of art’s distinctiveness that was then put forward served for the next 150 years as the center of most Euro¬ pean debates about the nature of art. On the other hand, aesthetics so understood has never played a very large role in American literary scholarship. It has seemed hopelessly academic in a tradition honoring passion and immediacy, from Emerson to Harold Bloom. It will help to remember, then, that aesthetics in Europe has been more than an exercise in Teutonic system building. Indeed, aesthetics had the power to scandalize. The aspect of aes¬ thetics that always made it a matter of dispute was the proposition that art gained its special place among human endeavors because it was isolated from constraints at work in the practical endeavors of everyday life. Art, in Kant’s fateful formula, had the quality of having “Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck or, as it is often translated, art had “the quality of being purposeful, without having a purpose” (a propo¬ sition we shall examine below in a different paraphrase; in discussions of literary evolution, the formula is more aptly “teleological without having a telos”). So vatic a formulation was bound to arouse a great deal of contro¬ versy, but nowhere was this more the case than in Russia. Indeed, the whole history of Russian literary criticism and theory in the modern period revolves around this way of formulating the distinctiveness of art: if it were not aimed at having an effect, asked radical nineteenth- century critics, who needed it? The history of Russian literary criticism and theory can be read, then, as a contest about the very right of litera¬ ture to exist. Vissarion Belinskii (1811-1847), 1 the founder of Russian literary criticism, after a brief fit of garbled Hegelianism during which Dialogism and Aesthetics 157 he argued that it was necessary for his countrymen to accommodate to their reality, no matter how harsh or unjust it might appear to be (for it was the ineluctable status of Spirit at the stage where they encoun¬ tered it), devoted himself to using literature as a weapon in the struggle to found a national identity. Pushkin and Gogol were important not because they wrote beautiful poems or great plays, but because they helped Russians understand who they were in the family of European nations. In the 1860s the situation became more fraught. It was a time when aesthetics were far from being a subject of merely academic debate: quite on the contrary, it was a time when, in the title of Charles Moser’s useful new book, everyone thought of “aesthetics as night¬ mare.” 2 Moser takes his unusually apt title from two quotations by opposed spokesmen from the period. The first, by the conservative poet Afanasii Fet, is a lament that “the legitimacy of poetry amid other human activities” is a nightmare “from which we should long since have freed ourselves forever.” The second quotation is taken from the radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev, who admits that “esthetics is my night¬ mare.” Fet’s hope that the need to defend the very existence of poetry would pass away like a bad dream was not to be fulfilled. It was the “new people,” the nihilists, who carried the day, and it will perhaps help us understand something of the tradition in which Bakhtin was work¬ ing if we briefly pause on the most militant of those radicals, Dmitrii Pisarev. Two of Pisarev’s 1865 articles, “A Stroll through the Gardens of Russian Literature” and “Pushkin and Belinskii” were particularly im¬ portant in establishing him as the enfant terrible of the far left. In the first, he makes clear why it is that he so hates most of what was popular in Russian literature. In terms that some contemporary Marxist critics will approve, he denounced the predilection of readers and authors alike for the merely personal, and bewailed the widespread inatten¬ tion to more significant, impersonal social forces that were shaping the future: In order to distract people from serious meditation, in order to divert their gaze from the idiocies of life both large and small, in order to conceal from them the genuine necessities of this age and this nation, the writer must draw his readers away into a tiny little world of purely personal |oys and purely personal griefs ... he must surround his small tales with charming descriptions of moonlit nights, summer evenings, 158 Michael Holquist passionate ecstasies, and luxuriant bosoms; and the main thing is that while he is at it he must carefully conceal from his reader that un¬ breakable link connecting the fate of the individual personality with the condition of society as a whole. 3 And in the second major article of that year, Pisarev attacked both the idol of the conservatives, Pushkin, and the darling of the left, Belin- skii. It is a bravura piece of polemic, which condemns Evgenii Onegin , already in the 1860s increasingly regarded as the greatest monument of modern Russian culture, as merely “a brilliant apotheosis of a most melancholy and senseless status quo.” For conservatives who loved poetry and felt its right to exist should never be put into question, the shock of having to defend literary art was indeed a nightmarish undertaking, but one still articulated as an exercise in aesthetics. For radicals who condemned poetry as effete posturing that distracted right-thinking people from urgent political goals, aesthetics was also a name for nightmare, but for quite different reasons. Aesthetics could serve as the key term for both sides of the arguments that raged in the 1860s, for it was a time when double mean¬ ings were the order of the day. A peculiarity of the age was that the same words had to bear quite different meanings. Double-voicedness was not yet invented as an analytical category by Bakhtin, but it was very much already a discursive reality in Russian literary debate. This condition can in large measure be explained by the need to use the same code—literature—to talk about many different topics. Chief among these were the pressing social problems of the day, such as the judicial reforms and the abolition of serfdom proposed by the new czar, Alexander II. His accession to the throne in 1855 coincided with the first shot in the literary wars of the following decades, the mani¬ festo on the superiority of life to art that Chernyshevskii published as his master’s thesis. There was yet another Polish uprising, unusual fires in Moscow, and Karakozov’s attempt on the life of the czar in 1866. Although the worst excesses of “censorship terror” under Nicholas I had diminished with his death in 1855, conditions in the 1860s were still not ripe enough for open discussion of such sensitive and divisive issues as, for instance, how the newly freed serfs would be assigned land. But in a discussion of how realistically peasants were depicted in a story or novel, such problems could at least be touched on, even if cast into an “aesopian language.” As Moser points out, “Esthetic questions were at the forefront of Russian intellectual life ... [because] many Russian intellectuals resorted to literature and literary criticism Dialogism and Aesthetics 159 as a means of dealing with what were at bottom political questions. If a novel or short story ‘accurately’ depicted Russian reality, then it could at least implicitly point to the reforms needed for the improvement of that reality; and literary critics, while purporting to discuss those same literary works, could deal with such reforms or changes directly. Thus some of Russia’s best minds then occupied themselves . . . with literature and literary criticism” (p. xiii). Extremists in the 1860s, such as Pisarev, attacked poetry in general and Pushkin in particular, arguing that life in Russia called out for radical change: proponents of the merely “beautiful” were hindering the work of those who labored in the service of the truly “true.” Politi¬ cally correct journals, such as Russkoe slovo (Russian Word) ceased publishing any poetry at all in its pages during its last radical phase before being suppressed by the government in 1866. The times called out for “the destruction of aesthetics,” the title of one of Pisarev’s most influential pieces. The idea that literature must be so immediately relevant to current political issues that it ceases in any meaningful sense to be literature has thus played an enormous role in Russian history. It is this aspect of its heritage that helps explain the urgency and not infrequent shrillness of certain Slavic theoretical writings. From at least the time of Belin- skii in the late 1830s, anyone wishing to be heard in the raging debates about the status of literature in Russian society had to take an extreme position; thus disputes about the relation of form to content, which in one way or another mark all histories of critical practice, became an especially pronounced feature of the Russian tradition. The problem of how literature related to other human activities is one that could not be avoided by later Russian theorists, and plays an important role in the work of Veselovskii and Potebnia, the two major figures between the Civic Critics and the Formalists. In addition, the status of literature among other discourses is built into the manifestos of all subsequent literary movements, such as the Formalists, Acmeists, and Futurists, different as they all are from each other. Aesthetics was thus of enormous importance in Russia, even after (per¬ haps especially after) its “destruction” had been announced by Pisarev, because it was in the nature of aesthetics, no matter which school might be invoked, to assume a cutoff between the art and other human forms of production. Thus its insistence on art’s independence from the material out of which it was constructed, and from any paraphras- able content that one might read out of it, was the most radical slap in 160 Michael Holquist the face of all those radicals who defined art as something material in its construction and socially useful (or harmful) in its content. Which is, of course, why the Civic Critics reacted against it so violently in the name of an unmediated Realism. Here is the most implacable “man of the sixties,” Pisarev, again: “Esthetics and realism are indeed in a state of irreconcilable hostility, and realism must destroy esthetics at the root... [for it is] the most implacable enemy of intellectual progress.” 4 The great problem in such an overheated environment was always that the distinctiveness of the aesthetic would be confused with argu¬ ments in favor of art for art’s sake. The task of aesthetics after the 1860s was to define the uniqueness of aesthetic effect, while still demonstrat¬ ing that such particularity was not a hopeless idealism, a mysticism of art, or a feckless aestheticism. While there was then no shortage of dispute about “aesthetics,” very little attention was really paid by anyone to the arts other than litera¬ ture. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The first of these is local: it was literature, or talk about literature, that became institutionalized as a forum for debate of issues whose discussion was otherwise for¬ bidden. Literature was a central concern in Russian society not only because it produced an extraordinary outpouring of great works dur¬ ing these years, but because it was a code for talking about everything that most urgently needed discussion in the society. Another reason, of course, inheres in the nature of literature itself: because its medium is words, and not sound or stone, it was closest to extra-aesthetic expression, and thus most likely to be confused with the languages used outside art. Dobroliubov was quite explicit in arguing that “lit¬ erature’s chief significance is that of propaganda.” 5 Good style was equated with clarity of positions taken: as Pisarev put it in 1864, “As we understand things these days, beauty of language consists solely of its clarity and expressiveness . . . [for language should be] a means for the transmission of thought.” 6 The Formalists, then, when they came strutting and tumbling onto the stage in the second decade of the twentieth century, were, in retro¬ spect, perhaps less revolutionary than they assumed they were. They certainly could not be accused of equating literature and propaganda. But while playing down the term aesthetics, they set out from the be¬ ginning to accomplish the task that aesthetics had come historically to nominate in Russia. They reduced the general problem of identify¬ ing the distinctiveness of the aesthetic to the more circumscribed task of seeking the distinctiveness of the literary, “literariness” ( literatur - nost’). They did so among other reasons because it was literature that had always been at the heart of debates about aesthetics. But the For- Dialogism and Aesthetics 161 malists paid homage to the past as well insofar as they understood literature’s uniqueness as a subset of the larger question of how an artwork is able to isolate itself from nonartistic factors in its material and content. This had always been the great problem not only of clas¬ sical aesthetics in the rest of Europe, but of its militant Russian version as well. The Formalists betray their imbrication in the Russian radical tra¬ dition in at least two other ways: in their concern to treat literary study as a form of technology (the text understood as the “sum of its de¬ vices”); and in their appeal to the laws governing human perception as the ground for their theory of literaturnost ’. Shklovskii’s original idea was that the essence of the literary was to be found in those devices writers employed to call attention to the stylistic innovations in their texts. In order to be perceived with the intensity required by art, a work had to shock the reader out of the habits formed through his ex¬ perience of past art. “Literariness” consisted, then, in devices such as “braking” or “step structure” which slowed down the reader’s ability to assimilate a given text, forcing him to dwell on this text, as opposed to all others. The text was thus understood as the “sum” of such de¬ vices. By concentrating on “devices” so understood, one could treat the work of art as a kind of material thing. It was not by chance that characteristic articles of the period carried titles such as Eikhenbaum’s “How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made,” suggesting that the Formalist critic was simply a kind of engineer of criticism, who took literary texts apart much as one might a machine. All of this was no doubt in¬ fluenced by a worship of modern technology among the Futurists who were close allies of the Formalists. But it also proved an effective way to deal with the thorny problem of aesthetic isolation—the traditional bugbear of Russian theory since at least Chernyshevskii’s 1855 master’s thesis, “The Relation of Art to Reality.” By treating the poet as essentially a craftsman who assembles de¬ vices, the Formalists were avoiding the possible embarrassment of being charged as mystics who were concerned with such imponder¬ ables as “beauty” and “spirit,” still very much a part of the Symbolist aesthetics the Formalists opposed. But they were also coming very close to the definition of art and the artist that had dominated the 1860s. Consider, for instance, Pisarev’s formulation of 1865: “One may become a poet just as one may become a lawyer, a professor, a journalist, a cobbler, or a watch repairer. A poet ... is just the same sort of craftsman as all other craftsmen who satisfy by their labor the various natural or artificial needs of society.” It is not by chance that histories of Russian Formalism, and there 162 Michael Holquist are now several good ones, 8 tend to organize their accounts around the different meanings the central Formalist conception of ostranenie, or “defamiliarization,” assumed over the course of their activity. The Formalists’ radical attempts to isolate the essence of the literary is an almost predictable twentieth-century reaction against the tendency to mix literature up with everything else typifying earlier centuries (and not just in the work of the academic literary scholars who im¬ mediately precede the Formalists and were castigated by Jakobson). In their first phase, the Formalists sought to strip the artwork of all its extra-aesthetic dimensions, especially the social ones which were the exclusive concern of the Civic Critics. It is this scandalous avoidance of social and historical factors in the earliest work of Shklovskii and Jakobson that made (and in some circles continue to make) the For¬ malists a favorite target: one reason the early Shklovskii, the Peck’s bad boy of Formalism, is so often quoted by later critics is that he makes such a useful straw man. But from relatively early on in their collective career, the Formal¬ ists were impelled not only by their Marxist opponents, but by a logic immanent in their own theory, to treat questions of literary history. In 1916, in one of his first expositions of the doctrine of defamiliar¬ ization, Shklovskii raised implicit questions about the dynamics of literary change; much of what the Formalists did later can be grasped as an attempt to give explicit answers to those questions. The crude, first formulation of defamiliarization emphasized the text’s palpability ( chuvstvitel’nost’). The (largely implicit) theory of literary change at this point assumed that readers, bored with familiar literary style, “felt” the novelty of new style through its power to “brake” their de¬ mand for a meaning, permitting them to experience the aesthetic, or as the Formalists put it, to experience the sensation of form. While exceedingly primitive, and owing much to Gestalt psychology and Broder Christiansen’s emphasis in his Aesthetics on “ Differenzquali- t 'dt the doctrine of defamiliarization—in its appeal to sensuality and presumed laws of perception—at this stage reveals its implicit rooted¬ ness in a past going back to the 1860s, a tradition the Formalists were most eager to repudiate at a more explicit level. If the early Formalist concept of literature as craft can be related back to prejudices with their roots in the work of Civic Criticism in general, the appeal to sensuality and laws of perception harks back to a specified trend in the 1860s: the tendency to ground theories of art in theories of science, more particularly, the science of physiology. This point need not be stressed to anyone who remembers in Tur- Dialogism and Aesthetics 163 genev’s Fathers and Sons the various pronouncements made by the nihilist Bazarov about the authority of physiology. As Moser points out, “The radical critics—who expected science eventually to resolve all the problems of human society—believed that scientific thought was the ideal to which all other varieties of thought should aspire.” 9 But it was not just the radicals, such as Pisarev, who held such views. Pisarev’s most redoubtable opponent on the right, Nikolai Solov’ev (1831—1874), discussed aesthetics in physiological terms as well. He could do so with some authority, since he had trained as a medical doctor before beginning his publishing career in Dostoevskii’s journal The Epoch in 1864. His most significant attempt to demonstrate that aesthetics must be grounded in the physical nature of things was made in a series of 1865 essays called (with self-conscious reference to the title of Chernyshevskii’s master’s thesis) “On the Relations of Natural Science to Art.” Solov’ev is in many ways a most appealing figure, not least because he was less given to the name calling and mud slinging that was so much a feature of theoretical debates about literature at the time. Although he, like the Civic Critics, showed an exaggerated respect for German science, he was knowledgeable enough to play down the importance of such simplistic popularizers as Moleschott and Buchner, the favorite authorities of the radicals, and to use the work of more serious Germans, such as von Helmholtz and Adolph Zeising (whose Neue Lehre von den Proportionen des menschlichen Korpers Solov’ev found especially useful in his arguments). While the radicals used physiology as a weapon against art, Solov’ev sought to enlist the aid of science in the battle for aesthetics. In terms that are strikingly similar to Mukarovsky’s later formulation of “an¬ thropological constants” as the basis of aesthetic value, Solov’ev argues that “the impact of natural forms upon our aesthetic sense is subjected to the same sorts of laws as the impact of sound and light, the only difference being that in the case of sound time is the most important factor, while space plays the chief role in the case of forms.” 10 There are, then, points of evolutionary contact between nineteenth- century Russian disputes about aesthetics and the activity of the For¬ malists even in their earliest, least contextualist phase. Bakhtin was not simply another Russian critic steeped in a knowledge of his own country’s literary traditions who was reading the Formalists in the late teens and early twenties of this century: he was himself an active par¬ ticipant in the ongoing dispute about aesthetics. Insofar as he was, he was also involved in thinking through many of the same dilemmas as 164 Michael Holquist the Formalists. And as with them, his work continues to manifest filia¬ tions going back to the 1860s. But his relation to the ongoing dialogue is somewhat skewed in terms of immediate impact as well as in terms of solutions he put forward. It is difficult to accommodate him to the standard model that is now generally accepted for the history of Rus¬ sian literary theory, which is why he is usually either ignored or treated as a kind of inexplicable mutation. Iurii Tynianov plays an axial role in these developments, for it was he who more than anyone else addressed the questions left unanswered in Formalism’s early phase—a characteristic that goes far to explain his many convergences with Bakhtin. Tynianov’s almost preternatu¬ ral “feel” for history, which would in his later years make him such a masterful historical novelist, can be seen at work in his 1927 water¬ shed essay “On Literary Evolution.” Tynianov had already concerned himself with the problem of how to incorporate Shklovskii’s powerful hut essentially anarchist ideas about defamiliarization into a system. Shklovskii was very much a part of the cultural revolution that co¬ incided with the political revolution wrought by the Bolsheviks; his instincts were those of the avant garde; he delighted in the role of en¬ fant terrible, and highlighted stylistic inversion of readerly expectation because such slaps in the face of the traditional public were in accord with his desire to tear down restraints of the past. Tynianov was less a destroyer than a builder, someone who was eager to use terms like “de¬ vice” and “defamiliarization” less as nihilist bombs than as historical bricks. He sought to use such concepts as materials from which could be constructed a system of literary change that would incorporate the past as well as the future (toward which Shklovskii strove exclusively, in this like the radical Pisarev, if in nothing else). Tynianov’s basic move was to concentrate on an elaborate theory of overlapping relations between different periods of time, different levels of social and discursive expression, and different styles, all of which were a part of a unitary process that was ongoing and synchro¬ nous. Such a comprehensive view is, of course, reminiscent of Bakhtin’s heteroglot dialogism. And like Bakhtin, Tynianov emphasized the de¬ gree to which literary history was not a dead succession of unconnected revolutions but a series of events whose consequences extended very much into the living present, and which, therefore, had implications for the future as well. He chose “evolution,” rather than “history,” to nominate his account of past-present relations, because he wished to emphasize precisely the tension and struggle of the process by which social forces work on texts to give birth to different texts. He proposes a number of key terms he hopes will be useful in Dialogism and Aesthetics 165 transforming literary history into literary evolution. One of the more important of these is ustanovka, first introduced by Jakobson as a Russian equivalent for the German Einstellung (which in Jakobson’s English translation becomes “set”). Ustanovka is a term that “can mean at once the orientation of one thing to something else, and the arrangement of all the parts within a system (corresponding to its ex¬ ternal orientation). Ustanovka permitted Tynianov to perceive parts as wholes and wholes as parts, as different levels of discourse hierarchi¬ cally interacted with each other. Tynianov emphasizes that each aspect of a text performs several functions at once: each element is part of the whole of the particular text containing it; but it also is an element in another series, the whole comprised by that part of literary discourse in which it is inscribed (more often than not, how the element is per¬ ceived against the backdrop of the genre to which it belongs). As such, it thus participates not only in a particular text, but in the evolution of other texts; it follows that each element in a given work must be read against the backdrop formed by other levels of discourse in the soci¬ ety—the evolution of legal, religious, business, and street languages, and so forth. Tynianov provides two other terms that are crucial for grasping the dialectic between system in an individual text and the various contex¬ tual systems that surround it: synfunction and autofunction. The first nominates a particular element’s role within a single text (let us say, in a crude example, a legal document, perhaps a will, used as a clue in a given detective story); the second refers to the element’s role in other literary genres (such as how legal documents are used in realis¬ tic novels). Autofunction ultimately will refer as well to extraliterary functions of the same element, such as legal documents in the law. And of course all these simultaneous functions must then be mapped onto the various histories that detective stories, literary language, and extraliterary discourses constitute together. Tynianov’s emphasis on evolution and system culminated in the theses he published with Jakobson in 1929 (the same year in which the Bakhtin/Voloshinov volume Marxism and the Philosophy of Language appeared) called “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language.” The calculatedly undramatic title of the theses did not conceal their nature as a manifesto arguing that the ancient quarrel between poetics and history was over, for it was now understood that “the history of a system was itself a system.”" The search for system was not confined to the Formalists during the 19ZOS. In Bakhtin’s major essay of 1923—24, “The Problem of Content, 166 Michael Holquist Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” 12 he repeats again and again the need for greater systematization in poetics: it opens with a manifesto¬ like statement claiming that “the present study attempts a method¬ ological analysis of the fundamental concepts and problems of poetics on the basis of general systematic aesthetics.” 13 This monograph was an attempt to distinguish his own position from that of the Formalists (it contains most of the stronger arguments against the Opoiaz group that later were collected in the book published under Pavel Medvedev’s name, The Formal Method in Literary Study ), and one of the most im¬ portant ways in which the distinction is defined is through a contrast in the attitude toward system that each manifested. Obviously refer¬ ring to the Formalists, Bakhtin refers to a false independence newly claimed for the work of art, and the “pretension to construct the sci¬ ence of a particular art independently of the cognition and systematic determination of the distinctive nature of the aesthetic within the unity of human culture.” He is here attacking the incomplete systematical¬ ness of the Formalists search for “literariness.” He goes on to add that “such a pretension is . . . completely unrealizable. ... It is true that the aesthetic is in some way given in a work of art itself—the philosopher does not just invent it. But only systematic philosophy is capable of developing a scientific understanding of the distinctive nature of the aesthetic.” 14 We shall expect, then, that the nature of Bakhtin’s systematic aes¬ thetics will differ from that of the Formalists, and indeed it does. It is precisely in the form that Bakhtin’s work assumes at this time that his relation to nineteenth-century Russian thought emerges with the greatest clarity. Briefly stated, it amounts to this: Bakhtin, like the radical critics of the 1860s, is obsessed by the problem of how art can be related to life. It is not by chance that his first published work is the 1919 piece “Art and Responsibility [or Answerability— otvetstven- nost’]." And like the Civic Critics, Bakhtin sees a connection between the two in a material poetics that takes the form of a body-based sys- tematics. It must immediately be added, of course, that there are great differences between Bakhtin and, let us say, a Pisarev. Much of that difference can be explained by the new possibilities for meditating on systems that were made available by work in the biological sciences in the years separating Bakhtin from his predecessors. In conclusion, I will argue this case in some greater detail. Most scholars will already be familiar with the major role that body thinking played in Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais, where the sheer physicality of “the lower bodily stratum” centers that book’s theory Dialogism and Aesthetics 167 of carnival. But there are several other indications of the body’s im¬ portance in Bakhtin’s life and work. It is not trivial, for instance, to know that Bakhtin began suffering in his teenage years from osteomy¬ elitis, a chronic disease that later required amputation of one of his legs, and from whose suppurations, fevers, and pain he was not free for the rest of his long life. It was, moreover, during the important years when Bakhtin was writing his early philosophical works that his suffering from the disease was most intense. Two of the more impor¬ tant influences in his life were directly associated with body thought: Ukhtomskii, the great Leningrad physiologist from whom Bakhtin de¬ rived his concept of chronotope, and whose writings on the concept of shifting dominance among the body’s various systems were helpful in formulating Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance; and Ivan Kanaev, an experimental biologist whom Bakhtin met in 1924, and who became one of Bakhtin’s closest and lifelong friends. It was Kanaev who took Bakhtin to hear Ukhtomskii lecture, who put the penniless Bakhtin and his wife up in his own apartment for three years (it was there that Bakhtin finished, among others, his Dostoevskii book), and it was Kanaev who sent books to Bakhtin during his exile in Kazakh¬ stan so that he could pursue his work on novel theory. It was Kanaev who aroused Bakhtin’s enthusiasm for Goethe’s scientific theories (on which Kanaev published two books). And it was under Kanaev’s name that Bakhtin published an article on vitalism in 1926. 15 More significantly, the body plays an enormously important role in Bakhtin’s writings. Most of his major theoretical statements, those works in which he establishes the characteristic insights and nomi¬ nates the basic categories of dialogism, all betray in their depths a filiation with embodiment. It is precisely in those texts where Bakhtin most openly engages classical aesthetics, such as Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity , or The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Artf 6 that embodiment becomes most indispensable. The body is present in a multitude of obvious ways in these texts, since it is the space in which the major aspects of Bakhtin’s philosophy find their expression; it is being in a particular body at a particular time that makes the whole concept of answerability, of the difference between I and the other, of existence as a deed. But embodiment is present also in significant ways an English translation cannot always fully render, as in such key formulations, for instance, as oplotnenie, translated as “consolidation,” but literally meaning “to take on flesh,” Bakhtin’s way of referring to the coming together of those features in the work of art that give shape to the aesthetic object in it. 168 Michael Holquist In these works of the 1920s, Bakhtin articulated a general aesthetics, against which he elaborates a specific theory of the place held by verbal art. In his later writings, he particularizes even more sustainedly. He provides more and more historical and formal detail in a specific genre in his texts of the 1930s and 1940s devoted to articulating a historical poetics for the novel. As indicated, the example of the Rabelais book is too obvious to pause on; in the Dostoevskii book, we get a specific ap¬ plication of the novel theory (i.e., Dostoevskian polyphony as example of the more comprehensive phenomenon of heteroglossia) that is laid out in the programmatic essays published in English in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). In such texts as those devoted to the chronotope, or in “Discourse in the Novel,” we see an expansion of Bakhtin’s body thinking to a more broadly conceived sense of meaning as “life,” and the history of discourse formulations as modeled on biological evolu¬ tion. In what follows we will look at some of the ways “embodiment,” “life/living,” and “evolution” not merely work as randomly chosen metaphors, but serve to shape the systemic distinctiveness of Bakhtin’s dialogism. In order to see the significance of the move from body thinking to a more broadly biological vision of process as it is at work in Bakhtin’s project as a whole, it will be helpful to remember again the important role played by physiology in the nineteenth-century Russian debates about aesthetics. It is arguably the distinguishing feature of Russian radical writings of the 1860s, but is so all pervasive that it colors as well the work of their opponents, such as Nikolai Solov’ev, or Apollon Grigor’ev, the most systematic of the conservative critics, whose whole method was known as “organic criticism.” Grigor’ev, who was a friend of Dostoevskii’s (indeed, the most important of his methodological essays was published in Dostoevskii’s journal The Epoch in the form of open letters to Dostoevskii), 17 was heavily influenced by German romantic Idealism, 18 including the Goethe who was so important in Bakhtin’s development. Bakhtin not only was aware of this important chapter in the history of Russian aesthetics, but has methodological filiations to it in his own aesthetic writings. This is particularly apparent in his own organicism, the emphasis on systematics conceived not merely as a reductive physi¬ ology whose effect is always to turn organic process into a catalog of mechanical connections, but systematics understood as a living event. If in the early work of the 1920s it is body thinking that shapes Bakh¬ tin’s aesthetics, everywhere we turn in the writings of the 1930s and 1940s devoted to Bakhtin’s theory of the novel we encounter organic thinking about system as active life. Dialogism and Aesthetics 169 I believe that Ken Hirschkop, in a volume of essays called Bakhtin and Cultural Theory ' 9 has put his finger on an important aspect of dialo¬ gism: there is indeed a radical materialism at the heart of the Bakh- tinian enterprise, and it is, perhaps in a sense unintended by Hirsch¬ kop and which remains yet to be investigated, also vulgar. Hirschkop, along with a growing number of critics, has begun to wrestle with the question of the status of the natural sciences in dialogism. There is ample evidence in Bakhtin’s allusions to relativity and quantum theory for concluding, as Hirschkop and other critics, such as D. S. Neff in an important essay, 20 that he was indeed, as Hirschkop charges, heavily influenced by “mechanical physics.” The natural sciences undoubtedly provided Bakhtin with some of his most basic systemic metaphors. One aspect of Bakhtin’s early in¬ vestment in Kant that stayed with him throughout his career was a sense that the question of what is real cannot be separated from the philosophy of science. But a single-minded focus on physics among Bakhtin’s critics has obscured the possibly even greater role played by the life sciences in dialogism. Hirschkop asks, “Why is there such a deep connection between the discovery of value and consciousness of exact physical placement [in Bakhtin]?” 21 I believe his question draws attention to a feature that has fundamental significance in dialogism, namely, its emphasis on the material ground of existence. In order for his question to work, however, it needs to be extended: not only should we wonder why placement in space/time is so important in Bakhtin’s theory of the subject, but we should ask as well, what exactly is it that materializes situatedness in that precise physical placement. And the answer, quite clearly, is that it is the body of the subject that registers his situatedness. Bakhtin’s radical insistence on the situatedness of perception results in an emphasis on the human body. In such early texts as “Philosophy of the Act,” Bakhtin is already announcing the leitmotiv orchestrat¬ ing the overwhelming majority of his later work: “For only I—the one-and-only I—occupy in a given set of circumstances this particu¬ lar place at this particular time; all other human beings are situated outside me.” 22 The logical result of so relentless a focus on uniqueness is to assign enormous privilege to the physical body, the marker most unambiguously indicating location in such a unique point. From the prominence of bodies in his Rabelais book, from the cen¬ tral role of “embodiment” in such early works as “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” from his emphasis on the physiological bases of time/space perception in the essay on chronotopes, it is obvious that Bakhtin, whose chronic osteomyelitis was a constant personal re- 170 Michael Holquist minder of his own corporeality, was particularly engaged by bodies. Emphasis on the situatedness of the perceiving subject in Bakhtin’s early works, as well as on “material bearers of culture” and “bodies of meaning” (tela smysla) in such late texts as the Novyi mir interview in 1970, has troubled some of Bakhtin’s more percipient readers. Hirsch- kop, for instance, says, “It seems odd that Bakhtin should so often define ‘situation’ as one’s places in the most literal, physical sense. There is, in fact, a kind of gross and vulgar materialism underlying the theoretical sophistication: after all the philosophical subtleties, every¬ thing depends on a concept of abstract space drawn undiluted from mechanical physics.” 23 But by focusing on the body as a merely physi¬ cal thing, we miss much of what is important in the key Bakhtinian concept of situatedness. What matters about bodies for Bakhtin is not only that they are there, but that they are alive—they manifest the deed of life in that particular place. There is a certain irony in Bakhtin’s critics focusing so single- mindedly on the role of physics to the exclusion of biology in dialogism: those who emphasize the mechanical as opposed to the life sciences recapitulate the history of vexed relations between the very disciplines involved in Bakhtin’s assumptions about system—the relations be¬ tween physics and biology. Physics, because it was first to develop of the disciplines we now recognize as scientific, has until very recently been regarded as the model to which all exact sciences should aspire. Because biology is not reducible to mathematics, the physicist Ernest Rutherford, for example, considered it to be simply a form of “postage stamp collecting.” 24 Physics has been a developed discipline since at least the seven¬ teenth century, while biology does not exist even as a word, much less as a science, before the nineteenth century (it is first used in 1802 by Gottfried Reinhold in German, and in English not until 1813). It is not surprising, then, that Newton’s laws, and those of successors such as Einstein and Bohr, are often regarded as coextensive with the workings of science itself. What such a view fails to take into account is precisely that as¬ pect of biology that made it of interest to Bakhtin: it concerns itself with animate subjects, while physics studies inanimate objects. Unlike early physics, biology insists there is a difference between a rock and a living organism. Thus biology from the beginning had to wrestle with the charge that the nature of its subject—life (bios)—was a con¬ cept that did not lend itself to the same kind of hard-edged definition that “velocity,” or “temperature” had in physics. In fact, biology had Dialogism and Aesthetics 171 to overcome the suspicion that its distinctive subject, “life,” had the dibious appearance of “soul,” and to hard-headed nineteenth-century physicists, “life” was a topic that smelled suspiciously of transcen¬ dence. Certain biologists, such as Hans Driesch, on whom Bakhtin wrote a (pseudonymous) essay in 19x6, 25 and certain eminent philoso¬ phers (such as Henri Bergson 26 ) did not help matters when they sought to define “life” as a “nonmechanical entelechy,” a “vis viva,” an “elan vital” or some other mysterious force. But as George Gaylord Simpson has pointed out, “Insistence that the study of organisms requires principles additional to those of the physical sciences does not imply a dualistic or vitalistic view of nature. Life ... is not thereby necessarily considered as nonphysical or non¬ material. It is just that living things have been affected for . . . billions of years by historical processes . . . The results of these processes are systems different in kind from any nonliving systems.” 27 The differ¬ ence between living and nonliving matter, in other words, consists not in the substance out of which they are made, but in the form of their organization. Thus Bakhtin’s predilection for biology should not at all be read as a turning away from materialism, certainly not from the specific lessons of Einsteinian or quantum physics, which play an important role in his systematic thinking. In fact, he appropriated biology as one way to deepen the significance physics might have as a model for open-ended systems. “Biology” in this sense, should not, of course, be confused with the kind of crude organicism that is attacked in the Voloshinov book of Freud, where the whole school of Lebensphilosophie (Sim- mel, Scheler, Bergson, Driesch) is denounced: “A sui generis fear of history, an ambition to locate a world beyond the social and the his¬ torical, a search for this world precisely in the depths of the organic— these are the features that pervade systems of contemporary philoso¬ phy and constitute the symptom of the disintegration and decline of the bourgeois world.” 28 Bakhtin’s use of biological models, especially as they pervade his thinking about culture, does not consist in the appropriation of any particular, single doctrine taken over from the discipline of biology. Rather, his work is bathed in what might be called “biological think¬ ing” (or, as it is sometimes called, “population thinking”), a point of view that is imposed when the world has introduced into it a phenome¬ non of living (a dynamic process, which is not the same as the static entity generations of philosophers have sought to define as the substan¬ tive “life”). I have in mind here the attributes of living as they determine 172 Michael Holquist both the behavior of single organisms, and as they mandate special conditions which must be met for any system that includes them. Using the eminent biologist and philosopher of science Ernst Mayr as our guide, we might identify among the features of living systems that make them different from nonliving systems of the kind physicists study—the features that made living systems influential in shaping Bakhtin’s dialogism—the following: living systems are first of all com¬ plex. “Systems may have any degree of complexity, but, on the average, systems in the world of organisms are infinitely more complex than those of inanimate objects.” 29 “Complexity” has a particular meaning in a biological context, one that has been neatly summarized by H. A. Simon, who defines a complex system as one in which “the whole is more than the sum of its parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole.” 30 Quite simply, “most structures of an organism are meaningless without the rest of the organism; wings, legs, heads, kidneys cannot live by themselves but only as parts of an ensemble.” 31 The opposite of such a system, one that would be merely me¬ chanical, is precisely the kind of system Bakhtin begins his career by attacking. The first words in his first published piece, “Art and Answerability,” are: “A whole is called ‘mechanical’ when its con¬ stituent elements are united only in space and time by some external connection and are not imbued with the internal unity of meaning. The parts of such a whole are contiguous and touch each other, but in themselves they remain alien to each other.” 32 It was the need to avoid such reductionism that led Bakhtin to search for the kind of systematic connectedness biologists call complexity. It was complexity understood in just this sense that gave rise to Bakhtin’s emphasis on dialogue as the only mode of interaction between elements locked into such ramifying interconnectedness. Another special characteristic of living organisms that necessitates a particular way of looking at any world they inhabit is that—unlike mechanical entities—they cannot be easily quantified. The qualitative aspects of biology “are particularly important in relational phenom¬ ena, which are precisely the phenomena that dominate living nature... Species, classification, ecosystems, communicatory behavior, regula¬ tion, and just about every other biological process deals with relational properties.” 33 Relational systems are those in which fine discrimina¬ tions are made at a local level; such systems are, in other words, value Dialogism and Aesthetics 173 systems. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative world¬ views is what Bakhtin has in mind when he writes in a characteristic passage, “Naive positivism assumes that what we have to do with in the world ... is a matter of. . . mathematical numbers, and that these have a bearing on the meaning and purpose of our acts .. . Meanwhile, the only thing these concepts explain is the material of the world, the technical apparatus of the event of the world . . . What needs to be understood, however, is not the technical apparatus, but the imma¬ nent logic of creative activity, and what needs to be understood first of all is [its] value-and-meaning structure,” 34 or, in other words, a system of values. Values impel choice, of course, an important first hint as to the closeness of dialogism and experimental method, where discrimination is fundamental. Living systems are not only complex, they are indeterminate, or, as Bakhtin has it, “unconsummated,” “unfinished” ( nesovershen ). In¬ determinacy is not to be grasped as it plays a role in physics, 35 but as it must be understood in connection with systems that grow, that are living. Remember that “complexity in living systems exists at every level from the nucleus (with its dna program), to the cell, to any organ system (like kidney, liver, or brain), to the individual, the ecosystem, or the society.” 36 Not only is it the case that this hierarchy mandates great subtlety in understanding relations between its different planes, from nuclei to nations; what cannot be overemphasized is that at each level these elements are constantly changing in themselves. “While entities in the physical sciences, let us say atoms or elementary particles, have constant characteristics, biological entities are characterized by their changeability. Cells, for instance, constantly change their properties and so do individuals. Every individual undergoes a drastic change from birth to death . .. from the original zygote, through adolescence, adulthood, senescence, death.” 37 As if all this potential randomness were not enough, living systems are characterized by a constant interplay between organisms and their physical environment. Two systems that are highly variable in them¬ selves—unique individuals and unique ecosystems—create, when per¬ ceived in their mutual influence, another order of stochastic possi¬ bilities. The way in which individual organisms interact with others of the same species, with the weather, or with other populations of other animals in their environment creates a perpetual dialogue whose consequences are unpredictable in most given instances. Living systems require that attention be paid to complexity, indeter¬ minacy, and uniqueness. The consequence of this is that biology is 174 Michael Holquist deeply pervaded by history. Max Delbriick makes the point by con¬ trasting, once again, the physical and life sciences: “A mature physicist, acquainting himself for the first time with the problems of biology, is puzzled by the circumstance that there are no ‘absolute phenomena’ in biology. Everything is time-bound and space-bound.” 38 It is precisely this sense that everything is ineluctably historical that impels Bakhtin to assert that “the image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.” 39 When, then, I describe Bakhtin’s dialogism as being pervaded by biological thinking, I mean that such key concepts as “heteroglossia,” “chronotope,” and, of course, “dialogue” itself, as well as the cru¬ cial distinctions between “finished” and “unfinished,” “horizon” and “environment,” or “given” versus “created” relate to each other most meaningfully if they are conceived as aspects of a single worldview. The worldview they manifest is one that focuses on all relations as having complexity of a kind found in living—as opposed to mechani¬ cal—systems. It was only by conceiving wholes as not “mechanical” that the living concept of answerability could arise that drives all Bakh¬ tin’s mature work. It accounts for the systematics that flows from the conviction that “I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art.” 40 Notes i. See Victor Terras, Belinskii and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison, 1974). z. Charles Moser, Esthetics as Nightmare: Russian Literary Theory, 1855- 18jo (Princeton, 1989). 3. Quoted in Moser, Esthetics as Nightmare, 80. 4. Dmitrii Pisarev, “Realisty” (The Realists), in Sochineniia (Works) (Mos¬ cow, 1956), 3: 58. 5. Nikolai Dobroliubov, “Luch’ sveta v temnom tsarstve” (A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness) Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works) (Moscow, 1963), 6: 310. 6. Pisarev, Sochineniia, 3: no. 7. Dmitrii Pisarev, “Pushkin i Belinskii” (Pushkin and Belinskii), in Sochi¬ neniia, 3: 373. 8. See, for instance, Jurij Striedter’s masterly Literary Structure, Evolu¬ tion, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Victor Erlich’s classic study, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine. 3d ed. (New Haven, 1981) is more comprehensive, and Peter Steiner’s Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, 1984) is more de¬ tailed and finely tuned as to shades of difference between individual critics and Dialogism and Aesthetics 175 the various stages through which they as a school progressed, besides having the virtue of covering Formalist versification, which almost everyone else scants. And of course, for any serious student of the subject, one must still go to Aage Hansen-Love’s blockbuster Der russiscbe Formalismus: Methodolo- gische Rekonstruktion seiner Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung (Vienna, 1978). 9. Moser, Esthetics as Nightmare, 98. 10. Quoted in ibid., 84. 11. For a brilliant analytical account of how this idea flowered in the subse¬ quent work of Czech Structuralism, consult Frantisek Galan, Historic Struc¬ tures: The Prague School Project, 1918—1946 (Austin, 1985). 12.. Published as a supplement in M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans, and Notes by Vadim Liapunov. Supplement trans. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin, 1990). This essay is translated by Kenneth Brostrom, 2.57-325. 13. Ibid., 257. 14. Ibid., 259. 15. 1 . 1 . Kanaev, “Sovremennyi vitalizm” (Contemporary Vitalism), in Che- lovek i priroda (1926), 1: 33-42.; 2: 9-23. 16. Both texts are to be found in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophi¬ cal Essays. 17. See, for instance, Apollon Grigor’ev, “Paradoksy organicheskoi kntiki” (The Paradoxes of Organic Criticism), Epokha 5 (May 1864): 255-"»3; 6 (June 1864): 264—77. 18. See Jurgen Lehmann, Der Einfluss der Philosophie des deutschen Idea- lismus in der russischen Literaturkritik des 19. Jahrhunderts: die ‘organische Kritik’ Apollon A. Grigor’ievs (The Influence of German Idealistic Philosophy upon 19th Century Russian Literary Criticism: Apollon Grigor’ev’s “Organic Criticism”) (Heidelberg, 1975); and Victor Terras, “Apollon Grigor’iev’s Or¬ ganic Criticism and Its Western Sources,” in Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature, ed. Anthony Mliktoin (Los Angeles, 1979), 71—88. 19. Ken Hirschkop, “Introduction: Bakhtin and Cultural Theory,” in Bakh¬ tin and Cultural Theory, ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Sheperd (Manchester, 1989), 1—38. 20. D. S. Neff, “Into the Heart of the Heart of the Chronotope: Dialogism, Theoretical Physics, and Catastrophe Theory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4.2 (1991): 87-105. 21. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, 13. 22. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Art and Answer- ability: Early Philosophical Essays, 23. 23. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, 13. 24. Quoted by Ernst Mayr in The Growth of Biological Thought: Diver¬ sity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 33. 176 Michael Holquist 25. “Sovremennyi vitalizm” (Contemporary Vitalism), in Cbelovek i priroda (1926), 1: 33-42; 2: 9-23. 26. Cf. Michael Holquist, “The Achitectonics of Answerability,” in the introduction to his edition to Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, xxxiii—xxxv. 27. George Gaylord Simpson, This View of Life (New York, 1964), 106-7. 28. V. N. Voloshinov, Erendianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I. R.Titunik (New York, 1976), 14. 29. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 53. 30. H. A. Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 106: 467—82. 31. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 53-54. 32. Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, 1. 33. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 55. 34. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Art and Answer- ability, 193-94. 35. Although Heisenberg’s work, and that of other submolecular specialists has opened up unexpected connections between the hitherto tightly segregated disciplines of physics and biology, nowhere more manifest than in the work of Max Delbriick. 36. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 53. 37. Ibid., 55. 38. Max Delbriick, “A Physicist Looks at Biology,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 38 (1949): 173. My emphasis. 39. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 85. 40. Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” in Art and Answerability, 1. Valery Leibin Freudianism, or the "Trotskiite Contraband": Soviet Psychoanalysis in the 1920s and 1930s Orienting the discussion of Soviet psychoanalysis toward a ~ foreign audience is both easy and difficult at the same time. It is difficult because the basic outlines of the history of the development of psychoanalysis in Russia have already been treated by scholarly lit¬ erature: indeed, researchers abroad may be better informed about the vicissitudes of the theoretical struggle for and against the emergence of psychoanalysis within the Russian context than are Soviet schol¬ ars, who for quite some time had been hampered by a basic problem of historical perception. One is therefore faced with the possibility of recapitulating layers of historical knowledge that may already be well known to scholars abroad. Yet this very circumstance also eases the problem of presentation of material, as it is possible to dispense with several subjects in the history of the origins and development of Russian psychoanalysis, already dealt with in the work of Western scholars. 1 With this in mind, I hope to explain some of the subtleties and nuances of the fate of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union. It must be said that in the 1920s psychoanalytic thought had wide currency among Soviet scholars: it was used in pedagogy, literary studies, and medicine. Almost all of Freud’s works published during this period had been translated into Russian. Lively discussions of psychoanalysis went on in literary, philosophical, and medical circles. In Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa there existed groups of followers of psychoanalytic theory who shared Freud’s understanding of neuroses. There were scholars who participated in the work of international psychoanalytic congresses, published their work in journals abroad, and joined international psychoanalytic organizations. During this period a psychoanalytic library published in translation the works of a number of psychoanalysts abroad, including Karl Abraham, Fritz Wittels, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, and others. Even while philosophers and psychologists argued over the pos¬ sibility of employing psychoanalytic conceptions within the context of Marxism, a number of psychiatrists adapted psychoanalytic methods for their own practice; some school and kindergarten teachers relied 178 Valery Leibin on Freudian approaches in the education of children, and individual theorists developed psychoanalytic readings of literary works. Obviously, far from all of Freud’s thought was accepted by Soviet scholars. Indeed, many would be critical of what they would see as the incursion of psychoanalytic ideas into the spheres of literature, phi¬ losophy, sociology, and politics. However, despite criticisms of psycho¬ analysis and Freudianism in general, despite individual hostilities to his position, most scholars gave Freud his due for his studies of the human psyche and recognized him as no less than “an outstanding psycho¬ pathologist” (P. Blonskii) and “one of the greatest minds of Europe” (A. Luriia). 