Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization 9780773576506

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliterations and Translations
Preface
1 Cultural Globalization, the “Posts,” and the Second World
PART ONE: RUSSIA: POSTMODERN TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE COMMUNIST METROPOLY
2 Iosif Vissarionovich Pushkin, or The Transformational Momentum of Sots-Art
3 Travels through Heterotopia: The Other Worlds of Post-Soviet Russian Fiction
4 Transfigurations: Postmodern Articulations of Gender and Corporeality
5 The End of House Arrest: Queerness and Textuality in Contemporary Russia
PART TWO: UKRAINE: BEING POSTCOLONIAL IN THE SECOND WORLD
6 Allegorical Journeys, or The Metamorphoses of Magic Realism
7 The (Post)colonial (Post)carnivalesque, or The Poetics and Politics of Bu-Ba-Bu
8 Confronting Traumas: The Gendered/Nationed Body as Narrative and Spectacle
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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E
F
G
H
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Citation preview

mapping postcommunist cultures

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Mapping Postcommunist Cultures Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization vitaly chernetsky

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007 isbn-13: 978-0-7735-3123-9 isbn-10: 0-7735-3123-8 Legal deposit first quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of grants from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Ukrainian Studies Fund, and Columbia University Seminars. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Chernetsky, Vitaly Mapping postcommunist cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the context of globalization / Vitaly Chernetsky. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-7735-3123-9 isbn-10: 0-7735-3123-8 1. Russian literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Ukrainian literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 3. Postmodernism (Literature) – Russia (Federation). 4. Postmodernism (Literature) – Ukraine. i. Title. pg3026.p67c44 2007

891.709’11309049

Typeset in New Baskerville 10/13 by Infoscan Collette, Quebec City

c2006-902818-4

To my friends and loved ones: Thank you for your support.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Note on Transliterations and Translations Preface

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1 Cultural Globalization, the “Posts,” and the Second World 3 part one russia: postmodern transformations of the communist metropoly 2 Iosif Vissarionovich Pushkin, or The Transformational Momentum of Sots-Art 59 3 Travels through Heterotopia: The Other Worlds of Post-Soviet Russian Fiction 88 4 Transfigurations: Postmodern Articulations of Gender and Corporeality 114 5 The End of House Arrest: Queerness and Textuality in Contemporary Russia 146

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part two ukraine: being postcolonial in the second world 6 Allegorical Journeys, or The Metamorphoses of Magic Realism 185 7 The (Post)colonial (Post)carnivalesque, or The Poetics and Politics of Bu-Ba-Bu 206 8 Confronting Traumas: The Gendered/Nationed Body as Narrative and Spectacle 228 Conclusion 265 Notes 269 Bibliography 327 Index 355

Acknowledgments

This book’s journey from the initial impulse to the eventual publication has been an unusually long one, and I am deeply grateful to the many wonderful people who generously supported me in this process through feedback, inspiration, criticism, and encouragement. Sadly, several of them are no longer with us: Charles Bernheimer, Nina Iskrenko, Evgeny Laputin, Robert Maguire, Salomea Pavlychko, George Shevelov, Vladimir Turbin. I hope that this book will in some way serve as a tribute to their memory. The project that would later become this book began taking shape at Duke University, where I had the great honour and fortune to work with such wonderful teachers and mentors as Fredric Jameson, Orest Pelech, and Eve K. Sedgwick. It continued on its journey to publication at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was fortunate to benefit from the insights, support, and encouragement of JoAnne Dubil, Bob Perelman, Nadya Peterson, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jerry Prince, Ivana Vuletic´, Liliane Weissberg, and other teachers, friends, and peers too numerous to name here. Later, at Columbia University I received invaluable support and helpful criticism from Ursula Heise, Andreas Huyssen, Ron Meyer, Cathy Nepomnyashchy, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Mark von Hagen. I also benefited from the insights of my graduate students, many of whom have also become true friends; thank you, Rory Finnin, Douglas Greenfield, Nadia Michoustina, Lucy Parts, and Valeria Sobol. I have been tremendously fortunate to receive feedback and support from friends and colleagues around the globe, among them Peter Barta, Luc Beaudoin, Pavlo

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Bosy, Nancy Condee, Steven Fincke, George Grabowicz, Inez Hedges, John High, Halyna Hryn, Taras Koznarsky, Dominick LaCapra, Hélène Mélat, Kevin Moss, Marko Pavlyshyn, Harlow Robinson, Stephanie Sandler, David Shengold, the Shinn family, Aleksei Yudin, and Myroslava Znayenko. Mark Andryczyk, Sergei Kuznetsov, and Michael Naydan generously shared with me rare publications and manuscripts from their personal archives. Jared Ingersoll, Ksenya Kiebuzinski, and Erik Zitser helped in my work with library materials at Columbia and Harvard. Bruno Bosteels introduced me to the art of Guillermo Kuitca. A suggestion from Kathy Howlett helped me to find the final title for this book. Among the writers discussed in the book, Yuri Andrukhovych, Yaroslav Mogutin, and Oksana Zabuzhko have been particularly generous with their time, friendship, and support. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript for their helpful suggestions and constructive criticism, and, at McGill-Queen’s University Press, to Jonathan Crago, Robert Lewis, Joan McGilvray, and John Zucchi for making the final steps of the book’s journey to publication so smooth. I thank my parents for putting a map of the world above my bed when I was two years old, thereby initiating my longstanding interest in globalization and cognitive mapping. My deepest, fondest thank you goes to Cesare Casarino, Patrick McClue, and Tom Robert – without them the moment of writing acknowledgments upon completing this long project would never have been possible. Publication of this volume was aided by generous support from Columbia University Seminars, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (huri), and the Ukrainian Studies Fund. Portions of its argument were presented, in an earlier form, at the Columbia University Seminar on Slavic History and Culture and at the weekly seminar series at huri. A portion of chapter 2 was published, in an earlier form, as an article in the volume Endquote: SotsArt Literature and Soviet Grand Style, edited by Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko (Northwestern University Press, 2000). It is reproduced here with kind permission from the original publisher. I am also grateful to the Stedelijk Museum for permission to reproduce Guillermo Kuitca’s painting Odessa.

Note on Transliterations and Translations

In the bibliography, notes, and quotations from the original Russian and Ukrainian, the transliteration from the Cyrillic follows the Library of Congress system (with diacritics omitted). In the main text, personal names are rendered according to a slightly simplified system, following the traditions of English-language common usage, such as replacing Ia, Iu, and Ie with Ya, Yu, and Ye and rendering the -ii and -yi endings as -y. Hence, for example, “Yeshkiliev” in the main text and “Ieshkiliev” in the bibliography. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations of non-English sources are my own.

Guillermo Kuitca, Odessa, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 125 ¥ 88 cm. Collection: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Preface

In the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, there is a painting by the Argentinean artist Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1960), a grandson of immigrants from Ukraine. The painting, titled Odessa, consists of two images fused with each other: the baby carriage rolling down the Potemkin steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, perhaps the visual image of this city best known internationally, and a road map of the area of southwestern Ukraine (then part of the still-existing Soviet Union) around Odessa. This work, painted in 1987, constitutes a transition between two major series of paintings by Kuitca: El Mar Dulce (The sweet sea), comprised of theatre-set paintings that incorporate the image of Eisenstein’s baby carriage and represent a meditation on the phenomenon of immigration and the constitution of diasporic communities (Kuitca transforms the image of the baby carriage into an icon of the trauma of displacement that accompanies an immigrant’s “rebirth” in a new land); and a series of map paintings that to a large extent has been responsible for the artist’s international acclaim. Kuitca’s painting could serve as a motto for the present study. In the pages that follow, the reader will find an attempt to consider the cultural processes that occurred in the part of the world depicted in this particular work during the period embracing Kuitca’s career as an artist so far, the last quarter of the twentieth century (with a few excursuses into the first years of the twenty-first). Similarly to much of Kuitca’s recent work, this consideration will proceed by way of mapping the salient features of the

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momentous cultural transformation that ushered in a new social situation now associated with the term “postmodernity.” For several decades, the social and cultural reality of our planet has been shaped by the first cultural dominant ever to establish itself on a truly global scale. This global socio-economic condition has received the name “postmodernity,” and its cultural logic, or dominant style, has been termed “postmodernism.” However, theoretical analysis of these phenomena initially developed in the Western context, allowing for a “global/ Western” slippage in most early theorizations. This tendency reached its logical limit in assertions that “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world.”1 Cultural models of this type, anchored in a vision of the US as “the last superpower,” the heir of Europe’s earlier political and cultural domination of the world, then spilled over from the discourse on postmodernism and postmodernity into its recently prodigiously developing offshoot: the discourse on cultural globalization. The present study thus intends to intervene in the discourses on postmodernism, postcolonialism, and globalization by compelling them to engage in consideration of a wide range of paradigms of Second World culture that emerged in the postmodern era, particularly in the two biggest ex-Soviet nations: Russia and Ukraine. My primary focus in this exploration will be on literary texts, as literature-centrism has been, for a variety of reasons, a defining feature of both Russian and East European national cultures during the past two centuries,2 although instances of other cultural forms will be considered as well. My focus is also primarily on literary texts because developments in other cultural forms, I would argue, seldom brought, in the cases of Russia and Ukraine, genuinely innovative paradigms of engagement with the globalization momentum, beyond the exceptions noted in this volume (such as conceptualism and sots-art in the visual arts). This has especially been the case, in my opinion, with the newly emerged post-Soviet mass culture – while it definitely constitutes a new phenomenon in the local context, it has not, for a variety of reasons, seized upon the possibilities for innovation offered by the new era and has largely replicated paradigms borrowed from elsewhere. In some cultural forms, such as cinema, the most interesting cases of innovation actually emerged elsewhere in the region, namely in Central Asia, and thus fall beyond the scope of this book. Finally, I regret not being able to dwell at greater length on the role of the Internet in the cultural development of the post-Soviet space. While, compared to some other parts of the globe, the Internet

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culture still embraces a relatively small segment of post-Soviet population, it has undoubtedly developed in fascinating and often unique ways.3 Indeed, the events of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine have offered ample proof that the Internet can be a powerful tool for democratic change. Naturally, the cases of Russia and Ukraine do not exhaust the many indigenized forms of postmodernist/postcolonialist/postcommunist culture in their diversity from the Czech Republic to Mongolia; however, their sheer size as the two most populous Slavic and ex-Soviet nations as well as the alternative privileging of the different “post-” discourses in their national contexts (postmodernism in Russia and postcolonialism in Ukraine) support the need to focus on their respective cases. Ultimately, the events of the Orange Revolution of November to December 2004, which thrust Ukraine into the international spotlight to an unprecedented extent (as well as the reaction to these events by the ruling elites of Russia and other postcommunist nations), rendered moot any doubts about the crucial difference in the paths that these two national cultures have been following in recent years, solidifying the view of them as the two paradigmdefining cases for the post-Soviet space. Therefore, I hope this volume generates a corrective, on the one hand, to the trends observable in Second World nations to use the term “postmodernism” merely as a decorative label in discussions of local culture conducted entirely within the traditional endemic framework (a similar trend with respect to “postcolonial” can be observed in Ukraine) and, on the other, to the perception of some Western intellectuals that by now postmodernism (as well as the other “posts”) is in danger of becoming “the darling of journalism [and] the Baby Jane of criticism.” To borrow Hal Foster’s metaphor, I would like to look at postmodernism and postcolonialism “in parallax.” (“‘Parallax’ [from the Greek para-, ‘beside, beyond,’ and allassein, ‘to change’], in astronomy, means ‘the difference in [position and] direction of a celestial body as measured from two points on the earth.’”)4 In “Postmodernism in Parallax,” Foster argues for the necessity of a vision of postmodernism that would be more sensitive “to the different speeds as well as the mixed spaces of postmodern society.” What served for Foster as an imperative for reexamination of postmodernism was a visit to Ford’s first factory with an assembly line in Detroit, “perhaps the most important site in twentieth-century industry, the paradigm of Taylorist labor around the world,” now standing abandoned and rusted, “in a purgatory between modern and postmodern worlds”; a reading of this experience led Foster to a reaffirmation of the category of postmodernism as this heterogeneous chronotopic terrain.5

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Foster’s model provides a clue to some common features of First World and Second World postmodernisms: the ruins of modernity. The late-Soviet to early-post-Soviet era was peculiarly postmodernist in manifesting an outright crumbling of a “metanarrative” – that of Soviet communism building. In this light, the “exodus” from Manhattan to Bayonne, NJ, “the epitome of the rust belt,” by Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, the leading representatives of sots-art (a pioneering postmodernist art form in the then still-existing Soviet Union),6 symbolically points to this shared aspect of postmodernism. The entropic crumbling found with postmodernism does not stop with the “deconstruction” of modernist projects either. An example of its ever-expanding momentum is Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans (1976–79): this pastiche of architectural icons of Renaissance Rome, hailed as one of the most successful projects of postmodernist architecture,7 already by the early 1990s stood rusted, dilapidated, “demystified,” “doubly” postmodern. In this study, I single out for discussion several key cultural paradigms through which one can discern the outlines of a “Second World postmodernity,” along with an emergent “Second World postcoloniality,” paradigms that comprise a global cultural development peculiar to the postcommunist world but resonant far beyond its borders. For all their endemic peculiarity, however, each of these paradigms is better understood in larger global or cross-regional contexts. In the opening chapter, before analyzing the artifacts themselves, I outline the cultural aspects of the recently accelerating processes of globalization and the theoretical models of postmodernism and postcolonialism that underlie the discussion of the products of late- and post-Soviet culture in the subsequent chapters. From tracing some of the prominent Western and Third World intellectual arguments in the discourses in question, I move to explorations of the postmodern/postcolonial moment in (post-)Soviet and East European culture. I confront arguments against considering the former Soviet Union’s cultural condition in postmodernist terms and reflect on why these arguments have been voiced – including the peculiar condition of presence/absence that characterizes Second World cultures in virtually all of the cultural models of the contemporary world – and also suggest why a discussion of Second World cultural phenomena in terms of postmodernism and postcolonialism is both legitimate and productive. In sketching the vision of postmodernism that guides my analysis of individual cultural products in the later chapters, I focus in particular on the theoretical models that foster a project of synthesis, most notably Fredric Jameson’s outline of a project of cognitive mapping and Hal Foster’s vision of a postmodernism of

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resistance that endows with a voice traditionally silent or underrepresented social groups. The theory of postmodernism proposed by Jameson provides one of the most thought-provoking models of a postmodern culture, and it has strongly influenced the model of Second World postmodernism proposed here. Jameson thinks of postmodernism historically (as a cultural reflection of a particular stage in human history), dialectically (as “catastrophe and progress all together”), and socio-economically (as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”). The strengths of Jameson’s comprehensive approach, however, are tied in with some of its limitations – for instance, the unpredictability of determining the complicity versus the critical power displayed by postmodernist artworks and also the view of postmodern culture as primarily reflecting American imperialist hegemony and the domination of transnational capital – for if these were the only economies providing for the possibility of postmodern cultural products, then their emergence within the borders of the part of the world radically excluded from the networkings of transnational capital would be downright impossible (this is the main underlying argument of Western skeptical voices on the culture of [post-]Soviet postmodernity). A potential resolution for this contradiction in Jameson’s model of postmodernism is proposed by Arkady Plotnitsky, who sketches out a model of postmodernism that draws upon a different theory of cultural economy, namely Georges Bataille’s “general economy,” defined by the domination of expenditure and excess. In my reading of the key theoretical statements on Second World postmodernism made so far by critics writing from both within and outside the former Soviet Union, I focus both on the insights and the limitations of this discourse in its present state. Among such limitations in Russian theorizations of postmodernism, the particularly glaring one is the obliviousness to the imperialist overtones of Russian cultural discourse and to the place of the colonial/postcolonial dynamic in the cultural transformations that the Second World has been experiencing in recent decades. To tackle this problem, I introduce a number of notions from postcolonial discourse. The latter has yet to penetrate Russian cultural consciousness in any meaningful way; however, it has proven to be extremely influential and productive in the cultural dynamics of the former subaltern member nations of the Soviet Union and of the postcommunist world at large. Among the most fascinating instances of such engagement is contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture; thus in this study I devote considerable attention to Ukrainian articulations of the current cultural condition that employ postmodern and postcolonial optics.

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The remaining part of this study is divided into two parts, the first focusing on Russian literary texts and artworks and the second on those from Ukraine. Chapter 2, the first chapter of the part on Russia, is devoted to work by artists preoccupied with the representation, simulation, and appropriation of totalitarian cultural forms – a phenomenon that came to be identified by the terms “sots-art” and “conceptualism.” The pleasure of perfectly mastering an alien sign system as well as the critical activity of subverting it underlie the work of several prominent visual artists, poets, and prose writers. The focus of this chapter is on texts by several writers preoccupied with investigating the totalitarian vocabulary and its functioning and with actively subverting this reigning lingua Sovietica. I offer a reading of representative writings by three poets (Igor’ Irten’ev, Vladimir Druk, and Aleksandr Levin) and one prose writer (Vladimir Sorokin) whose works offer some of the clearest cases of such targeted textual transformations. In the process of doing so, I draw upon Sorokin, who offers a particularly rich array of approaches, from pursuing “zero degree writing” in Barthes’s sense to a Sadean project of verbalizing the “dark underside” of Soviet civilization. Chapter 3 discusses what I propose to call heterotopic texts (texts where multiple realities, discourses, and spatial and temporal locales mingle and interact). This concept draws on the notion of heterotopia developed by Michel Foucault as well as on interpretive models of postmodern writing, such as Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction.” The designation “heterotopic texts” seems productive by virtue of the importance of “other” in its semantics and by being less exclusive than Hutcheon’s model (which rejects a number of works that she does not find “historiographic enough”). This mode, clearly, is best demonstrated in prose texts. In this chapter I consider instances of this kind in the writings of Mikhail Kuraev, Viktor Erofeyev, Viktor Pelevin, and Evgeny Laputin, very different authors who nevertheless share this common fascination with fusing multiple alternate worlds, and the critical intentions underlying their projects. Chapters 4 and 5 concentrate on those uses of postmodernist strategies that foreground previously under- or unrepresented cultural experiences, voicings of hitherto marginalized subject positions, and explorations of alternative textual modes. Chapter 4 is devoted to the exploration of one of the most important aspects of late- and post-Soviet culture in Russia: the unprecedented prominence of women authors on the literary scene and their active foregrounding of questions of gender and corporeality in cultural discourse. I discuss the work of women writers in the context of the problematic relationship of Russian culture, including its women

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practitioners, to (Western) feminist theory. The theory of feminine writing, as developed by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, is of crucial importance here, as is the debate on the conjunction between the critical projects of feminism and postmodernism as well as the models of openly political postmodern culture. The chapter discusses representative texts that highlight a number of key issues in women’s lives as well as the problematic of their textual representation as exemplified in the work of some of the most unconventional Russian women writers of their time. I begin with a discussion of two texts that shocked Russian readers by employing what has been dubbed “the strategy of maximum palpability” in their presentations of female bodies that document their owners’ pain and degradation, bodies that endure rape, abortion, beating, and disease: Elena Tarasova’s “Ne pomniashchaia zla” (She who doesn’t remember evil) and Svetlana Vasilenko’s “Shamara.” I then move to consider in greater detail the work of two representatives of the most radically experimental trend in contemporary Russian women’s writing who offer texts that are unconventional in both formal properties and thematic preoccupations and that combine explorations of avant-garde legacies with theoretical concerns with the construction of gender identity through textual means: the poet Nina Iskrenko and the prose writer Valeria Narbikova. Chapter 5 is concerned with the representation of sexuality – particularly queer sexuality – in contemporary Russian writing and with its farreaching effect on the current cultural landscape. In the last years of the Soviet Union’s existence, homosexuality began to lose its taboo status, which had prevailed throughout most of the Soviet era. However, although there have been numerous depictions of homosexuality in recent Russian letters, an overwhelming majority of them have been fuelled either by open hatred of gays or by deeply rooted homophobia: homosexuality is portrayed as something abhorrent and transgressive; its depictions are used to purposefully “gross the reader out.” In this attitude to homosexuality, writers otherwise occupying polar positions find themselves strange bedfellows: the likes of the ultra-nationalist Vasily Belov, on the one hand, and the avowed postmodernists Viktor Erofeyev and Vladimir Sorokin, on the other. In such conditions, the recent posthumous canonization of Evgeny Kharitonov, an openly gay writer whose assertive depictions of homosexuality form a leitmotif of his work, as one of the leaders of the underground “avant-garde” of post-Soviet literature is fascinating. The main part of the chapter analyzes the body of Kharitonov’s texts and the peculiar turns that the canonization of his work has taken. The Russian literary establishment, when accepting Kharitonov’s work, either downplays

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the relevance of his sexuality for his writing or interprets it as “a form of abstinence” or as an “aesthetic pose.” These interpretations are clearly influenced by the theories of homosexual desire prevalent in early-twentiethcentury Russia, most notably those of Vasily Rozanov. I address the questions of the impact of Rozanov’s aesthetics and his theories of gay desire on Kharitonov. However, my primary strategy in interpreting Kharitonov’s texts is rooted in contemporary Western critical (especially queer) theory. I discuss Kharitonov as a practitioner of an “écriture gaie,” drawing primarily on the work of Deleuze, Monique Wittig, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I believe that Kharitonov successfully articulates a gay subject position in writing, and in this chapter I dwell on the provocative impact of his work on the contemporary Russian literary scene. I conclude this chapter with a reading of the work of a younger author, Yaroslav Mogutin, whose outspoken queer writing openly challenges the attitudes of the Russian cultural establishment, focusing in particular on Mogutin’s practices of subversion and interrogation of stable cultural constructs of sexuality and nationhood. Mogutin’s textual practices offer a fitting transition to the final part of this volume, devoted to the study of the legacies of Russian/Soviet cultural hegemony and the resistant discursive practices in the context of a formerly subaltern national culture – that of Ukraine. Using postcolonial theory and subaltern studies as a point of departure, I consider the issues at stake in the work of the Ukrainian writers of the late- and post-Soviet period preoccupied with the peculiar hybridity of their culture at the stage of the breakdown of colonial domination. The present volume offers the first comprehensive attempt to place contemporary Ukrainian culture within a larger project of cognitive mapping. The first chapter of this section, Chapter 6, focuses on arguably the first major artistic paradigm engaged with the (post)colonial problematic to emerge in the then still-existing Soviet Union: an idiosyncratic version of magic realist prose developed in Ukraine from the late 1960s through the 1980s. The cultural project of such authors as Valery Shevchuk and Yuri Vynnychuk focuses on the retrieval and affirmation of indigenous literary and philosophical tradition, particularly of the Baroque era, and on strategies of ethno-national survival in the colonial context. Their texts, while operating with strictly domestic settings, display strong intellectual affinities with contemporaneous projects in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World. In their search for a path for resolving the antinomies of the crisis in which Ukrainian culture found itself by the end of the Soviet era, these authors, similarly to their counterparts in other parts of the globe, tend to favour a strategy that Jameson has termed “national allegory.”

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Through a reading of several of their most influential works, I sketch the model of cultural resistance that has exerted the greatest influence on contemporary Ukrainian culture. Chapter 7 discusses carnivalesque subversion of the crumbling totalitarian rituals by the literary group Bu-Ba-Bu, comprising Yuri Andrukhovych, Oleksandr Irvanets’, and Viktor Neborak. Their poetry and prose of the late 1980s and early 1990s proved particularly effective in challenging both the legacies of Soviet officialdom and the ossified populist narratives of national culture. However, the short-lived “instantly realized utopia” of the mass festivals that defined their artistic practices, like the events of Paris in 1968 or of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, has left a profoundly ambivalent legacy. In the remaining part of the chapter, I move to a close reading of Andrukhovych’s fiction and essays produced after this period. These texts, which have had a wide resonance beyond Ukraine’s borders, offer instances of “writing back” both to the empire’s centre and to the world at large and document the painful dilemmas and journeys of analysis and identification experienced by a postcolonial intellectual in the post-Soviet context. In his writing, Andrukhovych, I argue, has developed a new “post-carnivalesque” poetics. The final chapter considers in greater detail the body marked through gender and national identification as spectacle and narrative in contemporary Ukrainian culture. Several texts by male Ukrainian writers display a number of reactionary complexes and attitudes that persist even in the work of authors otherwise sensitive to the demands of the postmodern era; conversely, a school of thought that manipulates the feminist critical apparatus for the purposes of attacking Ukrainian culture as such and reasserting a Russian imperialist nationalism provides the other unfortunate extreme. As an alternative to these and by drawing a parallel to the cultural developments in South Africa, I offer a vision of a project that strives to address feminist concerns alongside a postcolonial rethinking of the nation, pursued in the poetry, fiction, and essays by one of Ukraine’s leading contemporary women writers, Oksana Zabuzhko. By working through both the national and the sexual traumas that haunt the contemporary Ukrainian cultural condition, her work offers a powerful exploration of the position of women in the postcolonial order and of the strategies of narrative recuperation and affirmation of their presence. The culture of Second World postmodernity is endowed with a significant productive and critical potential; however, its unstable and complicated condition produces a situation where the danger of this culture emptying itself out to the point of expurgatory excess still persists. It will ultimately

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be up to future generations of artists and thinkers to evaluate the longlasting impact of the paradigm shift that occurred in the Second World in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Still, the diversity and intensity of the changes that this shift brought about testify to the strong productive potential of its cultural products and to its intimate engagement with similar processes elsewhere around the globe. Neglecting the Second World in pursuing any vision of contemporary culture that aspires to global applicability would make such a vision fatally incomplete.

mapping postcommunist cultures

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1 Cultural Globalization, the “Posts,” and the Second World

The recent years have witnessed a rapidly growing endeavour by thinkers concerned with the processes of globalization and the condition of postmodernity to challenge the US-centric vision of the present global cultural condition, or the “new world order,” that was asserted so strongly in the early 1990s, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. More and more frequently, an argument can be heard that while the US economic, political, and cultural influence around the world is undeniable, excessive privileging of its role is but a paradoxical consequence of the West’s narcissism and self-assurance in claiming itself as the embodiment of universality. Thus Néstor García Canclini, in his study Hybrid Cultures, advances a vision of contemporary global culture as constituted by eclectic multidirectional contacts and borrowings that encourage the proliferation of new cultural forms. Similarly, Arjun Appadurai, in the face of the West’s, particularly the US’s, “endless preoccupation” with itself (whether positive or negative value judgments are attached), insists on our continuous awareness that “globalization is itself a deeply historical, uneven, and even localizing process. Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization,” as “different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently.”1 It is important to be aware that “the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes”; otherwise, we may become trapped in “a confusion between some ineffable McDonaldization of the world and the much subtler play

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Mapping Postcommunist Cultures

of indigenous trajectories of desire and fear with global flows of people and things.”2 The tragic events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath only underscored the urgent need for such projects of reconsideration. Guillermo Kuitca’s painting Odessa, with which I began the preface to this study, strongly supports these arguments. This painting is very much a product of global contact of cultures, yet its cultural coordinates have little, if anything, to do with either the US or the West conventionally understood; rather, the painting instantiates a nonhierarchized encounter between Argentina, the place of its production and initial reception, and Ukraine, mediated by the history of emigration from the Russian/Soviet Empire and this empire’s dominant cultural forms; it is also a product of hybridization of genres (painting, film, and cartography), ethnicities, and cultures (Odessa and Buenos Aires as heterogeneous port cities settled by migrants). Kuitca’s cartographic metaphor resonates with what Fredric Jameson, one of the most influential theorists of both postmodernism and globalization, proposes as a constructive form of postmodernist culture. For Jameson, formation of the latter lies in developing what he calls “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping,” described as “a pedagogical, political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.” The political form of postmodernism, he believes, would “have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.”3 In this volume I offer the reader an attempt at such a project of cognitive mapping, focusing specifically on two Second World nations, Russia and Ukraine, while situating their cultural politics in the larger global network of cultural paradigms. The approach grounded in mapping has served as an important corrective to the early assertions of postmodernity as something “global, yet American,” a consequence of the US’s economic and political power. Jameson’s 1984 essay “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,”4 by outlining the parameters of the “force field” of intellectual takes on postmodernism (a concept that found both supporters and detractors on either side of the ideological spectrum), rendered untenable attempts to deliver facile judgmental pronouncements on this topic. Similarly, his more recent essay “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” identifies a range of positions on and models and interpretations of globalization as a cultural and social phenomenon. Jameson highlights a crucial tension between the visions of globalization intellectually grounded, on the one hand, in cultural anthropology (like the work of Appadurai or García Canclini) and, on the other, in the

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Marxian interpretation of the cultural sphere as a superstructure determined by the economic base. He characterizes the “cultural” version as an overwhelmingly positive, postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation: suddenly all the cultures around the world are placed in tolerant contact with each other in a kind of immense cultural pluralism which it would be very difficult not to welcome. Beyond that, beyond the dawning celebration of cultural difference, and often very closely linked to it, is a celebration of emergence of a whole immense range of groups, races, genders, ethnicities, into the speech of the public sphere; a falling away of those structures that condemned whole segments of the population to silence and subalternity; a worldwide growth of popular democratization … which seems to have some relationship with the evolution of the media, but which is immediately expressed by a new richness and variety of cultures in the new world space.5

This passage provides a fairly accurate vision of potential cultural advantages of globalization, even if the celebratory tone with which it is infused verges on caricature. However, side by side with it, one finds the “economic” model, which emphasizes identity rather than difference: “the rapid assimilation of hitherto autonomous national markets and productive zones into a single sphere, the disappearance of national subsistence … the forced integration of countries all over the globe into [a] new global division of labor … a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale; of forced integration as well, into a world-system from which ‘delinking’ … is henceforth impossible and even unthinkable and inconceivable.”6 Again, it would be next to impossible to dismiss this vision, as it is indeed grounded in the documentable economic trends of recent decades. However, problems arise when the two visions, as it were, “invade” each other’s territory. An “economist” interpretation of cultural globalization, as one may expect, posits the contemporary cultural condition as “the worldwide Americanization or standardization of culture, the destruction of local differences, the massification of all the peoples on the planet.” Conversely, the “culturalist” vision of the global economy stresses “the richness and excitement of the new free market all over the world.”7 The problem – or perhaps the richness – of the contemporary situation is that each of these models has a degree of validity, and a productive approach would be an attempt to identify the vying and tension between these opposite forces, as it has been argued that one of the key characteristics of the condition of postmodernity is the “becoming cultural” of the economic and the “becoming economic” of the cultural.8 Jameson hopes

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that the clash of these visions will generate a productive “flying of sparks.” Could this standoff be resolvable after all? One possible clue to a resolution can be found in the pages of the very same essay. After supplying, in favour of the “economist” model, the example of Hollywood’s global influence precipitating a severe crisis for most other national film industries, Jameson turns to the case (apparently somewhat puzzling to him) of Latin America and the strength of its local culture, characterized by a high degree of independence from US influences. Indeed, although Jameson does not focus on it, the popularity and influence of Latin American pop music and television serials around the world pose a significant challenge to the sometimes exaggerated “threat” of American pop culture (which reminds us that even if one adheres to the “economic” model, equating it with Americanization is still misleadingly reductive). Similarly, the case of Latin America provides an opportunity to caution against the facile substitution of mass culture for culture tout court in the discourse on globalization. As Jameson notes, “in the Latin American case … the positive force of culture is not meant to designate mass or popular culture exclusively, but rather includes high culture and very specifically the national literature and language.”9 Indeed, many would argue that the relatively marginal status of national high culture in the US is rather an anomaly in the global context, and this example speaks in favour of balancing the stress on globalization with the project of “critical regionalism,”10 or as Appadurai formulates it, “the production of locality.”11 The basic paradigm of structuration of our world that underlies most of the global political, economic, and cultural models produced over the past half-century and that has enjoyed a very complex relationship with the discourses on postmodernity and globalization is that of the “threeworlds theory.” This paradigm, which has both geopolitical and scholarly implications, arose in the immediate aftermath of the onset of the Cold War and the beginning of massive decolonization in Asia and Africa.12 The numbering of the worlds constituted an unconcealed assignment of ranks, as what was designated as the First World, the industrialized West, was perceived as “technologically advanced and free of ideological constraints,” while the Second World, comprising the Soviet Union and other communist-ruled states, was characterized as “technologically advanced but encumbered by an ideological elite.” Finally, the rest of the planet was designated the Third World, due to being perceived as “traditionally, economically, and technologically underdeveloped, with a traditional mentality obscuring the possibility of utilitarian and scientific thinking.”13

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This ranked division, as well as the relatively restricted communication between the Second World and the rest of the planet, allowed for an apparent anomaly in the discourse on global culture. While the scholarship on “geopolitics” and, to a lesser extent, comparative economics at least attempted to take all three parts of the planet into account, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the proliferation of cultural models that were proclaimed universal even though they were grounded exclusively in the First World; the discourse on postmodernism was no exception to this. When direct challenges came to this continuing privileging of the First World as a synecdoche for the universal, they were formulated from the perspective of the Third World, and important and laudable as they have been, they perpetuated the exclusion of the Second World from global cultural models, now recast in the oxymoronic binary of the First vs the Third World, which can be found even in the work of otherwise forward-looking scholars.14 This has been true of the discourse on postcolonialism – a supplement and augmentation of the scholarly discourse on postmodernism originating from Third World contexts. When the Second World did warrant a passing mention, in either of these two discourses, it was only as an abstract model – a structural possibility of an “Archimedean point,” as it were, outside the First-Third binary – not as an actual dynamic culture with its internal tensions and developments.15 The opening up of Second World cultures to increased global contacts as a result of the policies of perestroika and glasnost and, even more so, the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the suddenly former ussr highlighted this jarring omission; however, the first attempts by “global” theorists to address it were awkward, if not embarrassing. In his essay “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” a pioneering attempt to integrate the Second World into the global discourse on postcolonialism, David Chioni Moore considers the instance of Ella Shohat’s 1992 article “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” recognized as “a classic postcolonial-studies reference.” Shohat identifies the presence of postcolonial concerns throughout practically the entire globe – with the conspicuous exception of the Second World. The latter is only accorded two passing mentions, entirely in reference to the impact of the “collapse of the Soviet Communist model” in the Third World context; Shohat believes that it “has not altered the neocolonial policies, and on some level, has generated increased anxiety among such Third World communities as the Palestinians and South African Blacks concerning their struggle for independence without a Second World counter-balance.”16 Moore finds it “remarkable or, rather, remarkably

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ordinary [that] a scholar enormously concerned with the fate of colonized and recently decolonized peoples across the planet should treat events that were widely perceived, at least in the twenty-seven nations from Lithuania to Uzbekistan, as a decolonization, instead as a distant, indeed abstract (see Shohat’s term ‘model’), noncolonial event, and as a loss, since it increased the anxieties of, for example, Palestinians and Black South Africans.”17 A more complex version of this structural tension can be found in the context of the discourse on postmodernism, particularly in the work of Jameson. The transplantation of this discourse into non-Western contexts, which occurred in a manner similar to the dissemination of other cultural phenomena of Western origin, has presented a problem for those Western theorists who lean toward the “economist” view of cultural globalization. As Appadurai has noted, “Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about commoditization, and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way: this is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions.”18 The discourse on postmodernism (and a little later and to a more limited extent, that on postcolonialism) faced precisely such an indigenized reclaiming in many Second World cultures, paralleling similar developments in the world’s other regions.19 Indeed, the rather active embrace of the term and the extension of its use to the Second World context generated surprise and a degree of resistance from the Western participants in this dialogue. If postmodernism is indeed a phenomenon pertaining only to late capitalist societies, then attempts to use the term in discussions of Third World and especially Soviet bloc cultures are patently absurd. In the early 1990s, Susan Buck-Morss considered this coupling an “apparent anomaly”;20 Marjorie Perloff called it “an oxymoron”;21 and Katerina Clark, while agreeing that “gestures in that direction [i.e., toward the ‘postmodernizing’ of ex-Soviet literary sensibility] have been made,” insisted that those who were making these gestures were by no means near to arriving at their destination.22 However, these warnings were voiced in the face of a fait accompli: over the course of just a couple of years, the term “postmodernism,” if not the phenomenon itself, was actively embraced by large numbers of Second World intellectuals. Perhaps not coincidentally, this embrace coincided with the disintegration of the Soviet bloc: by early 1992, the term was all over the pages of the now ex-Soviet

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cultural media and used overwhelmingly for a discussion not of foreign but of local cultural phenomena. At the time, Jameson himself expressed a very cautious sympathy with this use. Indeed, the two big projects that resulted from his interest in Soviet culture during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chapters “On Soviet Magic Realism” in his The Geopolitical Aesthetic and “Utopia, Modernism, and Death” in The Seeds of Time, testify to his complicated stance on the issue. The bulk of the first of the two is devoted to a reading of the 1988 film Dni zatmeniia (Days of eclipse) by the Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov, loosely based on a science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, Za milliard let do kontsa sveta (A billion years to the end of the world). From the outset, Jameson stresses the “instructive difference” of both Soviet science fiction and Soviet “new wave cinema” from their Western counterparts, something that he sees in danger of disappearing with “the new Western-style commercialization heralded by perestroika films and the influence of the market.”23 He goes on to assert that “Modernist traditions … are still very much alive in the Soviet Union today”;24 however, he stops short of identifying the film as either modernist or postmodernist. Still, the aims of Jameson’s interpretation of the film are clear. In both the novel and the film, characters who are on the verge of breakthroughs in knowledge find that an unexplainable external force is trying to thwart their efforts; the main characters receive mysterious packages and telegrams of unknown provenance, meet strange, surreal characters, and so forth; at least one of them kills himself. What is narrativized here, believes Jameson, are external attempts to block and thwart “the construction of socialism itself, a society in control of its own destiny, that sets its own, human agenda for itself.” Yet as the Soviet Union disintegrates, the forces that can be tied to this blockage can no longer be allegorically interpreted as Stalinism, nor can the Party be viewed as a totalitarian institution; rather, the culprit “is the capitalist world system into which the Soviet Union has decided to integrate itself.”25 Thus it appears that within the context of this reading, if one may talk about the Second World entering postmodernity, this came about only as a consequence of the collapse of communist rule and the Soviet Union’s entry into the situation where “late capitalism weighs on the world like a doom” and “the Soviets are in danger of becoming neo-colonial subjects.”26 The logical accent in Jameson’s engagement with Soviet culture shifts in The Seeds of Time. Each of the three large chapters of this book, he asserts, “attempts a diagnosis of the cultural present with a view toward

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opening a perspective onto the future,” a project much needed in the context where “any attempt to say what postmodernism is can scarcely be separated from the even more problematic attempt to say where it is going.”27 It comes as a bit of a shock, then, that while the first and the last chapters of the book indeed concern themselves with very contemporary – and Western – phenomena, the middle one devoted to Second World culture focuses on the 1920s modernist fiction of Andrei Platonov, a fascinating writer to be sure, but hailing from a very different time period. Jameson’s logic in including a reading of Platonov is that it allows a glimpse into an alternative form of modernity that was represented by Second World culture and that this latter is indeed a distinct phenomenon, “an emergent socialist culture whose development, in its Eastern or Slavic form, has been cut short.”28 It is important for Jameson to assert that there is indeed such a thing as a distinct Second World culture since such possibility “has been ignored, if not passionately repudiated,” in most attempts at presenting global cultural models. This is a culture that he believes is fast disappearing, “now that socialist institutions and property systems … have everywhere in the Soviet east been rolled back.”29 Still, in his view, “in the former Soviet Union (although not necessarily in the former Soviet east as a whole) modernism is still alive and continues to coexist with forms of postmodernism as fresh and sassy as anything current in the West”; moreover, the inhabitants of the ex-ussr are for him “the last surviving modernists in world culture, over whose shoulders we postmoderns are still in a position to peer.”30 This enigmatic statement, however, is left unsubstantiated: no examples of such “enduring modernism” in post-Soviet spaces are adduced. What seems foreign to Jameson’s vision of postmodernism is what by now has become commonplace in the discourse on Second World postmodernist culture, namely that the first signs of the shift from modernism to postmodernism arose in the Second World more or less simultaneously with their appearance in the West: in the case of Russia, for example, the fiction of Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) and Venedikt Erofeyev served as important harbingers from the late 1950s through the 1960s (and contemporaneous developments of this kind were also recorded in many other Second World nations), and a major development in both visual and verbal arts occurred in the 1970s, all of them the consequence of the waning of the utopian impulse, something that in the context of the West has been thematized by Jameson himself.31 This waning has been the focus of the most compelling attempt so far to construct a model of the contemporary global cultural condition that takes into account the Second

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World, Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. In contrast to Jameson, for whom the frustrations of (mis)communication resulted in his withdrawal from engagement with ex-Soviet and East European cultures,32 Buck-Morss has persisted in her theoretical engagement with Russian/Soviet culture, which has generated a vision that counters the longstanding tendency of considering Second World phenomena in isolation from the rest of the planet. From today’s perspective, asserts Buck-Morss, “the cultural forms that existed in ‘East’ and ‘West’ … appear uncannily similar. They may have differed violently in their way of dealing with the problems of modernity, but they shared a faith in the modernizing process.” She stresses the imperative “to recognize that the end of the Soviet era was not limited spatially to the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik experiment, no matter how specifically Russian cultural traits it developed, was vitally attached to the Western, modernizing project, from which it cannot be extricated without causing the project itself to fall to pieces – including its cult of historical progress.”33 However, Buck-Morss cautions against melancholy, cynicism, or “selfironizing distance” in approaching the contemporary condition. Indeed, this conviction is fused in her argument with an awareness of the structural limitations of her own methods – her theoretical focus is by and large only on (Soviet) Russia and the US. Having tackled the dream of mass utopia, which, she argues, “defined the cultural project of the twentieth century” only to be “pronounced a failure in the Second World” and to be “purposefully abandoned in the First,” Buck-Morss’s conclusion is that the utopian impulse that once animated mass production and mass consumption is capable of new configurations … While “global intellectuals” orbit above, floating from one international meeting to another, and while “national intellectuals” carry on a rear-line defense of cultural exceptionalism from their home territories below, there are producers of culture working on another level to open up alternative spaces – on the margins, at boundary crossings, at cultural intersections, within electronic landscapes – in subaltern worlds that avoid the homogenizing topology of globalization, while taking advantage of its electronic infrastructures and technological forms.34

Second World-based Internet projects, for instance, offer plenty of such examples of ingenuity and innovation. I would like to link this vision of “alternative postmodernist practices” with that advocated by Hal Foster in 1983, early in the discourse on postmodernism. The Anti-Aesthetic, a collection of essays edited by him, served

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as part manifesto and part analysis of postmodern culture that outlined the contours of the debate on postmodernism in the US. Against Jürgen Habermas’s much-commented-upon attack on postmodernism, included in that volume,35 where postmodernism is seen as a neoconservative repudiation of the project of modernity, Foster asserts that there are, in fact, many postmodernisms and sketches out a differentiation between a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction. While the latter combines an attack on modernism, presented as the cause of all the ills of modernization, with a rétro-style “affirmation” of tradition and history, the oppositional postmodernism of resistance is defined as that which “arises as a counter-practice not only to the official culture of modernism but also to the ‘false normativity’ of a reactionary postmodernism … a resistant postmodernism is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche of pop- or pseudo-historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them … it seeks to question rather than to exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.”36 Such practices of “postmodernism of resistance,”37 in combination with the project of cognitive mapping, provide ground for the continuing affirmation of the principle of hope in contemporary culture. A similar synthesis of the two paradigms occurs in the pages of BuckMorss’s study. Having outlined the above-quoted vision of alternative postmodernist practices, she turns to the notion of mapping in theorizing the contemporary cultural condition: “The end of the Cold War has done more than rearrange the old spatial cartographies of East and West and the old historico-temporal cartographies of advanced and backward. It has also given space for new imaginings to occupy and cultivate the semantic field leveled by the shattering of the Cold War discourse.”38 Agreeing with this statement, I would stress the imperative to challenge the residue of Cold War-era understanding of the separateness of the three worlds that persists in the distribution of “post-” discourses among them. As I have noted above, postmodernism has been and remains for many, first and foremost, a First World phenomenon, while postcolonialism is rooted in the cultural and social realia of the Third World, and “postcommunism” has been used, at least in the social sciences, as the specific characteristic of the Second World. Thus each of the three worlds has been assigned its own unique “post-.” However, the appropriation and indigenization of the discourse on postmodernism around the world has challenged the first assumption (effectively obliterating the efforts of some purists to guard postmodernism’s “proper” location). Buck-Morss’s study powerfully argues that “postcommunism,” too, is a phenomenon with global, not merely

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Second World, applicability and implications. Similarly, David Chioni Moore makes an argument that postcolonialism is not merely a Third World phenomenon and not even something that pertains to the “FirstThird” binary. Compelling postcolonial critique to abandon its practice of geopolitical exclusion and address Second World phenomena, he argues, does not “theoretically inflate the concept to the point of weakness”; rather, it means that postcoloniality should be considered “as fundamental to world identities as other ‘universal’ categories, such as race, and class, and caste, and age, and gender.”39 Let us have a closer look, then, at some of the intellectual signposts of the discourse on postmodernism. Extremely prolific and heterogeneous, it has been described as “a mine-field of conflicting notions.”40 One of the key issues at stake in the debate has been succinctly formulated by Foster, who questions whether postmodernism ought to be viewed as “a concept or a practice, a matter of local style or a whole new period or economic phase.”41 Unfortunately, the understanding of it as a “local style” dominated the early stages of Second World discourse on postmodernism, particularly in Russia. In contrast, I would like to assert, following Foster and Jameson, the understanding of “postmodernism”42 as a condition and a logic of a cultural era (generally dated back to the 1960s) – that is, as this era’s dominant rather than just a movement or a style (as the Russian literary critics have tended to view it). When the discourse on postmodernism “came of age” in the early to mid-1970s, it was associated to a large extent with the statements by Ihab Hassan in literature and Charles Jencks in architecture, both presented in the form of registering symptoms of change. Both critics eventually arrived at diagrams that highlight the “distinctive features” of postmodernism, as contrasted with modernism. For Jencks, the primary characteristic of postmodernism in architecture is “double coding,” a strategy that combines modernist commitment to the use of contemporary technology with active attempts to communicate with the public; postmodernist architects register and react to the failure of “International Style” modernism to communicate effectively with the ultimate users of architecture and to make “effective links with the city and history.” Theirs is not an uncritical traditionalist attempt at reviving the past; rather, it is marked by irony, parody, displacement, and so forth.43 Architecture thus became the area of cultural activity where postmodernism was first clearly discerned and articulated.44 The failure of the grand projects of modernist architecture, such as the city of Brasília, as

