11
Strange creatures have permeated the cultural representation of the gulag. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago starts with the story of Siberian convicts coming across a triton, a kind of prehistoric newt that has been preserved by chance under the ice, a frozen monstrosity. The convicts immediately fall upon it and consume it greedily, and Solzhenitsyn reflects: “I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there [in the camp] not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world.” Solzhenitsyn had cartloads of material on hand, even without that grisly triton. But in a strange yet convincing way, Solzhenitsyn contrived to make precisely that monster into an all-encompassing symbol of terror. Convicts were “the only people who could devour a prehistoric salamander with relish.” They were a “tribe,” he said, and the frozen monster was their totemic father. Freud would have appreciated this image.
We could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.
In his work on the uncanny, Freud asserts that whatever (and Solzhenitsyn would add, whoever) is repressed returns in distorted, fragmented, or monstrous forms. The postcatastrophic memory carries within itself elements of the uncanny—the familiar and the forgotten, the restored and the unrecognized, the never-experienced and the well-masticated. When the gulag prisoners tear the prehistoric monster apart and consume it in the light of the bonfire, it feels like a scene not from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago but rather from Freud’s Totem and Taboo. The devoured monster is immortal, of course; a memorial symbol of pain, fear, and guilt, it devours those who have tasted it. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn introduced his great book as an attempt “to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander—which, incidentally, is still alive.”1
Shades We No Longer Call Back
As Tancred learned from Clorinda imprisoned in her tree, the spirits of the dead do not just pass away over the years; their return in new forms feels dangerous to the living. Akhmatova’s verses of 1945 analyze this posthumous transformation, a crucial part of the work of mourning, in bitter and sober words. She describes three stages of memory: the warm and immediate feeling of the fresh loss that retains the image of the lost; ritualized, compulsive visits to the sites and images of memory that emancipate the subject by making the remembrance routine and aseptic; and finally, the eventual acceptance of the loss. With the passing of time, human memory defamiliarizes the dead. The dead become alien and frightening, and this third, shameful stage of memory is the bitterest.
And there are no remaining witnesses to the events . . .
And slowly the shades withdraw from us,
Shades we no longer call back
Whose return would be too terrible for us.2
For this last and “bitterest” stage, the most characteristic is the mutual misrecognition between the dead and the living. In her beautiful elegy, probably the best analysis of mourning in Russian poetry, Akhmatova repeats the theme of misrecognition twice, applying it first to the self, then to the other: if we could descend into the past, it would have been futile, because the past changes in its own way:
Nobody knows us: we are foreign . . .
And this is when the bitterest comes: . . .
We understand that those who died we would not recognize.3
Akhmatova’s husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was incarcerated in the Crosses prison in the center of Petrograd and then shot at a still unknown site in 1921.4 Their son, Lev Gumilev, was imprisoned in the Crosses in 1938–1939. It was there that Akhmatova spent “seventeen months” trying to pass food to her son and to obtain information about him, and where she wanted to be commemorated by a monument, though all this proved to be equally futile. Joseph Brodsky, who was imprisoned in the same prison in 1964, says that “the main thing in [Akhmatova’s] Requiem is the theme of splitting, the theme of the author’s inability to have an adequate reaction. . . . The theme of Requiem is not the perishing of millions but the impossibility of the survivor coming to terms with this perishing.”5 Depicting her experience at the gates of the Crosses, Akhmatova “is constantly talking about how close she is to madness,” notes Brodsky. He quotes from Requiem:
Already madness dips its wings
And cuts a shade across my heart . . .
I realize that . . . I must yield,
Listening closely to my own
Delirium, however strange.
“These last two lines pronounce the greatest truth,” says Brodsky. He might have continued this thought by quoting from Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, about the call of memory that interpellates the narrator:
. . . from afar, responding to this appeal,
Come the terrible sounds—
Of gurgling, groans and screams.6
Akhmatova scholars and translators have had a difficult time interpreting these lines. Classical Russian literature is a treasure house of the uncanny. Its most memorable monsters include the “thoughtful vampire” in Pushkin’s Onegin, Lermontov’s “Demon,” Gogol’s horrifying visions, and a panoply of Russian symbolists’ beasts.7 Aleksandr Blok even called the nineteenth century a “vampiric century.” Intertextually, Akhmatova might be referring to any or all of these predecessors. More important, however, is her general intuition, which tells us the poetic truth about memory and mourning after catastrophe: “Delirium, however strange.”
Snake Charmers
Vampire stories were also popular in Soviet culture and specifically in the gulag. In Shalamov’s story “The Snake Charmer,” prisoners force a writer in their midst, Platonov, to entertain them with “stories.” Platonov’s favorite is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but the prisoners prefer pulp fiction.8 Even though the prisoners are captivated by his storytelling, there is a sense of menace and violence hanging over the scene; his survival depends on his ability to keep them pacified with his stories. This is how Shalamov saw the Soviet writer: as a doomed snake charmer, a magician who mesmerizes the public because if he fails to do so, the public will beat him to death.
I see a lineage that runs from this fictional Platonov, who is not too distant from the real-life postrevolutionary writer Andrei Platonov, to a hermetic pioneer of the snake-charming genre in the late-Soviet period, Yury Mamleev. His first novel, Shatuny (written in 1966, published in 1988 in the West and in 1996 in Russia), presents the sleepy central character, Sonnov, who is able to talk only to corpses, preferably to those whom he has killed himself. Sonnov is not interested in women, work, or anything else but the dead. The peak of his life is the random murder of a student with whose corpse he establishes an inspired, sublime dialogue. In his intuitive but pretentious prose, Mamleev depicts a crucial paradox of the postcatastrophic culture: its obsessive interest in the dead, which obstructs its ability to communicate with the living. In the dacha community in which Mamleev sets this novel, a professor is dying; after his death, or instead of it, he turns into a half-bird, half-human monster whom other characters call the “chicken-corpse”—a caricature of the intelligentsia. Written with multiple allusions to symbolist and early Soviet prose, this bizarre fiction was one of the first exemplars of the emerging genre, which Mamleev’s critics of the 1990s labeled, not without reason, necrophilic.