2 After this initial reception the situation changed drastically. During the thirties, the publication of original psychoanalytic work of any kind would already be unthinkable. A single favorable reference to Freud in published scholarly research would be sufficient grounds for severe censure. In this intellectual situation, Freud would become off-limits for researchers who had earlier shown lively interest. While at this time Freud’s books were not publicly burned in our country, as would be the case in Germany with Hitler’s accession to power, numerous works on psychoanalysis would in fact be locked away. In the subse¬ quent years, this tendency became more manifest, as certain books on psychoanalysis were withdrawn from libraries, in particular G. Malis’s Psychoanalysis of Communism? How was such a shift effected? My purpose here is to investigate the way in which the dissemination of psychoanalytic thought in the Soviet Union during the twenties had changed to hostility toward Freud’s work during the thirties, a process that was to leave a notable imprint on subsequent attitudes toward psychoanalysis. The 1920s saw the creation and the working out of a Marxist philoso¬ phy and psychology in the Soviet Union. Heated discussions in various fields of scholarship accompanied the search for new methods in the human sciences, the research on personality, and education. I. Seche- nov’s physiological model and I. Pavlov’s reflexology, at home, as well as psychoanalysis and behaviorism, from abroad, were at the center of the theoretical debates. The growth of the scholarly discussion was accompanied by the emergence of “reactology,” pedology, psychotechnics, and a number of other trends in research at home. Although it had no official orga¬ nization or recognition, one school would play a not insignificant role within this context. Its various orientations had in common the belief Freudianism, or the "Trotskiite Contraband" 179 that psychoanalysis is compatible with Marxism, that its rich empiri¬ cal material was of value for scholarly work, and that its method of inquiry could be used successfully within the context of a society that was in a state of revolutionary transformation. Although hardly all of the adherents of this view thought of themselves as such, they were generally seen as Freudo-Marxists or Soviet Freudians. During the twenties, one of the central questions for Soviet schol¬ ars was whether Freudianism and Marxism were in fact compatible. Some were critical not only of attempts to supplement Marxian eco¬ nomics with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, but also of Freudian¬ ism per se, stressing its tendencies toward biologization, subjectivism, and idealism. This group included philosophers, psychologists, stu¬ dents of literature, physiologists, and physicians such as M. Astvatsa- turov, G. Bammel’, Iu. Vasil’ev, V. Voloshinov/M. Bakhtin, V. Gakke- bush, A. Deborin, N. Karev, I. Sapir, lu. Frankfurt, P. Effrusi, and V. Iurinets . 4 Others argued that in its study of the entire personality, in its break with the metaphysics and idealism of hitherto existing psy¬ chology, psychoanalysis was by its nature revolutionary: that in its dis¬ covery of the unconsciousness it was a constitutive part of dialectical materialism, and that in addressing the social conditions of the forma¬ tion of the human being it was in fact a continuation of historical ma¬ terialism. Those who, in one form or another, partially, with caveats, or unconditionally, expressed such views, included B. Bykhovskii, A. Var’iash, G. Veisberg, A. Zalkind, la. Kogan, A. Luriia, G. Malis, M. Reisner, M. Shirvindt, and B. Fridman . 5 It cannot be said that the critics of psychoanalysis completely de¬ nied Freud’s accomplishments in the study of the unconscious and the human psyche. Many recognized individual positive ideas devel¬ oped within the context of Freudian psychoanalysis. At the same time, the proponents of psychoanalysis not only stressed its value, but also recognized its drawbacks. In fact, even among those who recognized the value and importance of Freud’s thought, opinions on the compat¬ ibility of psychoanalysis and Marxism were by no means unequivocal. Discussions among scholars were numerous and often stormy. This is in fact quite understandable, since at stake was the revolutionary transformation of a society, including the sphere of scholarship. It is not surprising, then, that in the heat of the polemic one could hear reproaches addressed to one or another scholar, who, in the oppo¬ nents’ opinion misunderstood the essence of Marxism, or whose pas¬ sion for Freudianism was responsible for questionable views. And if in history and economics charges of a political character would often 180 Valery Leibin be made, in psychology, pedagogy, and medicine scientific arguments still prevailed. Therefore, it was hardly possible for anyone to predict with certainty which of the intellectual positions would gain the upper hand, whether psychoanalysis would receive official recognition in the Soviet Union or fall into disfavor. And it is not known what the fate of psychoanalysis in Soviet society would have been had the political and ideological considerations not prevailed over scholarly arguments. In their defense of psychoanalysis, some appealed to such political authorities of the time as Trotskii, Bukharin, and Radek. Reference to their statements on Freud, psychoanalysis, and psychology would be used in support of a given point of view. In struggling for psychoanaly¬ sis, some preferred to rely on the authority of Bukharin and Trotskii, while others tended to look to Plekhanov and Kautsky. While Plekha- nov and Bukharin were used as sources of thought on psychology, Trotskii and Kautsky were cited for their reflections on psychoanaly¬ sis. It is known that Trotskii and Radek publicly expressed favorable views on psychoanalysis. In the early twenties these views were to be reflected on the pages of Pravda, as well as other publications. It is also known that during the several years he spent in Vienna, Trotskii read a number of works by psychoanalysts, attended their meetings, and had occasion to have a more comprehensive acquaintance with Freudian psychoanalysis. In September 1923 Trotskii wrote a letter to Academi¬ cian Pavlov, where he presented his views on the relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the theory of conditioned reflexes. In his view, the sublimation of sexual energy, integral to the psychoanalytic interpretation of the person’s actions throughout his lifetime, could be seen in terms of the sexual basis of the development of conditioned re¬ flexes. Statements to this effect could also be found in Trotskii’s public statements, where he proclaims his support for psychoanalysis, seeing the Freudian movement as being materialist, and psychoanalysis to be compatible with Marxism. While it is hardly surprising that some appealed to Trotskii’s au¬ thority in their reflections on Freud’s psychoanalytic doctrine, it was in fact precisely this circumstance that was to become decisive for the sub¬ sequent fate of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union. In 1931, one of the issues of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia {The Proletarian Revolution) pub¬ lished Stalin’s letter to the editors, “O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma” (On Some Questions in the History of Bolshevism). In it Stalin leveled criticism at attempts of some theorists to “smuggle as contraband” into the scholarly literature “scholarly rubbish in dis¬ guise.” Trotskii was labeled the advanced regiment of counterrevolu- Freudianism, or the "Trotskiite Contraband" 181 tionary bourgeoisie. In the closing summary, Stalin called for a relent¬ less struggle against “Trotskiite contraband.” The campaign for the politicization and ideologization of science could not have left schol¬ ars’ attitudes to psychoanalysis unaffected. Editorial articles called for maximal ideological vigilance on the “scholarly front” and the merci¬ less exposure of overt and concealed “class enemies in science.” The offensive against psychoanalysis began under the banner of struggle with “Trotskiite contraband.” Articles published in 1932 in the journal Psikbologiia ( Psychology) drew direct parallels between Trotskiism and Freudianism. It was em¬ phasized that “Trotskiite contraband” had not been exposed in time and overtly enough in psychological research, since it was in fact none other than Trotskii who had suggested the synthesis of Freud’s and Pavlov’s thought as the basis of psychology. Those scholars who had found in Freudian psychoanalysis positive ideas that could be accept¬ able for Marxist psychology would be automatically seen as “Trotski¬ ite contrabandists.” In their adherence to psychoanalysis, they were charged with departing from Marxism—and from Feninism. Trotski¬ ism was the antipode of Feninism, for, as the critics inspired by Stalin’s letter would stress, in the question on the position to be taken on Freud, Trotskii had opposed Fenin. As a rule, those seeking to expose Trotskiism and to dispose of psychoanalysis cited a pronouncement on Freud made by Fenin in a conversation with Klara Zetkin in the fall of 1920. In her Reminis¬ cences about Lenin , Zetkin reproduced a fragment of this discussion where Fenin said that Freud’s theory was a kind of a fashionable whimsy. 6 In June 1925 an issue of Pravda called attention to Zetkin’s brochure: Fenin’s comments on Freud were cited in italics, and from this it was concluded that those who wanted to unite Freudianism and Marxism ought to think twice. Taken out of context from Fenin’s more general reflections on the women’s question and the problems of gender, the comment on Freud could be perceived as the basis of a negative attitude toward psychoanalytic theory. The subject was in fact quite different, namely, Fenin’s attitude toward the discussions on the questions of gender and marriage taking place in Germany at the time, and his skepticism about the incompetence and reductionism of the way in which popular literature presented theories of sexuality for the purpose of educating German women. In repudiating psychoanalysis some critics not only cited the one¬ sided interpretation of Fenin’s pronouncement on Freud, but also Krupskaia’s statements. Particular attention was called to Krupskaia’s 182 Valery Leibin 192.5 assessment of Freud. She believed that Freud exaggerated the role of sexuality in human behavior, and that many of his explanations of subconscious behavior were artificial, strained, and imbued with bourgeois-mercantile views of women. Krupskaia’s other statements— suggesting that her attitude toward Freud was not as unequivocal as it would appear to the most zealous critics of psychoanalysis—were either ignored or deliberately passed over in silence. Meanwhile, in June 1932, in discussions held at the Communist Academy on the problems of pedology, Krupskaia stressed in particular Lenin’s ob¬ servations on the necessity of the comprehensive study of children. She emphasized that “it would be a mistake, in the heat of criticism of the Freudians, to throw out the baby with the bath-water, to re¬ ject the use of valuable material on the ways in which subconscious drives translate into the conscious—a pedagogical problem that is of the utmost importance for us.” 7 At the same time, Krupskaia called the attention of the discussion participants to the exaggerated public re¬ pentances of some scholars for their previous partisanship of Freudian psychoanalysis. In particular, she mentioned A. Zalkind, who had pub¬ licly begun to recognize his “politically damaging” mistakes, namely, having earlier failed to subject the entire Freudian approach to “dev¬ astating criticism.” In “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1927), Freud noted the tendency of many people to sin and repent by turns. Yet he certainly could not have imagined a paradoxical situation where scholars would repent for sins that had not been committed either in thought or in action. This was precisely the situation of a number of Soviet scholars who would attempt, to whatever degree, to engage psychoanalysis. Some of them would publicly recognize their errors, which consisted only the noncritical mention of Freud’s name. Others resorted to repen¬ tance, whereby not only did they renounce psychoanalysis and indict themselves for the damage done, but also call other scholars to self¬ indictment. Still others folded their research work in psychoanalysis, having made concessions to an official ideology that sought to foster and encourage the repudiation of ideas and conceptions from abroad. In the end, the political and ideological struggle against “Trotskiite contraband” in science would result in the banishment of psychoanaly¬ sis and Freudianism from the heart of both theory and practice in the USSR. Freud’s theory of the unconscious was proclaimed reactionary, class-alien, and hostile to Marxism. Any efforts on the part of schol¬ ars to call attention to the positive contributions of psychoanalysis Freudianism, or the "Trotskiite Contraband" 183 would then be taken as something seditious, subject to political and ideological suppression. I do not presume to judge Stalin’s own attitude toward psychoanaly¬ sis, as 1 have no certain information on this account. However, it is well known that Stalin’s son Vasilii attended a special kindergarten where psychoanalytic approaches were used. Absorbed as he was in politi¬ cal intrigues, and giving no special attention to his children, Stalin would scarcely have had occasion to evaluate the results of the uses of psychoanalysis in education. It would probably be incorrect to say that because Trotskii defended psychoanalysis, Stalin would inevitably take the opposing position. It is no secret that after having defeated Trotskii, Stalin would subsequently take up a number of his ideas as weapons, passing them off as his own. Thus, without specific details it is difficult to judge Stalin’s real attitude to psychoanalysis. Yet I think that it is in fact not a question of whether Stalin had spe¬ cific knowledge of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. More important is the fact that the political culture of the people who came to power after the October Revolution contributed to the creation of a system that not only spawned the tyranny of Stalin but also reproduced itself long after his death, along with an intellectual atmosphere that would leave a significant imprint on the development of scientific work. In a system dominated by an anticivilized political culture, it was not very easy for alternative thought to survive, without having to reckon with the canons of a dogmatically interpreted Marxism. Freudian psycho¬ analysis was one of many sacrifices at the altar of the purification of Marxism from the filth of alternative thought in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s campaign against “Trotskiite contraband” undoubtedly contributed to the banishment of psychoanalytic thought from the con¬ sciousness of many scientists, and then, like an immune system, the sciences built up a basic level of resistance to the possibility of their transmission from modern Western culture. Yet there were other, and in my view, no less significant bases for hostility toward psychoanaly¬ sis during the period of the emergence of the cult and the tyranny of Stalin. Psychoanalysis, with its methods of intruding into the deepest layers of personality, with its attempts to penetrate beyond the person’s consciousness, posed a potential threat to a political culture that gave birth to a repressive apparatus of massive suppression of alternative thought. Indeed, could not the “father of the peoples” see a threat in an at¬ tempt to examine the history of the development of humanity in terms of the murder of the primal father by his children in the earliest primi- 184 Valery Leibin tive society? How could one allow the spread of ideas, according to which an “Oedipal complex” is alive in every person, manifested in the eternal ambivalence in the son’s relation to his father, simulta¬ neously loving and hating, fearing and yet seeking to take his place in life? The awe of the father, his deification could in fact be encouraged, maintaining a primal terror in the presence of his potency and power. But the beginnings of feelings of hatred, far less thoughts of a possible overthrow or murder of the father, certainly could not be tolerated! To do so is to cut down the tree limb that one has managed to climb onto, over the corpses that had been ground up in the “all-Russian meat-grinder.” The threat also consisted of the fact that some scholars’ psychoana¬ lytic analyses would begin to encroach upon certain sacred things like communism and the party. One need only mention the title of the book by G. Malis, Psikhoanaliz kommunizma (The Psychoanalysis of Com¬ munism)'. While here the idea of communism as a radiant future was not put in question, other studies would involve subversive thoughts in relation to attempts to examine neurotic complexes of a political character, as well as the “party members’ pathology.” Thus A. Zalkind undertook to analyze the negative sides of the party, attempting to ex¬ pose its “abscesses and ulcers.” He proposed a biological classification of members of the party, having isolated six groups. The “Frondeurs” (frondery ) —those who would actively work in the party, while not ad¬ justed to the new conditions of life under the New Economic Policy and busy scheming against colleagues and exposing of various “factions and deviations” within the party ranks. The “ailing” ( boleiushcbie ), who would direct their unused emotionality inward, painfully perceiv¬ ing the changes taking place in life, and effecting a “flight into illness.” The “sexualists” ( seksualisty ), who would channel emotions toward a “sexual breakthrough,” substituting the hatred toward political ene¬ mies and the fury of the struggle for power, jealousy in love, and a thirst for sexual possession. The “overflowers” ( vypleskivateli ) would direct their emotionality into artificial stimulation, whether it be alcoholism or drug abuse. The “predators” ( kbishcbniki ) would egotize emotion¬ ality, directing it toward careerism and material success in life. And, finally, those party members in whom one could observe a disorgani¬ zation of the emotions due to their being unaccustomed to intellectual work, an overstrain associated with a deep sense of responsibility for affairs entrusted to them, as well as an inability to cope with affairs due to insufficient competence, would experience a gradual fading of ener¬ gies that would leave no place for flexible, creative, and independent decisions. Freudianism, or the "Trotskiite Contraband" 185 While Zalkind believed that the party was sufficiently reasonable that there would be no need to be afraid to uncover its “abscesses and ulcers,” he could not but produce a negative response from the leadership with his reflections on the “dehumanization of party mem¬ bers” as the most terrible “party disease,” on the group of “predators” (kbisbcbniki) who would subsequently turn into a clan of those who over the course of many years would commit official crimes, and on uncreative party members who would promote the flourishing of the party bureaucracy. It is no accident that studies of this kind would be cut short in the most ruthless manner. It is also no accident that psychoanalysis was beaten to fluff and dust, for it was indeed poten¬ tially threatening to a political culture that cultivated a system of mon¬ strous suppression of any alternative thought, regardless of whether its leaders were at the base or the summit of the pyramid of state power. In the twenties, scholars could appeal to the intellect and conscience of researchers who had turned their attention to psychoanalysis, at¬ tempting to come to terms with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. One could lament the fact that many in the fields of medicine, psychology, and pedagogy were not able to properly evaluate Freud’s contributions to the study of the human psyche. However, with the beginning of Stalin’s organization of an extensive campaign to expose covert ene¬ mies in science, all previous appeals to reason in scientific evaluation of psychoanalysis would be suppressed by ideological and political considerations. Theoretical discussions and arguments over Freudian psychoanalysis would be replaced by the persecution of those who had in one way or another come into contact with psychoanalytic ideas. Under conditions of cruel political and ideological pressure, accom¬ panied by persecution and the physical annihilation of the heretics, psychoanalysis left the stage of domestic science. During the 1940s it was not mentioned at all. During the second half of the 1950s it was once again mentioned, though largely within the context of the relentless ideological struggle with psychoanalytic approaches. The conference on the ideological struggle with contemporary Freudian¬ ism, held in October 1958 in Moscow, at the behest of the Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, demonstrated yet again the tenacity of the Stalinist system of politicized and ideologically motivated scholarship. Today, as a result of perestroika, a number of processes are at work which enable the cultural regeneration of the society, and this history of the development of Soviet scholarship is being reassessed. Attitudes toward psychoanalysis are in fact also changing. Freud’s work is being published and republished. The pages of scholarly publications and the 186 Valery Leibin periodical press contain sober assessments of psychoanalytic theories and approaches. There is thus reason to believe that the reconceptual¬ ization of Freud’s intellectual legacy will no longer be colored by ugly political and ideological tints, as was the case in the late 19ZOS and early 1930s. One would like to think that the morbid lessons of the past will not pass without a trace either for contemporaries or the younger generation, who will soon enter the scientific world. Notes 1. See in particular Martin Miller, “Freudian Theory under Bolshevik Rule: The Theoretical Controversy during the 1920s,” Slavic Review 44, 4 (1985): 625-46; “The Origins and Development of Psychoanalysis in Russia, 1909- 1930,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 14 (1986): 125- 35; “The Theory and Practice of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union,” Psychiatry (February 1986): 13-24. 2. P. Blonskii, Ocherki detskoi seksual’nosti (Studies in Child Sexuality) (Moscow, 1935); A. Luriia, Psikhoanaliz v svete osnovnykh tendentsii sovre- mennoi psikhologii (Psychoanalysis in the Light of the Main Currents of Con¬ temporary Psychology) (Kazan’, 1923). 3. G. Malis, Psikhoanaliz kommunizma (Psychoanalysis of Communism) (Khar’kov, 1924). 4. See, for example: V. Voloshinov, Freidizm. Kriticheskii ocherk (Freudi- anism: A Critical Study) (Moscow, 1927); A. Deborin, “Freidizm i sotsio- logiia” (Freudianism and Sociology), Voinstvuiushchii materialist 4 (1925): 3—39; I. Sapir, “Freidizm i ego marksistskaia otsenka” (Freudianism and Its Marxist Evaluation), Molodaia gvardiia 1 (1925): 113-31. 5. See, for example: B. Bykhovskii, Metapsikhologiia Freida (The Metapsy¬ chology of Freud) (Minsk, 1926); A. Zalkind, Ocherki kul’tury revolutsion- nogo vremeni (Studies in the Culture of a Revolutionary Time) (Moscow, 1924); M. Reisner, “Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i uchenie Freida” (Social Psy¬ chology and Freud’s Teaching), Pechat’ i revolutsiia 3 (1925): 54-69. 6. K. Zetkin, Vospominaniia o Lenine (Reminiscences about Lenin) (Mos¬ cow, 1955), 44. 7. Quoted in Pedologiia 4 (1932): 103. Valery Podoroga The Eunuch of the Soul: Positions of Reading and the World of Platonov Platonov’s literature, the striking style of his prose, is born ~ out of a special art of seeing—one may say, out of a special culture of the eye. In an article entitled “Proletarian Poetry,” as well as the recently published fragment “On Love,” we find statements from which it is not difficult to reconstruct the original conditions of Plato¬ nov’s vision. Without an analysis of them, it is impossible to elucidate the inner form of such later works as Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit), Cbevengur, and luvenil’noe More (The Juvenile Sea). Here is the first position for the eye: “The point of objective nonrelative perception,” writes Platonov, “corresponds to a center of ultimate organization. Only by having departed from the world and from oneself is it pos¬ sible to see what all of this is and what all of this wants to be.” 1 What, then, is this point of perception, and who is being situated in it? Plato¬ nov provides an answer: this position of perception is occupied by a special eye, the eye of science, “the unblinking eye of humanity,” by “light that is clear and transparent throughout, though neither warm nor cold.” 2 In Cbevengur we encounter an extensive elucidation of a second position: But within the person there lives a little spectator: he participates in neither actions nor suffering—he is always cool and unchanging. His function is to see and to be a witness, yet he is without the right of voice in the person’s life, and it is not known why this solitary presence exists. This corner of the person’s consciousness is lit day and night, like the porter’s room in a large building. Day in and day out, this wakeful porter sits in the lobby of the person, he knows all the tenants of his building, though not a single one of them asks his advice about their af¬ fairs. As tenants come and go, the porter-spectator’s gaze follows them. Due to his powerless knowledge, at times he seems sad, though always polite, solitary, and has an apartment in a different building. In case of a fire he calls the firemen and observes the events that follow from the outside. While Dvanov rode and walked in delirium, this spectator saw everything within him, though never either warned or helped. He lived 188 Valery Podoroga parallel to Dvanov, though was not Dvanov himself. It was as if he existed as the dead brother of the person: all that was human was in evidence in him, yet something small and crucial was missing. The per¬ son never remembers him, though always entrusts himself to him, as the inhabitant who leaves his wife at home is never jealous of the porter. This is the eunuch of the human soul. 3 It is easy to note that some unknown event has occurred, and one position has been replaced by another. Yet has it been “replaced”? Rather, a transformation of the field of vision has taken place, and the eunuch of the soul—who claims something greater than mere mastery of the universal, the pure gaze—has become a perceptual character. The new position, that of the eunuch of the soul, is the position of the human eye, though one that is specifically prepared: it is a perceiving eye that does not desire what is perceived, a disembodied eye, an eye outside the body and against it. When we read the Platonov texts, having entrusted ourselves to this strange creature, omniscient and tireless, we demand no more: we read. Yet we may stop in order to catch our breath, to check once more what it is we are reading and how it is we are reading. It may be that the “past-ness” of history makes our comprehension more difficult, dis¬ torting that first passion which motivated the writer’s hand. Is this not the transparency of the texts of Cbevengur and The Foundation Pit , so accessible at first sight? Is this not what mystifies us, drawing us into that which we will never be able either to comprehend or to live? These doubts would be justified if the world created by Platonov were but a reflection, a reproduction of another actual and historical organic world—if it were but a means of historical cognition of the fates of village life during the 1920s and 1930s, a specifically literary document that would comment upon the epoch of collectivization in its own lan¬ guage. As far as I am able to determine, it is far from mere desire to discover how this really happened that defines our reading of Plato¬ nov, and his prose is far from revealing to us the “white spots” of our history. Reading, if it is really reading, always seeks to be immanent to what is being read—that is, to that special and irreducible world, as if removed from the stream of historical time, living an enchanted life of its own, one that is understandable only to the reader. This is why I would like to draw attention to those moments of read¬ ing that are still not objectivized in contemplation or historical reflec¬ tion, moments that are immanent and spontaneous. Reading Platonov, in the way we are able to read him today, we make peculiar fluctuating The Eunuch of the Soul 189 motions along the lines of two affective distances. To read is always to make a choice in favor of a certain affective-emotional distance. And Platonov gives us the possibility of choice. One distance will constantly remove us from what is depicted: this is the distance of the comic. The other will draw us closer: and this is the distance of the tragic. Yet the whole effect of Platonov’s prose consists of the fact that in the process of reading we experience the play of these distances synchronously. In listening to these “silly” and “unschooled” (if not insane) speeches of the Platonov characters, it is difficult to avoid a condescending smile, if not a veritable fit of laughter; on the other hand, we are overcome by a sense of hopeless inevitability before the dumb and senseless cruelty of Platonov’s world, where death roams freely in all its various guises, where the rights of the dead and the living are equalized. In essence, we are dealing with one and the same distance, which, while making us independent of what is being read, even its judges, suddenly returns us almost instantaneously to ourselves, through some unknown parabola, though now to a “different ourselves,” transforming us from autono¬ mous subjects into objects of provocation, revulsion, and melancholy. In removing ourselves, we suddenly draw nearer: one distance hides in the other. The intensity of the comic is so great and efficient that we cannot help but become its victims; its precise aim does not allow the experience of the tragic any path for escape into “noble” cathar¬ sis from an emotional dead end. And it is well-known that wherever the comic is excessive in intensity it easily plunges one into horror. A basis of pure laughter is unknown to Platonov’s world. To read him is constantly to confuse the comic with the tragic and the tragic with the comic. It is not ourselves and not the sensory blindness of our choice that accounts for this simultaneity, but rather the guide to whom we so easily entrusted ourselves, whose name is the “dead brother” and “the eunuch of the soul”; it is he who turns out to be the hidden regulator of two (and more) affective sensory distances that define the regime and the rhythm of reading. He creates a “third” distance, which, while encompassing the previous distances as those of experience, itself re¬ mains one of perception. The eunuch of the soul is one who observes and witnesses, his observation moving “parallel” to what is depicted, seeking never to intercept it at any point, for by definition he is de¬ prived of the right to be a normal sensing being, and even more so, to lend an order of his own to what is observed. Of course, it is not always that the eunuch of the soul merely sees: a drastic change in the field of observed events occurs at the same time as the appearance of 190 Valery Podoroga a displaced emotional relation within the observer (sorrow, empathy). Precisely at this point the path of the observer is skewed, parallels con¬ verge at this point—and this point is almost always death. Only death is capable of renewing some vitally important functions of human be¬ havior for the observer, and it does so only “once,” simultaneously erasing them. Stumbling across such discrepancies in the functions of perception, the reader begins to understand for the first time that the process of reading, though inspired by the eunuch of the soul, is nevertheless by no means contingent upon the path of surveillance along which the latter moves. Platonov’s prose acquires intensity of effect because it “lives” by this constantly renewed noncorrespondence between the sensitivity of spontaneous reading and the form of depiction controlled by the eunuch of the soul. But let us be careful. It may be that what is crucial here is that the eunuch of the soul is not capable of compre¬ hending what he sees; it is precisely the radical injunction to describe and to witness exclusively what is capable of no comprehension that defines the peculiarity of the Platonov gaze. To see, but not to com¬ prehend. The observer’s inner poverty and initial weakness create a special field of textual meanings—of negative bodily signs that are so effective in influencing the process itself. The eunuch of the soul sees only what is freed from the desire to be, to have, to manifest a will. Therefrom derives his amazing vigi¬ lance for precisely the details of representation which indicate that, in functioning within the literary space, bodies are barely “hooked up” to the currents of life. And for this reason they are not bodies that are extensive—images of duration—but rather bodies that are intensive: the body as a sign of intensity, which indicates the path traveled by the energy of perception in order to destroy an image of the body that is consistent with our conceptions. In my view, what is evident in Platonov’s prose is a refusal to project events, plot lines, and plans of behavior. Everything moves by itself and likewise the spectator moves without any goal or apparent rea¬ son. What is epic unfolds before us, outside its own generic horizon: events are not narrated but only “physically” shown, outside any strict narrative connection. What is represented is deprived of traditional novelistic props: it is depersonalized, depsychologized, and not defin¬ able by any inner teleology. The eunuch of the soul, this odd creature with whom we sympathize, and who would seem to occupy the most privileged vantage point for observation, is not capable of perceiving “souls,” “the languor of subjectivity,” or “the feeling of love”: this The Eunuch of the Soul 191 creature is not able to see the inner at all—and perceives only for this reason. But is this a defect or an advantage? For the time being, let us say that only external signs of events are accessible to such cog¬ nition: situations, changes, the actions of bodies, physical events and processes not animated by any authorial involvement. In Platonov we will not find a gaze that would go from the outer to the inner and would end its path with a psychological representation of the inner. The eunuch of the soul makes topological measurement of the external available to us—a more complex kind of measurement, whose analysis is not possible on the basis of the old inner/outer opposition. We may open at random any of his recently published works, and if we are careful, we will discover both the triumph and the destruction of bodies. For the overwhelming majority of Platonov’s characters, it is a burden to be integrated, to exist within a sphere that is pecu¬ liar to them, as well as their own life and death: they are insufficient, vulnerable, constantly seeking to enter into other bodies, prone to self- destructiveness. Their real existence is always to be discovered where they find freedom from organic form. It is as if they are driven by one passion: to be external to themselves. Everything that, according to an old habit, the reader hopes to interpret as internal is external. Small objects—boxes, crocks, felt boots, blouses—had turned into bulky objects of great size and were falling on Dvanov: he was obliged to let them inside him, they came in tightly and stretched the skin. More than anything, Dvanov was afraid that the skin would burst. What was frightening was not the suffocation of objects that had come to life, but that the skin might tear and one would choke on the dry, hot wool lining of the boot, stuck in the seams of the skin. 4 Skin no longer protects: it has ceased to be a boundary between the ex¬ ternal and the internal. While this experience is actually a dream, it is nevertheless quite realistic as the clinical experience of schizophrenia: as soon as the connection between subjectivity and the bodily image itself is lost, the body becomes “porous,” covered by “ruptures.” What is inside is expelled onto the skin surface. The Platonov gaze externalizes any event, even those that by their nature must belong only to inner measurements of the world and of human beings. Even the most thoughtful of Platonov’s characters are more akin to sage-automatons than to living, sensible people who are responsible for their actions—like us, the “normal” readers. While they may contemplate the physiology of their own thought, they are powerless to change or justify it, to master it psychically as one’s own 192 Valery Podoroga “inner.” This physiology appears accidental, and these lunatics, schizo- characters caught in the trap of “nonrelative, objective perception,” are condemned to remain strange automatons of nature whose conscious¬ ness “flows” along the surface of objects and of their own bodies— not knowing and not seeking the calm of the inner. Platonov is con¬ scious of his device, and points out for us a eunuch of the soul who really “has no knowledge,” for example, of inner experience of pain— of either the body or the soul. Yet precisely due to this unknowing, none of Platonov’s characters “feel” the inner measure of pain: they experience complete anesthesia. Nevertheless, in reading Platonov we cannot help but notice that for some reason this externally expressed pain enters into us. The location of the focal point of pain changes: it is now our interior. We are struck not by the precision of the detached description of pain, but rather by the fact that in Platonov’s world it does not belong to anyone, as if its inner experience is insignificant in a world where forces that are blind to individual existence are at work. For this reason, it is important for Platonov to show not just a particular physical pain, but the force that elicits it: the force that elicits the pain must become pain itself. They cannot be separated. Indeed, the body of any character experiences events that are in¬ adequate to the possibilities of inner experience: the killing bullet, the cracking of bones from an impact, or a deep wound (“the steel bird .. . stirred with prickly bristles of its wings”—this is Dvanov’s wound)— all of this is external, it is distributed along the surface of these strange bodies, killing and maiming them, while the bodies themselves, aban¬ doned by their inhabitants, are not capable of feeling. There is simply no one to experience the pain: no scream, no gnashing of the teeth, no moan can escape from this non-body. And even if we hear a cry, it does not belong to anybody. In other words, it is not within anyone’s power to put in question the power of the external forces, whose first harbinger is the eunuch of the soul. Platonov leaves us ample evidence: Bozhev felt the wind that hit him in the chest with firm force, and though he was already dead, he could not fall toward this force; he only slid downward along the wall. 5 With a revolver round, the chekisty hit the voiceless burzhui, who *As noted previously, the term “ burzhui ” is the Russian “equivalent” of “bour¬ geois.” The term “ chekist ” is derived from the acronym "Cheka,” which refers to the “Special Committee to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage,” established in 1917 and later reorganized and renamed GPU (State Political Direction). Whereas the former The Eunuch of the Soul 193 joined up yesterday—and the burzbui fell, awkwardly and sidelong, twisting their fat necks to the point of damaging the vertebrae. Each of them lost the strength in his legs even before the feeling of the wound— though the bullet had hit an accidental place and had overgrown with living flesh there. 6 It is as if there is only one task: to scrupulously describe physical events, to try not to miss the chief moments of their action, for all that takes place—an execution—cannot be understandable to the observers. It is possible to describe only that which cannot be understood. This impossibility is the power of Platonov’s prose, which suffers from a rupture between the literality of the depiction of the event and its mean¬ ing: the literal communication of the physical event, grounded before the action of accidental mechanical forces (the human “body”—the “body” of the bullet), produces our alienation from what is read, for we are not eunuchs of the soul and know (even if it is as if we dis¬ cover later, having suddenly remembered) that the depicted physical action is not simply the commonplace mechanics of the collision of two bodies of different density, but the killing of people. Yet our sud¬ den comprehension of what is occurring cannot be attributed to the appearance of some meaning that restores our lost equilibrium with the world of history (“it had to be this way,” “this was a mistake,” “a barbarity,” “fanaticism”). While we are reading Chevengur, the sphere of the absurd will pro¬ liferate and will not allow us any chance to slip away into the niche of justification or judgment: we must accept everything as it is or not read at all. We must recognize that completely different game rules are at work in Platonov’s world, and that it is not up to us to change them: while we read, we must follow the paths of his characters, and not only hear and see like them, but feel (at least to some extent) on our own skin how inevitably the boundary between the inner and the outer shifts—between what we may master as meaning and what denies all meaning and all means of psychologizing it. This is a different world, a different space, a different time: possibly it is much closer to us than those rational constructions that we tirelessly project from our interior onto the exterior, a place where we wish to find a world that is free of the insanity of Platonov’s characters. Even in the above passages it is noticeable how the boundary between the external and the internal vibrates (at least for us). The eunuch of the soul does not notice it: the was still a “revolutionary” organization, the latter had already become a state secret police.—Ed. 194 Valery Podoroga observer is present everywhere, he enters into the dead Bozhy, hears the cracking of the neck vertebrae of the burzbui, and observes, run¬ ning ahead in time, how the bullet will have been overgrown with fat. An amazing optics, which is the more compelling the less it seeks to explain its own images: it changes the course of time and distorts space to a point of unrecognizability—and simultaneously it shows the way in which murder is carried out. The images of the external also reveal the experience of sexuality. In Platonov’s world—and gradually we become accustomed to this—it is as if everything exists on a different set of scales: neither pain nor desire is able to enter this world as special values of individual existence. The sexual act is depicted as a momentary flash of a feeling of death, yet its “experience” is objective. First, the orgasm becomes physiologically transformed—it is the result of an unexpected displacement of inner organs, spontaneous and accidental: “Dvanov himself felt neither hap¬ piness nor total oblivion: he kept carefully listening to the high and thin work of the heart. But then the heart failed, slowed down, popped and shut—though already empty. It opened too wide and unwittingly let out its only bird.” 7 Second, the orgasm is not preceded by the desire to possess its object, or rather, the orgasm itself causes the recollection of the desire. And, finally—and perhaps most important—the orgasm represents an instantaneous mode of exchange of energy between inti¬ mate bodies under the sign of a growing feeling of death: it is precisely this energy that stimulates desire, whose fulfillment is death. He pressed the horse’s leg with both hands, the leg turned into the fragrant living body of the one whom he did not know and will not know, though now she became desperately needed for him. As Dvanov understood the secret of the hair, his heart rose up to his throat, he screamed in the oblivion of his liberation and immediately felt a re¬ lieving, satisfied calm. Nature did not fail to take from Dvanov that reason for which he was born out of the mother’s delirium: the seed of birth, so that new people would become a family. The time of death was coming—spellbound, Dvanov profoundly possessed Sonia. 8 All the sexual couplings in Chevengur (Dvanov-Sonia, Dvanov-Fekla, Sonia-Serbinov, Kopenkin-Rosa Luxemburg et al.) are essentially in¬ cestuous. These necrophilial bodies, saturated with love and in close kinship to dead bodies, move around and through the boundary of that great cultural prohibition—incest. And, in any event, how is “normal” sexual behavior possible if throughout the almost entirely depopu¬ lated spaces of the Platonov landscape there reigns a metaphysics of The Eunuch of the Soul 195 exhaustion? The sexual is by no means a signal of a corporeal excess of energy, but rather yet another (the most effective) means of denying life in its ultimate mystery—the point where it is born—in order to search, by way of orgasm (that “little death”), for paths toward sud¬ den transitions out of life and into death, and in death to search for a new life, without death. This is why (for the sake of this new life) all that exhausts, arrests, diminishes the individual power of bodies is so necessary. The true body of love is not formed in terms of pairings: a “third” body must always be present in this love coupling—a body that is dead, awaiting its resurrection (like Serbinov-Sonia-Serbinov’s mother). Simon gloomily embraced her and carried her from the hard body of the horse onto the soft hillock of the mother’s grave, legs in the grass below. He forgot whether there were other people at the cemetery or whether they had already gone, though Sofia Aleksandrovna silently turned away from him, into the clumps of earth, which contained fine ashes of other coffins, exhumed by the shovel from the depths. 9 Sexual energy is used not for the birth of life, but for its rebirth. This is why Platonov’s necrophilia is to be understood as an attempt to work out a new conception of human time: it is due only to a feeling of love for the dead that we can become closer to dead, forgotten time— time that we lack, for it has passed away from us in the dead bodies of those who were close to us—and revive it, draw it into the present and change ourselves, helping the dead become closer to the living. Platonov does not describe individual bodies—he points to their pres¬ ence through discrete physical actions. If there is anything that is de¬ scribed, it is only figures of bodies. A figure is a complex or a plural body: it is born and lives only through motion that is peculiar to it, when it is able to withstand an aggressive background that seeks to erase its boundaries and dissolve it within the force of Platonov’s in¬ creasingly barren spaces. Before seeing the actions and situations of bodies in all their physical persuasiveness and photographic precision, it is necessary to be able to see space—this art is paramount to Plato¬ nov. It is sufficient to recall that great space which closes in on us from the pages of Juvenile Sea, Chevengur, or The Foundation Pit. Platonov’s world is surrounded by active space, by the great barrenness of a steppe landscape, overcome by the melancholy and boredom of deserted vil¬ lage cemeteries, of rafters, dried-up riverbeds: there is nowhere to 196 Valery Podoroga “stand” here; ceaseless motion without purpose or hope becomes the sole means of being close to the landscape. The function of this space is to devastate and to scatter. Therefore, to be able to see it is above all to feel the growing impetus of the earth’s gradual desolation. Plato¬ nov’s language bears the hallmarks of this experience of spatiality, and it is produced as if from the outset it is destined to express—with metaphors of amazing precision—the eschatological dynamics of far- reaching paths, vortices, and horizons, to express the beginning of the end of time by which space has fallen prisoner to forces devastating the earth and has begun to scatter people’s bodies, towns and villages, thoughts and feelings. Increasingly, the world acquires inhuman quali¬ ties—and this may not be for the sake of being deployed on the map of the great soulless land surveyor who plots the fantastic geometry of the Foundation Pit. There are other spaces, created by the multifacetedness of objects and events, and sustained by the impetus of human time. However, Platonov does not feel spaces of this kind—for, as evidenced by his texts, all such manifold figuration of bodies and their movements is extremely fragile in the face of the might of the forces of devastation: it is not figures, as complexes of body events, that fill space and di¬ vide it according to their various measures, but rather the space itself, aggressive and two-dimensional, turning everything into appearances and ashes; it moves from all directions and in all directions, scatter¬ ing what is alive—it moves, driving back the richness of multifaceted visible life, toward death as it seeks to discover the original emptiness that is never filled by human time in all that is alive. In the figure, as a complex of bodies, we usually see some possibility of stopping this frightening action of space, which tends toward self-devastation. The figuration of space is the first condition of its being filled—which makes it possible to divide the forces acting within it and use them for the purposes of life. Only figurated space may be considered kin to us as human beings who are immanent to our finitude, to our pres¬ ence in the world. In space, the empty always demands to be filled: its function is to differentiate, but not to reign. For Heidegger, emptiness is positive and productive: emptiness-for-itself does not and cannot exist—it exists only for the sake of being filled. This relationship of figure and space is conceived quite differently by Platonov: freed from human time (history), space acquires maximal dynamics—it grows through the defiguration of the world. Nature returns to itself, by¬ passing human mediation. Space left without human involvement is capable only of devastation. And there is nothing strange in the fact The Eunuch of the Soul 197 that motion within this space no longer belongs to the one who is in motion but rather to the space itself. Something else must be understood. Platonov “writes” figures and not separate bodies, and for him a figure constitutes the fulfilled dream of the existence of empty and emptying bodies, of prisoners of space. However, the figure is not defined by the visible bases of life. More¬ over, it may be said that the figure becomes that fragile bridge which connects the visible and the invisible life, for a figure cannot be equal to the sum of the bodies comprising it within the concrete “piece” of space that is being read by us: dreamlike, all bodies, whether dead or alive, all events, both past and future, co-exist within it—the figure is endowed with the greatest fullness of presence. His characters are not able to live as individual bodies: they may exist only in complex con¬ glomerations, colonies, masses, where the individual body breathes with the breath of other bodies and receives or loses energy for life through the multiplicity of other bodies. Having made the transition to this level of existence, where visible and invisible life are already indistinguishable from one another, the human body no longer experiences the primordial fear of devastation, the end of time, pain and death. This is why devastation, the dis¬ persal of individual bodies and of their “objective” context becomes for Platonov a wandering in search of that one impossible figure that would encompass all those missing bodies of visible-invisible life. It is possible to resist the process of devastation only by assigning it posi¬ tive qualities. And this means that Platonov’s figures represent not so much visible material duplicates of the individual and the living as maps directing the movement of the characters. Some of the characters in Cbevengur may help us understand the unique power of Platonov’s figures. Here we see, for example, Kopen- kin—a human-animal who is inseparable from his horse named “The Proletarian Might”—revealed in a series of transformations as he carries on his revolutionary movement along the various routes that lead to Rosa Luxemburg’s grave (she is the mother, the sister, and the lover). Kopenkin’s figure is comprised of a multitude of bodies, simul¬ taneously deployed at different levels of the visible and the invisible life. (Is this not also the case with the human-bear from The Foun¬ dation Pit , who actively participates in collectivization?) While the whereabouts and the bearings of the operations of Kopenkin’s army are not clear, its destination is “Rosa’s portrait.” However, this is not the destination of history but of nature (“We are a force of nature,” says Kopenkin). In other words, this destination, which points out 198 Valery Podoroga for us the movement of space—freeing earth’s landscape from human time and from history—is the functioning of nature returning to itself. The historical is dissolved within natural forces. In Platonov we will find many other figural images that are faithful to this search for pure natural forces. He is ahistorical, or, to put it another way, he describes a space that no longer needs human time; yet it begins to function, to grow and devastate, when it discovers its extraordinary capacity for metabolism, which would allow it to move from a visible world to an invisible one—to become nature itself again, to exist in the world as an animal, a plant, or sunlight. At this point we may return again to our earlier question. What is the character of Platonov’s gaze and vision—what is its makeup? We will first recall some images of devastating space: Above the desert-like barrenness of the steppe rose yesterday’s tired sun, and its light was empty, as if over a foreign, forsaken country where there is no one. The cleared waste land smelled of dead grass and the dampness of bare places. The space of the plains and the country lay in emptiness, quiet. And where it was frightening at night, the plain spaces lay lit and poor. In his sleep he saw large trees that have grown out of poor soil, surrounded by airy, barely vibrating space, and an empty road was patiently heading far away. 10 This is the landscape that in Platonov’s opinion should likely appear before the reader in the moments of reading. The eunuch of the soul teaches one to see this inhuman landscape as the universal frontier of the world. Does this strange creature see anything else? Does he see positions, gestures, movements of individual bodies? Does he note their path toward the formation of figures—and afterward suddenly “stumble onto” this space, turning it into the landscape of a great flat- land country, a desert landscape? Maybe it really happens like this, in this succession? However, another supposition is quite probable, and in our view more convincing: the eunuch of the soul “sees” and reacts only to the growth of emptiness. Moreover, he collects it every¬ where: from human bodies, figures, voices, from the earth and the cosmos. But how is it possible to see emptiness? How is it possible to see what in principle cannot be seen, or is visible only in the case when there is something (a “thing,” a “body,” an “action”) that is struck The Eunuch of the Soul 199 by emptiness? And this is the case. This “something” may be a figure, yet can empty space bordering the figure be a background? May we resort to the old, though even today quite productive, gestalt opposi¬ tion of figure and ground in order to explain the “peculiarities” of the Platonov vision? We will attempt to answer this question by considering the thought of Filonov, one of the most significant visual artists of the Russian avant-garde, whose ideas were close to those of Platonov. Filonov dis¬ tinguished the “seeing eye” from the “knowing eye.” When we want to be realists (not in the best sense of the word), he suggests, and wish to reflect what we see within ourselves, we are compelled to submit to a pregiven canon, and are no longer capable of creating what we see; it is as if we restrict ourselves and our vision by those natural capabilities inherent in the eye as a perceptual organ. 11 The periphery of the ob¬ served objects always slips out of the field of vision, and there is no way for us to “embrace” it in all its objective fullness of existence. Hence all the limitation of the “seeing eye.” For Filonov, then, vision is an act of creation: “the knowing eye,” notes the artist, “says that in any atom of consistency forming the periphery, a number of transformative, actu¬ alizing processes take place, and the artist writes these and numerous other phenomena in an ‘invented form’ on any necessary occasion.” 