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well as the misguided attempts by modernist architects to destroy the traditional fabric of the city, which had served as a place for communication, work in favour of a position like Jencks’s. But beneath the slogans of a potential for an aesthetics of populism and diversity, “the signs of rehabilitation and gentrification often assume almost exactly the same serial monotony as the modernism they were supposed to replace.”45 Thus, while not denying the determining influence of Jencks’s theory on the understanding of postmodernism, it would be beneficial to consider the theory in conjunction with an alternative vision of architectural postmodernism, offered by Kenneth Frampton. He sees a potential for a postmodern “architecture of resistance” in “critical regionalism,” in which the cultural practice “distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress, from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past,” and from “the simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular”46 – thus tying architectural postmodernism closer to the models advanced within discussions of other arts, addressed below.47 The fragmentation of subjectivity is frequently cited as one of postmodernism’s characteristics.48 Jean-François Lyotard’s seemingly paradoxical proposition that the fragmented text is rather characteristic of modernity, while the essay constitutes a genuine postmodern form,49 seems to refer to an autonomous, alienated fragment and to suggest a model of the essayistic text as a rhizomatic construction à la Deleuze and Guattari.50 The rhizome, proposed as a model of thought and of textual organization in their A Thousand Plateaus, is shaped by principles of connection and heterogeneity, as opposed to the rigid, tree/root-like structure;51 it “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances.” It is guided by the principle of multiplicity, which “has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions,”52 and by the principle of a signifying rupture.53 Rhizome can also be conceived of as “a map,” as opposed to “a tracing”: it is “entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real … The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification”; it privileges performance over competence.54 The notions of the rhizome and the map form an integral part of the model of globalized postcommunist culture that I develop in this study. While early discussions of postmodernism were to a large extent couched in the discourse of symptoms, Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition

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tips the argument toward a diagnostic exploration of the crisis signalled by these symptoms. His project is to place the transformations that “have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts … in the context of the crisis of narratives,” or, rather, “grand” (or meta-) narratives (grands récits, méta-récits) – that is, discourses of legitimation, such as “the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.” The postmodern, then, is defined as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”55 Lyotard looks for “a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown” when “consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value,” which requires the recognition of “the heteromorphous nature of language games,” and when the latter are based on temporary contracts rather than on permanent institutions; the goal, then, lies in the “knowledge of language games as such and the decision to assume responsibility for their rules and effects.”56 In his subsequent essay “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?,” appended to The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard elaborates on his understanding of postmodern art as that which, situated within the modern, emphasizes “the powerlessness of the faculty of representation.” While modern art’s project, for Lyotard, is “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists,” postmodern art “allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in [the] writing itself.” The postmodern is seen as that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for.57

Lyotard’s influential account, the first key statement of what may be termed theoretical postmodernism, generated what Brian McHale has called “the anxiety of master narratives”;58 it put up, so to speak, an enormous Soviet-style poster with a warning inscription: “Do not totalize; do not commit a master narrative.” However, numerous critics have suggested that Lyotard’s theory of incredulity to metanarratives has itself become yet another metanarrative, writ large on the global intellectual landscape.59 Jameson, in his Foreword to the English translation of The Postmodern

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Condition, summarizes the problem as “how to do without narrative by means of narrative itself” and asks whether Lyotard’s attempted “rescue” of the desire for the unknown and the desire for justice from the teleological metanarratives that “have become peculiarly repugnant or embarrassing to First World intellectuals today” can “infuse” the otherwise repressive system with a dealienating and liberatory potential.60 While the Foreword skirts the issue of the book’s potential impact in the Second and Third Worlds, in many ways its questions anticipate the dilemmas ushered in by the collapse of the ussr and the complex global realignment that has been unfolding since then. Next to Lyotard, among French thinkers, Jean Baudrillard has probably had the greatest impact on the discourse on postmodernism. In his essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” which has become something of a postmodern “cult” text, Baudrillard paints a picture of the contemporary world as that in which simulacra (in Jameson’s succinct formulation, “the identical cop[ies] for which no original has ever existed”)61 precede and replace reality: in the words of Baudrillard’s epigraph, “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none.”62 The prime force of this transformation, again, is electronic communication; there are no longer media in the literal sense: the medium “is now intangible, diffuse and defracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it.”63 Baudrillard’s somewhat apocalyptic vision of the role of simulacra in postmodern culture has had a truly global reach and is strongly implanted in the discourse of Second World intellectual circles. Another extremely influential essay, Andreas Huyssen’s “Mapping the Postmodern,” combines the call for a postmodernism of resistance outlined in The Anti-Aesthetic with a painstaking attempt to offer a map of postmodernism’s many aspects and currents. Huyssen’s map is not so much a Deleuzian rhizome as a text in the tradition of the ancient Greek periploi, a fascinatingly detailed and generally reliable navigational manual that is nonetheless limited by the horizon of knowledge determined by a particular spatio-temporal location. His presentation of postmodernism is a historical account of its genesis and evolution, geographically limited to the US, France, and Germany. Huyssen believes that “postmodernism’s critical dimension lies … in its radical questioning of those presuppositions which linked modernism and the avantgarde to the mindset of modernization.”64 Postmodernism’s critique of modernist art, in his view, stems not so much from what “modernism really was” as from the retrospective view of it as the institutionalized

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art.65 The 1960s in the US are presented by Huyssen as the last impulse, the swan song, of the avant-garde and simultaneously as the beginning, the “prehistory,” of postmodernism. On the one hand, the 1960s launched a critique of institutionalized high modernism and a return to the disruptive moment of the avant-garde; on the other, they carried a populist celebratory impulse of the “global village,” sexual liberation, and counter-culture (including the affirmation of popular culture as a challenge to canonical high art). The 1970s, in turn, came to witness the dominance of a reactive, ornamental type of postmodernism. The iconoclastic counter-culture and the peak of the revolutionary moment were supplanted by “an ever wider dispersal and dissemination of artistic practices all working out of the ruins of the modernist edifice, raiding it for ideas, plundering its vocabulary and supplementing it with randomly chosen images.”66 This change in strategies of artistic practice was conditioned by a situation where the techniques and forms of modernism and avant-garde, simultaneously with all of the pre-modern art and the realms of traditional popular cultures and contemporary mass culture, became parts of a “database” of cultural memory. For the cultural products that arise through combination and retrieval of these techniques and images, the distinction between high and low in art is irrelevant; the omnivorous pastiche does not differentiate between them (and, correspondingly, an erosion of the “author function” is registered).67 The most promising examples of the new art in the 1970s, believes Huyssen, were those based on the “experimental meshing and mixing of mass culture and modernism.”68 What provided a radical edge to these explorations, asserts Huyssen, were the practices of women and minority artists who, reviving authorship and subjectivity in a new way, tried to recuperate the “buried and mutilated” traditions by their critical revisions of the canon. In this light, Huyssen considers the “ideological skirmishes” from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, when postmodernism was attacked by Habermas for being “neoconservative” and by the neoconservatives for what they saw as the destruction, rather than the revitalization, of traditional culture.69 He develops a view of poststructuralist theory as a postmodern practice sui generis as well. The turn by the leading poststructuralists to modernist artworks as objects of analysis allies poststructuralism with the retrospective critique of the project of modernism. And the skepticism toward the “overload of responsibility” (i.e., art that is called to change life) claimed by the avant-garde, which brought the latter to “shipwreck,” as Huyssen puts it, consistently characterizes poststructuralism as a postmodernist practice. Here, Huyssen brings in his

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criticism of poststructuralism as a “politically weak” enterprise. He responds to its early pronouncements with an assertion that “[t]o reject the validity of the question Who is writing? or Who is speaking? is simply no longer a radical position”; it attacks the valorization of individualism, which, for Huyssen, is an “appearance” of capitalist culture that misses its “essence.” As his counter-example, Huyssen posits the postmodernist practices of recuperation of the marginal, a new postmodernism of resistance, including resistance to the “early ‘anything goes’ variety” of postmodernism.70 Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism may be seen as complementing Huyssen’s project: if his is a periplos of postmodern art and theory, hers is a periplos of prose fiction. She defines her project as neither a defence nor a denigration of postmodernism but as a nonjudgmental exploration of its poetics.71 The main problem of her project has been outlined by McHale: she is in a catch-22 position of a need “to totalize without appearing to do so”; she strives to be sensitive to “committing a master narrative” and consequently banishes dialectics altogether. She insistently describes postmodernism as a paradoxical “new mode of questioning/compromise.”72 Hutcheon argues that postmodernism is a fundamentally contradictory enterprise: its art forms (and its theory) at once use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and provisionality and, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past. In implicitly contesting in this way such concepts as aesthetic originality and textual closure, postmodernist art offers a new model for mapping the borderland between art and the world, a model that works from a position within both and yet not totally within either, a model that is profoundly implicated in, yet still capable of criticizing, that which it seeks to describe.73

To hold together her study of novelistic postmodernism, Hutcheon borrows Jencks’s model of postmodern architecture. Claiming that architecture enjoys a relative consensus as to the definition and the characteristics of postmodernism,74 she goes on to posit her own unifying model of postmodern prose as “historiographic metafiction.”75 While, on the one hand, this model is flexible enough to include the many postmodernist novels that she considers in her book, it necessitates, on the other hand, the exclusion of many texts that are seen as postmodern by other theorists (such as the nouveau roman and similar phenomena: while “metafictional enough,” they lack the historiographic orientation in Hutcheon’s sense).76 Moreover, it reduces the readings of the novels that she considers to a

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single construct: all these texts are collapsed together as essentially doing the same thing as a result of her “opting … for thematic coherence … of a particularly reductive and repetitive, cookie-cutter kind.”77 However, even this single model of a postmodern text is instructive in its identification of a number of prevalent textual strategies. Postmodernist prose – that is, “historiographic metafiction” as Hutcheon understands it – is defined by “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs,” which serves as “the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.”78 “It is not,” she continues, “that the modernist world was ‘a world in need of mending’ and the postmodernist one ‘beyond repair.’ Postmodernism works to show that all repairs are human constructs”; however, this very fact determines both their value and their limitation. “All repairs are both comforting and illusory. Postmodernist interrogations of humanist certainties live within that contradiction.” In its interrogation of traditional teleologies, postmodernism’s take on history is not to argue that the past “didn’t exist” but “only that its accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned by textuality.”79 It questions “whether we can ever know the past other than through its textualized remains.”80 Throughout her study, Hutcheon stresses her understanding of the postmodernist project as ambivalent and contradictory: while working with the premise that “every representation of the past has specifiable ideological implications,” it is nevertheless caught in “depend[ing] upon and draw[ing] its power from that which it contests.”81 Postmodernism’s interrogation of culture’s baggage is channelled through parody not in its traditional sense of ridiculing imitation, but as a practice of “repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity,”82 which serves as one of the primary strategies of intertextuality – the postmodernist practice par excellence. To sum up, in postmodernist fiction “[t]he interaction of the historiographic and the metafictional foregrounds the rejection of the claims of both ‘authentic’ representation and ‘inauthentic’ copy alike, and the very meaning of artistic originality is forcefully challenged as is the transparency of historic referentiality.”83 While others were developing models and mappings of particular sectors of the postmodern landscape, Fredric Jameson was the first to undertake the ambitious project of tackling the postmodern in toto, and his take on it forms one of the cornerstones of the model of Second World postmodernity offered in these pages. In developing his vision, Jameson remains faithful to his well-known motto, “Always historicize!”84 The “rhetorical strategy” of

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his study of postmodernism, he writes, stems from “the attempt to see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that.”85 McHale, ironically, calls Jameson an “unembarrassed … unreconstructed totalizer”; this, however, does not preclude (and moreover, serves as a reason that enables) seeing Jameson’s model as “an instructive … though costly success,” against Hutcheon’s “instructive failure,”86 for reasons best outlined by Jameson himself: “whether … one can demonstrate the logical impossibility of any internally self-coherent theory of the postmodern – an antifoundationalism that really eschews all foundations altogether, a nonessentialism without the last shred of an essence in it – is a speculative question; its empirical answer is that none have so far appeared.”87 The concept itself of the postmodern, for Jameson, is best grasped when understood “as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”88 Jameson’s historical model of postmodernism as the culture’s logic or dominant at a particular stage of society (late capitalism) gives his view an advantage over the view of postmodernism merely as a style among others: the latter makes one prone to fast moral judgments (whether positive or negative), while the former constitutes “a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History”: for “if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must … be identified as a category mistake.”89 Jameson compares his view of postmodernism to Marx’s understanding of capitalism as “at one and the same time the best thing that has happened to the human race, and the worst”; postmodernism, too, must then be thought of, “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”90 Postmodernism is characterized by the dissolution, under the force of reification, of the “semiautonomy” that culture enjoyed under modernism;91 this does not necessarily “imply [culture’s] disappearance or extinction”; on the contrary, postmodernism should be “imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point that everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense.”92 True to his Marxist background, Jameson’s model of postmodernism is determined socio-economically, in terms of the superstructure-base pairing. Like the other theorists considered above, he locates the beginnings of postmodernism in the early 1970s: “postmodernism is the substitute for

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the sixties and the compensation for their political failure”;93 however, the explicit ties that he sees between postmodernism and both the 1973 oil crisis and “the end of the great wave of ‘wars of national liberation’” looks forced.94 Architecture, so frequently discussed in analyses of postmodernism, is indeed the most economically conditioned form of art, and it is a truism that architecture, especially of public buildings, is fundamentally ideologically conditioned – hence the legitimacy of tying “the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture” to “expansion and development [of] multinational business.” But I find it difficult to agree with the leap from this observation to asserting that postmodernist culture is thus nothing else but “the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world.”95 It is also difficult to accept the equation of postmodernism with commodification of culture, precisely because this view once again shuts postmodernism into the First World. The understanding of postmodernism as a cultural condition does imply that it is underpinned by a dominant economy of culture, but to associate this cultural economy only with late capitalism would be reductive.96 As to the political dimension of postmodern culture, Jameson is less willing to subscribe to a clear-cut distinction between a postmodernism of reaction and a postmodernism of resistance, insisting on postmodernism’s ambivalence. To the accusations of being “a vulgar Marxist hatchet man,” he responds by distinguishing between the dimensions of taste, analysis, and evaluation in approaching culture: “as far as taste is concerned,” he insists, “culturally I write as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism.”97 He is far more cautious and “passionately ambivalent” (as he himself described Foucault) in the dimension of analysis, and the political edge of postmodernist culture for him lies in developing, as I mentioned earlier, what he calls “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping” that seeks to “endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.”98 Within the domain of aesthetics, Jameson defines postmodernism as “a cultural form of image addiction which … transform[s] the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts” and thereby “effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project.”99 The textualization of experience results in “one of those extraordinary postmodern mutations where the apocalyptic suddenly turns into the decorative (or at least diminishes abruptly into ‘something you have around the home’).”100 The codeword for this transformation is “waning of affect”: postmodernism is dominated by “a new kind of … depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality

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in the most literal sense.”101 Against the various depth models dominating the cultural thinking of modernity,102 it posits a conception of multiple surfaces of practices, discourses, and textual play – that is, “intertextuality” in the broadest meaning of the term. This signals the shift in the “dynamics of cultural pathology [which] can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation.”103 The prime form of textual expression of this development, for Jameson, is pastiche. He is more skeptical than Hutcheon about the critical underpinnings of the postmodern mosaic-like text; against her model of parody as repetition with an ironic distance, he advances his own of pastiche as “blank parody,” “speech in a dead language.” Pastiche is a product of a situation where “the norm itself is eclipsed”; it is “devoid … of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.”104 The practice of postmodern art, for him, is that of “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion”: thus “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.”105 The word “random” is crucial here, for its implications can lead one to wonder whether Jameson is right in apparently reducing postmodernism to its “‘anything goes’ variety” discussed above. Hutcheon, for example, would object that postmodern artists “play with purpose.”106 However, Jameson’s discussion of Doctorow’s Ragtime offers thought-provoking evidence of the interplay of postmodernism’s many “routes of reference” beyond the model of “ironic problematizing”: although on one level a “seemingly realistic novel,” it is not merely a politically motivated “decentring” of the traditional portrayal of turn-of-the-century America that focuses on the marginal, underrepresented groups (blacks, immigrants, workers), as in Hutcheon’s reading.107 “Hutcheon, is, of course, absolutely right, and this is what the novel would have meant had it not been a postmodern artifact,” writes Jameson.108 In his alternative reading, he foregrounds the fact that the peculiarity of the novel’s construction is that “the objects of representation, ostensibly narrative characters, are incommensurable and, as it were, of incomparable substances, like oil and water”: of the three principal characters, one is a historical figure, the other a fictional one, and the third an intertextual one; the backdrop against which they function is “an unconscious expression and associative exploration of [the] doxa” about “the Left’s ‘experience of defeat’ in the twentieth century.” Doctorow’s novel thus emerges as “a nonrepresentational work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety of ideologemes in a kind of hologram.”109 Thus postmodern art, for Jameson, is “schizophrenic” in the

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Lacanian sense of “a breakdown in the signifying chain”: it is the disjunctive experience of “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” – which finds “one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video.”110 However, through this “schizophrenic” practice of pastiche, Jameson envisions another possible strategy of postmodernist cultural politics (which is a supplementing continuation of the strategy of cognitive mapping): “to undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself, to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of … substitutes for history.”111 The one problem with Jameson’s analysis of postmodern artifacts, as McHale points out, is that it remains unclear why in some cases he tips the balance of complicity and critique in favour of one or the other: sometimes, as in his readings of Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes or of Bob Perelman’s poem “China,” the artwork is identified as complicit with or symptomatic of the postmodern waning of affect in the first case and of its schizophrenia in the second; on the other hand, the prose of Claude Simon and Georges Perec and the video “AlienNATION” are read as critical.112 As McHale notes, it is unclear why Language poetry, in Jameson’s view, “fails to qualify” as a “homeopathic critique.”113 One also feels compelled to share McHale’s puzzlement about Jameson’s scattered remarks on cyberpunk, which for him is “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself,”114 and whose “orgy of language and representation” is nothing but “sheer compensation … a way of taking yourself into it and making, more than a virtue, a genuine pleasure and jouissance out of necessity, turning resignation into excitement.”115 For McHale, conversely, cyberpunk is a complex and provocative attempt at cognitive mapping that “attain[s] a level of self-consciousness rare in science fiction.”116 Thus we are brought back to the unresolved question of distinguishing the moment of resistance and the moment of reaction in postmodern culture. As for Jameson’s model of the cultural economy of postmodernism, I find a potential way out of its constriction in the vision that Arkady Plotnitsky develops in his Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy. Plotnitsky outlines a model of theoretical practice (including theories of the postmodern) based on Georges Bataille’s theory of general economy. “General economy,” writes Bataille, “makes apparent that excesses of energy are produced, which by definition cannot be utilized. The excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning.”117 Plotnitsky juxtaposes general economy as a theoretical practice “to

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classical theoretical systems or restricted economies, such as Hegel’s philosophy or Marx’s political economy. Such classical theories configure their objects and the relationships between those objects as always meaningful and claim that the systems they present avoid the unproductive expenditure of energy, containing within their bounds multiplicity and indeterminacy. The general economy exposes all such claims as finally untenable; it demands – and enacts – a different form of theoretical practice.”118 Plotnitsky ties the notion of general economy to Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity, generalized beyond quantum mechanics into “a mode of theorizing.”119 Working in this framework, he mounts a strong critique of the theoretical underpinnings of Jameson’s model of postmodernism as restrictive and overdetermined, arguing that the understanding of the political and cultural landscape of postmodernism demands a general economy. Postmodernism may indeed demand it as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” … or late socialism, or indeed late communism, postcommunism even – postcapitalism, postsocialism and postcommunism. Against Jameson’s logic, however, all these appear to coexist, or rather, in the mode of a general economy, are all simultaneously at play, the play that can never be quite simultaneous, although not without simultaneities, either. Obviously, such terms, and specifically “late capitalism,” have complex relations to the cultural logic of the modern, or the postmodern, or any period.120

While I do not share the somewhat combative intentions of Plotnitsky’s argument, it does seem to me that an understanding of postmodernism within the terms of general economy could be extremely productive since it accounts for the excess of signification and the overflowing of images, in both Soviet and Western contexts, for the general “explosion of culture,” and for the multiplication of alternate realities of cyberpunk. It also may help to sketch out an approach to postmodernism that does not limit the latter within late capitalist societies (i.e., the First World). One of the most instructive correctives to narrowly First World focused models of postmodernism is provided by the case of China. Thus Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang in the introduction to their volume Postmodernism and China stress that [the] situation of spatial fracturing and temporal desynchronization [that China is experiencing today] justifies the use of the postmodern against the spatial (as in the nation-form) and temporal (as in the development of national market and culture) teleologies of modernity. The coexistence of precapitalist, the capitalist,

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and the postsocialist economic, political and social forms represents a significant departure from the assumptions of a Chinese modernity … Postmodernism, at the very least, has heuristic uses for dealing with this situation of simultaneous unity and dispersal.121

Other scholars stress that in the context of China, postmodernism could not be further from the shallow understanding of it as “irresponsible playfulness.” Thus Xiaobing Tang asserts that “[a]s a general social discourse about cultural production,” postmodernism in China remains in the margin … But it is an energetic cultural practice that meets the demand of a society perennially caught in political instability and social reorganization. To talk about postmodernism, to engage in an intellectual activity that prolongs a productive and diversifying, although occasionally agonizing, “culture crisis,” is necessarily a political choice … Let us make no mistake about it, postmodernism in China is not something that the neo-Stalinist bureaucrats would spread and promote among the young students and the public. On the contrary, the Chinese conception of postmodernism has to include at once a rejection of the repressive political order and a critique of the rapid process of commodification. While opening up the past to parody and laughter, postmodernism in China is also bound to strip the future of its mystifying halo … the function of postmodernism is here precisely to dismantle various master-narratives about modernity and create a new field of uncompromising demystification.122

With this vision of the critical aspect of postsocialist postmodern cultural practices, Tang thus pinpoints, via the early poststructuralist concept of demystification, the kernel of the agendas of the “other postmodernisms.” This understanding of postmodernism as the cultural manifestation of a heterogeneous condition of the crisis and crumbling of teleological projects of modernity informed the first models of Second World postmodernism. Boris Groys, an émigré Russian philosopher and art critic, advanced the earliest among them in his 1988 German-language volume Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin.123 Groys’s model stems from a thesis that we can also find in Huyssen, namely that both totalitarianism and postmodernism are manifestations of a crisis of modernism.124 Groys first considers Soviet culture under Stalin: in his model, the role of the avant-garde artist was taken over by the leader himself, turning the ussr into a Gesamtkunstwerk project.125 At the same time, on the level of artistic production proper, the Stalin era displayed many postmodernist features: Stalinist culture, asserts

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Groys, “looks upon itself as postapocalyptic culture – the final verdict on all human culture has already been passed, and all that was once temporally distinct has become forever simultaneous in the blinding light of the Final Judgment and the ultimate truth revealed in Stalin’s Short Course of party history”; therefore, all earlier texts coexist as parts of the store to draw upon. Socialist realism “regards historical time as ended and therefore occupies no particular place in it”126 – hence its abnormal teleologies. Groys dwells extensively on socialist realism’s simulacric concern with verisimilitude. “Its heroes,” he writes, “must thoroughly resemble people if people are not to be frightened by their true aspect, and this is why the writers and artists of socialist realism bustle about inventing biographies, habits, clothing, physiognomies, and so on. They almost seem to be in employ of some sort of extraterrestrial bureau planning a trip to Earth – they want to make their envoys as anthropomorphic as possible, but they cannot keep the otherworldly void from gaping through all the cracks in the mask.”127 Groys’s argument leads one to conclude, then, that it is necessary to talk not about a single (ex-)Soviet Russian postmodernism (with further qualifications for other ex-Soviet nations) but probably about three of them: the (proto-)postmodernism of the “high Stalinism” years,128 the one of the 1970s and the 1980s, and the new post-Soviet culture that has been developing since the 1990s – the latter more closely resembling something like the Jamesonian model of Western postmodernism, with global capital triumphantly marching through the vast Second World spaces in the person of Barbara Cartland and the characters of Santa Barbara and Latin American telenovelas. This, however, is not the case for the 1970s and 1980s, although it is possible to trace other parallels: “Linking Russian literature and art of the 1970s and 1980s with similar phenomena in the West are a shared aspiration to erase the boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in art, interest in the myths of the everyday, work with extant sign systems, an orientation toward the world of the mass media, the rejection of creative originality, and a great deal more.”129 The conditions from which the Soviet postmodern art had emerged formed the focus of the writings of the émigré art critics Margarita and Victor (Viktor) Tupitsyn. Victor Tupitsyn, in a narrative similar to Huyssen’s, ties the birth of conceptualism, one of the leading movements of postmodernist art in the Soviet Union, to a reaction against the “dissident modernism” of the 1960s and its fairytale vision of the Western art world, nourished by the “coffee-table books” smuggled into the country.130 “The ecstasy of miscommunication,” which he calls, paraphrasing Baudrillard,

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the cultural relations between the West and the (ex-)Soviet East, persisted in events like Sotheby’s Moscow auction, which, according to Tupitsyn, was a kind of potlatch, a symbolic exchange of gifts devoid of “exchange value,” rather than a herald of the incorporation of the former Soviet Union into the global art market.131 If largely autonomous in its development, postmodernist art in the Soviet Union nevertheless developed features remarkably similar to that of the West: the artists of the sots-art movement approached official Soviet ideology and conventions of socialist-realist art, which dominated the everyday reality of Soviet life, as a peculiar semiotic system with its own hierarchical relationships, taboos, and myths and proceeded to deconstruct it from within, thereby, as Margarita Tupitsyn has noted, “constitut[ing] an unprecedented example of postmodernist praxis.”132 The parameters of the discourse on postmodernism in Russia itself were to a large extent set with the January 1991 publication of an essay by Mikhail Epstein, “Posle budushchego: O novom soznanii v literature” (After the future: On a new consciousness in literature), a work that combines elements of a manifesto and an analytical article.133 In this text, Epstein, who throughout the 1980s wrote about contemporary experimental Russian writing and its philosophical underpinnings, attempts to diagnose some key features in current Russian writing and goes on to compare it with “Western postmodernism.” In the first part of the essay, he perceptively registers the symptoms of a paradigmatic shift in cultural consciousness effected by the end of the 1980s. “Suddenly it became evident that communism had been accomplished in our country,” writes Epstein, “the end has already arrived.”134 The metanarrative of “progressive development of the mature socialism” was no more. The cultural practices of the epoch are realized in the “post-,” rather than “anti-,” genre: “post-utopia, post-communism, post-history.”135 This is the “last” literature, “not because of the moment of its appearance, but because of its … essential ‘beyondness’”;136 it is the literature that, “like Proteus … is capable of almost anything; like Narcissus, it desires only itself.”137 The character of the “superfluous man” of the Russian nineteenthcentury classics is supplanted by the entire world now rendered superfluous. The writers of the younger generation stand outside the traditional polarization of “city” vs “village” literature, of “Westernizers” and “liberals” vs “populists” and “men of the soil.” “While they are personally committed to liberal values,” writes Epstein, they “nonetheless see almost nothing in those values that could inspire them and which they could serve with their work.”138 Instead of ideological divisions, Epstein registers differentiations

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of style. One group, whom he calls “meta-realists,” focuses on the intensity of perceptive emotion or metaphysical transcendence. Another, the conceptualists, engages in the demonstration of the essential emptiness of linguistic signs through exploring the language itself in their simulacric reproductions of socialist-realist and nineteenth-century “realist” classics or of the linguistic environment of a Soviet “everyman.” Between the extremes of these two groups stand the writers engaged in ironic games of allusions in the polymorphous chronotopes of their texts, where “the vulgar stereotypes of Soviet everyday life suddenly acquire depth and merge with projections of other epochs into an ample mythopoetic polyglossia.”139 The middle part of Epstein’s essay is the most disputable and is strangely dissonant with his other arguments. Here he moves to argue that “nothing is new under the sun” and attempts to construct “a periodic table of the elements of Russian literature.”140 He singles out three cycles that Russian literature has undergone since the eighteenth century, each consisting of four phases, the “social,” the “moral,” the “religious,” and the “aesthetic.” Within this table, contemporary writers occupy only the final phases of the third cycle, to be succeeded by a fourth. The entire model is crudely reductionist, where each writer or movement is provided with tags carrying oneword definitions, and the sequencing is forced as well, often at odds with actual chronology. Paradoxically, Epstein then proceeds, in the final part of the essay, to stress the breakdown of temporal sequencing within the contemporary Russian cultural situation, where the postmodernists operate simultaneously with Solzhenitsyn, Joyce, Chaadaev, and the four evangelists.141 He emphasizes the retrospective orientation of contemporary writing, which he dubs “rear-guard.”142 The post-apocalyptically oriented literature is frequently nothing but a flow of writing, a stream that can be entered at any random point.143 Epstein notes that metonymy is the privileged principle of organization in the syntagmatic chains of associations of these texts, the primary examples coming from Valeria Narbikova’s writings. Metonymy, however, seems to merely stand for simplicity for Epstein, while it might be productive to consider these texts in the light of theories of feminine writing, in which, as Luce Irigaray suggests, metonymy is the leading structuring trope. Epstein concludes his essay with reflections on the relationship between the Russian “postfuture” and Western postmodernism. The common features, he asserts, were abundant, from the overall sense that one was inhabiting a “posthistory” and that the spatial axis had supplanted the temporal one in its importance, to the propensity for simulacra making and abundant

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quoting of clichés and styles of previous eras. If anything, Russia is even more postmodern than the West. “Is it not the case that ‘simulacra’ – that is, maximally lifelike likenesses that have no original – began to be created by our culture much earlier and in greater quantities than in the West?” asks Epstein rhetorically. He emphatically asserts the legitimacy of speaking of a Russian postmodernism (even taking into consideration the aborted history of modernism in Russia), noting the domination of simulacra, the “propensity for quotation,” and the deconstructive impulse as the defining features of contemporary Russian texts.144 Late capitalism, he believes, is only one possible condition for the emergence of a postmodern culture. Without naming names, Epstein expresses his strong disagreement with theorists who see postmodernism as an exclusively Western phenomenon: The features of Western postmodenism are fully confirmed by the experience of our literature. This is why it is impossible to concur with those scholars (Soviet as well as foreign) who limit postmodernism only to the field of activity of “late capitalism,” “multinational monopolies,” “computer civilization,” or “the schizophrenia of postindustrial society.” Postmodernism is a phenomenon of a much broader scale, which has emerged on the basis of both total technologies and total ideologies. The triumph of self-valorizing ideas, which both imitate and abolish reality, has been no less conducive to the postmodern way of thinking that the predominance of video communications, which also create a world of arrested time, rolled up in itself.145

The difference between the Russian/Soviet and Western civilizations, according to Epstein, is that the first is “logocentric” (“lingua-centric,” I believe, would be more correct here), while the latter privileges “the silent values of gold and [iconic] representation.” The Soviet Union was a society of voracious consumption of utopian narratives and ideological signs, and its “post-future” is for Epstein “perhaps the most radical of all existing variants of postmodernism.”146 Late-Soviet culture was indeed pervaded by prolifically reproducing reality-substituting simulacra. The festivities on the occasion of 1,500 years since the foundation of the city of Kyiv are exemplary in this respect: an outright arbitrary, fabricated date (1982) was used to insert into the city fabric empty signifiers, such as the fake “restored” Golden Gate (in reality, a reinforced concrete structure covered with marble) and the huge and monstrous statue of “Motherland” with a raised sword in her hand now dominating the city skyline, and to produce an imitation of the sports

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parades of the 1930s high Stalinism. These supreme manifestations of the simulacric, late-Soviet spectacles are wittily described by Slavoj Zˇizˇek: The logic of the essential appearance was carried to the extreme in “real socialism,” in which the whole system aimed at maintaining the appearance of the people united in their support of the Party and in the enthusiastic construction of Socialism – ritualized spectacles … in which nobody “really believed” and everybody knew that nobody believed, but the party bureaucrats were nonetheless uncommonly frightened by the possibility that the appearance of belief would disintegrate … The question to be asked here is simply: if nobody “really believed,” and if everybody knew that nobody believed, what was then the agency, the gaze for whom the spectacle of belief was staged? It is here that we encounter the function of the “big Other” at its purest. In everyday reality, life may be dreadful and dull, but all is well as long as this remains hidden from the gaze of the “big Other.” It is for his gaze that the spectacle of the happy and enthusiastic people must be staged again and again … What must be kept from the big Other (incarnated in the gaze of the leader) is the simple fact that he is dead.147

While Zˇizˇek presents the situation in Lacanian terms, I believe that the picture he paints also works in favour of a general-economy-based model of postmodernism: what we are dealing with in the case of the late Soviet Empire is excess of ideological signification overwhelming and fragmenting the perceiving subjects. Second World postmodernist artists engage in their “homeopathic” critical projects by registering this excess of signs and simultaneously reflecting and undoing it through the practice of pastiche. Also, like their Western and Third World colleagues, they frequently destabilize this economy through a foregrounding of the experiences of women and minorities. Thus one hopes that their practice enables maintaining (and disseminating) a critical stance in the present-day troubled cultural seas. Epstein’s “Posle budushchego” (After the future), while extremely influential, does not exhaust his thoughts on the topic of postmodernism, although many of them find expression there in a concentrated or embryonic form. After resettling in the US, Epstein continued publishing prolifically on the topic of Russian postmodernism in the 1990s.148 His later work has displayed greater influence of Groys’s writing, particularly of the above-mentioned book The Total Art of Stalinism and the essay “A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism.” The latter offers a more condensed formulation of his views of the place of socialist realism vis-à-vis modernism and postmodernism. Groys believes

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that the strategies of socialist realism display a use of proto-postmodernist means (“cannibalizing” appropriation) for modernist ends (“historical exclusiveness, internal purity, and autonomy from everything external”); hence its hybrid position as “a style and a half.”149 Epstein pushes Groys’s thesis even further, substituting communism for socialist realism in the above argument. In an essay suggestively titled “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism,” alluding to Nikolai Berdiaev’s classic study Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma (The origins and meaning of Russian Communism), which argues that indigenous religious underpinnings determined the Russian interpretation of the idea of Communism and its local adaptation from the Western model, Epstein asserts that what has come to be known as the distinguishing features of postmodernism – a propensity for simulacra making (as in the famous Potemkin villages),150 a view of the sign as radically autonomous, a fondness for pastiche, and so forth – constitutes the general characteristic of Russian culture at least beginning with Peter the Great’s attempts to Westernize the country during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After the interruption of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde, these features are reasserted in the Stalin era, and the Soviet project of building communism is for him an “explicitly heroic” form of Soviet postmodernism that anticipates the later, “implicitly ironic” one. Thus, he concludes, “postmodernism may be seen as a cultural orientation that has developed differently in the West and the Soviet Union. The Western version came later chronologically, but was more self-aware from a theoretical standpoint.”151 A cogent critique of this theory can be found in Mikhail Berg’s volume Literaturokratiia: Problema prisvoeniia i pereraspredeleniia vlasti v literature (Literaturocracy: The problem of appropriation and redistribution of power in literature). Berg sees Epstein’s approach as an implicit discreditation of both postmodernism (of which the Soviet communist project is “an unripe barbaric variant, as it were an ‘Oriental’ version”) and Russian culture (which, like the communist project, is judged to be “consciously secondary”): “Like every paradoxical comparison, the comparison of postmodernism to communism (and, in essence to the entire post-Petrine period of Russian culture) turns out to be correct in its details but contradictory in its entirety. Naturally one can find in Russian culture traces of borrowings and imitation, but this does not mean that it has been a culture of selfconscious secondariness and pastiche-making. Roughly speaking, the difference here is between a copy and a simulacrum, even if one agrees with the reductionist assertion that Russian culture [attempted to] copy the West.”152

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Berg here seizes on what I believe to be an overarching problem of Epstein’s theoretical project: extremely perceptive in his detailed observations, he is often strikingly off the mark in his generalizations. Epstein continuously tries to advocate a rigid systemic view of global culture, a latter-day incarnation of Goethe’s Weltliteratur coupled with the Arnoldian vision of culture as a coherent set of “the best that has been thought and said.” He tries to distil some sort of Platonic essence of this global culture, an essence that has to be ideology-free in his belief, which he terms “transculture” before going on to posit a pursuit of “transculture” as a more productive alternative to the Western pursuit of multiculturalism.153 Epstein continues to insist on his “periodic table of Russian literature,” where postmodernism turns out to be merely the last phase of one cycle among many, itself to be invariably supplanted by a move to a new cycle that will return to a condition akin to an expression of modernist energies. He is therefore sympathetic to Lyotard’s somewhat cryptic assertion that postmodernism can be viewed as something that is “proto-modern,” an expression of a nascent form of modernism.154 Epstein’s view of Lyotard contrasts sharply with Jameson’s view of Lyotard’s thesis – his only open engagement with Jameson’s writing. Epstein seizes upon Jameson’s critical comment on this statement by Lyotard, included in Jameson’s preface to the English translation of The Postmodern Condition, where he states that Lyotard’s “very commitment to the experimental and the new … determine an aesthetic that is far more closely related to the traditional ideologies of high modernism than to current postmodernisms.”155 Epstein then goes on to quote a truncated sentence from the cultural logic essay, which for him summarizes Jameson’s conception of postmodernism: “with the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style … the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in an imaginary museum of a now global culture.”156 While Epstein concedes that “the postmodernism known to us is closer to Jameson’s characterization … the subsequent evolution of postmodernism,” in his opinion, “approaches the boundary of ‘what will have been done’ described by Lyotard.”157 Although one can sympathize with Epstein’s utopian vision of contemporary Russian culture as “the protostage of some as yet unknown cultural formation,”158 his particular vision of that culture, namely as some wisened and refined phenomenon that is “beyond ideology,” strikes me as a reductive – and reactionary – phenomenon, a consequence of his desire to squeeze a multicultural world into his rigid “transcultural” system. No

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wonder Epstein reduces Jameson’s vision of postmodernism basically to the notion of pastiche and completely ignores – as inexplicably have all the Russian critics who attempt to engage with Jameson’s thought – the notion of an aesthetic of cognitive mapping as a positive postmodernist project. For it is envisioned as a pedagogical political culture, and the fact that any culture does indeed have a political dimension is not something that attracts Epstein’s attention (that Russian culture has served as a tool of imperialist oppression, for example, does not figure in his model in any way). While Epstein was extremely influential in the Russian discourse on postmodernism in the early 1990s, by the middle of the decade, the spotlight had shifted to other figures. Within general theoretical discourse, the first, but rather unsuccessful, attempt at a comprehensive model was advanced by Il’ia Il’in in his two books, Poststrukturalizm, dekonstruktivizm, postmodernizm (Poststructuralism, deconstructivism, postmodernism, 1996) and Postmodernizm ot istokov do kontsa stoletiia (Postmodernism from its origins to the end of the century, 1998). Il’in’s intention is to produce a kind of navigational manual for the sea of contemporary theory, yet the judgmental position “above the fray” that he assumes in these books seriously undermines his effort. For instance, the second volume, the one supposedly dedicated to postmodernism, is subtitled “an evolution of a scholarly myth” (“evoliutsiia nauchnogo mifa”), and from the outset postmodernism is referred to as a “chimera” (“khimera”). As a consequence of such decisions, his books focus entirely on the critical discourse itself, as postmodernism for him is only “a peculiar philosophy of cultural consciousness.” “The contradictory nature of contemporary life is such,” believes Il’in, “that it cannot be fit into any limits comprehensible to the human mind, and willy-nilly generates, in the attempts at theoretical interpretation, explanatory approaches no less phantasmagoric than itself,” postmodernism serving as his prime example.159 More recently, Nadezhda Man’kovskaya, in her study Estetika postmodernizma (Aesthetics of postmodernism), has attempted to engage thoroughly with the Western discourse on postmodernism and postmodernity and to develop an original take that will also account for Russian cultural practices. Her book’s primary focus is still on the Western discourse on postmodernism, tracing the development of several of its “keywords,” such as “irony,” “deconstruction,” “simulacrum,” “desire,” “schizoanalysis,” Kristevan “polylogue,” and “virtual reality,” as well as such phenomena as “the diffusion of high and mass culture” and “the aesthetization of science and the environment.” Man’kovskaya’s vision of postmodernism as something that interrogates the cultural Canon and various idées reçues is overwhelmingly

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positive; underlying postmodernism she sees “a drive to humanize art” and an “increase in subjectiveness, humanism and self-criticism in scholarly endeavors.”160 Perhaps as a logical consequence of such an approach, in contrast to Il’in, who expends a lot of energy to “expose” a host of celebratory “postmodernists,” Man’kovskaya feels compelled to defend postmodernism against its “opponents,” paradoxically singling out Jameson as her main target. While Man’kovskaya’s ends may be laudable, her misrepresentation of Jameson’s position for rhetorical purposes is unwarranted and can be seen as a symptom of the continuing troubles with effectively absorbing Western critical apparatus into the Russian scholarly discourse on postmodernism.161 However, it is not so much the “pure” theoretical discourse but the considerations of contemporary literature that account for the lion’s share of the Russian discourse on postmodernism, beginning with the abovementioned early writings of Epstein. The 1990s brought a number of attempts by Russian literary critics to map or navigate the terrain of the culture of (post-)Soviet postmodernism (which, notably, means only Russian postmodernism for just about all of them), especially its literature, analogous to those by Huyssen and Hutcheon. Thus Mark Lipovetsky devotes to this task a series of essays, one of which is even entitled, in its English version, “Mapping New Russian Poetry.” He offers a number of perceptive remarks and interesting readings of Russian postmodernist writing;162 however, they are forced to fit into the Procrustean bed of his overarching model – the same vision of cultural history as a series of repeating cycles, an “oscillating pendulum,”163 that we have seen to appear paradoxically in the middle of Epstein’s essay. This is indeed a peculiarly persistent model in Russian critical mentality, pervading other attempts at mapping Soviet postmodernism as well,164 which led Katerina Clark, in her essay aimed at problematizing the discourse on Russian postmodernism, to voice an opinion that contemporary Russian writers “are not postmodernists,” for “in their texts, not all narratives are equal; inter alia, the Hegelian story of the progress of Geist is privileged.” Both Epstein’s “periodic table” and Lipovetsky’s “pendulum” serve as supporting evidence for Clark’s claim that “what we saw in the late eighties [and later] was business conducted largely as usual,”165 as the Hegelian underpinnings of their models are obvious. Yet another peculiar aspect of Lipovetsky’s writings is his conviction that post-Soviet postmodernist art not only responds to a certain cultural crisis, but has itself reached a state of crisis.166 In his essays, he builds a retroactive model of (post-)Soviet postmodernism, with the premise that the latter

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had exhausted its innovative potential by the time it began to be theorized in the early 1990s. One of the foundations of Lipovetsky’s model of post-Soviet postmodernism is his conviction that the debate on postmodernism itself is an attempt to satisfy an escapist “nostalgia for the aesthetic”167 – a flight into “the pleasures of the text” from the political debates of the glasnost era.168 Although he does insist that “postmodernism … just like any art, grows out of sincere … suffering,”169 postmodern artists for Lipovetsky exist in a space of “culture that has ‘closed’ the world.”170 His vision of postmodernism is akin to that of the Western “early ‘anything goes’ variety”: instead of articulating a tragic vision, such as the one expressed in Venedikt Erofeyev’s Moskva-Petushki, which he justifiably considers one of the cornerstones of the new Russian literature, post-Soviet postmodernist writers, Lipovetsky believes, “cannot withstand the heat and tension of this tragic dialogue [with the surrounding chaos], capitulate at the threshold, when confronted by chaos, and engage in a merry game … plunging into chaos as though it were a warm bath.”171 Later Lipovetsky modifies this harsh view of contemporary literature; writing on the poetry of Russian postmodernism, he singles out what he considers its two principal strategies: either … an immersion into chaos, which is experienced tragically in the case of Zhdanov, elegiacally in that of Kibirov, and with full pleasure in that of Prigov – or … a strategy of “strange attractors,” when one recognizes the impossibility of constructing classical harmony, although one feels a certain nostalgia for it; however, no attempts of speculative modeling of it are made (and the already existing cultural projects of this kind are viewed skeptically); the nostalgia for harmony is realized in poetry as a continuous close scrutiny of past cultural orders’ fragments of which the chaos consists, and as a chain of attempts to “glue with one’s own blood” not the vertebrae of the two centuries, but a certain inevitably fragile and temporary home for the soul, from which no cultural “building materials” or cultural gravel are rejected.172

It is tempting to align this vision of constructing “homes for the soul” with Jamesonian cognitive mapping; however, there are reasons to prevent one from doing this, most importantly Lipovetsky’s undying belief in the grand narrative of the teleological development of a unified, monolithic culture (his assertions that postmodern culture is not monolithic notwithstanding).173 “It is time to push the pendulum in the opposite direction,”174 declares Lipovetsky, and this opposite direction for him seems to lie in some kind of “new realism.”175 However, one of the crucial distinctions