The son of a professor of psychiatry who studied Freud and died in the gulag in the 1940s, Mamleev became a leader of the “mystical underground” in the Moscow of the Thaw.9 He emigrated to the United States in 1975, wrote Shatuny in Paris, and returned to Russia after 1991. There he befriended Aleksandr Dugin, the leader of the pro-Kremlin “Eurasian movement,” which combines an obscure mysticism with nationalist politics. In his comment on Shatuny, Dugin wrote that Sonnov “uses the soul of every victim as a streetcar which brings him to the afterworld” and that he represents “the uncanny truth” about “the Russian people who are pregnant with metaphysical rebellion.”10 I believe that Sonnov’s “uncanny truth” is about the enormity of the Soviet losses. His compulsive desire to talk to the dead is, simply, a Hamlet-like obsession with their parental spirits. Longing for the dead, Sonnov and his author are possessed by the memory of their fathers. To be sure, Mamleev’s eerie, semiconscious mourning is different from the factual, righteous witnessing exemplified by Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Soviet past. Both versions of mourning are mimetic, but the difference between them might be compared to the difference between the genres of the documentary film, which represents a catastrophe by striving to reconstruct its facts, scale, and causes, and the horror movie, which reenacts the catastrophe, distorting all its features but actualizing the most important one—its horror.11
In 1992, Yefim Etkind wrote: “The reality of devils in our time is incomparably higher than it was in the past epochs.”12 Indeed, post-Soviet devils seem more real and also even more frequent than their predecessors in the classical Russian and Soviet literatures; but in contrast to the unfading interest in the gothic motifs of Russian and European letters, critics and scholars have barely noticed the uncanny in the post-Soviet literature.13 However, this theme has a generally acclaimed leader, Viktor Pelevin. In contrast to the warped and nationalist Mamleev, the younger Viktor Pelevin is highly successful both in Russia and abroad. His works present a panoply of monsters, which like their ancient precursors combine human and nonhuman features, though sometimes the nonhuman part is high-tech rather than beastly. In his early essay “Comparative Anthropology,” Pelevin interpreted the Soviet experience as zombification. Basing his ideas on The Serpent and the Rainbow by American anthropologist Wade Davis (1985), Pelevin describes how Haitian secret societies converted humans into zombies by burying them, digging them up the next day, and then selling them on as farmhands to plantation owners. Those who lived through the Soviet period went through something similar to this, speculates Pelevin. He imagines a person who, “after reading some brochures,” attempts to initiate perestroika in a typical Soviet town. Unexpectedly, the would-be reformer falls “into an incomprehensible pit. There are half-rotten logs, skeletons of horses and humans, pieces of ceramics and ruined metal around. He is in a grave.” He is a zombie who returns to the grave where he came from. The Soviet town rests on the remains of a camp: try to change it, and you are pulled into the gulag below. Its population is made up of zombies; “many zombies were members of the Soviet Union of Writers and therefore, zombies were described from the inside as well as from the outside.”14 In a more serious way, the exprisoner Veniamin Iofe wrote that surviving a Soviet camp was a symbolic death that always threatened to become real. Every personal survival was a return from the land of the dead, and, like Pelevin, Iofe imagined the whole nation returning to the new life from the state of frozen nonbeing.15 This is the reason for the specifically post-Soviet usage of prosopopoeia, a classical trope that enables poets to speak with and for the dead by lending voice to “an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity.”16 In the post-Soviet revival of this archaic tradition, these fictional but indispensable voices are lent to revenants, hybrids, and monsters.
In Pelevin’s Life of Insects (1993), the characters are talking insects who sound like the confused Soviet subjects struggling to find their way in the new era; in his Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004), the characters are revenants of the canine variety; and in Empire V (2006), they are vampires who reign over Russia. At one level all this adds up to a caricature of the greedy and ambitious, but still awkward and stumbling Muscovite elite; but there is also a deeper message. In The Sacred Book, the narrator, an immortal fox, turns into a woman at will. Working as a prostitute in Moscow, she meets a werewolf who works there as a general of the secret service, the heir to the KGB. From time to time, this wolf-general travels to the north where, among the abandoned camps, he growls at the exhausted oil wells, begging them to produce oil.17 In Empire V, vampires are not the ancient parasites who sucked human bodies, but modern ones who milk their cattle, humans, and take care of them like dairy farmers. A Muscovite-turned-vampire, the protagonist finds consolation in the idea that his new identity is no more surprising than his earlier transfiguration from a Soviet child into a post-Soviet man: “It was really strange when the epoch ended but the people stayed where they were. . . . The world became entirely different. There was something insane in it.”18 Vampires teach the two arts that are central to the new Russians, “glamour and discourse.” Unfortunately, these arts help vampires to establish their power over humans, but do not help humans banish vampires.