12 Thus the creative “eye” perceives content afforded to it by form. The artist functions as an inventor and not as a register of external distur¬ bances, seeking to master in art those invisible forces that create this thing and this world—prefigural forces—to work with the immediate perceptual fabric of the object at the microscopic, atomic level. Like few others, Filonov senses this excess of energy raging within matter, and in his painting he seeks to create adequate figure bodies for them, supersaturating living space with them: an amazing world, where there are unfulfilled lives. In Filonov, the background domi¬ nates, as the texture of painting dominates—swelling from an excess of energy. The background enters into complex, perceptually unexpected relations. The texture of the background—all of this microscopy of in¬ visible, swarming life—is advanced to the forefront at the same time as the figure recedes into the background. This may be seen as a chief prin¬ ciple of composition. In the textural background, the figure appears as something accidental in relation to the raging energies within the fab¬ ric of painting: at times it moves as a barely visible trace contour (this is the way Filonov writes “animals”); at other times it simply “breaks through” into the forefront—the fabric tears in the way that geologi¬ cal stratification forms (in this way Filonov writes his “heads”)—not 200 Valery Podoroga to mention Filonov’s cosmic visions, where the background texture is concerned only with itself and does not allow the appearance of any figures of bodies. It would seem that the way in which Platonov sees (“writes”) his figure-bodies is analogous: on the one hand, it is the insensitive gaze that enables extraordinary freedom for the observer—all the ruptures and shifts in the movements of bodies, their mechanical and acciden¬ tal nature; on the other hand, despite the fragmentary and peripheral character of what is depicted, the gaze is caught up in a general move¬ ment that generates ever-newer figures before our eyes. The boundaries of figures are traceable by the faith in the invisible forces of life: it is only the latter that create fluid and flexible boundaries that allow us to distinguish figures and not conflate them—they create, in spite of chance and the aimlessness of the various individual positions of bodies, their situatedness and possible death in the visible existence. The figure—that which must be at the center of the gaze—is created through a collecting effort, from partial and peripheral objects, though it is not the objects themselves that are collected, but rather that which is between them—interstitial, empty space. Platonov breaks the rule of the relation between the center and the periphery insofar as he does not recognize the primacy of the object for representation, but rather that which decomposes, transforms, and limits the object’s “structure of emptiness.” A gaze that sees the fis¬ sures of emptiness in the visible enables the visible both to appear and perish. This is why for us, those who are engaged in reading, these fantastic figures and configurations appear dreamlike—these Platonov characters which are unlike anything, and are so difficult to reduce to a spatial-temporal determinacy, or to assign a place and a fate. Their figurativeness is a sign of the dispersal of corporeality—and not of its consolidation against forces of devastation. Before us is a world where an animal, a human, an insect, an object, a portion of an object may form one uninterrupted series of visible-invisible life—a fabric that slips freely through the limits of death. If we ask ourselves what kind of world it is that the eunuch of the soul perceives, as if benumbed, there can only be one answer: a world created according to the model of catastrophic space (all the heroes and their deeds, events, move¬ ment and rest, separate gestures, boredom and melancholy—all that is “last,” still remaining—and this “last” will always exist). Filonov’s world is oriented by a different model, though one that is strikingly similar to Platonov’s, in reverse: this is a model of a regeneration of all powers of nature and the creation of new bodies, more indivisible into the dead and the living (all of his images are “the new” and “the first”). Raise my eyelids—I can’t see! —N. V. Gogol, Vii The Eunuch of the Soul 201 Is Platonov’s choice conscious? I would answer as follows: in creating the eunuch of the soul, Platonov is submitting to the perceptual choice of the epoch, which, as we know, was the negative reaction to the anthropologization of the world in the classical models of art and lit¬ erature. In the 1920s, a powerful wave of experimentation emerges in practically all areas of cultural experience; a challenge is issued to tra¬ ditional languages of culture, which are limited in their communicative capacities and are in the service of the customary stereotypes of cog¬ nition and literary conduct. Platonov’s world is manifested not in the word but in the vision. And he is hardly alone in his unusual strategy of vision. For there was already Gogol. Andrei Belyi perceptively pointed out the central rupture in Gogol’s creative evolution: the break between “vision” (“the eye’s nature”) and “postulation.” In Selected Correspondence * Gogol renounces his unique ability to see in favor of postulation. The eye possessed by the writer is subjected to a blinding, the optic area is dried up, losing all capacity of attraction—and all of this occurs because the late moral/ ethical askesis celebrates the victory over the joys of bodily vision. As soon as Gogol began to edify, to postulate moral truth, he ceased to see, for he destroyed his “natural” capabilities of vision by prophetic teaching about a world that must be—though already a more invisible one. Platonov’s prose (at least that of the 1920s) has never crossed this boundary between vision and postulation—thus his gaze has remained that of the eunuch of the soul, incapable of premising one’s own vision on some set of transcendental rules independent of vision itself. Yet how did Gogol himself see? Gogol’s eye is that of Viid To see is above all to depsychologize the perceived, to enter directly into the game of the perceptual forces of nature—without verbal mediators or assistants. “If anyone would see,” confesses the writer in one of his letters, “the monsters that at first came out from under my quill, they would certainly shudder.” 13 A double presence of vision: he has seen as one who wrote and as a reader; he saw himself “in the beginning” as well as in the second moment; he “shuddered,” for he “saw”— shuddered in horror before the monstrous, that which was created by his own hand, shuddered before the dead. One may imagine these numerous scraps of paper, filled with fine handwriting, collected into a " The full title is Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. —Ed. tThis is a reference to N. Gogol’s story Vii, whose central character, Vii, is a creature of pseudo-Ukranian folklore, chief of the gnomes. 202 Valery Podoroga folder—these accumulations of letter imprints from which there sud¬ denly appear monsters that the author himself could not have expected. Here the Gogolian vision is still free of norms of moral and didactic construction—it is as if language is overwhelmed by what is seen and only copies it, establishing no rules for it. This amazing vision—which is best able to see the dead—is a rare gift which Russian literature has not known before Gogol. Vision is enabled not through language but through writing—more precisely, through the hand that diligently traces letters in the special rhythms of bodily sensation. Writing that sees, grasps, desires the dead. The active triad of sensory inspiration: body-hand-eye. To see and to write is the same. The synchronous action of the eye and the hand, the penetrating force of the haptic: all that is touched by the Gogolian eye is deadened. This eye is capable of grasp¬ ing the living motion of life at the most microscopic levels of existence. In ancient rituals, a monster like Vii regulated the events of life and death through the “opening” or “closing” of its eyes: the opened eye brings death, the closed eye brings life. 14 At the center of the Gogolian vision, Nabokov (not without reli¬ ance upon Rozanov’s * intuitions) has noted an eye that is constructed according to the principles of the multifaceted vision of precrustacean insects: it is as if its capabilities of seeing are located on the other side of the kind of perception possessed by normal human vision. If at this point one thinks of only one aspect of this vision—that is, its de¬ stroying capacity as the “squinting eye” or the “eye of contemplation,” akin to the gaze of the ancient insect—the Gogolian eye is static, un¬ movable, and sees only the microscopic. Gogol finds an explanation: “The telescope that shows the sun and the microscope that conveys the movements of unnoticed insects are equally amazing and wondrous”; “the fine detail that slips away from the eyes, would flash boldly be¬ fore [one’s] eyes.” 15 In any objects or spaces of natural life, in gestures, grimaces, and attitudes of bodies, it sees only the smallest possible con¬ stituents. It is focused on the finest individual detail of the objective whole, and the whole disintegrates, for, saturated with photographic might, this eye enters into living matter with all the detachment of a surgical instrument, whose use demands dead bodies and objects. Thus he breaks down motion into the most minute phases, constantly augmenting the pauses between them—between the phases of separate *Vasilii Rozanov (1856-1919) was a highly controversial writer, critic, and philoso¬ pher at the turn of the century. He was the author of the well-known Dostoevskii and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and The Apocalypse of Our Times. —Ed. The Eunuch of the Soul 203 gestures—pauses of motionlessness, of cataleptic or sleeplike restful¬ ness. In his work on Gogol, Belyi notes: The smashing of the gesture into atoms, with the deepening of the pauses among them, leads to the increase in angularity, which presents the moment as a shock and a break in the line of the gesture; and the intensification of the pause passes into the fermata of the last pause, akin to the petrification of both the individual and the group of the gesticulants. 16 The object of this practice of writing is the reactivation of the dead figurines of characters: to bring them out of a state of “petrification,” to endow them with voices and movements (“seen anew”)—temporarily bringing the dead to life, without having made it living. In the Gogolian world, death has already occurred, for all that is living is presented here only as futile efforts of reactivation, which is why the broken- off, incomplete gesture dominates: shudders, convulsions, jerkings— all motions akin to those of a body that has parted with life, whose muscles may still react to an external irritant (a sufficiently strong elec¬ trical shock). Likewise with the Gogolian personages: they are mere dolls, incapable of any kind of independent movement. It is difficult to resist conjecturing that Gogol’s writing moves not from life into death, or from the individual to the nonindividual, but rather the re¬ verse—from the dead to what must become dead. The secret of the living is in the dead. Gogol is a great medic: he acknowledges the possibility of grasping disease only with the complete halt of life. Dis¬ ease is the name of life—the flash of the living in the dead flesh. The Gogolian gaze, which studies the human body according to the lessons of microscopic anatomy, establishes the rules of the dead for all that is living. To emphasize once again, it does not revive but deadens; for that which is living may be individualized only by death. This gaze kills any spontaneous motion, which in the Gogolian world is not real¬ istically possible. In other words, all that may be presented as living is already dead to begin with—though all that is truly alive and beau¬ tiful, colored by erotic feeling, pulverized within the psychomimetic layer of language, is also dead. “There is an amazing brightness of the brush-stroke everywhere,” reflects Rozanov, when he is speaking of corpses. One vividly sees “the beauty (the witch) in the coffin.” “The corpses arising from their graves”—whom Burulbash and Katerina see while passing the cemetery in a boat—are amazing. Likewise with the drowned Ganna. Everywhere the corpse leads a double life: nowhere is the corpse “dead”; it is the living who are amazingly dead. These are 204 Valery Podoroga dolls, schemas, allegories of vices. By contrast, the corpses—both Ganna and the witch—“are beautiful and individually interesting.” 17 Yet aside from the eye that sees the microscopic, there exists another eye—one that is blinded, out of focus. If one were to express this in a language of the opposition of two kinds of vision, as is characteristic for Gogolian texts, then the deadening (squinting, focusing, pinpoint¬ ing) eye is to be opposed to the dilated, the wide-open, the peripheral, the nonfocused (and therefore blind), the telescopic—or more exactly, the cosmological, mythical eye. And this eye, while it is open as far as possible, almost “wide-open,” sees nothing except the movement of the world’s great tumults (and their symbolism). It is blind—the eye of the most undifferentiated nature, the eye of life that does not know death. As a psychoanalyst might say, this eye is the product of a phantasm deriving from the ancient prohibition of “close-up vision.” In actuality, it is only the eye of death that is open—it is only death that is capable of seeing, and all that it sees cannot be living. Moments of vision are moments of the death of what is seen. Wherever Gogol sees, he is incapable of accounting for what is seen. He only sees, and he sees only the monstrous—that which he would not wish to see. The curse of the gaze. Yet paradoxical as it may be, it is precisely this gaze that is capable of functioning on one condition alone: the bodily excess of the world. It appears pregiven to it as life’s matter. Out of the mash of this inanimate matter that overflows boundaries—this gnostic clay— the eye makes out humanlike figurines, various organs and positions of bodies: a human-cabinet, a human-lips, a human-nose, a human- eyebrows. No contacts, meetings, confessions, or avowals: instead, complete excommunication. This eye regulates the various distances of our sensitivity, mixing and interchanging them, unfolding our bodily experience according to the logic of the hyperbola. Nevertheless, no matter how strong the affects of this sensoriality may be, it is defined by the dead, by that type of “eye contact”—and consequently, distance— which brings death to all that may be seen. At the same moment that the individual feeling or emotion appears in a flash, it settles in the form of the material, as if it were a scar or a fissure of the living within the dead. A twin becomes visible within the depths of the bodily plan that oversteps its limits: it is the exhaustion of bodily strength. An odd pen¬ dulum of sensoriality! If the eye is open, it puts all this bodily excess in motion, immersing it into an erotic atmosphere which is so close to that of a popular print. And if it is closed and no longer subject to the temptation to see (and hence, to resort to the expansion of the hori¬ zons of sensorial flesh), then it becomes immersed in the turmoil of the The Eunuch of the Soul 205 living animation of life. It becomes immanent to the visible (dream¬ like, insane, spiritually transformed). It does not establish distances and partitions in order to glory in the individualized sensoriality of the bodily plan, or to resort to the power of the dead in order to feel life. In other words, the Gogolian blinding (“spiritual transformation”) co¬ incides with the refusal of seeing—the eye that is directed and squints is condemned as devilish power of temptation and is subjected to the strictest prohibition: all of this results in bodily exhaustion. In Gogol’s texts (of different periods) we may notice the fluctua¬ tion of the pendulum of sensoriality, barely noticeable at first, then gradually increasing—and finally collapsing by the time of Selected Correspondence. The eye is focused, squinting, “open,” the bodily plan proliferates, multiplies, blocks out what it is incapable of seeing (move¬ ment). Yet as soon as it is closed, it immediately denies its qualities as a bodily organ, as a locus of haptic sensoriality—becoming imma¬ nent to movement. If the eye is focused, speech copies only what is seen, rushing after sensoriality and not anticipating it (“Gogol’s ‘little words’ that crawl up into one’s skull,” as Rozanov would say). If the eye is closed—and for Gogol this means that it is open too wide to see anything other than the movement of natural forces—then language already creates a special reality, impermeable to the devilish forces of the material, corporeal plan, where death forms the entire field of emotional life. Language is freed from reality and creates forms ade¬ quate to the author’s spiritual transformation; in order to sustain the strength of this prophetic surge, it is necessary to desire passionately all that destroys the values of the body (cataleptic seizures, exhaustion, deep pauses of dying). But let us stop. Does an evolution of vision exist in the current of Russian literature that begins with Gogol? On the whole, the eye of Vii is an archetypal structure of perception: it is possible to see only that which is deadened at the moment of perception. And ever-newer varia¬ tions and incarnations of Vii’s eye follow. Platonov’s creation is the eye that sees but does not comprehend. The eye that knows and does not see, or, to put it differently, the eye that sees only because it already knows—this is Filonov’s creation. But there is also Vertov’s “mechani¬ cal eye.” Yet another variation? Yet another incarnation? When, in his early articles, Platonov pathetically notes the necessity of a search for a standpoint of “objective nonrelative perception,” he is essentially seek¬ ing a consciousness of “perfect organization”: “Truth is a real thing. It is perfect organization of matter in relation to the human being.” 18 The new vision, if it is able to attain its perfect organization, will “automatically” change the world and its matter—where “concepts of 206 Valery Podoroga work, resistance, the human being, etc., will surely no longer exist.” The ideal of Platonov’s vision appears closer to Vertov’s investigations and experiments. How is it possible to see matter, or, perhaps, how is matter able to see itself? These questions may be specified: How and by what means is it possible to have vision of that which always re¬ mains invisible (the material composition of the world in the depths of its microscopic forces and elements)—as well as of something which, if it suddenly becomes visible, appears accidental, and also may not be seen? Vertov produces the theory of the “superhuman eye.” Kino- oko, kino-eye, machine-eye—these are the miracle-working mechanics of vision, capable of revealing in the world what is invisible to the human eye: The kino-eye lives and moves in time and in space, it perceives and fixes impressions quite unlike the human eye, quite differently. By no means constrained either by the position of our body at the time of observation, or by the number of perceived moments of one or another visual event per second, the camera perceives more and better, the more perfect it is. 19 It is due only to this mechanical eye that the human being is in¬ volved in a new vision—one capable of seeing “without boundaries or distances.” And the kino-eye has numerous resources for this: some are determined by the specific character of the camera as a mechanical device (in the 19ZOS, Vertov theorized the use of traveling shots, cuts “from top down” and “from bottom up,” speedups and slow-downs of all kinds, and even the “subjective camera”). Others are defined by montage, which enables the combination of various positions of the camera in time and space—the connection of the unconnectable: the far and the near, the great and the indistinct, the accidental and the predicted. New and novel spaces appear for the human eye, which are now no longer created by it; and since they exist, the human being, entangled by the perceptual prejudices of organic vision, cannot be present in them. The chief principle making it possible to combine the capabilities of the camera as a mechanical eye with the technology of montage is that of the “interval.” The camera captures reality from unusual standpoints, yet each of these standpoints is disengaged from similar ones by means of intervals (temporal and spatial). The interval is not what restricts the camera, but rather what allows it to enter the depths of the material world, the most invisible. The succession of the intervals is the rhythm of the visible, and montage only reinforces these rhythms, deploying them in an image of an unseen world. The eye now acquires an extra-human significance: the kino-eye is not simply an The Eunuch of the Soul 207 eye employed as a mechanical medium, but rather the eye of death, by means of which matter may see itself in a state, place, and time where it is not yet grasped by human perception. Yet what is the eye of Vii? Is this not also the eye of death? We will recall the double function of Gogolian vision, where, following Belyi, we distinguished the functioning of the “narrowed, squinting” eye from that of the “wide-open” eye. Vertov seeks to eliminate this doubleness of Gogolian vision. Vii’s eye turns upon itself: it goes into the very matter that has produced it in order to create an image of it— in a sense it enacts the eye’s self-reflection. As for the “dilated, wide- open” eye, its functions are completely transferred to the ideologemes of montage, motivated by the pure energies of natural, material forces. Turned upon itself, Vii’s eye intervalizes matter, tearing its organic link¬ ages, which have been subordinated to the organic optics of the human being. And this eye—reborn again after Gogol, in order to be the eye of matter itself—must be absolutely free: it sees without a plan, prior calculation, or general goal. This instantaneous gaze, which makes deep incisions at the surface of the visible material flow, frees invisible forces of matter. Filonov’s “knowing eye” is also in search of the mo¬ lecular, the atomic forces of the matter of color. We are faced with a world that is put together out of contingencies of the process of seeing, technologically reproduced and multiplied in multitemporal and multi- spatial fragments. This explains the necessity for new, superhuman effort, as well as new strategies of montage, capable of establishing the necessary interconnection of the selected intervals; it is precisely the intervals, as Vertov hoped, that will bring their chance oscillations in time and space into a single rhythm of the material whole. The path is open toward the creation of new bodies and worlds—and in this sense communism is not so much a new social formation as a new form of organization of matter. Indeed, when Vertov asserts the nature of the mechanical eye as a special superhuman perceptual organ, he means one that has no organic carrier of its own. This eye belongs to the body of the machine. Or, to put this another way, this eye is one without a body; it is an eye that is opposed to the image of human corporeality and has no need for it—no need for any limitations that are usually imposed by the organic dimensionality of the human body on all the processes of perception and comprehension. Why has the consideration of Vertov’s experiment proved impor¬ tant for us? Probably because Platonov’s vision (in the guise of the eunuch of the soul) likewise relies on the intervalization of what is seen. Yet the interval is understood not as that which would finally link all that is disjointed in space and time, but as a segment of empty 208 Valery Podoroga space and arrested time—a segment that is not filled by anything. The energy of emptiness. If we turn once again to the analysis of the eunuch of the soul as a special perceptual organ, we may notice an odd pecu¬ liarity: the eye of the eunuch of the soul is open toward emptiness— he sees only intervals, ruptures, fissures, cracks, shimmering surfaces, frontiers, dissipating horizon lines. It is as if he sees nothing, for his vision is focused on that which in principle cannot be seen. While, like a background, he enables one to see, it is impossible to see the background itself. And nevertheless we must become reconciled to this quality of the eye of the eunuch of the soul—one that is entranced with the world’s emptiness. Vertov goes from intervals that separate the reality perceived by the camera, to spatio-temporal points, to intervals as elements of a montaged whole, setting the rhythm of a new synthetic whole, a new world. In using the eunuch of the soul, Platonov achieves the opposite effect: it is impossible to stop forces that are active in the intervals of matter (there is no cinematographic machine that could do this)—they are continuous, and their action is graspable for the human eye only in the event of the collapse of visible forms of mat¬ ter. Platonov captures the action of these forces: at the first level—we will call it prefigural—there still functions a tension between language and the bodies speaking it; at the second level, the configurative, there emerge and form figurative complexes, which are more geometric- graphic than linguistic; finally, at the third, transfigurative level, there is only the reign of pure forces (devastation, forsakenness, the powers of empty places, the aura of the color gray, which blocks out the sun in the Platonov landscape). Thus, the “machine of vision” shown in figure i. A' The Eunuch of the Soul 209 This machine enables us to read and “understand” Platonov. The reader is located at point R and the eunuch of the soul is at point E. They are centers of two spaces, as if “interposed” with respect to one another: the space of reading as comprehension and that of vision as incomprehension. Point E is the most important point among the forces of vision/comprehension—not only because the eunuch of the soul occupies it but because here the reader encounters the realities of Platonov’s world. This is a point of shock, if you will, or perhaps, if one were to describe the functioning of the machine of vision in terms of force, the point of the initial pulsing energy of the Platonov text. On the one hand, I am supposing that there exists the world of the eunuch of the soul—a world that is closed off and unknown to us, one of pure vision, incommensurable with the text of a novel or a narrative. On the other hand, it is natural for the reader to desire to perform an act of understanding of that which the eunuch of the soul (as the one who controls the process of reading) does not understand himself. The first contact creates an instantaneous surge of energy, opening for the reader the possibility of transforming affect into a species of distance: if affect is grasped as tragic experience, then distance will be defined by drawing nearer; experience will be projected into the text and then ex¬ tracted as an experience that identifies the emotional tension of what is read (B-B'-R). 1 wish to note right away that this entire amplitude of tragic experience is produced at point R, and not E; that is, it is secondary with respect to the experience of shock that is undergone by the reader during the first contact with the text. A similar procedure of emotional interpretation is formed at the level of the comic affect, with one difference: now the reader is not drawing nearer to the text but apparently moving farther away from textual events—and the greater this distancing, the more the comicality of what is being read may be augmented (A-A'-R). As already noted, neither of the two distances is dominant for the eunuch of the soul: in his vision one distance be¬ comes hidden within the other—he is endowed with extra-distantial vision. For this reason, his seeing is not merely a perceptual action— not merely vision. We cannot see what is seen by the eunuch of the soul, for he sees the text of emptiness. Or, if we do see, then it is in that vanishing instant of the first shock that supplies us with the energy for reading—though one that may not be reconstructed in any interpretation. In fact, the text that we read is situated within the space between two extreme points of emotional tension, the comic and the tragic. And in order to understand this space, it is necessary to adopt either of the two interpre¬ tive strategies. Whereas the eye of the eunuch of the soul sees “reality,” 210 Valery Podoroga prohibiting any interpretation with respect to itself, we cannot tolerate this reality, for this reality is emptiness. We must nevertheless under¬ stand why all that is visible to the eunuch of the soul becomes marked by one or another sign of emptiness. The eye of the eunuch of the soul is the eye of the idiot, a schizo-eye: he sees in this way for he is unable to see in any other way—and what he sees is monstrous precisely because his vision is natural, lacking elements of coercion or intentionality. Its pathology is organic. The well-known complaint of the schizophrenic has to do with the splitting of one’s own cognition. For example, he is unable to find any commonality between the bird that he is able to see and the same bird that he may hear singing: for him these are two dif¬ ferent birds, and hence there is a perceptual gap between them, which constantly oppresses and worries him. We find something like this in the field of vision of the eunuch of the soul—who sees but does not distinguish the perceived according to cognitive functions. In short, the most important element in the vision of the eunuch of the soul— the cognitive element—is absent. Emptiness becomes the chief object of contemplation. But it is a negative, proscriptive object, precluding a cognitive situation; vision remains an unknowing vision, one that is unable to put together all that is perceived into a causally defined and noncontradictory picture. When does the bird recognized as a bird begin to sing? Only when a visual series and an auditory series may be attributed to the same subject, the same bird. For the eunuch of the soul it is absurd to “know” anything about what he may see and sees, due to his radical refusal of any “third,” interpreting mediator—one who alone is able to disentangle images, twisted within one another, of the comic and the tragic, the external and the internal, the figurative and the bodily, and to lend their connections obviousness and causal definition. The schizo-eye sees only what is between—and it is only this “between” that is capable of showing the stunned reader the way in which the unconnectable may be connected: namely, without any justification, protest, or intentionality. Let me suggest a hypothesis that may prove quite plausible: during the process of the creation of The Juvenile Sea, The Foundation Pit , and Chevengur, Platonov literally underwent something of a schizo¬ phrenic collapse. The phrases that Platonov uses to name the strange little homunculus inhabiting each of his characters (“the dead brother,” “the eunuch of the soul,” “the midnight watchman,” “the overseer”)— what do all these names tell us? One may respond with a single word: they tell us of mis-embodiment. While existing “inside” the shaded area of the consciousness, the eunuch of the soul nevertheless never The Eunuch of the Soul 211 occupies his own body. If in the early 1920s Platonov called for a stand¬ point of “objective nonrelative perception”—an authoritative position that would enable life not only to be perceived, but also enable the matter of life to be changed through perception—later there emerges the eunuch of the soul, for whom any body from which he investi¬ gates the world remains a foreign and empty dwelling. The unity of the perceiver and the perceived collapses. Consumed by the monstrous forces of the external, the body is subjected to a separation from sub¬ jectivity itself—from its soul—and loses all of its individual qualities. The new standpoint of perception is now not situated within the opti¬ mistic space of the will to power over the world and nature, but in a catastrophic space; it is as if this standpoint has been forming within the time of the catastrophic event itself. The eunuch of the soul is the witness and the chronicler of catastrophe. It is precisely for this reason that, when we see that Platonov’s characters do not possess their own “I” (or their own “subjectivity”), we speak of their mis-embodiment, supposing that it may be analyzable in the terms and positions of a schizophrenic “rupture.” What is Dvanov? Though Platonov himself emphasizes it, the dreamlike Dvanov I (father)/Dvanov 2 (son) pairing is not entirely sat¬ isfactory, for we do not consider it central but rather as derivative of the other schizophrenic pairing: Dvanov/the eunuch of the soul. We have already mentioned the apparent rupture, asserted by the eunuch of the soul, between the body of an individual character and the way in which it is represented in the text: it is traced out by an observer that is always torn out of the context of affective experience. We encounter something similar in the clinical definition of schizophrenia. A rupture runs between the “I-feeling” and “the body.” All the sensations recog¬ nized as authentic are situated in the strange space of the “I-feeling”— which is not embodied, has no corporeal support, and is consequently not capable of being linked with the world by means of the necessary and universal mediator, which is our body. Moreover, “my” body is objectivized in an object that is external to the “I-feeling,” and pos¬ sesses one’s own false, inauthentic subject. All bodily organs, sensa¬ tions, and their functions are analyzed by the “1-feeling,” as things that do not belong to it, but to someone else. And for this reason, one watches their functioning from the standpoint of the external, though remaining oneself within the “internal.” The clinic for schizophrenia changes the usual and normal practice of using images of the body. The relationship of what is usually des¬ ignated by “there” (moving away) and “here” (nearness) is reversed: 212 Valery Podoroga the “here” replaces the “there.” The observer may see that which is impossible to see, and not see that which is absurd not to see. In The Juvenile Sea, Dvanov is on a strange schizo-journey, for whatever he recognizes in himself, he finds out from this “silent watchman,” this “dead brother” who is presumably his soul, though one that is mis- embodied—and hence dis-related to its bodily carrier, as if it were something accidental and foreign. Dvanov is constantly redoubling, at the expense of the eunuch of the soul. And he gains serenity and sta¬ bility only when he is at one with his father, when he merges with the mass communal body of Chevengur. Indeed, the eunuch of the soul may see only what is “between,” for he does not comprehend organic, inherited links of life. And therefore Dvanov’s body, like other bodily and physical events, appears as bits and fragments where skin does not protect, where organs change places, where even remembering needs the one who remembers to acquire the temporality of death. Platonov’s language could be analyzed as the stylization of certain country, urban, or technocratic dialects. And this would be quite jus¬ tified. Yet I would like to propose another line of analysis: to reject the thought that Platonov stylizes, that he seeks to lend literary form to nonliterary language in such a way as to produce in the reader the illusion of the autonomy of one or another dialect. His language is con¬ structed quite differently. But how? Above all, it must be noted that it is “as if” the Platonov language is put together from various dialects (this, for example, is demanded by the socially stratified character). Yet this “as if” does not become the signal of stylization—it does not present an authorial position or a certain type of distance in relation to the stylized material. I have used the “as if” modality in order to point to the existence of an unknown and concealed linguistic force which deforms the dialectal peculiarities of speech and does not allow them to develop according to their own logic in the characters’ lines, sepa¬ rately and independently of each other. By such force I understand the language that is independent of the bio- and sociosphere, the language of the cosmocratic utopia. Almost all Platonov characters attempt to speak this language— and they would not be able to do this without distorting the dialectal forms of speech. The language of the cosmocratic utopia functions as a destroyer language, as a linguistic force that exists by means of dis¬ torting all sufficiently stable speech forms. In other words, Platonov’s language arises as a phenomenon of meaning whereby common every¬ day (dialect) language is subjected to deep deformation, because of The Eunuch of the Soul 213 the invasion by the language of the cosmocratic utopia: the everyday word is no longer related to a series of high and sacred words of the great utopia; on the contrary, everyday and dialectal words acquire all the attributes of the sacred. This is the utopia’s amazing power to cap¬ ture everyday vocabulary—a complete change of the words’ meanings, which now emerge from the purity of the utopian view of the world and have no referential twins in a reality independent of utopia. The word becomes saturated by maximal meaning and functions at the limit of its cognitive capabilities—or, to be more precise, already beyond this limit: it entrances the reader with empty meaning, for it no longer corresponds to any reality of feeling, object, event, or action. The vacu¬ ousness of meaning that frightens—and thus draws one into itself— does not communicate with us by means of signs of reality, since the content of the linguistic image is not aimed toward, but rather away from the one who is attempting to comprehend it. It truly beckons with its vacuousness. We may say something of this kind if we are in the role of analysts, partially indifferent to the content of Platonov’s writing—to those works impossible for readers to understand who did not experience the events of Russia’s social tragedy as living witnesses. But we cannot be such readers; we understand Platonov because he speaks a language that has been bred into us, or thrust upon us. And thus we cannot get rid of an alarming feeling that the images, figures, and bodies that we read and that “pass before us” not only belong to novelistic events and literary characters, but that we belong to them as hostages of meaning whose only defining characteristic is to generate emptiness, paraly¬ sis, or neurotic laughter. Platonov’s language is overcome by forces of devastation, it revolves around emptiness (all the while having it “in mind”)—it envelops it and emerges out of it. But how is it possible to speak out of emptiness? Is not emptiness the locus of silence? Silence cannot speak through itself; it must manifest itself through something other than emptiness, something that could be considered to be en¬ dowed with meaning: the human body. Platonov grants every depicted body its own measure of emptiness and silence, and each body moves, perishes, and seeks to exist and to die according to this measure. Bodies speak (and along with them, so do our bodies—the reading bodies), but in such a way that every articulated sound would reveal their powerlessness before what is said. Only one language reigns: that of the cosmocratic utopia—and it does not exist somewhere on the other side of the everyday life of these concrete character-bodies. On the contrary, the bodies themselves are its products: it is as if they are 214 Valery Podoroga made out of this language, and therefore it is not possible to discover this language at some safe distance from the speaking character. This language is always inside these bodies, still alive for the time being— and with the increase of its power, its radiance transforms the bodies of humans, terrestrial landscapes, and animals. And, most important, it also enters into us, the readers, revealing within us what we could seemingly become only in a terrible dream—those very bodies that are astonishingly “kin” to those of the characters, whose hideous outlines emerge through the shroud of this amazing and cursed language of utopia. After several minutes of reading Platonov’s The Foundation Pit , we are overwhelmed by a feeling of astonishment: it is born of ourselves, as we recognize ourselves in Platonov’s characters, and suddenly dis¬ cover the extraordinary linguistic power that takes reality away and moves the world toward emptiness. Now we indeed grasp all of our artificiality as living creatures: we appear as linguistic substrates of a cosmocratic design—no more than that. The tragic manner in which our situation is comic consists of the fact that we are condemned to death by language. And this means that anyone who, like Platonov’s characters, attempts to master the language of utopia and to speak it as the language of “reality” is condemned to death. This death sen¬ tence should not be construed as a metaphor; it has a literal meaning: language condemns to death all those who attempt to speak it; with its terroristic power, it is capable of intimidating all other languages and dialects, all bodies, heavenly and terrestrial—all those spaces where there is speech that is not subordinated to language-as-executioner. As the language of the cosmocratic utopia begins to unfold, all the natu¬ ral, spontaneously formed ties between bodies, formed in the course of a lengthy human history, begin to collapse. With every word uttered, each character perishes. And this language must “come true” no mat¬ ter what, even in spite of the fact that none of those who attempted to speak it—to the extent of the triumph of fulfillment—will be left. The presence of this language-as-executioner in the world leads to the de¬ struction of animate life, the devastation of bodies and spaces, the total nonpresence in the world of the living voice that stubbornly persists on speaking of oneself and of the Other. Indeed, our presence in the world is established not because we “see,” but rather because our own voice, distinguishing itself from the chorus of others, is heard by ourselves as well as by others. We are the possessors of our voice, unique and inimitable, for our presence-in- the-world is revealed in it. To the extent that other voices (living both within and outside it) allow this, it is precisely “my voice” that seeks The Eunuch of the Soul 215 to achieve the greatest proximity to itself and the world. My presence- in-the-world rests on this proximity afforded to me by my voice; the world must accept my voice as the seashell accepts and retains the sounds of the sea. Even my whisper must be heard, even silence. Plato¬ nov introduces a radical prohibition on one’s being-in-the-world. The voice is the sound contour of “my” body; 1 touch the world with it and the world touches me with it. Platonov’s is a mute world—the individually articulated human voice is absent there. This is a world filled with images of physical actions. There seems to be nothing other than this strange physics of bodies, until we notice the function of lan¬ guage, which consists not in presenting physical events, but in actually committing them. Platonov’s language is performative: the moment of the naming of actions is indistinguishable from that of their commission. Physical action emerges as a type of simulation of the “work” of the language, though it is not independent. A certain nomenclature of linguistic ac¬ tions belongs to every type of body that is constructed as a character; yet it is not so much that it “belongs” but rather that it is language itself that becomes the subject of action, and not specific characters. Language creates bodies: Zhachev (the body of the pseudocripple), Chiklin (the ideal body of labor and terror), Voshchev (the body of ex¬ haustion, a perverse body), Dvanov (the body of revolutionary askesis, intellectualism). And this nomenclature is indestructable. It should be reemphasized that the “language-action” is terroristic with respect to the individual body, for its mode of functioning is dependent upon the extent to which it is free of any connection with the carrier of concrete bodily individuality. The human voice cannot emerge: auditory spaces that could be heard are absent. Self-naming, self-dressing, the baring of the characters’ bodies—all of this emerges as performative linguistic actions: creating new bodies by means of words only. Given its sov¬ ereignty over concrete physical action, language carries on perpetual transformation of individual bodies—it constantly derealizes any ac¬ tivity, deed, and movement of characters. And its aim is always one and the same: to dispose of individual bodies capable of committing spon¬ taneous, chance actions—bodies that are difficult to integrate into the nomenclature of the cosmocratic language. One more step remains: in Platonov, language is assigned to a different corporeal physics—the physics of the cosmocratic body. This is why, in reading Platonov, we sense an odd kinship to insane images—to the extent that we ourselves belong to this great cosmocratic body, where we are “alive” only by being dead. A moment at a crossroads: on the one hand, we discern the perfor- 216 Valery Podoroga mative language of the cosmocratic utopia (the tragic), a language that contains utterance-actions and thus produces bodies, spaces, reality itself; on the other hand, we are unable to resist searching for safe dis¬ tances, for all the pleasures of life they afford us when we dissociate ourselves, slipping away and turning to the deliverance of flight—and then laughter claims its rights (the comic). Language as performativity and language as performance. Language as that which instantaneously performs an utterance as an action, and language as the activity of per¬ formance—activity as the pure act of desire. The comic and the tragic move in parallel and yet also through each other. In asserting its infi¬ nite power through acts of performance, the cosmocratic body enters the field of self-destruction, and we, the readers, refuse to follow it. The empty spaces have burned out Eternity has disappeared, as an instant The immortal wanderers wander Each having grasped all mysteries —Andrei Platonov, The Early Poems What is this “greedy” emptiness of these steppe-like places, where Platonov’s characters act, think, and perish? Indeed, why are they deserted? Why can’t these places be populated? A possible answer: Platonov’s world is so oppressive because invisible life has gained as¬ cendency over the visible. Acted upon by the forces of the invisible, the visible falls apart, disperses. Desertedness grows with our death, adja¬ cent to our efforts to attain a space that is independent of it. It never ceases to proliferate, replacing all other attributes and qualities of ter¬ restrial, visible space—to the extent that the near and the far, the loved and the unloved, though always kindred and living bodies, perish. The deserted space is full of the invisible: it is the space of “dead fathers” (mothers, sisters, children, objects, and events). And though it is in¬ visible, though it is adjacent yet inaccessible and removed, though it will not simply accumulate the dead next to us—and we will be dying without a feeling of concern for it—this invisible life will only increase the power of the dead over the living. The invisible is that which must be revealed to recollection and bodily transformation. Like Fedorov and Rilke, Platonov deeply felt this artificial division of life into the visible and the invisible. Because of the absence of all the dead, of those who have died in vain, without whom there is neither a unified flow of life nor eternal growth and movement of natural forces—the absence of that great metabolism of powers which enables the pres¬ ence of our bodies both within the visible and the invisible—only the The Eunuch of the Soul 217 negative power of the invisible predominates in the world. All living forces decline and move toward death, toward the futile expenditure and obliteration of human spaces. We submit to this artificial division of life, whose name is death. But if actual life is all there is to life, both visible and invisible—whose united energy awaits its moment within the depths of matter, in the backward, “dead” substance of nature— then why can its powers not be utilized for a new cosmocratic eugen¬ ics? Why can the human being not be recreated once again, out of dirt and ashes? If we know that nature’s living matter is no longer deter¬ mined by visible forms of social, biological, or historical existence, why is it not possible to create new bodies of life? It may be that the visible, which becomes increasingly devastated and dispersed, perpetu¬ ally generates for us various sign-traces of those invisible, universal powers of life—the life of everyone for everyone. Though it is difficult to understand this logic, it is also difficult to understand its basis: the rejection of death as an insurmountable boundary between the visible and the invisible. Why do we assume that what has died has irretrievably perished, passed into the abyss of the invisible? It is sufficient to glance somewhat more attentively beneath one’s own feet—as is done by Platonov’s “pensive” charac¬ ters—in order immediately to discern the most minute particles of the once-living, to discover traces that lead into the invisible: Voshchev picked up the dried-up leaf and hid it in the secret compart¬ ment of the bag, where he saved whatever objects of misfortune and oblivion. “You had no sense in life,” Voshchev reasoned with a miser¬ liness of empathy, “so lie here—I will find out why you decayed and perished. Since you are not wanted by anyone and lie about amid the whole world, 1 will keep you and remember you.” 20 Iakov Titych liked to pick up little bits from roads and back alleys, and to look at them. What were they before? Whose feeling adored and cherished them? Maybe these were bits of people or, just as well, of little spiders or nameless tiny ground mosquitoes—and nothing has remained in its entirety, and nothing to cry over for those who have remained after them, to live and suffer further. “If everything died,” thought Iakov Titych, “but at least the dead body would remain whole, then there would be something to hold and remember—otherwise the winds blow, the water flows and everything perishes and dissolves into ashes. It is suffering, then, and not real life. And whoever died, died for nothing, and now you won’t find anyone who once lived—one loss, all of them.” 21 218 Valery Podoroga The deserted spaces of Platonov’s narratives and novels are deserted only for those who perceive life in the visible forms, indifferent to the fate of these tiniest dispersed particles of what was once-living and close to us, the bodies still alive. Our true bodies are not “these” or “those,” concrete and perceivable, but rather invisible and permeable to myriads of particles of unknown life. In other words, these spaces, which the eunuch of the soul surveys with no trepidation, are over- populated by the dead: having become invisible, life has never died. Death is a hallucination from which it is necessary to awake—one that may be overcome through a life outside one’s own body (one that is solitary, awaiting death), without the help of “creation” or “I”— through an “external” life. “I want to live outside,” says Dvanov in his sleep, “it is too cramped for me to live here.” 22 Formed at the bound¬ aries of the visible and the dead, of a life that is “not returned” to itself, this frightening, nonterrestrial emptiness of the Platonov landscape leads Sasha Dvanov to the lake of his childhood, into the old dream, through the threshold of death—to his father’s body. Slipping into the dream of death, Dvanov awakens to an invisible life: now neither his body nor that of his father may be separate. Death is overcome since it has never existed for invisible life. Disturbed by an afternoon wind that has already quieted in the dis¬ tance, the water in Lake Mutevo stirred slightly. Dvanov rode up to the water’s edge. In an earlier life he bathed in it and fed himself from it; it never calmed his father in its depth, and now Dvanov’s last blood comrade pined for it through solitary decades in the cramped confine¬ ment of the earth. The Proletarian Might lowered its head and stamped its hoof—something below was bothering it. Dvanov looked and saw a fishing rod, which was dragged along from a hillock on the beach by the horse’s leg. A dried up, broken skeleton of a small fish lay there, hooked to the rod, and Dvanov recognized that this was his fishing rod, forgotten here during childhood. He surveyed the lake, immutable and grown silent, and became alarmed: for his father still remained—his bones, the living matter of his body, the decay of his sweaty shirt—the entire homeland of life and amity. And there exists a tight, inseparable place for Alexandr, where they await the return of that blood which was once separated within the father’s body for the son. Dvanov forced the Proletarian Might to go into the water up to the chest and, without parting with it, continuing his own life, got out of the saddle and into the water, in search of that road which the father once traveled in the curiosity of death—Dvanov, out of a feeling of shame of life before the weak, forsaken body whose remains languished in the grave, because The Eunuch of the Soul 219 he was one and the same with that not yet destroyed, glowing trace of the father’s existence. 23 Death does not constitute a boundary: there is nothing for it to di¬ vide, it has no significance for the invisible and does not occupy any definite place there, but remains the greatest sign of transition for all visible forms of life. “To be before the face of death”: we will find no such stoic valor in Platonov’s characters. It is only the free slipping into one’s own death as a new life that is of significance and of interest. To reach at once the farthest horizon, where “human meets human,” is to comprehend death as a journey and not the end. Moreover, the life that overcomes the boundaries of death is actual life, flowing out in a multitude of traces, particles, and vibrations; it assigns no significance to the death of separate, individually expressed visible bodies, for it is no longer that life which we “live” as creatures that are feeling, loving, and dying in solitude. Death’s existential status is changed. In read¬ ing Platonov and Fedorov, Rilke and Proust, we are not always able to understand this, since we know only one, individual death. When death emerges as the universal sign of the special value of our life, it is capable of a necessary correspondence to structures of individuation— that individual development which is defined by the future death. To call oneself “I” means, by the very act of naming, to condemn oneself to death; and, simultaneously, as if forgetting the experience of future death, to perceive in this little word “I” the only power that asserts and preserves life. By saying “I,” we seek to hold on to life through this one linguistic gesture; we suppose that “I” is an existentially distinct measure of humanity. Platonov attempts to resist this old life/death opposition: death cannot oppose life as an equal member of the pair¬ ing. Dvanov does not pass from life into death, but rather from “death” into life. It is of course extremely difficult to understand (moreover, it prompts sharp protest, charges of necrophilia) how it is possible to live a life that forms the most durable and indestructable links only at the microscopic levels of existence—for to live such a life is to be non¬ human: to lose completely all bodily dimensionality, values, history, to become nature itself. To this extent, Platonov’s prose has little in common with the tra¬ ditions of the classical Russian novel, wherein the individual, personal death was experienced at such a great height and intensity, as in Tol¬ stoi’s The Death of Ivan Il’ich. It seems likely that the fact that neither Dostoevskii, Gogol, nor Platonov could depict death from within, as a complex event that completes life—and, in principle, one that is transparent both for the one who is experiencing it and the one who 220 Valery Podoroga is depicting it—reveals a radical and absolute rejection of death. This rejection, as well as the power of asserting it, cannot be lessened by the fact that in the name of this struggle with death, individuality itself perishes. In essence, the radicalism of the rejection presupposes the ir¬ reversible extinction of individual bodies and consciousness. In other words, once its individuated basis is no longer relevant in this great struggle, the sacred mystery of life may be violated. Fedorov was the first to attempt (quite consciously) to do this: for him the dead—that which was once living, pulverized into the most minute particles and wandering through the mantles of the earth and the vast frontiers of the cosmos—is the potentially living. What is nec¬ essary is only a concerted rational effort to collect all the living out of the dead, to collect the dead as the living. While here we will not con¬ sider Fedorov’s entire conception, the following should be emphasized. If the living is displaced to the level of the invisible, then what clearly emerges from this displacement is a dissatisfaction with the forms of visible life—a life that is artificial, finite, having lost touch with bodies of the ancestors. On the other hand, can it be otherwise when visible forms are disfigured by sociality and power, which demand forgetting? Fedorov knows the way out: he hopes for a different power, pure and independent—that power which we call cosmocratic. What is it, then, that obstructs this power in the first place? From what is it necessary for it to free itself? Death, of course. What does it mean to become free of death ? It means to remove its immediate suffocating oppression over individual bodies—for not only does it kill and maim, but it also separates, saturating all human relations with nature and one’s own self. But this also means that it is necessary to free oneself from indi¬ viduation, as the process of the individual’s socialization—a figure of visible life as defined by the external boundaries of death. This death is revealed in the immutability of those external restrictions placed on the person, if he wishes to remain such, without killing those of his kind. Thus life is to be kept in some equilibrium with the environment, without the power of death. And it is necessary to free oneself from processes of subjectification, for it is here that subjectivity is formed— a figure of life defined by death’s internal bounds. Death already cor¬ responds to a number of inner psychological states: it is experienced not as the death of other bodies, but as “one’s own”—it is experienced existentially, as the internal knowledge of the most external (“I” in the world, “I” as an individual, “I” as a woman, a man, etc.). Products of individuation are interiorized, mastered psychologically: the “I” itself is but a psychoreflex of individuated states. It is precisely these cen- The Eunuch of the Soul 221 tral figures of the visible human life that are eliminated by Fedorov’s cosmocratic myth—for this project’s conception consists of creating bodies of life that would no longer feel the need to separate from the world, where any living being could be any other living being, without death, and hence, not born of anyone. You know, I accidentally discovered the principle of nonconductive transmission of energy. But only the principle. It is far from realization. Someday I’ll write an article in a scientific journal. —Andrei Platonov (from letters to his wife) The son of a locomotive engineer, Platonov passionately loved ma¬ chines: his prose and poetry of the 1920s are imbued with an extraor¬ dinary, almost magical atmosphere of worship of the machinic civili¬ zation of the future. The human being and the machine coalesce into a single image of the epoch. Here is Platonov’s poem-hymn, entitled “ Dinamo-masbina" (“The Dynamo”): The song of the silent depths of metal A long steady toll Out of steel a force has arisen Breathing with a million waves From mysterious wells Upward, on to the back of the machine, singing Streams burst out—a living heart beats there Blood that’s hot and red beats against the veins in advancing The wind blows out from under the wings of the swinging belts My comrade turns the dial all the way We, up to the legs, we, up to the death—with the machine, only with it We do not pray, do not love, we will die as we were born by the steel face Our hands: a regulator of electrical current Its unconquered power breathes in our heart Without a soul and without God, and we work without deadlines The electrical flame has welded another life for us There is no sky, could be, death Up above there’s a smokestack and smoke We are fathers and we are children too We explode and create Frightened, we lived, gave birth, loved But we made the machine, animated metal 222 Valery Podoroga Put to death God’s soul Shed old skin And we got up for work, to the dynamo controls Forgot eternity, becoming astral—what is not with us and not we With blackened hands We will make meaning out of darkness. 