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of postmodernity is that, as Gianni Vattimo remarks, it is “no longer … possible to regard history as unilinear”;176 instead, we are faced with a rhizomatic conglomerate of intermeshed marginal discourses and micropolitical practices. Postmodernism asserts the impossibility in principle of realistic transparent signification, devoid of cultural conditioning and ideological overtones and implications (not that such “pure” realism was ever possible). Failure to recognize this underlies the flaws of models of Russian postmodernism such as Lipovetsky’s.177 A similarly problematic case is constituted by the work of Viacheslav Kuritsyn, one of the most influential critics of contemporary Russian literature. His idiosyncratic, witty writings testify to the sharpness and independence of his thinking, but, as evidenced by his most comprehensive treatment of the topic, the book Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm (Russian literary postmodernism), his view of postmodernism is by and large exhausted by playfulness, pastiche, and fragmentation and thus is more akin to the “postmodernism of reaction” as described by Foster. Neither practices of resistance nor cognitive mapping appear to surface on his intellectual horizon – nor, indeed, the prodigious development of articulations of nonhegemonic subject positions (for instance, not a single woman writer is mentioned in the nearly 300 pages of his book). The shortcomings of the Russian theorizations of postmodernism, however, in no way signify the paucity of original and innovative postmodernist cultural practices in Russia. Nor do they exhaust the post-Soviet approaches to postmodernism – although many, in Russia and sometimes even abroad, persist in the prejudicial colonialist belief that it is the only post-Soviet state with an intellectual discourse of note. Such prejudices highlight the persistence of imperialist attitudes in Russia that survived remarkably well after the end of Soviet rule and explain why Russian intellectuals have remained by and large deaf not only to Western Marxism, as demonstrated by their troubled engagement with Jameson,178 but also to another critical discourse – that on postcolonialism. Until very recently, it was nowhere to be found in the pages of Russian scholarly publications, and among the scholars whose work I have discussed above, Il’in is the only one to mention Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, only to quickly label the latter a “socially engagée feminist deconstructionist” and the former “a well-known literary scholar of a leftist-anarchist orientation”179 and quickly move on. Yet there is a post-Soviet nation that has proven very receptive both to the discourse on postmodernism and to the discourse on postcolonialism while

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providing a home for some rather constructive engagement with the two: Ukraine. In the case of postcolonialism, we can even speak of an initial excessively euphoric appropriation that resulted in an uncritical use of the term that even spilled into the mass media, much like the fate of the term “postmodernism” in Russia at the same time.180 Yet when the time came for a calmer scholarly consideration of these discourses, Ukraine provided what can be considered a model approach. Rather than engage in judgmental expert discourse adorned with twisted snippets of quotations, a large team of scholars, led by the literary theorist Maria Zubryts’ka, prepared a comprehensive critical anthology of contemporary theoretical thought, Slovo, znak, dyskurs (Word, sign, discourse). In it, for instance, we find a representative section on postcolonial criticism and theory, containing selections from the work of Spivak, Said, Homi Bhabha, Simon During, and several other scholars, accompanied by an informative introductory essay and extensive commentary.181 As for an introduction to theorizations of postmodernism, Zubryts’ka and her colleagues selected Jameson’s essay “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,” likewise accompanied in their volume by a contextualizing twopage preface.182 The choice of this essay alone is a welcome contrast to the Russian approach, as it precludes the facile labelling of the theorist as an “advocate” or “opponent” of postmodernism, and, together with the calm, measured introduction and informative commentary, fosters the practice of cognitive mapping as envisioned by the author. One hopes that such examples will be more numerous in other postcommunist spaces. Similarly to Russia, however, one finds more discussions of postmodernism in Ukraine that are primarily concerned with the local cultural developments. Interestingly, here, too, the approach guided by cognitive mapping has been prominent, with two major writers, Yuri Andrukhovych and Volodymyr Yeshkiliev, producing a volume entitled Mala ukraïns’ka entsyklopediia aktual’noï literatury (A small Ukrainian encyclopedia of currently relevant literature, 1998), consisting of an anthology of innovative recent Ukrainian writing (compiled by Andrukhovych) and an encyclopedia proper (put together by Yeshkiliev) that addresses both domestic and international literary production, theoretical debates, and a number of other related points. The viewpoints and interpretations set forth by the two coeditors often differ greatly, as demonstrated by their introductory essays. For Yeshkiliev, postmodernism is first and foremost a “situation” in contemporary art from which one needs to find a “way out”; he sees postmodernism as primarily an “endlessly open game” that marks a “dead end of formalist creativity” and offers his vision of a new “demiurgic” art,

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grounded – somewhat paradoxically – in the mass culture genre of fantasy.183 Andrukhovych, after insightfully summarizing Yeshkiliev’s negative vision of postmodernism, offers not so much a refutation but a recapitulation of some of the descriptive points (some of them, often repeated by detractors of postmodernism, have reached the status of clichés) that lead to a reevaluation, grounded in cognitive mapping as the key underlying philosophy, in individual projects of exploration and investigation by authors-cum-bricoleurs.184 This productive tension between the visions and approaches of two coeditors allows for an encyclopedia project that is, ideologically, an open work in Umberto Eco’s sense and a work that has constituted a powerful intervention into the nation’s cultural politics. Another essay by Yuri Andrukhovych, one of Ukraine’s leading writers whose work is discussed in greater detail in chapter 7 of the present study, serves as a further welcome instance of the maturing of the Ukrainian discourse on postmodernism. This text, entitled “Chas i mistse, abo moia ostannia terytoriia” (Time and place, or My last territory), opens with a condensed and “carnivalized” presentation of stereotypical views on postmodernism (as “irresponsible,” “parasitical,” “death of literature,” “rejection [through pervasive irony] of each and every ethical system,” “dumb, mechanical experimentation,” “vulgar tastelessness,” etc.). Andrukhovych supplies a parodic list of negative epithets, beginning with each and every letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, that have been attributed to postmodernism and dwells on the view that postmodernism is merely a manifestation of literary narcissism that has existed throughout history and thus nowhere in particular. This flood of stereotypes, in Andrukhovych’s opinion, can be dealt with only through personal, subjective features and signifiers, through asking the question “where am I?”185 In other words, he emphatically asserts the philosophical paradigm of cognitive mapping. In Andrukhovych’s case, this leads to a reflection on the cultural composition of his native region, Halychyna (or Galicia), paradoxically located in the centre of Europe geographically and at its margins culturally. Halychyna, for him, is characterized by a certain superficiality of cultural patterns in a context that is “ironic and immoral”; it is, he says, an instance of “plagiarism, all the more pitiful since the plagiarist has chosen the deadest of all possible objects,” “classic” European culture. However, realization of being placed as a subject into this “suspicious and despised world” leaves one no choice but to attempt to put together, to recombine the fragments that constitute this place as a cultural phenomenon. Central Europe in general, he asserts, is nearly a figment of the

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imagination; it “almost doesn’t exist,” just as Halychyna “almost doesn’t exist” within Central Europe.186 This particular territory, he asserts, allows one to approach postmodernity as the “great promising void” following the crumbling or active destruction of various modernities and modernisms. It can also be described, he believes, as a “not fully formed, but already sensed posttotatilarianness,” combined with “a continuing neototalitarian threat,” that still can, “amoeba-like,” “fill with itself anyone in this space and all of this space in its entirety.”187 On yet another level, this is also the manifestation of a tradition of multiculturalism (Halychyna historically has been one of the most ethnically, religiously, and culturally heterogeneous regions of Europe), which, however, has been nearly obliterated. In other words, one now faces a “post-multiculturalism” manifested through ruins (“of castles, holy places, factories, bridges, observatories, and especially of cemeteries”),188 a palimpsest of cultures and “anti-cultures,” and likewise, through fragments, “of lost languages, writing systems, dialects, burnt manuscripts.” It is a “province at the center, for the center is everywhere and nowhere,” a representation of the “chaotic nature of being.” The task of a postmodernist practitioner of culture, asserts Andrukhovych, is to address the particular location where s/he finds her/himself today. This may be a “dangerous territory,” yet one has no choice but to address it.189 The imperative articulated in Andrukhovych’s essay provides one of the clearest articulations of what I believe to be the most productive – and the most badly needed – postmodernist project in the context of the Second World within the shifting global political, social, and cultural contexts. The chapters that follow represent an attempt at such a project through a mapping of what I believe to be the key productive paradigms of postmodern/ postcolonial/postcommunist culture of the two largest post-Soviet nations, Russia and Ukraine. Before proceeding, however, I would like to focus a little more on the emergent Second World discourse on postcolonialism in its relationship to both postmodernism and globalization. It is no secret that many cultural theories that aspire to global applicability often do so by turning a blind eye toward a large part of the globe, eccentrically claiming a universal dimension for a narrow model. As Edward Said has remarked in his Culture and Imperialism, many Western theoreticians have been “unheeding” to the questions of imperialism, anti-imperialist resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire, “which has not prevented

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their ateliers from churning out theories of Marxism, language, psychoanalysis, and history with an implied applicability to the whole world.”190 It appears, however, that the possibility of safely engaging in such exclusionary practices is rapidly receding into the past with the almost explosive development of the field initially termed “Third World studies” but now overwhelmingly referred to as “postcolonial studies” to reflect its wider geographic applicability and its preoccupation with a particular cultural and social dynamic.191 However, even this expansion still often curiously neglects to tackle a large part of the planet that used to be referred to as “the Soviet bloc” or the Second World. (Said himself, for instance, only narrowly escapes this misjudgment of largely ignoring the complicated nature of the Russian/ Soviet Empire in Orientalism and some of his other works.)192 The discourse on postmodernism, too, emerged as a specifically Western phenomenon, even though from its very inception (in the work of Lyotard, for example) it aspired to explain the global cultural condition. In this case as well, the first challenges and reworkings to broaden this discourse to account for non-Western phenomena (or to show its incapacity to do so) came from postcolonial studies, resulting in a prolific debate summed up by the title of K. Anthony Appiah’s famous essay, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” One of the most comprehensive and thorough discussions of the discourse on postcolonialism and its relationship with that on postmodernism can be found in Ato Quayson’s study Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Quayson argues that in contrast to postmodernism, which, as noted earlier, has been seen either as a global cultural condition or as a historico-stylistic paradigm, “postcolonialism designates critical practice that is highly eclectic and difficult to define … A possible working definition of postcolonialism,” he continues, “is that it involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local level of ex-colonial societies as well as at the level of more general global developments thought to be the after-effects of the empire. Postcolonialism often also involves the discussion of experiences of various kinds, such as those of slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, difference, race, gender, place, and the responses to the discourses of imperial Europe such as history, philosophy, anthropology and linguistics.”193 Postcolonialism is thus both a discourse and a “critical practice” in the broad sense of the term (in that it is developed not only in academic writing, but also in a wide range of artistic and other intellectual pursuits). It is to be viewed simultaneously in chronological and epistemological

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terms: “it focalizes a constellation of issues integral to the formation of a global order after empire.”194 As for the interrelationship of postmodernism and postcolonialism, Quayson believes that “one of the central problems which brings the two closer is on [sic] the question of the double vision that a peripheral existence in the world engenders.”195 Yet he posits an important distinction between the two modes: Without reducing the two theoretical perspectives to simple polarities, we might say that the key dimension that postcolonialism forces us to consider is that of agency, whilst the postmodernist angle would make us settle on the economy of the image and the potential for the fragmentation of subject positions. For postcolonial[ism], the question of agency is crucial because merely identifying the purview or ambit of the regulative parameters set up by images is not enough. The next step has to be how such images ought to be subverted or how, if at all, their effects are to be challenged with a view to setting up a better order of effects.196

In other words, postcolonialism can be seen as a development of the paradigm that Hal Foster has termed the “postmodernism of resistance,” projecting a number of the latter’s concerns in the context of interaction with and subversion of imperialism and its legacies. How, then, has the complex interaction of these two discourses been refracted in the Second World? As noted above, the discourse on postmodernism has enjoyed a rapid, if somewhat delayed, development, not unlike women’s and gender studies, becoming virtually ubiquitous in Russian-language literary and cultural media in the early 1990s and eventually resulting in several book-length studies, such as Mikhail Epstein’s collection of essays After the Future: Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. One of the key drawbacks of this admittedly rich and provocative study is that, once again, it aspires to present a global model, situating itself in some quasi-Platonic ideal space, while engaging only Russian and Western literature and art. Notably, Russian here by implication stands for all (post-)Soviet culture, while the imperialist aspect of Russian/Soviet culture is tacitly ignored. Unfortunately, Epstein does not constitute an exception. Only recently has greater scholarly attention been extended to the imperialist aspect of Russian culture.197 Among the early harbingers of this trend were Yuri Slezkine’s and Bruce Grant’s works on the indigenous cultures of the Russian Far East and Far North and Susan Layton’s study of the orientalist

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aspects of Russian cultural use of the Caucasus.198 More recently, the colonialist aspects visible in some of the most canonical and “respectable” Russian texts have been decried in a forceful but flawed book by Ewa M. Thompson.199 Generally, however, in present-day Russia postcolonialism is perhaps the only major contemporary theoretical discourse that largely continues to be proudly and persistently ignored (old imperial habits die hard).200 Even for many observers in the West, as Stephen Lovell, among others, has noted, “the grave abuses committed by Russia as an imperial power have been obscured by its geographical contiguity with its colonies and by the sheer awfulness of its own twentieth-century history (which has enabled the Russians to claim victimhood with some plausibility and moral impact).”201 As it finally begins to register on the intellectual horizon of some Russian scholars, postcolonialism is finding a somewhat unexpected application in support of a view that Russia, beginning with Peter the Great’s reforms, developed as a self-colonizing state. The roots of this argument are usually traced to the writings of the earlynineteenth-century Russian philosopher Petr Chaadaev, but its “rediscovery” in contemporary cultural discourse has been credited to a 1990 essay by Boris Groys. The reforms of Peter I, asserts Groys, “constitute a sui generis act of self-colonization by the Russian people: one of its parts as it were pretended to be foreigners, in their most frightening and threatening incarnation, and started persecuting consistently and radically everything Russian and imposing everything that by the standards of that time was considered modernized and Western … as a result of this cruel inoculation Russia saved itself from the real colonization by a West that surpassed it both technically and militarily.”202 The most consistent attempt to integrate Groys’s thesis with postcolonial and poststructuralist paradigms can be found in a recent article by Aleksandr Etkind, “Fuko i tezis vnutrennei kolonizatsii: Postkolonial’nyi vzgliad na sovetskoe proshloe” (Foucault and the thesis of internal colonization: A postcolonial glance at the Soviet past)203 (the “Soviet” in its title is misleading, as the essay concerns itself almost entirely with imperial Russia). Etkind makes some insightful observations on the views on Russian and Western models of colonization in Russian historiography, including in the Soviet era: Russian colonization is viewed as that of a settler type, “an expansion of the Russian people” in the process of “creation of its own territory,” while Western colonization is seen as a product of geographic discoveries and military conquests. “The notions,” notes Etkind, “are used in a way that makes the Russian colonization come across as a good deed, and the European one as bad. In the case of Europe

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colonization is defined in a manner that presupposes decolonization, while in that of Russia the definition makes decolonization logically impossible.” Thus the instances of a more “Western” type of colonization by Russia, such as in Poland, Finland, and Central Asia, are bracketed as “conquests of territories that were almost not colonized.”204 A critical tone in relation to this model barely registers in Etkind’s own analysis; his principal goal is indeed to focus on Russia’s colonization of itself, to argue that the nightmares of Russia’s twentieth-century history could in part be explained by the failure of Russia’s attempts to decolonize in the wake of this self-colonization. In the process, Etkind argues that attempts by enterprising Russian adventurers to claim overseas lands for Russia were resisted by the imperial dynasty, who apparently considered them “beyond their strength, unprofitable or immoral,” a (hypothetical) attitude that Etkind finds “surprising” in the context of its time.205 Even the conquest of the Caucasus was for Etkind “not quite colonial” since “after the incorporation of Georgia it [the northern Caucasus] found itself inside the empire’s territory.”206 In other words, once a noncontiguous colony is appended to the empire, in the case of Russia the imperative is to “naturalize” it by restoring the contiguity through conquering the territory in between. I am puzzled as to why Etkind argues that this practice makes the enterprise any less colonial.207 Paradoxically, however, in his argument about Russia’s internal colonization, and even in his factographical excursuses (for instance, on Jeremy and Samuel Bentham’s sojourn in the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great), Etkind’s frame of reference is constituted by the events that took place and the phenomena that existed in Ukrainian and Belarusian territory.208 Thereby Etkind perpetuates the aspects of Russian colonialist ideology that he apparently internalized to an extent that makes them invisible to him.209 This internalization provides depressing evidence of how far Russian culture still is from “find[ing] a positive, enlightened solution” to the enduring legacy of colonization, a call for which closes Etkind’s essay. Perhaps the most thought-provoking instance to date of engagement with postcolonial theory in Russian scholarship can be found in Madina Tlostanova’s 2004 book, Postsovetskaia literatura i estetika transkul’turatsii (Post-Soviet literature and the aesthetics of transculturation). In this volume, Tlostanova mounts a sophisticated attempt to place the current developments in post-Soviet (primarily Russian-language) literature and intellectual debates within the context of discourses of cultural globalization, postcolonial hybridity and creolization, and “transculturation,” a term that she borrows from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and

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that she proposes as a more felicitous synonym for the notion of cultural hybridization210 (her intellectual apparatus seems to be strongly influenced by the specific variant of postcolonial theory developing in Latin American studies). Tlostanova acknowledges in the opening pages of her study that her book bears a significant amount of autobiographical investment, and she is frank in highlighting her intellectual position as a representative of Russophone but not ethnically Russian intelligentsia and as someone who came to engage with post-Soviet literature after devoting a considerable amount of scholarly attention to contemporary anglophone writing and comparative literature. Unprecedented in Russian academic discourse in the degree to which it is conversant with Western academic discourse on postcolonialism and globalization, especially in the context of literary studies, Tlostanova’s book uncovers the Eurocentric underpinnings of both liberal (“Westernizing”) and conservative (“Slavophile”) intellectual discourse in past and present-day Russia. This extraordinarily rich and provocative volume, however, is not without flaws. Its primary trouble spot lies both in its excessive privileging of the position of a postcolonial hybrid intellectual who is speaking to, and in the context of, academic institutions of the former metropoly and in its disdain for all nationalist discourses of resistance – a position in Western postcolonial studies that received much deserved criticism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, as early as 1987, Benita Parry warned about the “disparagement of nationalist discourses of resistance” and “exorbitation of the role allotted to the post-colonial … intellectual,” as well as about other potential dangers inherent in “a theory whose axioms deny to the native the ground from which to utter a reply to imperialism’s ideological aggression or to enunciate a different self.”211 The strategically difficult self-positioning as someone multiply colonized and “othered,” rejecting both the humiliating position of a “native informant” and that of “a political activist who uses his otherness in his [sic] favor,” is productive when Tlostanova endeavours to critique mainstream Russian intellectual discourse but is problematic in its very rejection of a possibility of meaningful politics of resistance. Tlostanova’s interest in “transnational writing” in English and other Western languages prompts her to seek manifestations of similar developments in post-Soviet Russia. As she limits her focus to conventional plotdriven narrative fiction, and ignores poetry and other modes of experimental writing, her results are rather meager: the only “positive heroes” among contemporary Russophone authors that emerge in her book are

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Andrei Volos, the ethnically Russian writer who grew up in Tajikistan and whose novel Khurramabad, which allegorically portrays the collapse of the (imagined) multilingual and multicultural utopia of the Soviet project and the descent into ethnic hatred and ruthless violence of civil war, has received considerable acclaim in Russia, and Afanasy Mamedov, a writer of Azeri Jewish background who similarly focuses in his work on the collapse of the multilingual and multiethnic structure of the locus of his childhood and youth, the city of Baku. For both writers, the purported multiculturalism of these colonial Soviet sites is an object of nostalgia, and Tlostanova appears to be in solidarity with them. In a book that claims to deliberately abstain from value judgments,212 the positive valuation of these texts contrasts with the anomalous position and presentation in her book of the only two non-Russian-language post-Soviet texts that Tlostanova considers, which are two Ukrainian novels, Yuri Andrukhovych’s Moskoviada and Oksana Zabuzhko’s Pol’ovi doslidzhenia z ukraïns’koho seksu (Field work in Ukrainian sex),213 both discussed in detail later in the present study. The sections of her book devoted to these two works are dripping with poorly concealed hatred and are basically rhetorical offspring of Stalinist propaganda. Tlostanova appears to have taken on faith the worst stereotypes of Russian anti-Ukrainian discourse: she parrots the clichés about absence of original indigenous culture in Ukraine and, worse, insinuates that the two novels were written for mercenary reasons and for the Western implied reader (a latter-day incarnation of the nineteenth-century libel that the Ukrainian national liberation movement had been manufactured by the Habsburg Empire and/or Poland to subvert Russia). The absurdity of this claim is matched by her libelous accusation of both writers of racism, of hating anything non-Western, and of servitude to Europe (she uses the infamous adjective “kholuiskii,” popular in the Stalin-era and roughly meaning “subservient”). Tlostanova claims that the Ukrainian identity that the two authors advance is “absolutely constructed” (read: inauthentic and/or nonexistent) and labels their texts “novels trying to masquerade as anticolonial.”214 The main flaw of these two novels, she argues, is that “they oppose to the Soviet imperial discourse, which [they] confuse with the Russian one,”215 a “nationalist discourse of a far less global kind, which in present conditions is doomed.”216 Unlike Western discourses on postcolonial hybridity and creolization, Tlostanova’s book ignores both the discourse on anticolonial nationalism articulated by Frantz Fanon and others and the intellectual history of Ukraine (the two Ukrainian novels are discussed completely outside their intellectual context). Her book, which came out just months before Ukraine’s Orange

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Revolution, thus serves as a paradoxical combination of a call to rethink Russian imperial legacy, a symptomatic representation of persisting imperialist prejudices, and a cautionary instance of a strategic discursive appropriation that misfires. Ultimately, the subtitle of Tlostanova’s book determines its place on the intellectual map: Zhit’ nikogda, pisat’ niotkuda (To live never and write from nowhere). Prompted by a laudable utopian impulse, she ended up rejecting the localizing, indigenizing strain of cultural globalization and substituted a traumatized, melancholic utopia (in essence, another escape to an “Archimedean point” outside current cultural condition) for an informed politics of location. It is this unreflected and unworked-on traumatic loss that most likely prompted the paradoxical outburst against Ukrainian culture in Tlostanova’s text. Of all the subjects of the former Russian/Soviet Empire, Ukraine, the second largest ex-Soviet nation, has had one of the most complicated and difficult relationships with the metropoly. Ukraine’s subaltern, marginalized position found its reflection also in the similarly subaltern and marginalized position of Ukrainian studies vis-à-vis Russian studies in the West, a situation that was passionately decried soon after the collapse of the ussr in Oleh Ilnytzkyj’s essay “Russian and Ukrainian Studies and the New World Order.” Among the major instances of change in this situation was the 1995 debate occasioned by the essay by Mark von Hagen “Does Ukraine Have a History?,” a provocative call for reconceptulization and revitalization of scholarly discourse on Ukrainian history.217 Indeed, as Ukraine had been under foreign domination for most of the past millennium, scholars could regard it as not a “historical nation,” for, as George Grabowicz notes in his response to von Hagen’s essay, Ukraine was treated as an object rather than a subject of history. “The problem, of course, is generic and constitutes a paradigmatic post-colonial issue,” remarks Grabowicz.218 The brutal and lengthy history of colonial suppression of Ukrainian culture in the Russian empire, from the mid-seventeenth century onward, has been frequently compared with the English domination of Ireland:219 a lengthy, convoluted relationship of close neighbours that has produced a virtual minefield of cultural and political tensions. As Michael Naydan has noted, it has constituted a classic case of Saidean “unequal relationship between unequal interlocutors.”220 Ukrainian culture has been looked down upon, with the attitude typified either by Vissarion Belinsky’s notorious dismissal of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry merely for having been written in the “wrong” language221 or by many

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Russians’ professed fondness for Ukrainian food, songs, and dance, which single-handedly reduces a national culture to a frozen colonial stereotype. Similarly to the case of Ireland, one could argue that Ukraine’s colonial experience “lacks the classic ingredient of race,” if race is understood in the sense of drastic difference in skin color or other aspects of physical appearance. Grabowicz, however, counters this argument as well as the one that the conditions of Ukraine and other “white” colonies of Russia were not different from Russia’s “self-colonization”: [T]here is a basic qualitative difference: decrees were passed limiting and prohibiting such languages and literatures as Ukrainian and Lithuanian, not Russian. Beyond that, membership in the dominant nation transcended class distinction: a Russian laborer could feel superior to a Ukrainian intellectual simply because the latter was a “khokhol”;222 by itself this is racial discrimination without actually invoking color of skin (although that, of course, was also a factor in both the Russian and the Soviet empire: one need only to recall the contempt for the “churki”).223 And when this becomes a pattern of behavior in the so-called ethnic territories, it is hardly distinguishable from the behavior and values of classical colonialism.224

Still, as in Ireland, a Ukrainian background in and of itself “was no impediment to upward mobility and high imperial office” as long as it was accompanied by a “denationalization” of identity. This “denationalization of elites,” however, and the accompanying brain drain into the metropolitan center led to Ukraine’s double cultural oppression: “the colonial model … meld[ed] with the provincial one,” as a semi-autonomous vassal state turned into “a somnolent province”: Provincialization in terms of the loss of quality, narrowing of horizons, distortion of intellectual and artistic production, and so on was accompanied by the more classical features of colonial rule, especially economic exploitation and the reshaping of all indigenous cultural institutions … In effect, while turning it into a province and thus purportedly a constituent part of a larger administrative whole, the imperial goal was to weaken it, to prevent its resurgence by purposefully stunting its growth and infrastructure … Overarching it all was the general discreditation or, as the Soviet term had it, “deperspectivization” of things Ukrainian – in the scholarly sphere, as well as in every other.225

It is not surprising, then, that among the cultures of the Second World, Ukraine stands out as the one that in its encounter with Western theoretical

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thought engages primarily in the discourse of postcolonialism. Whereas in most East European cultures at present this is but one important strand of intellectual discourse among many, and in Russia until very recently its very existence appeared to be willfully unnoticed, Ukraine has experienced a veritable boom of talking and writing about things postcolonial. At least in its adjectival form, the term became ubiquitous in 1990s Ukraine. As with the term “postmodernism” – which, particularly in Russia, became an indiscriminately and loosely applied, and at times meaningless, label – “postcolonialism” appeared to be in danger of suffering the same fate in Ukraine: one saw references to “postcolonial culture” and “postcolonial reality” on almost a daily basis, in the most popular of the mass media, but with few elaborations on what these terms might mean. Dissatisfaction, however, with this semantic inflation has proven to be a productive factor in contemporary Ukrainian letters. We are slowly but surely witnessing the establishment of a rich idiosyncratic intellectual discourse on the topic. Although the cultural situation in Ukraine during the Soviet era has in many ways paralleled the general course of Soviet culture as a whole, the differences are noteworthy. The 1920s in Ukraine witnessed an unprecedented cultural revival, and the Ukrainian avant-garde has produced a great number of outstanding and original works in literature, performing, and visual arts. The crackdown of the 1930s, however, was even more severe and far-reaching than in Russia. The vast majority of writers, artists, and other cultural figures active at the time physically perished en masse, which earned this generation the sad name rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, the “garroted renaissance.”226 The effect was so devastating that the relative cultural liberalization of the Soviet Thaw only reached Ukraine by the time it was almost over in Russia. The opening night of Sergei Paradzhanov’s film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in Kyiv in September 1965, which turned into the first major protest rally in Ukraine, the key figure of which was the great Ukrainian poet Vasyl’ Stus, served as its symbolic high point, and its end came with the crackdown in 1972, following the appointment of Volodymyr Shcherbyts’ky as the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party.227 The second crackdown also in many respects was more fierce and thorough than elsewhere in the Soviet Union, and the liberalization associated with perestroika again arrived in Ukraine later than elsewhere. This historical digression recounts comparatively well-known facts; however, I believe that this reiteration is necessary to sketch out the context from which arose the texts that I shall discuss. Another important aspect of both these crackdowns, in the 1930s and the 1970s, is the accompanying

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manifest discouragement of the use of the Ukrainian language in all public spheres and the artful propagation of the stereotype of Ukrainian culture as second-rate and mediocre (since only the worst of conformist literature and art, with extremely rare exceptions, was allowed to see the light). The liberalization of the late 1980s came to a Ukrainian people that was unsure of its cultural affinities and even felt stigmatized by its own language.228 The parallels of this situation with that in many of the nations emerging from colonial dominance are striking. The sociological and psychological effects of colonization there seem to step directly off the pages of Frantz Fanon, who describes the conlonial subject as “Overdetermined from without,” a consciousness marked by a “Manichean delirium,” and a “dark shadow” of the Enlightenment man – all of which are designations that resonate with the Ukrainian colonial experience.229 The notion of postcoloniality was first introduced to Ukraine by Marko Pavlyshyn, one of the leading diasporic Ukrainian intellectuals, based in Australia. His two essays, “Ukraïns’ka kul’tura z pohliadu postmodernizmu” (Ukrainian culture from the point of view of postmodernism) and “Kozaky v Iamaitsi: Postkoloniial’ni rysy v suchasnii ukraïns’kii kul’turi” (Cossacks in Jamaica: Postcolonial features in contemporary Ukrainian culture), both first published in 1992,230 established the view of current Ukrainian culture as situated at the postmodern/postcolonial crossroads – a view that has been more or less readily accepted in Ukraine itself but, unfortunately, with few additional theorizations.231 Consider, for example, the statements made by the editors of Zoil, a Kyiv-based literary journal, who, in the context of a discussion of Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels, comment that in their view it is commendable that “postmodernism, which still irritates and disturbs minds on the other side of Konotop [a railway station near the Ukrainian-Russian border] is accepted here with academic calmness and seems already to have found its place in textbooks and anthologies … the passions [that surrounded the first publications of Andrukhovych’s writings] have subsided, and Bu-Ba-Bu [a literary group to which Andrukhovych has belonged] together with postmodernism moved into the realm where there is no place for mere criticism and where literary history enters the picture.” They do not believe, however, (and here I concur) that Ukrainian postmodernism has been as yet adequately described and interpreted. Still, they argue that it is understandable why, in their view, “it turned out to be more organic than the Russian one”: postmodern playfulness follows more naturally from the Ukrainian tradition, which has strong symbolic investment in the Baroque era, in contrast

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with what they describe as the Russian attempts to “graft exotic foreign flowers onto the Tolstoyan tree.”232 In his two influential essays, both of which appeared only months after Ukraine regained her independence, Pavlyshyn invites the readers to “put on postmodernist eyeglasses” as a way to envision the optimistic and productive path for the future development of Ukrainian culture. He expresses the view that while contemporary Ukrainian culture as a whole cannot be viewed as a postmodernist or a postcolonial phenomenon, since monologic, highly ideologized tendencies are still strong, a number of radically postmodernist and self-consciously postcolonial phenomena have nevertheless emerged. In other words, he seems to be in agreement with Jameson’s assertion that “in the former Soviet Union … modernism is still alive and continues to coexist with forms of postmodernism as fresh and sassy as anything current in the West.”233 Introducing the concept of postmodernism to his Ukrainian readers, Pavlyshyn outlines a global vision of pluralism and tolerance as the ironic and playful appropriation of low culture and even of the official art of the totalitarian era, a liberation from the rigidity of binary oppositions that have governed our thought, and Ukrainian thought in particular, caught in the endless confrontations of Russia vs Ukraine (i.e., the empire vs the colony, the metropoly vs the periphery), national enlightenment vs the orientation toward Europe (i.e., populism vs modernism), and so forth. Pavlyshyn acknowledges that his vision of postmodernism, and its implications for Ukraine, has a utopian dimension but deems such a utopianism necessary to bring Ukrainian culture out of the “colonial tragedy that had hanged on its neck for decades.”234 While I fully share his utopian aspirations, I believe that Pavlyshyn presents postmodernism as too coherent a phenomenon, playing down its numerous internal problems and contradictions. There is a world of difference between, on the one hand, the postmodernism practised by writers who delight in the playful use of previously taboo and inflammatory themes and vocabulary only to assert their extremely reactionary, patriarchal, and xenophobic views and, on the other hand, the postmodernism that seeks to grant a voice to heretofore neglected, oppressed, marginalized identities, the “postmodernism which integrates the micro-social concerns of the new social movements with an institutional and cultural analysis in the service of a transformative political vision.”235 It is true that postmodernism as a whole is a convoluted and contradictory enterprise, deeply implicated in that which it seeks to critique. While seeking a constructive, transformative strain in postmodernism, we should not blind ourselves to some of its more troubling aspects. In Ukraine, as in Russia, the

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field of postmodernist artistic practice is broad enough to offer examples of both kinds, as the subsequent chapters of this study will demonstrate. In his attempt to single out postcolonial features in contemporary Ukrainian culture, Pavlyshyn relies on a distinction that he proposes between the anticolonial and the postcolonial. “Anticolonial strategies,” he writes, “are united by the structure of negation – of turning on their head – the old colonial arguments and values. Anticolonialism is no less monological and ideologized than its adversary, and one frequently encounters in anticolonialist discourse the subconscious desire to speak in the name of power – although, of course, a new and different power.”236 The nature of postcolonialism, according to Pavlyshyn, is different. Postcolonialism, he asserts, is less reactive, and more original and creative. It does not so much wage struggle against colonialism; instead, it overtakes the latter and assumes a position “higher” than colonialism. Postcolonialism uses the colonial experience not simply as something to move away from, but as something to use in the process of forming its own self-consciousness. Postcolonialism understands that the anticolonial credo replicates with the opposite sign colonialist structures, and thus paradoxically preserves them. Armed with a poststructuralist, deconstructivist skepticism, postcolonialism understands the relativity of both the term “colonialism” and its negation; it is ready to use this condition in the spheres of political action and cultural production. In politics, postcolonialism creates the freedom to orient oneself toward pragmatism liberated from ideology, and in a work of art it discovers the possibility of using the old colonial myths and playing with them – not so much to refute or assert them, but to use them for its own new aesthetic projects.237

In other words, for Pavlyshyn, anticolonialism is caught in the ideological strictures of resistance, while postcolonialism has succeeded in liberating itself from the chains of the past and is now using their fragments in its playful new projects. Basically, postcolonialism denotes a postmodernist practice in the context of a former colony. Faced with the daunting task of introducing the term into Ukrainian intellectual discourse in the optimism-filled first year of Ukrainian independence, Pavlyshyn ended up presenting postcolonialism as too utopianly happy and coherent a phenomenon. In his later writings, he cautiously speaks of the “widespread, but unstable use of the term,”238 and he has put a lot of effort into bringing to the Ukrainian reader the texts of such Western postcolonial critics as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.

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Indeed, the reader would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere a distinction between the anticolonial and the postcolonial that is as clear-cut as Pavlyshyn has proposed or a vision of postcolonialism as something purely optimistic, playful, and forward-looking. Rather, most critics present the anticolonialpostcolonial dynamic as extremely complex and intertwined. Thus Ato Quayson’s vision of postcolonialism is almost diametrically opposed to Pavlyshyn’s. Quayson suggests that postcolonialism has to be perceived as a process of postcolonializing. To understand this process, it is necessary to disentangle the term “postcolonial” from its implicit dimension of chronological suppression, that aspect of its prefix which suggests that the colonial stage has been surpassed and left behind. It is important to highlight instead a notion of the term as a process of coming-into-being and of struggle against colonialism and its aftereffects. In this respect the prefix would be fused with the sense invoked by “anti.”239

Leela Gandhi puts forth a similar view in her book Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. She writes: postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath. It is a disciplinary project devoted to the … task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past. The process of returning to the colonial scene discloses a relationship of reciprocal antagonism and desire between colonizer and colonized.

In Gandhi’s opinion, “if postcoloniality can be described as a condition troubled by the consequences of a self-willed historical amnesia,” then “the theoretical value of postcolonialism inheres, in part, in its ability to elaborate the forgotten memories of this condition. In other words, the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past.”240 The understanding of postcolonialism as simply the condition of a colonial aftermath likewise is challenged by most critics. As Ania Loomba has noted in her study Colonialism/Postcolonialism, there has been a tendency “to think of postcolonialism not just as coming literally after colonialism and signifying its demise, but more flexibly as the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism.”241 What might help us in sorting out the complexity of the anticolonialpostcolonial dynamic is the distinction that Leela Gandhi proposes between

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anticolonial resistance and anticolonial critique. “The culture of [anticolonial] resistance,” she writes, “finds its theoretical and political limit in the chauvinist and authoritarian boundaries of the postcolonial nation-State – itself a conformity – producing prison-house which reverses, and so merely replicates the old colonial division of racial consciousness.”242 Anticolonial critique, by contrast, implies not only a denunciation of colonialism, but also a critical stance toward the structures of negative resistance. This distinction, in fact, follows from the one proposed by Frantz Fanon in his essay “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” namely between two kinds of anticolonial nationalism, one of them represented by the local elites’ basically appropriating and replicating (in reverse) the imperial power structures that they inherit, and the other, liberational nationalism, focused on the “reconquest of identity” and the “crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people.”243 While Fanon’s view was criticized for being overly messianic and derivative of the European romantic discourse of nationalism,244 it marks one of his greatest affinities with the discourse of the Ukrainian national renaissance of the 1920s, especially with Mykola Khvyl’ovy; it is this aspect of their shared vision that leads me to disagree with Pavlyshyn’s assertion that the Ukrainian anticolonialist cultural mode falls entirely into the former category.245 This double project of resistance and reparative critique, not merely overcoming anticolonialism, guides the best of postcolonial writing, including the work of the writers whom Pavlyshyn identifies as postcolonial – for example, Valery Shevchuk and the Bu-Ba-Bu group. In my opinion, we can clearly grant their work anticolonial status, for these writers do strive for a critical evaluation of the colonial past and of the traces of this past that still form a prominent part of the psyche of the contemporary postcolonial subject. In other words, these writers, whom Pavlyshyn has also identified as postmodernist, are representative of postcolonialism seen as an instance of engagé, resistant postmodernism. What, then, are the ways that contemporary Ukrainian culture has articulated its search for a new identity during the process of the disintegration of the empire and the ensuing decolonization? I would like to offer here one possible answer to this question. Needless to say, all such generalizing hypotheses are to be articulated with great caution, as evidenced by the lengthy critical debate that followed the appearance of the perhaps most influential, if tentative and hypothetical, attempt to offer a general theory of postcolonial literature, namely Fredric

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Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” In this essay, Jameson offers what he himself admits to be a “sweeping hypothesis,” namely that all postcolonial texts “are necessarily … allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what [Jameson proposes to] call national allegories”; while a dominant feature of Western literature, for Jameson, lies in “a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world,” postcolonial texts, “even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic – necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public [postcolonial] culture and society.”246 The two examples that Jameson offers in his essay are from China, Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918), and from Senegal, Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1976). These two very different texts – a diary of an intensifying nervous breakdown of a petty Chinese bureaucrat who believes everyone around him to be cannibals; and a story of the misadventures of the wealthy “new African” suddenly stricken by impotence – emerge, for Jameson, as a “manifestly social and historical nightmare,” exhibiting “a specifically political resonance absent from [their] natural or mythological western equivalent.”247 The bitter or tragic aspect of so many postcolonial works is seen as a result of their authors’ bearing “a passion for change and social regeneration which has not yet found its agents,” which is a political as much as an aesthetic dilemma.248 Jameson is certainly not alone in drawing attention to the notion of allegory in discussing contemporary culture; in fact, he admits that this concept is “experiencing a remarkable reawakening of interest in contemporary literary theory.”249 In the discourse on postmodernism, too, one of the influential early theoretical models centred on the notion of “the allegorical impulse.”250 What I think distinguishes Jameson’s model in an important way is his emphasis on the necessity of reading any postcolonial text as national allegory, even those texts that do not overtly display allegorical properties. The renewed interest in the notion of allegory can be registered in the countries of the former Soviet Union as well, as demonstrated by the publication in the final years of the ussr’s existence of a fair number of texts making extensive use of allegorical structures, the best known to the broader Slavist audience probably being Fazil’ Iskander’s Kroliki i udavy (Rabbits and boa constrictors). In the more properly postmodernist literature in Russia,

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a provocative example of the use of allegory can be found in the works of Viktor Pelevin and Egor Radov.251 In a mapping of postmodern Ukrainian literature, one can discern a number of divisions and trends that to a certain degree parallel those elsewhere, including Russia, yet develop a number of distinct idiosyncratic forms. There is the spatio-temporal convolution of narrative in combination with the perception of the mundane and the magical as fused or intertwined, most prominently in the works of Valery Shevchuk, but also in other writers, notably Yuri Vynnychuk and Ihor (Igor’) Klekh, a Russian-language author who is nevertheless very much a part of the literary and cultural dynamic of the Ukrainian postmodern.252 There is also a plethora of gleeful and daring engagements in all sorts of transgressive practices, both verbally and thematically, that are filtered through an engagement with the notion of the carnivalesque and its reverberations in the local Ukrainian context (for instance, in the poetry and performance art of the Bu-Ba-Bu group, notably the poezoopera Kraisler Imperial).253 Out of this trend, then, emerge the “postcarnivalesque” reflections of the leading Bu-Ba-Bist, Yuri Andrukhovych, which explore the trajectories of self-identification of the postcolonial Ukrainian intellectual in today’s multipolar world. There is, finally, the resurgence of new women’s writing and an unprecedented interest in the questions of gender and corporeality, explored with the greatest daring and sophistication by Oksana Zabuzhko. All of these paradigms, however, are infused with the signally postcolonial persistence of national allegory. In the second part of this study, I offer an attempt at a cognitive mapping of these paradigms that contextualizes these local Ukrainian literary developments in the greater global postmodern/postcolonial cultural processes. First, however, let us turn to consideration of the major postmodernist paradigms that emerged in the culture of the Second World metropoly – Russia – in the course of engagement with cultural globalization. While I hope that the reader will appreciate their diversity and the powerful innovative momentum, bearing in mind the above discussion of matters postcolonial will also help us to recognize the roads not taken by the Russian cultural practitioners.

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part one Russia: Postmodern Transformations of the Communist Metropoly

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2 Iosif Vissarionovich Pushkin, or The Transformational Momentum of Sots-Art

In the early 1970s, when unofficial Soviet visual art moved from imitating Western late modernist art – to which individual artists had access mostly through smuggled coffee-table-style volumes – and toward an investigative exploration of the “empire of signs” in which the Soviet subject was immersed, there sprang up the first coherent and genuinely innovative art trend to succeed the avant-gardes of the 1920s, which had been choked by the rising totalitarian state. The artistic duo of Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid christened it “sots-art,” thus underscoring the similarity of its strategies to Western pop art, even if the two worked with drastically different material. As Boris Groys has noted, “opposing [sots-art] is not a commercial, impersonal art that responds to and simultaneously strives to manipulate spontaneous consumer demand, but the art of socialist realism, which markets not things but ideology. Socialist realism, moreover, feels free and independent of the potential consumer, since marketing conditions rule out the possibility that the ideology will not be bought.”1 The mass-produced ideological signifiers of official Soviet art and the daily reality conditioned by it – both demonstratively rejected by nonconformist art in the past – were now recognized as the very material with which an artist could operate. Sots-art was, in essence, the first major paradigm of postmodernist artistic practice to emerge in the Soviet Union. As I have argued in the preceding chapter, if relatively autonomous in its development, postmodernist art in the Soviet Union developed features remarkably similar to that of the West. The artists of the sots-art movement approached official Soviet ideology,

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the conventions of socialist-realist art, and the everyday reality of Soviet life, which was dominated by the two former, as a peculiar semiotic system with its own hierarchical relationships, taboos, and myths and proceeded to deconstruct it from within. As Margarita Tupitsyn aptly remarks, “Sots artists … were the first to realize that socialist realism was structured as a conventional metaphysical system with carefully developed pictorial and verbal icons … The Sots artists dismantled the system of these sacred referents of totalitarian culture without abandoning its generic features and mythical language. As such they constituted an unprecedented example of postmodernist praxis.”2 In contrast to other art trends, sots-art did not take shape as a distinct, clearly defined movement (as happened with “Moscow conceptualism”), although, like conceptualism, it was centred primarily in Russian or predominantly Russian-speaking big cities.3 Rather, it came into being as a manifestation of a certain cultural condition, a cultural logic, a set of creative strategies that underlay a number of works produced from the early 1970s on, whereby the semiotic system of Soviet official and mass culture was appropriated and subverted from within. The idea was “in the air,” and the outpouring of diverse manifestations of sots-art was remarkable. It was only a matter of time before the trend moved to incorporate literary production as well, especially since the notions of a set code, a semiotic system, and a language were so crucial for sots-art. And particularly in literature the differentiation between sots-art, on the one hand, and “conceptualism” – a term that at one point appeared to supplant the former – on the other, arose with greater clarity.4 A prominent figure in the conceptualist movement, the Moscow poet Lev Rubinshtein, stressed in one of his theoretical essays that conceptualism, as its Russian exponents understand it, “works not so much with language as such as with consciousness. More exactly, with the complex interrelationships between the individual artistic consciousness and the collective cultural one.”5 This strategy does appear to prevail in the work of the poets usually associated with the conceptualist movement. Rubinshtein himself builds his “catalogues,” poetic texts composed of fragments of varying length inscribed on numbered index cards, from fairly neutral and transparent vocabulary. While many of them do contain intertextual references and some amount of language play, most overtly so “Voprosy literatury” (Questions of literature, 1992),6 they tend to focus on representing nonverbal experiences, such as dreams,7 the memories of childhood,8 and simply the individual experience(s) of being.9 Of course, all of these are wrought with numerous complications, and perhaps the most

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significant reason for Rubinshtein’s success is that the overall tone of his texts resonates so forcefully with collective experiences. The individual presenter/”lyrical hero” of Rubinshtein’s catalogues emerges as a Russian Soviet intelligentsia “everyman”; his works may be described as a latter-day incarnation of Chekhovian plays, with the absurdity and disconnectedness increased manifold. These texts can also be considered a purely verbal equivalent of the “trash albums” and installations of one of the leading (post-)Soviet conceptualist visual artists, Ilya Kabakov: both Kabakov and Rubinshtein assemble seemingly random, useless “scraps” of the material world (household objects, recorded mundane remarks) with the aim of rendering the experience of the actual moments and places where these scraps initially acquired a symbolic significance for individuals.10 The approach to writing developed by another prominent conceptualist poet, Dmitry Prigov, is markedly different from Rubinshtein’s.11 An amazingly prolific producer of texts (by now, he has authored many thousands of them), Prigov brings together, in a seemingly unconsidered fashion, elements drawn from the widest spectrum of human experiences, which he then usually organizes into subtly subversive quasi-doggerel short verse (although he has worked in other genres as well). In his textual investigations, Prigov targets the many possible speaking personae of Soviet reality, developing with remarkable success what might be considered a poetic version of the Zoshchenkovian skaz and drawing also on the more risqué tradition of Russian folklore. However, he artfully dismantles the voices of his imagined personae, pushing his texts, ever so slightly, toward the realm of the absurd. Still, it is not so much the capacity for the absurd discovered in Soviet language as such that appears to fascinate Prigov as the verbalization of the consciousness of his many appropriated “selves,” be that an urban philistine, or a poet fascinated by the might of the state as symbolized by the figure of the policeman, or even a sensuous young woman or a shy gay man.12 While Rubinshtein’s writings present a collection of seemingly disconnected utterances lifted from daily Soviet life, in Prigov’s work we encounter a sideshow of the actual characters populating it, portrayed in a mildly grotesque key. Both Prigov and Rubinshtein have achieved considerable renown in the West, at least among those who follow the developments in Russia. Below, however, I would like to present to the reader three less-known contemporary Russian poets who, in my opinion, deserve greater recognition for their work, followed by the discussion of the works of one prose writer. While they do not form a coherent group or movement, what unites them is the focus on late-Soviet/post-Soviet reality as a specific semiotic system

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and their subversive exploration of its language forms. Rather than focusing, like Rubinshtein and Prigov, on the phenomenon of the homo Sovieticus, they turn their attention directly to the lingua Sovietica. These three poets are Igor’ Irten’ev, Vladimir Druk, and Aleksandr Levin, and the prose writer is Vladimir Sorokin.13 Among these three poets, Igor’ Irten’ev (b. 1947) has probably achieved the greatest amount of recognition. He began publishing his poetry in 1979, within the relatively marginalized sections of humorous writing in such periodicals as Iunost’ and Ogonek. From about the mid-1980s on, he actively participated in mass poetry readings and was even repeatedly featured in the popular evening television show Vzgliad (View). His breakthrough in the more respectable press came in 1987, when his poem “Pro Petra: Opyt sinteticheskoi biografii” (About Peter: An attempt at a synthetic biography, 1986) was published in Novyi mir in a portfolio of experimental poetry; several collections of his poetry – Popytka k tekstu (Attempt at a text, 1989), Povestka dnia (Tidings of the day, 1989), Vertikal’nyi srez (Vertical cross-section, 1990), Tri Petra i dva Ivana (Three Peters and two Ivans, 1995) – appeared in the next few years.14 “Pro Petra,” perhaps Irten’ev’s most famous poem,15 provides an excellent example of his poetics. The poem’s title is already fraught with ambiguous irony: the use of the preposition “pro” alludes both to Russian folklore and to Mayakovsky’s narrative poem “Pro eto” (About this), while the name “Peter,” when used alone, leads a Russian reader to expect that the Peter in question is the emperor Peter the Great. However, here this name turns out to refer to Tchaikovsky; moreover, this already paradoxically defamiliarized signifier is used as a mere pretext for producing a simulacrum of a standard Soviet-style heroic biography of a public figure. The text is saturated with cliché vocabulary: “bard of popular good” (“pevets narodnogo dobra”), “loved the people with all his soul” (“vsei dushoi liubil narod”), defied social rank, travelled all over the country, served as inspiration for young pioneers – the list can be continued indefinitely. However, in this poem, as elsewhere, Irten’ev does not stop at the stage of merely exposing the arbitrariness of the endless recombination of the restricted set of standard signifiers, but ironically stretches it to the limits of the absurd, making his protagonist play the piano in each and every one of the “sakli, chumy i iarangi” (houses of the Caucasus mountaineers and the natives of the Far North) that he enters.16 The poem’s popularity among Russian readers is due to the liberatory jouissance of the gesture exposing this arbitrariness and absurdity present in each and every officially constructed Soviet biography and the deceptively simple, easily memorizable form.