Pelevin’s swinging between werewolves and vampires is understandable. In Slavic folklore, dogs, wolves, and werewolves were believed to be the worst enemies of vampires. Left unburied, a corpse turns into a vampire unless it is eaten by wolves.19 Rivals of the uncanny, canines play a large part in the cultural memory of the Soviet past. One of the early realistic narratives of the gulag, Faithful Ruslan by Georgy Vladimov (published in the West in 1975 and in Russia in 1989), focused on a camp guard dog that is presented as a more reliable witness than either the prisoners or their jailors. Vladimir Vysotsky, who celebrated the collective voice of exprisoners, presented himself as a cornered wolf in one of his famous songs, “The Wolf Hunt.” Stray dogs start and end Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s film 4 (2005), which is based on Vladimir Sorokin’s screenplay; they guard some humans, kill others, devour their uncanny effigies, and seem to be on the brink of taking over Moscow. The strange success of the Russian artist Oleg Kulik, who plays a barking and biting dog in his performances, can be understood in the same context.20
Justification
For reasons that the reader will grasp easily by this stage, the late-Soviet and post-Soviet novel has been overpopulated by historians as its central protagonists. In the novel Justification (2001), Dmitry Bykov presents the young Moscow historian, Rogov, the grandson of a victim who was arrested in 1938. Obsessed with the grandfather he never knew, Rogov develops an ingenious theory of Stalinism. Those “repressions,” he thinks, could not be “unjustified”; they must have had an interpretable meaning. Rogov theorizes that people were subjected to unbearable suffering in order to select out those few who were fit to survive it all. Those who gave up under torture and confessed to invented crimes betrayed Stalin and had to perish; those who resisted to the end were secretly preserved, healed, and trained.21 As operatives and leaders, these people changed the course of World War II and the Cold War, Rogov believes. Inspired by this theory, he travels to Siberia in the hope of finding his grandfather still alive and residing in a secret Soviet-style reservation. On his journey, Rogov discovers a clandestine community of religious sectarians and a sadomasochist resort where new Russians torture their peers for pleasure. Finally, Rogov drowns himself in a Siberian marsh. Starting as melancholy (a failure to separate from the lost object), the doomed longing for the grandfather ends by taking the form of paranoia (an obsession that is manifested in delusions).
Bykov is one of the most popular Russian intellectuals of the new century—writer, poet, media anchor, and biographer. In Justification, his first novel, he touched a nerve of post-Soviet memory.22 By creating a direct connection between grandsons and grandfathers, the fictional post-Soviet family renders the last Soviet generation irrelevant.23 Andrei Bitov should be credited with the invention of this motif; in his pre-post-Soviet novel Pushkin House, Odoevtsev, a young historian of literature, wants to undo the Soviet experience by rejecting his father and worshipping his grandfather, the gulag survivor. In contrast to Rogov who was born too late, Odoevtsev does find his grandfather, though the damaged returnee expresses little interest in his grandson (see chapter 3). Both novels confront Soviet history as part of a desperate quest for its meaning. Importantly, central characters in both novels are historians, professionals of memory. Odoevtsev survives his heavy drinking to become an established scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences; Rogov commits suicide. In comparing these texts, one observes that the pain of memory for the lost grandfathers has not been much alleviated during the last thirty years. But we can make out a certain narrowing of focus: in the 1970s Odoevtsev addressed his speculations to mid-nineteenth-century poetry, something that was irrelevant to his grandfather’s or his own life; in the 2000s Rogov concentrates on Stalinism, which everyone—the protagonist, the author, and the reader—identifies as the source of his inherited suffering.
For the reader of Russian historical fiction, it has been entertaining to see how some professional historians have joined their fictional colleagues in their self-destructive musings. In 2007, Vladimir Putin’s administration approved a new textbook on Soviet history. Describing Stalin’s terror as “the price of the great achievements of the Soviet Union,” the textbook presents “the utmost efficiency of the ruling elite” as a result of this terror. Stalin’s purges shaped “the new managerial class which was adequate to the tasks of modernization. . . . This class was unconditionally loyal to those in power. Its executive discipline was irreproachable.”24 No grand total of victims could ever be impressive enough to overshadow these fabulous results. This official textbook does not deny the mass violence of Stalin’s era, but it does entertain the radical transformation of the meaning of that violence. Essentially, the history textbook for Russian high schools presents as truth the same idea that Bykov’s novel explored as a paranoiac delusion: that the mass violence of the early Soviet era helped to shape the “New Soviet Man,” the tortured Bolshevik version of the Übermensch.
Among the current generation of Russian writers, one of the most passionate about the past is Vladimir Sorokin, a prolific novelist, poet, and artist who was trained as an engineer. In Marina’s Thirtieth Love (1999), Sorokin drew an ironic picture of a young Muscovite who vacillates in her commitment to political dissidents and Soviet true believers. Marina’s loves, male and female, defy novelistic convention by their very multitude. Like many post-Soviet novels, this is a story of a community rather than an individual. In her dissident phase, Marina imagines underground Moscow in a typically post-Soviet manner:
Under Stalin’s skyscrapers, under the puppet-like Kremlin, under modern constructions lie the pressed bones of millions of the tortured, murdered by the scary machinery of the gulag. . . . Nothing has changed here. It seemed that time ossified or maybe was canceled by decree. The hands of the Kremlin chimes turn in vain, like a wind-up doll without a spring.25
Paradoxically, since there are so few monuments on the former sites of the gulag, these sites are imagined to be everywhere. Mourning, writes Derrida, “consists always in attempts to ontologize the remains, to make them present.”26 In Sorokin’s fantasy, Marina fools around Moscow without an orgasm, like a wind-up doll without a spring, until her thirtieth love, a Communist leader, satisfies her by retrapping her mind in Soviet discourse. This erotic novel effectively predicted the political events of the subsequent decade, when Putin built up his popularity on two elements, Soviet retro-style and primitive masculinity. Among many possible readings of Sorokin’s novel, I propose to understand Marina’s thirtieth love and first orgasm as a feat of mimetic mourning. Like intercourse on the grave, a favorite scene of the late nineteenth-century decadent novel, Marina’s satisfaction comes out of the reproduction of her loss. Living in the shadow of the puppetlike Kremlin, she repeats the frightening discourse of the gulag in the orgasm of repetition compulsion. This is why her act of mourning has worked for the art of warning.