24 Platonov’s favorite machine is the machine of light—an electrical machine of the invisible ether; this machine is invented by Dvanov (< Chevengur ) as well as Popov with Kirpichnikov (The Ethereal Trail), and Vermo {The Juvenile Sea). How can one not love this machine if, by the design of its creators, it is to become an actual embodiment of the superproductive capabilities of humanity, and its amazing power would consist of relying not on the living but on the dead matter of nature—those vast forces of the cosmos, capable of lending a new measure of life to all that exists? But alongside, or crosscurrent to, this machine—the “life machine”—Platonov’s “non-loved” machine is also at work: it is the “death machine” (the Foundation Pit machine, the Chevengur machine), a specially designated place on the earth’s surface where everything is defined by signs of death, by overexertion and exhaustion. When the death machine is “working,” a great expen¬ diture of all living forces takes place. One machine constantly produces the living out of the dead, while the other produces the dead out of the living. It is necessary to attempt to understand not only the way in which these machines function, but also something else: Are these machines not one and the same, mirror images whose action, while aimed at different levels of being, belongs to a hidden yet integral structure of Platonov’s world? And another question: Will not the analysis that follows bring us nearer to a more precise understanding of the phe¬ nomenon that we describe as the dispersing and devastating space? It must be said, it is true, that the process of dissipation and devastation creates an image of space that is nonidentical with concrete spatiality. In any event, I am convinced that Platonov’s catastrophic space (the space of devastation and dispersal) is born and continues to proliferate due to the simultaneous action of these two machines. In other words, dispersal and devastation are produced as a result of their interaction. This may be shown in Figure 2. The Eunuch of the Soul 223 The principal object of the action of these machines is situated at the human body (Point B), the first scene of contact between the person and the machine: the magical animation of the machine mechanizes the body, which ceases to be human. The machine reconstitutes human corporeality. In Platonov, we find a number of characters who feel “machinic mechanisms with the precision of one’s own flesh.” Frosia’s husband had the oddity of sensing the level of tension of elec¬ trical current as personal passion. He humanized all that touched his hand or his thought, and hence acquired a true conception of the flow of forces in any mechanical device and felt the immediate, suffering, patient resistance of the machinic bodily metal. 2S Is Mal’tsev—the human locomotive from the novella In the Beautiful and Raging World —not the same? Other examples abound. Yet here I would like to emphasize the following. In this scene of the first magical contact, there is a complete confluence of the human body with that of the machine. This is not a substitution, but rather the incarnation of the human by the machinic—with the predictable loss of the old anthropomorphic qualities and the acquisition of new ones: the ma¬ chine animal. Suddenly, all the problems of human existence before and after the machine are resolved. We now have a new Nature. There is no place for this “event,” though it must always be kept in mind, since it remains universal for all the possible machines that may ap- 224 Valery Podoroga pear in Platonov’s texts. The diagram presents the human body as a whole, i.e., in its organic, cultural, and individual criteria, it is con¬ fronted by two radical demands, prompted by the fantastic images of the machinic civilization of the future. The first proclaims: “Create a machine out of your brain (body) for all the forces of the Cosmos and the Earth!” And the second: “If you wish to bring the future nearer, you must invent another machine, neither a technical nor a cerebral one, but above all a collective one capable of ‘rallying,’ ‘crowding,’ and ‘dissolving’ separate, individual expression, tolerating no ‘solitary existence.’ ” The above figure shows the fulfillment of these demands within Platonov’s literary space. I shall attempt to offer a small commentary. Figure 2 represents the functioning of two kinds of machines: one kind forms a series of machines—we call them death machines—and functions in such a way as to turn the living into the dead, stopping time. These ma¬ chines are destructive, for they demolish all that may individualize the living, or allow it to have its own corporeality or environment—all that distinguishes it from the living Other and gives it the ability to exist separately (“I,” “consciousness,” “possession,” etc.). This series of death machines vacates the space of incorrect bodies—bodies not capable of being porous or diffuse enough to be able to dissolve easily in a mass of similar bodies. These bodies move along the surface of the earth with the speed of the “International machine” (revolution¬ ary and military machines); they are able to burrow into its depth (the Foundation Pit machine), to stop, freezing in an apotheosis of non¬ activity (the Chevengur machine). The main goal of these machines is to enable the earth’s space “to be” without the human being, to make it noninhabitable—a “clear” space. I shall analyze the makeup of two of Platonov’s machines. (1) The Foundation Pit machine. The Foundation Pit is a machine of death: the sluggishness, bulk, and unyieldingness of the earth must be overcome through direct muscular effort, as if the earth could “open up” to a new ahistorical life, thanks to an impelling beginning derived from continuous human effort. Platonov’s earth digger is a figure of death—he is ready for only one function: to exhaust his own vitality for the sake of another life, which will come after the death of all who have experienced this great overexertion. But how can this machine be defined? How does it “work”? Here it seems to me necessary to cite Lewis Mumford, who described certain kinds of apparatuses as “megamachines.” 26 Did not machines create canals, mausoleums, palaces, stadiums, The Eunuch of the Soul 225 thoroughfares, towers, and cities? On the one hand, they may indeed be considered the first and most ancient examples of building tech¬ nology. But this is clearly insufficient. For they also had another unique function: megamachines were the first mechanisms for the creation and control of massive social bodies. Where they were born, even the well stratified (even if sufficiently restricted in time) turned into flow¬ ing, movable, migrating space; the parts of the future machine that were only recently human bodies would become not only cheap labor power, but the aggregate of the interconnected technical elements: each body was reduced to a certain technical function and disappeared in it. Megamachines gave rise to the phenomenon of the single mass effort. Once again, structurally reinforced, the qualitative units of the socium (groups, strata, unions, institutes, various technologies of individua¬ tion and subjectivization—in short, all that accumulates and secures the powers of life, all that creates the numerous economies of life) are transformed almost “instantaneously” into a special, socially amor¬ phous state, into a set of working units without qualities, utilized only as sources of certain kinds of natural energy (like the powers of the wind, fire, or water), and therefore, in order to maintain a certain rhythm of labor, they must be constantly replaced and refilled. In order to sustain the necessary level of energy expenditure, these machines consume vast amounts of human material. Within the present context it may be said that by its nature the megamachine is antiproductive: its goal is not to produce. Machines of this type do not produce any product whose creation would surpass the efforts expended in its pro¬ duction. On the contrary, they exhaust the resources of nature and of human life, not compensating them and not setting any limits for them¬ selves—for in the process of exploiting a multitude of concrete bodies, such mechanisms are transcendent with respect to the living elements comprising them. Their goal, of course, is not to produce what may improve human life or preserve nature (this is possible only as some¬ thing that is empirically accidental); their product is not monumental architecture, not factories or canals, but the idea of absolute power over natural processes, whatever their form. Only power is produced: the cosmocratic utopia asserts its greatness, infinitely multiplying its claim on the world. Through its own death, the living acknowledges the might of this power. The Foundation Pit is a sufficiently extensive depression in the ground, where the foundation of the great tower building may be built, and the more it deepens and broadens, the greater number of diggers is needed—the greater the amount of physical effort. Platonov’s Founda- 226 Valery Podoroga tion Pit is constructed in such a way that the future building itself—its imaginary geometry—could change arbitrarily and independently of the foundation. The grandeur of the tower building constantly demands ever-increasing depth and breadth. Moreover, the more extensive the break in the ground, the more grand will be the future structure. Plato¬ nov shows us some aspects of the game that unfolds between the prolif¬ erating emptiness of the Foundation Pit’s “black hole” and the fantastic geography of the future tower building, which exists simultaneously as the great void, a common grave, and as a great, unheard-of-geometry. 27 The future cannot happen until the Foundation Pit ceases to broaden and deepen—yet it is impossible not to broaden and deepen it without calling into question the grandeur of the proposed proletarian tower building. The cosmocratic building plan is quite independent of nature and of immediate human involvement. Amid the wasteland stood an engineer—not an old man, but gray from taking stock of nature. Fie conceived of the entire world as a dead body—he judged it from the standpoint of those parts that he has already transformed into a construction: everywhere, the world yielded to his careful and imaginative mind, limited only by the consciousness of nature’s unyieldingness; matter has always yielded to precision and patience—this means it has been dead and deserted. 28 In The Great Wall of China , Kafka attempted to show that this great building project was carried out not so much for the defense of China from the attacks from the North, and not so much to build a wall and then a tower, as for the sake of the empty gaps in the wall. 27 The wall was perpetually built by several generations, though in a frag¬ mentary manner, in five-hundred-meter-long paired blocks. If every laborer thought hourly about the possibility of finishing the wall, the wise architects of the wall in the “far away, secluded” quarters of the imperial palace thought of the emptiness of the gaps in the wall. Like the growth of Kafka’s tower wall, that of Platonov’s tower building is completely determined by the plans of empty space, which cannot, under any circumstances, be filled. The completion of the building project means the death of the cosmocratic (“astronomical”) model of imperial power—power that was born with the beginning of the project. The building of the Foundation Pit and the Wall must never be stopped. The future must become more and more geometrically lumi¬ nous and wondrous—but it must never become the present. For how does this power rule? How does it prevent its great megamachine from collapsing? It does so thanks to these “voids,” which must be under- The Eunuch of the Soul 227 stood as noncommunicative distances separating one fragment of the wall from the other, and both of them from the emperor’s universal plan—just as the constantly growing Foundation Pit is separate and independent of the geometric plan seen by the engineer’s mind. The Platonov megamachine is comprised of these “voids,” which emerge as assemblages of the new cosmocratic body of power. The level of intensity with which a given body is capable of expending itself in the ceaseless strain of physical labor becomes the criterion of its actual power—for this power does not acknowledge the future as the greatest value, but rather the death of all living bodies, all forms and kinds of stable (having their own sphere of existence, time, memory, etc.) social corporeality. So the Foundation Pit is a space of bodily transforma¬ tion, where, for the sake of uniting with other bodies, every individual body seeks to break down—as long as it and other bodies waste their living energy for the sake of this unnatural confluence, just so long will emptiness be their bloody idol. (2.) The Ethereal Machine. To master cheap energy, the energy of dead nature, is the other great goal: a rejection of labor as a futile waste of human powers and as a form of exploitation. This machine func¬ tions vertically: a deep elevator shaft by means of which the products of pure forces of matter are extracted to the surface. It removes within the depths of matter all boundaries between distinct periods of human existence, between the heavens and the earth, woman and man, the living and the dead. In describing his strange machines, Platonov often uses biological metaphors, which prompt us to see in them not rigid mechanisms with a definite sphere of functioning, but, rather, orgas¬ mic pulses. Ethereal machines—phantasm machines, superproductive machines—“know” no death. However, in its reverse projection, as a machine of life, the ethereal machine corresponds in its functions to the machine of death. Translated into a horizontal plan of measure¬ ment, the ethereal machine is in no sense different from machines of terror, coercion, and exhaustion. One object of the exertion of force (the human body) is replaced by another (the body of the earth). Yet the main functioning principle remains immutable: to tear energy out of the passive natural body and to consume it in ever-greater amounts, with no concern for the “cosmic unity of the human being and the world.” Both of these machines, the horizontal and the vertical, are made equal in mutual projections and their end results: the exhaus¬ tion of the powers of the body + the exhaustion of the resources of matter = death. Conceived in order to surmount death, they affirm its insurmountability. 228 Valery Podoroga Numerous works by Platonov represent experimental testing grounds for the idea of immortality. Hence the amazing number of varied machinic devices: Dvanov thought up an invention: to turn sunlight into electricity. For this purpose Gopner took all the mirrors in Chevengur out of their frames, as well as collecting all the glass of any degree of thickness. From this material Dvanov and Gopner made up complex prisms and reflectors, such that passing through them, sunlight would turn into electrical current at the back of the device. The device had already been completed two days ago, but electricity did not come from it. . . . [OJthers carried out all of the latest handiwork for completion: wooden wheels, two fathoms across, steel buttons, clay figures, accu¬ rately depicting beloved comrades, including Dvanov, a self-revolving machine made out of broken alarm clocks, a furnace, which used up the filling from all the pillows and blankets in Chevengur, though only one person, the one who was chilled the most, could temporarily keep warm. ... a wooden disk for launching stones and bricks at the enemy of Chevengur. 30 The heroes of Chevengur or The Foundation Pit, The Ethereal Trail or The Juvenile Sea are not the principal inventors of these machinic images. Aside from the literary constructions of these machines, which represent nothing other than the projections of the inner states of the characters themselves, there are other machines in Platonov—though these are already not machine projections but machine states, not re¬ ducible to their possible projections within a geometry of vertical or horizontal planes. In my view, a key text, where we may register the emergence of machine states, is Platonov’s Antisexus . 31 And there is nothing surprising here, if we recall the eunuch of the soul, his “eye,” indifferent and erotically nonanimated.The satirical depiction in Anti¬ sexus of a universal masturbational apparatus is clearly not all there is to it; also evoked is a strict monastic abstinence, a contempt for the pleasures of sexual life, not burdened by the responsibility of child¬ bearing, though also that “clarity” and “lightheartedness” that enable the eunuch of the soul to move within the literary space without link¬ ing with visible bodies, “without desiring them.” It is only the non¬ acknowledgment of sexual response as such that makes sex genuine. Moreover, sex must not be described in terms of pleasure or enjoy- The Eunuch of the Soul 229 ment (since it is so difficult for the person to resist) but rather through thanatographical imagery. The body of the other is desired only when it is a dead body—then, any sexual act represents an act of salvation, a return of forgotten bodies from death. Not only a return to life, but also a departure into death—which in this case need not be distin¬ guished. The eunuch of the soul is the product of the thanatographical depiction of the goals of life. His second name—“the dead brother”— points to the path along which sexual energy is to travel in order for it not to lose its purity, not to quit its opposition to masturbational ideology. In other words, for Platonov all sexual scenes—which are incidentally quite rare in explicit “depiction”—are subordinated to a single prohibition: the prohibiting of masturbation. In fact, this prohi¬ bition is understood broadly enough to include any forms or artifacts of sexual pleasures. Masturbation, the unmoderated and exhaustive ex¬ penditure of life, leads to degeneration. Yet more dangerous is the fact that masturbation produces individual gratification, which reinforces the independence of the individual body from communal, mass-like bodies. The autoerotic, the sensual, the sexual may not be manifested in its pure, bodily forms, free of a basis in tradition or cultural experi¬ ence, with no regard for the phenomenology of death. The right over one’s own body diminishes the role of the great Other (not only as a sexual partner), whose other name is “the dead brother.” Individual gratification is a challenge to death, its nonacknowledgment—it is the loss of consciousness, it is the joy of life as the free possession of one’s own body. The shaded triangle in Figure z designates the location of this anti- sexual machine. The machine as a condition and an event is in fact the growth of emptiness, which in Platonov’s other language is purity. It is in terms of this relationship that we must read the diagram, for all the machines (the vertical and the horizontal) are merely projections of this inner state, and they are born in literature as a direct and trans¬ formed reaction to it. Abstention and purity devastate bodies from within—human bodies and bodies of nature. The eunuch of the soul has reached maximal inner purity, and it is only for this reason that he has become able to see and identify fantastic mechanisms as parts of another great machine, whose pilot he is: the antisexual machine. And this machine, since its creation is defined by a struggle with death, creates images of projective machines around itself—machines which, if one were to examine them carefully, never, under any circumstances, lose their common quality: fruitlessness. Whether superproductive or antiproductive, they never engender, never produce anything. They re- 230 Valery Podoroga main only signs of an intensity of life—signs located outside of life’s boundaries, where there is neither life nor death, neither the visible nor the invisible. Notes i. Andrei Platonov, Sobranie socbinenii (Collected Works) (Moscow, i985), 3: 5M- z. Andrei Platonov, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 17 January 1988. 3. Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, Druzhba narodov 3 (1988): 116. 4. Ibid., izz. 5. Andrei Platonov, luvenil’noe more (The Juvenile Sea), Znamia 6 (1987): 66. 6. Platonov, Chevengur, Druzhba narodov 4 (1988): 71. 7. Platonov, Chevengur, Druzhba narodov 3 (1988): izz. 8. Ibid., hi. 9. Ibid., 138. 10. Ibid., 94-95; Platonov, Chevengur, Druzhba narodov 4 (1988): 114; and Platonov, Chevengur, Druzhba narodov 3 (1988): 104. 11. P. N. Filonov, “Pis’mo k Vere Sholpo” (Letter to Vera Sholpo), in Ezhe- godnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1977 (The Annual of the Manuscript Department of the Pushkin House, 1977) (Leningrad, 1979), ZZ9. iz. Ibid., Z30. 13. V. Veresaev, Gogol’ v zhizni (Gogol during His Lifetime) (Moscow, 1933), I 5 2 -—53- 14. “The deadliness of the gaze turns out to be derivative from the fol¬ lowing correlation: the opening of the eyes—death (or sleep); the closing of the eyes—life,” from V. V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov, Issledovaniia v oblasti slavianskikh drevnostei (Research in Slavonic Antiquity) (Moscow, 1974), IZ9. 15. Veresaev, Gogol’ v zhizni (Gogol during His Lifetime), 441,15Z. 16. Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia (Gogol’s Art) (Moscow, 1934), 160—61. 17. V. V. Rozanov, Izbrannoe (Selected Works) (Munich, 1970), z<)z. 18. Platonov, Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), 3: 5Z5. 19. Dziga Vertov, Stat’i. Dnevniki. Zamysli (Articles, Diaries, Concep¬ tions) (Moscow, 1966). zo. Andrei Platonov, Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit), Novyi mir 6 (1987): 53- zi. Platonov, Chevengur, Druzhba narodov 4 (1988): 116. zz. Ibid., IZ3. Z3. Ibid., 156. Z4. Platonov, Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), 3: 498-99. The Eunuch of the Soul 231 25. Ibid., 2:138. 26. Lewis Mumford, “Technology and the Nature of Man,” in The New Technocratic Wave in the West (Moscow, 1986), 233. 27. “Dead men in the foundation pit—this is the seed of the future in the hole of the earth,” Andrei Platonov, Dereviannoe rastenie. Iz zapisnykh knizhek, 1927—50 (The Wooden Plant. From the Notebooks, 1927—50), Ogo- nek 33 (August 1989): 13. 28. Platonov, Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit), 58. 29. Franz Kafka, Romany, novelty, pritchi (Novels, Novellas, Parables) (Moscow, 1965), 540. 30. Platonov, Chevengur, Druzhba narodov 4 (1988): 142—43,150. 31. Andrei Platonov, Antisexus, Novyi mir 9 (1989): 168—74. Helena Goscilo Domostroika or Perestroika ? The Construction of Womanhood in Soviet Culture under Glasnost To see ourselves as others see us!”—Robert Burns Messages from Russia: “A woman should primarily love, care [for], and cherish her own family.” * 1 “Women by nature are destined to be weaker. . . . Men are women’s major game. ... A woman without a family is without a master, like a stray animal.” 2 “Women in the West [who] always ask why so few women in our country hold government and other leading posts don’t imagine how many women tyrants have made themselves comfortable in these posts and are tormenting both sexes. Female bureaucracy is more horrible than its male counterpart— a male bureaucrat can still be moved to pity by one’s belonging to the fair sex [sic], whereas a female bureaucrat can’t be moved by anything. I feel sorry for our embittered women, running wild and tortured by the burdens of life. But I pity the men just as much. In the West it is now fashionable to fight men to the death. Nothing has been heard about this yet in our country. Thank God. If women enter the lists, they will win. For they are more cunning, wily and tenacious. And I would very much resent living in a land of conquered men.” 3 “Western women feminists have teeth like sharks.” 4 Clearly, from Russia without love. These opinionated pronouncements emanate not from men, but from educated Russian women of the intelligentsia, whose reflex response to the very terms “woman writer” and “feminist” recalls Dracula recoiling from the cross. That seismic reaction symptomatizes the fundamental discrepancies in assumptions and orientation between Russian female authors and their Western readers. The two operate by different, often antithetical, codes. Witness the case of Natal’ia Baran- skaia, whose story “Nedelia kak nedelia” (A Week Like Any Other, 1969) impressed Western feminists by its purported expose of patriar¬ chal oppression. Some have even dubbed this piece, which chronicles the dehumanizing effects of women’s double duty on the professional and home fronts, the angriest feminist cry to emerge from the Soviet Union. 5 Yet during an interview with me in spring 1988, Baranskaia (not having read Roland Barthes and learned of the death of the author) 234 Helena Goscilo asserted that her story, far from exposing the heroine’s husband as a chauvinistic exploiter, actually portrays the power of love. Although she intended to document the hardships endured by today’s women in Russia, Baranskaia protested, she considered it unjust to hold men responsible for conditions that she imputes exclusively if hazily to “the system.” What Baranskaia did criticize was Western women’s efforts to displace men from their “natural” position of superiority and the “unfeminine” tactics deployed in that campaign. Why, for instance, did the British publishing house adopt the name “Virago”—which Baranskaia understood only in its secondary meaning, as a termagant, a loud overbearing woman, and not in its primary dictionary defini¬ tion: as a woman of great stature, strength, and courage (Webster’s Seventh). 6 As Baranskaia’s indignant bafflement evidences, a Western audience reads according to a set of presuppositions and assimilated imperatives that Russians clearly do not embrace, indeed, even find alien and repugnant. As a result of the radical self-assessment by the educated segment of society in the West during the last two decades, feminism has funda¬ mentally transformed people’s way of perceiving and thinking about women. That transformation in turn has influenced the norms guiding the production and consumption of culture. For the reconceived image of woman (womanhood “with a human face”) has infiltrated not only the process of reading texts, watching films, viewing paintings, and de¬ coding advertisements and commercials, but also the very environment that incubates these artistic and media forms. In the United States, England, Germany, and France, where awareness of gender problems inflects the sensibilities of readers, viewers, writers, and directors alike, a more or less shared set of cultural experiences allies authorial choices with audience expectations and reactions. Recent fiction and films in the United States and England, for example, draw on a cultural context informed by the issues, if not necessarily the values, of the twenty-year- old feminist movement. Examples range from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Erica Jong’s series of unzipped novels, and Fay Weldon’s mordant shockers to Alison Lurie’s The Truth about Lorin Jones, David Lodge’s best seller, Nice Work (1989), such films as “Working Girl” and “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil” (1989), and various media messages (e.g., the commercial for Virginia Slims claiming “You’ve come a long way, baby!”) that subliminally or overtly promote a more self-conscious version of gender. Recent Soviet film and prose authored by men or women lack a comparable context and, consequently, the fund of referents available Domostroika or Perestroika ? 235 to Western artists and their public. Since discourses and artistic codes partially derive from specific sociocultural circumstances, it is critical to contextualize contemporary Russian inscriptions of womanhood in order to grasp what underlies the above-mentioned failure at commu¬ nication, let alone accord. Accordingly, my discussion offers a selective commentary that falls into four unequal segments: (i) A summary of institutionalized concepts of gender in Soviet society, with a glance at the status of feminism within that structure; (2) an assessment of the impact glasnost has had on the Soviet concept of womanhood; (3) an examination of how orthodox Soviet views are reflected, challenged, or subverted in contemporary Russian women’s writing in general; and (4) a necessarily brief, closer look at three women writers whose heterodox authorial practices have discomfited Soviet readers and pro¬ voked heated debate. 7 Context. Formally, Russian women enjoy rights that their Western counterparts may envy. In the classic Marxist conviction that women’s emancipation depends upon their integration into productive labor, the egalitarian Soviet Constitution guarantees women not only full political and civil rights, but also access to most trades and profes¬ sions, and fixed equal pay for equal work. 8 Because an ongoing need for an expanding labor force has intensified the government’s efforts to retain female workers, 90 percent of Russian women today are em¬ ployed (the highest percentage in the world) 9 in areas ranging from engineering and law to sanitation and construction. Women, in fact, account for 52 percent of the labor force. 10 Moreover, thanks to the legislation written in 1988 by the Soviet Women’s Committee (headed by Zoia Pukhova), the state vouchsafes women two years of maternity leave, and job security for three years after parturition. It also provides free public childcare facilities, and legal abortions and divorce for a small fee. However, as no less a figure than the once omniscient and now roundly discredited Lenin declared, “Equality before the law does not automatically guarantee equality in everyday life.” The disjunction be¬ tween the “paper rights” conferred upon women and the bleak reality of their lived experience dims the glow of the pseudo-utopian picture implied by the constitution. Ever since the Stalin period, when the offi¬ cial culture joined women’s economic role to the glorification of mater¬ nity and the reaffirmation of women’s traditional familial duties, the Soviet state and the society have exhorted women to be both producers and reproducers. As a consequence, they bear the double load of full- 236 Helena Goscilo time work and all domestic responsibilities. One might say that Rus¬ sian women are in labor wherever they turn. Men’s unwillingness to assume any household or parental obligations leaves the women alone to cope with rearing children and cleaning house, cooking, laundering, shopping, etc. Over a million women suffer the stress of single parent¬ ing while holding down regular jobs. 11 In a country where perpetual shortages of goods, shoddy products, lack of appliances, poor medi¬ cine, deplorable services, and inefficiently run institutions make every¬ day life a trial, women with a family have insufficient time and energy for career advancement. Hence in areas considered suitable for women, they disproportionately cluster on the lowest rungs of the personnel hierarchy, even though employers readily acknowledge that female em¬ ployees are more reliable and quick (not to mention sober) than their male counterparts. According to a freelance journalist in Moscow, few women nurture ambitions to assume top positions, knowing that prestigious establishments, especially, strictly observe a quota system, based on the unofficial but widespread formula: “We already have one Jew, z non-Party members, and 2 women.” 12 The writer Tat’iana Tol¬ staia and others deploring the so-called recent feminization of Russian society point out that women account for over 80 percent of the coun¬ try’s doctors and teachers, but overlook the low prestige of these spe¬ cializations in the USSR, as well as their links with nurturing and child raising. Women comprise 90 percent of pediatricians but only 6 per¬ cent of surgeons; in the late seventies, the powerful USSR Academy of Sciences boasted 14 women among its 749 members; 13 in 1986, men made up over 84 percent of the prestigious Soviet Writers’ Union: of the approximately 15 percent of women, none held key executive posts; editorial boards typically consist of seven to ten men, with one token woman at best. Most Russian women concur that they feel crushed by overeman¬ cipation. They complain that the average woman undergoes twelve abortions during her lifetime (abortion is the chief mode of contra¬ ception and some women have as many as 30); 14 that she receives no help from her husband with the children or the housework, yet is forced to work for economic reasons often under hazardous physical conditions, and so lives in a state of unrelieved tension and exhaus¬ tion. 15 Although women writers and sundry commentators repeatedly lament the arduousness of women’s lives in the USSR, few appear to make connections between official policy and the women’s situation. In that connection, a recent article by the American journalist Robert Scheer entitled “Where Is She, the New Soviet Woman?” expressed outraged bemusement: Domostroika or Perestroika ? 237 Many of my Soviet male friends tended to be primitive oppressors as re¬ gards women, viewing them as a mixture of beast of burden and sexual toy. More depressing, they seemed to find some moral confirmation in the laws of nature for clearly supremist and exploitative views that would be abhorrent [to them] in any other arena of life. It seems never to have occurred to anyone here that if women had political power in the Soviet Union one result might have been the greater efficiency of shop¬ ping and a vast increase in the production of labor-saving devices for the household. Why has there been such scant improvement, after de¬ cades of socialist organization, in the objective conditions that women now find themselves in? The answer is that women in the Soviet Union lack political power even to the degree experienced in the capitalist West. The disenfranchisement of more than half of the population is no minor discrepancy in a society struggling with questions of freedom and representation. 16 Gender disposition in the Soviet Union today corroborates Simone de Beauvoir’s aper^u that men have found more complicity in women than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed. Russian women have internalized official propaganda and the traditional male system of prerogatives so thoroughly that they themselves propagate the very inequities that marginalize them. Even among the tiny minority of self- proclaimed feminists, some believe that a woman completely realizes her essence and her destiny only through motherhood; that domestic tasks are “unfitting for a man”; that nature has endowed women with the traits of nurturing, softness, compliance, and patience. In short, they essentialize by mistaking social constructs (femininity) for bi¬ ology (femaleness). 1 In the spring of 1988 and 1990, while conducting interviews in Moscow and Leningrad with some thirty female authors encompassing the full spectrum of background, age, and worldview, I repeatedly (and often in unexpected contexts) heard the refrain: “A woman shouldn’t lose her femininity.” When asked what constitutes femininity, most cited gentleness, sensitivity, maternal instincts, and the capacity to love. And when I suggested that these were not neces¬ sarily inborn traits, virtually all of the women resisted the very concept of a constructed identity. 18 Ironically, in a country ruled by ideologi¬ cal impositions, women do not grasp the politics of gender formation. In irrationally hoping that general improvements in living conditions will ease their lot, without agitating for a fundamental reassessment of entrenched female-male roles, Russian women unwittingly reinforce gender stereotypes. Whereas Western women seek a “room of their own,” years of officially promoted self-sacrifice have habituated Soviet 238 Helena Goscilo women to “burdens of their own”—which they seem reluctant to jettison on the grounds (or, rather, quicksands), of a biologically or¬ dained self. Russian women frankly admit that the majority of Russian men scorn domestic tasks as an inherently female province, that they prove often unsatisfying sexual partners (given to “premature congratula¬ tions”), and are conspicuously absent parents (paternity has virtually disappeared from the vocabulary); they likewise recognize that condi¬ tions of employment invariably favor men, even though they are less reliable workers. Yet when exhorted to seek redress through political action on their own behalf, Russian women not only shy away from feminism but violently denounce it. As Nina Beliaeva, a feminist law¬ yer, observes, the very word “smacks of the indecent, the shameful” and for many is associated with lesbianism or masculinization. Femi¬ nism conjures up the specter of “bright, slovenly, raucous [women] with blunt gestures, bugging eyes, and cigarette smoke, [in] a small but vociferous procession of women declaring war on the opposite sex .” 19 Indeed, even otherwise enlightened Russians conceive of femi¬ nists as vengeful, mustached hags or harridans thirsting for the whole¬ sale metaphorical (if not literal) castration of men, intent on crushing or replacing them so as to gratify their lust for power, compensate for their self-doubts, or enact their lesbian inclinations. In addition to equating feminism with the masculinization or per¬ version of women, Soviets also stigmatize it on two other counts. For decades it has been discredited as springing from bourgeois values. Many Westerners puzzled by Soviets’ uncompromising rejection of it fail to realize that Russians entertain a reduced and uninformed, or his¬ torically overmarked concept of feminism . 20 Secondly, given its mani¬ festly political nature, feminism currently has little chance of taking root in a country that has suddenly lost faith in any political engage¬ ment as an activity. Many women, in fact, maintain that they prefer to leave the “dirty business” of politics to men, confining their energies to the more “authentic” spheres of family and intimate circles of friends. Glasnost. The era of glasnost has witnessed a growing receptivity on Soviets’ part to Western tendencies and a readiness to assimilate what earlier would have been dismissed as quintessential^ Western phenomena incompatible with Soviet principles. In fact, one might reasonably attribute to Western influence the recent influx in the USSR of what in the West could signal a burgeoning feminist awareness: (i) surveys of popular responses to questionnaires designed to high- Domostroika or Perestroika ? 239 light possible gender differences, such as the opinion polls reflecting attitudes to sexual practices, marriage, and divorce; 21 (2) articles in various publications devoted to women’s issues and urging increased attention to them; 22 (3) the opening this past summer of a Center for Gender Studies within the Academy of Sciences; 23 (4) the formation of a separate women’s section within the Writers’ Union, headed in Moscow by Larisa Vasil’eva; 24 (5) a sudden spate of publications of ne¬ glected women’s literature from the past (Karolina Pavlova, Nadezhda Durova, Evdokiia Rostopchina) and various collections of contem¬ porary women’s prose that have materialized in the last few years (Zhenskaia logika [Female Logic], Cbisten'kaia zhizn’ [A Clean/Pure Life], Ne pomniashchaia zla [Without Remembering Evil]); 25 (6) the emergence (and prominence in the media) of individuals who have committed themselves, despite formidable odds, to the dissemination of feminist ideas, e.g., the independent Leningrader Ol’ga Lipovskaia, editor of the informal publication Zbenskoe cbtenie (Women’s Read¬ ing), founded in 1988 and comprising articles, original poetry and prose by women, and translations of texts pertinent to characteristic feminist concerns; and (7) the proliferation of women’s organizations, including the Transfiguration ( Preobrazhenie) club, lotos (an acro¬ nym for the League for Society’s Liberation from Stereotypes), the club safo, a network of women’s councils, 26 and an international women’s press club called Thirty-three Women and One Man, the man being the rotating elected “hero of the month,” ironically called the “Knight of Perestroika,” whom the thirty-three women interview collectively in an effort to improve mutual understanding between the sexes. Par¬ enthetically, it is worth noting that the reaction of a prominent male political analyst on Soviet tv to the formation of this club drives home the dire need for consciousness-raising in Soviet society. According to his “professional” judgment, women can be reporters and good inter¬ viewers “especially if they are young and attractive, but never political commentators or serious analysts because the latter are at variance not only with tradition, but with the very makeup of women, their physi¬ ology and way of thinking.” 2 ' In a similar vein, a lawyer deploring the morals of prostitutes branched out into the following startling general¬ ization: “I respect the emancipation of women, but one perhaps ought to think of restoring the old rule banning women from restaurants in the evening unless accompanied by men. The woman who hangs out¬ side a restaurant waiting to be let in, who sits at a table without a man, a glass of cognac in her hand, does not give others any reason to have a flattering opinion of her.” 28 Items appearing in such publications 240 Helena Goscilo as Moscow News in the last few years testify to a strong division of opinion among Soviets regarding woman’s “proper niche” in life. That such issues are being debated at all has awakened moderate optimism among some Soviets. 29 These, however, are miniature pockets of revolutionary change, thus far more cosmetic than systemic. Isolated developments on a modest scale, they are virtually swamped by countercurrents, some new and imported from the West, others of immemorial domestic origin. After years of essentially denying that sex and the body exist, the Soviets have discovered both as a source of pleasure and economic gain. Espe¬ cially the exploitation of women’s bodies as marketable commodi¬ ties and objects of displaced male violence, which Western feminists (notably Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Susan Brown- miller 30 ) have combatted, finds unsavory expression in diverse aspects of contemporary Soviet culture: (i) the highly publicized beauty con¬ tests that have secured the then sixteen-year-old Mariia Kalinina (Miss Moscow 1988) and seventeen-year-old Iuliia Sukhanova (Miss USSR 1989) dubious fame; (2) a relentless barrage of films onanistically rely¬ ing on female nudity, explicit sexual acts, and prolonged or repeated rape as a means of attracting viewers so as to amass profits (e.g., Kh. Kaiziev’s “Shakaly” [Jackals, 1990], A. Eidamdzhan’s “Za prekras- nykh dam!” [To Beautiful Ladies!, 1990]; (3) a wave of video parlors (uideosalony and videokluby ) trafficking principally in sadomasoch¬ ism and pornography—artistic milestones with such subtle titles as “Devushki, razdevaites’!” (Take It Off, Girls!), “Obnazhennaia sredi kannibalov” (Naked among the Cannibals), “Ty ne oboidesh’sia bez nebol’shogo rasputstva” (You Won’t Get By without a Little Promis¬ cuity), and “Biust i taz—vot chto samoe glavnoe” (The Bust and Hips Are What Matter Most); 31 (4) heavy metal concerts during which female performers show everything they’ve got (apart from musical talent) 5(5) display of female bodies au naturel on covers of any and all publications, ranging from fashion magazines to scholarly economic journals ( Eko ), on dashboards of taxis, on posters peddled in sub¬ way stations, etc.; (6) the Soviet issue of Playboy photographed by Sasha Borodanin, which has raised hopes of a profitable career abroad in many a pneumatic Soviet breast; (7) a dramatic increase in, and a cynical respect for, prostitution as a ticket to material well-being and social prestige (in a recent survey Soviet women ranked prostitu¬ tion eighth in a list of twenty top professions; over one-third of high school girls freely admitted they would exchange sex for hard currency, i.e., foreign money). 32 The significance of these novelties in the Soviet Domostroika or Perestroika ? 241 Union cannot be compared to that in the West, given the primitive level of knowledge there about anything relating to sex. Virtually no sex-education exists in the USSR; condoms are in disastrously short supply and 70 percent of high school students who engage in sexual intercourse do not use contraceptives the first time; owing to Russians’ fundamental ignorance of biology, some women reach the fifth month of pregnancy before realizing their condition; and, finally, every fourth abortion that occurs in the world is performed in the USSR. 33 These are not ideal circumstances for the radical sexual revolution of the type now taking place. 34 After decades of puritanism, Russian males are flocking in thousands to inspect, and to parade their appreciation for, what the society denied them for so long. Within one social cate¬ gory at least, the politics of erogenous commitment has ousted earlier political idols: truck drivers have replaced the medal-laden portraits of Stalin that they used to display routinely on their windshields with coyly pouting pin-ups free of any and all decoration. One might argue that such regressive sexist innovations pervade only popular culture, and a minority within it, without impinging on high culture—the intelligentsia’s arena of significant activity. Such arguments, however, do not withstand close scrutiny. Surveys canvass¬ ing opinions regarding sexual, marital, and familial issues unambigu¬ ously confirm that both sexes across a broad social spectrum uphold the double standard. 35 Women’s organizations, while affording women platforms for self-expression, not only fail to be taken seriously by those empowered to change their lot, but themselves lack the political weight to effect improvements in women’s social and political status. And scholarly feminist publications have sparked enthusiasm in the West, but have left the educated Russian public skeptical or indiffer¬ ent. 36 If beauty contests and pornographic videos propagate a degrad¬ ing and reductionist image of womanhood, the titles of the above- mentioned recent prose collections likewise enforce hoary gender stereotypes through their code-affirming implications: for example, Female Logic (1989) relies on the tired and tireless fantasy of women as irrational, unpredictable creatures ruled by emotion and whim; A Clean/Pure Life (1990) evokes the hackneyed pseudo-ideal of woman as virgin or sterile/sterilized housekeeper—and so on. Editors continue not only to exclude or drastically underrepresent women in anthologies of prose and poetry, but to withhold their birthdates while supplying that information for all the male contributors, on the under¬ standing that women, unlike men, wish to hide their age (according to 242 Helena Goscilo the cliche that women grow old, while men become distinguished). 37 To the perceptive reader, the markedly different treatment of these authors, who, moreover, serve as isolated representatives of their gen¬ der, sets them apart—outside the malestream—and betrays the deep- rooted gender bias that prevails in all spheres of Soviet cultural life. Yet the majority of Russians, including those trained in deciphering the values and political allegiances attaching to ostensibly innocuous discourse, seem impervious to sexist language or strategies. Though sensitized to the encoded sociopolitical connotations of literary and journalistic statement, they cannot detect the articulation of gender politics in verbal formulations that any educated Westerner would find crudely chauvinistic. Women Writers. How do women born and raised in such a culture per¬ ceive and inscribe themselves in their texts? The answer is—problem¬ atically. Russian women’s reluctance to explore the liberating politi¬ cal and psychological potential of feminism 38 parallels Soviet female authors’ categorical disavowal of themselves as specifically women writers, even though they and their society at every turn underscore their Otherness. Whenever gender issues are raised, irreconcilable self- contradictions riddle the impassioned reactions of both. Asked by an American scholar how she feels as a woman writer, Viktoriia Tokareva replied: “It is no disadvantage that I am a woman. I am different be¬ cause I write with humor. Humor is rare, even [sic] with male writers. I prefer male prose, though; often women’s prose is overloaded with attention to detail. If the woman is talented this is delightful. But I like terse literature, not babskaia [broad’s or typical woman’s] litera¬ ture.” 39 Liudmila Petrushevskaia claims to write in a “male mode,” focusing on the essentials of plot and character, as opposed to wal¬ lowing in the ornateness that she, like many others, associates with women’s style. 40 For Tat’iana Tolstaia, women’s writing is synony¬ mous with superficiality and a philistine outlook, with a saccharine air and a mercantile psychology—but her revealing comment that men also write such “women’s prose” leaves unanswered the question why hack work of this sort merits a gendered label. 41 Although the highly successful critic/journalist Natal’ia Ivanova doubts the validity and usefulness of a gendered literary category, she nonetheless pro¬ ceeds to define “women’s prose”—in purely derogatory terms. For her, it denotes a parochial outlook, an exclusive preoccupation with women’s emotional life and a concomitant glut of weddings, infideli¬ ties, and divorces; its stylistic earmarks are triviality, coquettishness, Domostroika or Perestroika ? 243 and empty decoration. 42 Her model recalls an earlier article (1963) by the writer Natal’ia Il’ina, who summed up what she ironically dubbed “ladies’ literature” as a stultifying succession of narcissis¬ tic self-contemplations in mirrors, breathless declarations of improb¬ able desires and aspirations, littered with pretentious references to pseudolegitimating sources from Heraclitus to Kant, and unintention¬ ally hilarious stereotypes of incarnated masculine and feminine ideals that flourish in Harlequin Romances today. 43 In its derisive antipathy toward its subject, the critique rivals Nabokov’s dismissal of Heming¬ way’s The Sun Also Rises as a book about bells, bulls, and balls. In fact, when Petrushevskaia, Tolstaia, and Ivanova go on to assert that there is really only good and bad prose, it becomes evident that “bad,” for reasons suggested by the gender disposition in Russian society outlined above, is interchangeable with “women’s.” Female authors vehemently dissociate themselves from “women’s” writing, then, largely because the seemingly innocent term does duty for evaluative modifiers. In their works, which favor the genre of the short story or novella, Russian women authors, not surprisingly, tend to focus on what they know best and what interests them most: human interaction, often heterosexual relations, family dynamics, generational conflicts, prob¬ lems of self-fulfillment, and the conflicting claims of job and home. Hallmarks of Soviet women’s prose during the last two decades include a subordination of plot to a preponderance of description; psychologi¬ cal exploration; a style that eschews modernist techniques; and a fairly stable perspective, usually a female center of consciousness, conveyed through quasi-direct discourse (erlebte Rede )—a limited viewpoint in which boundaries between author, narrator, and protagonist often be¬ come blurred. 44 How do women’s narratives differ from men’s? Or, to cast the query in terms of the classic Freudian penal/penile test, one could ask: “What quintessential trait of male prose does women’s fic¬ tion lack?” Above all, a direct, focal treatment of political issues, an immanent impulse to universalize. A nakedly politicized system such as the Soviet Union’s appreciates all too well that the personal is political, but not in the sense theorized by feminists and other Western intellec¬ tuals. According to orthodox Soviet principles, the “retreat” into the private sphere signals a repudiation of the obligatory participation in collective endeavors and thought mandated by a monolithic ideology. In effect, then, the personal is treasonable. But because of the a priori separation of masculine and feminine arenas of activity—public for men, and domestic for women—male apostasy becomes female pro¬ priety. Women’s literary forays into the private world follow so-called 244 Helena Goscilo laws of nature (are a desideratum), whereas literary evidence of men’s withdrawal from political involvement carries serious negative impli¬ cations. The discrimination parallels official supervision of sexuality, with male “deviance” (i.e., homosexuality) punished by law, but les¬ bianism left unmentioned. In other words, the exclusion of manifestly political matters from women’s fiction and its emphasis on personal or familial aspirations coincide with establishment expectations. In that regard women’s fiction may be considered conformist. Its place in the culture parallels women’s time, from a masculinist viewpoint, as a pause in the day’s occupations when serious business is set aside for a lighter entertainment. 45 Moreover, the cult of maternity and self- sacrifice, the recurrent motif of guilt for striving to realize the self at the expense of the family (when the two prove incompatible), and the avoidance of formal experimentation all strengthen the impression that women’s fiction is conservative, devoid of risk and color. 46 The Subversive Trio. The recent critical reception of three women writers belonging to three different generations indicates that readers might feel more comfortable were their texts to conform to the bland dictates of the hypothetical genre of “ladies’ literature” gleefully deni¬ grated by one and all. These are Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, and Valeriia Narbikova. A playwright and prosaist in her fifties who finally, after a quarter- century of professional struggles, has achieved public recognition, Liudmila Petrushevskaia arouses considerable controversy. Her gritty plays and short stories, permeated with morbid humor and shocking grotesquerie, deal with the underbelly of adult relations—the nasty traffic in human desires and fears, whereby everything carries a lit¬ eral and metaphorical price. Suicide, alcoholism, child abuse, fictitious marriages, one-night stands, part-time prostitution to augment a mis¬ erable income, unwanted pregnancies, homelessness, abject crushing poverty, physical and psychological violence comprise the stuff of her fiction and drama (and did so long before such concerns received the official stamp of approval under glasnost). This nightmarish world on the brink of existence testifies to Petrushevskaia’s infallible instinct for instantly lighting on the darkest and most lacerating element in any situation. Life for her is the penalty we all pay for having been born. Although Petrushevskaia views children, pregnant women, the sick, and the old as instantiations of the most vulnerable moments in human life, and though her narrators and chief protagonists tend to be women, her writing is relatively free of gendered binarism. 47 It shows Domostroika or Perestroika ? 245 both sexes inflicting and experiencing pain in an unbroken chain of mutual abuse. Devoid of nature and character description, sparse in dialogue and stripped of imagery, Petrushevskaia’s prose relies for its effects on the distinctive language of its ambiguous narrators. Like the lives it ex¬ presses, that language is a triumph of incongruities, condensing urban slang, cultural cliches, malapropisms, racy colloquialisms, and sole¬ cisms, which stream forth in an effort to camouflage, or defer con¬ frontation with, what is most crucial and, usually, most painful (Petru¬ shevskaia’s familiarity with and enthusiasm for Freud is no accident). For her stratagems of deflection, transference, and avoidance Petru- shevskaia has elaborated a highly individual style that disturbs readers almost as much as the seamy catastrophes in which her plots abound. Alienated by the monstrosities that quietly but implacably multiply in Petrushevskaia’s fiction, few respond to the gnarled poetry of her lan¬ guage. Yet the gaps and collisions in that language are Petrushevskaia’s chief means of destabilizing conventional perceptions and precepts that have congealed into coercive truths. Her resistance to accommo¬ dation, and the unsentimental, mordant tone—accentuated rather than relieved by flashes of grisly comedy—in which Petrushevskaia’s nar¬ rators recount horrors explains why several commentators and Petru- shevskaia herself have insisted that she writes “like a man” (optimism and passive resignation being women’s obligatory province). Liberated from sexist prejudice, that translates into “writes good prose” that bears a distinctive signature. Particularly Petrushevskaia’s recent story “Our Crowd” (1988) has drawn opprobrium on two counts. 48 Its unflinching, cynical dissection of an amoral coterie from the intelligentsia challenges the institution¬ alized image of that milieu as the stronghold of its society’s conscience. Similarly, the female protagonist’s physical violence against her son, though exercised ultimately in his interests, overturns the enduring ideal of uncomplicated, nurturing maternity entrenched in Soviet ide¬ ology. In other words, Petrushevskaia’s morose emphasis on (self-) destructive human drives and intolerable external pressures, as well as her explicit references to sexual and physiological realia, simulta¬ neously violates the decorum of two gendered Soviet myths: (1) the euphemistically couched personal concerns supposedly exemplified in “ladies’ literature,” and (2) the emotional affirmation of family life that official policy has imposed upon women and cemented into the spurious national paradigm of femininity that continues to stifle them. Petrushevskaia’s texts offer neither reassurance nor occasion for 246 Helena Goscilo paternalistic condescension. Their aggressive and transgressive nega¬ tion unsettles even the minority capable of appreciating their stylistic sophistication. According to Petrushevskaia, after the publication of “Our Crowd,” acquaintances snubbed her on the street, while others upbraided her for “wallowing in filth” and queried the “usefulness” of “maligning” the technically oriented branch of the intelligentsia that the story depicts. Such reactions expose the drawbacks of an enforced monolithic critical tradition ruled by what Mary Jacobus calls the “flight toward empiricism,” which naively assumes “an un¬ broken continuity between ‘life’ and ‘text.’” 49 It allows scant room for imagination, ludic activity, and aesthetic transformation. And it reduces Petrushevskaia—a poetic talent with a tragic view of life— into a querulous journalist intent on maligning the (hypothetical but culturally promoted and inculcated) norms of her sex. Most remarkable of all, neither Petrushevskaia, who considers her writing “masculine,” nor the readers disquieted by her tough “un¬ feminine” literary manner, perceive the flagrant contradiction between their sweeping claim that gender is irrelevant to literature, on the one hand, and the gendered terminology they apply to Petrushevskaia’s specific case, on the other. If one follows the untenable logic operative in educated Soviet society, which customarily invokes “femininity” in discussions of all but the creative aspects of women’s lives, one would have to conclude that as soon as a woman picks up a pen or sits at a keyboard she miraculously sheds the gender she apparently displays everywhere else. According to the gendered binarism that has acquired the fraudulent status of objective truth through decades of system¬ atic codification, Petrushevskaia as a woman betrays and/or jettisons her inherently feminine traits of emotion, compliance, nurturing, and pathos once she as author assumes the purportedly masculine desider¬ ata of intellect, aggression, power, and logos. Were one to credit such an unpersuasive scenario, the problem would still remain: how to rec¬ oncile the a priori essentialization of such a position with its simulta¬ neous unproblematic endorsement of constructed or acquired gender- specific characteristics? No rhetoric can disguise the arbitrary premises or incompatible conclusions of the yoked syllogisms. A: Woman is in¬ trinsically feminine / Petrushevskaia is a woman / Petrushevskaia is inherently feminine. B: Forceful prose is masculine / Petrushevskaia writes forceful prose / Petrushevskaia’s prose is masculine. Logic com¬ pels the inference that the very process of writing (well?) mysteriously metamorphoses the “feminine” principle into the “masculine,” and re¬ verses that transmutation the moment creativity ceases. Any Westerner Domostroika or Perestroika ? 