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In fact, most of Irten’ev’s poems are written in the commonest of metres found in Russian verse (usually iambic and trochaic trimeter and tetrameter)17 and generally constitute exercises in mounting collages of fragments of truisms, official slogans, lines from canonical authors memorized in secondary school, and observations of the speech and the daily life of Soviet “everymen.” Often the effect of ironic subversion is achieved through unexpected contrastive juxtaposition of these scraps of “reported speech,” as in the poem “Pro iskusstvo” (About art, written 1983): Iskusstvo—dostoian’e mass I dostizhenie prirody Ono siiaet kak almaz, Kogda ego pochistish’ sodoi Ono ne terpit suety I v to zhe vremia— Volokity. Ego prekrasnye cherty Dlia vsekh zhelaiushchikh otkryty. Ono vesti sposobno v boi I mozhet vyvesti iz stroia. Ono rastet samo soboi, Kak biust Na rodine geroia. “Ars longa, vita brevis est” Siiaet nadpis’ gordelivo. Kto ne rabotaet—ne est. I eto ochen’ spravedlivo!

Art is the property of the masses And an achievement of nature. It shines like a diamond After it’s cleaned with baking soda. It cannot stand fuss As well as Red tape. Its beautiful features Are open to all those who are willing. It can lead into a battle And can cause a breakdown. It grows by itself, Like the bust At the birthplace of a hero. “Ars longa, vita brevis est,” The inscription shines proudly. He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat. And this is extremely fair!18

By creating a transparent excess of absurdity (for instance, by describing art as an “achievement of nature” that “grows by itself, like the bust at the birthplace of a hero”), Irten’ev unveils the equal lack of sense in the other set phrases in the poem, which are part and parcel of Soviet idées reçues. By daringly pairing, among others, the communist slogan “he who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat” with “Ars longa, vita brevis” and presenting both in a context that taints them with absurdity, he further extends the subversive intent, directing it not only at the Soviet thought clichés, but at clichés tout court. Side by side with such overtly citational, cliché-recycling texts, we find instances of another type of poem favoured by Irten’ev: the usually brief descriptive studies that bring to mind the texts of oberiu, the last of

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Russia’s avant-garde poetic movements. One of the clearest examples of this kind is “Avtobus” (A bus, written 1983).19 This poem combines the structure of an ironic panorama/catalogue, typical of several “scrolls,” or “columns” (stolbtsy), by Nikolai Zabolotsky – such as “Vechernii bar (‘Krasnaia Bavariia’)” (An evening bar [“Red Bavaria”]), “Chasovoi” (The sentry), and “Na rynke” (At the market)20 – with the quasi-children’s poetic tone of the late works of another poet associated with this movement, Nikolai Oleinikov.21 However, Irten’ev infuses the oberiu form not with the images of “concrete” reality, characteristic of the oberiu poetics,22 but with an all-too-perfect simulation of an idyllic picture from the pages of a didactic Soviet children’s book that pushes the internal laws of the genre to an absurd extreme (stretching the bus of the title to the scale of a Noah’s ark that contains all the iconic images of “happy Soviet life,” including the rather incongruous presence of a woman giving birth). If we follow Zabolotsky’s advice to read his writings “more with the eyes and fingers than with the ears”23 and try to apply it to Irten’ev’s text, we will be faced with the outright impossibility of such concrete experiential contact, or, more precisely, with a realization that such a contact produces a shocking encounter with a collapsing house of cards. Like the canvases of one of the leading sots-art painters, Erik Bulatov, both “Avtobus” and Irten’ev’s other “oberiutian” poems – among them “Sluchai v bol’nitse” (Incident in a hospital), “Elektromonteram” (To the electricians), “Chasovoi” (The sentry), and “Pesn’” (A song) – recreate the iconography of official Soviet culture with greater skill and precision than its own appointed hacks, only to reveal its hollowed nature. Side by side with these texts, Irten’ev offers a different type of simulacric reconstruction – the verbalization of the attitude of a (post-)Soviet “everyman.” This is the direction that his writing has taken in more recent years, as evidenced by Irten’ev’s mid-1990s collection of poetry, Tri Petra i dva Ivana (Three Peters and two Ivans), where most of the poems follow the mode exemplified by the following one: Nekompetentnost’ pravit bal, Upala vniz boegotovnost’, Tsinizm vkonets zakolebal, Zakolebala bezdukhovnost’.

Incompetence rules the ball, Combat readiness has declined, Cynicism has grown beyond belief, And so has lack of spirituality.

Spoili nachisto narod,

They’ve led the people to utter drunkenness and Pushed the idea off the pedestal,

Ideiu svergli s p’edestala,

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Vdov stalo men’she, chem sirot, Sirot prakticheski ne stalo.

There are fewer widows now than orphans, Orphans have almost disappeared.

Nauka polnost’iu v ogne, Iskusstvo tam zhe, no po poias. Nikto ne moetsia v strane,

Science is all engulfed by fire, And so is art, but only up to the waist. No one in the whole country washes himself, I alone still wash for some unknown reason.24

Lish’ ia odin zachem-to moius’.

The poem masterfully recreates philistine rants of the disaffected petty bourgeois of our era. Its targeted sarcasm and references to pseudo-high cultural clichés (here especially the allusion to the Russian-language version of Mephistopheles’s aria from Gounod’s Faust) invite a comparison to the classic examples of early-twentieth-century Russian satirical poetry, particularly its best known representative, Sasha Cherny.25 Simultaneously, by presenting us with a nearly parodic lyric monologue, it signals a move in the direction of a more Prigovian aesthetic (while Prigov himself in the 1990s moved toward more abstract conceptualist projects, as evidenced by his collections Piat’desiat kapelek krovi (Fifty drops of blood, 1993; bilingual ed. 2004) and Iavlenie stikha posle ego smerti (The apparition of verse after its death, 1995). However, Irten’ev maintains the key features of his poetics, thus differing in important ways both from Cherny’s individualist irony and from Prigov’s “performing lyric personae.” Irten’ev, to an extent, searches for a middle point between the two, constructing the text by recycling mass-media clichés but then rupturing it by stretching them to engulf the manifestly absurd. Unlike Vladimir Sorokin’s prose, which in many instances is organized in accordance with a similar strategy, Irten’ev’s absurd never reaches macabre and physically transgressive levels, but its more “mundane” dimensions may in the end appear more troubling than the extremes of Sorokin’s text. Another poet who has achieved renown for masterful sots-artian subversive texts is Vladimir Druk (b. 1957). Similarly to Irten’ev’s case, Druk’s breakthrough in print came only in the mid to late 1980s, and a comprehensive collection of his poetry, Kommutator (The switchboard), came out in 1991.26 Another similarity between the two poets can be seen in their taking up the oberiu paradigm. Among Druk’s poems, one can find several that constitute instances of brilliant texts written entirely in an oberiutian mode, most notably “Vitebsk”27 – a poem where he brings the images of Chagall’s paintings to life in a Zabolotskian “scroll,” insightfully seizing upon an aesthetic affinity between these two avant-garde masters.28

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However, it is a different type of poetry that has come to manifest Druk’s distinct contribution to sots-artian writing. The middle section of Kommutator, entitled “Imena” (Names), is comprised of texts organized as transformational paradigms of Soviet linguistic clichés, in which Druk literally performs irreverent deconstruction of words and phrases solidified in their formulaic glory. Thus, “Intermul’-86”29 works with the phrase-book for foreigners as its “substratum,” defamiliarizing the realia of daily Soviet life through a proliferation of quasi-linguistic exercises: Vy zhenaty? Ia kholost. Ia zamuzhem. Ia ne zamuzhem. My ne zamuzhem. My razveden s vdovoiu.

Are you married? I am single. I am married. I am not married. We is not married. We has divorced a widow.

…

…

Chem vy zanimaetes’? Vy rabotaete? Ia ne rabotaiu. Kem vy ne rabotaete?

What do you do? Do you work? I do not work. What kind of work you don’t do?

Ia slesar’-sborshchik, veterinar, inzhener-tekhnolog, uchitel’, uchitel’nitsa, poet zhenskogo roda … My kollegi.

I am an assembly line metalworker, veterinarian, engineer-technologist, schoolteacher (male), schoolteacher (female), poet (feminine gender) … We are colleagues.30

The poem’s list becomes increasingly morbid and absurd – “Can I see a therapist, a neuropathologist, an ophthalmologist, a gynecologist, a forensic scientist?” (“Mogu ia pokazat’sia terapevtu, nevropatologu, okulistu, ginekologu, patologoanatomu?”) – and ends with a scream, “Masha, where are we?” (“Masha, gde my?”). The make-believe stability of the language exercise progressively gives way to a sensation of existential crisis. A few of the poems in this cycle, such as “Petrov i Kozlov” (Petrov and Kozlov), once again manifest greater indebtedness to the oberiu tradition, this time to the darkly absurdist side of Daniil Kharms, in focusing on the arbitrariness of signification (in the text, Kozlov, Petrov, and Ivanov continuously pair up, break up, and exchange names).31 The misadventures

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of these characters appear to foreshadow the texts later in the book, which are more immediately preoccupied with demonstrating the hollowness of signifiers and the arbitrariness of naming on the basis of the more contemporary material. In “Avtoepitafiia” (Auto-epitaph), “Unsere Familia,” “Vecherniaia poverka” (Evening roll call), “Lapsheron,” and other poems, Druk takes such designations as professional affiliations and personal names (in several cases, his own) and transmutes and proliferates them ad absurdum. Thus, in “Unsere Familia,” the author’s last name is used as a building block for a series of “Sovietese” neologisms: Soiuzdruk, Soiuzdruktsirk. Gosplemdrukkhoz. Agropromdruktorgtrest. niidruk. Iuzh-mor-nefte-gaz-geo-fiz-razvedka (Vdruchnuiu). … Strashnyi Druk: drukomol, drukoman, drukopisets, drukonosets … I ty, Druk!— druk naroda!— I—drukie. Uniondruk, Uniondrukcircus. Statedrukbreedingfarm. Agroindustrialdruktradetrust. druk Research Institute. South-sea-oil-gas-geo-phys-prospecting (Drukially). …

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Fearsome Druk: drukgrinder, drukomaniac, drukographer, drukbearer … Et tu, Druk! – druk of the people! – And – otherdruks.32

An analogous effect is achieved in “Vecherniaia poverka” (Evening roll call) through a rhythmical pairing of a name and the first person pronoun: ivanov—ia petrov—ia sidorov—ia tak tochno—tozhe ia k sozhaleniiu—ia vidimo—ia

ivanov—me petrov—me sidorov—me yessir—also me unfortunately—me apparently—me

…

…

mirnye liudi—ia i bronepoezd—ia

the peace-loving people—me and the armoured train—me

i vezuvii—ia i vergilii—ia i vasilii—ia

and vesuvius—me and virgil—me and vasily—me33

And so forth. In this text, the militarized structure of a roll call first stretches to engulf the entire Soviet reality, from “everymen’s” surnames Ivanov, Petrov, and Sidorov to the “armoured train of the peace-loving people” taken from a famous revolution-era song, eventually reaching beyond the borders of the Soviet realm (and even the Russian language – at one point the poem switches into German, then back into Russian) before collapsing from absurdist overexertion. This group of poems aptly illustrates the facility with which the signifiers of daily Soviet realia come together in endless combinations and recombinations. Even the seemingly innocuous elements like pronouns and surnames are swiftly incorporated in this Brownian movement, generating ever-more-absurd, new pairings. The central place in the cycle is occupied by the poem “Iosif Vissarionovich Pushkin,” which expands the same structural device to tackle the most sacred signs of the Russian cultural canon. The poem’s transgressive title

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in and of itself symbolizes sots-art’s signature aesthetic principle, taking up the totalitarian sign system and pushing it to the logical extreme by fusing together the names of the two “controlling” figures: the national poetic idol (pre-Soviet but well integrated into the Soviet semiotic system) and the totalitarian dictator – a device also used in one of the key sots-artian films, Yuri Mamin’s Bakenbardy (Sideburns), featuring in a central scene the transformation of a Lenin statue into that of Pushkin, thus establishing a parallel between the two repressive semiotic economies at work in the late-Soviet era. The poem seizes upon the inflation of the Pushkinian myth, so dominant in the Soviet cultural mentality.34 The poet’s name, along with a few commonly quoted lines by him, become but a set of empty signifiers floating in the stream of language games. Druk follows through several common syntagmatic couplings of the signifier “Pushkin” in Soviet discourse, both literary and mundane, and then jolts the reader with sudden subversive inclusions: lermontov—eto pushkin vchera lermontov is—pushkin yesterday derzhavin—eto pushkin pozavchera derzhavin is—pushkin the day before yesterday egor isaev—eto pushkin segodnia egor isaev is—pushkin today i maiakovskii—pushkin and mayakovsky is—pushkin i khodasevich—pushkin and khodasevich is—pushkin dazhe kuniaev—pushkin even kuniaev is—pushkin a pushkin—eto kushner… but pushkin is—kushner… a ty pushkin? net, ia ne pushkin znachit, ty ne genii, da, ia ne genii a kto ty? ia sukin syn i pushkin sukin syn net, pushkin eto ai-da sukin syn net, pushkin eto aida! mozhet, ia vse-taki pushkin, khotia ne genii ne genii—ne genii—ne genii—ia da, ty zlodeistvo

and are you pushkin? no, i’m not pushkin so you aren’t a genius, no, i am not a genius and who are you? i’m a son of a bitch and pushkin is a son of a bitch, no pushkin is hey-ho son of a bitch no, pushkin is hey-ho, let’s go! maybe, i’m still pushkin if not a genius not a genius—not a genius—not a genius—i yes, you are villainy

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a pushkin togda kto? a pushkin togda gde? pushkin—tot kto ne s nami tot protiv nas pushkin tam gde nas net

and who is pushkin then? and where is pushkin then? pushkin—he who is not with us is against us pushkin is where we are not

mozhet, ia vse-taki pushkin khotia ne genii? mozhet, ia vse-taki pushkin khotia zlodeistvo? mozhet, ia griboedov?

maybe i’m still pushkin, although not a genius? maybe i’m still pushkin, although i’m villainy? maybe i’m griboedov?

a pushkin ne otvechaet a pushkin za vas otvechat’ ne budet pushkin za ottsa ne otvechaet! ai-da pushkin! ai-da sukin syn!

and pushkin doesn’t answer and pushkin won’t answer for you pushkin doesn’t answer for his father! hey-ho pushkin! hey-ho son of a bitch!

da-da-da-da! pushkin, sukin syn za ottsa-suku ne otvechaet!

yes-yes-yes-yes! pushkin, that son of a bitch does not answer for his father, the bitch!

ai-da pushkin! net pushkin eto—aida! aida, pushkin!

hey-ho pushkin! no pushkin is hey-ho, let’s go! let’s go, pushkin!

ia—eto pushkin zavtra! ty—eto pushkin poslezavtra

i am—pushkin tomorrow you are—pushkin the day after tomorrow we are—pushkin the day after the day after tomorrow

my—eto pushkin posleposlezavtra

i my budem sravnivat’ sravnivat’ sravnivat’ poka vse ne sravniaem

and we shall compare and level compare and level until we level everything

aida, pushkin!

let’s go, Pushkin!35

In this poem, Druk begins by seizing upon the propensity of the official and nationalist discourse to abuse Pushkin’s name as a universal “equalizer”

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– as seen in the poem’s erasure of the gaping difference between the neoclassicist Khodasevich and the futurist Mayakovsky and in its wallowing in the self-aggrandizement of the hacks Isaev and Kuniaev – and then subverts this propensity by equating, in turn, Pushkin himself with the semidissident St Petersburg poet Aleksandr Kushner, with his very “unRussian” name. The poem then moves to a semi-”sacrilegious” variation on the “genius versus villainy” dilemma of Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri” and his famous exclamation upon completing the play Boris Godunov, “Hey-ho Pushkin, hey-ho you son of a bitch!” (“Ai-da Pushkin, ai-da sukin syn!”). It then suddenly incorporates samples of the demagogic slogans and sayings of the Stalin era (such as “he who is not with us is against us,” “the son does not answer for his father,” and “Pushkin won’t answer for you”) and seamlessly blends them into the text’s general frame of reference. The poem culminates by proclaiming that the excessive production of signifiers leads to the complete erasure of all difference and thus leads to a discursive breakdown. In a classical sots-artian gesture, Druk thus uses his text to demonstrate (and accelerate) the impending collapse of official Soviet linguo-ideological structure. The project of exploration and subversion of the Soviet discursive regime is continued in the poem “Teletsentr” (tv station),36 which follows the “Imena” (Names) cycle in Kommutator and is probably Druk’s bestknown work. This uniquely constructed text provides an excellent example of the trend toward the multiplication and fragmentation of the voices and “languages” of poetry. The poem constitutes an extremely interesting case of formal experimentation by employing double-voicedness as the basic underlying principle. Subtitled “a stereopoem,” it is composed of two columns of text parallel one to the other. At poetry readings Druk usually invites one of his friends to read the right column while he reads the left one; thus the poem is double-voiced in the most literal sense. It is also characterized by a mosaic-like construction of bits and pieces of most diverse origin. These fragments are allusions to and quotations from: •

•

Boris Pasternak’s famous poem “Hamlet” (lines 12 and 13 in the left column: “the noise has stopped I crawled” – “walked” in the original Pasternak version – “onto the stage” (“gul zatikh ia vypolz” – “vyshel” [Pasternak] – “na podmostki”); “the twilight of the night is aimed at me” (“na menia nastavlen sumrak nochi”); Russian proverbs and sayings (“one cannot drop a word from a song” [“iz pesni slova ne vykinesh’”]) as well as Latin (Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant, etc.);

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•

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Russian folk songs; Russian history (Tsarevich Dmitry, Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son); literary history (Hotel Angleterre in St Petersburg, where Sergei Esenin committed suicide in 1925); Soviet songs of the Stalin years (“Ia liubliu tebia, zhizn’” [I love you, life]); propaganda slogans (“Gotov k trudu i oborone” [Ready for labour and defence]); classics of children’s literature (Pushkin’s Skazka o rybake i rybke [Tale of the fisherman and the fish]), Aleksei N. Tolstoy’s Zolotoi kliuchik, ili Prikliucheniia Buratino [The little golden key, or The adventures of Buratino]); entries on wall calendars; brand names of Soviet television sets; the Beatles; ice hockey (Montreal Canadiens); ethnic crises in the “margins” of the Soviet Empire; names of politicians (Ronald Reagan, François Mitterand); cartoon characters; avant-garde artists (the film director Aleksandr Sokurov and the poet and scriptwriter Yuri Arabov); terms from the natural sciences and from tv and radio technology; and so forth.

These elements combine into a multicoloured pastiche that is conceived as a portrayal of the schizophrenic mind of a late-Soviet tv viewer (snippets from television or radio form a major part of the right column), and it may serve as a document of sufficient interest for someone undertaking a sociological or anthropological study of the last decade of Soviet society. The above list could be continued by any number of the names of various objects, animate and inanimate alike. That the author builds his work around the image of television as the almighty force transforming today’s world has a special relevance if one bears in mind the definitive role assigned to television and video technologies by the theorists of postmodernism. It truly becomes, to use Fredric Jameson’s term, a “videotext.”37 Most of the items quoted or alluded to are subverted, fused together, transformed sometimes almost beyond recognition: the name of Karabas Barabas, the villain from Zolotoi kliuchik (The little golden key), merges with that of Nagornyi Karabakh, for several years an arena of ethnic violence and unrest, which has been continuously covered, however inaccurately at times, by the Russian media. But this mutated existence is exactly the one to which all these realia of “background knowledge” led in the consciousness of a Russian Soviet man of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Another peculiar feature of Druk’s poem is that this variegated combination of literary and socio-cultural allusions is conveyed within the frame of a strict metrical pattern. Druk envelops his work, abounding in words

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and themes that from the conventional point of view could never be thought of as the property of poetry, into a syllabotonic pattern (trochaic pentameter).38 However “defamiliarized” by the construction of two parallel columns of text, “Teletsentr” in its versification still stands sufficiently close to the classical Russian tradition. Ultimately, however, the provocative use of spacing, which makes the two columns of the poem engage in dialogue and interpenetrate each other, signals the presence of overtly postmodern characteristics in Druk’s text. If both Irten’ev and Druk effect subversions of the dominant Soviet discourse by stretching or rupturing the signifying chain to include a series of discrete transgressive elements, the texts of Aleksandr Levin undertake a step further and move the subversive process to the level of word-formation – Levin’s own terms for his work are lingvoplastika (linguoplastics) and plastilistika (plastylistics). Similarly to Irten’ev and Druk, Levin began publishing his poetry in the late 1980s, and a comprehensive collecton of his poetry entitled Biomekhanika (Biomechanics) appeared in 1995.39 Among contemporary Russian poets, Levin is probably the most committed heir to the Futurist tradition of slovotvorchestvo (word-creation). While not all of his texts fall squarely into the sots-artian paradigm, several create brilliant “convex mirror” images of the dominant Soviet discourse. The uniqueness of Levin’s poetry is to a great extent due to his choice to pick up the Elena Guro line of the Futurist aesthetic, tapping into the fascinating resource of children’s language.40 Through the deliberate infantilization of his representations of Soviet speech, Levin insightfully seizes upon the infantile nature of the Soviet totalitarian subject’s mentality, an important aspect of the cultural paradigm of socialist realism with which the sots-art writer works.41 In his use of sots-artian tools, Levin, similarly to several other poets of his generation, does not back off from working with the icon of the dissenter, which he recognizes as part and parcel of the Soviet semiotic system. In one of his best-known poems, “V zerkale pressy” (In the mirror of the media), Levin offers an ironic rewriting of one of the episodes in the series of events accompanying the emergence of Boris Yeltsin as a dissenter figure: V ogromnom supermarkere Borisu Nelokaichu pokazyval vaizory, kondomery, garpunkeli, potriasnye blin-gliukeny, otlichnye fufloery a takzhe dzhinbsy s tonikom, khai-fai i pochechui

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… Pokazyvali raznye devaisy i butlegery, kinsaizy, golopoptery, nevspeipory i prochee. I Bóris Nelokaevitch poklialsia, chto na rodine takoi zhe tsukermarkeret narodu vozvedet! In a giant supermarker Boris Nelokaich was shown visors, condomers, harpoonkels cool whoops-hallucens, excellent crappers as well as jeans & tonic, hi-fi, and patchouli … He was shown various devices and bootleggers, kingsizers, bareassers, newsdrinkers and so forth. And Boris Nelokaevitch swore that back home he’d erect a sugarmarket just like this one for the common folk!42

The poem explores the “magic” feeling of foreign-sounding words for the average Soviet citizen, providing a modern-day version of the ironic distortion of such borrowed vocabulary in classic nineteenth-century Russian texts, such as Nikolai Leskov’s “The Left-Handed Craftsman.” Simultaneously, it parodies the recurring promises of “catching up with the West” generously offered by Russian leaders before, during, and after the Soviet era.43 Levin, however, is particularly successful in his masterful reproductions of formulaic “high-Stalinist” writing. Among the best specimen of this type of text is “Prostaia istoriia (Sovetskaia narodnaia pesnia)” (A simple story [A Soviet folk song]),44 which targets the absurdity of Stalinist “fakelore.” The poem recounts the basic “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again” plot with a socialist-realist twist. The boy and the girl meet “na ulitse Sklerofimovicha” (on Sklerofimovich Street) at the Uriadnik (Constable) Movie Theater, a transparent travesty of the Udarnik (Shock worker) Movie Theater on Serafimovich Street – part of the Moscow “House on the Embankment” complex and one of the key symbols of the Stalinist chronotope. The protagonists are exemplary shock workers with nonsensical-sounding professions – she is a “suchil’shchitsa,” and he is a “volochil’shchik.”45 Both of them, similarly to the name of the street on which the happy couple eventually settles down – Krasnykh Pilil’shchikov

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Street – contain fairly obvious sexual puns.46 Their love story is the only conflict among the otherwise paradisial existence of the workers’ collectives, described with the help of nonsensical pseudo-industrial terminology that parodies the staples of the production novel – one of the cornerstones of socialist-realist writing. The overload of clichés and conventions of the genre that the reader experiences in this two-page text culminates in the scene of the happy reunion of the protagonists: Kolia the Volochil’shchik sees Olia the Suchil’shchitsa on stage during the May Day amateur concert reciting “a funny folk ditty in support of the Central Committee platform” (“smeshnuiu chastushku narodnuiu v podderzhku platformy TsK”). Thus Levin, in a classic sots-artian gesture, adopts the rules of socialist-realist writing and himself becomes a shock worker, a producer of standard masterpieces that, nonetheless, burst at each and every seam.47 It is, however, the Russian prose writer Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955) who has emerged as the master creator of self-destructing socialist-realist masterpieces. The majority of his texts constitute skillful simulacra of conventional literary styles, most often of socialist-realist narratives, which then, transgressively, include the unspeakable: the reader is offered fine reproductions of a wide variety of genres and types of Soviet writing, but suddenly and without warning the calm tone of the narrative, which has been presenting to us a more-or-less standard, unremarkable plot, shifts to a depiction of transgressive acts (of a sexual, excremental, or violent nature) that is usually combined with transgressive vocabulary (profanities and curse words); frequently, such puncturing leads to the total disintegration of the text. In these gestures of transgression, Sorokin observes no limits. His textual bravado led to an unusual situation: even after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Sorokin, despite the critical acclaim, experienced extreme difficulties with publishing his work.48 The tide began turning in the mid1990s, and by 1999 Sorokin was already a bestselling celebrity author.49 Sorokin asserts that his literary practice provides him an opportunity to look at literary texts from a distance. He has remarked that text in general can sometimes make him nauseous,50 and the image of nausea – and, purportedly, expurgation and catharsis – has been used in discussions of his work. Sorokin’s practice of textual expurgation led Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, in her discussion of his work, to assert that “his prose works represent zero writing par excellence.”51 Indeed, Roland Barthes’s concept of the zero degree of writing provides an insight into Sorokin’s textual laboratory.

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In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes offers an account of modern literature’s ever-increasing awareness of the question of form, tracing the beginnings of this process to Flaubert: Flaubert … established literature as an object, through promoting literary labor to the status of a value; form became the end-product of craftsmanship, like a piece of pottery or a jewel … From an initial non-existence in which thought … seemed to stand out against the blackcloth of words, writing … passed through all the stages of a progressive solidification; it was first the object of a gaze, then of creative action, finally of murder, and has reached in our time a last metamorphosis, absence: in those neutral modes of writing, called here “the zero degree of writing,” we can easily discern … a formal reality independent of language and style.52

Perhaps one of the best examples of such writing, in which “literature is [experienced as] irony, and language … is experienced in depth,”53 can be found in Sorokin’s novel Ochered’ (The line/queue, written 1982–83). This text entirely consists of remarks uttered by people waiting in a long line for some unknown goods; however, it was not conceived as an exposé of the shortages of consumer goods during the Brezhnev era. Sorokin’s stated intention in writing it was to render the line not “as a socialist phenomenon, but as a carrier of a specific speech practice, as an extraliterary polyphonic monster.”54 In Ochered’ and several other early Sorokin texts, notes Mikhail Ryklin, “the presence of collective speech is so massive and irreducible that the function of the author at first glance seems limited to the simple arrangement and staging. The illusion that it is the Id speaking is at times complete.”55 In this type of writing, we observe an intentionality similar to the one Barthes discerned in the writings of Raymond Queneau. “Queneau,” writes Barthes, “has tried … to show that it was possible to contaminate all parts of written discourse by spoken speech.” As a result, “[l]iterature is openly reduced to the problematics of language; and indeed, that is all it can now be.”56 However, Sorokin’s overarching project differs from the one that Barthes had advocated. For Barthes, the arrival of zero degree writing was a milestone that brought literature closer to becoming the utopia of language.57 Sorokin, however, pushes the discourse he takes on to its limits when “the heavenly clarity of collective speech suddenly, without any preparation, turns into monstrous action that completely does not follow from the preceding narration. Speech becomes action-in-speech,” and the reader is confronted by “the unveiling of the underlining of collective speech.”58

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This gesture is the signature device of another of Sorokin’s early literary projects, the collection of short stories entitled Pervyi subbotnik (The first subbotnik, written 1980–84).59 In this work, representatives of the Soviet collectivity, described in run-of-the-mill socialist-realist style, are shown to be capable of numerous and shocking transgressions behind the façade of propriety. It seems appropriate to suggest here a comparison with Marquis de Sade’s project of unveiling, through his openly transgressive writings couched in the language of his era, the underlining of the upheavals of the French Revolution. As Pierre Klossowski notes in his Sade My Neighbor, “while recognizing in Sade his role of executor, we must also attribute to him the function of denouncing the dark forces camouflaged as social values by the defense mechanisms of the collectivity. Thus camouflaged, these dark forces can dance their infernal round in the void. Sade was not afraid to get involved with these forces, but he enters into the dance only in order to tear off the masks that the Revolution had put on them to make them acceptable and to allow the ‘children of the fatherland’ to embody these dark forces with innocence.”60 In Sorokin’s “signature” mode, transgression is channelled through the familiar dialectic of disgust and desire associated with the “lower bodily stratum”: excrement and explicit sex, almost cartoonish excessive violence, and “foul language.”61 It is not as elaborately orchestrated as in Sade’s writings (nor does he offer, as Sade did, a philosophical defence of these transgressions). Rather, similarly to Rabelais, Sorokin methodically explodes one by one the wide variety of discursive forms of the ruling (Soviet) metanarrative in a seemingly carnivalesque abandon. As Mikhail Bakhtin has noted, in Rabelais’s writing a parodic attitude toward almost all forms of ideological discourse – philosophical, moral, scholarly, rhetorical, poetic and in particular the pathos-charged forms of discourse (in Rabelais, pathos almost always is equivalent to lie) – was intensified to the point where it became a parody of the very act of conceptualizing anything in language … Rabelais taunts the deceptive human word by a parodic destruction of syntactic structures, thereby reducing to absurdity some of the logical and expressively accented aspects of words (for example, predication, explanation, and so forth). Turning away from language (by means of language, of course), discrediting any direct or unmediated intentionality and expressive excess (any “weighty” seriousness) that might adhere in ideological discourse, presuming that all language is conventional and false, maliciously inadequate to reality – all this achieves in Rabelais almost the maximum purity possible in prose.62

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However, as Boris Groys has pointed out, Sorokin’s use of these textual devices bears one crucial difference from the Bakhtinian carnivalesque: the reader would be hard pressed to find the liberatory impulse of reversal in this gesture.63 Sorokin seems to be reacting instead to the obsession with controlling and regulating the “dirty other” that emerged in the Victorian era, and he can be seen as echoing the desire of the Baudelairian flâneur to enter transgressively the contaminating crowd, especially the Freudian studies of anality64 – the latter, in particular, is confirmed by his half tonguein-cheek “self-analysis” included in the story “Dorozhnoe proisshestvie” (A road accident).65 This “signature” mode of Sorokin’s writing is best exemplified in his short stories that masterfully reproduce standard subgenres of official Soviet writing. Thus “Sorevnovanie” (Competition),66 for instance, is an account of the “socialist competition” between lumberjacks that drives one of them to slice up his partner with a chainsaw, which in turn leads to the breakdown of the text into a flow of delirium. “Sergei Andreevich”67 is the supposedly edifying story of a schoolteacher introducing teenagers to grown-up life, culminating in one of the students greedily consuming his beloved teacher’s feces. The other stories constitute variations on the same paradigm, presenting alternative combinations of (1) simulations of an official style – among the most striking is the classic “village prose” lament about the decay of moral values brought about by urbanization in “Otkrytie sezona” (The opening of the hunting season),68 which, as the reader learns by the end of the story, is voiced by a couple of cannibals hunting down unsuspecting tourists – (2) physical transgression, described in a detached and matter-of-fact manner,69 and (3) the eventual breakdown into delirium. Because of this uniform structure, the shock produced by the first encounter with such texts is thus soon followed by the expectation of the repetition of the familiar experience. Sorokin’s novel Roman (written 1985–89) constitutes an extended exercise of a similar kind; however, here the simulated discourse is that of the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel (Sorokin himself has described it as “quasi-Turgenevian”):70 320 pages of slow-paced and elaborate narrative centring on a love story set against the background of an idyllic Russian country estate are followed by 77 pages of a catalogue-like account of death and destruction: on his wedding night, Roman, the protagonist, kills the entire population of the village with an axe. As Mikhail Epstein notes, this novel operates as a metatext; it reads “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

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is described this way, a country estate that way, and this is a way to describe the face of a young lady in love … [Sorokin] separates signifiers from the signified and demonstrates the transparency and illusory quality of the latter.”71 The novel, however, acquires a particularly disturbing dimension since it sets out to demonstrate that the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel, in its “posthumous” twentieth-century function as the officially sanctioned canon, merged into one single semiotic system with totalitarian art. But just like he did in Pervyi subbotnik to the middle-of-the road socialistrealist writing, Sorokin stages here a full decomposition of the genre: the last sentence of the book reads, “Roman umer.” Needless to say, these words refer not only to the protagonist (“Roman died”) but also to the genre itself (“the novel died”). Sorokin goes even further in disturbing the “holy cows” of Russian cultural iconography in his “Mesiats v Dakhau” (A month in Dachau). This text was the first in Sorokin’s œuvre composed in the mode of heterotopic writing,72 inaugurating a series of texts that weave together the legacies of the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany:73 it is set in the alternative reality of both the ussr and Nazi Germany surviving the Second World War. Here, the pretext for the breakdown into violence and the transrational is set by a pastiche of Russian classics (Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Blok’s “The Scythians,” and so forth) and Second World War poetry. The alleged quotation from Lenin, serving as the “motto” placed at the centre of the text, epitomizes the text’s agenda: …nenadoprotivit’siagnoinomubezumnomusochashchemusiakrovavo ispermoikhuiutotalitarizma,anadoumet’otdavat’siaemusnaslazhden iemipol’zoidliaobshchegodela. …oneshouldn’tresistthepurulentinsanephallusoftotalitarianismo ozingbloodysperm,butoneshouldknowhowtosubmittoitwithpleasur eandforthebenefitofthecommoncause.74

The fulfilment of this call by the “leader and teacher” to submit to the phallus of totalitarianism is powerfully rendered in one of Sorokin’s most accessible texts, the novel Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s thirtieth love, written 1984). This novel’s underlying principle is a reversal of that of much of his other writing: here, the narrative begins at its most anti-Soviet (the protagonist is a dissident lesbian); then the role of unspeakable transgression is played by Marina’s enthusiastic embrace of the Soviet way of

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life and her effective dissolution in the factory collective;75 the role of final delirium is played by a montage of official news reports that appears to be a transcription of the evening television news program Vremia. I shall discuss this novel at greater length in chapter 5, focusing in particular on its treatment of lesbianism; it should be noted here, however, that this text, containing probably the smallest amount of taboo imagery and vocabulary in Sorokin’s œuvre, has been extraordinarily effective in pulling the ground of stable assumptions out from under the readers’ feet. Norma, the book that Sorokin wrote in the bleakest years of the “stagnation era” (1979–84), showcases his excellence as a stylist and his daring reappropriation and revision of diverse groups of Soviet literary texts. This book consists of eight distinct parts that represent different modes of Sorokin’s writing and come together as a powerful attempt at “exorcising” the repressive totalitarian economy of language and thought. The first part is a panoramic portrayal of Soviet society through thirty vignettes, some cheerful, others grim, composed in the prose style favoured by the writers of the “thaw” generation of the 1960s. What unites these short pieces is the depiction of one particular aspect in the daily life of a Soviet citizen: the mandatory consumption of a portion of a mysterious substance supplied by the state that the characters refer to as norma; by the fourth story, the reader is given a few obvious clues that identify it as mere human excrement. Thus the text presents the life of the homo Sovieticus as shit, or at least as the eating of it. This act – a macabre travesty of the Eucharist, the ritual ingestion of the body of God that is meant to unite the community of Christians – serves as the common denominator that brings together the young and the old, a party apparatchik and a dissident, a hospital nurse and a thug, a war hero and an abusive alcoholic; Sorokin’s brilliant gesture here is to literalize what for many would be an apt description of daily Soviet life. Similarly to his cycles of short stories, the opening part of Norma strives to generate shock that then dissolves into the recognition of the familiar before leading to the overwhelming sensation of nausea (the various ways of eating shit are described in meticulous and realistic detail). This section of the book is followed by an account of a man’s life through a succession of phrases that couple the adjective normal’nyi (normal) with a series of nouns, predictably beginning with rody (birth) and ending with smert’ (death). The life in particular is unremarkable in and of itself (and would indeed appear “normal”); however, the association of the word norma with shit spills over from the preceding section to colour this part of the text as well and further instil the feeling of profound disgust with the subject matter portrayed. Later on,

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the sixth part of the book continues this mode in a string of slogans in which the word norma, once again, serves as the ultimate equalizer. The third part of Norma matches the transgressiveness of the earlier ones. Here, the reader is offered two alternative versions of a short story. The first is a simulation of the genre of chauvinist nostalgia for Great Russia, favoured by the village writers and others in the nationalist cultural camp, that reads as a substandard copy of the nostalgic image of Russia in postrevolution émigré writing (particularly of such classic instances as occur in Bunin’s The Life of Arseniev and the Russian novels of Nabokov). Its blatant preoccupation with ideological mythmaking is reproduced in all faithfulness but with hues of subtle sarcasm. However, it pales next to the second version, where the first becomes a framing narrative for a macabre text in the genre most reminiscent of the theatre of cruelty. Dated 1947, it describes a visit to a collective farm by the district party and state security bosses, prompted by reports of the deaths of livestock. They order the farm’s chairman to take them on a tour of the farm, during which they methodically set fire to one building after another, subjecting the farm’s chairman to all kinds of verbal and physical abuse in the process. But even these pages of gruesome absurdity do not prepare for the shock produced by the account of the cattle farm itself, for it turns out that the dead livestock in question is human; the narrative presents a gallery of corpses of the “enemies of the people” who had been sentenced to hard labour. Once again, Sorokin masterfully uses literalization of a metaphor – labour-camp prisoners who lived in conditions of inhuman cruelty are here situated in conditions that are literally not human – to render by means of text the nightmare of totalitarianism. The fourth part of Norma serves as a lighter interlude, constructed as a cycle of twelve poems representing the months of the year. These are simulations of writing styles of Soviet-era Russian poetry, some of them neutral (e.g., March), others parodic (January, April, October) or transgressively filled with swearwords (June, September); one of them (August), however, ties in with the previous part, for it almost exactly reproduces the Acmeist poem written by one of the dead “enemies” discovered at the collective farm. Further into the book, the seventh part also offers an amusing rewriting of several canonical songs and poems of the Stalin era – Evgeny Dolmatovsky’s “Sluchainyi val’s” (An accidental waltz), Yaroslav Smeliakov’s “Khoroshaia devochka Lida” (The good girl Lida), and so forth – by contextualizing them in the circumstances of the daily life of those years: the heroine of “Sluchainyi val’s,” for instance, becomes a janitor cleaning a five-metre-tall portrait of the “great leader.” But the fifth

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part offers a return to Sorokin’s “signature” mode, best known through his short stories, and is picked as the clearest example of such by Groys in his reading of Sorokin’s work. “The passage,” he writes, consists of a collection of letters written by an old pensioner who lives in a dacha belonging to some privileged city dwellers. It begins, like many of Sorokin’s works, with an idyllic village scene, a description of which, quite in the spirit of Russian neonationalists, is combined with moral indignation with the rich urban good-fornothings whose garden the old man is forced to tend. This indignation gradually becomes so intense that it can no longer be expressed in ordinary words, and the old man’s anger pours forth in a kind of transrational (zaumnyi) language. His letters begin to resemble the transrational texts of the Russian avant-garde, so that Khlebnikov’s poetic inspiration suddenly becomes the equivalent of a kind of verbal foam on the lips of a narrow-minded philistine driven by life into a fit of hysterical frenzy.76

Groys’s comparison of the delirium part of the text, culminating with a four-page scream rendered by lines of mere “aaaaaaaaa,” with the Futurists’ experiments with transrational language is somewhat forced; its motivation is transparent enough in the light of the overall thesis of Groys’s study, namely that the art of the Russian avant-garde and the totalitarian art of socialist realism that supplanted it are not contrasting opposites but expressions of one and the same cultural logic. Sorokin’s nonlexical writing – whether nonwords, as in this and in the eighth part of Norma (structured as an account of the editorial-board meeting of a journal, in which the participants exchange lengthy statements consisting precisely of such gibberish),77 or actually existing words combined in a paradoxical way78 – is a flow of letters and words in a self-conscious signification of nonsense, in contrast to the alleged ulterior meaning of trans-sense poetry. As part and parcel of the overall project of Sorokin’s writing, it disrupts the ties of signification and instead mass-produces signs divorced from referentiality. Thus Sorokin, in a classical sots-artian gesture, targets proliferating ideological signifiers of Soviet discourse that progressively lose their referential ties and, by “outdoing” this discourse in his own texts, strips it of its layers of self-mythologization, thereby precipitating its collapse. It is perhaps symbolic that in the year of the Soviet Union’s collapse, 1991, Sorokin produced a novel that offers a stunning tour-de-force synthesis of several major paradigms of Soviet fiction as well as a thorough engagement with questions of corporeality and desire, Serdtsa chetyrekh (Four stout hearts). This text, to an extent even greater than in Sorokin’s other writings, offers

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a plethora of scenes of cold-blooded violence, murder, and sexual abuse (pedophilia, rape, etc.). Yet their dispassionate presentation is grounded in the overall narrative logic: the novel (as noted, for example, by Aleksandr Genis) is first and foremost a subversion of one of the paradigmatic genres of socialist realism, the production novel – a subversion that is achieved by the deconstruction of the opposition between man and machine. “In Sorokin’s universe,” argues Genis, “there is no difference between animate and inanimate matter. The plot of [Serdtsa chetyrekh] features intensive production processes that could be either human or mechanical. The text can therefore be interpreted as sadistic if read as populated by living beings, or comical if the characters are interpreted as inanimate. Sorokin’s characters are thus “non-machines” and “non-people.”79 The novel’s four protagonists – an old man, Shtaube; a middle-aged man, Rebrov; a woman, Ol’ga; and a teenage boy, Serezha – constitute a surrogate family80 that bonds through their mysterious shared cause and through acts of violence toward one another and toward their actual relatives (such as the killing of Serezha’s parents and Rebrov’s mother). Sorokin masterfully interweaves episodes in which the four act as characters in a socialist-realist adventure novel (in either its early Stalinist or later detective incarnation)81 and at times a regular thriller with shootouts, high-speed chases, and so forth, with those of a classic production novel, making the characters, as in his earlier texts, perform bizarre “technological” rituals and spout pseudo-industrial gibberish, here often reduced simply to combinations of numbers. However, the very opacity of the “production” dialogue keeps the reader in suspense until the very end as to the precise purpose of the four protagonists’ quest.82 In this context, questions of corporeality and desire come to the forefront. The major rites of passage that the protagonists undergo during their quest undeniably signal a psychoanalytic subtext: after the murder of Serezha’s parents, his mother’s lips are cut off and preserved in a jar, and the head of his father’s penis, likewise chopped off, is continuously sucked and chewed on, in turn, by all four; Rebrov’s mother’s body is liquified (and is then referred to as “liquid mother”) and carried by the four in a suitcase. At the end of the novel, the bodies of the four are compressed by heavy machinery into frozen cubes, marked as dice, and thrown onto a surface covered by the now frozen “liquid mother.” Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover offers a Lacanian reading of this quest. Sorokin, she argues, “thematizes the body as the surface of inscription. As such, the body represented in his prose has a dual function: it is, on the one hand, a metonymy of the subject and hence (paradoxically) a kind