In Sorokin’s Ice (2002), we read the story of Snegirev, not a historian but a student of astronomy, which he understands as “the history of the universe.” At the start of the terror, in 1928, Snegirev goes to Siberia. He is about to die there in a marsh, like Bykov’s character, but instead he comes across a fragment of magic ice, which changes his nature. From then on, Snegirev has special powers and is, on top of that, unusually communitarian, but only with his own kind. Instead of making love with his words and genitals, he can speak straight from his heart, and his peers respond by using the same organ. Born again through this ice, Snegirev recruits his fellowship by hammering humans with sacred ice. A few are fully transformed, but many are killed in the process. The People of the Ice make their way into the core of the Soviet system, which they exploit for their benefit. They infiltrate the NKVD and take part in building a gulag system, which they use as a plantation for selecting and cultivating their fellowship. Performing sacral manipulations on human bodies, the People of the Ice strive to reach a magic number of their fellowship, which will instigate the desired end of the world.27 They produce their alternative histories in intonations that are reminiscent of some Russian religious narratives, starting from the great writer of the Russian schism, Avvakum. Like many of their precursors, Sorokin’s sectarians struggle to overcome history but inevitably return to it. Though Sorokin’s apocalyptic fantasy is very different from Pelevin’s, they converge in depicting their protagonists as superhumans who parasitize humans. Unlike Pelevin’s vampires, the People of the Ice do not suck blood; in fact, they are vegetarians. In its own way, Sorokin’s fantasy responds to the same desperate quest for meaning that inspired Bykov’s Justification.
I take another example from the works of Vladimir Sharov, author of seven novels and a trained historian with an advanced degree. In his first novel, Rehearsals (1992), the narrator is a historian who is working in Tomsk, in Siberia, in 1965. His dissertation subject is the seventeenth-century schism of the Russian church (Sharov himself defended his dissertation on a slightly earlier period, the Time of Troubles). There are some indications that what we are reading is a fictional dissertation, though of course there was no chance that the narrator could ever have defended this work in the Soviet Union in 1965, or even much later. From his friend, a survivor of the gulag, the narrator acquires a manuscript, which was written in the seventeenth century by the founder of a mysterious sect. This author happens to be a French theater director, Jacques de Certan. Captured by Russian troops in Livonia, Certan lived at the court of Czar Alexei and worked with Patriarch Nikon in his monastery. He documented his Russian travels and exploits in Breton, and the narrator now translates and updates Certan’s story in the form of the current book. The action starts in New Jerusalem, an amateurish copy of the Holy Land that Patriarch Nikon built in the countryside near Moscow. Nikon renamed every river and village after their Palestinian originals and built churches as copies of their Jerusalem models; started in 1658, the Cathedral of Resurrection was erected as a full-size replica of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, built where Jesus met his end. In the Soviet period, there was a labor camp there, which was also called New Jerusalem; Solzhenitsyn spent many months in this camp after his arrest in 1945. The monastery was reopened in 1994, and many pilgrims and tourists have since visited Nikon’s (and Solzhenitsyn’s) Jerusalem on the banks of the Istra River.
Sharov bases his story of New Jerusalem on established fact, but the narrator then takes a few steps beyond it. We learn that while building his Holy Land, Nikon asked Certan to rehearse a full-scale mystery play there, a theatrical reenactment of Christ’s words and passions and everything that is described in the four Gospels, plus some apocrypha. Everyone would be depicted in these rehearsals but Christ, since the mysterium itself was aimed at bringing about the Second Coming by luring Christ to come forth as the real-life Messiah. Then Nikon falls into disgrace, which did happen in 1666, and the hundreds of peasants who have been taking part in the rehearsals are exiled to Siberia. Certan dies on the road, but his actors remain faithful to his teaching, form a sectarian community, and continue the rehearsals in hope of the imminent arrival of Christ. Surrounded by Siberian marshes, they rehearse for generations, but then something unplanned happens to them. A quarrel breaks out between those playing Christians in these scenes from the Gospels and those playing Jews. The conflict escalates to the point where the former start to exterminate the latter, by which stage a gulag has already been established in their village. The apostles become the commandants of the camp, and they continue their rehearsals as their chosen method of atheist propaganda. The only Jewish survivor of this holocaust, a little boy, supplies the narrator with Certan’s manuscript.
Sharov’s grandfather and grandmother were lost to the Stalinist terror, and he remembers his father, also a writer, as “a very sad man.”28 Despite his academic training, Sharov believes that his real university was his experience as a child in the late 1950s, when friends and colleagues of his father were returning from the camps and telling their stories.29 The central character of Sharov’s novel Before and Then (1993) is Madame de Staël, the French romantic author who was once influential in nineteenth-century Russia. In Sharov’s novel, de Staël is immortal. She has moved to Russia and sleeps with its luminaries, including her own son, Stalin. The narrator meets her in a Soviet madhouse where she keeps company with the Russian fin-de-siècle mystical philosopher, a theorist of immortality and resurrection of the dead, Nikolai Fedorov, and a covey of old Bolsheviks. While the narrator is recording the oral history of these survivors, an apocalyptic flood drowns Moscow.