247 versed in feminist theory recognizes this brand of “reasoning” as the “pen-penis” syndrome that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar assailed in their study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Tat’iana Tolstaia’s prose has little in common with Petrushevskaia’s, yet has elicited reservations for generally analogous reasons: com¬ plexity, stylistic distinctiveness and self-assurance; and independence of dominant cultural trends as well as of expectations regarding women’s writing. Although Tolstaia enjoys tremendous popularity in the West, where modernism has not been strangled by political conser¬ vativeness, she has provoked discomfort among both Soviet critics and readers, who not only confuse her fiction with her journalism, but also overlook the primacy of poetry, metaphysics, and verbal play in her stories. Tolstaia relies on the transforming powers of the imagination to explode and construct worlds through the language into which, she maintains, we are all born. Her fiction celebrates the poetic possibilities of that language through a densely intertextualized, multivocal prose. Tolstaia’s apodictic pronouncements in articles and interviews ill prepare one for the quicksilver oscillation of her narrative among con¬ stant allusions, multiple unidentified voices, staggeringly bold tropes, and unresolved contrasting moods that revive the authorial practices of the 1920s and present a daunting challenge to the hermeneut. Few Russian writers of either sex breach realistic conventions more color¬ fully and creatively than Tolstaia, who withholds unequivocal guide- posts from readers who comb her texts for meaning. Irony, decentering through a steady clash of synchronic perspectives and tones, the poetic devices of anaphora, rhyme, assonance, and developed metaphor, an amalgam of the grotesquely comic and the elegiacally lyrical—all make for an infinitely rich verbal play in which language ultimately displaces character as protagonist. Tolstaia’s acute sensitivity to the power of language enables her to pinpoint stock images and concepts neatly encapsulated in cliches. These include cultural myths about love, romance, and other ritu¬ alized aspects of heterosexual relations that she deconstructs in at least three of her stories: “Okhota na mamonta” (Hunting the Woolly Mammoth, 1985). “Poet i muza” (The Poet and the Muse, 1986), and “Ogon’ i pyl’ ” (Fire and Dust, 1986). 50 Although in conversation Tol¬ staia adopts an impassionedly antifeminist position, her skepticism of systems and classifications leads her to dismantle all manner of con¬ structs—including gender stereotypes. In an interview of November 1989 and again last year, Tolstaia confided that, for her, the writer is ideally an androgynous being. 51 If one agrees with Carolyn Heilbrun 248 Helena Goscilo that “androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate ,” 52 Tolstaia’s ironic, allusive manner amply testifies to the creative androgyny that enables her to reproduce narratively the autonomy of a subversive subjectivity. Ambiguity, parody, and the incessant, unresolved interplay among the competing discourses of di¬ verse subjectivities invite readers to distance themselves from a single monological viewpoint and to recognize its limitations. Tolstaia’s de¬ throning of authority, her awareness of the precariousness of a subject position, her mediating techniques of authorial self-elimination, and her subversive use of humor free her from the strictures of essentialist binarism that have corseted Russian women’s fiction. One could prof¬ itably apply to Tolstaia what Susan Friedman has argued on H.D.’s behalf: that “[her] writing itself constituted her action against the dominant culture .” 53 Yet published and private responses to Tolstaia’s fiction have tended to downplay its profundity, stylistic sophistication, and boldness by squeezing it into a domestic pigeonhole with a single subsuming voice of (s)mothering compassion or by faulting it on “human” grounds. Just as Tolstaia’s unusually outspoken refusal to genuflect before the sacred cows (bulls?) of the patriarchal literary establishment unleashed a flood of abuse and delayed her acceptance into the Writers’ Union, so her unorthodox authorial practices have incurred disapproval on the shaky grounds of “artificiality” or excessive “artistry,” “aristocrat- ism,” and “flight from reality” or “adulthood.” Uncomfortable with Tolstaia’s emphatic syncretism, critics and fellow literati have all ad¬ dressed the ingenuous (and, strictly speaking, nonliterary) question of whether Tolstaia “likes” her characters and handles them “kindly .” 54 (An issue of nurture, of course.) Others have impugned the “appro¬ priateness” of her ironic tonalities or found her prose overladen with “superfluous” tropes (cf. “too many notes” in Milos Forman’s film “Amadeus”). These reproaches register the vast expanses separating her prose from the ultimately conformist formulations of universally scorned “ladies’ literature.” Instead of a steady flow of emotional self¬ revelation in a generic vein, consistent authorial identification with “porte parole” characters, and a monotonous language of vapid pastels or unabated hyperbole, Tolstaia’s texts tackle metaphysical questions, favor flamboyant juxtapositions, and engage in linguistic imperialism. They demand not lachrymose empathy, but intellectual effort, a ready command of cultural history, and an alertness to poetic strategies. In short, the traditional “masculine” traits of undisguised voraciousness and freedom from external constraints, combined with disciplined Domostroika or Perestroika ? 249 organizing powers, distinguish Tolstaia’s writing from any convention- bound prose. A young writer aged thirty, who since her debut in 1988 has pub¬ lished only five narratives, Valeriia Narbikova won a reputation over¬ night as the “bad girl” of current fiction. (Inaccurately) dubbed the first Soviet female author of erotica on the basis of her first publica¬ tion, “Ravnovesie sveta dnevnykh i nochnykh zvezd” (The Equilib¬ rium of Light from Diurnal and Nocturnal Stars, 1988), Narbikova conflates sexual with textual in narratives where bodies and liter¬ ary citations copulate indefatigably. Narbikova’s blithe treatment of intercourse, her narrative sophistication, and her humorous debunk¬ ing of authoritative male culture through, so to speak, the deflationary devices of inverted syllogism, impudent inversion of intertexts, and cross-pollination of low and high culture have outraged a number of Soviet critics. 55 Above all, Narbikova exposes the formidable power of language to construct systems that subsequently lay claim to reality and thereby murder authenticity, obstruct perception, and anesthetize mental processes. Her verbal play aims to defamiliarize a world con¬ gealed in inert formulae that have accreted unchallenged over time. “The Equilibrium of Light from Diurnal and Nocturnal Stars” oper¬ ates on a matrix analogy between sexual and textual: just as the third member of a “love triangle” reconfigures the relationship of the origi¬ nal couple, so does the introduction of a new, illicit element into a formulation numbing in its familiarity reanimate it, transforming one’s perspective and awakening a fresh response or giving birth to an origi¬ nal concept. Drawing on cultural myths, fairy tales, and citations from literature and philosophy, Narbikova postulates language as the site of struggle, of co-optation, of seduction, of impotence and renovative power—to the extent that discourse becomes the ultimate intercourse. In a world of disjunction, where language has drifted loose from lived experience but has contaminated it through imposition, the pursuit of a new mode of expression, whereby phenomena are named anew, de¬ notes a search for lost innocence. Hence the disrobings, the flights to nature, and the dismantling or restructuring of available formulations that proliferate in Narbikova’s prose. On the basis of the “theft” enacted in Genesis, Mary Daly has ac¬ cused men of having stolen language from women. 56 Indeed, through¬ out Russia’s history, males have been the producers of language, espe¬ cially of official discourse and its oppositional Aesopian code. It is therefore no coincidence that Petrushevskaia, Tolstaia, and Narbikova —three of the most challenging and original contemporary Russian 250 Helena Goscilo writers—have heightened blood pressure among conservative Soviet critics for their bold, unapologetic encroachment on that tradition¬ ally masculine terrain through their sui generis, irreverent use of lan¬ guage. If, to revise de Buffon’s maxim, “Le style est la femme meme,” then their impenitently liberated authorial manner not only overturns Soviet preconceptions about women’s fiction, but, potentially rocks the foundations on which Soviet culture has constructed womanhood. In the realm of gender, then, it is not via direct political agitation nor via the inauguration of new heroic or antiheroic models, but through a linguistic coup d’etat —their self-confident seizure of language— that Petrushevskaia, Tolstaia, and Narbikova have become the subver¬ sive “troika of perestroika" during the increasingly self-contradictory period known as glasnost. Notes The original version of this essay was written for the first of four annual con¬ ferences of the Working Group on Contemporary Soviet Culture, organized by Vladimir Padunov and Nancy Condee and sponsored by alcs and ssrc at Moscow (June 1990). Another version was translated into Russian by Ol’ga Lipovskaia for the Soviet journal Obsbcbestvennye nauki (The Social Sciences, 1991). Modified and presented as talks at various universities during 1990- 91, in its present form the essay has benefited from revisions at the National Humanities Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. Hence my gratitude to Padunov, Condee, the Working Group, and to the Center. 1. Libya Nikolayeva, “To Love, Care and Cherish,” response to a question¬ naire circulated on International Woman’s Day, Moscow News 10 (1987): 16. 2. Sigrid McLaughlin, “An Interview with Viktoria Tokareva,” Canadian Woman Studies 10.1 (Winter 1989): 76. 3. Tatyana Tolstaya, “In a Land of Conquered Men,” Moscow News 38 (Sept. 24—Oct. 1,1989): 13. 4. Opinion of Viktoriia Tokareva, reported by Beatrix Campbell, “Writer’s Room with a View,” The Guardian (21 Feb. 1989): 35. 5. For a discussion of this story from such a viewpoint, see the compe¬ tent survey of Baranskaia’s oeuvre by Susan Kay, “A Woman’s Work,” Irish Slavonic Studies 8 (1987): 115-26. 6. Interview with Natal’ia Baranskaia in Moscow conducted and taped by Helena Goscilo (13 May 1988). 7. See particularly the famous dialogue between Sergei Chuprinin, “Dru- gaia proza” (The Other Prose) and Dmitrii Umov, “Plokhaia proza” (Bad Domostroika or Perestroika ? 251 Prose), Literaturnaia gazeta 6 (8 Feb. 1989): 4-5; Evgeniia Shcheglova, “V svoem krugu” (Among One’s Own Crowd), Literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1990): 19—26. 8. Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976). 9. Figures vary, depending on the source. The latest cited is 86 percent of women working outside the home: Broadcast by Ted Koppel, “Sex in the Soviet Union” (January 1991). 10. Statistics drawn from Moscow News (Nov. 1988). 11. Kerry McCuaig, “Effects of Perestroika and Glasnost on Women,” Canadian Woman Studies 10.1 (Winter 1989): 12. 12. Index on Censorship 3 (1989). 13. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society , 188. 14. Here, as elsewhere, discrepancies in statistics reflect different sources. The variously reported averages seem to range from twelve to fifteen. The high¬ est figure I have encountered for abortions undergone by a woman is thirty. Ol’ga Lipovskaia considers fourteen the national average: In private conversa¬ tion (Moscow 1990), also quoted in Francine de Plessix Gray, Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope (New York, 1989), 19. 15. Nearly half of Russia’s female workers engage in unskilled labor. In agriculture, manual labor remains women’s province, for machinery tends overwhelmingly to be entrusted to men. 16. Moscow News (30 Apr.—7 May, 1989). 17. 1 take femaleness to be a matter of biology, of possessing a body poten¬ tially capable of bearing and sustaining children. Femininity, by contrast, is understood here as a set of externally defined characteristics, a construct whereby cultural and social norms impose patterns of sexuality and behavior on women (hence de Beauvoir’s assertion in The Second Sex [1949] that “one isn’t born a woman, one becomes one”). Helene Cixous has illustrated how tradition has determined that identity as a symmetrical antithesis to the nor¬ mative male paradigm, generating the familiar binary oppositions imbricated with the patriarchal value system, whereby masculine denotes culture, activity, intellect, aggression, power, logos; and feminine—nature, passivity, emotion, gentleness, and pathos. Helene Cixous, “Sorties,” La Jeune Nee (1975), trans. as Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman (Min¬ neapolis, 1986/1988), 63-132. Most Russians of both sexes subscribe, with minimal modifications, to this binary paradigm. 18. While Soviets fully appreciate how overt forms of political propaganda can brainwash even educated members of a society, their general conserva¬ tiveness discourages them from questioning more subtle, less visible, forms of mass manipulation. For instance, the cult of maternity, despite its complicity with official demographic campaigns and the heritage of Stalinist coercion, persists as an ineradicable fixture of Soviet thinking. 252 Helena Goscilo 19. Nina Belyaeva, “Feminism in the USSR,” Canadian Woman Studies 10.4 (Winter 1989): 17. zo. As the historian David Ransel astutely observes: “ ‘Feminism’ is a thor¬ oughly discredited notion in Soviet thought; the socialists of revolutionary Russia bound that signifier so tightly to bourgeois class interest that it has been virtually impossible to pry it loose and use it more creatively. Then the Stalin¬ ists destroyed the socialist program for women’s rights [Zhenotdel, established in 19ZO and headed by Inessa Armand and Aleksandra Kollontai, was dis¬ banded in 1930], declared that the ‘woman problem’ had been solved, and reimposed patriarchal authority with a vengeance. The resulting confusion of discourse and action left Soviet women without a language to discuss their grievances.” David Ransel, review of Tatyana Mamonova, Russian Women’s Studies: Essays on Sexism in Soviet Culture, in Women’s Studies Newsletter at Indiana University (1990). zi. Many of these are published in Moscow News , a flagship of glasnost. zz. In 1988 Moscow News introduced a regular column entitled “She and We,” dealing specifically with women’s issues, and since then has carried di¬ verse items ranging from letters and opinion polls to editorials and “think pieces.” Z3. The Center for Gender Studies, attached to the USSR Academy of Sci¬ ences Institute for Socioeconomic Studies of Population, under the directorship of N. Rimashevskaia, has as its deputy the economist Anastasiia Posadskaia, one of the four founders of lotos (a rare individual insofar as she has a thorough understanding of Western feminism). Z4. Members of the Moscow branch of the Soviet Women Writers’ Federa¬ tion, constituted on the initiative of Larisa Vasil’ieva, meet on a semiregular basis to discuss professional issues, read from works in progress, and organize seminars, conferences, and other forums for women’s creativity. Z5. The recent collection Ne pomniashchaia zla (Without Remembering Evil, 1990), compiled by Larisa Vaneeva, contains fiction by the younger gen¬ eration of women writers (e.g., Svetlana Vasilenko, Nina Sadur, Valeriia Nar- bikova), who are more venturesome stylistically than their predecessors and sufficiently unidealizing in their vision of the world to have elicited unease among critics. z6. The women’s councils recall the Zhenotdely of the 19ZOS. While the campaigns for female candidates in the political arena on the part of the coun¬ cil headed by Ol’ga Bessolova have not proved very successful so far, the efforts reflect a healthy realization that political representation may lead to improved conditions for women. iy. Moscow News 51 (1-8 Jan. 1988), iz. According to several feminists in Moscow, the press club smacks of frivolity and “coquetry,” has no serious platform, and contributes little to the betterment of women’s social status. Interview with Natal’ia Filippova, former member of Preobrazhenie (Trans¬ figuration), Moscow (May 1990), recorded by Helena Goscilo. Domostroika or Perestroika ? 253 2.8. Elizabeth Waters, “Reading between the Novosti Lines,” Canadian Woman Studies 10.4 (Winter 1989): 34. 29. Women’s issues have received extensive coverage in the Soviet press during the last few years, and while many surveys and essays have advocated a more liberal approach to gender issues, literary reviews have tended to iter¬ ate precisely the kind of sexist assumptions derided in Cixous’s essay. See, for instance, Shcheglova; also, Pavel Basinskii, “Pozabyvshie dobro?” (The Good Forgotten? Literaturnaia gazeta 7 (20 Feb. 1991): 10. 30. See, for instance, Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York, 1981), Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), and Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York, 1975). F° r more extensive bibiographical data, see MacKinnon, 231—36. 31. See the letter of complaint by a fifteen-year-old male student in Vecher- niaia Moskva (Moscow at Night) (25 Apr. 1990): 2. Regarding film, see the review by Irina Pavlova, “Zachem svoboda?” (What’s Freedom For?), Ekran 1 stsena 17 (26 Apr. 1990): 4. Pavlova queries the value of an artistic and politi¬ cal freedom that yields such cheap results, for the absence of prohibitions in contemporary Soviet cinema does not vouchsafe improved quality, and in the specific cases of the films cited, merely breeds vulgarity. The views expressed in Igor Dedkov’s contribution to the Working Group Conference coincide in several respects with Pavlova’s. 32. Koppel broadcast. 33. Koppel broadcast. 34. Pornography and violence in film and tv arose gradually out of the Western capitalist system that continues to sustain conditions hospitable to their development, and in that sense may be called an “organic” part of Western society. The eruption of such phenomena in Soviet Russia after a lengthy tradi¬ tion of puritanical suppression gives cause for unease, particularly because of the country’s volatile current atmosphere. Despite acrimonious controversy, British scholarship seems to confirm that pornography incites violence against women. On the lively market in Soviet pornography, see Dmitry Sidorov and Dmitry Demidov, “Pillow Talk,” Moscow News 38 (30 Sept-7 Oct., 1990): 16. 35. A survey of attitudes toward sexual practices administered in 1988 re¬ ported that 15 percent of males and 10 percent of females canvassed found premarital sex with any likable man acceptable for women, while 42 percent of males and 19 percent of females deemed premarital sex with any likable woman acceptable for men. Thirty-five percent of men and 43 percent of women con¬ sidered premarital sex for women acceptable only with “the one she loved,” but only 24 percent of men and 40 percent of women judged the criterion of love applicable to men. While respondents had mixed views on adultery, both sexes consistently condemned adultery more vigorously in women than in men. Figures indicated that women’s views were more evenhanded than men’s, the gap between what they allowed themselves and what they thought 254 Helena Goscilo permissible tor the other sex much narrower than in the case of male respon¬ dents. "What you think about the bedroom revolution,” Moscow News (Sept. 1988): 11. 36. Such, at least, is the judgment of Posadskaia regarding her research and that of fellow lotos member Ol'ga Voronina, and such items asTat'iana Klimenkova’s survey of key aspects of Western feminism: T. A. Klimenkova, “Filosotskie problemy neofeminizma 70-kh godov” (Philosophical Issues of Neofeminism in the 70s), Voprosy filosofi 5 (1988): 148-57. Members of lotos and of the new Center for Gender Studies actively pursue contacts with the West in the interests of improving their grasp of feminist principles and in the hopes of avoiding some of the pitfalls that American feminists have not circumvented. They have therefore forged links with, for example, the Women’s Dialogue USA/USSR, headed by Colette Shulman. 37. The otherwise liberal collection Vest’ (News, 1989) and the editors of the four-volume series Sovremennaia moskovskaia povest’ (The Contempo¬ rary Moscow Tale) supply the birthdates of all contributors except the female authors: Tat'iana VrubeP, Larisa Miller, Galina Pogozheva, and Anna Nal’, as well as Nina Katerli (the sole female prosaist) in Vest’\ and Irina Raksha and Viktoriia Tokareva, represented in volumes 3 and 4 of the povest’ series, re¬ spectively. The latter two are the only women among the almost forty writers whose tales comprise the anthologies. 38. This is not to imply that Russian women should unthinkingly adopt Western feminism wholesale, but acquaintance with its basic principles would enable them to elaborate a version of feminism tailored to their specific cir¬ cumstances. Westerners who impose irrelevant paradigms on Russian women and Russians who protest that feminism may have been necessary in the West but has no application to their markedly different situation both ignore what American feminists in recent years have increasingly stressed: the need to take into account the specifics of individual cases as opposed to embracing a uni¬ versal model of womanhood. For a lucid and balanced overview of the conflict between ,\merican partisans of pragmatic progressivism on the one hand and French proponents of idealist radicalism (what Catharine Stimpson has called the “false ahistorical overuniversalizing of ‘woman’ ”) on the other, see Betsy Draine, “Refusing the Wisdom of Solomon: Some Recent Feminist Literary Theory,” Signs (Autumn 1989). 39. McLaughlin, “An Interview with Viktoria Tokareva,” 75. 40. Sigrid McLaughlin, “Contemporary Soviet Women Writers,” Canadian Woman Studies 10.4 (Winter 1989): 77. 41. Tatyana Tolstaya, “A Little Man Is a Normal Man,” Moscow News 8 (1987): 10. 42. Natal’ia Ivanova, “‘Kogda by zhizn’ domashnim krugom . . .’” (If [I Were to Choose] a Life of Domesticity), Literaturnaia gazeta 4 (1986): 72-74. 43. Natal’ia Il’ina, “K voprosu o traditsii i novatorstve v zhanre 'damskoi Domostroika or Perestroika ? 255 povesti” (On the Question of Tradition and Innovation in the Genre of “Ladies’ Tales”), Novyi mtr 3 (1963): 224-30. 44. Fairly well known representatives of this fiction include I. Grekova, N. Baranskaia, M. Ganina, N. Kozhevnikova, G. Shcherbakova, and L. Uvarova. For a sampling of their fiction, see Balancing Acts, ed. Helena Goscilo (Bloomington, Ind., 1989). See also the fine anthology entitled Soviet Women Writing (New York, 1990). 45. Elaine Showalter, “Women’s Time, Women’s Space,” Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship , ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 31. 46. Younger writers in the last decade, however, have moved in different directions. See, for example, the work of Elena Makarova ( Balancing Acts, —33) and Nina Sadur (Ne pomniashchaia zla, 217—48. 47. On gendered binarism, see Gillian Beer, “Representing Women: Re¬ presenting the Past,” in The Feminist Reader, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York, 1989), 63—80. 48. Conversation with Petrushevskaia in May 1988 and conversation with Liudmila Ulitskaia in May 1990 in Moscow. 49. Mary Jacobus, “Is There a Woman in This Text?”, New Literary His¬ tory 14 (Autumn 1982): 138. 50. On this, see Helena Goscilo, “Monsters Monomaniacal, Marital, and Medical: Tolstaia’s Regenerative Use of Gender Stereotypes,” in Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, ed. S. Sandler, J. Costlow, J. Vowles (Stan¬ ford, 1992). 51. Peter I. Barta, “The Author, the Cultural Tradition, and Glasnost: An Interview with Tatyana Tolstaya,” Russian Language Journal 147-49 (1990): 282. 52. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York, 1964/1982). 53. Susan Friedman, “Modernism of the ‘Scattered Remnant,”’ Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: 1987), 210. 54. For a selected bibliography of critical responses to Tolstaia’s work, see Barta, “The Author, the Cultural Tradition, and Glasnost,” 283. 55. See Urnov; also Nadezhda Azhgikhina, “Razrushiteli v poiskakh very (Novye cherty sovremennoi molodoi prozy)” (Destroyers in Search of Faith [New Features of Contemporary Young Prose]), Znamia 9 (1990): 223—24. 56. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston, 1973) and GynlEcology (Boston, 1978). Mikhail Epstein After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature The past year—the summer of 1989 through the summer of ~ 1990—cannot possibly be fit into the space of a single year, and this is not only because it marks the passing of a decade (which tends to open a great deal of space for generalizations and predictions). In the past year our past and our future have exchanged places. The principal problem posed by recent events is no longer a (derivative) social or political one, but rather an eschatological one: how to live after one’s own future, or, if you like, after one’s own death. Suddenly it became evident that communism had been accom¬ plished in our country—exactly within the promised time frame, by approximately 1980. All the possible and sufficient communism—“for [there may be] no other kind”—was in place. The following ten years were an attempt to rid ourselves of this oppressive fact—to put the tri¬ umph of communism somewhere further off, in order to retain at least some semblance of historical perspective. We had periods of “actual socialism,” “developed socialism,” “acceleration”—and the longest period of all—“ perestroika .” And so, through the quickened breath of imminent suffocation, it became clear that the end had already arrived. Historical perspective collapsed; we would be carried off into some kind of a beyond. At the highest spiral of development, we crashed into the rear guard of humanity, a communal-tribal structure in the thick of a civilization turned savage. And all the while, the same question: How to tame, how to domesticate this civilization gone wild, this premeditated bar¬ barism? And once again the nausea of social concern approaches: What is to be done? This question, which was asked by a democratic writer, Chernyshevskii, was given an anticipatory answer by a people’s writer, Pushkin, in his favorite verdict “there’s nothing to be done.” (The ex¬ perts might count the number of times this expression appears in Push¬ kin’s The Captain’s Daughter alone.) While everyone sought to outwit all others in deciding what must be done, it was only Pushkin who deliberately disposed of this false question, having shown that the per- 258 Mikhail Epstein son truly becomes himself and morally matures when there is nothing to be done. Then, having escaped the trap of historiography-biography, the person ends up in a strange, topologically inverted space—where there is no imminent horizon, no left or right, front or rear. Utter de¬ spair forces him to taste the tea—the kind that the underground man sips by the ruins of all the crystal palaces of the future, when there is no longer even any light left in the world. An eschatologically pure beyond is already opened up: the tastelessness, colorlessness, and soundless¬ ness of a world that is rolled up like a scroll. The word is in delirium amid transparent graves. A 1989 paper on Soviet literature by Viktor Erofeev, called “The Wake for Soviet Literature,” had been optimistically framed—in the genre of a festive eulogy. But it must be noted that the bell tolls for all those who have been left alive; the word “Soviet,” with its gloomy, owl-like, sepulchral symbolism, does not depart from the lexicon, but spreads far and wide: institutions of power and everyday mores be¬ come not less, but more and more “Soviet.” And it is not in spite, but rather because of this, that there is a growing sense of a closing-in grave and a new widespread shamelessness at the festival of the dead: ''''Bobok! Bobok! Bobok!” * is to be heard all around. Everyone is over¬ come by a sense of an ultimate outrage—when not only do people revel in the excess of insanity and hopelessness, but indeed “the image of the world passes” (in the words of the apostle Paul)—or, as they joke in the streets of Moscow, we are witnessing apocalypse in a single country. This is why, in reflecting on the literature of the recent period, one wants to pause precisely on the category of “the last.” It may well turn out that history will once again close up in waves around the current beyond—yet the land of the eternal island, Patmos, is currently popu¬ lated as never before, encompassing a sixth of the entire earth. “The last” cannot be defined in terms of the category of time: it is after time, and remains the last even if the flow of history is to be renewed thereafter. The new literature is last, not because of the moment of its appearance, but because of its makeup, its essential “beyondness.” De¬ void of signs of time, it is precisely this literature that is now perceived as genuinely contemporary ( sovremennaia) d *“Bobok! Bobok! Bobok! is to be heard all around” is a reference to Dostoevskii’s fantastic-philosophical story Bobok (1873). In the story, the made-up word “bobok" was to be a call for everyone to shed their clothes and inhibitions: here this means, roughly, “anything goes.”—Ed. tThe Russian word “ souremennaia" could mean “contemporaneous,” “contempo- After the Future 259 Above all, this literature has no attachment to the image of this world, or to attempts to recreate it. One “last” or “final” image of world history has been that of the Antichrist—and it is toward this image that all so-called “anti-totalitarian” prose gravitates, framed in terms of the coordinates of historical time and space. In the works of Grossman, Bek, Dudintsev, Rybakov, as well as their lesser-known followers, the very subject is the Antichrist, the soldiers and marshals of his army, the suffering of his victims. Yet with the Antichrist history ends and we enter a region of dissipating structures and evaporating reality; the lyrico-epic imagery which had functioned to exalt, and then to expose the Antichrist, is also exhausted. Along with the reality it had been learning to reflect, literature loses its figurativeness: this is the first distinction to be made between a “last” literature and the prior, openly realist literature. A last literature is dishonorable and arbitrary: like Proteus, it is capable of almost anything; like Narcissus, it desires only itself. Another distinction: the impossibility of working in an “anti-” genre: anti-totalitarian, anti-utopian, anticommunist, antimilitarist, etc. All of these realities are so locked in history that the relation¬ ship is better expressed by “post” than it is by “anti”: post-utopia, post-communism, post-history. Moreover, to this literature, which has found itself in the beyond—without a top or a bottom, without a left or a right—any kind of directedness “for” or “against” is entirely alien. This is a tired literature, which would like “to fall asleep like this forever”—regretting nothing, desiring nothing. There is no backdrop against which a last literature might be con¬ trasted. Even apocalypse is by no means the alarming, catastrophic mindset with which one could awaken the conscience of a slumbering generation, or presage an ominous future to an unrepentant people. Today’s Patmos is devoid of all pathos and is more akin to a tea party in Chekhov than in Dostoevskii. Black humor, absurdity, a surreal act, futuristic shock—at one time, all of this was a revolt against: against one’s environment, gluttony, reason, well-being. In our last literature, the beyond is akin to indifference. Equally otherwordly is everything in this, the most impossible of worlds. Not long ago, in the spirit of classical traditions, Russian Soviet rary,” or “modern.” While in English I have sought to retain the most immediately contextual meaning, the reader should be aware of the others, as well as the fact that in Russian there is not nearly as rigid a conceptual distinction between the possible meanings of this word—which is to say, that to a certain extent they must be thought simultaneously.—Trans. 260 Mikhail Epstein literature was preoccupied with the tragedy of the superfluous people who were alien to the world of socially useful homogeneity—such was the grand theme of the best writers, from Iurii Olesha to Andrei Bitov. The Kavalerovs and the Odoevtsevs—the enfeebled descendants of the Onegins and the Pechorins—had already become completely extinct in the Soviet world. This is not because that world had assimilated and consumed them for its own purposes—as might still have been feared not too long ago. No, the surrounding world itself had become so completely superfluous that the superfluousness of an individual trait became a trait of widespread general indifference. It is impossible to stand out or be ennobled by this superfluousness—amid rootless things, nonrepayable money, maladapted dwellings, unpassable roads. Superfluous people stand in lines and crowd into packs, but this does not enable them to take root in existence—on the contrary, existence becomes transparently peopleless. Somnambulism is the final phase of this kind of development. “It is only the appearance of us that is left,” writes the contemporary author Valeriia Narbikova, whose novella is called just that, The Appear¬ ance of Us. Somnambulists tend to be the predominant characters of a last literature: people who have not managed to accomplish any¬ thing or think anything through, who immediately drown in apocalyp¬ tic fog. We can also read the stories of another contemporary writer, Tatiiana Tolstaia— Peters, The Circle, The Okkervil River —concern¬ ing the fates of people who are not simply malformed, but who no longer count: here, failure would even be a reward, a status of some sort. At times such people are aggressive; they strive, bustle, acquire— but all the same they somehow manage to be absent from life. Touch their shoulder, give them a good shake, and they won’t notice it. It is as if all their activity comes from lunar magic, while on earth they have long been asleep, whether blissfully or troubled. “The night blows in the sleeping face”: this is said about the face of a running man in Tolstaia’s “Sleepwalker in the Fog.” Such is our present race along im¬ passable paths—this terrifying, involuntary acceleration: not by the strength of the legs, but as if due to a rupture in the soil, an attraction to imminent voids. “Could it really be that he won’t make it to the light?” The kind of light that is meant here—after the pitch dark and the black void—needs no explanation. The one who is dying dreams of resurrection. While it has often been displaced by the intelligentsia’s version (though just as often, the latter has itself vividly highlighted it), the “grass-roots” type of restlessness (rootlessness) has changed in pre¬ cisely the same way. I mean our oddities which derive from Turgenev’s After the Future 261 Kalinych, the Leskovian “enchanted wanderer”—and recently incar¬ nated in Shukshin’s “ chudiki .” * They cannot be described, following Herzen, as “intelligent” superfluities—but rather as “naive,” as mani¬ festing a kind of dislocation of the mind, maladjusted to the proficient existence of the majority, which causes one to rummage for incon¬ ceivable and vanishing essences: “So what’s the point of the state?” “So why is the tro/^a-Russia ruled by a dead soul?” “So why don’t people reply to ‘hullo’?” Such a sweet, sincere bit of insanity, where the sentimental-humanist hope for “embrace, you millions” coexists with an idiotic inversion of values and a striving to pinch as painfully as possible whoever happens to be nearby, for the sake of their spiritual good and useful edification. This instructive oddity ( chudak) has been somehow aired out of our literature—having first turned into the sincere cynics of Iuz Alesh¬ kovskii, the sperm of someone who is dying, though still inclined to multiply the social organism. In comparing, for example, the charac¬ ters of Shukshin and Evgenii Popov (who, in his Siberian bluntness and a wilderness-like freshness of thought, had been proclaimed the former’s young successor about fifteen years ago) one sees how a type that has been familiar to us is transfigured into the kind of chudak that begins with the letter “m.” + The bit of cleverness freezes on the flushed face of “such a guy” with the splattered grimace of a social cretin. We have not yet fully appreciated or examined this powerful mani¬ festation of the mudak in our literature of the 1980s—which is com¬ parable to the role of chudak during the 1960s. In and of himself, the chudak falls out of the cells of social reason, promising their future re¬ newal. The chudak is an individual departure from overly constricted forms of social life—the hero of our sincere, confessional, indicting prose and poetry of the 1960s and early 1970s, with its officially ap¬ proved or semi-approved nonconformism, its romantic prickling of the eyes from the smoke of the taiga and from hidden thought. At times the mudak is also meditative, to the point of an ache in the brain, and also departs from the norms of common sense, though this is not the char¬ acteristic of an individual, but of a collective being that has gotten off the path of reason and history. The chudak is an individual challenge to general common sense; the mudak is an erased image of societal mad¬ ness. The mudak /vacationer will confide to you on a train that in his basement there is a sack of coal, where either Goebbels was hanged or *“Chudiki" is the dialectal form of “chudaki” or oddity.—Trans. +A “ chudak ” that starts with the letter “m” is a “mudak ”—which translates into English as “asshole.”—Trans. 262 Mikhail Epstein Bukharin was shot. The mudak /orator believes in an invisible source that radiates psychophysical waves of Zionism throughout the world, and demands international legal protection from the microwave inter¬ ference in the minds of his compatriots. The mudak/peop\e-\over takes an over-aged idiot into his home for re-education and then complains that his wife had an abortion after making love to his smitten charge. We won’t recount such found and lost plots: many of them are in the 1970s work of Popov, Viktor Erofeev, and Viacheslav P’etsukh—and in all of them foolishness degenerates from charming bit of cleverness to joke on the clever one himself. The mudak is possessed by his own significance as a social being; this is an inanity from which the core of individual existence is removed. Neither extraneous people nor en¬ chanted wanderers remain in the world, which has become extraneous to itself. The current literary situation is often reduced to the opposition of two camps: the “right” and the “left,” the “grass-roots” and the “West- ernizers,” the “originalists” and the “liberals.” While this conflict has been heating up since the mid-1960s, recently it has reached the blind¬ ing intensity of a civil war. The polemic is so manifest that it needs no commentary. Yet even from the mid-1970s, a new generation began to emerge which was entirely indifferent to this struggle—or, to be more accurate, which has accepted its political, though hardly its aes¬ thetic meaning. The public positions of Vitalii Korotich—or Stanislav Kuniaev, or Grigorii Baklanov—and lurii Bondarev are diametrically opposed, but become almost identical at the level of style. “Social con¬ cern,” “the duty toward the people,” “anguish for one’s country,” “the confession of guilt,” “honest prose,” “the truth of history,” “the choice of a path”: such terms are used by feisty critics and writers on the right as well as the left; they belong to a certain kind of moralizing literature, in the context of which they take on irreconcilably opposed meanings. At the same time, the “sixtyish” conception of literature as a social tribune and a moral homily turns out to be foreign to the new genera¬ tion, which has reached maturity during the 1980s. It is not so much that this generation would remain haughtily above the fray—but, while close to the liberals in politics, they are nevertheless alienated from their “spiritually useful” and “lifelike” aesthetic almost as much as they are from the “Village Writers” and the “populists,” with their naive experiments in mythologizing the people’s age-old way of life. The 1980s generation has splits of its own, which are not very per¬ ceptible for a broader reading public because these splits are devoid of After the Future 263 moral-political coloration. Two poles or extremes stand out, toward which, in one way or another, the writers of the “new wave” tend to gravitate. One of these is meta-realism: an art of metaphysical revela¬ tions, striving for realities of the highest order, which demand spiri¬ tual ascents and mystical intuition of the artist. This movement may be related to neo-romanticism or neo-symbolism—with the notable difference that it lacks the haughty pretensions of the romantic per¬ sonality and the abstract codes of symbolic doubleness. Meta-realism is a poetics of a homogeneous, indivisible unfolding of a multifaceted reality, where, for the sake of observing a theocentric world structure, the lyrical “I” gives way to a lyrical “it.” We may recall Pushkin’s “The Prophet”—truly a prophetic work in regard to this new way of think¬ ing—wherein the person’s weapons of subjectivity, the sensitive heart and the idle tongue, are to be torn out. The flaming coal and the snake bite that replace them are signs of the poet’s dehumanization, which allows him to rise above sentimental self-expression and to attest to a Spirit that is not reducible to an anthropomorphic image. You will unfold in the broadened heart of suffering, wild dog rose, o, the wounding garden of the universe! The wild dog rose is white, whiter than any other. The one who names you would out-argue Job. While I remain silent, disappearing from the beloved’s glance in the mind not taking my eyes and not taking my hands off the fence. The wild dog rose moves along like a stern gardener, knowing no fear, with the crimson rose, with the hidden wound of sympathy under the wild shirt. Ol’ga Sedakova’s poem “The Wild Dog Rose” is one of the em¬ blems of the new poetry, which is religious not so much in signs of the creed that is being expressed, but in the intensity of the act of belief itself, whose every manifestation reveals the limit of oversig¬ nification and the miracle of becoming. The wild dog rose—this is the image of an intensified ( ozhestochennogo ) universe,” where inno¬ cence is what is most deeply wounded: yet it is its thorny path that “The Russian word ozhestochennyi also implies “more cruel.”—Trans. 264 Mikhail Epstein leads to the sacred garden, and its suffering to salvation. The only one who could out-argue Job is someone who is more innocent and more tormented. Thus, a wild bush reveals the nature of an overgrown, neglected universal garden, and simultaneously the highest nature of the gardener—the Saviour whose suffering cultivates this garden and transforms “a hidden wound” into a “crimson rose.” As Saitanov has observed, its ceremonial name already resonates somewhat within the poem before becoming its meaning: “raz verneshsia,” “rasshirennom “mhozdan’ia” Such is the poetry of moral structures of the universe, which now show through the thinning fabric of history. It is already no longer necessary—as in the era of the symbolists—to relentlessly stress the meanings of certain select words and to elevate them to the status of otherwordly symbols. The bountifulness of earthly existence and of available vocabulary is such that it allows one to refer to other worlds without distancing this one, without thinning it out, but concentrating it in colors and assonances. Or is this the maturity of time itself, which has come to the harvest of meanings in earnest, when God, as prophe¬ sied, would become everything in everything—and would no longer demand seclusion in the temple and separate prayer? The other movement, or the other extreme of contemporary move¬ ments, is commonly called conceptualism. Here, linguistic signs do not strive for a fullness of meaning; on the contrary, they reveal the vacuousness of their essence, their freedom from the signified. Con¬ ceptualism, which emerged as an artistic movement in the West at the end of the 1960s, acquired a second homeland in the Soviet Russia of the 1970s and 1980s, where by that time ideological consciousness had decomposed into a rich collection of empty fictions and hollowed-out structures. Conceptualism, represented by the works of Il’ia Kabakov, Dmitrii Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Timur Kibirov, Sukhotin, and Bartov, did not limit itself to a play with the signs of the Soviet civilization— though these signs supplied it with an example of linguistic empti¬ ness, which began to spread to the languages of other eras and cul¬ tures. Thus, the prose writer Vladimir Sorokin creates a kind of cliche of the Russian psychological and realist novel of the nineteenth cen¬ tury—a novel of great size, which is called just that: Roman" Imagine them incarnated as a single artistic figure—“the-nineteenth-century- *The Russian word “roman” translates into English as “novel”; here it is also the protagonist’s name.—Trans. After the Future 265 Russian-writer”—and Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoi, and Chekhov together could have written this book. Such a generalized reality— “the-nineteenth-century-Russian-novel”—does exist, at least in the consciousness of readers and scholars, and the conceptualist writer undertook the task of reconstructing it as a single text. The creative synthesis is based on a preliminary—literary-critical, if you will— analysis, which identifies the common characteristics of many Russian novels, their conceptual core. What is the point of such an obviously derivative production of texts, based upon already known linguistic models? This is the point: Sorokin’s novel is read like a work about language—language that exists by itself, independent of the reality described by it. The reader’s consciousness glides over a number of signifiers: nature is described this way, a country estate that way, and this is a way to describe the face of a young lady in love. The effect is completely different from that of reading Tolstoi or Turgenev, where signs are more or less transparent and direct us to the signified in order to evoke specific feelings, thoughts, motivations. Conceptualism sepa¬ rates signifiers from the signified and demonstrates the transparency and illusory quality of the latter. Although conceptualism disavows any kind of signification or “con¬ tent” in art, it also marks its last, eschatological meaning. There is such a muteness and cleanness in the world that signs cease to signify any¬ thing whatsoever: they are to be swept out like trash from an emptied art vault. The deliberate misarticulation and linguistic alienation of the conceptualists—as if they would erase the meaning of the words pronounced or put them in quotation marks—is the negative manifes¬ tation of the same “beyond” which the meta-realists seek to represent in a positive form. The conceptual treatment of language leaves us in a space of tense silence, of the decay and decrepitude of all existing or possible words—in a kind of nirvana of discarded sign systems and absolute, extrasubjective, extralinguistic meaning-conjecture. Here, for example, is a fragment from Rubinshtein’s catalog, “ Val’ dal’she i dal’she ” (“Further and Further On”)—wherein all the entries are written on separate index cards—one of the important genres of conceptualism, which marks the enumerability of images, their sche¬ matic disengagement into “the first,” “the second,” and so on. The abstraction of quantity deliberately triumphs over the plasticity of quality: i. Everything begins here. Here—the beginning of everything. However let’s go on. 266 Mikhail Epstein z. Here no one will ask you who you are and from where. It’s all clear anyway. The place where you are spared importunate questions— precisely here. But let’s go on. iz. Here it is written: “Passerby. Stop. Think.” 13. The next inscription reads: “Passerby. Stop. Try to think of something different, better than this.” 14. Here we read: “Passerby. Sooner or later—well, you understand yourself. . . . So—well, you understand yourself. . . .” 15. Here it is written: “Passerby. Beware—you may not understand anything anyway.” 16. Here: “Passerby. We didn’t even know each other. What is there for us to talk about?” 17. And here: “Passerby. Don’t stop. Go on.” 18. Let’s go on. If one thinks about it, these passages depict the same “last” reality as in Sedakova’s poem: a kind of absolute space, which in one approach is designated as a “garden,” and in another as “here.” For Rubinshtein, all the descriptions of this place either say nothing or they deliberately mislead: the passerby is invited to stop and think, and at the same time to keep going. All of this is “here.” The movement “further” and “further” occurs within one place, which turns out to be infinitely ex¬ pandable. We could say one thing about it, or something completely opposite: this place is expandable not only spatially, but also logically. In rendering each of the definitions meaningless, Rubinshtein creates an image of the limitless, the unnameable, the unrepresentable. This is a kind of metaphysics of negative terms, which point toward the absolute by erasing all of its particular definitions. If meta-realism is a poetry of a positive beyond, which may be manifested as Eden, then conceptualism is a poetry of a negative beyond, which may be called nirvana. But the common sign of both movements is this directed- ness toward a beyond, which sharply distinguishes them from previous trends in our literature, which were devoted to the historically flowing, “current” reality. Between conceptualism and meta-realism there are many intermedi¬ ate stages, many stylistic zones which may be only briefly outlined here. In poetry, the “polystylistics” of Aleksandr Eremenko stands out— After the Future 267 based on sharp linguistic splicing and the dissonances of the street, the forest, the laboratory (the social, the natural, and the technologi¬ cal). The seams and sutures between different aesthetic layers, between the highbrow and the colloquial, are themselves aestheticized. The ex¬ tremes of meta-realism and conceptualism are mediated in prose by a grotesquely fragmented manner of writing, which we find, for in¬ stance, in Erofeev’s novel The Russian Beauty, as well as in his short stories. For Erofeev, archetypes fished out from the depths of Russian history turn out, upon verification, to be divergent schemes and a field of ironic linguistic games, whereas the vulgar stereotypes of Soviet everyday life suddenly become the depths and merge with projections of other epochs into an ample mythopoetic polyglossia. The opposition or co-presence of these stylistic extremes is observ¬ able not only in literature, but in painting, which leads to an internal dialogical (or even duel-like) tension between such artists as Kabakov and Mikhail Shvartsman in Russia, or Komar, Melamid, and Mikhail Shemiakin in the Russian emigration. Despite all the intensity of argu¬ ments that reject conceptualism as a “cheap parody and a tongue stuck out at an obsolete totalitarianism,” and meta-realism as a “vul¬ gar attempt to create the imperishable by way of bypassing modernity [. sovremennost ’],” 4 despite these mutual reproaches, the relatedness of these two extremes of the new artistic consciousness is beyond doubt. One of them reveals the passing of the world’s image, as well as all of its arbitrary “hierarchic” signifiers; the other seeks to reveal a new heaven and a new earth in the fullness of “hieratic” supersignifications. Thus emerges a parallelogram of the forces that are active in con¬ temporary ( sovremennoi) literature. The liberal-nationalist opposi¬ tion forms one axis, where all contemporary publicism and the lit¬ erature of a moral-historic pathos rests. This opposition is in turn opposed to quite a different opposition between conceptualism and meta-realism. These two axial collisions, and the direction of their internal arguments, turn out to be on such different planes that open conflict between them may not often occur. The “grass-roots” position automatically counts all meta-realists and conceptualists as opponents, denouncing them precisely as liberal—both morally and socially. Meanwhile, the liberals embrace neither the conceptualists nor the meta-realists, because of their lack of moral orientation or their lack of engagement in the current ideo-social battles. For their part, *On the problems of translating the Russian word "'sovremennost 'see the note on page 258.—Trans. 268 Mikhail Epstein while they are personally committed to liberal values, the meta-realists and the conceptualists nonetheless see almost nothing in those values that could inspire them and which they could serve with their work. This entire game of mutual enmity—or simply misunderstanding— was of course not invented yesterday: it is consistent with the laws and cycles of the development of Russian literature and may be grasped only within their context. For all the uniqueness of the current {sovre- mennogo) stage, it can be said of it: “Everything was there in the olden days, everything will be repeated again, and sweet is only the moment of recognition.” If we pause on this sweet moment of recognition, a kind of a periodic table of the elements of Russian literature falls into place before us. What did Russian literature begin with in its new period—when it awoke, so to speak, from the middle ages? When there was not any literature to speak of, and what there was merged with various service¬ able types of writing (quotidian, didactic, scholarly, edifying)? The new Russian literature begins with social and civil service, which in its first period, in the eighteenth century, is called classicism. Kantemir with his satires, Lomonosov with his odes, Fonvizin with his comedies, Radishchev with his revolutionary sermons: they are all in the service of the goals of the state, the good of the fatherland, the education of its worthy sons. Literature is spread out horizontally, addressing the conscience of the reader-citizen, enlightening him with models of caste virtues and vices. But then, as if reflecting some general law of moral development, Russian literature shifts from a social phase to a moral one. Discrete individuality—its feelings and needs, its tears and tenderness—comes to the forefront. It was in this way that sentimentalism emerged, having undermined the dominance of social norms and criteria. The Lomo- nosovian period of Russian literature is replaced by the Karamzinian, the societal horizontal is narrowed to a single point—the individual— who is entirely directed toward himself. The next phase—the religious—is one that is designated by a ro¬ mantic tendency and the name of Zhukovskii. Once again, the point grows into a line, though this line is no longer directed outward as a social plane, but upward as a metaphysical vertical. The individual discovers his kinship with the superindividual, the otherworldly, the absolute. Poetry becomes mythmaking, a revelation from above, the expression of the inexpressable, the longing for the ideal, the creation of a temple. Thus, with the appearance of its own norm and power, art closes After the Future 269 in on itself. The vertical contracts, though now it is not to a point, but to a circle: art exists not for the sake of the ascent to an external absolute, it is an absolute in itself—a language that speaks about the possibilities of language. In Russian literature this is the phenomenon of Pushkin and the school of “harmonious exactness” founded by him. At this point, the other objectives of art—the service of society or of morality—are done away with. “Poetry is higher than morality, or it is something else altogether”; the artist—his own highest judge. Accord¬ ing to Belinskii’s accurate observation, the main pathos of Pushkin’s work is its aestheticism: that which was once to be taken as a means, becomes an end in itself. With Pushkin, the first cycle of the development of Russian lit¬ erature is completed: having moved from the horizontal, through the single point and the vertical, it returns to a circle, to itself, to literariness as such. Then a new cycle begins—with the proclamation of all those same ideas of social responsibility and in a heated polemic with the pre¬ vious “schools,” romantic as well as aesthetic. While Belinskii ridicules the epigones of romanticism, Pisarev raises his hand against Push¬ kin. The first phase of the new cycle—“the natural school,” headed by Gogol—is to be seen as a “relentless uncovering of the sores of social reality.” And further on, the physiological sketch, the exposi¬ tory novel, “realism” and “nihilism,” revolutionary-democratic criti¬ cism, homage to the criterion of practical good, the reestablishment of the Radishchevian-Fonvizinian, socially enlightening tendency in literature. At the same time, the social function of art does not satisfy the great¬ est writers, and already in the early work of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii the moral-psychological imperative begins to predominate: not types, but individuals, the “dialectic of the soul” and “the freshness of the moral feeling.” Thus the sentimental phase is already reconstituted in the second cycle of literary development—marked by the obvious in¬ fluence of Schiller on Dostoevskii and of Rousseau on Tolstoi. In fact, to the very end, all of Tolstoi’s work remains fundamentally moralist in its pathos; its goal was the direct emotional effect upon the reader— “infecting the reader with the writer’s feelings.” And, in one way or another, the majority of Russian writers of the second half of the nine¬ teenth century were resolving the same problem: the education of the soul, moral enlightenment, the influence upon the conscience—from the revolutionary-populist moralism of the later Nekrasov and Nad- son, to the humanist-individual moralism of Chekhov, Garshin, and Korolenko. But already in the work of Dostoevskii, Russian literature moves 270 Mikhail Epstein into its next phase—the religious, where the world is constructed along a vertical, consisting of heights and abysses. The religious function of literature is conclusively established by Vladimir Solov’ev and his fol¬ lowers in Russian symbolism, which is directly inspired by the legacy of romanticism (as Blok was by Zhukovskii). Language becomes an allusion and a kind of initiation into the secret of the higher worlds. Art becomes theurgy—that is, an act of persuasion, an appeal on behalf of the transformation of existence in God’s image, and all artistic- philosophical thinking of the beginning of the century moves in the same current—from Merezhkovskii to Berdiaev and Florenskii, from Andrei Belyi to Viacheslav Ivanov. Yet this cycle too was destined to close with an aesthetic phase. The increased critical attacks on symbolism accused the latter of disem¬ bodying and mystifying art, of turning it into myth and cryptography, whereas the task was to return it to a magical plasticity, to language as such. This problem was addressed in a variety of ways in postsym¬ bolist movements: acmeism,* futurism, imagism, all of them deriving from the self-sufficient worth of the artistic vision. “Sublime clarity,” “the self-spun word,” “language art,” “form as organism,” “the image as an end in itself”: all this brought literature along the new spiral, back to work on its own language. The formalist school of literary criticism, conceiving art as a device, also contributed to this artis¬ tic self-sufficiency. Having passed through the same four phases—the social, the moral, the religious, and the aesthetic—Russian literature thus ended the second cycle of its development. The third cycle corresponds to the Soviet era and coincides with its boundaries. Yet it seems that even if there had been no Bolshevism or October Revolution, literature would still have entered yet another cycle from the horizontal—by posing social tasks and proclaiming its social mandate, though the terms may vary: proletarian culture, class loyalty, party loyalty, the social face of the writer. After all, the cycles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began in a similar way— Why should the twentieth century be an exception? While there would not have been the killings of disobedient writers, there would have been the murderous condemnation of works that would diverge from the horizontal or lapse into the previous phases of development, into a circle or a vertical. It is characteristic that the first phase of a new cycle is merciless with respect to the last two phases of the previous cycle ''“Acmeism” refers to an early twentieth-century Russian literary movement whose chief aim was a reassessment of symbolism.