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of disincarnate symbolic self and, on the other, a fetishized and eroticized ‘partial object’ of the unconscious, implicated in the ‘authentic experience’ of desire and jouissance … Sorokin’s poetics is a poetics of the body, in which body parts function as corporeal or incorporated representations of signs caught up in the drama of desire and signification.”83 The four protagonists, for Vladiv-Glover, are “a model of metonymy (meaning as negativity or non-corresponsive contiguity), which is coeval with the structure of desire as lack or difference.”84 The end of the four’s journey, she argues, is an actualized metaphor, a literal transformation of them into objets petits a – that is, objects of desire for the other. By this literalizing gesture, Sorokin, according to Vladiv-Glover, once again stages meaning “as pure nothingness, erasing sense through the non-sense of parodic play, redoubling the desire of the other as a comic negativity – namely, as the ‘desire of desire.’”85 While a reading of Serdtsa chetyrekh grounded in Lacanian semiotic theory of desire offers a provocative insight into the interrelationship of Sorokin’s practices of subversion of the Soviet semiotic order and his increasing interest in the corporeal,86 it largely bypasses the implication of the fusion of this problematic with that of the machine and the topos of production. What I believe distinguishes Serdtsa chetyrekh is a thorough exploration of these implications, an exploration that invites not so much the classic Freudian or even the structuralist Lacanian framework of analysis but the framework presented in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari open their study by introducing the concept of a “desiring-machine.” Fascinated by the features of schizophrenic subjectivity, they proclaim that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.” An example of this kind is Lenz in the eponymous novella by Georg Büchner. Lenz, argue Deleuze and Guattari, has projected himself back to a time before the man-machine dichotomy, before all the coordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever … What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production.87

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Deleuze and Guattari attempt to subvert the difference between nature and industry and nature and man: “the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man,” they write, “become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as the production of man and by man.”88 The key concept, then, of the materialist psychiatry that Deleuze and Guattari introduce is that of “desiring-production” in the context of a “schizophrenia [that] is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as ‘the essential reality of man and nature.’”89 The vision outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus is strikingly similar to that of Sorokin in Serdtsa chetyrekh. As in the novel, Deleuze and Guattari present the human bodies and their surroundings as part of a network of machines, of desiring-machines that always couple: a flowproducing machine connected to the one that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (an example they offer is “the breast–the mouth”). Desire, they argue, “constantly couples contiguous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows … Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, or urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects.”90 The realm of Sorokin’s text is similarly governed by the logic of desire structured by flows and interruptions. The four heroes are constantly on the move; their quest is an experience of flowing movement continuously interrupted by obstacles or rituals. Their interaction with other characters and with each other is overwhelmingly structured as a series of periodically solidified flows (flows of all possible bodily fluids, but also of hot metal, food, fuel, even machine-gun fire, and so forth). However, in both Anti-Oedipus and Serdtsa chetyrekh, the network of flow-based desiring-machines encounters an interruption. Deleuze and Guattari name this interruption “the body without organs.” The ending of Sorokin’s text (and of the four’s quest) is brought about by precisely such an interruption. Deleuze and Guattari envision a moment when “the machines [would] run so badly, their component pieces fall apart to such a point that they will return to nothingness.” For that, however, what would be required is a pure fluid in a free state, flowing without interruption streaming over a surface of a full body. Desiring-machines make us an organism;

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but at the very heart of this production … the body suffers from … not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all … The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable … The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life … Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down … The body without organs … is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product.91

The finale of Serdtsa chetyrekh constitutes precisely the moment of encounter of desiring-machines (the four “hearts”) and the body without organs (represented in the text as the frozen “liquid mother” – an image that Vladiv-Glover traces to Kantian primal matter).92 Production here is brought to an exhaustive encounter: “The full body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction; but yet another characteristic of the connective or productive synthesis is the fact that it couples production with antiproduction.”93 In Serdtsa chetyrekh Sorokin, as it were, stages a bloodletting of the discourse of production (Soviet and otherwise) as well as of the discourse of desire itself. A text composed in the last days of the Soviet Empire’s existence thus instantiates a thorough deconstruction of the Soviet “empire of signs.”94 Serdtsa chetyrekh did not come to serve as the final full stop in Sorokin’s literary career. It did, however, mark a moment of crisis since in the following years Sorokin the producer of texts appeared to be engaged in a pained search for a new discursive paradigm, culminating in the publication in 1999 of his first major new work of fiction since Serdtsa chetyrekh, the novel Goluboe salo (Blue lard). In this work, Sorokin appears in great literary form, constructing a captivating and complicated plot and offering the reader a dazzling exhibit of his favourite devices, such as “cloned” texts of Russian classics of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, along with colourful scenes of sexual transgression, adventure, and pulpfiction violence. However, the ideology that governs the text is now different; the repetition of transgression seems to be less automatic this time and closer to the more sincerely Rabelaisian carnivalesque. This book heralded the arrival of a new, “reinvented” Sorokin. This reinvention, on the one hand, finally granted the writer a breakthrough into commercial success; on the other, it generated a great amount of trouble for him (in 2002, three years after the initial publication of Goluboe salo, a criminal

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court case was initiated against the novel’s author and publisher on charges of obscenity – the first such instance in post-Soviet Russia). Overall, however, this text, together with Sorokin’s later books, Pir, Led, Put’ Bro, and 4, belongs to a different mode of post-Soviet textuality, the one that I propose to term “heterotopic writing,” which is the focus of the next chapter of the present study. The literary version of sots-art, as represented by the works of the four writers whom I have discussed here, similarly to the type that emerged in visual arts, provided a brilliant contribution to the breakdown of the dominant Soviet totalitarian semiotic system. Through an investigative mapping of the absurd and arbitrary premises that lie at its foundations by means of creating works that surpass in their perfection the classic specimen of the genre, these authors opened up a way to productively use the totalitarian cultural heritage and simultaneously break its stronghold on creative expression. They have deprived totalitarian art of its self-assumed aura of uniqueness and demonstrated its structural homology to numerous other artistic systems. They have taken up the task of appropriating the discursive modes of the Soviet metanarrative, pushing them to their limits and ultimately rupturing them.95 Their accomplishment, however, is not limited to clearing the totalitarian debris and freeing the space for future artistic projects, for their insights in the rules of operation that guide artistic production have pointed them in a direction similar to that of other postmodernist cultural projects and offered one of the paths of incorporation of post-Soviet culture in that greater global organism that has been called the postmodern condition.

3 Travels through Heterotopia The Other Worlds of Post-Soviet Russian Fiction

In the multitude of Russian texts that emerged in the final years of the Soviet Empire, one of the most distinct paradigms to be discerned among the clear-cut “continents” on the cultural map was constituted by a group of works that fascinated and baffled the public. They daringly tackled the dark, suppressed, erased parts of the country’s history and mentality; however, they approached this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established facts of everyday life, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground for the stable construct of “Russia” and “the Soviet Union” – historically, culturally, and even spatially. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythology has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This chapter considers some of the representative examples of this kind of text, which I propose to call heterotopic. In defining a heterotopic text, I am drawing upon several sources. Most immediately, this notion stems from Michel Foucault’s usage of the term “heterotopia” for the purpose of designating the “other” cultural spaces of our civilization, as outlined in the preface to his The Order of Things and further developed in his lecture “Of Other Spaces.” Heterotopias, together with utopias, constitute the type of cultural sites “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” But while utopias are “sites with no real

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space” that “have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society,” heterotopias are spaces that do exist within society. They are, writes Foucault, “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”1 In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault sketches a typology of heterotopic sites within the “actually existing” space – boarding schools, prisons, mental hospitals, libraries, museums, fairs, brothels, ships; however, the concept itself is arrived at through a reading of a literary text, namely a short story by Borges.2 Heterotopia, for Foucault, arises out of the “heteroclite” – a term used to designate grammatical or geometrical anomalies. While utopias “afford consolation,” heterotopias “are disturbing,” he writes, “because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things … to ‘hold together.’”3 A related notion of heterotopics and heterotopic space is advanced as a semiotic concept by A.J. Greimas. Space, as a signifying form, can exist only as a result of projection of organizing human activity onto expanse, taken in its continuity and plenitude. Heterotopics, then, is the requirement for any knowledge and apprehension of space or of a point in it: one cannot speak of this topos without postulating the existence of other topoi. Only then, stresses Greimas, can discourse on space take place.4 It is thus the idea of plurality of spatial ontological possibilities, a foregrounding of this plurality, the crucial emphasis on otherness, that the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia shares with the heterotopics of semiotics. The notion of heterotopia is further developed by Gianni Vattimo, who, in his The Transparent Society, writes of “a transition from utopia to heterotopia” as “the most radical transformation in the relation between art and everyday life to have occurred since the sixties.”5 In contrast to the unilinear, rigid organization of a utopia, the heterotopia with its underlying principle of plurality, for Vattimo, dominates the aesthetic experience today.6 Thus heterotopia becomes in effect an alternative designation for postmodern culture as such.7 In literary scholarship, the notion of heterotopia was first explored by Brian McHale.8 In his study Postmodernist Fiction, he conceives of it as a “problematic world … designed … for the purpose of exploring ontological propositions.”9 However, McHale restricts his use of the term to the

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description of allegorical “other worlds” depicted in works of fiction, such as “the Zone” in the novels of William Burroughs, the worlds of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and of Julio Cortázar’s 62: A Model Kit, and the Empire of the Great Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – textual realms where “a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impossible space.”10 I believe that the term can be used in the more general sense of textual organization proper – that is, “heterotopia” not as what the text describes but as what it is; “heterotopia” names a condition when multiple textual regimes come into contact to create a new symbiotic entity, a chronotope of coexistence that is simultaneously asserted and ironically subverted.11 This understanding of heterotopia underlies my use of this term as a designation for a broad paradigm of postmodern writing. In this paradigm, of course, not only the spatial, but also the temporal, axis is subverted. As Ursula Heise notes in her study of temporality in postmodern fiction, [p]ostmodernist novels … project into the narrative present and past an experience of time which is normally only available for the future: time dividing and subdividing, bifurcating and branching off continuously into multiple possibilities and alternatives. It forms part of the inherent asymmetry of time that in everyday experience we envision what is to come as open and indeterminate with regard to a multiplicity of possibilities, whereas the past and present are continuously narrowed down to one temporal strand amongst these possibilities. In the universe of postmodern novels, however, we cannot be sure even retrospectively which one of several possible developments turned from possibility to reality, let alone do we know which one is being realized in the narrative present. Through this narrative strategy, the reader is made to live in a constant retrojection of the time experience of the future; as a consequence, time in these texts appears labyrinthine in all its dimensions.12

A more accurate term, then, to designate this paradigm of writing, would be “heterochronotopia”; however, I would argue that “heterotopia,” understood as a method of textual organization, already contains the semantics of heterogeneity in reference not merely to space but to the entire spatiotemporal continuum of fiction as “exploration of ontological possibilities.”13 It can be seen as a designation for a paradigm of writing that is less restrictive than, if similar to, Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction.” As the reader will remember from the opening chapter of this study, Hutcheon’s model of postmodernist prose is shaped by foregrounding the latter’s self-awareness that both history and fiction are human constructs; this theoretical underpinning serves as the starting point for these texts’

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rethinking and reworking of the past. Their project is not to offer ways of “mending” history but to bring about an awareness that all our attempts at “repairing” it are human constructs, which is what constitutes their value as well as their limitation. Repairs are comforting – but they are illusory. Postmodernist interrogations of traditional teleologies live within this contradiction. Theirs is an attempt not to erase or ridicule the past but to produce an awareness that every representation has undeniable ideological implications.14 “Heterotopia” seems to be a more felicitous designation for the texts in question since the centrality of “other” in its semantics points to a particular strategy for the interrogation of cultural constructs that they perform – by focusing on the experiences of the marginal, the minor, the underrepresented – which allows us to consider them an instance of postmodernism of resistance15 and which may serve as an insight into the political edge of these cultural projects. The textual strategy of heterotopia also suggests bringing into the framework of analysis another theoretical concept: Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” (littérature mineure), understood as an umbrella concept for “minor practices of major language from within,” writings from a marginal subject position. The practitioner of littérature mineure, they write, is the one who opts “to make use of polylingualism of one’s own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape.”16 The concept of minor literature is developed by Deleuze not as a temporal one (as is postmodernism), but the names of the authors whose work he brings up in conjunction with it – from Kafka to Beckett to Godard17 – suggest situating this concept within the discourse on modernism/postmodernism. It is indicative that Hutcheon, in effect, states as much, asserting that postmodernism’s interrogation of dominant cultural constructs is rendered particularly effective by “making the different, the off-center, into the vehicle for aesthetic and even political consciousness raising.”18 Thus calling a text “heterotopic” would also imply that it is preoccupied with exploration of those topoi – cultural, social, linguistic – that lie on the margins of the traditionally privileged literary discourses. The works of Mikhail Kuraev, the first writer to be discussed in this chapter, constitute a provocative case of such exploration. Kuraev’s biography is somewhat unusual for an author who broke into print in the years of perestroika. Born in 1939, he published his first novel, Kapitan Dikshtein

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(Captain Dikshtein), in 1987, and was immediately recognized as a major new voice in Russian literature. After a lifelong (and frustrating) experience as a scriptwriter at the Lenfilm studios in Leningrad, Kuraev’s literary career suddenly took off. What earned Kuraev’s work due recognition was the perspective that it brought to its chief thematic concern – exploration of the country’s “unpredictable past” – a perspective radically different from that found in most of the glasnost bestsellers. At the time of Kapitan Dikshtein’s publication, the Soviet Union was going through a boom of rediscovering history, and its readers were thrilled by works like Anatoly Rybakov’s Deti Arbata (Children of the Arbat), published earlier that year – a text utterly unremarkable from the artistic point of view but one that deals with the previously forbidden topic of Stalinist terror in the 1930s. The mode that dominates the fiction of Rybakov, Solzhenitsyn, and many other writers who deal with Soviet history and whose work was published during the years of perestroika (mostly written “for the drawer” in the previous years) is the uncovering of the Real, True History of the nation, previously hidden and distorted by censorship and official propaganda. Kuraev’s works also engage the “blank spots” or “forbidden chapters” of Soviet history – his novella “Nochnoi dozor” (Night patrol, 1988), for instance, deals with the Stalinist terror and Kapitan Dikshtein with the Kronstadt sailors’ anti-Bolshevik uprising of 1921 – however, they have been recognized as an example of “how artistic complexity can vouchsafe a more nuanced treatment of a subject that seems doomed to simplification in the hands of overt polemicists.”19 Kuraev’s texts problematize the notion of History as such; the premise that underlies his writing is that the master narrative of history has disintegrated. As Byron Lindsey remarks, “Kuraev stands history on its head and then presents it from the perspective of ordinary men with their small passions, large fears, and remarkable gifts for survival. The result is a kind of anti-history with few certainties and reliable landmarks.”20 Writing about the appearance of Kapitan Dikshtein in retrospect, Helena Goscilo commented: Kuraev swam against the tireless tide, inasmuch as his atypical Kapitan Dikshtein … denarrativized “history as master plot” into random components, not only alinear but also ultimately unknowable (with both fabula and siuzhet eluding certitude). Replacing causality with fortuitous sequentiality, blurring lines between fact and fiction, Kuraev interrogated the primacy of “big events” and the unitary concept of history that shaped the treatment of historical topics in scholarship, journalism, and literature of the period, [in contrast to] glasnost “fiction” and drama … intent

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on recuperating an officially withheld past [which] not only sustained the fictional pretense poorly but also reduced history to the transparency of fully accessible facts inertly awaiting incorporation into a comprehensive Truth.21

Many critics have noted that Kuraev’s works are stylistically indebted to the national literary tradition. His “whimsical, ornamental style, with intricate sentences and frequent asides to the reader,”22 evoked numerous comparisons to the Gogolian tradition in Russian prose, as did his focus on “the little man” as the faceless victim of history. Traces of other canonical St Petersburg narratives – notably, those of Dostoevsky and Andrei Bely – are visible as well.23 His writing as such, while evoking the “charm” of classics from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is not blatantly subversive; however, the structuring of Kuraev’s texts is rather complex, and there are lines of subversion present, particularly when Gogolian irony is applied to the modern Soviet characters of his works. One of the most obvious instances of this kind can be found in the opening pages of Kapitan Dikshtein, where the hero’s slow waking up and the interior of his apartment are described in a tone that clearly echoes the ironic descriptive introductions of the landowners visited by Chichikov in Dead Souls.24 Kuraev’s treatment of narrative space and persistent attention to displacement – to the violability of borders of safe bounded spaces and to crises of spatial equilibrium – likewise point to an indebtedness to Gogol’,25 yet these traits of Gogolian prose likewise undergo a radical intensification. In the “framing” part of Kapitan Dikshtein, set in the 1960s, the last day in the life of the protagonist is narrated in slow, minute detail: in hyperrealistic closeup, the novel describes the interior of his apartment and follows Dikshtein through waking up, getting dressed, going to the store to exchange empty glass bottles for the deposit, buying some beer, visiting the courthouse and a pub, and dying in the street. The bulk of the narrative is presented in its numerous authorial intrusions, digressions, and historical excursuses.26 The novel is subtitled fantasticheskoe povestvovanie (a fantastic narrative), which could perhaps strike one as an odd choice for a historical novel; however, it perfectly fits the logic of the text. Kuraev’s novel does not contain descriptions of anything mythical or supernatural, but the course of Russia’s history itself, the twists it puts into individual human destinies, are indeed “fantastic.” “Where are you to look for fantastic heroes and fantastic events,” notes the narrator, “if not in the black holes of history, which, one must assume, swallowed more than one careless, curious man who dared to look over the edge!”27 History as a black hole that can mercilessly swallow people and events, rather than a utopian

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repository of Truth, and the heterotopic narrative balancing on the verge of this abyss and potentially capable of rescuing those who are slipping by textual means – these two notions become the axes that determine the problematic of Kuraev’s writing. One of the novel’s two extended historical excursuses narrates the history of the town of Gatchina, where Dikshtein lives in the 1960s. This town had innumerable powerful owners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – from Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Orlov to her son, the future Emperor Pavel (whose father was murdered by Orlov), and Pavel’s son, Emperor Nicholas I; it was even offered by Catherine as a gift to JeanJacques Rousseau, who, however, declined to become a Russian serf owner. Pavel, denied his rights to the throne by his mother, tried to make his “own” Gatchina look like a model German town, and Nicholas later took over Pavel’s palace-building projects. The town, however, never developed the luster of other imperial residences and, in the twentieth century, went into profound decline, exacerbated by the Nazi devastation; not included on major tourist routes, it did not receive funds to restore its historic landmarks. It also changed its name several times, first to Trotsk (the only town in Russia to be renamed after Trotsky), then to Krasnogvardeisk, after the Red Guards, then back to its original name. An obscure town in decline, with many names and a convoluted history, described by the author at one point as a “wonderful stage set for a senseless performance played out no one knows for whom and why,”28 Gatchina is in many ways comparable to its resident, the novel’s protagonist. A former sailor, he participated in the 1921 sailor uprising in the city of Kronstadt on the Island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland, the principal Russian navy base in the Baltic Sea since the eighteenth century, which, Kuraev tells us, also deserves to be “recognized as a propitious place for the staging of a fantastic story.”29 After the uprising’s defeat, he assumed the name of one of the executed navy officers who took part in it, of Baltic German background.30 The uprising in Kronstadt, drowned in blood, was viewed as a great threat by the Bolshevik government but was subsequently completely erased from official Soviet history.31 Kuraev narrates the history of the uprising and its repercussions throughout Russia not as a singular authoritative version but as seen through the multiple and frequently conflicting viewpoints of its participants and contemporaries, through scraps of documents and hearsay. The lives of the two Dikshteins serve as examples of ordinary human beings thrown into the whirlwind of history. The blindingly bright episode of Kronstadt made the rest of their lives unreal, illusory. Dikshtein the second lived through the Stalinist purges

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and the Gulag, the fighting at the front in the Secvond World War, and the pow experience; however, all these are merely mentioned in a cursory fashion. It is as if he glided through a fog for the rest of his life, being “a man who in fact, as it were, didn’t exist” (“chelovek, kotorogo fakticheski kak by ne bylo”).32 As the narrator emphatically notes, Dikshtein had never been able to become, in Stalin’s infamous metaphor, a human “cog,” smoothly functioning in the machine of the totalitarian state.33 Rather, his life can be described by the famous epitaph on the grave of eighteenthcentury Ukrainian philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda: “The world tried to catch me, but failed.” In this respect, Dikshtein drastically differs from the protagonist of Kuraev’s novella “Nochnoi dozor” (Night patrol). Comrade Polubolotov is a retired nkvd-kgb operative and enforcer, presently working as a night guard at a warehouse. In Deming Brown’s succinct characterization, “proud of what he considers to have been an honorable and constructive contribution to society, absorbed in the details and procedures of his work, Polubolotov enthusiastically shares his experiences – surveillance, interrogations, burials – like any other conscientious technician … Morally obtuse and limited in intelligence … he has simply been a dutiful, specialized workman in a system that, to the reader, is manifestly insane.”34 “Nochnoi dozor” bears the subtitle “Noktiurn na dva golosa” (A nocturne for two voices). This dialogue between the two narrative voices gives the novella its disturbing beauty. Polubolotov’s reminiscences are intercut with the melancholy reflections of the omniscient narrator, which form a new, Soviet chapter of the St Petersburg narrative of Gogol’, Dostoevsky, and Bely: the beauty of the white nights and the horrors of the human condition. One particular locus, Revolution (former Trinity) Square, emerges as the symbol of the incongruousness of the noble aspirations and the dark reality of human history; its look, paradoxically juxtaposing the utopian aspirations of the constructivist House of Political Prisoners (that is, of the former political prisoners under tsarism) and a heavy monster of “high Stalinist” architecture, the two placed side by side, comes to stand for the dark paradoxes of Russian and Soviet history.35 If Polubolotov’s story is that of a cog dutifully fulfilling its (horrible) function, the novella “Kuranty b’iut: Metafizicheskoe chtenie” (The bells are ringing: Metaphysical reading, 1992) turns to the cogs’ role in the state machine that is actively breaking down. Its borderline genre – a semifictional essay on streetcars jumping off tracks and city clocks stopping –imparts the absurd and dark humour of the Soviet machine’s breaking down on its own, or rather, its active self-destruction. Kuraev’s narrative is

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concerned with the revolt of time itself against the Soviet experiment:36 the collapse of the Soviet machine instantiates the end of history, which, prior to the theorists of the postmodern, was prophesied by SaltykovShchedrin in the Russian proto-postmodernist text Istoriia odnogo goroda (History of a town, 1869). In “Kuranty b’iut” the stoppage of time is accomplished through the dutifully functioning human “cogs”: the worker Takabushkin, who, fulfilling his supervisor’s orders, cut through the cable that connected the clock at the Supreme Military Command Arch (“arka Glavnogo shtaba”) and the Pulkovo observatory, ensuring that the former shows precise time; and Miron Naumovich, the keeper of the clock at the Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral, who got caught up in the clock mechanism. Ultimately, the failure of the cog-function and the tragic absurdities of human displacement become the chief preoccupation of Kuraev’s writing, as in the novella “Druzhby nezhnoe volnen’e” (The tender agitation of friendship, 1992), in which the first-person narrator is given a symbolic last name, Malkhov, from Malchus, a person mentioned in the Bible only once for the absurd reason of having his ear cut off by St Peter.37 This paradoxical origin, matched by the narrator’s misadventures, leads to the question that concludes the text: “Looking around myself … I see how a question is growing and developing, a question that cannot be posed other than in a way of … a note to the reader: don’t you feel like a cut off ear? a minor historical misunderstanding?”38 But perhaps the most poignant depiction of an individual’s absurd displacement and misadventures is offered in Kuraev’s novella “Malen’kaia semeinaia taina” (A small family secret, 1989). This short tale of conflicting identities and people mercilessly thrown around by Russia’s twentieth century highlights the alienation and cruelty that come through in the most mundane situations. In the opening pages, Kuraev mocks the journalese cheap shots of some perestroika-era writing that exploits the situation when “a certain degree of anger against the higher-ups is almost officially sanctioned” (“pochti ofitsial’no razreshena dazhe nekotoraia ozloblennost’ protiv nachal’stva”)39 and instead, as before, offers the reader a devastating account of Soviet history through the life of several emphatically “small people”: the protagonist, Maria Adol’fovna, a Lenigrader of aristocratic Polish descent, spent most of her life an armed guard of the warehouse depot of an obscure railway station in Siberia. The narrative concludes bitterly with “Maria Adol’fovna has it good: she’s old and will die soon, but you and I still have to live.”40 Maria Adol’fovna’s is the ultimate story of a life erased and emptied out – and Kuraev brings it to the reader without falling into cheap moralizing.

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Constructed in Kuraev’s signature manner of a series of flashbacks, the narrative bears a tinge of sad irony; its dominant tone is that of exasperation with “Homo sapiens.” The stoicism of Maria Adol’fovna, who withstood all the blows that fate had dealt her (death of her first husband and children, exile at the outbreak of the Second World War and work in inhuman conditions, condescension of distant relatives whom she visited in Leningrad after the war, and finally, involuntary cruelty of the man she loved years ago and married, in her last attempt to reengage with the world, at the age of seventy) suggests that, like in the case of Dikshtein and other heroes of Kuraev’s fiction, hers is the story of affirmation through precarious survival in an almost impossible space, or rather, in a whirlwind of displacement. Yet her identity, her very humanity, remains enigmatic. The experience of Kuraev’s characters is that of individuals whose lives were torn apart by twentieth-century history. They occupy positions of utter invisibility, positions at the margin, such as Dikshtein, a man “who [officially] didn’t and couldn’t have existed” (“v liuboi instantsii skazhut, chto ne bylo takogo cheloveka i ne moglo byt’”).41 They have lived through multiple, conflicting identities. In the end, their lives are actually constituted through the narrative itself, the heterotopic narrative of mixed, labyrinthine spaces and times. The narrative serves as the topos where the repressed or suppressed fragments of the traumatized memory, both individual and collective, are unearthed and joined together in an attempt to articulate and simultaneously confront the past. Kuraev’s texts are instances of writing that functions as a means for self-definition and a search for cohesion and unity in a cruel, chaotic, and otherwise meaningless world; writing becomes the locus for an attempt to solve the modern crisis of identity.42 Another writer who develops a complex heterotopic textual mode is Evgeny Laputin (1958–2005). Relatively neglected by critics,43 he nevertheless published his work in leading venues and occupied a distinct place on the contemporary Russian literary scene.44 Laputin published his first book, a collection of novellas and short stories entitled Pamiatnik obmanshchiku (Monument to a liar), in 1990. His literary evolution to an extent parallels that of his other vocation, medicine. A brain surgeon by training, Laputin later switched to working in plastic surgery and was considered one of the leading (and most sought after) practitioners of this craft in contemporary Russia until his tragic untimely death at the hands of a knife-wielding attacker. In a similar fashion, his early literary texts can be interpreted as “incisions” into their protagonists’ minds, while later works

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are primarily preoccupied with a postmodernist play of surfaces and unreliability of appearances, with tragedy frequently lurking offstage. In Laputin’s first collection, the narrative point of view is “third person major”: the texts follow the protagonists’ perceptions of the world and of themselves through major life crises; several of them end with the main character’s death (“Tot samyi fotograf” [That very photographer], “Neudavshiisia listopad” [The failure of falling leaves]) or with the hero’s disappearance (“Nakanune bessmertiia” [The eve of immortality]). These psychological etudes, characterized by keen attention to matters of style and particularly by the descriptive metaphors, already signal the major preoccupations of Laputin’s writing: the construction of memory and the ego’s identification with itself and the world. The story “Retsepty bezumiia” (Recipes of madness), which gives the title to his second book, showcases Laputin the stylist at his best. Not unlike the modernist-era short masterpiece by Yuri Olesha, “Liompa” (1927), it is a narrative of life and death conveyed in brightly metaphoric language that focuses our attention on defamiliarized experiences of sensory perception and mesmerizes the reader already in the very first lines: However, this day didn’t bear any secret sign indicating that trouble was near; on the contrary, everything around was peppered with things habitual and tiresome, and nothing changed when the hot, dark blue evening crawled into the courtyard through the stentorian arch of the gateway – just like yesterday, the low, quivering sky was stitched by tiny seams of stars; near the scarlet brick house the Romeo from the telegraph office was embracing, with brief pauses, the lame, big-mouthed Anichka, who was hopelessly in love with him; she responded with damp and hesitant laughs, as if she knew in advance that everyone would abandon her, the guy from the telegraph office and those who would come after him, and, with someone’s help, she would give birth to a gentle balding child who would strangely resemble a napping old man. But, cavils aside, it was an ordinary month of August, fairly yellow and slightly crunchy.45

“Retsepty bezumiia” is also the most “reality-connected” of Laputin’s works: the life of the protagonist, an aging former ballerina named Vera Ivanovna, is marked by both Stalinist terror and the empire’s contemporary decay. The meticulously described insane asylum where she spends her last days is a charged space where many threads of life and memory come together in a series of tiny details: for instance, her worn hospital robe was made at the factory where she performed in a concert back in

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the early 1950s that has been meticulously preserved by her memory; her jewellery was confiscated in accordance with the hospital regulation introduced years ago when a fellow patient tried to cut his veins with a sharpened medallion, that patient being the very man who informed on Vera Ivanovna’s husband back in the 1930s, as a result of which the latter was “quickly and skillfully” shot. The overlapping of layers of time and memory, of many (mental) worlds, and the complicated wave-like temporal progression of the narrative unite this story with Laputin’s first two novels, Improvizatsii ot tret’ego litsa (Improvisations in third person), included in Retsepty bezumiia: Rasskazy i roman (Recipes of madness: Stories and a novel), and Priruchenie arlekinov (The taming of the harlequins, 1993).46 The world of Laputin’s novels is a web of convoluted and intermeshed narrative lines with a plethora of intertextual references. His text abounds in Faulknerian page-long parentheses, Cortázarian narrative hopscotch, Proustian hyperrealistic close-ups of childhood reminiscences, and Kafkaesque mental journeys:47 his novel Improvizatsii ot tret’ego litsa in particular is a veritable catalogue of modernist narrative devices that saturate the text to a degree that may very well overwhelm the reader. However, there is one particular “shadow” that emerges with greatest clarity behind Laputin’s writings, and that is Nabokov. In fact, while Nabokov’s œuvre has exercised considerable influence on a number of contemporary Russian writers, Laputin is the one among them whose narratives are the most “Nabokovian.” The nostalgia for the world that has passed by, memories, not quite real and not quite possible, the settings in an imaginary modernity that is “not quite Russia,” and the zeroing in on the displaced protagonist’s mind – all these features of Laputin’s text bring us back to the earlier master. Moreover, the novels are peppered with references, both open and hidden, to various Nabokov texts: Improvizatsii, for instance, quotes two of his poems, while Priruchenie arlekinov (the title of which alludes to Nabokov’s final novel) refers repeatedly to the chess player Luzhin and contains the following entry in its guidebook to an imaginary Paris, entries from which are interspersed with the narrative proper: The “Seven Weeping Women” fountain was constructed in 1768 in honor of the eponymous poem by the English poet Vivian Calmbrood, who described in his immortal work a certain remote French cloister. The poem’s protagonist, the softbodied Sister Joan, suffers from an acute and malignant form of split personality, and the brisk energy of the disease’s development in the end allows Joan to see simultaneously seven false doubles. They have the appearance of muses, they are

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different in the face and to the touch, they dance a round dance with Joan in the centre and affectionately introduce themselves: Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, Klio, Urania, Terpsychore. Joan is accused of heresy and under her naked tender heels a fierce bonfire is lit, out of which before the astonished inquisitors’ eyes step out (lined up by height) seven unharmed ruddy-faced muses. They weep and breathe in the bitter air mixed with the ashes of the now disappeared Joan. The fountain was built close to the bank of the Seine, and the builders designed it to feed directly from the river; however, the underwater pipes were repeatedly clogged by small river fish, and only when the fish would rot completely would the fountain again sprite cheerfully and resiliently. Once the fountain washed out a not yet spoiled chopped off female finger, shining with the blood of a false ruby (a tasteless elaborate ring got stuck on the main phalanx), and the city authorities had to yield to the demands of the sensitive public and disconnect the fountain from the Seine. For several years the fountain stood inactive, but then a smart Italian engineer (his name did not survive) designed and put into life a truly original solution that connected the “Seven Weeping Women” to the city’s water supply network. For three quarters of a century the fountain worked perfectly. The water, loudly spouting out of the mouths of the seven muses, unfailingly gathered a multitude of loiterers; once, in the late fifties, the writer and philosopher Pierre Delalande slapped several times the muse Erato right before their eyes, after which he tried to shoot himself in the head but struck his ear and, bleeding profusely, was taken first to the police station and then to the asylum for the temporarily insane. After one of the scheduled repairs, delegated to a team of German contractors, the fountain suddenly started spouting liquid noxious excrement, and the frightened Germans explained that apparently they had confused something in the drafts and hooked the fountain up to the city sewer (which was indeed the case). At present the fountain does not work.48

This entry combines in a nutshell the many concerns of both Nabokov’s and Laputin’s texts through recounting incidents where the tragic, the comic, and the absurd go hand in hand. The passage brings together Nabokov’s alias Vivian Calmbrood and Pierre Delalande, the “author” of the epigraph to Nabokov’s 1938 novel Invitation to a Beheading, crediting the former with the authorship of the story of an “anti-Joan of Arc” who suffers from an “acute and malignant” multiple personality disorder, and placing the latter into the parable-like account of the history of the fountain built to commemorate Calmbrood’s text. Thus a text that, according to the rules of the genre, is supposed to be a transparent description of “actually existing” reality – a guidebook entry – turns out to be the product

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of a multilayered intertextual game. And just like elsewhere in Laputin’s writing, the reader’s attention is called to seemingly minor details. Through them, the text reveals some key features of the authorial outlook: postmodern skepticism leads to the exclusion of two of the Muses: Kaliope, the muse of heroic poems, and Polyhymnia, the muse of oratory and sacred poetry. Members of the late-Soviet generation, just like those of Nabokov’s generation before them – the younger displaced émigrés after 1917 – are repelled by the pompous heroism that reeks of official celebrations of totalitarianism. But what is it that attracted Laputin to Nabokov’s text? What does it mean to produce a simulacrum of a Nabokovian novel in contemporary Russia? I believe Laputin, a member of the generation that came of age in the stifling years of the imperial decline, finds in Nabokov’s writing of displacement and exile what Fredric Jameson believed attracted Walter Benjamin to the German Baroque: “the melancholy that speaks from the pages of Benjamin’s essays,” he writes, “private depressions, professional discouragement, the dejection of the outsider, distress in the face of a political and historic nightmare – searches the past for an adequate object, for some emblem or image at which, as in religious meditation, the mind can stare itself out, in which it can find momentary, if only aesthetic, relief.”49 For Laputin, the “other space” par excellence of émigré writing becomes that emblem or image, the unique locus where this symbolic escape is possible. Laputin’s novels also offer a peculiar amalgam of the two species of Nabokovian texts, the one identified with his Russian-language novels and autobiographical writings, which manifests more affinities with modernism, and the other discernable in the later English-language novels Pale Fire, Ada, and Look at the Harlequins, which exhibit most of the qualities associated with postmodernist fiction.50 In Laputin’s writings, memories of childhood and youth that evoke the pages of Nabokov’s The Defense, The Gift, and Speak, Memory dissolve in the world where the “real” and the “imaginary” ghostly characters mingle freely, where the past and the future frequently trade places and the text constantly resists precise spatio-temporal identification. Ultimately, Laputin’s works can be described, to borrow the title of Pierre Delalande’s opus, as a “discours sur les ombres.” They can hardly be viewed as offering an instance of clear-cut political resistance. Still, much like Nabokov’s writings, they convey a strong aversion to the totalitarian mentality of singular and single-minded “grand narratives” and, by doing so, perform the task of cultural replenishment that John Barth assigns to postmodernist fiction.51 Their “momentary, if

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only aesthetic, relief” could perhaps signal the opening up of the possibility of new ways of constructing subjectivities in the semiotically overdetermined post-Soviet space. Another writer who has achieved a position of prominence on the Russian literary scene with works that present a heterotopic defamiliarized pastiche of the peculiar continuum of late-Soviet culture is Viktor Erofeyev. A prolific writer of both fiction and criticism, Erofeyev has had a rocky career. By the early 1990s, however, he indisputably became one of contemporary Russia’s leading literary figures. Born in 1947 to parents working in the Soviet diplomatic corps, he spent part of his childhood in Paris and enjoyed exposure to Western thought and culture to a far greater extent than most of his peers. A literary critic by training, he defended a dissertation on Dostoevsky and French existentialist writing in 1975 and has published a number of scholarly essays on Russian and French literature. It was, however, his participation in the underground Metropol’ almanac in 1979 as a coeditor and as a writer of fiction that put him on the literary map. Expelled from the Writers’ Union, to which he had just gained admission at the time, he became one of the prominent figures of the cultural underground. The subsequent years proved extremely productive for Erofeyev the writer; while his works remained unpublished, he frequently read them publicly to crowds of intellectual devotees, before finally breaking into print in 1988. It is perhaps this “oral existence” of his texts that made Erofeyev particularly successful in shorter narrative forms; while his novel Russkaia krasavitsa (Russian beauty), written in 1980–82 and published in 1990,52 has attracted the most critical and public attention and his more recent successes are associated with the genre of literary essay, where he seems to be following in Brodsky’s footsteps, the short stories showcase Erofeyev at his best as a remarkable stylist and provocateur. Erofeyev’s texts emerged as manifestly transgressive, creating uneasiness among many a member of the Russian intelligentsia. This transgression was channelled in two particular ways: on the one hand, through what Helena Goscilo has referred to as his “transform[ation of] the body into an occasionally revolting discourse of revolt”53; and on the other, the fusion of many spaciotemporal realities into a heterotopic mirror of Russian culture and society. It would not be an oversimplification to state that these two axes fundamentally determine the textual realm of all of Erofeyev’s published fiction; while my primary interest lies in the second aspect, it cannot be adequately considered without giving some attention

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to the first: it was by far the violence and uninhibited sexual content of Erofeyev’s texts that scandalized his Russian readers the most.54 Curiously, in this aspect Erofeyev is at his most intertextual: his take on this problematic can, to a large extent, be deduced from his interest in Dostoevsky, on the one hand, and Sade, on the other. One of Erofeyev’s first published works was a long scholarly essay on Sade, “Markiz de Sad, sadizm i XX vek” (The Marquis de Sade, sadism, and the twentieth century).55 In her reading of this essay alongside other contemporary scholarship on Sade, Goscilo discerns “Erofeev’s kinship with Sade … in his articulation of rebellion against authority through the body.”56 His is not a direct borrowing but a shared awareness of the subversive power of violating taboos – hence the incorporation of a multitude of bodily acts and vocabulary traditionally considered “inappropriate” into Erofeyev’s fiction. It is notable that the purported “liberation” of sexuality is articulated from a very heterosexist and patriarchal point of view; the Sadean autoeroticism of the heterosexual male Erofeyev (absence of reciprocity is a key characteristic of the Sadean universe) 57 precludes him from articulating other, oppressed sexualities. His is a sexual liberation of a Henry Miller rather than, say, of a Jean Genet or a William Burroughs.58 However, what enables some of Erofeyev’s texts to reach a subtler and more provocative level of subversion is his construction of the narrative as a subtle pastiche of different styles and epochs, resulting in unique chronotopes that contradict the laws of formal logic by blending the properties of numerous styles, historical periods, and national traditions. In the words of Mikhail Epstein, “for [Erofeyev] the archetypes fished out from the bottom of Russian history turn out to be nothing else but familiar schemata and a field for ironic language games, whereas the vulgar stereotypes of the Soviet everyday reality suddenly grow in depth and intertwine with the projections of other epochs in a capacious mythmaking heteroglossia (mnogoiazychie).”59 One of the best examples of this authorial technique can be found in Erofeyev’s story “Berdiaev.”60 In this text, the reader is invited to follow a complicated but fascinating play with linguistic and cultural realia; disoriented, he or she is never allowed to pinpoint the action of the story in terms of temporality. The language of the story is recognizable as a brilliant reconstruction of that of pre-revolutionary Russian literature. However, one cannot identify it with the style of any single author; it is more like the “generic style of nineteenth-century Russian literature” that Sorokin attempted to reconstruct in his novel Roman, discussed in the previous chapter. Such words as shlafrok (housecoat) or biriuk (lone wolf;

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i.e., unsociable person), references to baly (the balls), nashe prosveshchennoe obshchestvo (our enlightened society), the Marquis de Custine, ladies reading French novels, groshovye broshiury evropeiskogo kommunizma (cheap European Communism pamphlets), and so on confirm the conviction that the narrative takes us back at least eighty years from the time when the story was written (1980s). However, to our surprise we suddenly see the characters talk to each other on the phone, catch a taxi to Kuntsevo (a Sovietera residential district of Moscow); they live in modern apartment blocks, wear tight corduroy trousers, complain about snabzhenie ([erratic] supply of consumer goods). Thus the reader concludes that the story cannot refer to pre-revolutionary Russian reality; however, he or she cannot be sure that it refers to Brezhnev-era Moscow either. The references continually shift back and forth from the pre-revolutionary era to Moscow of the late 1970s and early 1980s. One could view the characters as Muscovites trying to escape the suffocation of the Brezhnev years through playing into prerevolutionary aristocratic life; but one of them turns out to have been close with Lermontov, the other has been corresponding with Korolenko, and they argue for the reform of Russian orthography to abolish the letters izhitsa, iat’, and fita, which indeed took place in 1918. Historically distant cultural phenomena meet in the postmodern realization of simultaneity of cultures. The terms that Jameson has used in commenting on another postmodern text, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, also provide an apt description of the textual machinery found in “Berdiaev”: “we are now … in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ …”61 The only realistic explanation for the story’s chronotope is that it exists only in the deranged, schizophrenic consciousness of the narrator. This conclusion is confirmed by the narrative’s construction, which starting with the fourth paragraph is organized as an address to a certain Vashe Siiatel’stvo (i.e., a count) who keeps haunting the narrator. To the reader’s surprise, the count turns out to lack material properties; he does not exist bodily: Since you have lost your bodily shell, many things have changed. Two years of importunate dialogue have not been wasted. For two years, Count, I was continuing an unending discussion with you, for two years … again and again I would sit down in front of you and the interlocutors would start a conversation … Our discussions would run in diverse ways: sometimes you would be courteous and render me signs of attention, once you even lit up a match when I took out a cigarette, and I was most grateful, but suddenly the whole thing would start “smelling of Siberia” … I was nervous, I entangled myself in lies, I was fidgeting, but the

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storm would magically disappear and again, almost in a friendly fashion, we would start discussing the global questions of life’s organization.62

This “incorporeal” Count reminds the reader of the other kind of dialogical partner to be recurrently found in literature: the devil.63 He is as ubiquitous and almost as almighty as the Prince of Darkness, following the narrator throughout his wanderings. At the climax of the story, Yulia, the heroine, mysteriously turns out to be nobody else but the same familiar figure of the Count.64 However, this sinister figure is continuously mocked and laughed at by the characters; the parodic strain in the narrative is evident. The story subverts and exposes to laughter (or carnivalizes, to use Bakhtin’s term) the Russian cultural canon, the idea of literature’s noble mission. Erofeyev desacralizes such icons for the Russian intelligentsia as the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev and the painter Pavel Filonov, giving their last names to the parodic characters of the story. “Berdiaev” allows multiple readings, but a likely one is that of a tongue-in-cheek parodic portrayal of the life of the liberally-minded dissident Russian intelligentsia during the Brezhnev era. Erofeyev’s story invites being discussed in terms of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogicity: besides being double-voiced from the point of view of formal construction, “Berdiaev” also engages in a dialogue with the heritage of the Russian cultural tradition and with contemporaneous Soviet reality. Another story by Erofeyev that offers an illuminating example of a heterotopic amalgam of chronotopes and discourses is “Popugaichik” (The parakeet).65 In this work, Erofeyev continues his practice of producing a text that blends the realia from different chronotopes into a paradoxical whole. In “Popugaichik” Erofeyev uses again a dialogical (in the narrow sense) form of narrative construction. The story is built as an official letter addressed to Spiridon Ermolaevich Spirkin, written in response to the latter’s inquiry about the fate of his son, who had been detained for “compelling a dead bird to undertake unnatural flight.” However, all the while, the person who writes the letter, who happens to be an investigator, prosecutor, and executioner combined, engages in hidden polemic with his addressee, asks numerous rhetorical questions, and tries to anticipate possible objections. The place of the story’s action is identifiable as a city in Russia, but further narrowing down the location does not seem feasible; nor is it feasible to pinpoint the story in time. Many of the realia refer to pre-Petrovian Russia (most probably the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries): for instance, the narrator mentions a neighbour of the Spirkins who is a boyars’ doctor (boiarskii lekar’) and another, the exotic Dutch merchant Van Zaam, who took on a Russian name (“gollandskii kupets Van Zaam, a po nashemu