The author of these historical fantasies, Sharov describes his credo: “The history which I learned was not the history of humans. It was the history of hectares, crops, financial flows. . . . It was entirely foreign to me. . . . I am trying to understand what the revolution was . . . why the people who had beautiful dreams committed monstrous crimes.”30 In his Resurrection of Lazar (2002), Sharov writes in the first person and delineates in minute detail his dream of the physical resurrection of his father. Preparing this resurrection in the cemetery where his father was buried, the narrator uses techniques mostly borrowed from the writings of Fedorov. This project brings him back to the archives, where he produces a reinterpretation of the early Soviet period as Fedorovian resurrection in disguise, with a Bolshevik leader, Lazar Kaganovich, the builder of the Moscow metropolitan, as the chief executor of resurrection.31
Sharov’s gentle, melancholic writing combines with his unbridled historical fantasy in a consistent way that has yet to be adequately explored by literary scholars. His last novel, Be Like Children (2009), presents a broad panorama of the revolution of 1917. As clues to understanding this event, Sharov depicts the legendary thirteenth-century Children’s Crusade and the millenarian expectations shared by Russian medieval and modern sects. An amazing cast of characters, from Siberian shamans to Bolshevik leaders, play out this millenarian impulse in their different ways. “The revolution of 1917 was passionately awaited by a huge number of very different persons, parties, and religious groups,” says Sharov, and his list of these groups starts with the Old Believers and sectarians.32
Drunk Reality, Sober Observer
In post-Soviet Russian literature, there are stories about werewolves and werefoxes; about sectarians who copulate with the soil, and bio-philologists who clone the great Russian writers to extract the essence of immortality (Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard); about the revival of the medieval Vikings and the Khazars and the civil war in Russia that follows the collapse of oil prices in the wake of a techno-magic invention that makes traditional energy sources redundant (Dmitry Bykov’s ZhD); about a global dictator of mixed Russian-Chinese origins, whose teacher, a sectarian Old Believer, educates him by citing Sigmund Freud (Pavel Krusanov’s Angel’s Bite); about the restoration of the monarchy and public executions in twenty-first-century Russia (Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik); about the survival of the old Finnish tribe Meria as a kind of religious sect among contemporary Russians, with the most bizarre sexual and funeral rites (Denis Osokin’s Finches); and about vampires in disguise who secretly rule over the Russians in the manner of the Soviet Communists or the post-Soviet oligarchs (Sergei Lukianenko’s multiple novels, Viktor Pelevin’s Empire V). These stories do not necessarily belong to “popular literature” but rather cover the whole range from the low- to the high-brow. One can safely say that these writers are successful with Russian readers. They publish their novels with mainstream commercial publishers, enjoy celebrity status, produce literary scandals, and receive national prizes. Whateverthese authors imagine in the past or in the future, the goal is usually the understanding of the central trauma, or rather the catastrophe, of the Soviet period.
Though the fantasy of post-Soviet authors seems unlimited, their actual themes overlap. They seem to be mostly interested in two areas of human experience, religion and history, which they combine in rich and shocking ways. At the same time, they are not concerned with other traditional areas of literary interest, such as psychology, or the realistic analysis of social issues. They tend to go deep into the past in order to contextualize the present. Sometimes they construct a future that looks frighteningly like the past. Then, it becomes difficult to distinguish between mourning and warning (see chapter 2); this conflation is exactly what the authors intend to accomplish.
Several authors have argued that the concept of magical realism would work in application to the east European literatures that have recently been emancipated from Soviet domination. Examples offered in this connection have generally comprised the works of non-Russian writers: Ukrainians, Kirgiz, Abkhazians.33 Coined in Weimar Germany and applied to Latin American and then African fiction, the concept of magical realism made almost a full circle before it arrived in the post-Soviet space.34 The anthropologist Michael Taussig explores the connection between the internationally renowned prose of the magical realists and native practices of healing and sorcery; he concludes that the literary elaborations of popular magic stand as a counterhegemonic force.35 But does “magical realism” capture the unbridled peculiarity of post-Soviet Russian fiction?
Salman Rushdie famously described magical realism as “the commingling of the improbable and the mundane.”36 Improbable as they are, Sorokin’s, Sharov’s, or Pelevin’s novels do not have much of what could plausibly be characterized as mundane. They involve plenty of magic, but to describe them as “realistic” would plainly be wrong. I believe that the application of the concept of magical realism to recent Russian fiction requires a major theoretical revision. These narratives are similar to and different from magical realist ones in several important respects. They are similar because they make extensive use of magic in full-scale novelistic constructions. They also present an implicit critique of contemporary society by revising its historical foundations. They are different because they are self-consciously distanced from the traditions of the realist novel that are so critical to magical realism. The post-Soviet novel does not emulate social reality and does not compete with the psychological novel; what it emulates and struggles with is history. However unrecognizable, its allegoric images retain their dependency upon the past, but this relationship cannot be described in the customary terms of Russian cultural criticism. I coin the concept of “magical historicism” to define the bizarre but instructive imagery that has evolved out of postcatastrophic, post-Soviet culture.
History and magic are strange bedfellows. The life of ghosts is ahistorical, wrote Benjamin, but this is only a partial truth. Witches are ahistorical, but witch hunts and hunters embody their historical moment. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other beasts help authors and readers to discuss their own history, which is not comprehensible by other means. Such was the Soviet period with its “unjustified repressions.” The uncanny scenery of post-Soviet literature signals the failure of other, more conventional ways of understanding social reality. It is not the pointed clarity of social and cultural criticism that attracts readers, but the inexhaustible fantasy of creators of alternative pasts. Often, these stories present manipulations on human bodies, which allow for supernatural warmth and an immediacy of contact between the manipulated. After being hammered by ice, Sorokin’s sectarians can talk to each other with their hearts. After being bitten by a vampire, Pelevin’s characters comprehend other creatures, human or vampiric, by biting them. Sharov’s characters acquire similar powers after having sex with Madame de Staël. In the post-Soviet condition, the antimodern fantasy of immediate, extralinguistic communication becomes a popular refuge. In most of these stories, immediate knowledge leads to unlimited power. These are stories of super-communes, not supermen.