—Ed. After the Future 271 (the religious and the aesthetic)—summarily lumping them together as “decadence”—while adopting the first two (the social and the moral) and recovering them as part of the “classical heritage.” Gogol and Tol¬ stoi are revered, while Solov’ev and Nikolai Gumilev are devalorized or silenced. The social phase is lengthy: from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s—and it is quite natural that, as with the initial phase of the first cycle, one critic, Siniavskii, called it “socialist classicism,” though by analogy the term “socialist realism” is no less appropriate as a name for the initial phase of the second cycle. It is hardly necessary to list the greats of this period: following Gor’kii and Maiakovskii, they are still listed in all the textbooks—and quite deservedly so—as the “classics of Soviet literature.” But then, from the mid-1950s, from the period of the “thaw,” the warming soul and the softening heart, the second phase begins—and it would be difficult to find a better name for it than socialist sentimental¬ ism. Once again there is criticism of rigid classical canons, the rejection of “sociologism,” which had become “vulgar,” in favor of moral ap¬ proaches based on the individual “soul” and “conscience.” The unique human individual is at the center of attention. “There are no uninter¬ esting people in this world”: this is the credo of Evgenii Evtushenko, one of the founders of this new sentimentalism. This credo is compa¬ rable to Karamzin’s immortal “peasant women know how to love too.” Once again we find images of “little people”—tailors and stocking- makers, instead of generals and warriors. The principal demand made of literature is sincerity, personal anxiety, confession. The principal di¬ rection—that of “moral searchings”—continued almost through the middle-1980s, indeed without hope of any end to the search. Voz- nesenskii, Okudzhava, Aksenov, Bitov, Kazakov, Trifonov—all of them were formed by this principal direction, regardless of the paths they were to choose later. “Variety-hall poetry,” “confessional prose,” “urban prose,” “the urban romance”—these were the signposts and the milestones of the “sentimental education” of our literature of the 1950s and 1960s. And it was here that a second, mature period of the same movement came to replace youthful reverie: what appears on the scene is the stern Solzhenitsynian sermon of moral cleansing—“to live not by lies,” as well as Tvardovskii, Novyi mir, the poetics of the bitter truth and the tortured conscience. But literature moves on—and, following some unknown law, once again makes the transition from a moral stage to a religious one, constructing a metaphysical vertical line over the single point of the superstitious moral individual. Chronologically, perhaps the end of 272 Mikhail Epstein the “Prague spring” and of Novyi mir (The New World) marked this transition most clearly. Above all, this change was figured in the case of Solzhenitsyn himself, in his personal transition from “moral social¬ ism” to Christianity. Morality was exhausted as a sovereign force, a humanist impulse and a “conscience without God.” Several periods may be distinguished in this metaphysical phase of our literature. The earliest is that of the “quiet poetry” and the “rural prose,” with their initial sense of resignation, the abdication of the “I,” the embracing of age-old ways of life. This is religiosity as naive, ar¬ chaic, almost pagan—with its cult of the earth, of nature, of national roots, insofar as it is orthodox it is also idolatrous, a folk tradition of everyday life. Then came the turn to mythologism, no longer so morally bound and preachy, freely playing with the abysses and cliffs of the spirit, with the exoticism of Eastern religions and the esoterica of mysterious everyday lives—with reincarnations, spells, demonic delu¬ sions, falls into wells of times and spaces. Iurii Kuznetsov emerged in poetry, while in prose it was Anatolii Kim and Iurii Mamleev, with their “fantastic realism.” Chingiz Aitmatov traversed the same path from the moral mission of his early works to the metaphysical overload of his later ones. Finally, the third and culturally the best-worked-out layer of this neo-romanticist movement is comprised of what we have called meta¬ realism: the poetry and prose of Sedakova, Viktor Krivulin, Ivan Zhda¬ nov, Elena Shvarts, and, in a different way, of Tolstaia and Mikhail Kuraev. In this work there is not so much the drunkenness and color¬ fulness of myth, as a sobering and intense peering into the transparent outlines of things, the ascent up the staircases of cultural parallels, entering into aborted embryos of cultures and their eternal archetypes. The conflict of super-reality with reality can be ironically sharpened, as in Tolstaia, or gnostically washed away, as in Zhdanov—but in both cases analogies with the two other “vertical” epochs in Russian literature suggest themselves. And further on, as experience would suggest, literature is “rounded off,” entering the last phase—the aesthetic, becoming an encyclopedia of the possibilities of literature, a collection of signs and a crossing of languages. The epoch of conceptualism arrives—when the mystical winds from the 1970s begin to be perceived as the rotten fogs of stag¬ nation, as the bequeathed “imperishables” of decayed and languishing souls. The word “vulgar” now clings to the preceding phases: if it was the moralism of the “ shestidesiatniki" (“the generation of the 1960s”) that was vulgar for the metaphysicians—who in their turn condemned After the Future 273 “vulgar sociologism”—then it is all kinds of mythologisms or meta¬ physical constructions that the conceptualists find vulgar. Language is to be pure of the sin of content and must continue to purify itself, entering the zone of silence. A striking feature of the new aestheticism is its anti-aestheticism— which, in a sense, finds a parallel phase in the experiments of the futurists. The difference is that the futurists put greatest possible em¬ phasis on the “trans-mental” sound of words, their majestic ugliness, while conceptualism tends toward humble squalor. Transmental lan¬ guage would youthfully thunder the nonsense words “dyr but shcbil ubesbcbur ,” in Kruchenykh’s verse; in Nekrasov’s it becomes senile muttering: “that is, this is it / this is what it is.” Language ( iazyk ) * is ashamed of its chattiness and seeks to hide deeper inside the oral cavity, even if at the cost of stuttering, lisping. Language has come up with so many monstrosities in the twentieth century, it has told so many deadly lies, that now it wants to forget itself and go to sleep— though of course in the form of dozing-off speech. The recent aesthetic phase cannot be reduced to conceptualism alone—it is its “lower” stratum, while a “higher” one exists as well: not anti-, but indeed aesthetic. Alongside futurism there was acme- ism. Likewise, the concluding phase of the current cycle includes prose and poetry that appear to be purely phenomenal, cleansed not only of socially-morally-religious tasks, but also of conceptual noncontent. Sensitivity is elevated to a position of the artist’s supreme virtue: vision, hearing, touch—that is, all that would return aesthetics to itself, as a discipline of sensitivity (in the literal sense of the word “aesthetics”). In the work of Iosif Brodskii, one may still sense a transition from the meta-realism of his early collections to the phenomenalism of his later ones—and even not so much a transition in and of itself as a retention and dynamic parity of the two different components. It is as if language does away with the metaphysical aim through its own logic and finely honed syntax, though this is restored precisely because of the trans¬ parency of the syntax, which cannot help but philosophize about the object in space—with noun cases and verb endings. In his best verses, Brodskii’s world is ideally surface-based—it is depth turned inside out, in such a way that not a single grain of matter, not a single step upward or outward separates metaphysics from physics and physiology. This phenomenalism, a poetics of the pure presence of the object on *The Russian word “iazyk" also means “tongue,” in the literal sense—and as the context suggests, both meanings must be retained.—Trans. 274 Mikhail Epstein the iris of the eye and on the tips of the fingers, is developed in the prose of Sasha Sokolov and Sergei lur’enen, in the poetry of Aleksei Parshchi- kov and ll’ia Kutik. True, for the latter two, the logic of sensitivity, the “figure of intuition,” and the “pentathalon of the senses” (the titles of Parshchikov’s and Kutik’s collections) become apparent not so much in the forms of metaphysics as in those of science, technology, or sport, concretely applied in terms of the devices for mastering the object and of mapping out space. But in general what is characteristic of phe¬ nomenalism is the transformation of the word into a term-metaphor, whose appeal consists of its dry visual precision, blocked-off from both the meta-realist “overflow” of meanings as well as from concep¬ tual “outpour.” It is as if phenomenalism were deployed in a middle zone between myth and parody, between metaphysical seriousness and linguistic mischief—upon a surface that lies between the depth of the object and the comic inversion of this depth. I think that in the literature of emigration this aesthetic middle is more fully represented than at home, where it is pushed aside by the extremes of meta-realism and conceptualism, mystical enthusiasm and “nihilist” grotesquerie. In general, emigration itself—both external or internal—is conducive to the presentation of objects as phenomena, whose ulterior substantive nature is concealed and covered in haze, like the motherland that has been left behind. It was Nabokov—who is today perceived in Russia as the freshest news and the principal writer of the years that have elapsed since his death—that emerged as the precursor of this amazingly deep surface writing. And, on the whole, in being spatially removed, the emigre has been remarkably successful in lagging according to phases of time—as if, for seventy years, from Bunin to Sokolov, the emigre has been preparing for the concluding, aesthetic phase, for the merging with the principal course of the cur¬ rent, not just anywhere but precisely at the mouth, right before it falls into the next and still unknown cycle. It is possible, however, to surmise that the fourth cycle will also begin with a phase that will be strikingly social, whose anticipation is already forming within the depths of glasnost, although the fourth cycle could just as well have come into being without it, without any jolts from the outside. Having exhausted the circuitous and self- sufficient aesthetic model, literature will again throw itself at the mercy and the tearing to pieces of the horizontal—such is its inevitable des¬ tiny. What is to be done? There’s nothing to be done. The rectangle of forces is revealed as a predetermined coexistence and rivalry of different phases of the development of Russian literature: the moral-humanist, the national-pagan, the religious-metaphysical, After the Future 275 and the aesthetic-conceptual. In order that all of this not be confused in the reader’s mind, I will introduce the promised table of the cyclical development of Russian literature (Table I), insisting upon its approxi¬ mativeness. The squares and columns are drawn in a highly provisional manner and upon careful examination would turn into painting, where each individual phenomenon is a spot of color, a brushstroke across all straight lines. The most significant thing to note is the way in which the regular progression of the four phases in the historical movement of literature (horizontally) leads to the steady repetition and their cor¬ respondence through all three cycles (vertically). So it is possible to anticipate the beginning of yet another new cycle, and, with it, the beginning phase of a social and even (multi)party literature. It seems, however, that this would be a different kind of sociality, intermixed with play and carnival, which recognizes the art of politics—and, therefore, politics as a kind of art. Today, this meta¬ politics, which freely plays with the signs of political groupings (left, right, centrist), is manifesting itself in the activity of the new presi¬ dent, which in a significant sense may be seen as literary-artistic. The words pronounced by him can in no way be taken in their literal sense, but more often than not in an opposite, dislocated, or figurative sense, as the play of mutually exclusive viewpoints. It may be objected that Brezhnev’s and Stalin’s speeches could not be trusted either—yet a lie that renounces reality is hardly the same thing as a play that produces this reality. Today reality is so well-known to everyone that there is no point in efforts to conceal it. The president’s speeches contain not so much lies as the free play of signifiers and signifieds. For example, a decisive protest against the existence of the post of the president may signify the establishment of that post three months later, and its occu¬ pation by precisely the figure who protested against it. A refusal to abolish the party monopoly could signify the impending decision to renounce this monopoly. Words and actions do not correspond to one another, but rather enter into a free dialogue, which may be seen as a symptom of the synthesis of different arts (politics-literature-theater). Now one begins to understand some literary critics’ laments about the disappearance of the literary process in the recent period: new works seem to appear, though they do not constitute a process, an inde¬ pendent dynamics. Above all, what sort of literary process can there be with the simultaneous entrance into literature of the four evangelists, as well as Piotr Chaadaev, Vasilii Rozanov, James Joyce, Aleksandr Sol¬ zhenitsyn, and thirty-year-old neo-conceptualists? Instead of a process in the conventional sense—that is, a linear succession of events—we 276 Mikhail Epstein Table i. A Periodic Table of the New Russian Literature (the Cycles and Phases of Development) Phases Social (the horizontal) Moral (the single point) Cycle i 1730—1840 Classicism. The honor of nobility. Civic valor. Service to the homeland. Obligation toward homeland. Sentimentalism. The dis¬ tinct individual. The inner world. Sincerity, earnestness. Edification. Moral usefulness. Cycle 2 1840-1920 Critical realism. The natural school. The physiological sketch. The denunciatory tendency. Social usefulness. Revolutionary democracy. The new sentimentalism. Psychologism. Self-analysis. The “dialectic of the soul” and the “freshness of moral sensibility.” Conscience. Guilt. Repentance. Denunciation of falsehood and vulgarity. Cycle 3 1920—90 Proletkult. The music of the Revolution. The social order. The pen as a bayonet. Popular loyalty, class loyalty, party loyalty. Socialist real¬ ism. The hero as a fighter and a creator. Upbringing of workers in the spirit of socialism. Socialist sentimentalism. Sincerity. Confessional prose. The poetry of the bared “I.” The freshness of feelings. Self-expression. “We aren’t screws.” Moral searching. “To live not by lies.” Conscience. Guilt. Repentance. Cycle 4 1990-? The new sociality. Meta¬ politics: the play with the signs of various politics. The synthesis of politics, literature, and theater. After the Future 277 Phases (cont.) Religious (the vertical) Aesthetic (the circle) Romanticism. The superindi¬ vidual, the beyond, the inexpress¬ ible. “There,” “in that direction.” The pining for the heavens. The pathos of the artistic. Har¬ monious exactness. “Poetry above morality. ...” “We are born for inspiration.” Fantastic realism. Symbolism. Art as theurgy. Production of myth. The world’s soul. Signs of ascent. The mysteries of other worlds. Acmeism. Futurism. Imaginism. Sublime clarity. The self-spun word. Image-creation. The creation of a new language. Art as a device. Neo-romanticism. (i) “Village prose” and “quiet” poetry. Humbleness. The grass-roots. The people. The national roots. The fathers’ faith, (z) Mythologism. Fantastic realism. The parable. Reincar¬ nation. Werewolves. Doubles. (3) Meta-realism. Sobering. Con¬ templation. The religious content of culture. (1) Phenomenalism. The metaphysics and plasticity of language. The logic of sensitivity. Things as they are. Surface = depth. Terms = metaphors, (z) Conceptualism. The play with empty language. Signifiers over and above the signified. Schemas and skeletons of cul¬ ture. The concept as a work of art. (3) The rear guard. Zero-degree writ¬ ing. The dust and garbage of culture. Decentering. Entropy. Language as it is. 278 Mikhail Epstein are faced with a kind of space with many entrances and exits. Nabo¬ kov arrives, Fadeev departs; someone who had come in through one entrance, now enters through another—Gor’kii or Tvardovskii, for ex¬ ample. Everything that used to happen at different times is taking place at the same time, and it is difficult to extract one thread of wax from this buzzing multicelled hive. Moreover, the literary process departs from literature and enters the nonliterary: politics, philosophy, religion, culture in general. Like a shared bathroom or a communal apartment, literature used to com¬ bine all missions, all goals—it was the sacred vocation of all types of projects. Now, having caught the scent of freedom, all the projects exit the fray of literature, occupying their own living spaces and dividing spheres of influence. What is it, then, that is left for a literature that is no longer the dwelling for politics, religion, or philosophy? It is left with language, a kind of minimum and final bridgehead from which it stipulates the terms of its capitulation. Thus emerges the most modern ( sovremennyi) of the literary phe¬ nomena of recent times—the rear guard. Whether consciously or not, most of our up and coming literature has to do with this rear guard. It may be conceded to those who like classifications (including this author) that this is a last variation of the last cycle of our literary de¬ velopment. Having passed through the phases of phenomenalism and conceptualism, the aesthetic phase now becomes the rear guard of all art, where it is sustained by the barest minimum—before it is to break down and give way to the cruder and fresher forces of the new socialization. What is it that constitutes the rear guard as a kind of final outlook? Contemporary aesthetics is equally weary of both a realism that corre¬ sponds to reality and an avant-garde that anticipates it. Reality turns out to be somewhere ahead, rapidly changing according to its own his¬ torical laws, while literature brings up the rear, noting and sweeping up everything along the way—though already as historical rubbish, as the disintegrating layers of reality. Having begun with the avant- garde, the art of this century ends with the rear guard. The avant-garde vigorously promoted new forms, technical devices, strictly organizing material into specifically designated constructions, doing away with the past out of a love for the future: this is the way it was to be when the century was lunging forward in predatory leaps. Now, on the verge of the last gasp, this century values the art of amorphousness—not of exacting experimentation, but of an all-encompassing and reliable bottom, the last gurgling crater into which the overdone experiments of earlier majestic forms and grandiose ideas are to fall. After the Future 279 Garbage and excrement: these are the overarching metaphors in the art of the end. Erofeev asks: “But is this really life? This isn’t life, it’s fecal waters, a whirlpool of slops, a collapse of the heart. The world is plunged into darkness and is renounced by God.” In the so-called “parallel” (rear guard) cinema, shots of people who smear themselves and others with feces constantly flash by. This is a parody of the gesture with which at the beginning of the century people anointed each other for the kingdom—in the holy war of utopias and ideas. Forms that have become overripe and rotten in reality, and henceforth rejected by it, comprise the fertile, “manured” layer of the contemporary rear guard and the so-called “necro-realism”—a movement in literature and film concerned with the depiction of corpses. The final limit and the be¬ yond, the eschatology of matter and consciousness, the metaphysics of garbage—these are what take the center stage in art and what define not only the choice of theme, but also the construction of style, which is maximally weakened, flabby, boneless. In the eschatological per¬ spective, it is more honorable—and aesthetically more productive— not to be the first, but the last; not to proclaim, but to stutter; not to lead, but to trail along. The one who is to be the last will take up the place of the Truth, the place of the End. The prose of the rear guard does not yield to genre definitions. It is simply prose, a flow of writing: one could enter this flow twice or three times without recognizing anything around—as if it begins all over again with each sentence. In Valeriia Narbikova’s The Balance of Light of Daytime and Nighttime Stars and The Appearance of Us, or Igor’ Gerb’s The Sacrifice of a Horse, or Ruslan Marsovich’s The Prism- Kino, not only does the plot disappear—as a sign of history that has melted away—but so does the skeleton of the coherent whole, which before was called composition and was drawn with graphic sharpness in conceptualism. A rear guard work may begin and end with any¬ thing, may go on at equal length in all directions—a continuum of weightlessness. Aesthetic reason, which Kant at one time defined as “a form of purposiveness in the absence of a goal”—is diluted in the rear guard into a new definition: “the absence of purposiveness as a form of the image.” It is quite difficult to adduce examples of the new prose, because the selection of citations already presupposes a purposiveness, and it is necessary to go through many pages in order to perceive its nonpurposiveness. But here, at random, is Marsovich’s description of a suicide: When it grows dark, the bath is filled for Marat, for a brother, for an in-law. When you array yourself in red and gloomily play the violin of 280 Mikhail Epstein the arm, chlorinated, tepid water carries you from pool to pool, from the river into the sea. “The sea awaits, but we are not there at all.” It’s scary when the cups are alike, their rims quivering—one doesn’t want to drink. If it is possible, despair crushes the glass of the cup in your hand—and no more is to be done for the sake of immortality. The derealization of the flesh. The desemanticization of the word. Speech manages not to say anything; words are freed of the captivity of meanings. The rear guard is left with the simplest path of associa¬ tions—by contiguity, metonymically. Where there is the bath, there is also chlorinated water; where there is the pool, there is the sea as well. Where there is water, there is the cup, glass; where there is glass, there is a splinter, pain—and that means a chance for immortality. The goal of the text is to deconstruct language, to place words in such a context that they can be washed away by other words, getting rid of all mean¬ ings: figurative, metaphorical, symbolic, and even simply denotative. The following is from Narbikova’s The Appearance of Us: And the object’s name comes off like the last year’s snow off the object, goes into the ground, falls into the Black Sea—that’s why there are so many languages, that’s why! to give a name to the object in a hundred, a thousand languages, so that names (languages) would mutu¬ ally exclude one another and the object would again remain without a name. After ideological overexploitation, the semantic skeleton of the word —the “concept”—still remains, though this too is soon transformed into sepulchral dust, desemanticized once and for all. The movement from conceptualism to the rear guard is a retreat to the end of litera¬ ture, to its graves and smouldering ruins: handfuls of gray dust instead of decked-out skeletons. The hard, bony state of death is replaced by a pulverization of posthumousness. In the text by Marsovich that I cited above, or, at any rate, in the version that has fallen into my hands, the pages are not numbered, and this oversight, it seems, may betray the author’s secret plan—to aban¬ don all schemes, to give the reader a freshly shuffled deck of cards, so that no one could suspect the author of card-sharping. From the point of view of rear guard stylistics, a numbered page is the same as a marked card: one knows in advance where it is to be slipped in; a literature whose pages are dispensed to the reader in accordance with a preconceived plan is a kind of fraud that deals out life as “plot” or “composition,” whereby the dealer can beat the reader and instill a hierarchy of values, his own “new order.” After the Future 281 It is precisely such a design—which, with an iron hand, would drive the reader toward the happiness of true understanding, the happiness of the great idea—that the literature of the rear guard fears most of all. Even belonging to a definite genre, like having a set order of pages, could be perceived as the guard towers of an aesthetic Gulag, where the prisoners are to be distributed by zones and strut about with numbers on their backs. Smashed into hundreds of dully glimmering prisms, the specter of postcommunism wanders over the most recent prose: the backbone of history—the plot—has been broken up into a mul¬ titude of vertebrae, as in Mandel’shtam’s poem “The Century.” The century is ending. In place of a hard-pawed and relentless predator, there are tender bugs that flash in different directions, disheveled bits of semantic fluff in every phrase. Simultaneously with the death of “scientific” and “state” commu¬ nism, there is also its rebirth as a mystical heresy, as a kind of meltdown of bodies and souls in a millennial kingdom of erased borders and un¬ confirmed possessions. From what was once a discipline of force, it is only a utopia of confluence, of the least possible effort of the will, that remains in the collapsing structures of our society and consciousness. In this sense, the rear guard is the last remnant of communism as an entropic thirst for the dissolution of all in all—a cloud of dust that has risen above the enfeebled earth. In the contemporary ( sovremennom) artistic consciousness, as in the society itself, the decentering, the elimination of large structural constructions—of genre, of plot, of ideas—is going on at an acceler¬ ated pace. The peculiarity of this “literature without qualities” may be discerned from a brief comparison of the earlier centered and eccen¬ tric literatures. The centered prose of our time—above all that of Sol¬ zhenitsyn (but also Grossman, Vladimov, and others)—has a definite authorial voice and position. The author, like a demiurge, would cre¬ ate his authority with the slashing sword of the Word. All words are autologic, used in their straight and straightened meanings, without any substitutions, disguises, clandestine displacements. “To live not by lies.” “One word of truth will outweigh the whole world.” In contrast to this centered prose is the eccentric prose developed in internal polemic with it, seemingly eluding the power of the cen¬ ter and freely playing with it—as in the works of Andrei Siniavskii, Vasilii Aksenov, Iuz Aleshkovskii, Venedikt Erofeev, and Viktor Ero¬ feev. Like a little ball, meaning is tossed from word to word before the breathless reader who, enraptured, tries to catch it. Eccentric prose is not burdened by straightforward meanings: it is instead lightened by figurative ones. It is not autological, but metaphoric. If the first type of 282 Mikhail Epstein prose says what it wants to say, the second type wants to say something that it does not say. It does not stare, but winks, exchanges glances. The first is seriousness itself and the love of truth; the second—play, spectacle, carnival. Yet by the end of the 1980s, a third type of prose emerged and began to acquire currency—no longer eccentric, but decentered. While it does not yet have catchy names, Sokolov could be considered its mentor. If the eccentric constantly plays with the concealed and effaced center (“I say one thing and something else comes out”), decentered prose is completely devoid of such a structure-forming place, where even a minus-position, an anticonception could be reinforced. A net of distinctions is cast over the world—one that has no semantic knot that would allow it to be either tied or undone. There are no stubborn repulsions or passionate attractions between words. There is no sub¬ ordination, hierarchy, or directive, and even the culture of comradely mutual assistance is lost. One could place periods not only between sentences, but indeed between words—so indifferent are they to one another. “When. It grows dark. The bath. Is filled. For Marat. For a brother. For an in-law.” Metonymy keeps objects in a holding pat¬ tern, making no claim to the place of the center. You make your way through back alleys and back streets, knowing in advance that there is no center in the city of the text, that it consists entirely of outskirts. “I say something, and nothing is coming out.” The literature of the rear guard has a reliable remedy against being infatuated by the idea, against the totalization of any style or out¬ look: a “loaded” boredom, which selects the most secondary of words and proliferates a multitude of secondary meanings. This is an absent- minded prose, devoid of either the seriousness of the centered or the passion of the eccentric; it calls for nothing, refers to nothing, not even deletions or colorful voids. It eliminates first meanings without creating second ones, in the zero-degree zone of writing. Again, from Narbikova’s The Appearance of Us: One could run to the store, there is champagne there, but without medals—then beer is better, but is there beer with medals? Of course, the host has the name that his mother gave him; why do they give names to the taxi driver and the ticket inspector, the host whom we visited— in order to better remember them? Then we won’t name the bus driver who drove us, or the host, so as to better forget them. This prose takes away names rather than appropriating them, so that being is left only with absent purposiveness—“so as to better forget.” After the Future 283 Rear guard style is usually quite sound without particular authorial effort. There are no inarticulate snags, clumsinesses, poorly selected words, just as there are no rules for selecting correct words. Conceptu¬ alism was minus-, but not yet zero-degree writing; behind it one could divine a violated norm: this is why it was perceived as inarticulateness, a scoffing at correct, literary language. If the avant-garde was striving to explode the system of rules, the rear guard gets rid of them by a less energetic means—by elevating every construction into a rule. There¬ fore, the rear guard succeeds at everything, it does not make mistakes, since the rules of language—orthography, morphology, syntax—are unerring. Such a literature begs for refuge from language, tries to say no more than language does (when the one who is speaking it is silent) and therefore becomes desolately great and free. It is difficult to distinguish such literature from language itself, which is capable of expressing everything and so never says anything by itself. Rear guard speech is the speech of the great mute—language—in all the extent of its muteness. It is silence—the best and the most profound which may be heard: no longer separated from words, as the unexpressable, but rather dissolved in them as the unexpressive. And the last question, which is impossible to avoid: How is this “post¬ future” of contemporary Russian literature to be related to what in the West is commonly called “postmodernism”? It would seem that we have fallen hopelessly behind the develop¬ ment of Western literature, which during the twentieth century has passed logically through all the stages of modernism. What kind of postmodernism can there be for us if modernism was grasped only in its early beginnings, during the brief prerevolutionary segment of the twentieth century? While we are bad at living in harmony with modernity ( sovremen- nost’), we are not at all backward when the movement of time is arrested, when it becomes timelessness, a pretemporality or a post¬ temporality. Thus postmodernism seems somehow very kindred and long predestined for us, who barely had time for a taste of modern¬ ism. It was Diderot, it seems, who noted that in Russia fruits begin to rot without having had time to ripen (the fruits of freedom, en¬ lightenment, civilization). Indeed, in the movement of our literature, there is a distinct emergence of extremes, of “underripe” and “rot¬ ting” fruit—as pre-modernism and post-modernism—between which hangs a thinned-out, shredded strip of modernism. 284 Mikhail Epstein That which existed under the name “Soviet literature,” particularly from the 1930s through the 1950s, was clearly cut off from the moder¬ nity ( sovremennost’) of the twentieth century: this was a premodern¬ ist, partially even a preclassicist phenomenon. The poet functioned more like an aedes or a rhapsode of prehistoric times, who sang not of himself, but of what was on the lips and consciousness of everyone. Extrapersonal structures clearly formed the content and style; they thought and spoke through the writer. No modernist break with tra¬ dition—no privatization of style and the decomposition of the “great social canon,” no fencing-off of individual plots in the collective farm of the all-national language and socialized moral property—could be possible. As the time of modernism passed, it was discovered with amaze¬ ment that, at key points, the system of “socialist exploitation of the spirit” coincided with a postmodernist and postindividualist view of the world. It remained only to realize that this “inborn” socialism of ours did not represent a historical misfortune, but rather a new post- historical habitat where we can be rid of the captivity of our own personality. This process of rapid transition from a premodernist con¬ sciousness to a postmodernist one—based on the same material of “developed socialism”—occurred in our country mainly during the 1970s, during the time of timelessness. By the 1980s, the basic premises of artistic consciousness in our country were completely postmodern, perhaps even more radically and consistently than in the West. Is it not the case that “simulacra”—that is, maximally lifelike like¬ nesses that have no original—began to be created by our culture much earlier and in greater quantities than in the West? What, for example, is one to make of the figure of Brezhnev, who personified the “busi¬ nesslike, constructive approach” and the “progressive development of mature socialism”? In contrast to the figure of Stalin, ominously modernist and Kafkaesque, Brezhnev is a typical simulacrum: a post¬ modern surface object, even a kind of hyperreal object, behind which stands no reality. Long before Western video technology began to pro¬ duce an overabundance of authentic images of an absent reality, this problem was already being solved by our ideology, by our press, and by statistics that calculated crops that would never be harvested to the hundredths of a percentage point. The Potemkin village: here is our prefiguring of postmodernism— an illusion that is produced according to all the rules of reality. To be sure, it would take a certain technique ( tekbniku ) of consciousness in order to perceive these likenesses not as lies that deviate from reality, After the Future 285 but as the only reality available to us—in our country, the ideological, or, in the West, the videological way ( obraz) of life.* But already in the 1970s, and even more so in the 1980s, we became almost incapable of reacting to Brezhnev- or Chernenko-type objects as lies—instead, they smoothed over our cheerless existence. They were parodies—not of some other object, but of themselves. In the same way, postmodernism’s notorious “propensity for quo¬ tation”—operating with ready-made cliches and styles from other epochs—was anticipated by the propensity for quotation in our social¬ ist practice, where all utterances, whether in quotation marks or not, expressed “someone’s” opinion (issued, as it were, from either authori¬ tative or hostile sources), which existed in the “this is the way they say it” or “this is the way it should be said” mode. For many decades, practically the entire production of books and journals did not contain a single utterance of one’s own—everything was said “by somebody,” whether named or unnamed, whether singular or plural. The socialist epoch also managed to carry out the work of decon¬ struction, which in analyzing meaningful texts arrives at a demonstra¬ tion of their meaninglessness, so that neither the reader nor the writer is capable of explaining what a given word, an expression, an entire text means concretely: they mean so much that they contradict them¬ selves, abolish their own signification. The vortex of words carries with it an empty funnel of meaning. Myriads of deliberately deconstructed texts (not in subsequent analysis, but in the very process of creation), texts that would have an outward visibility of meaning, would prove devoid of it upon any attempt at definition. Along with deconstruction the socialist enterprise already wit¬ nessed the paradigmatic construction of texts, which enforces itself at the expense of the syntagmatic, the linear-progressive. In this regard, texts comprise not so much a narrative structure as a list: a catalog, an inventory of possible opinions, facts, or desires. Once again, this was the way in which socialist thinking would operate—whereby diverse elements appear as variations of an originating thesis, and all facts as evidence and confirmation of an earlier-discovered historical law. It is sufficient to compare the hurried stylistics of Lenin, still part of the lin- ’’This is a play on the double meaning of the Russian words “ tekbnika ” and “obraz.” The word “tekbnika” could also mean “technology,” while the word “obraz” could also mean “image.” Thus, the alternative sentence would read: “To be sure, it would take a certain technology ( tekhniku ) of consciousness in order to perceive these likenesses not as lies that deviate from reality, but as the only reality available to us—in our country the ideological, or, in the West, the videological image (obraz) of life.”—Trans. 286 Mikhail Epstein ear motion of history, with the slowed-down stylistics of Stalin, who had departed into the space of the completed social structure. The para¬ digmatic series made it possible to decline a given ideological position through all of its cases: in the “dialectical” and the “historical” par¬ ticularities of the moment, against rightists, leftists, and centrists, etc. On the whole, the speeches of the most recent ideologues seem to fol¬ low a paradigm that has been adopted once and for all, as the structural framing of a “paradise” attained—a paradisiacal timelessness. Finally, there is alienation, endured and decried by all the writers of the modernist epoch. Postmodernism no longer feels this as an op¬ pression and a curse, because the ideal “subject” or “individual” from whom the surrounding world was presumably alienated has turned out to be a mythical construction. The postmodern environment is so flattened-out, culturally colorful, and uniform (one does not contra¬ dict the other), that alienation ceases to be felt as pain and rupture. Alienation has been assimilated to such a degree that the mark of differ¬ ence between what is one’s own and what is the other’s vanishes—the mature personality is constructed of superpersonal and extrapersonal components. But that is precisely the way in which the environment of social uniformity was conceived and experienced in our country until the dissident modernists declared it alien, depersonalized, threatening. The artistic consciousness of the 1980s has gotten rid of this individu¬ alist prejudice: today, not a single lyrical hero would rant against social oppression and degradation, as in the verse of our poet -shestidesiatniki (“the generation of the 1960s”), because the lyrical hero himself has disappeared. This hero has been replaced by a kind of encyclopedic sensory receptor, which either freely passes through the space of differ¬ ent epochs and cultures—and therefore does not feel constrained in its historically cramped space (metarealism)—or is formed out of those same semifolkloric “commonplaces” and banalities that comprise the surrounding environment—and therefore would not and could not withstand it (conceptualism). In any case, Soviet postmodernism is de¬ void of the tragic anguish and the absurdist wail characteristic of the modern (and especially of existentialism as its last and most extreme variety). The Soviet postmodern is optimistic, at least insofar as every¬ thing of one’s own is already alienated, precisely to the extent that all that is alien is made one’s own. It would be possible to go on and on listing symptoms of Western postmodernism that are confirmed by the experience of our literature. This is why it is impossible to concur with those scholars (Soviet as well as those abroad) who limit postmodernism only to the field of activity After the Future 287 of “late capitalism,” “multinational monopolies,” “computer civiliza¬ tion,” or “the schizophrenia of postindustrial society.” Our postmod¬ ernism is a phenomenon of a much broader scale, which has emerged on the basis of both total technologies and total ideologies. The tri¬ umph of self-valorizing ideas, which both imitate and abolish reality, has been no less conducive to the postmodern way of thinking than the predominance of video communications, which also create a world of arrested time, rolled up in itself. The difference is in the fact that Russian and Soviet civilizations are logocentric, while Western civilization privileges the silent values of gold and representation. But words are just as capable of impenetrably coating reality and creating an unbroken chain of signifiers empty of signifieds as are television representations. In our country, ideology has naturally yielded its function to nothing other than glasnost, which is much more successful at talking away reality and coating it in a shroud of words than ideology, with its poor vocabulary. Glasnost continues and takes to the greatest degree of perfection the postmodernist reduc¬ tion of the world to a play of signifiers. Today, no realities, whether omitted or silenced by ideology, can be compared with or juxtaposed to the word—with the acceleration of glasnost, the word names and replaces everything with itself. In the epoch of glasnost, there is perhaps one path remaining for true (nastoiashcheiy literature: that of verbalized silence—or of the silenced word. To blurt out secrets so as not to divulge mysteries. To conceal the meaning of the word at the moment of its utterance. To preserve literature at the bottom of language, in its boundless silence. Such is the current poetics of the effacement of poetry. Such is our post-future—perhaps the most radical of all existing variants of post¬ modernism. This is a play on the meaning of the word “nastoiashchii ”—which could also mean “present” or “today’s.”—Trans. Katerina Clark Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture Soviet culture has always been grounded in a particular ~ temporal model. Although ostensibly the society is future oriented, in fact the greatest care has been taken to define the past, to establish the society’s genealogy. Throughout Soviet history, and even in the prerevolutionary period, there has been a marked proclivity for writers and officials to articulate their model of the present in terms of a particular historical figure. Most frequently, they have adduced a triadic pattern, a genealogy whereby the present represents the third and culminating moment in a series stretching over time. This master model, then, serves as a dominant in political and intellectual discourse for a given period; both official spokesmen and more dissident figures tend to articulate their sense of the present in terms of it. The society is legitimized in a myth of origins and a line of succession (of either great men or great epochs) stretching from that moment of origin through the present. With each major political upheaval, the canonical points of temporal orientation have been reshuffled and a new genealogy has emerged to replace the old. In the course of Soviet history there occurred many such moments of temporal confusion and reorientation. To the more liberal of them, we generally give the name “thaw.” With each reorientation, new vocabu¬ lary and symbols came to dominate the cultural sphere. Frequently, the same genealogy was adduced as before, or as at some earlier point in time. Thus one can read Soviet cultural history as a text that is chap¬ tered by different versions of the past that intellectuals—both party and non-party—have turned to. However, in looking at various pasts that have been invoked, one encounters repeated usages of the same historical moment, such as the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the reforms of Peter the Great, or the Decembrist revolt of 1825. But of course each time a historical moment is invoked, it is always contextualized differ¬ ently. Moreover, every time a given historical model is dominant, each party in the intellectual debates of the day gives its own accentuation to the account of the current historical model a little, and the slight differences can be highly consequential. 290 Katerina Clark Those who have written on the historical paradigms of Soviet cul¬ ture have generally assumed that they were mandated from on high (e.g., Stalin chose Peter the Great as the model for his work in in¬ dustrializing Russia). 1 contend, however, that it was not simply the case that the successive models were mandated from on high, or that a given model was, as it were, seized upon by intellectuals in response to events. The impulse to historicize was larger than the intention of the players, even of the players ostensibly calling the changes. Simi¬ larly, in Soviet Russia there never has been a conscious decision made about what was to be, so to speak, the historical model of the month. Without pretending to solve the mysteries of cause and effect, I hope to demonstrate that most often the historical model itself has gained as¬ cendancy in public discourse before the crisis, whether that crisis was Lenin’s revolution or Gorbachev’s. However, once the crisis occurs, the model has frequently been modified or reaccented by the shaping forces of events as they transpire on the historical stage. In this article I shall discuss some of the particular permutations that this general pattern has assumed in Soviet Russia by concentrating on two moments of most intense search for historical precedents, that is, around the time of the October Revolution, and in the present. A striking feature of Russian culture in the immediately prerevolu¬ tionary years is the vogue for retrospectivism. In art, in literature, in ballet, music, and theater, the “new” movements were bent on reviving styles or isms from some much earlier era. The only major exception to this would be the avant-garde Futurists who, in the manifesto of 1912 “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” wanted to throw “Push¬ kin” and all such representatives of the Russian Great Tradition off the “steamer of modernity.” In a sense, however, their obsession with the need to eradicate the past was symptomatic of the time’s preoccupation with it. 1 Retrospectivism, which took several different forms, can be dis¬ cussed as part of a wave of reaction against realism and the ideal of progress which underwrote so much cultural activity over the past half century or so, but it can also be viewed in a broader context. All the many versions or retrospectivism essentially shared a common starting point which propelled them to look back in time for models to orient themselves around. The retrospectivists were revolted by the rentier mercantilist culture which was coming to dominate Russian society, what we would call popular mass culture, which they associated with the boulevard novel and the cafe chantant. They sought to cleanse Rus- Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 291 sia of all such “filth,” and revive the culture of some earlier age, when, they believed, it truly served the community or state. One of the main expressions of this was neoclassicism, which sought to revive or maintain styles in art and architecture imported to Rus¬ sia from the West under Peter the Great and also fostered by several of his successors. Supporters of this movement tended to advance as emblematic a triad of great ages comprising the reign of Peter himself, followed by that of Alexander I, who presided over a second flower¬ ing of neoclassicism in what was known as the Empire Alexandrine style; the third culminated in the reign of the then csar Nicholas II who, it was hoped, would help reverse the contemporary trend for greater architectural eclecticism and the style moderne in favor of a third neoclassical renaissance. Arguably, the neoclassical revival and the lionization of Peter in the press during this period do not merely reflect the antiquarian inter¬ ests or aesthetic tastes among large sections of the upper classes but also mask a shared ideological program. Whether consciously so or not, neoclassical art and Peter the Great, while doubtless considered of intrinsic interest and value, also functioned for many as emblems of a particular reformist lobby. They were symbols for rationalizing the country’s economy and legal practices, and for instituting a rule of science, thereby transcending the infamous obscurantism of a Rus¬ sian autocracy under the sway of the worst expression of Orthodox Christian obduracy. The cult of Peter in the liberal press as an icon of moderate reform and rationalization necessitated presenting a highly selective account of him. For instance, Peter is remembered as the founder of the first secular intellectual institutions in Russia, a sort of honorary founder of the Russian intelligentsia.’ Among those who supported neoclassicism, not all were of re¬ formist persuasion. Many were, on the contrary, conservatives, who espoused neoclassicism largely because of its potential for a monu¬ mental art and national aggrandizement. Both groups used the same historical model (Peter 1 /Alexander I/Nicholas II), but each accen¬ tuated it differently: while the liberal reformists stressed the role of Peter and downplayed Alexander, the more conservative interpreted the triad of csars more as emblematic of great Russian imperialism or royal cultural patronage and consequently emphasized rather Alexan¬ der (since the empire style for which his reign is famous had its origins in Napoleonic France). When the Russocentric triad of allegedly great reigns (Peter I/Alex¬ ander I/Nicholas II) emerged as dominant in these years, it was always 292 Katerina Clark implicitly understood that these csars’ stature was guaranteed by a series of great historical ages from the European arena which, it was implied, were recapitulated in their reigns: classical times and the Napoleonic era. Thus the reign of the current csar was represented as a time which had the potential for becoming the third term in a historical progression of world-historical great ages. A similar version of this grand historical sweep was popular at the time among other groups generally further to the left in the political spectrum than those who championed neoclassicism. Their version of the model triad—Ancient Greece, the French revolutionary age, Now—particularly captivated the imagination of those in the grip of Nietzcheanism, and of those leftist intellectuals, including many Bol¬ sheviks, who were trying to formulate models for the culture of a new, post-bourgeois society. Although their triad was close to that of the neoclassicists (the major difference being the moment in the great up¬ heavals in France of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which each group chose to idealize, namely, the French Revolution versus the Napoleonic era), but each of the moments in the historical progression was valued for radically different reasons. Those groups that included the French revolution in their model triad shared with the neoclassicists a revulsion against modern mass culture, but they were no less antagonistic to the high culture of the privileged which they deemed elitist, artificial, dry, and reinforcing class differences. Thus, in seeking to purge Russian culture of this material, they aimed to realize not a loftier and more august art, as did those inspired by neoclassical models, but an art which was more truly democratic and free from commercialization. The model most often adduced was Hel¬ lenic Athens as a place where, allegedly, the masses were not excluded from, or manipulated by, cultural production, but participated in it. For them, the French Revolution emerged as the next such golden age, and they hoped to see a third such age in Russia. Among the various groups which espoused this ideal, there were differences of emphasis, as there were among the neoclassicists. In the writings and speeches of Bolshevik intellectuals, the first term in this triad—ancient Greece—was rarely emphasized. Both before the Revolution, and in the years immediately thereafter, they adduced as the primary historical referents or great ages of the past to be resur¬ rected in greater glory through their Great Revolution the revolutions in France—the French Revolution of 1789 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Even after 1917, less attention was paid to Russia’s own revo¬ lutionary prehistory; generally, it was non-Bolshevik writers (such as Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 293 the Scythians) who stressed native precedents for 1917, and generally such precedents came from peasant revolts (Stenka Razin, Pugachev). Symptomatically, in the new monumental art sponsored by the Soviet government, although some Russian revolutionaries’ statues and busts were commissioned, they were outnumbered by statues to French revo¬ lutionaries such as Marat and Robespierre. 3 That the Bolsheviks should seek models for the Revolution in the French past reflects of course the specific intellectual tradition from which they came. As we know, Marx and Engels had devoted most of their discussion of revolutionary processes to events in France, and Lenin regarded Marx’s Civil War in France as an indispensable text, so much so that when he went into hiding in Finland in 1917, he took only one other book with him. 4 But in this he was in a sense not only acting out the role of a good Marxist, but also of a good Russian intel¬ ligent, for in the decades leading up to the October Revolution, the revolutionary history of France was a positive obsession of the Rus¬ sian intelligentsia of all hues, and particularly of leftists and liberals (perhaps not entirely unexpected since at that time Russia was de¬ pendent on France economically and in the world political arena, a situation which was largely duplicated in culture). Most of the major histories of the French Revolution—French, German, and English— had been published in Russian translation, and they ran a close sec¬ ond numerically only to histories of the Paris Commune; the history of other European countries was only scantily represented in Russian publications but, more surprisingly, even native Russian history was neglected. Contemporary events were almost exclusively interpreted in terms of one or another precedent in revolutionary France. 