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Timofei Ignat’evich”). Among them one suddenly sees something possible to imagine only in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia: Ermolai, the son of Spiridon Spirkin, is watched from the window by “mademoiselle Shelgunova playing a harp” (“igraiushchaia na arfe mamzel’ Shelgunova”). In the final part of the story, yet one more group of realia comes in, this time belonging to Stalin’s Soviet Union (steam locomotives, the high-rise building of Moscow University). In addition to the disorientation produced by these extralinguistic realia, the language of the story also continuously shifts its references: modern juridical terms and clichés appear side by side with Church Slavonicisms, archaic Russian vocabulary, out-ofplace colloquialisms, and lofty humanistic notions.66 The tone of the narrator/torturer shifts constantly. At one point it is dry and official, at another it is self-ingratiating and polite, then threatening, then unceremonious and familiar, then charged with ideological pathos, and at times even lyrical. For describing the horrible inhuman tortures that the addressee’s young son had endured, he chooses an easy, matter-of-fact manner and makes sure to list them all. He even tries to construct a pseudo-philosophical interpretation of the events, talking about “mankind’s great passion for torture.” The figure of the torturer in “Popugaichik” brings to mind Varlam Aravidze from Tengiz Abuladze’s film Repentance, one of the key cultural events of early perestroika. The analogy between the two works could be extended: in Abuladze’s film the reality that is created also resists pinpointing itself in time and is mythologized through the symbolic inclusion of realia from different epochs (from Georgian folklore to Jesus Christ and Satan, young pioneers,67 and Albert Einstein). Another feature that unites the two works is that both invite being read as a parable, although “Popugaichik” does so less overtly. Moreover, in the multiple layers of the story, we find both the possibility of reading it as a parable (realistic timing is of no importance for a parable) and as a parody of a parable (reflected in the narrator’s comic obsession with the notion of symbol: the word “symbol” appears almost in every other sentence). Erofeyev’s story is permeated with ironic overtones, although this irony constantly verges on becoming black. Like Abuladze’s film, the story calls the reader to reflect on Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s tragic and sometimes absurd history, but unlike Repentance, Erofeyev’s text continuously deconstructs the possibility for a definitive interpretation. In works like “Berdiaev,” “Popugaichik,” and several others,68 Erofeyev uses textual means to construct a heterotopic reflection of the troubled presentday Russia. His stories combine elements of parable and allegory with

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those of a realistic narrative, adding to them a strong dose of thematic transgression and black humour. Many similar features can be detected in the prose of another contemporary Russian author, Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962). One of the brightest members of his literary generation, he debuted in 1991 with a collection of short stories entitled Sinii fonar’ (The blue lantern),69 which was awarded the special Russian Booker Prize in the shortstory category. It was followed by the novel Omon Ra (1992), the novella “Zheltaia strela” (The yellow arrow, 1993), the novels Zhizn’ nasekomykh (The life of insects, 1993), Chapaev i Pustota (Chapaev and Pustota, or Chapaev and the void, 1996; published in English under the alternative titles The Clay Machine-Gun and Buddha’s Little Finger), and Generation P (1999; published in English under the alternative titles Babylon and Homo Zapiens). After a pause of a few years, Pelevin returned to publication with a heterogeneous prose collection with the abbreviated title DPP(nn)70 (2003), followed by the novel Sviashchenniaia kniga oborotnia (The sacred book of the changeling, 2004); a volume of early and uncollected stories and essays, Relics, came out in 2005. While chronologically most of Pelevin’s writing falls in the post-Soviet era, his thematic concerns signal the determination by the late-Soviet cultural condition as the key aspect of his work. The genre of Pelevin’s writing has been described as a “satiricophilosophical fantasy” and as “a peculiar mix of super-science fiction and harsh realism.”71 While some of his texts take up the more traditional narrative forms, others offer pioneering exercises in those previously unrepresented in Russian literature (such as cyberpunk).72 This latter interest (which led one critic to generalize that all of Pelevin’s writing reads like scripts for computer games)73 is but one of the manifestations of the writer’s preoccupation with fusion and multiplication of alternative realities. As Sally Dalton-Brown has remarked, “Pelevin’s work is the most essentially ‘postmodern’ of contemporary Russian prose. Creating ludic texts in which the ontological ramifications of the ‘creative world’ itself form the basis of his narrative play, Pelevin invites the reader to enter the ‘game’ of the text, and to discover that there is never any end to the game, never any return to ‘reality,’ and no possibility of winning.”74 The short stories that comprise Sinii fonar’ offer a series of witty subversions of late-Soviet reality through daring fusions or travesties of narrative patterns. One of the most impressive of them is “Zatvornik i Shestipalyi” (Hermit and Six Toes),75 a picaresque narrative in which the reader follows the two protagonists in their journey through several different darkly Orwellian totalitarian worlds. Gradually, the reader is given

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more and more clues that identify the story’s characters as chickens at a giant mechanized poultry farm; the two protagonists are the lone critically thinking individuals who manage to escape slaughter, learn how to fly, and leave the dreadful universe into which they were locked. The story’s textual space fascinates through the development of the narrative from a point of view of a chicken awakening to thought; thus it shapes this text as an allegory of dissident rebellion against totalitarianism and simultaneously lowers it to the parodic level of a dingy Soviet poultry farm. The text presents not a transparently targeted allegory like Orwell’s Animal Farm, but a much more ambivalent heterotopic space similar to that of Hiroaki Yoshida’s 1990 film Twilight of the Cockroaches, which employs a similar strategy for an allegorical, yet not straightforwardly so, story of survival in the face of genocide. Other stories in the collection offer additional alternative manifestations of this textual strategy. Thus “Problema vervolka v Srednei polose” (A werewolf problem in Central Russia)76 populates the decaying Soviet collective farms with werewolves and other changelings, while the earliermentioned “Prints Gosplana” (Prince of Gosplan) seamlessly and paradoxically fuses the reality of the decaying Soviet bureaucratic apparatus with those of numerous computer games that the characters play in their worktime (most extensively “Prince of Persia”). The story’s characters, employed at Gosplan, the state planning agency, and other similar institutions, encounter game traps and hidden passages to a higher game level at office cafeterias, on subway escalators, in barber shops, and so forth; conversely, ministerial meetings are held in the middle of (computer game) tank battles. One does not need to look for a harsher indictment of the inefficiency of Soviet bureaucracy than this narrative where the realms of computer games actively compete and come to dominate the one of “real life.” Yet another story, “Mittel’shpil’” (Mid-game),77 offers a narrative of unexpected double identities achieved through sex change: the upscale hard currency female prostitutes turn out to be former male Komsomol functionaries, and the navy officers that tried to kill them in the name of noble Soviet ideals are revealed to be female-to-male transsexuals. In all of these texts, however, the political aspect does not play the leading part; rather, breakdown of the empire leads to the breakdown of stable identities, and what fascinates the author is the characters’ precarious journey through this realm of identities in flux as they search for greater understanding of one’s place in it. The main preoccupation of Pelevin’s writing emerges as the exploration of alternative individually experienced worlds through the multiple ontologies

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of solipsism.78 One of the most sustained and transparent developments of this textual mode can be found in the story “Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny” (Vera Pavlovna’s ninth dream),79 structured as an apocalyptic narrative of the entire city of Moscow drowning in a flood of sewage brought about as a result of the forces of change unleashed by perestroika. What would otherwise appear as simply a grotesque anecdote, opens up new interpretive channels through the transformation of the narrative focus: the story events are presented as experienced by the protagonist, a janitor at a public restroom. At her passage to a different world, the voices of judgment identify her as someone going through “the third stage of solipsism” and condemn her to spend the rest of her existence, as the story’s title encourages the reader to anticipate, as the heroine of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Compared to Pelevin’s other texts, “Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny” is a relatively light-hearted vignette; however, a similar ontological problematic is given much more extensive and complex treatment in Pelevin’s first novel, Omon Ra. This text, the story of a boy who wanted to become a cosmonaut and fly to the Moon, takes the reader to a bizarre and absurd world that is nevertheless shockingly close to the actual reality of the lateSoviet period. In this novel, the Soviet civilization’s propensity for making pretenses and mass-producing empty ideological signs is exaggerated ever so slightly but results in a macabre picture of a world in which it is never possible to be certain where the “real” ends and the “make-believe” begins. Most of the grand Soviet achievements in the field of science and technology are revealed to be falsifications aimed mainly at impressing the West and, to a degree, at keeping the local populace in check. The ideologues, however, maintain that the ends in this case justify the means. As Colonel Urchagin, the space centre’s chief ideological officer, tells the protagonist in a lofty speech that starkly contrasts with its macabre context, Remember, Omon, although a human being, of course, does not have such a thing as a soul, every soul is a universe … And as long as there is a single soul in which our cause lives and conquers, that cause will never die. For an entire universe will exist, and at its center will be this … Just one pure and honest soul is enough … for the red banner of triumphant socialism to be unfurled on the surface of the distant Moon. But there must be such a pure soul, if only for a moment, because it will be precisely within that soul that the banner will be unfurled.80

The Soviet system is thus affirmed as the realm of “triumphant solipsism,” so it does not really matter in the greater scheme of things that, as the

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reader suddenly realizes by the end of the novel, instead of the actual space flight, the protagonist had experienced only mind games, that the Soviet space program turns out to be a deception, and that all flights are nothing but imitations staged in secret tunnels underneath Moscow, just as the Soviet nuclear tests, the reader is told, were merely two million prisoners jumping at the same time. The boundary between the real and the imaginary is transgressed in other ways as well; in the Meres’ev Flying School, which the protagonist joins to fulfil his lifelong dream, the cadets replicate the experience of this Soviet wartime pilot – who lost his legs in an accident but overcame his disability to return to the frontline; his story was canonized in one of the key socialist-realist texts, Boris Polevoi’s Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (The story of a real man, 1946) – by getting their feet chopped off. The novel unravels before the reader a monstrous accumulation of mind games, tortures, and outright deception. When this elaborate construction collapses and the protagonist is thrown into a Moscow subway tunnel, the narrative, as it were, replicates the experience of the breakdown of deception and self-deception as it is lived by the Soviet subject – an experience that ultimately brought about the breakdown of the Soviet system. Thus the reader, in a way, relives this cathartic experience. Pelevin turns the textual condition of a heterotopia, balancing on the very edge of the familiar (Soviet) existence, into an exquisite machine of subversion of the totalitarian mindset. The novella “Zheltaia strela” (The yellow arrow) rivals Omon Ra in staging a semiallegorical account of an individual’s escape from the collective totality of deception. The structure of its plot bears strong similarities to that of the earlier mentioned “Zatvornik i Shestipalyi” (Hermit and Six Toes), although this time the text portrays actual human beings. Another partial allegory for the late/post-Soviet condition, it places its characters on a giant train named Yellow Arrow,81 on which they travel for years with little thought – let alone hope – of stopping or getting off. The grotesque and dismal realm of this train is depicted in painstakingly realistic detail, as the reader witnesses the progressive decay and disintegration of the most elementary aspects of life on it (the gradual disappearance of everything from spoons to compartment doors). Against this background is set a familiar Pelevinian story of an individual hero’s awakening to selfawareness and eventual escape from the Yellow Arrow. Pelevin once again constructs a strikingly lifelike representation of the world painfully familiar yet defamiliarized through a revision of merely one of its “axes of coordinates,” to affirm the critically thinking individual as someone possessing the capability to break out of the sealed-off macabre funhouse of late-

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Soviet reality, or perhaps even of reality tout court. Pelevin’s hyperrealistic heterotopic texts have thus offered one of the most devastating critiques of the decaying totalitarian society without resorting to the corrupt rhetoric of straightforward denunciations. The realms of his texts that balance on the borderline with the familiar “experienced world” problematize the post-Soviet condition in a thoroughly disquieting way; however, they also partake of this diseased and absurd “reality,” using it as building blocks in textual constructions that – it can be argued – are vulnerable to accusations of preaching escapism as the ultimate solution. Two questions thus arise: how many critically thinking individuals withdrawing from the experiential realm of post-Soviet existence does it take to alter the latter? And is there any structural coherence to this “minor” collectivity? Most probably, these are not the questions that most postmodern writers are ready and willing to answer; but let us give them credit nevertheless for aiding the reader in navigating that complex multidimensional entity that has been called the postmodern condition. Perhaps the most ambitious undertaking by Pelevin to construct a complex heterotopic narrative that builds upon Soviet and post-Soviet realia is his novel Chapaev i Pustota.82 The text interweaves several narrative lines: in one of them, set during the times of the civil war of 1918–19, the St Petersburg Symbolist poet Petr Pustota, to his amazement, finds himself (through an unusual chain of circumstances) the commissar of the Red Army commander Vasily Chapaev. Chapaev, famous in the former Soviet Union as the protagonist of the eponymous 1934 film (loosely based on the 1923 biographical novel by Dmitry Furmanov) and even more so as the subject of countless jokes that themselves became an outstanding example of Soviet-era folklore, is revealed in Pelevin’s novel to be as much a mystic philosopher as he is a military commander. The account of Pustota’s interactions with Chapaev, narrated by the former in the first person, alternates with chapters in which the narrator/protagonist, Petr Pustota, is an inmate of a psychiatric hospital in 1990s Russia, on the outskirts of Moscow, diagnosed with a “split false personality.” Pustota, however, believes that his existence in the mental hospital is a dream and that his adventures with Chapaev are the reality – which is corroborated by the preface to the novel, in which the reader is told that the text was written “during the early 1920s in one of the [Buddhist] monasteries of Inner Mongolia.”83 Many authors have attempted to construct literary texts on the basis of an interrogation of the difference between dream reality and “actual” reality: well-known examples include Calderon’s La Vida es sueño (Life is a dream,

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1635) and Pirandello’s Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1922). What distinguishes Pelevin’s novel is its insistence that, indeed, all of the events are but phantoms conjured in the universe of the mind (the cover of the first Russian edition informs us that the author defined his work as “the first novel in world literature to take place entirely in the void”).84 This is a text that emphatically asserts its textual essence, its noncommensurability with extratextual space and time. As Hélène Mélat has stressed, in Pelevin’s textual universe both the space and the time are closed; “the characters do not have a past, they live in an eternal narrative present, suspended, as it were, in the midst of words.”85 Yet paradoxically, Pelevin’s writing is frequently described as one of the most incisive critiques of contemporary Russian society. The key to this paradox also lies in the textual organization of Pelevin’s works. The often fantastic events that befall the characters of Chapaev i Pustota, like most of Pelevin’s texts, are presented in graphic visual detail. In Aleksandr Genis’s insightful formulation, in Pelevin’s texts “everything takes place on the ‘windowsill,’ the boundary between different worlds.” Genis goes on to compare Pelevin’s writing to the paintings of René Magritte. “Plunging the viewer into the absurd,” he writes, “Magritte balances between norm and anomaly, investigating the limit that separates one from the other. His canvases as if embody [sic] the invisible line separating phenomena: the animate from the inanimate, waking from dreaming, art from nature, the living from the dead, the possible from the impossible … Magritte is a student of that minimal shift that transforms the real into the surreal.” Similarly, Pelevin is, for Genis, “a poet, a philosopher, and a physiologist [who] dwells in the zone where realities collide. The site of contact generates expressive artistic effects: one picture of the world succeeds another, creating a third that is distinct from the first two.”86 This observation leads Genis to propose that Pelevin’s texts are, in essence, “proliferating border zones” that live according to their own peculiar laws.87 The realm of the (post-)Soviet chronotope and “the world beyond” generate in their collision a new heterotopic space. For what else are Pelevin’s textual border zones if not instances of heterotopic textuality, ever exploring new ontological possibilities on the edges of our own familiar reality? Pelevin never tires of disturbing our experience of the world around us through sudden subversion (suggesting in Generation P, for instance, that all of the world’s politicians, particularly the post-Soviet ones, are merely computer-generated simulacra for televisual consumption). The drama that plays out in his texts is an awakening of the mind of a “little man” from a zombie-like stupor of routine existence to a critical

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awareness of the world that surrounds him – and to the fact that these worlds are as numerous as our minds. Heterotopic texts thus not only rescue “minor” destinies from oblivion and dissolution; most important, they decentre and subvert the claims of singular authorial access to Truth and History.88 By paying attention to their multiple narratives, humanity might make itself more aware of the complicated and constructed character of its past and of its representations of the past, thereby successfully partaking of the project of “cognitive mapping,” which, the reader will remember from a discussion in the first chapter, has been described by Jameson as “a pedagogical, political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system,” thereby constituting the positive, political edge of postmodern culture. “The political form of postmodernism,” he continues, would “have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.”89 Heterotopic texts contain the potential for moving in this direction.

4 Transfigurations Postmodern Articulations of Gender and Corporeality

While the preceding two chapters have considered instances of postmodernist subversion and reworking of the Soviet cultural baggage conducted largely within the more-or-less established artistic and social paradigms, in the chapters that follow I concentrate on those uses of postmodernist strategies that foreground previously under- or unrepresented cultural experiences, the voicings of hitherto marginalized subject positions and explorations of alternative textual modes. As Ursula Heise, among others, has noted, the appellation “postmodern writing” has come to include two distinct sets of texts. The first set emphasizes narrative and other formal experimentation and intertextual play (such as the texts discussed in the preceding two chapters), while the second group of texts privileges not formal innovation in and of itself but the publicization of alternative histories of women, formerly colonized cultures, and different minority groups that had been ignored or repressed in mainstream cultural production.1 This second understanding of the term has yet to adequately penetrate Second World cultural discourse, particularly in the case of Russia, although there is no shortage of cultural products of this type emerging from the region. I thus hope that the discussion of these works in postmodernist terms produces a much-needed intervention into Second World discourse on postmodernism, thereby fundamentally altering its system of coordinates. I shall begin with one of the most far-reaching and crucial among these paradigmatic changes, namely the unprecedented attention to gender and corporeality in cultural discourse and the prodigious

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development of the new Russian women’s writing that is actively conscious of gender-based concerns and engages in provocative and productive explorations of the late/post-Soviet spacio-temporal continuum, generating a corpus of writing that is both challenging and fascinating.2 Many scholars of contemporary literature and culture of the Second World countries have noted that one of the key ways in which the crisis of the communist society had manifested itself was the disruption and dislocation of the traditional constructions of gender identities and gender relations. As Ellen E. Berry remarks in her introduction to the collection Postcommunism and the Body Politic, “gender roles and relations, experiences of sexuality and attempts to recontain them, representations of the body – especially the female body – and the larger cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly striking sites for witnessing the performances of complex national dramas of crisis and change.”3 The resurgence of gender concerns in Russian writing in the late/postSoviet era has indeed been remarkable: a whole pleiad of women writers, in all the major literary genres, has risen to considerable critical acclaim, baffling the patriarchy’s domination of the Russian literary and critical establishment; a number of male writers also have contributed more nuanced constructions of gender in their recent work.4 Russia’s notorious feminism-phobia and the dismissive discourse about “ladies’ literature” are finally receding into the past, even though opinions about and awareness of the feminist cultural paradigms have been improving with a marked uncertainty and a great many fits and starts. Not helping matters is that often, especially earlier in their literary careers, some leading women writers dismissed the relevance of specifically womanly aspects and feminist concerns in their own work.5 In the late 1980s and 1990s, it became possible to differentiate an entire spectrum of ideologies and literary strategies within Russian women’s writing and to sketch out several of the key directions that the new women’s writing was taking. The positions range from extreme Russian nationalism coupled with formal conservatism (e.g., Tat’iana Glushko) and writing that falls more into the domain of mass culture (with someone like Viktoria Tokareva balancing on the boundary between “high” and “low,” while Aleksandra Marinina unabashedly and prolifically produces pure pulp fiction) to formconscious and innovative writing that more properly belongs to the subject of this study. Within the latter group, it is possible, in my opinion, to map out three principal “fields” or trends that, obviously, do not constitute clearly defined movements and whose boundaries are never too rigid.

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The first group comprises writers who have revived some of the modernist preoccupations with detailization of an “ornamental” style, experiments with point of view and narrative voice, and allusive intertextual writing that primarily develop from within the more established cultural paradigms that are put to unexpected new uses. Among prose writers these tendencies constitute a principal area of concern in the work of such authors as Tat’iana Tolstaya, Marina Palei, Liudmila Ulitskaya, and Larisa Vaneyeva; within the realm of poetry, similar developments can be discerned in the writings of Ol’ga Sedakova, Elena Shvarts, and Elena Fanailova. The second group includes prose writers and dramatists who, in Helena Goscilo’s words, “elaborated a strategy of externalization, of maximal palpability, whereby not tearful lamentations but the female body – as the text’s physical and tropological center – testifies to women’s experience. Female bodies ‘document’ their owners’ suffering and degradation: they bruise, hemorrhage, and break; they endure rape, childbirth, abortion, beating, and disease; they succumb to substance addiction, incontinence, and sundry dehumanizing processes – all painstakingly detailed in slow motion.”6 These writers form the trend of a new gritty or “dirty” realism7 that in its externality and focus on the corporeal at times borders on naturalism; this trend by and large dominated Russian women’s writing in the 1990s and is represented by, among others, Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Nina Sadur, Svetlana Vasilenko, and Elena Tarasova. The third trend can be described as the most experimental, offering the reader texts that are unconventional both formally and thematically and that combine explorations of avant-garde legacies with (openly stated or implied) theoretical concerns with women’s writing as a phenomenon. The leading practitioners of this trend are the poet Nina Iskrenko and the prose writer Valeria Narbikova; among other authors whom I would include in this trend are the poets Polina Andrukovich, Anna Gorenko, Evgeniya Lavut, and Stella Morotskaya, as well as the prose writer Margarita Meklina. In this chapter, I first consider two representative texts of the second trend in new women’s writing, Tarasova’s “Ne pomniashchaia zla” (She who doesn’t remember evil) and Vasilenko’s Shamara. I then consider in greater detail the work of the leading representatives of the third trend, Iskrenko and Narbikova. Elena Tarasova (b. 1959) is an enigmatic presence in Russian literature. Her fame (or for some, notoriety) rests on the two novellas that she published in the last years of the Soviet Union’s existence, “Ne pomniashchaia zla” (She who bears no ill) and “Ty khorosho nauchilsia est’, Adam”

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(You’ve learned well how to eat, Adam). The first of them appeared in 1990 in the eponymous collection of new Russian women’s writing and the second in another similar anthology, Novye amazonki (The new amazons), the following year.8 The first novella in particular provoked the ire of many Russian mainstream critics; one of them, Pavel Basinsky, went so far as to assert that “this kind of writing should never be published.”9 The text’s emphatic, indeed hyperbolic, focus on the corporeal ran in the face of the body-shy Russian literary tradition. Critics have located the text’s primary subversive gesture in Tarasova’s radical interrogation of the traditional binary opposition of the soul and the body, or the spirit and the matter, in which the second element is traditionally associated with women. “The freshness of Tarasova’s treatment,” as Goscilo has noted, is a result of “her disregard for institutionalized literary inscriptions of gender.”10 Tarasova’s text presents the unnamed protagonist in the restricted space and time of a part of a single day that she spends crouching in front of the oven in her apartment. The narrative develops via the heroine’s thoughts and reminiscences, presented through quasi-direct discourse (in the penultimate sentence, the narrative voice switches from third to first person). The story that the reader is told is that of the narrator/protagonist’s discomfort, fascination, disgust, anger, obsession with her diseased, monstrous body. In full accordance with Freud’s dictum,11 her ego is fully shaped by her corporeal experiences. The text instantiates a clash between two regimes of bodily control, two channels of inscription: the social and the psychical. In the grip of an unnamed syndrome analogized with Boyle-Mariotte’s law of physics, the protagonist’s body undergoes progressive eruption out of the norms of health, fitness, and beauty: her torso and limbs swell, her hair thins and falls out, her teeth rot, eyes inflame, blood vessels rupture in her scaly skin, and so forth. These metamorphoses are presented in hyperrealistic detail, with the narrative thus “mimic[ing] the uncontrollable biological forces that cause eruptions in the protagonist’s flesh.”12 The corporeal transformation of the protagonist, however, goes hand in hand with the changes in her psyche. Indeed, as the narrative asserts, it is the soul that mirrors the body, not the other way round: She used to think that the soul is a reflection of the body and its shape, that it is equally palpable. When the body loses a finger, the soul loses one as well; when she loses a tooth, so does the soul. But the body can use prostheses, while the soul remains toothless, legless, fingerless. The soul doesn’t wear wigs; it is openly bald. Plastic surgery can correct a horrible nose, but the soul carries the scars from the

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operation for the rest of its life. Everything that heals in the body continues to bleed and fester in the soul … There is never a smile on the face of her soul or on her own, red, bumpy, distorted face … Yes, the soul is the reflection of the body. Hers is hideous. It is huge, heavy, embittered, scowling like the bacilli in the color supplement to the magazine Health.13

The protagonist’s body literally emerges as the battleground in her struggle against the regimes of social control, represented by the abusive parents, medical institutions, and the entire social world around her, down to the routine of everyday life. The novella is ambiguous as to the causes of the mysterious syndrome that afflicts the protagonist, leaving open the possibility that it is self-willed, or at least psychosomatic. The text offers an account of a breakdown in the chain of social ordering of the body. What we observe in Tarasova’s text is a body’s refusal to undergo the procedures of becoming human, indeed a dehumanization of it – at one point, the protagonist’s body is described as “wild heavy meat” (“dikoe tiazheloe miaso”). While initially one may discern in the text a tug-of-war between the social and the psychical channels of bodily inscription (earlier in the protagonist’s life, as the reader learns, she abhorred all flesh and tried engaging in self-mutilation), the body that is at the centre of the text in the end defeats both. Indeed, at the centre of Tarasova’s text is a woman’s body that openly challenges the traditional strategies of depiction and social stereotypes. It is emphatically not beautiful, nor is it sensuous or submissive. It is a rebel that speaks for it(her?)self, and in this individualist rebellion, it withdraws from society and disavows the features that the latter had attempted to inscribe on it. A similar account of “psychosomatic rebellion,” so to speak, is offered in Svetlana Vasilenko’s (b. 1956) short novel Shamara.14 However, while Tarasova’s text privileged the nonsexual woman’s body – indeed, a somewhat abstractly philosophical conception of it – Vasilenko’s work overflows with sensuality and desire. The text is also profoundly visual, even subtitled a “videopoema,” and structured as a series of self-contained scenes or “frames”; below, I discuss it concurrently with its 1994 film version, produced with Vasilenko’s active participation. The film adds to the novel a dimension of ethno-national hybridity, so characteristic of the late-Soviet era. Produced at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv, it is the first full-length feature by the director Natalia Andriichenko and one of the few recent Ukrainian films to reach an

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international audience. Vasilenko herself is partly of Ukrainian origin, but she was born and grew up in Russia, in the secret military town of Kapustin Yar in the Astrakhan oblast (her mother’s family fled Ukraine during holodomor, the Stalin-engineered famine of the early 1930s). Her father, an army officer, a nuclear scientist, and an ethnic Russian, abandoned her and her mother when she was small (more exactly, right after the Cuban missile crisis), and the young Svetlana became acutely aware of her marginal status – growing up as a woman in a broken family in a house on the edge of a top secret military installation, identifying strongly with her Ukrainian mother (whose last name she took), and trying to become a writer. Her first short story, “Za saigakami” (Going after goat antelopes), was published in 1982 in the journal Literaturnaia ucheba and generated some controversy, but she achieved greater renown only in the early 1990s, when – with the publication of both Shamara (1990) and a comprehensive collection of her prose, Zvonkoe imia (A resounding name, 1991), and as editor of a ground-breaking anthology of new Russian women’s writing, Novye amazonki (New amazons, 1991) – Vasilenko was recognized as one of the leading women authors writing in Russian.15 The novel Shamara takes place in an unnamed military town, loosely based on the author’s native Kapustin Yar and the nearby Volzhsky, where she lived briefly after finishing high school. Like most other texts by Vasilenko, it shocks the reader by its brutal undiluted hyperrealistic portrayal of its (mostly female) characters and by the persistent depiction of the most harrowing experiences in their lives. As the writer herself has noted, she strives to represent the crisis of the final decades of Soviet society, a shockingly materialist society where people’s lives were determined by biological, animal drives, or, as she says, where human souls have suffered exposure to “spiritual nuclear radiation.” These primordial drives, however, can rise to the level of high passion. In a personal conversation, Vasilenko told me that one of the goals she had hoped to achieve while writing this novel was to create a modern-day analogue of classical Greek tragedy, where the protagonists are consumed by passions that are stronger than people themselves. One of the most critically informed readings of Vasilenko’s writing has been offered by Helena Goscilo. In Dehexing Sex, she suggests that Vasilenko’s texts’ most innovative feature is their “unorthodox approach to female corporeality.” In Vasilenko’s fiction, she writes, the female body resists stable identification with any single phenomenon. It functions, in fact, as a field through which passes every conceivable experience, open to endless signification. A source of joy and suffering, the corporeal self is

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both metaphor and material entity, depending upon the specifics of the given moment. As signifier, it floats more freely than any other body in current [Russian] women’s prose … Vasilenko resists both conventional narrow troping and simple materialization of the female body. Neither antithetical to mind or emotion nor a visible emblem for them, woman’s body in Vasilenko has a capacity for multiple signification, including nonsignification.16

While the film Shamara differs in a number of respects from the original prose text, I believe that it offers an example of one of the more successful screen adaptations of a literary work (Vasilenko herself wrote the script). What has changed, however, is the overall framing of the narrative. The unnamed military town is now based on (and filmed in) Mykolaiv, also a closed military city during the Soviet era. However, the city is now doubly cut off, as it is under quarantine due to a cholera outbreak (which indeed had happened there repeatedly, most recently in the early 1990s). The film thus engages in an elaborate play with open and closed spaces, the inside and the outside: the smaller quasi-open space of the town is juxtaposed with the enclosed space of the quarantine, which, however, is the link to the greater open space of the country beyond the town. Simultaneously, the film emphasizes the lack of individual private space: all the characters live in workers’ dormitories or prison labourers’ barracks; they can be alone only in the deserted open spaces on the outskirts of town. The constantly twisting and subverted space is charged with an ambivalent energy of claustrophobia and desire. Indeed, as Goscilo suggests, the entire world of Shamara is “vigorously sexualized.” I disagree, however, with her assertion that the entire narrative “consists of people’s holding knives to each other’s throats, randomly fondling each other’s bodies, spying voyeristically on copulating couples, attempting murder and suicide, succumbing to alcohol, and so forth.”17 There is an ample amount of violence and sexuality in this work, yet it is not randomly absurdist but mediated through the figure of the protagonist, Shamara, situated in the nexus of the web of pain and desire. As the reader (viewer) learns, she had been gang-raped by eight men, only to fall in love with one of them, Ustin, marry him, and follow him to this town where he is now a prison labourer. Love, however, takes strange forms in this work. In this world, there appears to be no alternative to the choice between rape and the complete rejection of a sexual partner. The narrative is structured not as a progression of events but as a series of presentations of mostly unrequited desires (of Shamara for Ustin and vice versa, of others who desire them, and so forth), only occasionally briefly and partially satisfied. The only location

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literally and symbolically outside this web of desire is the quarantine island, whose only inhabitants shown in the film are children – while in the town itself children are conspicuously absent. The space of the town by the end of both the text and the film emerges as the one where there could be no resolution; thus Shamara contains several attempts at escape and ends with the protagonist finally leaving it (and Ustin). Shamara’s final gesture brings us to the aspect of the work that led me to include it in this chapter, namely its unusual but telling portrayal of the ways that gender is constructed and performed in post-Soviet culture. Within the space of this work, the privileged aspect of same-gender socialization is solidarity and camaraderie, and the predominant aspect of crossgender encounters is violence and trauma. Women and men are presented as fundamentally alien to one another, but the imperative of desire propels them to their inevitably traumatic contact. Same-sex desire appears to be absent from its world, with the exception of one of the principal characters, Lera, a hermaphrodite who is in love (unreciprocated) with Shamara. Neither gender treats Lera as one of their own, even though it appears that s/he is closer to the masculine side. Lera is the quintessential outsider, who can serve as a catalyst or a helper, but situated in his/her own, individual space beyond the gender dynamic. S/he is less of a destabilizer of gender constructs than something like a wise eunuch in the midst of a bipolar realm of gender. The two “stable” genders, however, are presented in a very heterodox way. We have none of the traditional objectification of women – instead, Shamara offers a tense dynamic of an encounter of two groups of active, aggressive, willful subjects, whose bodies, in Goscilo’s colourful description, are inscribed “not only as an ambulatory testament to stoic suffering but also as a center of pleasure and aggressive appetite.”18 Men, however, are granted an unambiguously subaltern role: “not sexual aggressors but themselves objects of sexual desire, men [in Shamara] serve various enabling but secondary purposes in women’s lives,” notes Goscilo. “But,” she continues, “women’s unfettered sexual activity here, contrary to custom, does not pull the reader back into the ancient binary opposition between body and soul that automatically feminizes materiality and masculinizes the spirit.”19 In other words, we are presented with a dialogue between two communities that are alien but equal to each other; they maintain an independent and largely self-contained existence but with a constant undercurrent of mutual attraction that constantly reveals its darker, more violent side. The feeling of tense binary incongruity is exacerbated by the film’s deliberate use of clashing visual and sound imagery: the viewer is frequently faced with

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depictions of a surreal technocratic wasteland, reminiscent of the images in Antonioni’s Red Desert and Godard’s Passion, accompanied by the sounds of Mahler’s First Symphony. The confrontation seems to be only moments away from a much larger upheaval, but the film leaves unclear what the resolution might be. We are left unsure of whether Shamara’s escape from the town is truly liberatory. In the end, I believe that both the film and the prose narrative, for all their power, are situated on rather too abstract a plane. Paradoxically perhaps, an ultimately more powerful expression of women’s lives and concerns, as well as of the psychical and social inscription of gender, can be found, in my opinion, in the work of the authors who actively pursue formal innovation.20 While the two authors whose work I discuss below, Nina Iskrenko and Valeria Narbikova, have worked independently of each other and were never explicitly associated as members of a distinct literary movement, I would nevertheless like to consider their texts concurrently. In my opinion, it is remarkable that these two quite different writers working in different literary genres demonstrate affinities and similarities in their choice of themes, concerns, and creative strategies. In one of her last performance endeavours, the poet Nina Iskrenko (1951– 95) chose as a “matrix text” a passage from Plato’s Laws that notoriously disparages same-sex sexual relations. She crossed out most nouns and, without revealing the source, invited several Russian and American writers to fill in the blanks. The resulting texts, by Iskrenko herself and by twelve other writers, varied greatly in content, style, and length. They appeared in the issue of the American literary journal Five Fingers Review, published a few months after Nina Iskrenko’s untimely death on 14 February 1995 and dedicated to her memory.21 This performance piece, in my opinion, can serve as the key to the writing of this remarkable woman poet. It comes as the finale of a writing career preoccupied with revising myths, transforming canonical texts, and looking at both the daily reality and our cultural baggage through the irreverent eyes of a woman. It is my intent here to situate her within the context of contemporary women’s writing and to trace the key textual strategies that shape her work.22 Iskrenko occupies a unique place in contemporary Russian literature. A poet who eschewed many of the conventions that still dominate Russian versification, she brought to her texts, unlike other poets of the more experimental wing, specific womanly concerns.23 In a tribute to Iskrenko’s

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memory in the journal Novaia Iunost’, her close friend the poet Yuri Arabov sums up her contribution to Russian literature as follows: Nina seems to have done the impossible: in her “avant-garde” texts that build on the traditions of the Russian Futurists, using the slang and the realia of our joyless society, she has represented the fate of today’s woman who is overwhelmed by the city, the mundane, but still has not lost her soul and the capacity to love … Nina dealt with this monstrous world, exposing it to ridicule, showing the artificiality and inhumaneness of its social foundations.24

Another poet and friend of Iskrenko’s, Mark Shatunovsky, continues: Nina wrote poetry for our entire country. Her poems reflect the full spectrum of speech generated on its territory, the entire range from four-letter words to theosophical terminology. Some day, gazing upon itself in her verse, the country will recognize its authentic verbal portrayal for the late seventies and early eighties.25

Like all summaries, these remarks, while pinpointing some of the poet’s crucial concerns, cannot fully reflect her work in all its complexity. The same may be said about the categorizing of Iskrenko’s work offered in Andrew Wachtel’s brief introduction to the posthumous collection of her poetry in English translation. For Wachtel, Iskrenko started out as a mediator between conceptualism and metarealism, the two trends singled out in Russian poetry of the late 1970s and 1980s,26 and then shifted to “a more straightforward style,” “embracing day-to-day life and taking into account the changes that have occurred in Russia in the wake of the collapse of Communism.”27 While well intentioned, such categorizations evidence the danger of trivializing the poet’s contribution to Russian literature and thus end up shortchanging her work, running the risk of reducing it to an assortment of platitudes since they either focus on the most transparently obvious themes or attempt to squeeze the poet’s writing into rigid classificational frames based on some of its formal aspects. I believe that a more productive reading of Iskrenko’s work can be arrived at by exploring the key concerns and preoccupations of her writing. Below, I focus in particular on the poet’s challenge to conventional wisdom and preconceived notions, her search for new ways and means of cognition and rendering the world in a poetic text, and the emphasis on “rescuing” women’s lives and women’s narratives from obscurity.

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Iskrenko’s preface to her collection Referendum provides a productive starting point for this inquiry. In this text, the poet identifies several of her beliefs and approaches to literature and to her own writing in particular. This manifesto sui generis in six theses presents Iskrenko’s literary credo through a rearticulation of her view of the concept of authorship: it is structured as an “address to a supposed interlocutor” in the shape of parallel construction, each thesis starting with the word “author.” The poet advances her belief that [t]he content of a poetic text is not the reflection of the real situations taking place in it, and especially not their unequivocal evaluation, but only the capacity to perceive an object simultaneously in all or at least several of its possible conditions or from all the points of view, as incompatible and contradictory as possible. To see something through the eyes of different (in the classical understanding) people or under different temporal angles means not only to “live” the collected life of these various, often contrasting people, but to feel, recognize oneself (that is, to be) simultaneously a human being and humanity in its entirety, a tree trunk and a forest, the entire world and one of its minute parts, the way a fragment of a holographic disk, unlike a clipping from a photograph, carries all the information about the represented object.28

In this passage, and throughout the preface, one finds several allusions to the revision of the concept of authorship in contemporary literary studies. Iskrenko unmistakably echoes Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” with its key thesis that “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”29 The parallels emerge even more strongly if Iskrenko’s statement is read in the light of Foucault’s notions of the “erosion of the author function” and of “discourses as objects of appropriation,” both developed in his “What Is an Author?” However, Iskrenko’s prefatory manifesto offers an unexpected answer to the question that concludes Foucault’s essay, “What difference does it make who is speaking?” She concludes her address by offering “a thousand apologies for stopping at the most interesting place because [she has] to switch off the kettle.”30 This intervention of the real woman in the kitchen into theoretical elaborations points to the other major problematic in her writing, namely the position of the contemporary (late-Soviet) woman in the present literary situation.

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One of the most illuminating analyses of the place that the woman writer occupies in the structures of literary authority, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” outlines the dilemmas of authorship for writing women. Gilbert and Gubar proceed by emphasizing the alterity of the writing woman within the literary tradition by challenging Harold Bloom’s theory of literary histor, which postulates the artist’s “anxiety of influence,” the “warfare of fathers and sons,” as the key to its dynamics.31 They argue that in reaction to the masculine authority of the tradition, the female poet experiences an “‘anxiety of authorship’ – a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate and destroy her”; the female artist, they continue, “must first struggle against the effects of socialization, which makes conflict with the will of her (male) precursors seem inexpressibly absurd, futile, or even … self-annihilating.” She has to react to the tradition with a revision that is far more radical than that performed by her male counterpart – frequently by actively searching for a female tradition that, “far from representing a threatening force to be denied or killed, proves by example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible.”32 While Gilbert and Gubar focus on nineteenth-century Anglo-American women writers, their observations can be fruitfully applied to late-twentieth-century Russia, where women writers are emphatically asserting their presence on an unprecedented scale against the male-dominated literary canon. It is, then, the overcoming of the “anxiety of authorship” and the shaping of a very different “author function” that we register in the poetry of Iskrenko. But the greater preoccupation in her writing appears to be in the search not necessarily for writing precursors but for the women – historical, fictional, and mythological – who become figurations for the state of the contemporary Russian woman.33 It is to these instances of “genealogical” exploration in Iskrenko’s work that I would like to turn now. In a poem titled “Dopros” (The questioning) from her “Fivanskii tsikl” (Theban cycle, 1988),34 as in many of her other texts, Iskrenko offers a grim and unflattering portrayal of contemporary reality; however, this poem also presents what can be perceived as a ray of hope. Here, the poet writes her new Antigone, who supplants the classical Antigone of Sophocles and the modernist Antigone of Jean Anouilh. This new Antigone of our times at first may seem an unlikely subject for heroic elevation, for she is “a crazy girl” (“devochka s privetom”), “antidove of the antiworld/ antipeace” (“antigolub’ antimira”), “drunk daughter of the incestuous

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coupling of Tat’iana Larina and Zoia the guerrilla fighter” (“bukhaia dshcher’ krovosmeshen’ia Tani Larinoi i Zoi-partizanki”).35 Remarkably, and perhaps fittingly, this new Antigone is apparently the child of an incestuous relationship of two women; two mothers from different epochs give birth to the postmodern heroine. This new Antigone will not be able to bury her brother, the enemy of the “under-caesar” (“unter-tsezar’”). This world renders her insane, her enemies are “akhineitsy,”36 and it does not matter any more whether they are “from Thebes or the various Lubiankas” (“iz Fiv ili s Lubianok”). However, the poem ends with a question, “Antigone Who are you Antigone” (“Antigona Kto ty Antigona”): she cannot be pinned down, she is fundamentally “unfinalizable” (nezavershima), to use one of Bakhtin’s favourite words; the worldview of the preceding epoch cannot explain the Antigone of Soviet postmodernity. Antigone’s silent resolve and persistence, her unfinalizability and defiance of logic, serve as an apt figuration for projects of resistance and subversion, for challenging culture’s dominant narratives by foregrounding and recuperating the “lost” narratives and experiences of women. Iskrenko pursues this topic through several key cultural loci, among them classical Greece (Antigone, and also Danae, in the poem “Tiazhelaia tucha v vysokoi trave” [A heavy cloud in tall grass”]),37 the Bible (the poem “P’ianye zhenshchiny s nezhnost’iu smotriat drug drugu v glaza …” [Drunk women tenderly look into each other’s eyes …”]), the beginnings of East Slavic history (“Ol’ga”), and the modern Russian cultural canon, represented by an unusual combination of Tolstoy and Malevich (“Dorogaia razden’sia do poiasa …” [Strip to the waist dear…]). The poem “P’ianye zhenshchiny” (Drunk women)38 is an impressive depiction of the situation of contemporary Russian women, compelled to “silently sob into the empty triangle of love, private property and higher education” (“molcha rydat’ v pustoi treugol’nik liubvi / chastnoi sobstvennosti i vysshego obrazovaniia”). However, Iskrenko not only seizes upon this triad that has played a major role in defining women’s experiences (and literary depictions thereof) in contemporary Russia; she also offers a daring rewriting of the Biblical story of Jezebel, wife of King Ahab (I Kings, 21), who conspired to take possession of a vineyard.39 Jezebel, negatively portrayed in the Bible, is transformed here into a kind of Brontesque character, whose emotional strength prompts a rebellion against the orders of society, and simultaneously into a Bacchante; moreover, she redoubles herself in the poem: two women together trespass into the vineyard and unleash themselves. In her revisionist portrayal of a Biblical character, Iskrenko continues the strategic choice of earlier Russian

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women poets – for instance, Anna Akhmatova, whose poem “Lotova zhena,” (Lot’s wife, 1924) offers a similarly daring and powerfully affirmative reinterpretation of a traditionally pejoratively viewed Biblical character.40 In another case, Iskrenko’s Ol’ga, in the poem of the same title,41 also emerges as a multi-layered image: she is simultaneously the ancient Rus’ princess and a troubled contemporary woman, a silent, defiant and elusive, “almost invisible” presence undefeated by the whirlwind of events around her. When Iskrenko, as do other contemporary Russian women writers, undertakes to revise the male-dominated canon of Russian literature, it is symptomatic that she seizes upon one of the most notorious couplings of a patriarchally dominant male writer and his female character, Tolstoy and Anna Karenina:42 Dorogaia poprobui lech’ Na tramvainye rel’sy ukhodiashchie za gorizont Dorogaia ty lezhish’ absoliutnoi vyrazitel’nosti dostigaia Slovno chernyi kvadrat ili platok otpugivaiushchii staiu sterviatnikov My k sozhaleniiu ne mozhem zhdat’ milosti ot sokorytnikov My i ne zhdem ee k schast’iu my zhdem tramvaia. My dear try to lie down on the streetcar tracks that lead beyond the horizon My dear You lie achieving absolute expressiveness Like the black square or a shawl that scares away a pack of vultures Unfortunately we cannot expect mercy from those with whom we share the trough Luckily we aren’t waiting for it we are waiting for a streetcar43

The heroine’s act of lying down on the railroad tracks is identified here with Malevich’s Black Square as an instance of absolute expression transcending

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the moralizing scheme of the nineteenth-century patriarch (although touched with sad irony – “we cannot expect mercy” from “those with whom we share the trough”). Another poem by Iskrenko, “Ura! I zhenshchina Mariia …” (Hurrah! And the woman Maria …, 1990), continues the genealogical, or rather archeological, line of figurations in her work while also being a link to representations of contemporary Russian women in the process of selfcognition. This text brings together in a nutshell a number of Iskrenko’s key themes. On the one hand, it is an active illustration of the process of overcoming the “anxiety of authorship”: the entire poem consists of crossed out lines in which the woman poet depicts and questions her protagonist, Maria, who, like Ol’ga in the poem discussed earlier, emerges as a fusion of the archetypal images of Mary – both Mother of God and Mary Magdalene44 – with the image of a contemporary Russian woman. The text arises from the “rubble” of allusions to canonical depictions of women by male authors – several poems by Pushkin, Blok’s “Neznakomka” (Stranger), the fable “Pchela i shershen’” (The Bee and the Drone) by the eighteenthcentury Ukrainian poet and philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda – and from the notorious saying cherchez la femme, so popular in Russia. This composite portraiture in which the subject, like a mosaic, arises from the fragments of cultural tissue, is one of the main aspects of Iskrenko’s poetic method. To return to the passage from the introduction to Referendum, quoted earlier, the poet sees her work as an assemblage of fragments/microcosms in a mosaic-like whole – a project that is simultaneously epistemological (that is, aimed at understanding and representing the extratextual reality) and ontological (aimed at rendering an experience of being). This approach to rendering the extra-literary reality in her texts arises as a logical consequence of Iskrenko’s vision of the condition of a contemporary subject. In one of her prose poems/manifestoes, she writes: “Why do the singularity of meaning, the clarity of conceptual definitions, and the unambiguous motivations of actions disappear? Because a discrete concrete individual no longer poses interest. More precisely, there is no such thing as a discrete individual; he or she exists only as a distribution of probability and is spread out with a certain density like an elementary particle. That is, it makes sense to talk only about a set of situations and actions within whose limits a person would operate.”45 This vision of the “spread out” human subject underlies Iskrenko’s aesthetic program. I have noted elsewhere the strong parallels that can be discerned between this vision and the theorization of the contemporary subject offered in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.46 I believe, however,