In the philosophical tradition, historicism strives to understand the current state of the world as the result of its development in the past. It also denies other ways of understanding the present, such as the concept of free will that shapes the present without being predetermined by the past. Ironically, magical historicism shares this belief in the explanatory power of the past with rational versions of historicism. In the melancholic visions of Bykov, Sharov, Sorokin, and their colleagues, the past is perceived as not just “another country” but an exotic and unexplored one, still pregnant with unborn alternatives and imminent miracles. Arguably, the expanded use of the subjunctive tense characterizes postrevolutionary periods. The feeling of loss opens up questions of what might have been.37 Haunted by the past and unable to withdraw from its repetitive contemplation, post-Soviet writers find themselves trapped in a state of melancholia. Their time is “out of joint,” like Hamlet’s, and with or without awareness, they realize Derrida’s dictum: “One never inherits without coming to terms with some specter, and therefore with more than one specter.”38 Celebrating an unprecedented consumer boom, their readers feel the loss of the political opportunities they recently enjoyed. Writing in a glossy men’s journal, the cultural critic Grigory Revzin described the situation in political rather than clinical terms: “The past does not know the subjunctive mood only if the present knows it. . . . If the present is what you cannot change at all, the past becomes what you can change in every possible way.”39 When politics does not provide alternatives, historiography offers them in abundance. The hauntological idea of justice becomes relevant when the real courts deny hope; in a similar way, allegories bloom when other ways of constructing truth and memory betray the storyteller. Combining catastrophic past, pathetic present, and dangerous future, early twenty-first-century Russia is a greenhouse for ghosts, revenants, and other spectral bodies.
Michael Wood’s twin concepts of drunk reality and sober observer help us understand the post-Soviet fantasies. Writing about magical realism, Wood distinguishes between two strands, one that is magic in material and realist in style (“as if the author were reciting a telephone book”), and another that is realist in material and magic in style (“the facts . . . are given to us as if they are fables”). Wood seems to be mostly interested in the first kind of narratives, which he suggests are written as if the reporter is sober and reality is drunk.40 Famous Latin American examples such as Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which clearly belong to Wood’s first kind of magical realism, deconstruct nationalist historiographies by telling the fantastic stories of the past impartially, as if the history were drunk but the historian sober. Recruiting popular magic and multiplying its use in the most unbridled ways, these stories disavow the official narrative of the people’s suffering in the past as necessary, justifiable sacrifices for the sake of the people’s present. Projecting magic into history, these novels subvert scholarly discourses of historiography with their habitual emphasis on rational choices and social forces. These novels tend to follow some of the stylistic conventions of historical writing, such as impartiality and what Wood aptly calls sobriety. Rarely, if ever, do the narrators of these novels play Nabokovian games with their readers by actualizing the presence of the narrator in the course of the action. They boost their readers’ understanding of the relational, constructed nature of the narrated reality with genealogical rather than narratological experiments.
This is where post-Soviet Russian fiction converges with that of postcolonial Latin America.41 In reality, there is no border between the past and the present; this is even more the case in the realm of magic. Correspondingly, the border between magical realism and magical historicism is a matter of focus or emphasis rather than one of definitions or boundaries. In the final account, the popularity of magical historicism among post-Soviet writers and readers realizes the “compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal” that Freud ascribed to melancholia.42 Psychologically, the inability to differentiate oneself from the lost object prevents the individual from living in the present, from love and work. Politically, the reverse is probably equally important: when there is no choice in the present, the historical past unfolds into a cyclical narrative that obscures the present rather than explains it. Poetically, Freud’s observation about the “piecemeal” character of the melancholic compromise with reality provides an instructive perspective on the nature of postcatastrophic writing. Literature has a mystical license that would not be recognized in other domains of human experience, such as religion, politics, or “real life”:
We adapt our judgments to the conditions of the writer’s fictional reality and treat souls, spirits, and ghosts as if they are fully entitled to exist, just as we are in our material reality. . . . Whatever has an uncanny effect in real life has the same in literature. But the writer can intensify and multiply this effect far beyond what is available in normal experience.43
Allegorical constructions of the uncanny, the monstrous, and the corporeal are all metonymical; these constructions take parts for the whole, pars pro toto, and combine them in creative combinations. Producing its own range of readers’ responses, this rhetorical convention is different from a more traditional, metaphorical poetics, which compares distant realms without dissecting them, focusing on the parts, and mingling them together. In this process, the metonymical poetics of magical historicism emulate the “piecemeal” logic of torture, which also manipulates parts of the body with the aim of changing the whole of truth, integrity, and history.