5 Of the two great French revolutions, Marx and Engels had singled out the commune as the great harbinger of future revolution because, in their view, the commune was the embodiment of the principle of dictatorship of the proletariat; the French Revolution, dramatic and laudable though it was, really only ushered the bourgeoisie into power. Lenin also adopted the Paris Commune as the official historical prece¬ dent for the new revolutionary society in Russia and told delegates to the Seventh Party Congress in 1918 that it would be easy for them to succeed in their revolution because they were “standing on the shoul¬ ders of the Paris Commune.” 6 The Paris Commune also became important for the Bolsheviks be¬ cause the February Revolution had identified so strongly with the earlier revolution in France of 1789; the “Marseillaise” was virtually the Russian national anthem after February. Indeed, when in August 294 Katerina Clark 1917 intellectuals chose to organize a grandiose mass festival in cele¬ bration of the new, post-February age (a project which was never realized), they chose as their theme the French Revolution in Paris. 7 To some extent, the fact that the February Revolution had identified itself so strongly with 1789 meant that the Bolsheviks, who dismissed the February Revolution as “bourgeois,” were constrained to identify their revolution as of 1871 and not of 1789. Consequently, in their principle revolutionary mass spectacle, “The Storming of the Win¬ ter Palace,” staged in 1920—and which, incidentally, was directed by essentially the same crew as in August 1917 had begun organizing one in celebration of the February Revolution (e.g., N. Evreinov and Iu. Annenkov)—one of the major symbols for the triumph of the Bolshe¬ viks was the way the “Internationale” came progressively to prevail over the “Marseillaise” which, for its part, was played more and more out of tune. 8 Lenin, in his writings of around 1917, such as State and Revolution , advanced the Paris Commune as a model for the new revolutionary society in which there would be a dual government comprising the party and the soviets. The latter he saw as facilitating a kind of partici¬ patory democracy for the masses. But this book is generally regarded as a testament to the influence of the left on Lenin at this time, and while it was doubtless of great importance in guiding Lenin’s actions during 1917 (in, for instance, his espousal of workers’ control in fac¬ tories), soon after the seizure of power it became little more than a legitimizing myth. But this did not alter the fact that for Russian leftist intellectuals the ideal of the commune became attractive as a symbol of mass participation in governance. But then events themselves seem to have had their impact on the models. Although the Bolsheviks were in theory committed to the commune as their chief model, when, as the Civil War progressed, the Bolshevik press sought to justify party policies or actions, they began increasingly to invoke precedents from the Lrench Revolution rather than the Commune. The encirclement of Lrance by foreign pow¬ ers anxious to restore the monarchy (and the events at Valme in par¬ ticular) served to provide better models for explaining policies that had to be introduced under the pressure of the foreign intervention. The very image of the Lrench Revolution changed in consequence from that of the fountainhead of an illusory, bourgeois “Liberty, Equality, and Lraternity” to that of an embattled revolution which was not afraid to use force to save itself. 9 Thus, in the party press, the Lrench Revolution had become a legiti- Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 295 mizing point of reference for not only the militarization of the Bol¬ shevik revolution, but also for the use of terror in general. Debates over the use of extreme means were frequently veiled behind a discus¬ sion of the virtues or otherwise of the principle, rival leaders of the French Revolution (especially Danton, Robespierre, and Marat). Dan- ton was particularly popular among non-Bolshevik intellectuals who saw in him a champion of a more humane approach in revolution¬ ary work. 10 Among Bolshevik hard-liners, by contrast, Marat was the hero. Marat was said to be the only leader prepared to defend the poor against the bourgeoisie, and, as if a logical consequence, he possessed those essential character traits of “sternness” ( surovost ’) and “merci¬ lessness” ( besposhcbadnost') which meant that he could deal with the “enemies of the revolution” and was prepared if need be to turn the revolution into a “dictatorship.” 11 It was also the case that the example of the French Revolution was the dominant one underwriting official cultural policies of the initial postrevolutionary years. For instance, the program for pulling down the old statues to the csars and other such icons of autocratic Russia and erecting new, revolutionary statues in their place was conceived of as reviving the cultural practices of the French Revolution, as is clear in the rubric used at that time: “To the guillotine with all the old statues” (the guillotine, of course, has no Russian associations). Also, the institution of a new, revolutionary or “red” calendar represented a nod in the direction of the French, while those who commissioned or directed the mass spectacles were inspired by the writings of Romain Rolland and Thiersot on the festivals of the French Revolution (which had been published in Russian translation about a decade before). 12 The French Revolution, Rolland, Thiersot, and their mentor Rous¬ seau had, of course, all been inspired by the Greeks. 11 Indeed, in the theory and practice of the Russian revolutionary mass spectacle the ideal of the spectacles in revolutionary France was conflated with the ideas of the Russian Nietzschean movement for theatrical reform which took his Birth of Tragedy as its little red book. 14 In consequence, most of the mass spectacles of war communism were informed by the triadic genealogy which extended the line leading up to October 1917 back as far as ancient Greece. 15 Even in the party press of these years one can find lead articles where ancient Athens and Greece are invoked as models for the communist ethos. 16 Thus under war communism a sort of consensus genealogy for the revolutionary era emerged and informed a great deal of official and less official culture. This genealogy charted the road to October through 296 Katerina Clark Greece, the French Revolution, and the Paris Commune. However, this temporal model was a fuzzy one and each group gave it different ac¬ centuation. For instance, the non-party intelligentsia understood it as originating in “humanistic” Hellenic Athens whose baton was taken up by the French Revolution. They acknowledged but downplayed the Paris Commune as a stage in the historical progression, and pro¬ claimed the October Revolution as the ultimate realization of the spirit of Hellenic Athens. The Bolsheviks, however, tended to understand by the point of origin in “ancient Greece” not Athens but Sparta (as did Rousseau), and looked to a more regimented and militaristic version of ancient Greece. Similarly, in their account of the next stage in the progression, the French Revolution, they focused on the later years of the revolution when Marat and others proved unflinching in suppress¬ ing “counter-revolutionaries,” and the revolution had to prove strong in the face of invading foreign armies. After the Revolution, then, the dominant historical models and the groups that espoused them remained approximately the same as they had been during the years leading up to the Revolution, although the lobby for a neoclassical revival which was too implicated with the ethos and institutions of the csarist and provisional governments was weakened in these years (temporarily, as it turned out). Arguably, the decisive break in establishing the official genealogy for the Revolution came not in 1917, but in 19x4-25, that is, in the period immediately following Lenin’s death. At this time, a totally new and Russocentric genealogy emerged: its general framework embraced a prehistory in the Russian peasant revolts but its main moments formed a triad culminating in Octo¬ ber which was preceded by the Decembrist uprising of 1825 and the 1905 Revolution. This triad became the official genealogy for the 1917 Revolution and as such has remained largely in place to this day. Thus Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin (commissioned in 1925 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution), opens with the words attributed to Lenin: “Revolution is the only lawful, equal, and effective war. It was in Russia that this war was first declared and won.” Suddenly, it would seem, the official genealogy was not transna¬ tional but hermetically Russocentric. As it were, once Lenin was dead, the Stalins came out to play. One should not assume, however, that this shift was entirely motivated from above (e.g., that it was a direct result of Stalin’s policy of Socialism in One Country, promulgated in 1924). Among non-party intellectuals one can detect a shift to greater Russocentrism starting around 1921 when anniversaries asso- Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 297 dated with Dostoevskii and Pushkin became major occasions for self¬ definition. And even in party-sponsored ritual one can detect in the early years of nep the beginnings of the shift away from a transnational historical model.' 7 When the triad 1825/1905/1917 became the canonical account of the road to October, the non-Bolshevik intelligentsia largely adopted the same dominant historical model as did the party, but, effectively, appropriated it to their ends. As individual intellectuals adopted the new triadic revolutionary genealogy, it tended to be the case that the non-party intellectuals chose to celebrate 1825, whereas Bolsheviks and the supporters of “left art” such as Eisenstein celebrated 1905. Thus we have here another case of varying accentuation. The question arises, why did non-party intellectuals focus on this particular time? One answer is that they could shift in this mediated way the movement from a time of revolution to one of reaction and cultural stagnation. The iconic revolutionary moment in the past func¬ tioned in the cultural production of such intellectuals primarily as a place to go to explore the present existential dilemmas and strivings of their intellectual caste. Thus in exploring these dilemmas, they were essentially mapping 1825 onto 1925. A general trend in Soviet culture of the late twenties (in literature, film, theater, and even art) was to focus on 1825 not just as a revo¬ lutionary high point, but rather as a critical moment in the evolution toward the 1830s and 1840s, that is, toward the infamously conserva¬ tive and repressive years of Nicholaevan Russia. 18 Nicholaevan Russia was a positive obsession of non-party intellectuals in these years, as can be seen in, for instance, the many theatrical productions of Gogol and his dominant influence in literature. The vogue for Gogolian satires and allegorical historical novels about 1825 and all that petered out by the end of the twenties. The triad 1825/1905/1917 remained the official genealogy of October through¬ out the Stalin period, but was no longer the dominant historical model used for explicating the present. For a start, in explicating the present in terms of the past, emphasis shifted, de facto, from revolutionary moments to military engagements. Consequently, in the thirties the Civil War functioned as a more important moment of legitimation than November 1917 itself. In the forties, that function was assumed by the Second World War. Moreover, the milestones to 1941 were major mili¬ tary engagements of the Russian past such as the Battle of Kulikovo (against the Tartars) and the Battle of Borodino (against Napoleon), rather than any specifically revolutionary engagement. The dominant historical paradigm for this era was not a military 298 Katerina Clark engagement, however, but that (alleged) moment when Lenin passed his baton on to Stalin as the only worthy heir. Essentially, then, during the Stalin years the dominant paradigm was binary rather than triadic. Throughout the thirties and forties this model dominated Soviet cul¬ ture, and the margins for divergent interpretation were slight. Since I have discussed this model at length elsewhere, I will not dwell on it here. 19 After Stalin’s death in 1953, his cultural heritage was partially dis¬ mantled. However, the historical models that dominated Soviet culture during the Khrushchev thaw, and even those that prevailed for most of the Brezhnev years, arguably represent a deliberate reordering of the high Stalinist model such that the new model essentially represents mutations on the old. Under Khrushchev, it was structured as a new line of succession from Lenin through Old Bolsheviks and their sup¬ porters, but bypassing Stalin and Stalinists as usurpers and unworthy heirs of Lenin. During the Brezhnev years, however, Soviet cultural production showed an increasing interest in seeking historical precedents in vari¬ ous noncanonical versions of the past. This interest in the country’s past grew in the late Brezhnev years and through the brief periods under Andropov and Chernenko in the eighties. One can see it not only in the work of nationalists (both Russian nationalists and representa¬ tives of other ethnic groups) or of those who sought a religious revival but in fact among groups representing all points on the political spec¬ trum. Many intellectuals set themselves up as self-appointed archivists for a particular figure from the past who had been purged or other¬ wise repressed in the Soviet period and devoted their lives to collecting as much information as possible on their subject, lobbying to publish his or her neglected works, and so forth. At the same time, a new stock figure emerged in films and literature, the martyred intellectual as tragic bearer of the cultural memory. Thus when Gorbachev acceded to power, his intelligentsia were essentially obsessed with the past, but this obsession was not to abate. Hence the paradoxical situation whereby during a thaw whose osten¬ sible aim is to save the country from stagnation and conservatism the main focus of intellectuals was on the past. If one abstracts from the literature and film of the glasnost era ma¬ terial performing a purely iconoclastic function, one will find that it is, to an inordinate extent, looking back over time to the fateful moments in the national past. The element of retrospectivism which is endemic to all thaws is particularly strong in this one. In the “Gorbachev Revo- Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 299 lution” the names of the two leading rival cultural organizations among intellectuals are both versions of a word for memory— Pamiat’ and Memorial. As so much of the energy in Soviet cultural life of the first five years under Gorbachev was directed at reclaiming those vast reaches of the past which had been systematically excluded from public dis¬ course and civic space, it was not only the Soviets, but also we on the sidelines, who suffered from what Mikhail Epstein has called “past shock.” More and more historical figures, events, and periods entered the purview, making it difficult to identify any one historical moment, or series of moments, which might function as the new paradigm. A further complication is that as films and books produced over a period of about seventy years were released or published for the first time, this made somewhat elusive even pinpointing the moment Now in the evolution of Soviet culture. If one might generalize horribly about the general trends during the first five years under Gorbachev, one might say that there have been two phases in the search for historical models. The first, which culmi¬ nated in 1987,1 would characterize as the time intellectuals focused on the 192.0s and 1930s as the time which might illumine the present. Just as writers in the second half of the twenties focused on the eighteen twenties and thirties as a place to go to illuminate their own dilemmas, so did writers and filmmakers under Gorbachev initially become ob¬ sessed with the nineteen twenties and thirties. Of these two decades, it is generally true that while filmmakers focused on the evils of Stalinism in the thirties, writers in the mid-eighties tended to focus on the twen¬ ties. It is true that in literature much attention was paid to the evils of Stalinism, as was the case in the thaws under Khrushchev (this time some new aspects of the phenomenon were explored). Significantly, however, most of the writers who published on the Stalin theme dur¬ ing the initial years of glasnost either did so under Khrushchev as well (such as Dudintsev), or are themselves victims of the purges (such as Aitmatov, for whom this is far from a new subject). The twenties do not represent, just as the French Revolution does not represent, a single homogeneous time but rather a period during which a series of momentous upheavals occurred. Inevitably, then, dif¬ ferent writers and critics focused on different moments as “the twen¬ ties.” For instance, some looked to nep as a time of idyll (as in the novel After the Storm [Posle buri] by S. Zalygin, which was published be¬ tween 198Z and 1987; under Gorbachev, Zalygin was appointed editor of the leading literary journal Novyt mir). Principally, however, the intelligentsia idealized the early twenties, 300 Katerina Clark in large measure because that was the fateful moment when it was split up into a “Soviet” and a “non-Soviet” intelligentsia; it was also a time when some of the major divisions in the party emerged. Frequently, intellectuals looked back to the early twenties as to a golden age of Russian culture or to a heroic age of the great party debates (as in the historical dramas of Mikhail Shatrov). Generally, this golden time was crystallized in an emblematic figure. Hence, for instance, the cult of Akhmatova as a sort of mater dolorosa of Stalinism and torchbearer of the Great Russian Cultural Tradition combined. She was repre¬ sented as a sort of second term in a genealogy stretching from Pushkin through to his heirs in the eighties (chiefly the writers of the Leningrad school). 20 As phase one moved into phase two, the frantic search for a bygone moment that might illumine the dilemmas of the present increasingly devolved into a search not for a Golden Time or even for a Great Time to emulate, but rather for an originary moment in a trajectory of aber¬ ration. In other words, the search for the hero became a search for the original sin. This trajectory was frequently organized in a triad comprising the moment of fall/ the Stalin years/ Now. Many writers identified the moment of fall somewhere in the twenties. Most com¬ monly, they located it around the time of the Revolution. Alternatively, they fastened on 1929, the year of the Great Breakthrough (or more specifically the year the drive for collectivizing agriculture began which was also a high point in the antireligious campaign) as a moment when the Russians’ cultural heritage was snatched from them; 21 many pin¬ pointed the next milestone in that progression as the 1960s and 1970s under Brezhnev. Thus, whether the quest was for a golden time or for a moment of fall, there was in all this searching little trace of the sense of the twen¬ ties or the immediately postrevolutionary era as the Third Renaissance in a series which included Hellenic Greece and revolutionary France. And yet some of the historical paradigms which seemed ineluctable in the early twenties saw a partial revival after all those years of almost total neglect. For instance, as writers sought to account for the fall, they began to invoke again the paradigm of the French Revolution. 22 In the late eighties, however, the paradigm did not function as a model moment in a historical progression but was presented as a cautionary example. The French Revolution was discussed by figures from all ends of the political spectrum. It was invoked, for instance, by Moscow’s reformist mayor, Gavriil Popov, in an article entitled “On the Uses of Inequality” published in Literaturnaia gazeta during 1989 when the Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 301 debate about future economic policy was raging. In a subsection en¬ titled “The Main Manoeuvre” where Popov writes of the necessity of introducing the market in the Soviet Union, he warns against doing as they had done in revolutionary France and exerting tighter controls on economic transactions in an effort to reduce speculation and inflation. That, he maintains, proved to be the fatal move in the French Revolu¬ tion, leading straight to a more dictatorial political practice, and from there to the guillotine, to Napoleon’s rise to power, and all that. In the Soviet Union, he contends, it would condemn the country to “retake that familiar route from 1917 to 1937 [i.e., to the worst year of the Stalinist purges].” 23 The French Revolution was used as a negative example by those on the right as well. For instance, in Igor’ Shafarevich’s infamous article “Russophobia” of the same year, he laments Russia’s disintegration from a society that was whole into one that is divided and has lost its way; Shafarevich locates the moment all this began in the pre¬ amble to the French Revolution when its ideologues, the philosophes, emerged. And he identifies the philosophes—as thinkers who rejected the religious basis of the culture of the French people—as a freethink- ing “minority group” [malyi narod] which thereby become alienated from a sort of moral majority or “ bol’sboi narod ” (note the Russian term used means literally little people/great people). The return of interest to the French Revolution after an absence of so many decades was partly occasioned by its bicentennial in 1989, but is also symptomatic of a less ephemeral moment. Of course Popov, Shafarevich, and others who invoked the French Revolution in the polemical writings of the late eighties were less concerned with the actuality of that event and more with the revolution as metaphor. Since it was a favorite example of Marx and Engels, it can function as a place to go to critique the Russian Revolution, which, it was traditionally claimed, represented a more perfect realization of the same form of revolution as the French. Critiques of the French Revolution which appeared in the late eighties can be seen as part of a general trend for dismantling 1917 as a sort of Berlin Wall of Soviet historiography. This dismantling of 1917 freed intellectuals to find their 1917, that is, their originary moment which they sought at points deeper in the past. This quest became the common task of phase two as intellectu¬ als focused primarily on some moment in the nineteenth century as their specular time to illumine the tragedies of Soviet history and the dilemmas of their present. Much of their effort was directed at dis¬ mantling the canonical (Soviet) account of the rise of the intelligentsia 302 Katerina Clark by, for instance, advancing Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspon¬ dence with Friends or Dostoevskii’s Diary of a Writer (previously dis¬ missed as reactionary or obscurantist texts) as the core of a new canon. Literary polemicists never seemed to tire of rehashing the critical de¬ bates between Dostoevskii and Chernyshevskii, or between Belinskii and Gogol, most often favoring not, respectively, Chernyshevskii and Belinskii, as used to be standard in Soviet accounts of these debates, but Dostoevskii and Gogol. It became de rigeur that everyone cited Dostoevskii, who, de facto, usurped the place of Lenin. His literary works frequently provided the frame of reference for prose works of all genres, including even the most hard-nosed and naturalistic exposes of contemporary life . 24 Dostoevskii, then, came (yet again) to function as a figure whose significance was not confined to the literary world. He became a cul¬ tural icon for large sections of the intelligentsia trying to adduce not just a new canon, but also new points of historical orientation to chal¬ lenge the standard Soviet ones. Some writers, however, did not so much try to establish a counter-canon or advance a new historical moment as the emblematic one, but challenged the very practice of selecting individual models from the past as emblems for the present. 26 Several literary works published in the late eighties are structured upon a stark juxtaposition of canonical texts from the Great Tradition of Russian literature with the realia from Soviet experience. Viacheslav P’etsukh’s New Muscovite Philosophy (1989), for instance, provides a hilarious send up of trying to thrust an account of life in the infamous commu¬ nal apartment into that Procrustean bed of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment , while in Mikhail Kuraev’s Night Watch (1988) the mono¬ logue of a spear carrier in the system of the purges, of a member of the arresting squads from the purge years who has survived unscathed to sit out his twilight years as a factory guard in Leningrad, is juxta¬ posed against a lyrical reworking of texts by Gogol and others asso¬ ciated with the myth of Petersburg. 26 Such texts manifest not merely the variety and contrast between the two worlds; they dramatize the impossibility of coherence among items of their catalog. A parallel trend would be the growing number of literary works which question the canonical historical (as distinct from literary) land¬ marks. These landmarks are figured in their work not as moments to be recapitulated in the present, or even as originary moments or high points in a trajectory of error. Rather, such works challenge the prac¬ tice of foregrounding a single historical moment as if it could be dis¬ crete from all others and emblematic. Some of them take a diachronic approach, using concrete historical examples to show the role played Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 303 by contingency in even the major events of the world stage; P’etsukh’s Rommat (the title is a contraction of “romantic materialism”) of 1989 is a good example of this, and chronicles in some detail the inglorious line of succession from Russian csar to Russian csar during the period of about 150 years from the reign of Peter the Great to the Decembrist uprising in 1825; his narrative is punctuated by an entire series of hap¬ hazard or bungled palace revolutions “culminating” in 18x5 itself. 27 Other works of the late eighties take a more synchronic approach in challenging the notion of the emblematic moment by establishing how many different temporalities may be found in even the smallest Rus¬ sian/Soviet town so that assigning to it a single identity (such as “the town of the Decembrists”) is misleading. 28 But even in these relatively skeptical works authors have had a hard time abandoning such perennial predilections of the Soviet intelligen¬ tsia as the myth of Russian particularism, and above all the cult of their own singularity and “spirituality.” In Kuraev’s The Night Watch, for instance, though the monologue of the spear carrier of Stalinist repression cannot come together with the cultural traditions of that place where he is located (Petersburg/Leningrad), one does not doubt that many of the individual intellectuals he recalls arresting could find a way to bridge that gulf. And in P’etsukh’s Rommat a paradoxical distinction is drawn between the French Revolution as a “success” in that one cast of rogues was able to wrest power from another, and the Russian, Decembrist uprising of 1825 as a glorious failure, a fail¬ ure because of the paltry numbers of “neurotics and poets” who stood against the autocratic regime and because of their vastly varying agen¬ das, but glorious because of their moral/spiritual commitment and their “preparedness to sacrificial action in the interests of historical transformation” (in which aspect they emerge implicitly as harbingers of the intelligentsia itself). 29 P’etsukh even adduces a teleological view of history which his earlier excursion into the successive reigns of the Russian csars might have led us to believe he had abandoned. He con¬ tends that, although the actual course of historical progress cannot be charted (as it was in Marx), it is nevertheless subject to the laws of his¬ torical necessity and has a clear end. P’etsukh’s account of this seems to follow an unacknowledged Hegelian model whereby man cannot know the future course of history because he does not yet have con¬ sciousness enough, but, by fits and false starts, with many twists of the dialectic, he will ultimately see the final triumph of his true nature as a creature of reason and good; the logic of historical necessity will dictate that man become man “in substance” and not just “in form.” 30 When man becomes man in substance, he will of course become a 304 Katerina Clark Russian “intelligent.” This is the familiar story about history that has as its telos of all progress . . . me. Thus while we can see no lack of evidence of the ways in the late eighties writers began deconstructing the long-standing official genealogies for 1917, we should be wary of seizing upon even the most radical versions of this as evidence that Soviet literary sensibility had at long last become “postmodernist.” Of course gestures in that direction have been made, but if we are to take “postmodernism” in one of its classic formulations (made by Jameson in his foreword to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition) as “do[ing] without narrative by means of narrative itself,” 31 meaning that all claims to truth are merely stories, then it becomes clear that these writers are not postmodernists. In their texts, not all narratives are equal; inter alia, the Hegelian story of the progress of Geist is privileged. Thus while the writers of the eighties were still using many of the same historical models as were adduced as canonical in the twenties, they were adducing them less as model moments and more as times to be looked to for their parabolic potential; but then that was com¬ monly done in the twenties as well. In other words, what we saw in the late eighties was business conducted largely as is usual (whenever possible). Notes 1. In fact, as is often remarked, many of Russia’s leading avant-gardists, such as Velimir Khlebnikov, also had a strong retrospectivist bent. 2. “V Pirogovskom obshchestve” (In the Pirogov Society), Birzhevye vedo- mosti (22 February 1913, Morning): 2. 3. “Otchet o deiatel’nosti Otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv Narkomprosa” (Report on the Activity of the Fine Arts Section of Narkompros ), Izobrazi- tel’noe iskusstvo 1 (1919): 72. 4. Marian Sawer, “The Soviet Image of the Commune: Lenin and Beyond,” in Images of the Commune , ed. James A. Leith (Montreal, 1978), 246. 5. John Keep, “The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd,” Soviet Studies 20.1 (July 1968): 246. 6. V. I. Lenin, “Report to the Second Congress of the R.C.P. (b), March 8, 1918,” in Collected Works (Moscow, 1960-70), 27: 133. 7. V. P. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zbizn Moskvy 1 Leningrada v 1917 godu (Artistic Life in Moscow and Leningrad in 1917) (Moscow, 1983), 389. 8. For the libretto see “Massovye prazdnestva” (Festivities for the Masses) in Russkii sovetskii teatr 1917-1921. Dokumenty i materialy (Russian Soviet Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture 305 Theater 1917—1921. Documents and Materials), ed. A. Z. Iufit (Leningrad, 1968), 272-74. 9. Cf., for example, Feliks Gra, Terror (Terror) (Moscow, 1920). Note, however, that when the White Army under ludenich attacked Petrograd in October—November 1919, the analogy used was with the fate of the Paris Com¬ mune. See V. Bystrianskii, “Dva geroia: Parizh i Petrograd” (Two Heroes: Paris and Petrograd) and L.Trotskii, “Parizhskii rabochii 1871 g.—Petrogradskii pro¬ letariat 1917 g.” (The Parisian Worker of 1871—the Proletariat of Petrograd of 1917), in Bor’ba za Petrograd. 15 oktiabria—6 noiabria 1919 goda (The Battle for Petrograd. 15 October—6 November 1919) (Petrograd, 1920), 311—17. 10. Z. Steinberg, “Dantovo i Robesp’erovo nachalo” (Danton’s and Robes¬ pierre’s Principle), in Puti revoliutsii (Ways of Revolution) (Berlin, 1918), 51. 11. S. G., “Marat. K125 letiu” (Toward Marat’s 125th Anniversary), Petro- gradskaia pravda 149 (6 June 1918): 2. 12. Zhul’en T’erso, Prazdniki 1 pesnt frantsuzskoi revoliutsii (Festivals and Songs of the French Revolution) (1908); R. Rollan, Narodnyi teatr (People’s Theater) (1910). 13. See Howard T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolution (Chicago, 1937). 14. See, for instance, the keynote address of Viacheslav Ivanov to the first national conference called to consider policy for the mass theater in revolution¬ ary Russia, “K voprosu ob organizatsii tvorcheskikh sil narodnogo kollektiva v oblasti teatral’nogo deistvia” (Toward the Question of the Organization of the Creative Forces of the People’s Collective in the Domain of Theatrical Action), Vestnik teatra 2 6 (14,15,16 May 1919): 4. 15. This is most striking in “The Mystery of Liberated Labor,” staged in 1920. 16. For example, V. Bystrianskii [the editor of Petrograd Pravda and a former writer of leaders for Pravda], “Kommunizm i dukhovnaia zhizn’” (Communism and Intellectual Life), Kniga i revoliutsiia 5 (November 1920): 1—2. 17. See, for example, the mass spectacle “Three Days” ( Tri dnia ), staged for the anniversary of Bloody Sunday (1905) in January 1922, and which is informed by the same triadic genealogy (1825/1905/1917). 18. A good example of this would be Iurii Tynianov’s novel Kiukhlia of 1925 about a poet who participated in the Decembrist uprising. 19. See Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981). 20. For example, writers like A. Kushner, E. Rein, and J. Brodsky. 21. Cf. V. Belov’s God velikogo pereloma (The Year of the Great Turning Point), Novyi mir 4 (1991); or N. Shlelo, “Libo sila, libo rubl’ ” (Either Force, or the Ruble), Znamia 1 (1989): 129. 22. Cf. Aleksandr Buravskii, Vtoroi god svobody (Gill’otina dlia 306 Katerina Clark Robesp’era ), Tragicheskaia fantaziia na temu Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v 2 chastiakh (The Second Year of Freedom [The Guillotine for Robespierre]: A Tragic Fantasy on the Theme of the Great French Revolution in Two Parts), limost’ 6 (1988): 66-85. 23. “O pol’ze neravenstva” (On the Benefit of Inequality), Literaturnaia gazeta 40 (4 October 1989): 10. 24. Sergei Kaledin, Stroibat. Povest’ (Stroibat. A Novella), Novyi mir 4 (1989), esp. 77. 25. Although these works were published in the late eighties, many of them were completed earlier. For instance, Evgenii Popov’s Dusha patriota Hi raz- lichnye poslaniia k Ferfichkinu (The Soul of a Patriot, or Diverse Epistles to Ferfichkin), published in 1989, is dated 1982, i.e., pr e-glasnost. See below, note 28. 26. Viacheslav P’etsukh, Novaia moskovskaia filosofia (New Muscovite Philosophy), Novyi mir 1 (1989); Mikhail Kuraev, Nochnoi dozor. Noktiurn na dva golosa pri uchastii strelka VOKhR tov. Polubolotova (The Night Watch: A Nocturne for Two Voices with the Participation of VOKhR Secret Police Rifleman Comrade Polubolotov), Novyi mir 12 (1988). 27. Viacheslav P’etsukh, Rommat (Romanticheskii realizm) (Rommat [Ro¬ mantic Realism]), Volga 5 (1989): 66-83. 28. Evgenii Popov, Dusha patriota ill razlichnye poslaniia k Ferfichkinu (The Soul of a Patriot, or Diverse Epistles to Ferfichkin), Volga 2 (1989), esp. 11—14. 29. V. P’etsukh, Rommat , Volga 6 (1989): 75. 30. Ibid., 75-77. 31. Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” to Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard, The Postmod¬ ern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), xix. Donald Raleigh Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg: Some Reflections on the August Revolution, Provincial Russia, and Novostroiko From its earliest days, the Soviet regime has demonstrated ~ an unrivaled capacity among the major powers to project an image to the outside world that is both alluring and alienating. The latter one, in particular, has concerned us, for it often has as much to do with our own state of mind as it does with Soviet reality. As satir¬ ist Aleksandr Zinov’ev observed years ago, the West sees the Russia it wants to see. This was as true during the cold war as it was while the icons of power came crashing down in the heady days of late summer 1991. Historically, our representations of “the other,” which at first glance seem antithetic to their own, under closer scrutiny bare an un¬ easy symmetry to theirs. To take one example, our widely subscribed- to images of a totalitarian society, which denied or ignored the social dimensions of Soviet politics, did not differ too much from the mono¬ chrome society exalted in the encyclopedia of Stalinism, the official Short Course (History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Another important reason that our images of the Other are so one¬ dimensional is the West’s myopic gaze, focused on Moscow, St. Peters¬ burg, and a handful of other cities, which has produced an entrenched bias in our academic writing about and media coverage of the Soviet Union. The borderlands, inhabited largely by national minorities, and the provinces of European Russia, populated mainly by Russians and other Slavs, for the most part remain outside our field of vision. Recent events have reminded us of the importance of better understanding the cultures of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. The need is every bit as pressing, though perhaps not as obvious, to better comprehend developments and moods outside the capitals of the Russian republic. To be sure, there are practical reasons why our representations of the Soviet Union often have been based on convenience—Soviet society was closed and there were logistical problems to penetrating the thick smoke screens put up to obstruct one’s vision. It is ironic that Soviet society has also been closed to those who con¬ stitute it, including its leaders. How else can we account for the colossal ineptitude of Russia’s “Pinochets,” as Soviet newspapers began calling 308 Donald Raleigh Gennadii lanaev and his accomplices? The miscalculation and incom¬ petence of those who plotted to derail the Soviet Union’s reform move¬ ment baffled those of us who were eyewitnesses to the epic events of August 1991 as well as those who celebrated them from afar. Back in 1917 Lenin actually had a much better appreciation of the public mood out in the provinces than did those who later calculated the overthrow of M. S. Gorbachev. Had they taken the pulse of the Russian heart¬ land beforehand, they probably would have reconsidered their plans or abandoned them altogether. As it was, the putschists were deluded by the widespread belief that, apart from a few exceptions, the provinces represented a bulwark of conservatism, and by illusions of a central¬ ized power that still had the clout to compel the provinces to comply with the center’s wishes. Failing to see that the old guard’s ability to survive contrived elections in many provincial centers told us virtually nothing about prevailing attitudes in these settings, the conspirators became victims of their own self-deception. What is the source of such attitudes and perceptions and how do they affect our own ability to probe the social and political landscape in today’s Russia? Entrenched notions about provincial Russia undoubt¬ edly have to do with many factors: the extreme centralization of politi¬ cal power and decision making in that country, both before and after 1917; the substantial material, cultural, and professional advantages to living in the capitals; and the lamentable fact that, thanks to Soviet power, many cities had become more provincial than they had been be¬ fore the Revolution. Something else needs to be addressed: much less tangible but perhaps as crucial in explaining attitudes toward provin¬ cial Russia are popular beliefs about life outside the center. And these are much more pernicious than what New Yorkers or Los Angeleans think about Omaha. It is not uncommon for Muscovites and Petro- graders to regard “provincials” with an element of smugness and con¬ descension, which, at its worst, easily dissolves into contempt and scorn. One is considered to be provincial not because of the parochial or unsophisticated views one might hold, but because of where one happens to reside, and this has been a political question in the Soviet case. So powerful and seductive are such attitudes, moreover, that we have come to see the provinces as a torpid partner to Soviet decep¬ tion, while some inhabitants of the provinces themselves have come to believe they do not matter in the long run. These perceptions are not necessarily wrong, but they are hyperbolic and distorted. How did the August coup play itself out in provincial Russia, and what is the significance of the events there? Before addressing these Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg 309 questions, I must provide a bit of necessary background in a flashback to 1990. Many visitors to Moscow and Leningrad that summer returned home with a sense of a disoriented society slipping into chaos. Talk of economic collapse and imminent civil war, of irreconcilable ethnic unrest and disaffection filled the air, detracting from the newly won, if vulnerable, political freedoms and steady march of the reformers. I, too, was falling under the spell of the rampant pessimism and cynicism until I made it to the provincial capital of Saratov, after a sixteen-year battle to get there, as a participant in an official exchange program between the American Council of Learned Societies and the USSR Academy of Sciences. This month-long experience left me with a sense of cautious optimism about the country’s future, an optimism that has not dissipated as a result of the events of August 1991. A proud, attractive city of contrasts, Saratov has close to a million inhabitants. Spared the devastations of war, the historical section of the old city, not devoid of splendid architectural monuments, serves as a constant reminder of the town’s robust growth in the decades pre¬ ceding World War 1 , while the general state of neglect of much of the historic district and the absence of the numerous onion-shaped domes and spires that once dotted the skyline make an altogether different statement. A respected university and conservatory, an unusually rich art museum, lively theaters, large military hardware factories, good farmland, and aspiring entrepreneurs make Saratov a prominent cul¬ tural and economic center—and provide a basis for hope for the future that many observers believe will be prisoner to the country’s tragic past and ambiguous present. It is a city of handsome people, radish nose¬ gays, dill, dried fish ( voblia ) and vodka ( vodechka ), rickety old buses, and mud. The Volga River embankment with its parks and ice cream peddlers adds to the local color, as does Glebuchev Ravine, the bane of csarist city planners and sanitation engineers, packed tight with nineteenth-century structures lacking right angles and, to this day, for the most part, modern facilities. The well-publicized saga of my battle to get to Saratov (e.g., see the April 5, 1990 issue of Izvestiia) added a certain moral urgency to my presence and guaranteed a rare reception in a city that had been closed to foreigners for decades. Every evening I was the beneficiary of Rus¬ sian hospitality, and paid the price in terms of physical and emotional exhaustion. Nonetheless, the trip rewarded me professionally, for it was the first time my relations with Soviet historians—with most of them, at least—seemed more or less normal. Although initially I feared my fondness for Saratov would lead me 310 Donald Raleigh to romanticize life there, I soon realized that the affinity I felt had more to do with the fact that Saratov had not lived up to the expectations of others, that is, of colleagues and friends in Moscow and Leningrad as well as those back home in America who dismissed Saratov as a dull provincial town. Saratov had become for me what a distant and exotic tribe becomes for the anthropologist seeking to grasp the meaning of a remote culture. That it was so misunderstood, even maligned, both¬ ered me, for 1 was struck by the vitality of local intellectual life, by the sincerity and friendliness of most people with whom I came into contact, and by a freewheeling spirit that decried the less important political fact that the local nomenklatura from the Brezhnev era still clung to power. My stay in Saratov helped broaden my perspective on the course of perestroika in the USSR in mid-1990. Saratov certainly lacked the frenetic political atmosphere of the capitals, but this should not be misread or dismissed as a fact of life in provincial Russia. Still reigning over local politics, reactionary party apparatcbiki had repressed public demonstrations in February and May of 1990. They still controlled the major newspaper, which was as dull as they come. However, I could not help but wonder whether their remaining in power had something to do with the fact that local food supplies were better than in Moscow. That is, I sensed that the old guard still in charge felt more accountable than ever before to its local constituency, which no longer would toler¬ ate mere lip service to its needs and concerns. Shattered was my image of enterprising Saratovites boarding the train to Moscow on Friday nights in order to spend the weekend on shopping sprees. Shattered, too, was the image of a centralized economy controlled from Moscow; the country had already broken apart into local economic units. Beneath the superficial calm, moreover, a heterogeneous civil soci¬ ety measurably and firmly pushed the limits of the permissible. New faces had gotten elected to the Saratov City Soviet—people who had campaigned to end the local Communist party apparatus’s monopoly of power and to open the city to the outside world. While I was in town, the first issues of several independent newspapers appeared. Volga Germans and the local Tatar community pressed for reform and recognition. People exchanged views freely and I found no forbidden topics of conversation. The national media and the spate of unofficial local publications that had started up recently had clearly made sig¬ nificant strides in keeping people informed. But even more important, local sentiments and broad social phenomena paralleled those in the capitals because they made sense in terms of local conditions. Saratov Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg 311 society suffered the familiar crisis of confidence as it searched desper¬ ately for something to believe in. I participated in the same discussions one heard in the capitals about historical alternatives to the path taken by Soviet history, about environmental issues, and about the country’s uncertain future. As elsewhere, a nostalgic and usually uncritical inter¬ est in the past (in part because Saratov was preparing to celebrate its 400th anniversary), filled the spiritual vacuum, as did a revival of reli¬ gious or other spiritual activity, which included a fascination with the occult. The political lineup among the local intelligentsia did not dif¬ fer from that of Moscow: Sakharov was a hero, Yeltsyn was popular, Gorbachev was neither. And, just as in Moscow, all possible political persuasions found adherents. I encountered monarchists, anarchists, neo-fascists, Social Democrats, Tolstoians, Christian socialists, and Hari Krishnas. All in all, I observed a powerful, irresistible undercurrent of change, but without the harshness—and hysteria—evident in Moscow and Leningrad. Although the political mood in Saratov was far from uni¬ form, I nonetheless detected broad public agreement on the most vital and fundamental political and socioeconomic issue: systemic reform had to continue. The successes of perestroika and glasnost were not skin-deep. I left with a good feeling, with the sense that the wide¬ spread expressions of despair and pessimism one heard from Soviets and Westerners alike, when refracted through the prism of Saratov, seemed far less discouraging. A year later, on the eve of the August Revolution, I returned to Saratov under “private” auspices in order to carry out additional research in the local archive and to edit the Russian-language edition of my book, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, 1986). Much had changed since my first visit to the banks of the Volga. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that the country’s entire belief system had been shattered by years of ferment and endless revelations about the tragedy of Soviet history. Soviet power had been completely dis¬ credited in many circles. The “democratic forces” had already gained a foothold in the city soviet the previous year; as a result of elections in the spring of 1991, they had now become much more visible and one of their spokesmen, V. G. Golovachev, soon to emerge as “Saratov’s Yeltsyn,” had been elected chairman of the soviet. Like many of today’s reformers, Golovachev had been a career Communist; like many of today’s reformers, it was unclear whether he had been a Communist by conviction or by convenience. Having spent most of his professional 312 Donald Raleigh years in Saratov, Golovachev now sided with the city’s demokraty on all issues that challenged the power and prestige of the entrenched apparatchiki. He and his supporters encountered strong and even bit¬ ter resistance from the chairman of the city soviet’s executive com¬ mittee, from the ruling cliques settled in some of the neighborhood soviets, from the provincial soviet and its ruling organs, and from the local provincial party boss, K. D. Murenin, whose autocratic inclina¬ tions and egotism, so reminiscent of those of Romania’s former leader Ceausescu, earned him the nickname Murenescu. The major news¬ paper, Kommunist , maintained its conservative, cautious line, while Saratov , one of the several new publications debuting that year—a badly produced, officially reviled, and disrespectful biweekly—boldly supported Golovachev and the reformers. Lack of any reliable information from the outside, other than the official broadcasts aired that morning, and repeated over and over again, colored the first day of the coup in Saratov, creating an anx¬ ious atmosphere and guaranteeing the spread of rumors and relentless speculation. The local media and city’s political leaders were com¬ pletely silent. Although reports of conversations overheard on crowded buses and the like urged law and order, no one with whom I spoke that day, and I spent the entire day in conversation, supported the actions of the cumbersomely named State Committee for the State of Emer¬ gency. Instead, those with whom I shared my fears on August 19 spoke of being stunned or numbed by the news of the coup. Be that as it may, reactions to the official bulletins remained a private matter, something shared with family and friends. People did not congregate, as in Mos¬ cow, to defend any concrete symbol because that which needed their protection, for then, remained an abstraction. Not until that evening when anyone with a television set could, and most likely did, view the nationally broadcast press conference with the coup leaders, were Saratovites able to piece together what was going on elsewhere. The press conference may well come to mark one of the great moments in the history of the Soviet media. Expressing their outrage over the high-handed and unconstitutional conduct of the putschists, representatives from the Soviet press and tv posed no less hostile questions than our own correspondents. A sniffling Gen¬ nadii Ianaev, his face swollen by fatigue and alcohol, had a tough time fielding the combative questions. His trembling hands and quivering voice conveyed an image of impotence, mediocrity, and falsehood; he appeared as a caricature of the quintessential, boozed-up party func¬ tionary from the Brezhnev era. I went to bed relieved that the putschists had seized not power, but merely its illusion. Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg 313 The next day the coup began to unfold locally. It did so sponta¬ neously, shaped by the media and by news from the outside relayed over the telephone and teletype and fax machines. I suspect that only a handful of local apparatchiki had been in the know beforehand. The news undoubtedly posed quite a dilemma for them, for although they may have agreed with what the State Committee sought to accom¬ plish—to derail the new union treaty coming up for ratification and to shore up the party’s diminished power—they realized that the des¬ perate measures would muster little support in Saratov. If they openly sided with the putschists and the endeavor failed, their careers would be over. So they did nothing apart from issuing a few bland calls to re¬ main calm and allowing the official paper, Kommunist, to publish the documents of the State Committee, with no commentary whatsoever apart from a few suspect letters from citizens who demanded law and order. In contrast, the opposition paper, Saratov , which hit the stands at the same time, came out in unequivocal support of President Boris Yeltsyn and Mikhail Gorbachev and carried statements by Yeltsyn, Vice-President of the Supreme Soviet R. Khasbulatov, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Republic I. Silaev. That evening an estimated 12,000 people assembled on Revolution¬ ary Square, Saratov’s equivalent to Moscow’s Red Square, to protest the coup. The local branch of the Democratic Russia movement, a loose caucus of political groups battling to end the Communist party’s hegemony, organized the meeting that featured Golovachev and other leading democrats. Demanding the resignation of the provincial party leadership, the demokraty also pressed for the removal of the Saratov City Soviet’s executive committee, and those responsible for the previ¬ ous day’s information blackout. This audacious demarche contrasted with the behavior of the local party apparatus: First Secretary Murenin (Murenescu) of the provincial party committee had departed on a Volga cruise the night before the coup (!), and the colleagues he had left behind issued yet another flat appeal to remain calm and, in effect, to avoid taking a position, a maneuver that exposed their banality. A handful of extremists in this mixed crowd composed primarily of the intelligentsia raised some radical calls, but in general those who had congregated demonstrated confidence and restraint. The militia and KGB milled about, but made no effort to interfere in any way with the proceedings. The crowd ignored them, just as it ignored, for then, the tasteless, clunky Lenin monument that towers over the square. Lenin’s slightly limp, outstretched right hand seemed to be pointing an ac¬ cusing finger at those who fell under his stony gaze. As well it should. For in a few short days Lenin would no longer be standing in Revolu- 314 Donald Raleigh tionary Square, but in Theater Square, as it had been called before the Revolution. The irreverent would be collecting signatures on a petition demanding his removal, while a few scandalized war veterans would try in vain to prevent vandals from defaming the icon, as in spraying in blood-red paint on the monument’s pedestal, “hangman of Russia” (palach Rossii). The drama played itself out at breakneck speed. Each day was like an epoch, and I, like those with whom I mingled, experienced every human emotion, in rapid succession and in magnified form. But the sense of euphoria more than anything else distinguished these dra¬ matic days. The collapse of the coup, the arrest of its ringleaders, the return of Gorbachev to Moscow, the triumph of Yeltsyn, the downfall of the Communist party, the reorganization of the kgb, and the top¬ pling of symbols of the Communist dictatorship revolutionized Sara¬ tov’s political life and public consciousness. The coup proved to be a blessing in disguise for local democratic elements, who now got the upper hand in the ongoing power struggle. In Saratov, the city soviet sat in emergency session for five days, transmitting its delibera¬ tions to passersby in the heart of town. The old guard resigned or was voted out, and Golovachev, designated by Boris Yeltsyn as his local plenipotentiary, presided over the transformations. Less suspect indi¬ viduals replaced the former provincial leaders. As could be expected, many of the new officials were former Communists—the democratic forces, with a few exceptions, had had more experience in challenging the former status quo than in administering. When I left Saratov in mid-September recently elevated officials were trying to sort out their strained relationship with Golovachev, whose powers had not yet been delimited by the then popular president of the Russian republic. It was clear that one’s behavior during the putsch would now prove to be an overriding determinant in defining suitability for public office. A true power struggle was under way, concealed by calls for consensus and unity, and fueled by rumors that when the offices of the party bosses and kgb chiefs were sealed, lists of Saratovites slated for eventual arrest were discovered. My unexpected encounters with the kgb also reveal a great deal about the ebb and flow of the coup from the perspective of Saratov. In retrospect, I should have anticipated some trouble with the security organs—and I did expect to have my activities monitored—for I had arranged to rent an apartment in what was still, at the time of my in¬ opportune arrival, a closed city. Moreover, even before my return to the provinces, several Saratovites with whom I had been in contact the Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg 315 year before cautioned: kgb agents had questioned them after my first visit to the city, insisting that there was more to me than met the eye. I suspect that what lay at the heart of their mistrust was the fact that over the years I had created something of a cause celebre out of the imposed distance from my sources. In making a virtue out of remoteness from the object of my scholarly investigation, I had fueled the mindless sus¬ picions of those who simply could not comprehend why Saratov could be of interest to me. Claiming to be a member of the Association of Private Detectives (!), my solicitous host phoned or dropped in on me each day with offerings of tomatoes, cucumbers, and bite-size purple plums. A short, compact man who liked to box and fish, he sought in his soothing baritone voice to convince me of his good intentions and concern for my well-being. His assessment of the public mood on the morning of the coup especially interested me—the narod (people), he argued, had not submitted to the “former” government and were not likely to comply with the decrees issued by the putschists either. His pronouncement carried some authority, for in Moscow he had told me in the company of friends that he would not be surprised if Gorbachev were removed from power soon. Recollections of this episode came back to haunt me the week of the coup, particularly when my Moscow friends phoned, reminded me of the conversation, and advised me to stay clear of this “dangerous” man. Although he never formally admitted who he was, there was no doubt in my mind, nor in that of my Saratov colleagues and friends, as to Viktor Ivanovich’s real identity. During the week of August 19— z6, his calls and morning visits became less frequent. When the coup attempt failed and the Communist party came apart at its worn seams, he dropped in unexpectedly. Explaining that he had been asked to help some “comrades” flee from the Baltic states where they were no longer welcome and perhaps in danger, he requested my permission to release him from any responsibility for my stay. When I anxiously concurred, he pronounced me a free man in Saratov and told me that I could move out of the apartment that had been put at my disposal and live wher¬ ever I wished, providing I register with the police. Because he was no longer able to meet his responsibilities, he said, I owed him nothing for the apartment. It might have been a coincidence, but my hot water went off with his self-proclaimed exile. During the next two weeks, Viktor Ivanovich became the subject of a great deal of lighthearted speculation and joking among my asso¬ ciates, so much so that a gutsy correspondent from the newspaper Saratov drafted an article about my adventures, which she entitled “I 316 Donald Raleigh Was a Guest of the kg b I had doubts about letting the article run, but her suggestion that I was resorting to self-censorship and her persis¬ tent reminders that a revolution had taken place and that an article of this sort could serve some good convinced me to surrender my doubts. That is, until the sudden return of Viktor Ivanovich. First my phone went dead, preventing me from contacting Moscow. Then his call took me by surprise. 