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that it would be particularly productive to consider it in the light of feminist reworkings of Deleuze’s theorization of subjectivity, particularly those proposed by Rosi Braidotti in her Nomadic Subjects. According to Braidotti, the work of Deleuze has been instrumental in articulating the decline of phallogocentrism and the breakdown of the classical understanding of subjectivity, governed by “the imperialism of rational thought,” and bringing us to a vision of the subject “as an interface of will with desire.” The key Deleuzian concepts of deterritorialization and the becoming-woman (devenir-femme) as a strategy of subversion, and the figuration of the rhizome, with its “affirmation of difference in terms of a multiplicity of possible differences,” chart some of the ways of transforming human subjectivity and our vision of it. These insights, Braidotti contends, lead us to a new awareness of “the embodied sexed subject [as] situated in a web of complex power relations that … inscribe the subject in a discursive and material structure of normativity,” while a recognition of “the women’s movement [as] one of the primary sources of the dislocation of the rational subject” leads to a conceptualization of what, together with Braidotti, we can affirm as a vision for a postmodernist feminist project.47 I believe that Iskrenko’s texts make an invaluable contribution to this project, for they provide a vivid instance of a project of exploring (and subverting) the condition of subjectivity that Braidotti has described as a “heap of rabble, calling itself the center of creation; a knot of desiring and trembling flesh, projecting itself to the height of an imperial consciousness” and violently “bind[ing] a fractured self to the performative illusion of unity, mastery, self-transparence.”48 A number of Iskrenko’s poems convey a vision of contemporary subjectivity that resonates with Braidotti’s argument and that fundamentally differs from an earlier, modernist vision of fragmentation that still contained in itself a promise of ultimate cohesion.49 Thus the first part of the Referendum collection is comprised of texts where a multitude of fragments of discourses, scraps of personalities, clash in a Brownian movement and produce a fascinating, if bitter, portrait of human beings in interaction. For instance, the opening poem, “Kolybel’naia rech’” (A lullaby oration), is structured as a clash of “high” and “low,” “official” and “unofficial,” public and intimate discourses, allusions to high art and mass culture that return to haunt each other, like the movements in a fugue (one of Iskrenko’s favourite musical allusions): O chleny iz chlenov tiki

o luchshie liuo paralleli partera

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O korolibodinamomashizofreidisko Ne shevelites’ a to poluchitsia nerezko O razgovorshchik O shekotlivye trolli lemury i super-star-pery O sel’vyplevyeklevye srednekondovye sleva i szadiZ a s a k h a r e kry Skazhite boga radi KTO POSLEDNII Kto kra Zasypaet zemlia Zasypaiut ee utiugami ukreplennymi bunkerami arman’iakami i burgin’onami kraine pravymi levymi odnostoronnimi obshchedostupnymi otdel’nymi nedostatkami osobniakami s vidom na Pripiat’ i Adriatiku tiubikami s zubnoi pastoi i palym zheleznym listom Zasypaet pod’’ezdami oknami okolozemnym prostranstvom i prosto musorom i prostymi chelovecheskimi chuvstvami Ty mne Ia tebe Très bien ensemble Ne nado Ia sama I ty som Oh members of members oh la crème de la flower oh parallels of the orchestra Oh kingsordynamomaschizofreudradishes Don’t move or it will come out blurry Oh the talker Oh ticklish trolls lemurs and superstaroldfarts Oh selvouplaying cool medium-boondock to the left and behind Sugar-coa ra Tell me in the name of god WHO’S LAST Who is at the en

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Earth falls asleep It is covered with iron-presses fortified bunkers armagnacs and bourguignons extreme right left one-way universally accessible certain shortcomings mansions with the view on the Pripiat’ and the Adriatic toothpaste tubes and falling iron sheets Covered by stairwells windows stratosphere and simply garbage and simple human emotions You to me I to you Très bien ensemble Don’t I can do it myself And you’re a catfish50

The construction of and the interaction between genders become the dominating topics in a number of poems in the collection. Thus “Poludennyi seks” (Sex at noontime)51 is the exploration of “male madness” (“muzhskoe bezumie”), the aggressive sexual drive that is alternatively sublimated or finds its basest outlets in “urinating in elevators, smashing shopwindows and rubbing against lampposts” (“Muzhskoe bezumie mochitsia v lifte / kolotit vitriny i tretsia o fonarnye stolby”). The poem masterfully renders the amalgam of attraction and repulsion, the commanding and maddening force of desire. On the other hand, “Perekhod na kol’tsevuiu liniiu” (Transfer to the circle line)52 portrays the frustration of attempts at communication between a man and a woman in the schizophrenic realm of a contemporary big city, here Moscow. The overflow of objects and information today obstructs any human communication – and Iskrenko attempts to render this flood of reification, or even calcification, of language in “Iz zhizni terminov” (From the life of terms),53 where “prosecutor, proctologist and poet talk like a mute to mutes” (“prokuror proktolog i poet / kak nemoi s nemymi govorit”). The survival and self-conceptualization of a woman in the contemporary world becomes the main theme of the section “Drugaia zhenshchina” (Another woman, 1984) in the collection Ili. This section’s title poem54 is a particularly poignant articulation of the vexing task of woman’s survival in the realm of late-Soviet mundane life, from the lyric heroine’s anger at

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being told that she is not woman enough and that “another woman in her place” would have done much better to several vignettes of various “other women”: the battered wife from a neighbouring apartment, a Modigliani painting, a peasant woman from a book illustration, an imagined woman from the world where all the ingredients listed in a cookbook are actually available. The various incarnations of “Woman” give way to an authoridentified woman walking the streets of Moscow, her failed encounter with the bronze patriarch of poetry – Pushkin – and her return to the dark corridor of her own apartment. The poem thus becomes a narrative, once again, of the anxiety of authorship (a tired intelligentsia woman in dirty jeans returning from ovoshchnaia baza55 and confronted by the bronze image of Poetry) and of the very anxiety of womanhood in a patriarchal society that underlies it (as Gilbert and Gubar write, “it is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters”).56 Several of Iskrenko’s poems are miniature portraits of women who have been broken down by the force of society and its daily life. In these texts, bitterness and occasional sarcasm mix with melancholy sympathy, as in “Bud’ zdorova Liusia Komarova” (To a long life, Liusia Komarova),57 where a funeral emerges as the only event that can bring together a former sisterhood of friends, and especially in “Nishchenka kudriavaia …” (Curlyhaired beggar woman …),58 where the sad cries of resignation ultimately give way to a promise of future peace. Iskrenko’s poetry offers an uncompromising portrayal of the society in which she lived and a powerful critique of both its patriarchal foundations and the phallogocentric underpinnings of its literary tradition. However, hers is also a poetry of subtle lyricism and optimistic vision. In accordance with Braidotti’s redefinition of the subject as “an interface of will with desire,” the active volition of love, for Iskrenko, emerges as the key positive transformative power. A forceful declaration of this vision can be found in her prose poem “Kak perezhit’ etu noch’” (How to live through this night), where a woman starts calling each and every phone number and saying “I love you”; not giving up after initial discouragement, she literally achieves a transformation of outside reality: By morning her love was famous throughout Moscow evident in the behavior of the construction site’s individual concrete slabs. Each slab had collapsed, and the old paving on Red Square protruded from beneath an imaginary, more spiritual (as it then seemed) surface, and every stone whitened swelled and strained, imitating the movement of female breasts.

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A couple of kgb agents, who regularly hung out in holy places, and who seemed peculiarly solitary at this deserted hour, suddenly sensed that they were standing on shaky ground … Something screamed Oh and screeched in the air, and fountains of milk unexpectedly struck the night sky … Meanwhile she kept on calling.59

While the ending of the poem is anticlimactic (Europe and America ignore the calls, and sunrise brings the spree to an end), this rebellion through love becomes the key site for subversion and transformation of reality. The proliferation of the very signifier “love” effects a metamorphosis of dead matter into a living and life-giving entity without depriving it of its assertively material aspects. Moreover, this transformed matter is emphatically endowed with a gendered, female identity. This process results in a collapse of the metaphysical structures of ideological power, with all the transcendent spiritual qualities that this power had claimed for itself. The multiplication of love emerges as a “micropolitical project of resistance”; it becomes a means for constructing an individual utopia, for resistance to entropy and commodification, or even merely for survival (lovemaking is one of the few activities that the totalitarian state – pace Zamiatin’s We – was not able to appropriate completely). Iskrenko emphatically returns to the topic of love over and over again: she ends one of her few television appearances60 with the poem entitled “Zhazhda” (Thirst), where the female addressee is challenged to an act of love so that, “in the midst of pineapples, fountains, stockbrokers, cappuccino and pizza,” the enigmatic Other may be purified and consoled. Strategies of textual and extratextual resistance thus join together to confront the condition of the Soviet postmodern, to challenge its drive of reification – offering, as in the prose poem discussed above, an alternative vision of an animating metamorphosis of the reified social realia represented, in that text, by the stones of Red Square – and, by understanding one’s place within the Soviet postmodern, to work for its change. Iskrenko’s writing is another example of a “visionary, utopian and at times even prophetic quality,” a remarkable force of affirmation and high intensity found in much contemporary women’s creative and theoretical writing. Braidotti emphatically asserts that “women can see the light where men just stare into empty space, watching the downfall of phallic monuments and documents they had erected by and for themselves. Women have something to say – failing to say it would amount to an historical abortion of the female subject.”61 Perhaps very soon Iskrenko’s writing will be seen, at the very least within the Russian cultural tradition, as the cornerstone of this remarkable revolution.

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The writing of Valeria Narbikova (b. 1958), while differing from that of Iskrenko in many respects (to my knowledge, the two writers have never publicly acknowledged affinity between their creative strategies and concerns), nevertheless demonstrates a remarkable continuity with the textual concerns and preoccupations discussed above. Narbikova is a writer who focuses on textuality and corporeality (and sexuality) and whose literary works stand as a peculiar amalgam of these elements. Her free-floating, antiteleological, rhizomatic texts concern themselves – from the earliest published Ravnovesie sveta dnevnykh i nochnykh zvezd (Equilibrium of diurnal and nocturnal starlight)62 to the most recent piece, “… i puteshestvie” (… and a journey, 1996)63 – with the life of the text and the life as text, the life as an active transformation into a text organized as virtually a textbook case of écriture feminine as understood by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Narbikova’s texts, similarly to Cixous’s writing as discussed by, among others, Toril Moi, appear to “encourage non-linear forms of reading”64 by their repetitive wave-like flow. Narbikova’s texts instantiate Irigaray’s vision of otherness and multiplicity of feminine textuality,65 affirming Irigaray’s assertions that a writing woman is infinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious … not to mention her language, in which “she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand … She steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished … When she returns, it is to set off again from elsewhere. From another moment of pleasure, or of pain. One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an “other meaning” always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. For if “she” says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she means. What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon).66

Narbikova’s writing offers one of the most productive and challenging cases of Russian postmodernist writing: by appropriating and reworking many of the aspects of postmodern sensibility through her peculiar textual mode, she has produced an exquisite and fascinating textual body. This textual body is notably metatextual and palimpsestic. As one writer of the Soviet postmodern generation has asserted, “the only meaning that can be convincing today is the one that breaks through the chaos, through

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the ‘excessive,’ through the parasitic. If we want to dance towards the nonvulgarized (neoposhlennaia) reality, we have to represent first in full volume today’s cacophony of ‘bad sense.’ And the future of our culture is exactly the cacophony organized in different ways, the palimpsest.”67 The notion of palimpsest provides a useful metaphor for the postmodern cultural production. For “a parchment or other writing material written upon twice, … a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing,” as palimpsest is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, is an apt description of the postmodern text, which is at all times conscious of being only another layer among the many layers of culture’s texts. The narrator of Narbikova’s Ravnovesie (Equilibrium) at one point meditates upon this condition: An expired palm tree lay nearby, but there was no one to sing its praises because its poet had died. Otherwise the poet would have written: so, palm tree, you’ve been torn from your sisters and carried off to a distant, frigid land, and now you lie alone on foreign soil. In that dead poet’s place was another one, a living poet, but he was worse. Beneath his text you could sense the subtext of the former. No, not some sort of secondary meaning, but a subtext in the literal sense, that which lies beneath the text. Beneath this new text lay the perfectly distinguishable text of the dead poet.68

The passage purposefully evokes in the reader’s memory an earlier cultural text (in this particular case, the poetry of Lermontov) that the memory has partially effaced. From this passage, one can attempt to reconstruct, much like philologists do with ancient palimpsest parchments, the motifs of Lermontov’s “Tri pal’my” (Three palm trees) and “Na severe dikom stoit odinoko …” (Far up North there stands, all alone …): the reader of postmodern writing is thus involved in an archeological enterprise. These scraps and layers of earlier writing and of language itself appear withered and hollow, generating a manifest Lyotardian “incredulity towards metanarratives.”69 The very words that comprise these (meta)narratives appear inflated; quotation marks, ubiquitous in contemporary writing, seem to become the only possible escape from words’ mythologizing power, as, for example, in the following passage from Narbikova’s Okolo ekolo (Near ecolo): It’s a city fall like … if it’s fall, then what kind is it? The “beautiful” sun, moving across a “luxuriously blue” sky, shone its rays straight down onto dirt that had been turned up: potholes, boards, pieces of paper swollen from rain. And the wind,

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going over the garbage dumpsters in a “slight” gust, showered the pavement with watermelon rinds, fruit pits, and apple cores – the “generous” gifts of fall. It is not like winter, when garbage, frozen into the ground and covered with a “thin layer of snow,” weakly sprouts “early” growth, but precisely fall, which is so “bountiful.” And the day is pumped full of sounds, each of which is a “triumph” of conscious “human” activity: the sounds of trolleys and trams, which “celebrate” the “power” of “humankind,” that of which “humans” are capable on this “beautiful” “sunny” “morning” at the end of the twentieth century.70

At first merely registering the narrator’s irony, the quotation marks around words gradually completely overtake the verbal flow, finally presenting the reader with a “‘beautiful’ ‘sunny’ ‘morning.’” Of special significance are the quotation marks around “‘power’ of ‘humankind’” registering the symptomatic disbelief in the abilities of humanity. Language, however, constitutes literature’s last resort, the only thing that it can claim as “its own.” In the postmodern epoch, literature increasingly becomes a reflection about language and a representation of language’s self-reflection. The quotation marks in a postmodern text can serve as a means of “decolonisation of [cultural] codes and of language itself.”71 This novel form of politicization of language spills over into casual overtly political invectives that crop up in Narbikova’s texts, serving as evidence that at times postmodern writing is not at all afraid of calling a spade a spade. She frequently brings up burning issues of Soviet (and post-Soviet) existence, such as the absurdity of the organization of society’s basic functions and its disastrous ecological consequences as well as the perilous projects of “transformation of nature” – an obsession of the totalitarian regime – and their outcome: In no other corner of the earth did the earth change so rapidly. Only in our land can you walk on earth at the bottom of the sea, and look at a marine fleet in the middle of a desert. We build canals not for the sake of water, but for the sake of geometry, it’s nothing else but a theorem: two parallel canals do not intersect, q.e.d. People plant vineyards, here they are chopped down, everywhere humans live, here they are becoming extinct, that’s why everywhere life goes on, and here it seethes.72

All these problems culminate in the collapse of the official ideology – and with it, of Soviet civilization in toto: Petia and Boris left the restaurant to the sounds of an orchestra playing something that may well have been the anthem of the Soviet Union. The backdrop against which they were human beings was a street, and it was inconsequential that it was

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Gorky Street, because what was Gorky today had been Tverskaya yesterday and would be Lah-lah tomorrow, and everything would end and everything would change, and the only thing that would remain would be beauty (the landmark examples of art and architecture) – no, only love would remain, as the poet said; and he was speaking the truth, and since the time when he said this – a hundred years later – love has remained while revolution has come and gone, leaving behind flags, prisons and monuments, and the cult came and went, leaving behind monuments that were like prisons (and not at all like landmark examples of art and architecture), and what will be left tomorrow? flags?73

Narbikova’s most ambitious work, the trilogy Okolo ekolo (Near ecolo),74 contains as its main theme the relationship of the artist to the state, represented in the lives of the heroine’s two beloved – Boris, a sculptor, and Gleb Il. I., a poet – and also in the figures of Sverchok (i.e., Pushkin) and n.z. (i.e., Zabolotsky). Critics have noted75 that in the trilogy, the themes of cultural intertextuality, characteristic of Narbikova, coexist with contemporary political realia; language and the empirical reality interweave in the tissue of the narrative: in the second part, the plot revolves around a republic that decides to secede from the Union, and in the third, the characters write a collective letter to Gorbachev. The sad dictum found by the reader in the second part, “whoever had been a nobody became everything, and whoever had been somebody ceased to exist” (“kto byl nichem, tot stal vsem, a kto byl kem-to, togo ne stalo”)76 – a transformation of a line from Eugène Potier’s “Internationale” – sounds like the pronouncement of a 1970s dissident; however, it seems almost to drown in the textual environment of “excess” and “bad sense.” However, this does not deny its presence in the text; rather, it is now up to the reader to discover it in the text’s labyrinth, holding on to his/her Ariadne’s thread on the way through its labyrinth: the reader cannot foretell what awaits him/her behind the corner, on the next page. Another aspect of interaction of the aesthetic and the political that the reader encounters in the second part of Okolo ekolo is something that would be equally nightmarish for Plato and Walter Benjamin: messengers of the republic that decided to secede invite Gleb Il. I. to become its new leader, for they want to construct a state that is aesthetically perfect, like a poem: “we are establishing a republic that would be perfect in its form and content like a poem that can be perfect in its form and content, and the laws must be so significant in their content, so much so that they be perfect in their form.”77 Thus the republic decides to undertake the aesthetization of the state and the political – a gesture that fits the black irony of Jameson’s remark:

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“Benjamin … thought it meant fascism,78 but we know it’s only fun.”79 “But this is absurd!” cries out Gleb Il. I. in reply, “absurd in verse isn’t so bad, but absurd in life is worse” (“no eto zhe absurd! Absurd v stikhakh— ne tak plokho, absurd v zhizni—eto khuzhe”). However, the late Soviet Empire seems to offer an example of precisely such an aesthetization of reality,80 using the aesthetics of the absurd – the narrator of Ravnovesie (Equilibrium) calls it the style a lia liurs (i.e., à la l’URSS ).81 Many works of Russian (as well as other ex-Soviet) postmodern writing seem to be engaged in a twofold project: to represent this style à la l’URSS and at the same time to attack, deconstruct, refute it, mobilizing what Jameson calls “the offensive features of the postmodern revolt”: “obscurity … sexually explicit material … overt expression of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism.”82 A common manifestation of such defiance is the bringing together of a formal structure and a verbal content that the tradition views as “improper” – a strategy emphatically asserted by the narrator of Ravnovesie: “And if Otmatfeian wants to write poetry, then let him put some shit into a transparent sonnetic form, and let the form pat you on the head and the content grate on your ear. Maybe then this disharmony will make heads spin, and the world will quit standing on its head, and everything will move into its place, and love will be love, and you won’t need additional steroids, you won’t need the next exhibition, or the next bruise, in order to confess your love to the sounds of a march.”83 The sexual element in the corporeal/textual amalgam of Narbikova’s writing likewise plays the role of a shocker, which accounts for abundant inclusion in her texts of scenes with sexual content (although always coded: the genitalia are never explicitly named). For this reason, she was instantly and wrongly labelled a writer of erotica.84 Upon some deciphering, the reader does identify rather graphic descriptions of sexual acts;85 more often, however, they are transformed into philosophical meditations, as at the beginning of Okolo ekolo, or they become the means for constructing an individual utopia or for expressing defiance – compare Iskrenko’s “Kak perezhit’ etu noch’” (How to live through this night) discussed above – as on the final pages of Ravnovesie. The latter novel to a significant extent is constructed of scenes of lovemaking – perhaps the only available escape – on the ruins of the empire. The eschatological theme of the disintegration of the empire runs through all of Narbikova’s œuvre, most importantly in the key image of the black hole: “why must one sit down on a toilet in some special way so that it doesn’t rock, that’s because in our land

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the toilet hasn’t yet been born, it’s still in an embryonic stage, only endless holes are gaping all over Russia, black holes plus the electrification of the entire country.”86 We thus arrive at the definition of the dying empire: it is a conglomerate of black holes, which are nothing else but embryos of toilets (or the other way round?), “plus electrification of the entire country,” part of Lenin’s “formula of socialism.” Another text by Narbikova, “Ad kak Da aD kak dA” (Hell as yes helL as yeS), ends with the characters being eaten up by a black hole located in the field of Borodino, site of the key battle of Napoleon’s war with Russia in 1812. The only redeeming quality of the disintegrating empire seems to be that it is “bad life for the sake of good texts” (“plokhaia zhizn’ radi khoroshikh tekstov”).87 Apart from love, text (i.e., writing) seems to be the only available escape: “in the end there will be the word, as in the beginning there was the word, and the word was everything” (“v kontse budet slovo, kak i v nachale bylo slovo, i slovo bylo vse”)88 – hence writing, continuous writing to justify, to prolong, to fill one’s existence, for the written text is what shall remain after us: So, what remains is the text, naked and uncovered, after the flood not a drop remained, not one plank from the ark nor one shinbone from Noah, but the text remained, and from us there shall remain a text as proof that we existed … This other reality (the text) cannot contain within itself the other reality (life), even if you roll it up and push it in since this life is ours, here with us, while the text comes after us … Everything that is so good in life is bad in the text, and everything that is bad in life is good in the text; this dynamic text can be swallowed with such ease whereas you choke on this dynamic life, all the very best goes into it, just barely squeeze a teardrop into the text after a night of tears and the teardrop will appear ridiculous, though crying is not ridiculous, and on top of that it materializes, the text, it has horns and a tail and it creeps into life on hooves, but that’s no big deal to it, it has no heart, its pancreas doesn’t hurt, nor its tooth, it’s a tough nut, the text, and not a simple mechanism.89

As we see, toward the end of this meditation about the nature of the text, the latter acquires its own materiality – it has hooves, horns, and a tail, but not a heart (so is the text a devil?) – and it leads its own independent existence; moreover, it invades the domain of life, redoubles it, remaining fundamentally different and incompatible with it. However, according to the narrator, life in its entirety, struggling with the text’s effort to encompass all reality, refuses to enter the textual structure, so we

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arrive again at the postmodern text, with its “depthlessness” and “noise of excess,” the text that deceives the reader while attracting him/her deeper into the labyrinth with its glimmering light. The textual universe of language transforms the world of the Real by naming it. The activity of naming has fascinated humanity since its early days, for it seems to possess uncanny powers; it can give life to an object but can also kill it: “Naming kills. To call the stomach a stomach is to kill the stomach. It’s a dangerous area, where the name of an object is born, you mustn’t go there, people mustn’t look there, only from a bird’s eye view, from the top row of a stadium.”90 However, humans continuously engage in this dangerous activity of naming, and each act of naming produces a universe of its own – the postmodern epoch intensely perceives the Earth as Babel (multiple languages, multiple worlds): And the name of an object recedes from the object like last year’s snow, goes into the earth, flows into the Black Sea, that’s why there are so many languages, that’s why! to give an object a name in a hundred, a thousand languages, so that the names (languages) mutually exclude one another and the object is again left without a name, since if there were one language for us all and if everyone called a table “a table,” it would be too serious, if precisely that combination of sounds – t-a-b-le – characterized that four-legged matter, but since there are a thousand languages and a table, as matter, is la table, and stol, and muk-muk, then the rules of the game, that in our tribe this thingy is called a table, are acceptable, but only as the rules of the game and only in our tribe! … language is man’s handiwork, in language he sleeps and sees, indeed, thinks … man was obviously taught language by other people, but they were some sort of amateur inventors, not mama, language is completely unnatural for man and, if a person ends up completely alone for good, he’ll forget language entirely, but while man lives among people … he’ll force his way through his language to speak as distinctively as possible of the heart, with a distinct combination of sounds, so that every person will understand instantly with his own eyes, ears and heart that he’s referring to the heart.91

In this passage the narrator of Ravnovesie continuously oscillates between an indictment and a vindication of language. In fact, what the reader encounters here is the return of the age-long philosophical problem of the relation of the world of language and the world of noumena, whose history one can trace from Plato’s Cratylus. Writing as performing the activity of naming has another aspect: naming as giving birth to the characters in the text. The names of Narbikova’s characters at first seem accidental, precisely an expression of rejection of

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the necessity of the name’s referentiality, or, rather, the names in fact possess a referent, but this referent seems to be a dead end, a false clue, a distraction for the reader. However, the reader soon uncovers an apparently consistent system of names: many of them refer to the Christian tradition, like Otmatfeian, from ot Matfeia; St Matthew’s Gospel, Avvakum; the name of the leader of Russian Old Believers; Boris and Gleb, the names of two brothers, the first Rus’ martyr saints; the name Sana evokes osanna (hosannah) and santa (saint); the name Irra, which, besides being a direct reference to “irrational,” alludes to the Biblical Sarrah, who was given the second “r” in her name by God as the sign of being chosen; the self-explanatory Angel; Lzhedmitry, the false Dmitry, alluding to Russian history; and finally two characters with names evoking the inescapable Russian cultural pair, Dodostoevsky (“Ur-Dostoevsky”) and Toest’lstoy (“i.e., Tolstoy”). There are, of course, some puzzling names, like Ezdandukta, which is perhaps onomatopoeic. The name Petrarka (shortened to Petia) alludes to Petrarch, but also plays with gender boundaries, for it turns out to be the name of a female character. Finally, the name of one of the characters can perhaps serve as a symbol of the activity of naming itself: Чящяжышын (Chiashchiazhyshyn), the name that deliberately breaks the rules of Russian orthography only to come closer to the actual pronounced sound.92 Narbikova’s writing continuously combines postmodernist strategies of subversion with the foregrounding of gender-based concerns. Through decentralization of the narrative, fragmentation of the subject, and a refusal to be pinned down to a definitive singular interpretation, her texts, similarly to those of Iskrenko, work against the foundations of patriarchy, metaphorical unity and singularity, and the reign of binary oppositions. In his essay “Feminine Antinomies,” Oleg Dark recounts how Narbikova criticized his project of analyzing contemporary women’s writing in terms of binary oppositions (between Tolstaya and Petrushevskaya, Sadur and Vaneyeva, etc.) and confesses that he failed to fit Narbikova’s writing into such a binary scheme.93 Narbikova’s texts, engaging in what Dark has called the “re-creation (peresozdanie) of reality,”94 enact a deconstruction of one of the fundamental binary oppositions, that of gender difference, a deconstruction performed within the two elements of Narbikova’s world, love and language. The element of love transcends the boundaries of gender95 (grammatical and otherwise), as in the following passage from the third part of Okolo ekolo: “They embraced for an infinitely long time, and at the end of this infinity, after the final result, at the journey’s end, when the day waned,

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they expressed themselves, and it turned out that he loved her, and she loved him, they loved he, and they loved she, and it loved it.”96 In a similar fashion, the element of language exposes the arbitrariness of gender designations, becomes “the materialization of gender crossing,” which Narbikova explores in the following passage from Ravnovesie, which plays with the grammatical gender of Russian words designating inanimate objects: Outside the window there was a sexless moon, and the sexless rain was approaching climax. It could have climaxed at any second, but found it pleasant “not to” … The rain was a “he” for the convenience of people, and a star was a “she,” also for their convenience, not its own, and the sun was an “it” for …, but up there, they had their own relationships. The rain changed its sex for another in a different language, and the sun changed its sex in a different language; the moon, which is also luna, changed its sex in the same language. A sex change. Language was somehow the materialization of sex change. Human relations exposed sex, and the change of sex, and this revealed itself in the language. But when language itself determined the sex of the elements, forces, and luminous bodies, their relations followed from the language. The wind chased off a flock of clouds. Star conversed with a star. The hermaphroditic Russian sun set beyond the androgynous Russian sea for a long spell.97

Narbikova’s texts also exercise a critique of the gender dynamics in the Russian literary canon, so much embedded in the idea of writing as a masculine activity. At some points, the narrator’s tone becomes openly sarcastic: At the institute a seminar was going on, devoted to the work of a male writer who was Kostroma’s classmate and a female poet who was Petia’s classmate, and the seminar was led by a young male critic, already about to graduate, who said right away that when the heroine of a story is referred to by her last name and the hero by his first name, that’s very bad, and it’s better when the heroine is referred to by her first name and the hero by his last name, and it’s better still when the heroine is referred to not by her full name but by a diminutive one, like Tania instead of Tatiana. This proved to be the most engaging topic because no one said anything on any other topic. And only at the very end did someone say that the young poet’s work had a manly strength to it, and then in parting someone called her an accomplished poet.98

In this passage the reader is presented with a scene standard for the Russian literary tradition: a male critic assigns the female character and the female writer a subordinate place. We learn from him that female

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characters should be called by their first names, and preferably diminutive (Tania), thus reinforcing women’s imprisonment within the boundaries of the domestic and the denial for them of a public role and reducing them to childlike existence. Poetry is also regarded as a fundamentally male occupation, and a woman poet is paid (apparently by the same critic or his associate) the rather shocking (and – alas! – rather frequent in the Soviet and post-Soviet context) compliment that one can feel in her poems genuine “masculine” strength, which makes her a full-fledged poet. One can understand why this “seminar” made the female protagonist sick. While Narbikova’s writing is not as centrally preoccupied with the mode of figuration that I have described in my discussion of Iskrenko’s writing (on the contrary, the reader is confronted with active subversion and erosion of “Big Names” as such), we encounter some similar efforts at revision and reappropriation of some figures from the male-dominated canon of Russian literature. Narbikova too takes up that archetypal coupling of a patriarchally dominant male writer and his female character: Tolstoy and Anna Karenina – which Iskrenko used in her poem “Dorogaia razden’sia do poiasa …” (Strip to the waist dear …). Narbikova’s version goes as follows: “All this was so terrible that Anna Karenina should immediately have jumped in front of the train which she was riding to see Vronsky when she was late to see him – and not only should she have jumped, but she should have jumped together with Vronsky’s mother, who was riding with her, so she would not be tormented by her throughout the course of the novel and so Vronsky would be left without Anna from the very beginning and could grieve for her throughout the whole novel and not just in the last chapter.”99 The familiar plot collapses due to the displacement of the suicide scene; Anna, the protagonist, escapes the tribulations that Tolstoy makes her go through, and Vronsky gets the largest share in the novel’s economy of suffering. Playful and daring, at times seemingly naive, at times ready to pronounce in-your-face invectives, yet, again, subtly saturating her texts with desire, balancing on the verge of the corporeal and the textual, Narbikova has consistently puzzled most Russian critics, who were at a loss when looking for analogies for her writing. There is, however, a surprising similarity between the writing of Narbikova and that of a woman author who for various reasons remained virtually unknown in the Russian tradition: Gertrude Stein.100 This remarkable author, whom Jameson calls an “astonishing genealogical precursor of postmodernism,” an “outright postmodernist avant la lettre,”101 developed a manner of writing strikingly similar to Narbikova’s weaving of writing, living, and loving: long, repetitive, alliterative sentences (writing as the means of prolonging existence; writing governed by a general economy

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of expenditure, excess); rejection of the centred narrative; development of a writing style that seems to meet all the criteria for considering it feminine writing. Both Narbikova and Stein can be seen as eroticizing the act of writing itself (Narbikova’s sexualized texts thus parallel such works by Stein as “Lifting Belly” or some sections of Tender Buttons). The now famous opening passage of Narbikova’s Ravnovesie would look surprisingly “Steinian” to a scholar of Anglo-American literature: She wanted you-know-what with you-know-whom. But “you-know-who” didn’t call, although who-knows-who did. Outside there was who-knows-what. Yesterday they had forecast something and it was doing what they had forecast. All three sheets to the wind where free of snow, but there was a robber in Arabia, the robber Barabia, the robber Barabbia, the robber Barabbas. And all the other people were killing those who have adapted in order somehow to adapt themselves (birds and beasts are well-adapted from the very beginning; people from the very beginning are poorly adapted). Beasts are born in caps and coats, in little houses with tubs and toilets, and people spend their whole lives in search of caps and coats and little houses with tubs and toilets.102

Narbikova’s female protagonists find a parallel in Stein’s Ida, the protagonist of the novel by the same name (1941), whose life at first seems to be nothing else but gliding over the surface of existence, periodically getting married; however, much like Narbikova’s female characters, Ida possesses a gift of being able to transform (peresozdat’) this reality through her vision, her meditation on the order of things: she sees signs. That these women see signs and read signs and construct their existence out of living, remembering, and reflecting upon these signs makes them able to undertake a critique of the hierarchized modern world. Their writing habits, which are strikingly similar – Stein was and Narbikova is known to write in hand, producing fragile, almost illegible texts that require immediate retyping; Iskrenko, notably, also once referred to herself as “an author who writes quite a lot and [is] simply a disorganized woman” (“avtor, pishushchii dovol’no mnogo, i prosto … bezalabernaia zhenshchina”)103 – can be interpreted as another factor enabling them to undertake their critical projects, another aspect of resistance to the dogmas of patriarchy and unitary teleology.104 In his survey of contemporary Russian literature, Deming Brown writes about Narbikova: What we have in the stories of Narbikova is a strange, subjective amalgam of fragmentary erotic and linguistic musings, interlarded with sometimes girlishly

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naive, sometimes impressively perceptive speculations on the phenomena of time and space and on human nature. Occasionally her verbal texture and her small, idiosyncratic intellectual games are delightful. Her treatment of sexual themes, however, seems purely intellectual, designed to shock, perhaps to impress, but scarcely to seduce. One suspects that until she is able to fit the bits and pieces of her lively, imaginative world into a discernible system, Narbikova will remain a writer of unfulfilled potential.105

Such reading of Narbikova’s texts is symptomatic: while Brown apparently approves of Narbikova’s work, his laments about the lack of systematic organization in her writerly universe demonstrate that he misses the determining features of her project: the refusal of “masculine” Aristotelian logic and rigid textual organization is a key aspect of Narbikova’s – and Iskrenko’s – writing: indeed, sometimes it is important to be a “sloppy woman writer” (“pisatel’nitsa neakkuratnaia”).106 The powerful “infidel” heteroglossia, the rhizome of oppositionality that results from this project, is perhaps the most effective tool for anti-phallogocentric transcoding of the world now available to us.

5 The End of House Arrest Queerness and Textuality in Contemporary Russia

In the previous chapter, I considered the unprecedented attention to issues of gender and corporeality in contemporary Russian culture and the remarkable flourishing of new Russian women’s writing – particularly those forms that appeal to the strategies of challenging and subverting the established paradigms of patriarchy, simultaneously with a postmodern project of investigation and active elaboration of an alternative set of coordinating legacies and figurations – as one of the key aspects of the cultural paradigm shift associated with the postmodern era. Now, I would like to continue my project of mapping the salient features of Second World postmodern culture by turning to the unprecedented renaissance of textual representation and self-representation of possibly the most stigmatized and oppressed minority group in contemporary Russia: gays and lesbians. After many years of harsh repression of homosexuals and public silence on homosexuality in Russia, the nation’s opening to cultural globalization initiated a swift and far-reaching change in the society’s attitudes to homosexuality, which began losing its status as a taboo topic (present since the 1930s) in 1987 and slowly but surely attracted the attention of the media and the broad public. The movement for gay and lesbian rights in Russia scored its major victory in 1993, with the repeal of the Soviet-era article of the criminal code that punished consensual acts between adult males with imprisonment and hard labour. The progress in the sphere of social tolerance, if relatively slow and beset by many troubles, has been evident in statistical surveys of public opinion.1

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All of these accomplishments notwithstanding, Russia remains one of the most hostile countries to gays, lesbians, and other queers. Few prominent cultural and political figures have come out or have shown open support for the cause of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender rights, and virulently homophobic attitudes are frequently voiced through mass media outlets.2 In this chapter, I explore the prevalent uses of the topic of homosexuality within the literary realm. Needless to say, they have frequently been problematic. One clear achievement is the republication of gay and lesbian writing from the past, particularly from the early twentieth century. By now, almost all of the prose and poetry by Russia’s greatest gay writer of the Silver Age, Mikhail Kuzmin, has been made available to the readers in his home country. The work by the Silver Age lesbian authors, such as Sophia Parnok, has also been reaching the readers, if more slowly.3 However, if we look at the representations and discursive uses of homosexuality in contemporary Russian letters, the picture is markedly different. While there have emerged several gay or gay-friendly literary periodicals,4 so far they have been reaching a relatively small audience. The broader reading public is more likely to be familiar with the discussions and depictions of homosexuality that have been appearing with an increasing frequency in work of comparatively more “mainstream” writers, both “traditionalists” and “avowed postmodernists.” Among them, Viktor Erofeyev, Vladimir Sorokin, Vasily Aksyonov, and Vladimir Makanin can be singled out for devoting considerable attention to this subject, if for greatly varying reasons. For instance, in the writing of Sorokin, whose techniques of shock I discussed in the second chapter, the troubling aspect lies in his lumping together all the phenomena that heretofore have been “unspeakable”: the same nauseating effect is expected from depictions of eating excrement, body mutilations, cannibalism, child molestation, and homosexuality. In such stories as “Delovoe predlozhenie” (A businesslike proposal) and “Pominal’noe slovo” (A funeral speech),5 homosexual content finds itself coupled with cold and matter-of-fact descriptions of bodies chopped up and people hanged – these phenomena are presented as part of the same series. Omnivorous transgression for transgression’s sake, practiced by Sorokin, for all its “postmodernness,” while doing the job of deconstructing the language and practices of Soviet totalitarian culture, thus reinforces this culture’s venomous homophobia. Yet another text by Sorokin, “Dorozhnoe proisshestvie” (A road accident), includes an “elegy” in iambic trimeter, where cliché images of sadness and autumnal dying of nature overflow with words such as “sperm,” “menstrual,” “fellatio,” “abortion,” “tampax,” “frigidity,” and so on, with such images as “the universe’s

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clitoris” (“vselenskii klitor”), “libidinal dawns” (“libidoznye zori”), “the scrota of being” (“moshonki bytiia”), and so forth culminating in “the star of blind lesbianism is shining, and anal love rules over silence” (“svetitsia zvezda slepogo lesbiianstva, i pravit tishinoi anal’naia liubov’”).6 While to some extent this nonsensical poem might be amusing, it provides one more proof of the troubled organization of images in Sorokin’s work: for him “lesbianism” is nothing but another taboo word to throw in. Despite performing the project of “revealing an internal similarity” of diverse totalitarian discourses (implying a potential liberatory use),7 Sorokin’s texts thus effectively reify one of their repressive strategies. A more subtle, but ultimately analogous case of such textual functioning of homosexuality is offered in Sorokin’s novel Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s thirtieth love, written 1984).8 Marina’s lesbianism signifies transgression par excellence; it fascinates much like political dissidence, and its place in the narrative machinery is subordinated to this paradigm. Marina’s present sexual orientation is portrayed as resulting from several traumatic experiences with men in her childhood: first, she witnesses her mother having sex with a man other than her father, then her father rapes her and subsequently kills himself. While credit should be given to Sorokin for such foregrounding of child abuse, unprecedented in Russian literature, the direct causal link that he posits between these childhood experiences and the subsequent same-sex orientation of the protagonist is troubling. It is also notable that even to bring in homosexuality as a topic, Sorokin feels compelled to sugarcoat the pill, so to speak. The novel opens with a s(t)eamy heterosexual sex scene, in which Marina takes part for an unclear reason: she does not enjoy it, nor does she do it for money. The novel’s climax is constituted by Marina’s dream, structured homologously to the other famous dreams of Russian female chracters (Pushkin’s Tat’iana in Eugene Onegin and Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in What Is to Be Done?). Marina’s twenty-nine female lovers pass before her, and a voice tells her that she never truly loved any of them, that her one true love still awaits her – and this love will be a man. The novel’s subversive gesture is that the “right man” who “cures” Marina of her lesbianism happens to be a factory party committee secretary. In the sex scene with him, she achieves orgasm when the radio comes on at six in the morning playing the Soviet anthem – which serves as a miraculous experience that transforms Marina into an exemplary character in a socialist-realist “production novel” of the classic variety of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Thus Sorokin’s signature transgression in this novel moves in the direction opposite to that of his other works. If usually a simulacrum of a cliché Soviet text breaks down

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into the unspeakable physical transgression and then into delirium, here the “dissident text” breaks down into its own taboo – socialist-realist kitsch, with the role of final delirium taken by what appears to be a faithful transcription of programma “Vremia,” the evening news program on Channel One of Soviet tv. The novel as a whole is a stunning tour de force, stylistically brilliant and often quite funny; its use of homosexuality, however, like elsewhere in Sorokin’s writing, reinscribes the society’s oppressive and discriminatory attitudes. Viktor Erofeyev, a member of the same literary circle as Sorokin and another influential contemporary Russian writer who invokes the theme of homosexuality in his work, also constructs his texts through several “signature devices.” As I noted in the third chapter, in a number of his works, he creates a subtle pastiche of different styles and epochs; these narratives frequently resist identification with a particular point in time or space, and they are by far the most interesting works that Erofeyev has produced. Additionally, all of his fiction includes a significant amount of sexual content (one could speculate that the author fashions himself as a kind of Russian Henry Miller). However, these sexual scenes are clearly presented from a heterosexist and male point of view: descriptions of homosexual acts are added ostensibly for shock value, as in the short story “Zhizn’ s idiotom” (Life with an idiot),9 where an intelligentsia family takes in from an asylum to live with them a mute and mentally handicapped man who looks suspiciously like Lenin. Over the course of time, he first destroys books and furniture in the apartment, then has sex with the wife for a few days, then with the husband, and then cuts the wife’s head off – with the husband having an orgasm during the scene. At the end, the husband, who has gone mad himself, is picked from the same asylum by a Western man who turns him into a sex slave.10 Another story, “Popugaichik” (The parakeet),11 discussed in greater detail earlier in the present study, is a parable sui generis about the dark pages of despotism and totalitarianism in Russian history that includes frank and matter-of-fact depictions of a teenage boy being raped, of him having his testicles cut off, and of the narrator/executioner having an orgasm. Yet another story by Erofeyev, “Podrugi” (Girlfriends),12 uses the depiction of a lesbian relationship for the same purpose of shock value and also as a source of pleasure for the heterosexual male voyeur. The story portrays a relationship between a recently widowed Russian intelligentsia woman and an American academic who, having quarrelled with her husband, came to Russia for a year-long research trip. It is narrated by a Russian man who is in love with the American, Susie, which does not preclude him from

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recounting the scene of Susie seducing her Russian friend, Liza (to my knowledge the first description of women sucking on each other’s toes in Russian literature).13 However, even when these women make love to each other in Erofeyev’s text, the pleasure is in the eye of the (heterosexual male) beholder – the story’s next paragraph “cuts” to the narrator mentally undressing Liza as he watches her going up the stairs. The lesbian scenes in Erofeyev’s bestseller Russkaia krasavitsa (Russian beauty, written 1980– 82), a first-person narrative of the life of an upscale Russian prostitute, perform the same function (even the pattern is similar: Irina’s girlfriend is a rich expatriate married to a Frenchman). In sum, Erofeyev’s use of lesbians falls into the worst paradigm of exploitative heterosexual pornography. Other recognized Russian authors who have devoted attention to homosexuality in their work, such as the realist-leaning Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Makanin, display a more tolerant and sensitive approach to the topic. Still, as Anatoly Vishevsky notes in his study of this theme in their writing, in the end “Aksyonov punishes his characters with death not for indulging in the sin of sodomy, but for breaking away from the prescribed literary convention, the stereotype”; in Makanin’s text, the characters’ encounter with homoerotic desire likewise ends with death. In their texts, as Vishevsky notes, “the gay ‘other’ … functions as a defamiliarizing element, forcing readers to change their perspective” and builds up the dramatic tension in the text.14 Still, that these writers “kill off” their queerly desiring characters evidences their discomfort with this issue, comparable to that of much of Western fiction of the pre-Stonewall era, where gay-themed plots inevitably led to the death of the character(s). Aksyonov’s and Makanin’s treatments of homosexuality, however, still constitute an exceptional instance of relative tolerance within the mainstream of contemporary Russian writing. No matter how polarized the contemporary Russian literary scene, writers from opposing camps finds themselves strange bedfellows when it comes to the treatment of homosexuality. If one suggested to Erofeyev and Sorokin, on the one hand, and to Vasily Belov, a leading figure among the so-called “village writers,” who in the 1980s came forth with numerous nationalist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist statements, on the other hand, that they share parts of their ideological outlooks, both sides would be equally scandalized. However, let us consider the attitudes to homosexuality demonstrated in Belov’s Vse vperedi (Everything is ahead, 1986).15 In this novel, Belov – known for his work from the 1960s and 1970s, in which he portrays the traditional lifestyle of Russian peasants of his native Vologda region – produces a spiteful attack on the Moscow intelligentsia. The novel is very