Close to Zero
The intermingling of the political and the literary in high quarters found its culmination in the 2009 novel Close to Zero. Published under a pseudonym, the novel is unanimously attributed to Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of Russia’s presidential administration who defined Russia’s internal politics since his appointment to this position in 1999 until his scandalous removal after the forged elections of 2011, which he oversaw. Half-Chechen and half-Russian, Surkov was trained as a theater director. He has a reputation as an “effective manager” who has presided over the concerted and purposeful degradation of Russia’s politics and public sphere.44 Under his own name, Surkov has published an elusive review of Close to Zero; the review neither confirms nor denies his authorship.45 The author’s hostility toward the writing, reading, and thinking part of the Russian Federation is quite obvious from this novel; these are people who are “close to zero.” The protagonist of the novel is a professional writer and editor. However, this innocent profession is described as a dirty activity in which bloodthirsty gangsters force drug-addicted storytellers to mock the undiscerning public, the newest reincarnation of the snake-charming activity that Shalamov ascribed to the storytellers of the gulag. After committing several murders for the sake of his publishing business, the protagonist loses his love to the related genre of post-Soviet film. A certain studio in the Caucasus makes snuff films for the Moscow club of millionaires that feature real-life scenes of rape and murder. This studio, Kafka Pictures, has even made a version of Hamlet in which the protagonists actually die of wounds and poison. After watching his girlfriend die on screen, the protagonist contemplates revenge. He goes to the Caucasus to find the filmmaker responsible, but ends up being tortured and mutilated himself by Kafka Pictures in an ordeal that is then screened for the viewing pleasure of the Moscow connoisseurs. At the end of the novel, he has most of his fingers and an ear cut off, which is indeed a popular form of torture in the Caucasus that was used by both sides during the Russian-Chechen wars. Finally, the protagonist finds the film director and kills him, though this final scene reads as his delusion rather than reality.
Medialization of violence is a crucial feature of this sadomasochist story, but its geography is also meaningful. The place for torturing, killing, and screening is the Caucasus, the most recent setting for Russian state violence and the birthplace of Surkov’s father. The pleasurable contemplation of these acts takes place in Moscow, among the circles where the author lives and works. Whatever the authorial intentions of the individual or team that wrote Close to Zero, the cultural meaning of this fantasy is familiar: this is the high-tech version of the Victims’ Ball, mimetic mourning for the losses of mass violence that emulates, in this fantasy very literally, the details of this violence. The novel depicts the Moscow club of sadistic millionaires, most of them corrupted officials with their glamorous women, as the proxy for its own readership.
Playing with classical texts, Close to Zero leaps from one text to another: the beginning rewrites Chekhov’s Seagull, the film studio is named after Kafka, and the finale repeats the conclusion of Nabokov’s Lolita. Curiously, in his review, Surkov insists that among these and other intertextual connections, the most important is Hamlet. However, it is not clear where this Hamletian connection is actually situated in the novel. There is no ghost in the narrative, and no lost father, but I find it meaningful that Surkov still insists that it follows Hamlet, a universal template for mourning and revenge. In his review, he claims that by crossing Shakespeare and Quentin Tarantino, Close to Zero reveals the moral vacuum of post-Soviet society. I would rather state that this novel creates a sense of vacuum by satirizing the reckless protagonist, bloodthirsty Moscow, and the violent Caucasus without exploring the historical processes of victimization that brought them all into being. Cutting history away from this medialized picture is like amputating limbs from a human body, a process that this novel depicts in many details. As in many other cases, ignoring the Soviet roots of the post-Soviet problems leads to their essentializing in terms of “postmodernity” or, alternatively, ethnic “psychology.” Surkov’s purpose is to present Russia’s people of all classes and ethnicities as intrinsically violent and ultimately incapable of democratic self-rule, and to present the twenty-first-century’s modernity as the rule of secret conspiracies and managed simulacra. This is the image that justifies the Kremlin’s take on power, as implemented by Surkov and his colleagues.
Precisely because of its deliberately short historical perspective, Close to Zero does not belong to magical historicism even though it employs its techniques. Magical historicism does have critical potential. Though the political boundaries in Russia tend to blur, magical historicists are recognizably different from those authors who use realistic methods for spreading their pro-Soviet nostalgia. Organized by Surkov in 2002, the pro-Putin youth movement Marching Together (Idushchie vmeste) publicly destroyed copies of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard by disposing of them in a giant commode in the center of Moscow (a performance that in its turn recalls Marcel Duchamp). Set in the future, Blue Lard tells the story of an elixir that the monstrous clones of great Russian writers, from Tolstoy to Nabokov, produce when writing. Turned into this “blue lard,” their writings promise immortality. Exotic Russian sectarians from the future steal this substance from the Russian-Chinese scientists who produce the clones. Using a time machine, sectarians send this elixir to Stalin, who is presented here as the lover of Khrushchev. Finally, we see the immortal Stalin as a servant to one of the pathetic masters of the future. The final pages hint that Stalin is, in fact, the narrator of the story. Changing its focus from invented communities to pseudo-historical personalities and back to communities, this exemplary novel combines many features of magical historicism: unmotivated distortions of history, semihuman monsters, manipulations of the body, fantastic cults, circular time, and the resulting interpenetration of epochs. The Marching Together movement deciphered the political message sent by this novel—a message that was aggressively critical toward Putin’s Russia.
As Russia approached its 2011 crisis, I observed peculiar manifestations of the magical-historical way of understanding contemporary reality, not only in post-Soviet fiction but in nonfiction as well. Let me share with you, as this book about the past and the past representations of the past reaches its conclusion, some brief observations on the curious kind of nonfiction that Russia’s high officials, or people very close to them, are writing in this present moment of despair. At the end of 2010, the chairman of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, Valery Zorkin, published an essay, “The Constitution against Crime,” in an official newspaper of the Russian Federation. In this essay, Zorkin makes a subtle distinction between a criminalized state, which the Russian Federation (he admits) has become, and a criminal state, which the Russian Federation risks becoming. Amazingly, in formulating his warning, Zorkin chose not the language of the constitution, but the language of Pelevin, from Empire V:
In a criminal state, our citizens will divide into predators, who will feel very free in the criminal jungles, and subhumans, who will understand that they are just food for these predators. The predators will be in the minority, the “walking beefsteaks” among the majority. The gap between the former and the latter will constantly expand.46
Zorkin uses a citation from Pushkin’s ironic verses of 1823 to describe his attitude toward this subhuman majority: “they should be either slaughtered or shorn,” he quotes bitterly. He further speculates that these subhumans are longing for a “savior” who can only take the form of a dictator and super-predator. This is not an anti-utopia, claims Zorkin, but a “negative scenario.” It is instructive to see that while we literary scholars agonize over whether our soft language is appropriate to describe legal or political phenomena, the top lawyer of the Russian Federation embraces this language.