1 avoided him that day. The next morning, however, he waited downstairs at the exit until I emerged from my apartment. Without mentioning the article specifically, he accused me of soiling his reputation in town and spreading slanderous rumors about him. For a moment he convinced me that I had made a serious mistake. Breaking off the conversation, I insisted I did not wish to see him again, and rushed to the newspaper office to have the story dropped before the proofs went to press. There I was told that an in-house informant had undoubtedly tipped off the kgb, which “could not be pleased by the piece.” I reread it. It was written with humor and irony. It was set in the conditional mood. After discussing the matter with colleagues braver than I, I agreed to let it be published. It appeared the next day, a few hours before I flew to Moscow. As a postscript, I should note that my host did not come by again to see me, as he had threatened. Instead, I received a call from a woman who claimed to be the owner of the apartment in which I was living. She apologized that Viktor Iva¬ novich could not drop in to see me off and made arrangements for me to leave the key next door, where she just happened to be. In my frequent travels to the Soviet Union over the past twenty years I took it for granted that among my acquaintances and colleagues and those I considered friends were a number of kgb informants and agents. However, it was simply impossible to say with absolute assur¬ ance who they might be. Thus it struck me as paradoxical that my first clear run-in with the reviled kgb took place when the country had never been as open. Although I can only guess the elusive consider¬ ations that went into the kgb’s thinking, this episode is important to recount because it points to a shift in the balance of political forces in what had been dismissed as a “bastion of stagnation.” More impor¬ tant, it underscores that consequence of the coup that made the greatest impression on me at the time: people simply stopped being afraid. This is the sentiment, the refrain I heard constantly. Political consciousness, like class consciousness and perhaps national consciousness, may well come about as a result of something specific that happens to people. The events surrounding the attempted coup aroused in people some¬ thing I had not noticed before. It broke the spell of fear, making it Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg 317 easier for people to give voice to their inner promptings. Once events peeled away the representation of centralized power and it became clear that nothing substantive stood behind it, people’s fears disap¬ peared. As did Viktor Ivanovich himself. Admittedly, it is difficult to assess just how this evaporation of fear will affect developments in the post -perestroika era, as euphoria gives way to melancholia, but it cer¬ tainly marks a turning point in the country’s modern history. It defined the moment and invested it with historical significance. It gave people new hope. At the very least, it should make it possible to deal with the country’s enormous problems in an aboveboard way. Upon his return to Moscow, Gorbachev himself realized that a revolution in public consciousness had taken place and publicly admitted that the Soviet Union was now a different country, inhabited by a different people. To understand more fully why the end of fear in provincial pub¬ lic life marks a major turning point, it is necessary to speculate in brief on the reform phenomenon that got under way back in 1985. The major problem facing the Soviet Union before Gorbachev had come to power, I would argue, was not political or economic, but moral. By this I simply mean that no systemic change was possible until the country dealt with its own past honestly and openly. A revolution in conscious¬ ness, perestroika was doomed to failure unless Clio’s box was thrown open and the country’s historical past was purified by public debate. Only after a process of self-confrontation could the country set about solving its other problems. Thus, to an extent, the most consequen¬ tial challenge the country faced had already been addressed before the coup; the putsch merely completed the process. The August Revolution represents an unambiguous victory for civil society, precarious as it is. It means an enormous step forward in ad¬ dressing the key issue of the country’s political future. The significance of this great event, however, has been obscured by almost universal focus on the epic dimensions of the challenges confronting the country. My experience in Saratov suggests that our emphasis on the immedi¬ ate and our tendency toward catastrophic and pessimistic thinking regarding today’s reform movement often prevent us from considering plausible scenarios that inspire hope. The problems we discuss today existed long before the start of perestroika, but official propaganda obscured their scope from us and from the Soviet people. How they play themselves out now should not be cause for surprise or, for that matter, undue alarm, but for sober reflection. Equally disturbing is the widely held view that reactionary forces might strike again, as only Moscow, Leningrad, and the Baltic states produced strong resistance 318 Donald Raleigh to the coup attempt. Those who are in agreement with this assess¬ ment are confusing superficial manifestations with the true meaning and substance of the various strategies of social protest. The collapse of the Soviet state’s central power serves as a poignant example of the need to look beyond today’s grim headlines in order to reach a better understanding of what is taking place in this part of the world. To our amazement, Eastern Europe first spun out of Moscow’s galaxy, then the Soviet republics. Now, within the Russian repub¬ lic itself, the urge toward localism is overpowering. Observers have lamented that, as technology is making the world smaller and West¬ ern Europe is taking a step toward greater unity, we are paradoxically experiencing a rise of petty nationalisms and the pull of centripetal forces in the former Soviet Union. Is this disarray dangerous, or does the area’s salvation lie in putting an end to the long tradition of state power and control over society? What is exciting about this scenario is that the phenomenon runs against the predominant grain of the Rus¬ sian historical experience. Left to evolve organically, the region will ultimately give rise to new integrations and relationships. Some will be better simply because they will be more honest. It is important to take a long-term view here; the dissolution of the union might be a good thing. I wonder if what we are actually seeing is an integral part of the broader phenomenon of accommodation, a distinct variation on the recognition of multiculturalism in a postindustrial, postimperial world. The Soviet Union needs to unravel first, before the region can put itself back together again. The Communist regime’s legacy, after all, is a mixed one: seventy-five years of Soviet power have both in¬ flamed national feelings and created toleration of diversity, have bred both a passive reliance on the center and a bitterness over rigid cen¬ tralization. We might take a similar approach in regard to the economy. Is there a bright side to the falling output, huge and growing deficit, inflation, unprecedented shortages, and widespread despair? If, indeed, the tran¬ sition to a market economy is the answer for this part of the world, then the current disorder is an unavoidable and necessary stage, not a state of affairs that will scar the popular consciousness or necessarily unleash a whiplash reaction against reform. It proved impossible to decree a market economy into existence; the rigid command economy could not be planned into a market one. However disorienting the present disorder might be, it is a logical consequence of failed efforts to create a market economy from the top down. Moreover, in dwell- Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg 319 ing upon the difficulties that lie ahead, we are giving short shrift to the advances that have been registered so far. The country is as far away from the old centralized economy that lies in shambles as it is from a market-directed one. The fact that the provinces are bartering and trading with one another and that many Saratovites have taken to tilling plots on the outskirts of town for the first time or are doing so with greater determination are positive signs that people have lost hope in the center to solve their problems and have taken their own measures to do so. They may not be pleased with this, but the fact that they are taking responsibility for their future should not go unnoticed. Besides, if they proved capable of adapting to the former command- administrative system—in effect creating a strapping black market economy within the official one and forcing the regime to turn a deaf ear to it—they have the know-how and resourcefulness to adjust to a transition economy. In fact, what we see now is evidence that they are doing precisely this. What about the lack of a democratic tradition we keep hearing about? Here the historical record, and not only theirs, makes it harder to be overly optimistic, for political democracy is an invention of pros¬ perity. As in much of Eastern Europe, it has become clear that the democratic movement was not so much democratic as it was opposed to the Communist order. Be that as it may, Russia did not lack demo¬ cratic traditions, as we have seen in the decades before the Revolution. Much of the country’s powerful non-Bolshevik, populist, and socialist tradition that went down in defeat back then was, at heart, democratic. It was also provincial-based. Moreover, Soviet Russia has produced some exceptional democrats, most notably Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, who serve as a sort of aclu to the populist rough-and-tumble democracy of Boris Yeltsyn. It is too early to tell, but perhaps the Soviet experience offers a lesson to us that a variety of paths to human freedom exist, and that some, unfortunately, are more tortuous than others. Is it patronizing to find something optimistic to say when the entire country is inclined toward pessimistic thinking? I don’t believe so. Popular fears of civil war, of counterrevolution, of economic disaster, of clashes between nationalities and the like might also have a sobering, constructive effect on public discourse. Speaking openly of the enor¬ mity of the country’s historical tragedies raises public consciousness, making it far more difficult to repeat them. Knowledge has enfran¬ chised the people. It bears repeating that there is much to fear these days, except for the institutionalized fear that existed before, paralyz- 320 Donald Raleigh ing public life. As before the Gorbachev era, the critical question today remains a moral one as the country comes to grips with working out a new public morality. To begin, it must first face the unenviable task of figuring out how to deal with the two million people who, in various degrees, have served as informants for the secret police. Now that many talented and principled people from all walks of life have a stake in making things work again, the rampant pessimism one encounters today ultimately might be put to good use by advancing metaphors that will offer new interpretations of Russian history. It is anyone’s guess as regards the underlying representations of political unconsciousness that some day will be articulated, but one possibility is that they might find temporary expression in images of the Russian people as “veterans of Soviet power” (just as earlier they were depicted as the hapless victims of the Mongol yoke). In highlighting their suf¬ fering, the Russian people might stumble across their contribution to world history. There is some consolation in the fact that despite the ahistorical tone of much of the public discussion of the country’s past, tens of millions of people have taken part in the debate. For now, it might be asking too much of them to argue that the Revolution of 1917 was anything other than a failure and a mistake. For now, it might be asking too much of them to resist the ad hominem and undiscrimi¬ nating rejection of the last seventy-five years. What we see as naive teleologies are to be expected from a people whose own history was falsified by “professional” party historians who created and sustained historical myths and did not teach generations of Soviet people to think historically. It will take time to sort things out, but it is certain that the paradigms will eventually change, as well as their crude Flegelian underpinnings. Perestroika is over and novostroika, new structuring, has begun. It is difficult for us to comprehend recent events in the Soviet Union, not only because of their expansive dimensions and global implications but also because they have taken place at a time when we are hard put to help solve their problems: we have few ideas as to how to do so, and we are preoccupied with our own economic woes. We cannot set right our own pressing social problems, so theirs seem formidable, particularly because we understand the extent to which outside devel¬ opments have played a critical role at crucial junctures in the Soviet past. With the exception of puzzling gestures of support from our De¬ fense Department, we appear to have disavowed any strategic part in the process of stabilizing the post -perestroika era, justifying our lack Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg 321 of resolve and plans by calling attention to the uncertainty of the Soviet tomorrow, both literally and figuratively. Soviet perceptions likewise confuse things. The layers of represen¬ tation that blend together to form images of the Soviet Union have proven to be more durable than the power to deny visas to foreigners. At one layer, Saratov was never closed, for the feeling of kinship with a larger whole created by our technological and electronic age, the irrepressible flow of information, the power of ideas, the autonomy inherent in a civil society, and the complexity of human discourse dem¬ onstrated far greater pull than the force of an artificial administrative status. At another layer, Saratov was as closed to Ianaev as it was to me. The Soviet text is more open than ever before, but they, and we, do not appear to be reading it any better because we’re still reluctant to read closely all the chapters. If I’m right, we’re confusing freedom with disorder and chaos and keeping the Russian people chained to their past. Index Abalkin, Leonid, 18 Abortion, 236, 2.41, 251 n.14 Abramov, Fedor, hi Academy of Sciences, 236, 239, 309 Acmeism, 273 Acmeists, 159 Aesthetics: American literary scholar¬ ship and, 156; Bakhtin and, 163-64, 165—66,168; defined, 156; Europe and, 156,161; Formalists and, 160- 64,166; literary focus of, 160; Moser and, 157; physiology and, 162—63,168; Pisarev and, 157—58, 159,160; poetry and, 158,159,161; political issues and, 158—59; Real¬ ism and, 160, 278; Solov’ev and, 163; Tynianov and, 164—65 Afghanistan, 36 After the Storm, 299 Aitmatov, Chingiz, 272 Akhmatova, Anna, 109,116, 300 Aksenov, Vasilii, 271, 281 Aleksandr Nevskii, 48 Aleshkovskii, luz, 261, 281 Alexander I, 291—92 Alexander II, 36—43,158. See also Great Reforms Alexander Nevsky, 102,103 All-Union Artistic Conference of Workers in the Soviet Film Indus¬ try, 97 All-Union Conference on Thematic Planning, 98 Amalrik, Andrei, 43—44 American Council of Learned Soci¬ eties, 309 Amur Valley, 143 Andreev, Leonid, 130,134 Andropov, Iurii, 298 Animal Farm, 69, 85, 88 Antichrist, 259 Antisexus, 228 Antokol’skii, Pavel, 63 Appearance of Us, The, 260, 279, 280, 282 Arabesques, 50 Aristotle, 156 Armand, Inessa, 252 n.20 Atwood, Margaret, 234 August revolution (coup), 308, 313—18 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 85 Authoritarianism, 26, 27 Autofunction, 165 Avenarius, 63 Avramenko, Il’ia, 125 Azhaev, Vasilii, 132—33,141-42,146, 147,149-51,152- Babaevskii, Semen, 112,127 Babcock, Barbara A., 58 Bagritskii, Eduard, 132 Bakhtin, Mikhail: aesthetics and, 163, 1:55—56,168; biology and, 170— 72; body thinking and, 166—68; critics of, 155,170; dialogism and, 168,172,174; Driesch and, 171; embodiment and, 167—68,169— 70; Formalists and, 163—64,166; Kanaev and, 167; naive positivism and, 173; natural sciences and, 169; Tynianov and, 164 Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, 169 Baklanov, Grigorii, 262 Balance of Light of Daytime and Nightime Stars, The, 279 Baltic Republics, 19 Baranskaia, Natal’ia, 233—34 Barnet, Boris, 104 Barrel-Organ, The, 83 Barthes, Roland, no, 233 Bartov, 264 Battle of Borodino, 297 324 Index Battle of Kulikovo, 297 Battleship Potemkin, The, 2.96 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 156 Bazin, Andre, too Bear’s Wedding, The, 99 Beliaeva, Nina, 238 Belinskii, Vissarion, 156—57,159, 269, 302 Belyi, Andrei, 201, 203, 270 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 20, 270 Bergson, Henri, 171 Bessolova, Ol’ga, 252 n.26 Biology, 170-72, 173-74 Birth of a Tragedy, 295 Bloom, Harold, 156 Bogoliubskii, Andrei, 52 Boldyrev, Sergei, 134—35 Bolshevik (October) Revolution, 14, 42, 53-56,183,295,296 Bolsheviks, 16, 292—97 Bondarev, Iurii, 262 Bonner, Elena, 319 Borges, Jorge Luis, 87—88 Borodanin, Sasha, 240 Borodulin, Rygor, 64—65 Boule de Suif, 100 Boxcar, The, 149—50 Bradbury, Ray Douglas, 72—73 Brave New World, 69—70, 89. See also Huxley, Aldous Brecht, Bertolt, 95 Brezhnev, Leonid, 284, 298 Bright Shore, The, 128 Brikhnichev, Iona, 54 Britain, 21-22, 23, 234 British Labour party, 28 Broad Stream, The, 130 Brodskii, Iosif, 273 Bronze Horseman, The, 61 Brown, Edward, 55 Bubennov, Mikhail, 118 Builders, The, 124 Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 180 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 60, 62—63,128 Bureaucracy: accomodation of, 34; conservative forces and, 26; dys¬ topias and, 85—86; Great Reforms and, 38; health care and, 29; liberal reform and, 31 Burns, Robert, 233 Bykov, Vasil’, 1x8 Cape Pogibi, 143 Capitalism, 24—25 Captain's Daughter, The, 257 Castle, The, 69-70, 73,85-87,90 Catastrophic thinking, 1 Catherine II, 19—20 Caucasus, 16 Center for Gender Studies, 239 Chaadaev, Piotr, 2,37—38, 52, 275 Chapaev, 100-101 Chaplin, Charlie, 101 Cheka, 55, 72,192-193 Chernenko, K. U., 298 Cherniavsky, Michael, 49, 52 Chernobyl, 36 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 122,158, 161,302 Chevengur, 69—70; communism and, 82-83; eunuch of the soul and, 187— 88; reality and, 71,193; salvation and, 78—79;space and,197—98; transparency and, 91 China, 31,143, 226 Christianity, 84, 93, 272 Christiansen, Broder, 162 Chudakova, Marietta, 114,115,122 Chukovskaia, Lidiia, 147-48 Circle, The, 260 City Lights, 101 Civic Critics, 155,159,160,162 Civil War, 297 Civil War in France, 293 Clark, Katerina, 57-58 Clean!Pure Life, A, 241 Cold war, 307 Collectivization, 300 “Cologne Address,” 19 Communism: Chevengur and, 82—83; democratic movement and, 319; disintegration of, 257; dystopias and, 82—83; Golovachev and, 311; Greece and, 295; Lenin and, 54; psychoanalysis and, 184; rebirth of, 281 Communist party, 43, 310, 313, 314, 315 Companions, The, 129 Conceptualism, 264—66, 267, 272, 283 Congress of People’s Deputies, 16-17 Constitutional Democratic party, 24, 41 Counterplan, 98 Index 325 Cranberry Grove, The, 127—28 Crime and Punishment, 302 Crimean War, 36—37, 38, 40 Czarism, 26 Daleko ot Moskvy. See Far from Moscow Daly, Mary, 249 D’Anthes, 48, 51, 63 Danton, Georges, 295 Darkness at Noon, 70 De Beauvoir, Simone, 237 De Maistre, Joseph, 37 De Man, Paul, 155 Death of Ivan Il’ich, 219 Decembrist poetry, 51—52 Decembrist revolt, 49, 289, 296, 303 Decisive Years, The, 134-35 Delbruck, Max, 174 Democracy, 22, 84 Democratic Russia Movement, 313 Democratic Union, 28 Democratization. See Glasnost Dialogic Imagination, The, 168 Dialogism, 167—70,172,174 Diary of a Writer, 302 Dictionary of Russian Literature Since 1917,141,142 Diderot, Denis, 283 Dina Dzu-dzu, 99 Dinamo-mashina, 221 Dmitrii Donskoi, 48 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 140,144 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 160 Dombrovskii, lurii, 69—70, 71, 77, 87 Dostoevskii, Fedor: dystopias and, 73; evolution of Russian literature and, 269—70; fear and, 89-90; Great Re¬ forms and, 39—40; polyphony and, 168; Pushkin myth and, 53; Solov’ev and, 163; suicide and, 81 Driesch, Hans, 171 Druzhba narodov (The Friendship of Nations), 17,149 Dystopia(s): art and, 76—77; bureau¬ cracy and, 85—86; Christian mystery and, 80; collective labor and, 76; communism and, 82—83; death and, 77; factual basis of, 69—71; fear and, 89—90; freedom and happiness and, 80-81; human image and, 74- 75; human nature and, 93; miracles and, 89; namelessness and, 80; new language and, 73; parental principle and, 77—78; as personalistic, 74; plots of, 89; population control and, 75; power and, 84—87; rationality and, 84—85; salvation and, 78—79; sexual freedom and, 76; time and, 88—89; transparency and, 91—93 Early Poems, The, 216 Economy, Soviet, 18—19, 2 5, 318-19 Egypt, 31 Eisenstein, Sergei, 55, 296 Ekk, Nikolai, 99 El’iashevich, Arkadii, 127 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 156 Engels, Friedrich, 31, 293, 301 Epoch, The, 163 Epstein, Mikhail, 299 Eremenko, Aleksandr, 266—67 Ermilov, Vladimir, 118,122—23 , 12 5 Erofeev, Venedikt, 281 Erofeev, Viktor, 258, 262, 267, 279, 281 Esenia, 105 Ethereal Trail, The, 222, 227 Eunuch of the soul: cognitive element and, 210; human landscape and, 198; machines and, 229; perception and, 190-91, 208; Platonov and, 201, 208; as witness, 188,189—90 Europe, 21,156,161, 318, 319 Evgenii Onegin, 158 Evtushenko, Evgenii, 271 Faculty of Unnecessary Things, The, 69-70,71,87 Fahrenheit 451, 72 Fantastic realism, 272 Far East, The, 146 Far From Moscow: anti-Semitism in, 144—45; author of, 141—42,146, 147,149-51,152; “double quality” of, 151; enemies and, 132—33; pub¬ lishing record of, 143—44; reality and, 142-43,145,147,149; setting of, 142; Simonov and, 150; socialist realism and, 142,144; Stalin Prize and, 143,144,146; variations of, 144-47,15 1 —52.; war and, 146 Fathers and Sons, 162—63 326 Index February Revolution, 2.93, 294 Fedorov, Nikolai, 220—21 Fedorov, Sviatoslav, 29 Female Logic, 241 Femininity v. femaleness, 251 n.17 Feminism: Baranskaia and, 233—34; glasnost and, 238—40; Narbikova and, 249—50; Petrushevskaia and, 246—47, 249—50; Russian women denounce, 238; Soviet public opin¬ ion and, 241; Soviet culture and, 252 n.20; Soviet film and prose and, 234—35; Soviet women writers and, 242—44; Tolstaia and, 247—50; transformation via, 234; Western film and prose and, 234 Fet, Afanasii, 157 Film, Soviet: dislocation of, 105—6; entertainment content of, 98; Ger¬ man influence in, 104; ideological content of, 96—98,100,104; import and export of, 101; mass taste and state demand and, 102—5; monopoly of, 95, 96-97,102; popularity index of, 102-3; quantity of, 95- 98; statistical data secrecy and, 96; technological advancement and, 96; youth audience and, 103 Filonov, Pavel, 199—200, 205, 207 Finland, 293 Florenskii, Pavel, 270 Fonvizin, Denis, 268 Foreign, 131 Foreign Shadow, The, 133 Foreword to Life, 141-42,149 Formalists, 159,160—66 Formal Method in Literary Study, The, 166 Forty-First, The, 99 Foundation Pit, The, 187,188,195, 214—16, 224—27 France, 18, 24, 234, 293 Free Russian Press, 43 French Revolution, 15, 292, 293, 294— 96, 300—301 Freudianism: German rejection of, 178; Marxism and, 179,182,183; Soviet acceptance of, 177—78; Trotskii and, 180,181 Friedman, Susan, 248 Friedrich Schiller, 104 Friends and Enemies, 132 Futurists, 54,159,161, 290 Futurological Congress, The, 89 Gaal, Franscesca, 102 Gaidar, Arkadii, 103 Gefter, Mikhail, 115,131 Gerb, Igor’, 279 Germany, 104,156,178,181, 234 Gestalt psychology, 162 Gilbert, Sandra, 247 Girl of My Dreams, The, 104,105 Glasnost: feminist awareness and, 238—40; Golovachev and, 311—12; via perestroika, 18; postmodernist reduction and, 287; repressive toler¬ ance and, 32; Saratov and, 311—12; social literature and, 274; state’s will and, 16; Treaty of Paris and, 37; Western tendencies and, 238 Gogol, Nikolai: critical debates and, 302; death and, 202-4; evolution of Russian literature and, 269, 271; Nabokov and, 91; national iden¬ tity and, 157; Nicholaevan Russia and, 297; Pushkin myth and, 50, 53; vision and, 201—2, 204—5, 20 7 Going Under, 148-49 Golovachev, V. G., 3x1—14 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 35, 298, 311, 313, 314,317 Gor’kii, Maksim, 271 Gorky Literary Institute, 141 Gots, Gennadii, 65 Great Force, The, 112,133 Great Reforms: autocracy and, 40, 43; bureaucracy and, 38; censorship and, 37, 42—43; discontent with, 36, 41, 42; Dostoevskii and, 39; educa¬ tion and, 38; effectiveness of, 39—42; effects of, 37; ethnic borderlands and, 39, 41—42; Gorbachev’s pere¬ stroika and, 43—44; Herzen and, 39; industrialization and, 39; judiciary and, 38; landowners and, 41; lib¬ eralism and, 39—40; Marxism and, 42; military reforms and, 38-39; perestroika and, 36; political terror¬ ism and, 42; problems facing, 38; taxes and, 40-41; Russia’s power status and, 40; serfdom and, 38, 40—41; young intellectuals and, 42 Great Russian Cultural Tradition, 300 Index 327 Great Turning Point, The, 104 Great Wall of China, The, 226 Greece, ancient, 292, 295-96 Green Street, The, 112,133 Greenway, John, 57 Grigor’ev, Apollon, 50 Grossman, Vasilii, 69—70, 71, 88, 90, 92,103,117,118 Grudtsova, Ol’ga, 122 Gubar, Susan, 247 Gulag Archipelago, The, 14 Guilty without Guilt, 103-4 Gumilev, Nikolai, 109, 271 Gypsies, The, 53 Handmaid’s Tale, The, 234 Happiness, 134 Harvest, The, 128 Health care, 29-30 Heavenly Sloth, The, 104 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 16 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 247—48 Hemingway, Ernest, 243 Herzen, Alexander, 39, 42, 43, 261 Hirschkop, Ken, 169,170 Historical analogies, 36 Historical models of Soviet culture: Bolsheviks and, 292, 293, 297; Brezhnev era and, 298; contempo¬ rary authors and, 300—304; French Revolution and, 293—95, 300—301; Gorbachev era and, 298—304; Khru¬ shchev era and, 298; leftist groups and, 292—94; military models and, 297—98; non-Bolshevik intelligen¬ tsia and, 297; retrospectivism and, 290—91, 298—99; Russocentricism and, 296—97; Stalin era and, 298 History, paradoxes of, 15—16 History of Postwar Soviet Writing: The Literature of Moral Opposition, A, 147 Hitler, Adolf, 178 House on Moika, The, 125 Hungary, 24 Huxley, Aldous, 69; death and, 77; fear and, 90; freedom and, 73, 81, 93; parenthood and, 78; Platonov and, 71; production of humans and, 75; rationality and, 84; renewal and, 79; solitude and, 91; time and, 89; Zamiatin and, 72 Iampol’skii, Boris, 69—70 Ianaev, Gennadii, 307—8, 312 ll’ina, Natal’ia, 242 In a Good Cause, 117,118 Indian Tomb, 104 Inspector General, The, 6on In the Beautiful and Raging World, 223-24 In the Trenches of Stalingrad, 117—18 Invasion, 104 Invitation to a Beheading, An, 69-70; death and, 77; fear and, 90; free¬ dom and, 72; individual feeling and, 76; parenthood and, 77—78; power and, 70—71, 83; time and, 88-89; transparency and, 87, 91 Iur’enen, Sergei, 274 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 270 Ivanova, Natal’ia, 242, 243 Ivanov’s Family, 117 Ivan the Terrible, 289 Jacobus, Mary, 246 Jakobson, Roman, 162,165 Japan, 23-24 Jong, Erica, 234 Joyce, James, 275 Juvenile Sea, 77,195, 210, 212, 222 Kabakov, Il’ia, 264, 267 Kadet party, 41 Kafka, Franz, 69—70, 85, 226 Kalinina, Mariia, 240 Kanaev, Ivan, 167 Kant, Immanuel, 156,169 Kantemir, Prince Antiokh Dmitrie¬ vich, 268 Kapitan Dikshtein, 13 Kaplan, Fania, 54 Karakozov, Dmitrii, 158 Karamzin, Nikolai, 271 Karo, 103 Kasack, Wolfgang, 139,141 Katerli, Elena, 126 Kautsky, Karl, 180 Kaverin, Veniamin, 59—60, 63—64 Kazan, University of, 47 Kennedy, John F., 49 Kesey, Ken, 89 kgb, 313, 314—16 Khasbulatov, Ruslan, 313 Khrushchev, Nikita, 298 328 Index Kibirov, Timur, 264 Kim, Anatolii, 272 Kireevskii, Ivan, 50 Kirov, Sergei, 150 Kiukhelbeker, Vil’gelm, 51 Kliamkin, Igor’, 26 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 49, 53, 57 Knight of the Golden Star, The, 112 Knizhnoe obozrenie (The Review of Books), 18 Koestler, Arthur, 70 Kolendo, 143 Kollontai, Aleksandra, 252 n.20 Kol’tsov, Aleksei, 50 Kolyma Tales, 69—70 Komar, Vitaly, 109, 267 Kommunist, 118,312, 313 Komsomol’sk, 143 Korneichuk, Aleksandr, 127 Korotich, Vitalii, 262 Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit), 187, 188,195, 214—16, 224—27 Kozhevnikov, Vadim, 127 Kronstadt, 16 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 273 Krupskaia, Nadezhda, 181-82 Kruzhilikha, 129—30 Kuban, The, 130 Kuniaev, Stanislav, 262 Kur-Urmiisk, 143 Kuraev, Mikhail, 302, 303 Kutik, Il’ia, 274 Kuznetsov, Iurii, 272 Lame Gentleman, The, 99 Lane, Christel, 58 Latin America, 22 Law of Honor, The, 133 Left ideology: British Labour party and, 28; characteristics of, 22; democratic ideology and, 22; East- West comparisons on, 34; economy and, 25; health care and, 29—30; liberalism and, 24, 31, 32; marginal position of, 32—33; money and, 25; nonofficial organizations and, 27; People’s Fronts and, 28; radical¬ ism and, 27—28; reform program of, 30—31; Russia and, 24; ruling circle and, 24; school reform and, 29; socialism and, 22; special zones and, 30; Stalinism and, 22, 26; state enterprises and, 31; totalitarianism and, 23-24; United Fronts and, 27; working class and, 23, 24, 25 Lektorskii, A., 118 Lenin, Vladimir: ascent to fame by, 54—55; August revolution and, 308; Brikhnichev and, 54; Brown and, 55; Civil War in France and, 293; evolution of myth of, 58; gender equality and, 235; Maiakovskii and, 55; New Economic Policy by, i6n, 35; Paris Commune and, 293, 294; psychoanalysis and, 181; quoted on revolution, 296; Saratov monu¬ ment of, 313—14; Sosnovskii and, 55; Trotskii and, 54, 60 Leningrad, 115 Lenin in 1918, 102 Lenin in October, 102,103 Lermontov, Mikhail, 48, 50, 51, 52, 5A 63 Let History Judge, 147 Levitt, Marcus, 53 Liberalism/Liberals: authority and, 27; classical, compared with current, 26—27; czarism and, 26; economic reforms and, 25; Great Reforms and, 39—40, 42; Huxley and, 84; left ideology and, 24, 31, 32; media con¬ trol by, 32; People’s Fronts and, 33; poor and, 24-25; populism and, 33; positive reform role by, 32; Yeltsyn and, 33 Life and Fate, 69—70, 72, 92 Light Over the Earth, 127 Lipovskaia, Ol’ga, 239, 251 n.14 Literary theory, 155 Literature, Russian: aesthetic phase of, 273—74, 278 ( see also Aesthet¬ ics); classicism and, 268; concep¬ tualism and, 264-67, 272, 283; contemporary, 258-60, 278—79; decentered prose and, 282; devel¬ opment of, 274-77; eccentric prose and, 28r— 82; liberals and, 267—68; metaphysical phase of, 272; me¬ tarealism and, 263, 272; morality and, 268, 269, 272; opposing camps of, 262, 267-68; postmodernism and, 283-87; Pushkin’s death and, Index 329 47—48; religious phase of, z68, 270; social phase of, 268; Soviet era of, 270—71; Stalinism and, 299; totali¬ tarianism and, no; women and, 241—42. See also Postwar literature; names of specific authors and titles Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Gazette), 26,300 Literaturnyi kritik (Literary Critic), 60 Little Ceasar, too Little Mamma, 102 Lodge, David, 234 Lomonosov, Mikhailo, 268 Lonely White Sail Gleams, A, 103 Lukonin, Mikhail, 125 Lurie, Alison, 234 Lysenko, Trofim, 135—36 Madwoman in the Attic, The, 247 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 54, 55—57, 271 Malia, Martin, 49 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 57 Malis, G., 178,184 Mamleev, Iurii, 272 Man from the Restaurant, The, 99 Mann, Iurii, 50 Man with a Gun, The, 103 Marat, Jean Paul, 295, 296 Market Stalinism, 26, 27, 34 Marsovich, Ruslan, 279—80 Marx, Karl, 31, 293, 301 Marxism: Freudianism and, 179, 182,183; Great Reforms and, 42; psychoanalysis and, 178—79,180; women and, 235 Marxism and the Philosophy of Lan¬ guage, 165 Master and Margarita, 63 May Night, A, 91 Mayr, Ernst, 172 Medvedev, Pavel, 166 Medvedev, Roy, 147 Melamid, Aleksandr, 109, 267 Mel’nikov-Pecherskii, Pavel, 47—48 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 270 Metarealism, 263, 267, 272 Mezhrabpom studio, 98—99 Michnik, Adam, 21 Middle Asia, 16 Migranian, Andranik, 26 Mikhanovskii, Vladimir, 65 Minoustchine, Maya, 151 Miss Mend, 99 Modern Times, 101 Morozov, Pavlik, 113 Moscow News, 33, 240 Moscow’s Sons, 127 Moscow Street, A, 69—70 Moser, Charles, 157,158,163 Mother, 99 Motyleva, Tamara, 112 Movies. See Film Multiculturalism, 318 Mumford, Lewis, 224 Murenin, K. D., 312, 313 Myth compared with rituals, 57 Mythmaking, 48-49, 55, 57, 59, 65, 268 Nabokov, Vladimir, 69, 202, 243, 274. See also Invitation to a Behead¬ ing, An Nanaisk, 143 Napolean, 297 Napoleanic War, 49 Narbikova, Valeriia, 244, 249—50, 260, 279, 280, 282 Nashe delo (Our Cause), 28 Nationalism, 318 Nazi Germany, 57 Nekrasov, Viktor, 117—18, 273 Neoclassicism, 291—92 Nevskie zapiski, 21 New Anatomy of Britain, The, 21—22 New Economic Policy, i6n, 35, 97,184 New Muscovite Philosophy, 302 New Socialists, 33 Newton’s laws, 170 New world order, 1 Nice Work, 234 Nicholas I, 37, 38, 39, 43, 51, 61, 62- 63,158 Nicholas II, 291—92 Nietzcheanism, 292 Night Watch, The, 13,302, 303 Nikitenko, Aleksandr, 38 Nikolaeva, Galina, 128 1984, 69—70; death and, 77; Dom- brovskii and, 71; erotic drive and, 76; fear and, 90; “newspeak” and, 73; parenthood and, 78; rebellion 330 Index 1984 ( continued) and, 81; time and, 88; transparency and, 91 Nobel Prize, 14 Nochnoi dozor (The Night Watch), 13, 301,303 Novostroika, 320 Novyi mir (The New World), 14,18, 64—65, nx, 118,146, 271—72, 299 O’Bell, Leslie, 48 Ohyknovennaia pila (A Common Saw), 141 October (Bolshevik) Revolution, 14, 42 -, 53 - 56 ,183, 295, 296 Odoevskii, Vladimir, 48 Oedipal complex, 184 Ogarev, Nikolai, 50, 51, 52 Oglon’gi, 143 Ohm Kriiger, 104 Okkervil River, The, 260 Oktiabr’, 122,126 Oleksich, Gavrila, 103 One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso¬ vich, 150 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 89 One’s Own, 131 Opoiaz group, 155,166 Orwell, George, 69, 72, 75, 85. See also 1984 Palievskii, Petr, 61 Panferov, Fedor, 126 Panova, Vera, 118—19,128—29 Paris Commune, 292, 293, 294, 295—96 Parshchikov, Aleksei, 274 Party Central Committee for the Fif¬ teenth Anniversary of the October Revolution, 98 Path to Life, The, 98, 99, too Patrol’s Exploits, The, 104 Pavlenko, Petr, 121,134 Pavlov, Ivan, 178,124,180 People’s Fronts, 21, 28, 32 Peredreev, Anatolii, 65 Perestroika: building a new philosophy and, 19—20; catastrophic think¬ ing and, 1; confrontation and, 317; democratic tradition and, 319; dic¬ tatorship via, 34; economy and, 18—19, 318—19; glasnost via, 18; Great Reforms and, 36, 43—44; in¬ formants and, 320; intelligentsia and, 43; October Revolution and, 14; opposition to, 27; optimism toward, 319; pessimism toward, 317, 320; psychoanalysis and, 185-86; restabilization and, 320—21; 1921 revolution and, 35; Saratov and, 311; social concern and, 257; state’s will and, 16; time span of, 257; United States and, 320—21 Pericles, 15 Permiak, Evgenii, 130,134 Perventsev, Arkadii, 134 Peters, 260 Peter the Great, 289, 290, 291—92, 303 Petrushevskaia, Liudmila, 242, 243, 244-47, 249-50 P’etsukh, Viacheslav, 262, 302, 303 Philosophical Letters, 52n Physics, 170—71,173,174 Pioneer, The, 135—36 Pisarev, Dmitrii, 157,159,160,161, 269 Platonov, Andrei: bodily experience and, 192—93; center-periphery relationship and, 200; choice and, 188-89; criticism of, 118; death and, 77; devastation and, 197; eunuch of the soul and, 190, 201, 208; externalization and, 191; Filonov and, 199-200; invisibility and, 216-18; language of, 212—14; machine of vision and, 208—9; rna- chines and, 221—30; pain and, 192; perception and, 187—88; perfect organization and, 205; physiology and, 191—92; plotlines and, 190; postulation and, 201; Pushkin and, 60—61; rejection of death and, 217— 20; schizophrenia and, 210—12; sexuality and, 194-95, 2-2-8-29; space and, 195—98; stasis and, 117; Vertov and, 207—8. See also Chevengur Playboy, 240 Plekhanov, Georgii, 180 Plekhanov Auditorium, 57 Pluralism, 33—34 Poem without a Hero, 109 Poetics, 156 Poet’s Calling, The, 104 Index 331 Poland, 21, 24, 33 Polish Constitution, 41 Polish revolt, 41-42 Pomerantsev, Vladimir, in Popov, Evgenii, 261, 262 Popov, Gavriil, 300—301 Population control, 75 Populism, 33-34 Pornography, 240, 241, 253 n.34 Poslednie dni (Last Days), 62 Postwar literature: conflictlessness of, 122; creative act and, 121-22; criti¬ cism of, hi— 13; cynicism and, 121; deviation from, 117-18; diverse reactions to, 111; duty of, 131; fruit- lessness of, 113—14; function of, 131; hero image in, 139; human image and, 122-23,135—36; ideology and, 116—17; individuality and, 120—21, 123,125—26,135; interest in, 114; marketability of, 117; poetry and, 125; positive and negative heroes and, 132—34; postwar history and, 114—15; prison camp literature and, 150; production novels and, 123— 30; psychologism and, 128—29; reversal and, 134; social conscious¬ ness and, 119; socialist realism and, 139—40,149; Stalin and, 134; stasis and, 115,117; time and, 111; truth and, 131. See also names of specific authors and titles Potebnia, Aleksandr, 159 Pravda, 101,118,180,181 Precious lnheritence, The, 130 Predislovie k zhizni (Foreword to Life), 141-42,149 Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, 185 Prigov, Dmitrii, 264 Primary Chronicle, 51 Prism-Kino, The, 279 Proletarskaia revoliutsiia (The Prole¬ tarian Revolution), 180 Proletcultists, 54 Psychoanalysis, Soviet: communism and, 184; debates on, 178—80; de¬ fense of, 180; Freud’s acceptance by, 177- 78; Krupskaia and, 181—82; Leninism and, 181; Marxism and, 178- 79,180; Oedipal complex and, 184; perestroika and, 185-86; politi¬ cal culture and, 183,185; political ideology and, 180; rejection of, 178,180—81,182—83; Stalin and, 180—81,183,185; threat of, 183—84; Zalkind and, 184—85 Psychoanalysis of Communism, 178,184 Psychology, 181 Puccini, Giacomo, 86 Pukhova, Zoia, 235 Puppo, Igor’, 65 Pushkin, Aleksandr: aestheticism and, 269; death of, 47—48; Futurists and, 54, 290; harmonious exactness and, 269; inaction and, 257-58; martyrdom of, 52—53, 63, 64; national identity and, 157; Nicholas I and, 51, 61, 62—63; Pisarev and, 159, 269; Soviet government and, 59; Surovtsov and, 47, 52 Pushkin celebrations, 59—60 Pushkin myth: Bolshevik Revolution and, 53—54; Bulgakov and, 62; Dostoevskii and, 53; effect of, 64; Gogol and, 50; Kaverin and, 63— 64; Kol’tsov and, 50; Fermontov and, 50, 51, 52, 63; Ogarev and, 50, 51, 52; Platonov and, 60—61; resur¬ facing of, 59; retainment of, 65—66; Rodionovna and, 61-62; Shergin and, 64; sources of, 60; Symbolists and, 53; Tiutchev and, 52; World War I and, 53 Pushkin Square, 65 Pyr’ev, Ivan, 130 Radek, Karl, 180 Radishchev, Aleksandr, 268 Ransel, David, 252 n.20 Realism, 160 Reconstruction. See Perestroika Reform, Soviet: authoritarianism and, 26, 27; Golovachev and, 311—12; left-right ideology and, 28-31; Sara¬ tov and, 310, 311. See also Glasnost; Great Reforms; Perestroika Reinhold, Gottfried, 170 Reminiscences about Lenin, 181 Renaissance, 18 Repressive tolerance, 32 332 Index Retrospectivism, 290—91, 296 Revolutionary Square, 313—14 Revolution of 1905, 296 Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov, 311 Riabov, Ivan, 112,127 Right ideology, 22, 23-24, 27—28 River of Fire, The, 127 Road that Goes Far, The, 126 Road to the Gallows, The, 104 Rokk, Marika, 104 Rolland, Romain, 295 Romashov, Boris, 112,133 Romm, Mikhail, 99 Rommat, 303 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 269, 295 Rout, The, 129 Rozanov, Vasilii, 202, 203, 275 Rozhkov, Nikolai, 127 Rubinshtein, Lev, 264, 266 Rural Doctor, The, 122 Rus’, Kievan, 51 Russia: August revolution and, 318; censorship in, 37; Crimean War and, 36—37; identity search by, 49; left ideology and, 24; Nicholavean, 297; Soviet identity and, 2; Western perception of, 307; writer’s situa¬ tion in, 13. See also specific subject matter Russian Beauty, The, 267 Russian Great Tradition, 290 Russian literary criticism, 156-59 Russian Literature 1945—88 ,139 Russian Soviet Federative Repub¬ lic, 143 Russkoe slovo (Russian Word), 159 Rutherford, Ernest, 170 Ryleev, Kondratii, 51 Sacrifice of a Horse, The, 279 Sailors, The, 134 Sakhalin, 143 Sakharov, Andrei, 311, 319 Sampson, Anthony, 21, 23 Saratov, 309—15, 321 Saratov, 312, 313, 315—16 Saratov City Soviet, 310, 311, 313, 314 Scheer, Robert, 236—37 Schelling, Friedrich, 37 Schiller, Friedrich von, 269 School, The, 103 Schvartsman, Mikhail, 267 Sechenov, Ivan, 178 Sedakova, Ol’ga, 263, 266, 272 Sejm, 2t Selected Passages from Correspon¬ dence with Friends, 201, 205, 302 Serebriakov, Gennadii, 65 Shafarevich, Igor’, 301 Shalamov, Varlam, 69-70 Shatrov, Mikhail, 300 Shemiakin, Mikhail, 267 Shergin, Boris, 64 Shklovskii, Viktor, 161,162,164 Sholokhov, Mikhail, t32 Shroud of Turin, 65 Shtein, Aleksandr, 133 Shubin, Dmitrii, 21 Shukshin, Vasilii, 261 Shumiatskii, Boris, 98 Sigmund Kolosovskii, 104 Silaev, Ivan, 313 Silva, 104 Simon, H. A., 172 Simonov, Konstantin, 117,131—32,133, 141,146,147,150,152 Simpson, George Gaylord, 171 Siniavskii, Andrei, 149, 271, 281 Slavophilism, 49 Slonim, Marc, 140—41 Smoke of the Homeland, The, 131—32 Snow Fantasy, 104 Social calling, 13—14 Socialism, 20, 22, 31 Socialist realism: adaptation and, 151; defined, 139,140; Far from Mos¬ cow and, 141,142,144; film and, 105; hero of, 145; imposition of, 58; organic nature of, ro9; postwar literature and, in, 139—40,149; reality and, 147; Soviet culture and, 140; survival of, 140 Socialist sentimentalism, 271 Sokolov, Sasha, 274, 282 Solov’ev, Nikolai, 163 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 270, 271 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 14,18,150, 271-72, 275 Somnambulism, 260 Sorokin, Vladimir, 264 Sosnovskii, Lev, 55 Index 333 Sovetskii Pisatel’, 149 Soviet Constitution, 235 Soviet culture: adaptation and, 151; feminism and, 252 n. 20; 1825 focus and, 297; historical figures and, 289—90; retrospectivism and, 290; socialist realism and, 140; temporal reorientation of, 289—90. See also Historical models of Soviet culture Soviet Literature, 147 Soviet ritual, 58 Soviet Russian Literature, 140—41 Soviet Women Writers’ Federation, 252 n.24 Soviet Women’s Committee, 235 Soviet Writers’ Union, 139,149, 236, 239, 248 Stadniuk, Ivan, 140 Stalin, Iosif: common citizens and, 119—20; Far from Moscow and, 144; Japan and, 23-24; Lenin myth and, 58; modernism and, 284; Orwell and, 78; Peter the Great and, 290; postwar literature and, 134, 139; proletarian principles and, 23— 24; psychoanalysis and, 180-81, 183,185; Soviet literature and, 299 Stalin, Vasilii, 183 Stalinism, 22—23, 26, 307 Stalin Prize, 117,143,144,146 State and Revolution, 294 State Committee for the State of Emer¬ gency, 312, 313 Stites, Richard, 54 Storm over Asia, 99 Sukhanova, Iuliia, 240 Sukhotin, M., 264 Sun Also Rises, The, 243 Sungari, 143 Supreme Soviet, 26 Surov, Aleksandr, 112,133 Surovtsov, Grigorii, 47, 52 Svirski, Grigori, 147,148—49,152 Svobodnoe slovo (The Free Word), 28 Sweden, 25 Symbolists, 53 Synfunction, 165 Tambov province, 16 Tartars, 297, 310 Technology, 84 Teleskop, 52n Thatcher, Margaret, 23, 28 Thatcherism, 34 Theatre Square, 314 Theodosius, St., 61, 62 Thiersot, Julien, 295 Thun, Nyota, 63 Tiutchev, Fedor, 52 Tokareva, Viktoriia, 242 Tolstaia, Tat’iana, 236, 242, 243, 244, 247—50, 260, 272 Tolstoi, Aleksei Nikolaevich, 120 Tolstoi, Leo, 126, 219, 269, 271 Tosca, 86 Totalitarianism, 23—24, 73, 88, no Transvaal in Flames, The, 104 Treaty of Paris, 37 Trotskii, Lev, 54, 60,180—81 Truth about Lorin Jones, The, 234 Tumarkin, Nina, 54 Turgenev, Ivan, 162-63, 2-60-61 Turner, Victor, 58 Two Buldis, The, 99 Tynianov, Iurii, 164—65 Uchenik litseia (A Student of the Lyceum), 60 Ukhtomskii, Aleksei, 167 Unemployment, 25 Unforgettable Year 1919, The, 134 Union of the Left, 22 United Fronts, 22, 27 United States, 234, 320—21 Ussuri, 143 Utopia(s), 74, 75, 78, 84, 91,93 Vasil’eva, Larisa, 239, 252 n.24 Vertov, Dziga, 205, 206, 207—8 Very Good, 55 Veselovskii, Aleksandr, 159 Village Afloat, The, 128 Virgin Soil Upturned, 132,133 Virta, Nikolai, 122 Vishnevskii, Vsevolod, 134 Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, 55 Volga Germans, 310 Volga-Volga, 103 Voprosy literatury (Issues in Litera¬ ture), 17 Vyborg Side, The, 103 334 Index War, The, 140 Warner Brothers, 100 Washington, George, 49 We, 69—70; death and, 77; fear and, 90; labor and, 76; miracles and, 89; namelessness and, 80; parent¬ hood and, 75, 78; plot of, 89; reality and, 71—7Z; rebellion and, 8i-8z; transparency and, 91 Weber, Max, 7Z Weimar Germany, 35 Weldon, Fay, Z34 Wielopolski, Marshal, 4Z Women, 181—8z, Z33, Z35, Z37. See also Feminism Women, Soviet: abortion and, Z36, Z41, Z5Z n.14; benefits to, Z35; double duty of, 2.35—36; equality and, Z35; feminism denounced by, 238; gender stereotypes reinforced by, Z37—38; labor force and, Z35, Z36, Z51 n.15 marketing of, Z40—41; perception of men by, 238; politics and, Z38; premarital sex and, Z41, 2.53—54 n.35; Scheer quoted on, Z37; sexual revolution and, 240— 41; Soviet literature and, Z41-4Z stress by, 236; women’s organiza¬ tions and, Z40—41. See also names of specific women Working class, zz— 23, 24, 25 World War I, 53 World War II, 297 Writer’s Diary , 81 Yeltsyn, Boris, 33, 314, 319, 311, 313 Yugoslavia, 24 Zakrutkin, Vitalii, 128 Zalkind, A., 182,184-85 Zalygin, Sergei, 18, 299 Zamiatin, Evgenn, 69, 73 125. See also We Zetkin, Klara, 181 Zhdanov era literature. See Postwar literature Zhenskoe chtenie (Women’s Read¬ ing), 2-19 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 62, 268 Zinov’ev, Aleksandr, 307 Zinov’ev, Grigorii, 54 Zionism, 262 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 116 Zvezda, 115 Notes on Contributors Katerina Clark is Associate Professor in the Department of Compara¬ tive Literature at Yale University, where she teaches twentieth-century Russian literature and film. She is the author of The Soviet Novel: His¬ tory as Ritual (1981) and coauthor with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), as well as of a number of articles on Soviet literature. Paul Debreczeny is the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Russian Lit¬ erature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Nikolai Gogol and His Contemporary Critics (1966), Temp¬ tations of the Past (1982), and The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexan¬ der Pushkin’s Prose (1983). He has also translated and edited a number of works, and written articles on Gogol’, Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and others. His book Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Evgeny Dobrenko is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Duke University. He has taught at state universities in Odessa and Moscow and specializes in the history of Soviet literature, particularly of the late Stalinist period. Dobrenko’s work has appeared in most of the leading Soviet literary periodicals, including Literaturnaia gazeta, Novyi mir, and Voprosy literatury. Most recently, he has edited a collection on socialist realism, Differ¬ ent Points of View: Ridding Ourselves of Mirages—Socialist Realism Today (1990). A book on Babel’s Red Cavalry and another on the literature of the Stalinist era are both forthcoming. Mikhail Epstein is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at Emory University. He has taught at the Gorky Institute of World Literature and directed the Laboratory of Modern Culture in Moscow. He is the author of The Classics Renovated: Derzhavin, Pushkin, Blok in Mod¬ ern Perception (1982), Paradoxes of the New: On the Development of Literature in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1988), Nature, the World, the Universe’s Hiding Place: The System of Landscape Imagery in Russian Poetry (1990), and A Diary for Olga: A Chronicle of Fatherhood (1990). 336 Notes on Contributors Renata Galtseva is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Scientific Information in Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She has written extensively on the history of ideas and intellectual currents within both Russian and Western contexts, and on Russian religious philosophy. She is one of the creators of the Soviet Philo¬ sophical Encyclopedia, as well as editor of and contributor to several series of collections, including The Fate of Art and Culture in 'Western European Thought of the Twentieth Century, Philosophical Neoclassi¬ cism, Neo-conservatism , and others. She is the author of Sketches of Russian Utopian Thought of the Twentieth Century, and, with Irina Rodnyanskaya, Summa Ideologiae, both of which are forthcoming. Helena Goscilo is Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages, Lit¬ eratures, and Cultures at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include translations of Lermontov’s Vadim (1984) and Nagibin’s fic¬ tion The Peak of Success and Other Stories (1986), as well as Russian and Polish Women’s Fiction (1985), Balancing Acts: Contemporary Stories by Russian Women (1989), GLASNOST: An Anthology of Literature under Gorbachev (1991), Wild Beach (1991), and Skirted Issues: The Discreteness and Indiscretions of Russian Women’s Prose (1992). Her annotated anthology of recent Russian women’s literature, entitled Ever Transitive, is slated for publication in 1993, as is The Fruit of Her Plume, a collection of essays devoted to Russian women’s writ¬ ing. She is working on a monograph on Tatiana Tolstaia and a critical study of Russian women’s fiction from 1965 to the present. Michael Holquist is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Among his book-length works are Dostoevsky and the Novel (1977) and Mikhail Bakhtin, with Katerina Clark (1984). He has also edited, with Alvin B. Kernan and Peter Brooks, Man and His Fictions (1973). Holquist made a major contribution in diffusing the oeuvre of Mikhail Bakhtin, which he has edited and partly trans¬ lated: The Dialogic Imagination (1981); Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986), edited with Caryl Emerson; and Art and Answer¬ ability (1990), edited with Vadim Liapunov. Boris Kagarlitsky is a freelance writer, political theorist, and activist. He has been a coordinator of the Federation of Socialist Clubs and has worked on an oppositional journal the New Left Turn, for which he was arrested on April 6 ,1982 and later released under Iurii Andropov. He is the author of The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State, 19x7 to Present (1988), The Dialectic of Change (1990), as well as Farewell Perestroika: A Soviet Chronicle (1990). Notes on Contributors 337 Gene Kuperman is a student in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. Mikhail Kuraev has worked for over twenty years as a cinema script writer at the LenFilm in Leningrad. He has recently emerged as one of the major writers of the perestroika era. He is the author of the criti¬ cally acclaimed Captain Dikshtein: A Fantastic Narrative (1987) and The Night Watch: A Nocturne for Two Voices with the Participation of VOKhR Rifleman Comrade Polubolotov (1988). His most recent work in translation is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Thomas Lahusen is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Duke University. He is the author of The Concept of the “New Man”: Forms of Address and Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia (1981), as well as a number of articles on Russian and Polish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently working on a major study of the production of the Zhdanovite model of socialist realism in the Soviet Union and its diffusion abroad. Valery Leibin is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Systems Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (isa-ran) and Professor in the Department of Global Problems at the Russian Open University in Moscow. He is the author of The Philosophy of Social Criticism in the U.S.A. (1976), Psychoanalysis and American Neofreudianism (1977), Models of the World and the Image of Man (198Z), and Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Contemporary Western Philosophy (1990). He has also published a number of articles on contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis. Sidney Monas is Professor of History and Slavic Studies at the Univer¬ sity of Texas, Austin, and was the editor of the Slavic Review until 1991. Monas has translated Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment (Signet, 1968) and a collection of essays by Mandel’shtam (Austin, 1977). He is the author of The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (1961). Valery Podoroga is the Head of the Russian Laboratory of Post- Classical Studies at the Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences. He has written extensively on the problem of the body, sensuality, and power as well as Western philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among his forthcoming books are Meta¬ physics of Landscape: Communicative Strategies in Philosophical Cul¬ ture — Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Adorno and Geology of Language and the Philosophy of Heidegger. 338 Notes on Contributors Donald Raleigh is Professor of Soviet History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Currently writing a book entitled “Civil War on the Volga: Politics, Revolutionary Culture, and Society in Sara¬ tov Province, 1918—1922,” he is the author of Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (1986). Raleigh translated and edited E. N. Burdzha- lov’s Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd (1987) and also edited and annotated A Russian Civil War Diary: Alexis Babine in Saratov, 1917-1912 (1988). Since 1979 he has edited Soviet Studies in History, a quarterly journal of translations. In 1989 M. E. Sharpe Inc. published an anthology of writings drawn from Soviet historians that he edited ( Soviet Historians and Perestroika: The First Phase). Irina Rodnyanskaya is a member of the editorial board of the journal Novyi mir. She is a critic, literary scholar, and cultural theorist who has written on Lermontov, Gogoll, Dostoevskii, and Blok, as well as a number of independent writers and poets of the 1970s. She has been an active contributor to the Abridged Literary Encyclopedia and The Philosophical Encyclopedia in the Soviet Union. She is the author of The Artist in Search of the Truth (1989) and, with Renata Galtseva, Summa Ideologiae (forthcoming). Maya Turovskaya is a film and theater critic and historian of Soviet cinema, currently working as a researcher at the Institute of Cultural Research in Moscow. Turovskaya is also the author of a series of film scenarios, including Mikhail Romm’s famous A Normal Fascism (1966, co-authored). During the Sixteenth International Film Festi¬ val in Moscow (1989), she organized a retrospective of the cinema of the totalitarian era. Her recent publications include Babanova: Legend and Biography (Moscow, 1981), Frontiers of the Arts: Brecht and Cinema (Moscow, 1985), Recollections of the Present Moment: Sketches, Portraits, Notes (Moscow, 1987), and Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry (London, 1990). SOVIET & POST-SOVIET STUDIES / CULTURAL STUDIES As the Soviet Union dissolved, so did the visions~bfT5ast-ai^^ that informed Soviet culture. With Dystopia left behind and Utopia forsaken, where do the writers, artists, and critics who once inhabited them stand? In an “advancing present,” answers editor Thomas Lahusen. Just what that present might be—in literature and film, criticism and theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, and in the politics that somehow speaks to all of these—is the subject of this collection of essays. Leading scholars from the former Soviet Union and the West gather here to consider the fate of the people and institutions that constituted Soviet culture. Whether the speculative glance goes back (to czarist Russia, to Pushkin, to the history of Russian aesthetics or Soviet Freudianism, to the sociology of cinema in the 1930s, or to texts produced during the Zhdanov era) or forward (to the “market Sta¬ linism” compellingly predicted by Boris Kagarlitsky or to the “open text of history” advocated by Donald Raleigh), a sense of immediacy, or history-in-the-making, animates this volume. Will social and cul¬ tural institutions now develop organically, the authors ask, or is the society faced with the prospect of even more radical reforms? Does the present rupture mark the real moment of Russia’s encounter with modernity? Will the Western “machinery of progress,” transplanted to the Russian context, function as a kind of “cosmocratic utopia?” The options explored by literary historians, film scholars, novelists, and political scientists make this book a heady tour of cultural possibilities. An expanded version of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 1991), with seven new essays, Late Soviet Culture will stimulate scholar and general reader alike. Thomas Lahusen is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Duke University. Gene Kuper- man is a student in the Literature Program at Duke University. Post-Contemporary Interventions, A Series Edited by Stanley Pish and Fredric Jameson UKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Box 90660, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0660 isbn 0-8223-1291-3 318 rs , nLn 04/9 3 33357 QUbU D00549173T DUKE UNIVERSITY UIBRARY DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 27706 GAYLORD