During the debates on President Medvedev’s “modernization” project, one of the most skeptical voices belonged to Simon Kordonsky, a former official and a well-informed, very conservative thinker.47 In the address that Kordonsky gave at a Moscow meeting of pro-Kremlin intellectuals, “Onwards, Russia!” in January 2011, Kordonsky offered a systematic analogy between plans to build a new scientific center near Moscow and the Soviet sharashka, a type of fenced, secret laboratory in the gulag in which the researchers were prisoners and the bosses were officers of the NKVD. Arguing his point, Kordonsky cites Stalin’s letter of 1930, which launched the notorious trial of the “Industrial Party” and then, the first sharashka of the gulag. Bridging the historical gap of eighty years, Kordonsky draws an analogy between Leonid Ramzin, the engineer and chief victim of that trial, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the businessman who has been in prison since 2003. The speaker explicitly suggested creating a sharashka in which Khodorkovsky could realize his talent for modernization without doing any political damage. “Halfway to the Sharashka”—this is the title that Kordonsky gave to the published version of his talk.48
Gleb Pavlovsky had been a long-standing ally of the Kremlin administration, before this administration ostracized him in 2011. A one-time Soviet dissident who was imprisoned from 1982 until 1985, Pavlovsky went on to become the leader of the post-Soviet “political technologists,” a term that he created and that has since passed into everyday usage. Sometimes officially and sometimes informally, he served as adviser to Presidents Yeltsin and Putin, and as a prototype for Tatarsky from Pelevin’s novel, Generation P. In an essay that he published as an op-ed in the journal that he owns, Pavlovsky says that Russia had entered a “period of turbulence.” He attributes this to what he calls the Russian people’s dysfunctional relationship to reality. No matter what we try to do, it never turns out that way, he confesses in despair. To quote Pavlovsky’s characteristic muttering:
It turns out that one of the most incomprehensible aspects of contemporary Russia are the powers-that-be. . . . The Russian state officials are conducting a kind of guerrilla warfare. They are worming their way into the places that have been privatized by “the regime” . . . but they never know for sure where they have a chance of succeeding in consolidating their grip, and where they should avoid even dipping their toe in the water. So, for example, a regiment of “state guerrillas” led by the Justice Minister . . . has managed to skulk its way into the gulag jungles of GUIN [the state prison administration], where they are trying to rationalize and humanize the world of the zone.49
According to this insider, state prisons in Russia are still a gulag, fifty years after this institution was officially disbanded. Russian officials with all their bureaucracies, bodyguards, and budgets are guerrillas who operate in the jungles of uncertainty and danger. Engaged in this unbounded mythologizing, Pavlovsky transfers responsibility from these hapless or corrupt officials onto anonymous, fantastic forces. Speaking of the Internet and the alleged danger that it poses for Russian sovereignty, Pavlovsky laments: “There are half-natural creatures operating in this world, with their inhuman politics.” He compares these harmful forces disturbing the work of Russian officials and political technologists to sharks and volcanoes. Finally, he reveals the source of his inspiration: the current situation in Russia, he says, is like “pictures in certain novels: it is a gloomy morning, and there are swollen, incomprehensible people coming out of the woods, gathering in clusters. To what end is unclear.” Pavlovsky does not name these novels, but they definitely belong to the magical historicist variety, starting with Mamleev and ending with Pelevin and Bykov.
In 2011, after it became clear that Putin would return to the Russian presidency, the prominent journalist Oleg Kashin said that in his view, journalism in Russia had shifted toward literature and to some extent had effectively been replaced by fiction. News has lost its value, he said, and this is not a result of censorship but rather of the impoverishment of the political process. But literature and even poetry have stepped into the role of investigative journalism: “one single poem by Dmitry Bykov is able to represent and explicate Russian politics in terms that are more adequate than any essay in a newspaper.” In the spirit of magical historicism, Kashin took part in a collective experiment: several Moscow authors wrote fictional memoirs from the perspective of the leading Russian politicians and media moguls about twenty years into the future: “only in this way, by poems, fairytales, or devil knows what, can one continue a meaningful dialogue with the reader today.”50
Imagining humans as animals, monsters, or walking beefsteaks renders both shame for the past and fear of the future—mourning and warning. Practicing senseless violence that eludes any functional interpretation, the Soviet system effectively reduced humans to working animals. Starting with Solzhenitsyn’s triton and Vladimov’s guard dog, literature has used humanized animals to tell the story of inhuman suffering. In the later spirit of magical historicism, these characters have developed into monsters that embody the horror, not the truth, of the Soviet period better than either humans or animals. This memorial culture is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet. Many classical figures and motifs resurge here: monsters like the Sphinx, Moloch, Leviathan, and Triton; Antigone, who wanted to bury her brother; Dante’s infernal adventures and Hamlet’s possession and revenge; Clorinda’s posthumous transformation; Dracula, to be sure; and also Bulgakov’s stray dog with the glands of a Communist. Probably the most pertinent master-plot is that of Little Red Riding Hood: the wolf ate the granny, and now he looks like the granny—or maybe it is the murdered granny who looks like a wolf?