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badly written; its plot is schematic: the good purebred Russian men of peasant background are led to peril by the evil Jews, Freemasons, “liberated” women, and all of the city intelligentsia, corrupted by the evil influence of the West and its “sexual revolution.” It is no surprise, then, that one of the positive characters, Medvedev, the author’s mouthpiece, tells his friend that for him gays and lesbians are the most despicable of all people.16 In the list of people he hates, gays and lesbians are then followed by “the Freemasons”: the alleged Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, for the extreme Russian nationalists of Belov’s ilk, is the root of all of Russia’s misfortunes. Both share their “unspeakability,” and uttering their names in print in the mid-1980s for Belov was clearly an act of transgression. Belov’s case is obviously odious; however, the distance from his spiteful attacks to the depictions of homosexuality for the sake of shock value and “nausea,” considered earlier, is minimal.17 Against the entrenched presence of works like these within the Russian literary landscape, the recent years witnessed an unprecedented powerful counter-tendency, defined by the booming posthumous fame of Evgeny Kharitonov (1941–81), a Russian writer unique not merely for never denying his homosexuality, but also for allowing his sexual orientation to become “the one lens available for looking at the world.”18 Kharitonov’s literary fate stands unparalleled in Russian literary history. He was not able to publish a single line in his lifetime either in the Soviet Union or abroad. Small “gourmet portions” of his work were published first abroad,19 then, beginning in the late 1980s, in his home country. Simon Karlinsky, the pioneer of gay studies in the Slavic field, was perfectly justified in writing in 1989 that “not much is known so far about Yevgeny Kharitonov.”20 Only in 1993 did Kharitonov’s name became famous almost overnight: a two-volume set of his works was published, and he was honoured by a special tribute on 8 November at Moscow’s Tsentral’nyi dom literatora,21 which on this occasion was packed to capacity (a fairly rare sight in contemporary Russia, where the general audience’s interest in literature has declined considerably); finally, an article on the event in one of the leading Russian papers, Nezavisimaia gazeta, referred to him as “one of the most (if not the most) unique and talented among Russian writers; a Russian literary genius.”22 The legacy of this new Russian literary genius, however, remains contested, and interpretations have been either superficial or significantly distorted. A typical example of the Russian literary establishment’s attitude toward Kharitonov can be found in the remarks of Pavel Basinsky, who

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writes: “A lot of Kharitonov’s writing is foul (gadkoe) or … ‘shameful’ (stydnoe) – something that either should have never been written, or, in any case, should not have been published today (or at any time). But there are also some exquisite lines.”23 Many critics followed Basinsky in praising Kharitonov and then hastening to add, “but he didn’t have to write about that.” Even the most open-minded members of the straight literary establishment have had serious trouble “swallowing” Kharitonov’s homosexuality as the foundation of his creativity.24 Several customary strategies of dealing with it have emerged – for example, to divorce Kharitonov the gay man from Kharitonov the writer or to engage in an “apologetic unsexing” of him.25 “Kharitonov’s prose is … overtly homosexual, but this is neither its main asset nor the only one,” wrote Aleksandr Panov, reporting about the November 1993 tribute; he praised those speakers who “had the daring” to declare that Kharitonov’s homosexuality was “fake, or at least naive,” and then lamented the audience’s bad reaction to such assertions. The most prevalent strategy for dealing with the “difficult” subject matter of homosexuality in Kharitonov’s writing among the Russian literati has been to read his works through the prism of those written a good sixty years before Kharitonov’s: those of Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919), the author of texts unprecedented in Russia both in their self-conscious free play with form – particularly in his books Uedinennoe (Solitaria, 1912) and Opavshie list’ia (Fallen leaves, 1913–15) – and in their close attention to matters of sexuality. Rozanov’s texts have exercised strong influence on a number of contemporary Russian writers, but commentators have been particularly persistent in bringing up Rozanov’s name in discussions of Kharitonov, especially when examining the four late texts by Kharitonov written as a series of fragments: “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom” (Tears for the killed and strangled one), “Nep’iushchii russkii” (A Russian who doesn’t drink), “Slezy na tsvetakh” (Teardrops on the flowers), and “V kholodnom vysshem smysle” (In the cold ulterior sense).26 Thus Yaroslav Mogutin, in his editor’s preface to Kharitonov’s collected works, writes: “The work of Rozanov exercised enormous influence on Kharitonov, who in his best works develops the narrative aesthetics … of the books Solitaria and Fallen Leaves … [while] Rozanov’s [nonfiction] book People of the Lunar Light (Liudi lunnogo sveta) was particularly influential in the formation of Kharitonov’s worldview.”27 Untangling the Kharitonov/Rozanov knot requires first turning to the question of the importance of Rozanov’s writing for Russian intellectuals during the late-Soviet period. While officially forbidden and not republished until the late 1980s, Rozanov’s texts were widely read and discussed

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by the intelligentsia. A testament to the high regard in which Rozanov’s writing was held by the Soviet-era Russian intelligentsia is that when Sergei Bocharov, together with the other younger scholars responsible for “rediscovering” Bakhtin in the early 1960s, asked the latter at their first personal meeting what they should read, the answer was “Read Rozanov.”28 For them, an encounter with Rozanov entailed a certain excitement, or even jouissance: his daring views, strong opinions, habit of never mincing words, and veritable talent for contradicting himself and making enemies carried a remarkable freshness and novelty in the post-Thaw years. Some critics have already noted that from the point of view of aesthetics, the connection between Rozanov’s and Kharitonov’s fragmentary writing is problematic. Viktor Erofeyev, for example, writes: “in Kharitonov I immediately read Rozanov and jumped over that … In his small works the influence of Rozanov is obvious. Its presence can also be found, say, in Sinyavsky. But there it is not free, while in Kharitonov it is free. In Sinyavsky this is a borrowing of a device, while in Kharitonov it is a borrowing of freedom. Kharitonov simply chose this device, this key, and developed it.”29 Others, like Nikolai Klimontovich and Aleksandr Gol’dshtein, stress the difference between Kharitonov and Rozanov, which they perceive in the former’s ample polyphony (“the separate fragments are each pronounced in their own voice”)30 and the latter’s monologism. Rozanov thus belongs more to the tradition of fragmentary writing of eighteenth-century French moralists, German Romantics, and Nietzsche, while Kharitonov displays closer affinities to such texts as the sketches in Chekhov’s notebooks as well as to such modernist fragmentary works as Kuzmin’s “Pechka v bane” (A furnace in a bathhouse). Unlike Rozanov’s “philosopher’s musings,” Kharitonov’s fragments are polyphonic and playful, each possessing a tone of its own, very loosely identified with the autobiographical narrator (which is what brings them close to the sketches in Chekhov’s notebooks – mininarratives, embryos of stories, overheard remarks). Of all the viewpoints stressing the similarity between Kharitonov and Rozanov, that of Dmitry Prigov is probably the most nuanced. He writes: “since the time of Rozanov there hasn’t been in our literature an example of such intimate/ marginal way of existing within art, which demands resolution of contemporary problems of literature and language on the ultimately and challengingly sincere level and material of personal life.”31 I believe that Prigov is correct here but only in part. Kharitonov, indeed, took up filtering the text through the intimate, personal experience of himself as a discrete individual. But simultaneously with this technique – and this has been the overwhelming reason for the unease of critical reactions to his work from

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within the Russian literary establishment – he did perceive himself, as I shall try to demonstrate below, as a spokesperson of an underrepresented (indeed, unrepresented) social group: gay people. Kharitonov courageously chose this path, although this made him even more acutely aware that his status was that of unpublishable writer (note Basinsky’s remark quoted earlier that much of Kharitonov’s work “should never have been published”). Even those who claim to sincerely admire his work object to the subject matter of homosexuality. Evgeny Popov, for example, writes: “It seems to me the book would only gain if he removed the most ‘propagandist,’ as it were, of his writings, for instance, ‘A Leaflet’ (Listovka), if he crossed out the ‘hard-core’ paragraphs, words or sentences, introduced irony, a smile, distanced himself at the right time.”32 He is seconded by Igor’ Yarkevich, who declares that “the unabashedly homosexual pages seem to [him] the weakest part of Kharitonov’s heritage.”33 Reading these condescendingly homophobic remarks in the portfolio of critical writings on Kharitonov that is appended to his collected works may feel strange, but they provide a sobering contextualization for Kharitonov’s textual practices. However, in a way, their flaunted homophobia is easier to confront than the no-less-prolific pseudo-theoretical speculations about Kharitonov’s sexuality’s filtering into his aesthetic. To tackle them, we once again need to turn to Rozanov. It is Rozanov’s unorthodox views on sexuality, extensively presented in his work, that made him scandalously popular in his lifetime (and served as one of the key reasons for the ban on his work later on). It would be a thankless task to summarize as a consistent theory his extremely selfcontradictory pronouncements on the subject – a trap that Laura Engelstein to a degree walks into in the chapter on Rozanov in her otherwise excellent volume The Keys to Happiness.34 However, it would be safe to say that his was a very affirmative view of sex as such, and he repeatedly attacks those institutions that propagate the ideology of chastity and abstinence. His famous remark that his books are written not with ink or even blood, but with sperm, repeated twice in Opavshie list’ia (Fallen leaves), provides ample evidence of his valorization of sex.35 Thus it was with the agenda of critiquing the ideologies valuing chastity and abstinence that Rozanov wrote his highly speculative nonfiction volume Liudi lunnogo sveta (People of the lunar light, 1911, rev. 1913), which until recently remained the only influential book-length study of the topic of homosexuality in Russia. Karlinsky, in his article for Gay Sunshine on the history of homosexuality in Russia, remarks that Rozanov did not personally know any homosexuals and engaged in Liudi lunnogo sveta in pure abstract theorizing, as a result

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of which a number of remarkable insights are continuously mixed with exceedingly bizarre ideas.36 Of course, Rozanov did personally know homosexuals, Dmitry Filosofov being but one of the many gay intellectuals with whom he was fairly closely acquainted, but it is true that Liudi lunnogo sveta in its entirety is far removed from Rozanov’s personal experiences. Indeed, about half of the book is taken up by lengthy quotations from various (mostly obscure) sources and Rozanov’s polemical comments on them, with pure abstraction dominating the other half. While Rozanov rejects some of his age’s stereotypes about homosexuality – for example, that it is a result of surfeit (presyshchennost’) in heterosexual experience,37 he strongly subscribes to another one: the conflation of aversion to sexuality per se with aversion to heterosexual acts. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses this stereotype in her analysis of The Wings of the Dove by Rozanov’s contemporary, Henry James, noting that “the identity between Lionel Croy’s [one of the novel’s characters] ‘unspeakability’ and his frigidity represents a quite specific – a historically specific – homophobic libel, not the less so in that permission to imagine him as cathecting anyone outside his family (e.g., a man or a boy) is foreclosed by the same gesture as is his desire for the women attached to him.”38 This conviction underlies Rozanov’s argument throughout Liudi lunnogo sveta, and it largely accounts for many of his conclusions. It takes a lot of untangling to separate Rozanov’s attacks on “spiritual sodomites,” whom he openly wishes to “descend into the grave,”39 from some of his insights remarkable for the time and the context in which they were made. He emphatically speaks out against the criminal persecution of homosexuals and is fairly skeptical about the possibility of a “cure” for homosexuality. He is also very much against the advice to homosexuals “not to act upon their desires.”40 In addition, Rozanov was the first in Russia to emphasize the homoerotic aspect of Christianity, starting with Jesus himself, for Rozanov a quintessential “muzhe-deva” (“man-maiden”),41 and particularly of the monastic tradition, arguing that taking the vows often served as a means for coming to terms with one’s own sexuality. While Rozanov admires the fecundity of the Old Testament tradition, he simultaneously asserts that transgression of natural law (including that of procreation) is the condition of possibility for genius and spirituality, to the point of crediting gays for the birth of civilization.42 Finally, one of the most remarkable insights of Rozanov, which serves as a direct link to the literary realm of Kharitonov, is that in homosexuality desire saturates the entire being, rather than being confined in a particular organ, that every move, every touch could be sexually charged.43

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It is perhaps inevitable that looking for strategies for dealing with Kharitonov’s gay writing, his Russian critics turned to the only “theoretical” text on the subject available to them. However, they (perhaps to a degree unconsciously) appropriated Rozanov’s images of self-torturing sex-shy homosexuals and projected them onto Kharitonov. Thus, Klimontovich, having tried to distance Kharitonov from Rozanov aesthetically, offers the most “Rozanovian” approach to Kharitonov’s sexuality: “Kharitonov was … a man of asceticism and spirituality. Apparently through pandering to the flesh, through revealing the rough forms of lust, he deromanticized it and turned it against itself. His homosexuality was to a large extent a form of abstinence; any retreat from the vow of chastity was punished by the most horrendous dissection of the most evanescent sin.”44 A similar position is taken by Nina Sadur, who writes that Kharitonov acutely perceived himself as sinful and displayed “cruelty toward himself of such unbelievable intensity that sometimes it makes it impossible to read him.”45 Thus the “canonization” of Kharitonov has been conducted through the construction of a mythical narrative of a tragic and dark genius, writing in a confessional mode about his self-hatred.46 However, a very different Kharitonov emerges from a reading of his texts that is not predetermined by the worldview of a typical heterosexual member of late-Soviet intelligentsia. Without trying to downplay the role of Russian historical and cultural context in shaping Kharitonov as a writer, I would like to offer a reading of his texts grounded in the conceptual framework of contemporary critical theory and of queer theory in particular. The revolutionary character of Kharitonov’s writing within the Russian literary landscape can be credited to his successful articulation of a minority position. One can view him as a practitioner of littérature mineure (minor or minority literature) in the sense of this notion developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book on Kafka – an umbrella concept for “minor practices of major language from within,” writings from a marginal subject position. Littérature mineure’s definitional characteristics, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”47 The task of a practitioner of littérature mineure is poignantly described by Jean Genet in his preface to the writings of the Black Panther leader George Jackson. One who writes from a position of a repressed minority, in Genet’s words, must use the very language, the words, the syntax of his enemy, whereas he craves a separate language belonging only to his people … It is perhaps a new source of

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anguish for the black man to realize that if he writes a masterpiece, it is his enemy’s language … which is enriched … He has then only one recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so skillfully that the white men are caught in his trap. To accept it in all its richness … and to suffuse it with all his obsessions and all his hatred of the white man. That is a task.48

The minority writing based on the subject position of a marginalized race, ethnicity, or class has enjoyed reasonably adequate recognition in Russian literature. However, it is the minority writing grounded in marginalized gender and sexuality that is now transforming the Russian literary scene, as evidenced by the prominence of the works discussed in the preceding chapter, on the one hand, and of Kharitonov, on the other. The particular effectiveness of the subversive/deconstructive momentum of the gay and lesbian version of minority writing has been argued by Monique Wittig. “Since Proust,” she writes, we know that literary experimentation is a favored way to bring a subject to light. This experimentation is the ultimate subjective practice, a practice of the cognitive subject. Since Proust, the subject has never been the same, for throughout Remembrance of Things Past he made “homosexual” the axis of categorization from which to universalize. The minority subject is not self-centered as is the straight subject. Its extension into space could be described as being like Pascal’s circle, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. This is what explains Djuna Barnes’s angle of approach to her text – a constant shifting which, when the text is read, produces an effect comparable to what I call an out-of-the-cornerof-the-eye perception; the text works through fracturing.49

The texts of Kharitonov display exactly the kind of cognitive universalization on the basis of “homosexual” described by Wittig. Sorokin, in a problematic but sometimes insightful interview about Kharitonov, describes the latter’s texts as “a kind of romantically analytical movement of mind in collision with this, if you wish, homosexual reality. And all reality for him is saturated with this homosexual sentiment.”50 The peculiar turns that the recent “canonization” of Kharitonov has taken can serve as an example of the dilemmas of writing a “homosexual text,” described by Wittig: Writing a text which has homosexuality among its themes is a gamble. It is taking risk that at every turn the formal element which is the theme will overdetermine the meaning, monopolize the whole meaning, against the intention of the author

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who wants above all to create a literary work. Thus the text which adopts such a theme sees one of its parts taken for the whole, one of the constituent elements of the text taken for the whole text, and the book becomes a symbol, a manifesto. When this happens, the text ceases to operate at the literary level; it is subjected to disregard, in the sense of ceasing to be regarded in relation to equivalent texts. It becomes a committed text with a social theme, it attracts attention to the social problem. When this happens to a text, it is diverted from its primary aim, which is to change the textual reality within which it is inscribed. In fact, by reason of its theme it is dismissed from that textual reality, it no longer has access to it, it is banned … it can no longer operate as a text in relationship to other past or contemporary texts. It is interesting only to homosexuals … [It] loses its polysemy, becomes univocal.51

Kharitonov’s texts, in their author’s lifetime, were largely positioned outside the literary process, even if the ranks of their admirers within the literary underground grew steadily. His first posthumous publication includes reflections on being an “unpublishable writer,”52 and while there have been attempts to capitalize on simulating his literary style, only one “mainstream” writer, to my knowledge, has explicitly acknowledged his influence on her work: Nina Sadur.53 Meanwhile, in the process of the recent “canonization” of Kharitonov, the efforts to “wrestle away” his texts from being “merely homosexual” have been dominant. Let us, then, turn to Kharitonov’s texts themselves in an attempt to arrive at a definition of his aesthetic and political project. Nikolai Klimontovich, Kharitonov’s close acquaintance since 1973, provides a rough chronology of his work.54 Kharitonov began writing at the age of twenty, and throughout the 1960s he wrote poetry that was “Acmeist in spirit.”55 However, approximately in 1969 he renounced most of what he had written by then and embarked on developing a new manner of writing. Shortly before his untimely death in 1981 from a heart attack, he collected most of his work from 1969 on in a samizdat volume entitled Pod domashnim arestom (Under house arrest), which has been reproduced as the first volume of Slezy na tsvetakh, the 1993 two-volume set of his works. The prose text that opens the collection, “Dukhovka” (The oven),56 is the first work authored by the “new” Kharitonov and perhaps the best known.57 It is a first-person narrative about a gay man in his late twenties making the acquaintance of a sixteen-year-old boy and about a series of their subsequent encounters. Its narrative mode has been described as a “telegraphic stream of consciousness,” as “in a diary written as quickly as

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possible before one forgets what happened or in a hastily scribbled sexual fantasy in which the pen can barely keep up with the lusting mind,”58 or as a spontaneous monologue of an agitated, obsessed protagonist.59 Upon a first reading, “Dukhovka” struck me, rather, as a carefully constructed narrative of memory of a Proustian kind, a nostalgic attempt to reproduce a temps perdu. Now, however, I would like to suggest a different reading in light of the discourse on a particular version of contemporary literature of resistance, namely what in Latin American studies has come to be known as testimonio. Viktor Erofeyev, a writer whose work is more readily described by contemporary Russian critics as an example of Russian postmodernist writing, while expressing his admiration for Kharitonov, remarks that He lived, suffering too seriously … He “oversuffered” … There is a certain lack of real freedom, that of his own life, which got reflected in literature. He didn’t play with the theme; he only played with words. His homosexuality was declared too seriously, his passion wasn’t defamiliarized. His philosophical reflections are interesting as well, but all this construction lacks a roof, so to speak – an attitude toward himself, the situation which would release absolute freedom, relieving him from passion and, most important, from literature.60

Erofeyev’s remarks provoked the justified indignation of Yaroslav Mogutin, the editor of Kharitonov’s collected works and one of the very few out Russian gay literary figures: [Kharitonov’s] homosexuality wasn’t a pose or a game; and it most definitely wasn’t an element to exploit, which is what it is now in the works of the cunning and blasphemous postmodernists who have invented for the purposes of their verbal prostitution (slovobludie) everything, including themselves. They say, he “suffered too much,” and that’s over the top; it is not funny, hence it isn’t interesting.61

The attitude displayed by Erofeyev merits a Habermasian castigation of postmodernism as a neoconservative repudiation of the “project of modernity.” However, not all of cultural production that has been viewed as postmodern merits a description in the above terms. Thus Kharitonov’s own writing can be regarded as an instance of what Hal Foster has termed the “postmodernism of resistance,” which “seeks to question rather than to exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.”62 John Beverley, in his essay that offers a mapping of Latin American postmodernism, posits a model that foregrounds such elements of

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resistance. Beverley sees postmodernism’s political edge conditioned by “the loss of aura or desublimation of the artwork [that] offers the possibility of very radical forms of cultural democratization.”63 The new radical writing to which Beverley gives the most attention in his study is testimonio, a genre that has received considerable attention in Latin American studies. As Beverley describes it, testimonio is a narrative “told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts”; in other words, it is a literary simulacrum of an oral narrative, its crucial feature being the importance “of speaking or writing for [oneself] rather than being ‘spoken for.’”64 Testimonio is a “‘narración de urgencia’ – a story that needs to be told – involving a problem of repression, subalternity, exploitation, or simply survival that is implicated in the act of narration itself.” It does not so much concern itself with the life of a discrete individual hero, taken in and of itself, as with the problematic of a collective social situation that the narrator lives alongside the other members of his or her community.65 As for the voice of the first-person narrator, we are meant to experience its presence as that of a real rather than fictional person, which serves as “a mark of a desire not to be silenced or defeated, to impose oneself on an institution of power like literature from the position of the excluded or the marginal.” Beverley argues that in testimonio the “I” of the narrator possesses “the grammatical status of a shifter – a linguistic function that can be assumed indiscriminately by anyone … Testimonio is an affirmation of the authority of a single speaking subject, even of personal awareness and growth, but it cannot affirm a self-identity that is separated from a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle.”66 It is an instance of a text situated in a condition of “public intimacy,” when the boundaries between literature and life, the public and private spheres, which are fundamental in all forms of modern culture, are transgressed. Testimonio is a text that, on the one hand, “implies the importance and power of literature as a form of social action” while, on the other, pointing toward “its radical insufficiency.” It is a type of literary text that “appears where the adequacy of the existing forms and styles – even of the dominant language itself – for the representation of the subaltern has entered into crisis.”67 In his book, Beverley discusses both the texts that belong to the genre of testimonio proper (the most famous of them perhaps being I, Rigoberta Menchú),68 and fictional texts operating with simulations of the testimonial narrative voice (such as, for example, García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold).69

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Many of Kharitonov’s texts can be considered, alternatively, instances of testimonio tout court, or simulacra of testimonio. Thus “Dukhovka,” the most consistent example of the testimonial mode in Kharitonov’s œuvre, opens with a chance encounter at a small resort town70 between the unnamed, autobiographically identified protagonist and the boy, Misha. The narrative follows the attempts of the former to get as close as possible to the object of his obsession, to spend as much time as possible in his company (even the boy’s name is repeated in the narrative with almost Steinian insistence). However, all this time the narrator is conscious not to provoke the slightest trace of suspicion on behalf of Misha and his friends. At every step, he evaluates his own actions so that they appear “natural” and logical to Misha and the circle of his straight friends. Like a spy working on enemy territory, the narrator is constantly engaged in consumption, production, and evaluation of signs. He lovingly collects the smallest signs of Misha’s friendliness, and bitterly criticizes himself for slips in his behaviour that may result in alienating the object of his desire. His is a semiotic behaviour par excellence, of the kind described by Harold Beaver: The homosexual is beset by signs, by the urge to interpret whatever transpires, or fails to transpire, between himself and every chance acquaintance. He is a prodigious consumer of signs – of hidden meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality. Exclusion from the common code impels the frenzied quest: in the momentary glimpse, the scrambled figure, the sporadic gesture, the chance encounter, the lowered guard. In a flash meanings may be disclosed; mysteries wrenched and betrayed … Homosexuals … live not in an alternative culture but in a duplicate culture of constantly interrupted and overlapping roles … Every sign becomes the cause for elaborately inconclusive fantasizing. Every sign becomes duplicitous, slipping back and forth across a wavering line, once the heterosexual antithesis between love and friendship has been breached. The need to trace a compatible world becomes the urge to control one with an unceasing production of signs.71

What the narrator tries to provoke in Misha are trust and friendship; he is horrified when someone hints that one of Misha’s acquaintances is “like that”72 – the text’s only euphemism for homosexuality. Nevertheless, for a while he seems to be close to achieving his goal. Then, however, his luck suddenly seems to disappear: with the weather deteriorating, Misha’s father comes to drive his family back to the city. All of a sudden everybody seems to be cooler and more reserved, and the development of the protagonist’s relationship with Misha is reversed: “It’s all like the first day – a

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complete stranger, a boy of rare beauty standing on the hill playing the guitar, and for him I’m just a passerby, and he has no use for our acquaintance, there’s nothing for him in my actions and conversations, no matter how I might adapt myself.”73 The narrator does not try to pursue his earlier goal – to give Misha his Moscow address so that they stay in touch. For the rest of the story, he clings to the smallest signs that remind him of his lost object of affection, of the times “when Misha and I walked together” (a phrase repeated twice in a single sentence).74 As in most of Kharitonov’s texts, the first person narrator to a degree possesses autobiographical features. As noted by Sorokin, Kharitonov “simultaneously filters his text through himself, and, parallel to that, leaves in the text a certain operator/observer who describes himself as a character in the text.”75 In “Dukhovka” the focus of this tension in the text is the representation of the closet – in Sedgwick’s words, “a performance initiated as such by the speech act of silence – not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularly by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds it and differentially constitutes it.”76 As Kevin Moss has remarked,77 “Dukhovka” is a narrative about the closet, but not a closeted narrative: although the narrator uses euphemistic vocabulary, he is situated precisely in the condition of “public intimacy,” openly sharing his thoughts and feelings with the reader from whom he definitely does not conceal his sexuality; in this way, the reader is compelled to identify with the narrative perspective. The closet does not occupy this central position in Kharitonov’s other texts; however, another central theme of “Dukhovka” continues in his later work: unrequited desire, failed projects to find “the boy of his dreams” – the hero’s passion builds up, but he lets the chance to act on it slip away. It could be, for example, a beautiful dancer whom he sees at a concert, in the title poem of the collection of free verse entitled “Vil’boa i drugie veshchi” (Vilboa and other things),78 or a particularly well-endowed country boy whom he meets at a public bathhouse, in “Sobytie: pokazali fenomena …” (An event: They showed me a phenomenon …).79 Another early prose narrative, “Odin takoi, drugoi drugoi” (One like this, the other different),80 provides an ironic deconstructive twist on this topic: the convoluted ways of searching for an object of love are compressed into the text’s first page and a half – a theatre-of-the-absurd-style, dizzingly fast sequence of events where characters replace one another; several of these characters are obsessed by a certain pop star. The narrative then follows one of them in trying to get to the place of the object of his desire; however, when he finally gets hold of the star’s unlisted phone number,

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the rest turns remarkably easy, and he gets more than he hoped for: the star himself invites him to come over and speaks “the simple words of love.” The goal is almost achieved, but then the guest cannot achieve an erection, “and the more concerned he became about this the more his dick played possum” (“i chem sil’nee on na eto obrashchal vnimanie, tem bol’she khui byl kak mertvyi”).81 Thus he has nothing left to do but to get up early, kiss the star goodbye, and get out. The quest narrative is further subverted in such texts as “Alesha Serezha” and “A., R., ia” (A., R., and I). One can say that these texts enact a quest in reverse: instead of acts aimed at winning the male object of desire, the narrative stages conscious acts leading to disposing of him. At the beginning of “Alesha Serezha,” the narrator encounters Alesha, a beautiful boy who eagerly gives himself to the narrator. The latter, however, right away is certain that this happiness will not last, for “you can’t compare with him in looks or behavior” (“vam ne sravnit’sia s nim vidom i povedeniem”). He continues: “You know very well yourself – he’s such that you couldn’t think of anything better for you. But you are not at all what he should be dreaming of. You got someone you could only dream about, but he’s been cheated … You, in your own words, have fewer virtues than he, otherwise you wouldn’t love him so much, and you’re right to simply be afraid of losing him and you have come to the final confession that it is inevitable.”82 Then, similarly to the developments in “Dukhovka,” the narrator tries to plot an event that would resolve the tension that he feels: to keep his beloved, he needs to show Alesha that it is himself, the narrator, whom everyone admires. However, the narrator instead uses the “suitable event,” a visit by the narrator’s friend, Serezha, to explode the fragile balance that has only begun to form – he denies himself the solace of settling in a relationship. In “A., R., ia” the reader encounters a staging of another explosive scene: the triangular relationship is reproduced, and the narrator consciously makes himself a mediator, who through alienating from himself the other two, his lover, A., and the visiting friend, R., brings them together.83 These two stories also illuminate the mode of Kharitonov’s texts as defined by Sorokin: the author/narrator is simultaneously inside and outside the text, directing the action and taking part in it. His is the position of someone who claims to control the course of his and others’ lives, at the same time knowing only too well that such is not the case. Kharitonov’s early quasi-autobiographical narrative works are succeeded by “Roman” (A novel), an experimental text written in a mode most analogous to that of American Language poets: an assemblage of mostly brief

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fragments that combine explorations of the boundaries of text and writing with a strong autobiographical colouring.84 The pages of “Roman,” filled with experiments in spacing, offer sequences of words that become magic formulas, next to “draft” texts with words crossed out – all of them saturated with gay themes and desires. Thus the opening fragment offers such formulas centred around the personal pronouns ia (I), ty (you), on (he), ona (she) and the Russian word for penis (khui) – playing with the homography of the Russian letter for “kh” and the Latin “x” and of the Russian letter for “u” and the Latin “y”: Iiaion Ia i oN ia=ia ia-ia=ty ty+ty=2 ty ia+ty=on on-ona=ty kartina: pered: glazami: ni kh.u.ia

x+y=Z

kh-u=i85

The third fragment highlights writing and sexuality as the centre of Kharitonov’s universe: Ne Vazhno Chto Pishu Vazhno Chto Pishu

/pishu pishu/

i-ukh-ukh-ukh-ukh-ukh It’s Not Important That/What I Write It’s Important That/What I Write/write write/ and-go-go-go-go-go86

Side by side with these are fragments similar in tone and style to Kharitonov’s earlier narratives – stories of the narator’s personal acquaintances, absurdist kaleidoscopic sequences of events, together with personal letters, observations, a monologue of Ivan the Terrible, in which the latter is presented as a character of Sadean type who engages in sexual tortures but is humble before a young monk who does not reciprocate his desires, and reflections on writing, history, and religion. The last word of “Roman,” the enigmatic trans-sense blIUnchli,87 could potentially signal “the end of writing,” Khlebnikovian poetic madness. Instead, Kharitonov went on to write a series of reflective fragments,

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anticipated by some of the pages of “Roman.” Klimontovich comments upon this transition: After “Roman” [Kharitonov] liberated himself from a most dangerous temptation, more exactly, from a number of temptations: the affected Acmeist form, the traditional narrative forms, lyrical and impersonating, the inner causal connection in free verse. But the path of this freedom is mortally dangerous to the Poet: through verbal ruins and shapeless drafts it leads to the horrifying and magnetic abyss of the blank page, of writing nothing, of silence; and that some people refer to it with the “vice-versal” (naoborotnym) term of formalism is pure confusion. To stop above the abyss of silence and to turn around is for the one who writes to pass the last temptation. The abyss did not swallow him … he turned around and walked away.88

Klimontovich’s description and the simple comparison between “Roman” and the text that follows it in the samizdat Pod domashnim arestom (Under house arrest), “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom” (Tears for the killed and strangled one), suggest that at this point the author underwent a crisis. It is evident from the sharp contrast between the trans-sense of the ending of “Roman” and the lines that immediately follow it: “So. Faith salvation repentance revelation; sin” (“Itak. Vera spasenie pokaianie otkrovenie; grekh”). Klimontovich suggests that all of Kharitonov’s work after “Roman” can be read as a single text, divided into sections.89 This is both true and not true. There is a common stylistic organization, following the tradition of the fragment, as noted above. However, there are significant discrepancies between different cycles of fragments from this late period. The Rozanovian mode and references to the turn of the century in general are especially prominent in “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom” – reflections on Orthodox Christianity, gender roles, the relationship between the artist and the state. Without resorting to the pathos of a Solzhenitsyn, Kharitonov writes with great pain about the repressive totalitarian machine, its cynicism and humiliation, alongside descriptions of glory holes, representations of the affected language of “flaming” queens, accounts of “the scene” in other Soviet cities, and moments of high erotic tension: he ran it over my lips I understood my heart stopped I wanted him to repeat the order he took this glue from his dick again and smeared my lips with his sticky finger I died he coolly left his finger on my lip I could only agree and touched it said “yes” with my tongue entranced and he made me go down and I took him.90

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Never in Kharitonov do we find remarks that he hated himself for being “hopelessly homosexual,” as Zufar Gareyev has put it,91 or perceived his homosexuality as a sin, as Sadur suggests.92 He regarded his sexuality as a given, and to apply to it moralizing value judgments would simply be a category mistake. As he most emphatically asserts in the opening section of “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom,” sin is not to do what one wants and for a writer to stray from his calling: sin is not to fulfil one’s destiny (if one explains it through duty); and if through desire, then sin is not to do what I want. I want to create amazing artistry but get distracted with other things, while life goes on; and who will create my artistry with an anxious hand with a light hand. Who will give the only beauty from which I’ll die where there will be everything. Wondrous passages. Some particular words where something is caught … I do not bear any life sin, because whatever is in life it’s just that, and really what exists is what’s in artistry. There are no sins in life except for the things that interfere and distract. Although it is always like that when you first are against everything that claims you, leads you away, and that, it turns out later, was precisely where something life-giving was to be found.93

What Kharitonov took up from Rozanov was not the chimeric beliefs concerning aversion to sexuality per se but the perception of Christianity as infused with homoeroticism, the perception of Christ and his followers as androgynous “men-maidens” – we find reflections on this topic in “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom” and especially in “Rasskaz odnogo mal’chika, ‘Kak ia stal takim’” (One boy’s story, ‘How I got like that’).94 In “Listovka” (A leaflet),95 he takes up Rozanov’s assertion that it is gay people who are the (“secret”) arbiters of taste and founders of culture. As for the notion of the entire living experience being infused with desire, with sensuality (to the point of Irigaray’s notion of “having sex organs all over one’s body”),96 this is definitely not an influence of Rozanov on Kharitonov but the insight of the bookworm Rozanov that answered Kharitonov’s own perceptual system. Prigov offers supporting evidence for such a reading by recounting that “Kharitonov began writing absolutely unaware of the existence of those sources with which he could retrospectively align himself … Later on, when he had already developed as a writer, [Kharitonov] on his own tried to somehow identify his roots. In 1978 he was the first to give me [Leonid] Dobychin to read; he also frequently made references to [Andrei] Egunov.”97 Side by side with passages of the kind described above in “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom” and the next text, “Nep’iushchii russkii” (A Russian

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who doesn’t drink), the reader finds reflections on Russians and Jews (again, partly going back to Rozanov) written in very ambivalent terms – perhaps the most problematic part of Kharitonov’s legacy. Although another late text, the passionate manifesto in defence of homosexuality, “Listovka,” (A leaflet), extensively compares homosexuality to Jewishness, and thus shows that Kharitonov’s attitudes on this subject were far from clear, the vocabulary he employed in several fragments on “the Jewish theme” allowed Mogutin, the editor of Kharitonov’s collected works, in a controversial gesture, to publish them, together with some other fragments, mostly dealing with Russian and Soviet history, in the right-wing ultranationalist paper Den’.98 “Nep’iushchii russkii” is followed by a text that stands out as an exception among these cycles of fragments. “Rasskaz odnogo mal’chika, ‘Kak ia stal takim’” (One boy’s story, ‘How I got like that’) is a realistic narrative, an almost documentary, sociological account of the biographies of two gay boys from a provincial town. This text serves as another watershed in the corpus of Kharitonov’s writings – the cycles of fragments that follow, “Slezy na tsvetakh” (Teardrops on flowers) and “V kholodnom vysshem smysle” (In the cold ulterior sense) differ in tone and themes from the earlier ones. These late texts are much more subdued and reflective. “In my life, I have already said and thought everything that can be said” (“Vse, chto mozhno skazat’, ia uzhe v zhizni skazal i podumal”), writes Kharitonov in “Slezy na tsvetakh.” And later adds: “Come on, stop doubting. Whatever you will write shall be beautiful (and whatever you won’t write, even more so)” (“Da perestan’te zh somnevat’sia. Vse, chto vy ni napishete, budet prekrasno [a vse, chto ne napishete, tem bolee]”).99 Reflections on the impossibility of producing a narrative text, on the faculty of writing itself, form a thread running through these cycles. Thus “V kholodnom vysshem smysle” suddenly explodes with a poem: Golova gudit ot stikhov, ot obryvkov melodii! Mil’on ikh, kazhetsia, roitsia v golove. Za kakuiu nitochku ni potianesh’, vsio vykhodit kakaia-to izumitel’naia, oi-oi, tol’ko uspevai zapisyvat’. Vdokhnovenie, okean. Nu, nu, eshche! Priam podriad, podriad idut. Chto zhe eto takoe so mnoi delaetsia ia ves’ perepolnen. The head is full with the humming noise of verse, of scraps of tunes! A whole million of them, it seems, swarms in my head. No matter what thread

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you pull, there comes an amazing one, wow, you only need to have time to write it down. Inspiration, ocean. Well, well, more! They really come one after the other. So what is it that is happening to me I’m all overflowing.

But only a few lines later – “again the pen falls out of my hand” (“opiat’ pero vypadaet iz ruk”).100 The melancholy tone of fragments now resembles that of another Russian predecessor, Turgenev’s cycle of prose poems, Senilia. Kharitonov’s late texts still include masterful ministories, “scraps” of Proustian detailed remembrances of childhood, but analytical backward glances on life and reflections on death occupy a much more prominent place. Memories and reflections seem to overtake life itself: “I look so inspired that nobody wants to kiss me. It’s like kissing a book” (“U menia takoi odukhotvorennyi vid, chto so mnoi nikto ne khochet tselovat’sia. Vse ravno chto tselovat’sia s knigoi”).101 Kharitonov must have had a presentiment of the nearing end, for in his final days he was primarily preoccupied with carefully assembling his tome Pod domashnim arestom (Under house arrest). He also searched for a definition of his own “textuality” – and the very terms in which he describes it invite the possibility of identifying it as “gay writing” (écriture gaie). The following fragment demonstrates this best: The most incredible, the most heartfelt person on earth was undoubtedly St John the Evangelist. And the second was Oscar Wilde. Here Joyce could vie with him. But Joyce wasn’t homosexual, which prevented him from becoming as heartfelt as Oscar Wilde, although his artistic talents are mind-boggling. The second place could also be challenged by Sei Shonagon. But Japan is a country that is not of our world, and Sei Shonagon is a woman. And it is necessary that writing be neither straightforwardly masculine nor exclusively feminine. However, I repeat, say whatever you wish, but she is his, Oscar Wilde’s, rival. And the third one – what to do – is myself, and I say it without being sly. And praised be those people who sometimes feel it.102

Kharitonov insistently asserts that it is homosexuality and its textual representation that provide the transformational momentum for reality, both textual and extratextual: “if we [gay people] write about them, about their monstrous deprived norm, then one should close one’s eyes and cry that some final screw has not been placed into them” (“esli my napishem o nikh, ob ikh chudovishchnoi obezdolennoi norme, nado zakryt’ glaza i zaplakat’, chto v nikh ne vlozheno kakogo-to poslednego vintika”).103

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Wittig has written that to be effective a text by a minority writer must “make the minority point of view universal.” She stresses that this is what enabled the work of such gay writers as Proust and Djuna Barnes to “transform the textual reality of our time.”104 Littérature mineure has been assuming ever-increasing importance due to its potential for representation of the decentred and fragmented postmodern subject.105 And while its most subversive and revolutionary strain has been frequently associated with feminine writing, it should be borne in mind that Hélène Cixous, the leading theorist of écriture feminine, singles out a gay man, Jean Genet, as one of its foremost practitioners.106 The ongoing recognition of the importance of Kharitonov’s work, the foremost écrivain gai of postmodern Russian letters, serves as another imperative for undertaking the gay and lesbian inquiry into the body of Russian literature, for, as Sedgwick has written, Within every … canon … the work of gay/lesbian inquiry requires to be done. We can’t possibly know in advance about the Harlem Renaissance, any more than we can about the New England Renaissance or the English or Italian Renaissance, where the limits of a revelatory inquiry are to be set, once we begin to ask – as it is now beginning to be asked about each of these Renaissances – where and how the power in them of gay desires, people, discourses, prohibitions, and energies were manifest. We know enough already, however, to know with certainty that in each of these Renaissances they were central. (No doubt that’s how we will learn to recognize a renaissance when we see one.)107

The history of the reception of Kharitonov’s work in Russia is instructive. Homophobia still pervades Russian society, and Sadur unfortunately is right when she says, “It seems to me that Kharitonov will keep on causing incredible fury because we, people of ordinary nature, secretly, deep in our souls, take away from the people of the nature that is unlike ours the right to … the fullness of feeling and … to salvation.”108 However, Kharitonov is being read and discussed, and one hopes that, as Wittig described Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, his œuvre will become “a war machine with a delayed effect,”109 which in her view is better equipped to change the textual, as well as the extratextual, reality than merely “committed literature.” What turns a work by a minority writer into a “war machine,” for Wittig, is “the attempted universalization of the [minority] point of view.”110 I believe that Kharitonov’s work is an exemplary case of such a project, and one must hope that its “war machine” will succesfully contribute to the breakdown of the citadel of homophobia in Russian culture.

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Kharitonov’s writing became an icebreaker sui generis that established a path of development for the majority of younger Russian writers preoccupied with explorations of queer identities. His influence has been particularly strong on the poets whose writing contains gay themes and homoerotic imagery; traces of his influence can be found, to various degrees, in the work of the overwhelming majority of them (only a very few, such as Aleksei Purin, disclaim Kharitonov’s influence and instead return to the poetics of Silver Age authors, most notably Mikhail Kuzmin and Viacheslav Ivanov).111 For instance, in the texts of Aleksandr Shatalov, we see a development of Kharitonov’s position of public intimacy, a hyperrealistic focus on the seemingly random details of day-to-day experience combined with a pained search, an unquenchable longing for the perfection of a union both bodily and spiritual of two men. In his poetry one also senses traces of influences of a number of Western poets, most notably of Garcia Lorca and Frank O’Hara. His focus is frequently on attempts to seize the sensory and emotional makeup of a fleeting moment, to release its traumatic outcome by transforming it into a poetic text. Dmitry Kuz’min’s impressionistic, quasidiaristic sketches likewise partake of O’Haraesque “personism,” and Vasily Chepelev’s texts seem to be developing a similar paradigm. Other poets who explore homoerotic motifs and desires do so often in a more circumspect fashion, mediating the subject position through a web of allusions or sometimes deliberate obfuscation. Thus in Sergei Kruglov’s writing we see a fascinating amalgam of the poetics of Kharitonov with that of Joseph Brodsky in its combined skepticism, melancholia, and rootedness in the Mandelstamian “yearning for world culture.” In Aleksandr Anashevich’s texts the authorial voice is overlayed by multiple defamiliarizations and a hermetic withdrawal that is nevertheless unable to contain the pierrotesque, theatricalized, yet very palpable pain of the speaking subject. Dmitry Vodennikov goes even further by incorporating in his poems allegorical, sexually ambiguous (from bisexuality to autoeroticism and even attraction to plant life), quasi-absurdist imagery – yet the strong charge of desire and the lyrical hero’s vulnerable position of “public intimacy” remain unmistakable. Dmitry Volchek constructs his poetics by experimenting with small, elliptic forms and intertextual references, evoking by some of his strategies a comparison to the American poets of the Black Mountain school. However, Kharitonovian voicing of intense intimacy and incisive observation is ever-present in his texts, which particularly in recent years have been shifting to the more thematically transgressive mode reminiscent of Bukowski or Genet. It would be an exaggeration to claim that all of these poets form a clearcut, coherent trend or movement; however, it would be equally erroneous

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to deny their shared common ground not only in their extraliterary experiences, but also in the way that their subjectivity filters into their writing. The diversity of these voices testifies to the prominent position of writing that touches upon the nonheterosexual experiences in contemporary Russian poetry (unfortunately, this work so far has been pursued overwhelmingly by men; a similar flowering of lesbian writing has yet to occur).112 A similar development, if on a smaller scale, of the Kharitonovian textual model can be observed in contemporary Russian prose, most notably in the writings of Aleksandr Il’ianen. However, one author in particular can be singled out as having continued Kharitonov’s challenge of building a new gay – or, in this case, more properly queer – textuality, in both poetry and prose: Yaroslav Mogutin (b. 1974). I turn to his œuvre in the concluding part of this chapter. Mogutin’s rise to fame in the early 1990s was meteoric. From the age of seventeen, he prolifically published journalism and essays in a number of mainstream Russian newspapers and magazines. Within two years, he became a true celebrity and in 1994 was named the best critic of the year by the influential Nezavisimaia gazeta. However, his path was continuously hampered by threats and harassment from various Russian powers-that-be, which eventually led him to leave the country in 1995 and to apply for asylum in the US. This situation arose from Mogutin’s assertive, outspoken queerness: in a way unprecedented in Russia, he became a public figure who was out from the very beginning.113 Mogutin’s activity in Russia in the first half of the 1990s was not limited to journalistic cultural criticism. As I mentioned earlier, he edited the critical edition of Kharitonov’s collected writings and also contributed prefaces to a number of volumes, such as the Russian translations of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. He also increasingly turned his attention to his own original writing, both poetry and prose, which became the focus of his creative effort later in the 1990s. Similarly to many other contemporary writers exploring marginal subject positions, Mogutin’s work testifies to the fact that the erosion of the author function is far from a universal phenomenon in contemporary culture (or rather that the Author that has eroded represented a particular race, class, gender, and sexuality). His project can be seen as a postmodernist update of the Russian Symbolist notion of “life-creation” (zhiznetvorchestvo) – which had asserted that the figure of the Poet was greater than the sum total of his or her texts – combined with tireless (post-)avant-gardist “self-fashioning,” continuous reinvention, and modification of subjectivity. The novelty of Mogutin’s life-creation in the Russian

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context is that it is not exclusively of a literary nature; rather, the boundaries between self and text, writing and action become increasingly blurred in his work. While anchored in the Kharitonovian mode, Mogutin’s texts also belong to the tradition of writing that intends to shock and confront the sensibilities of the poet’s audience. They truly brim with an assertive, aggressive energy and are strongly rooted in performativity. For all the imagery of graphic sex and violence that appears in his texts, there is, however, something peculiarly uplifting about them. Speaking from the stance of a poète maudit in the tradition of Rimbaud and early Mayakovsky, while at the same time influenced by the experimental wing of post-Second World War American poetry, Mogutin mobilizes his audience to embrace the new cultural possibilities in all their diversity, calling for a “radical sodomization of Russian culture.” As Dmitry Kuz’min has noted, in Mogutin’s writing “homosexuality for the first time [in the Russian tradition] is victorious, endowed with excessive vitality” (as opposed to the previously dominant representation of male “homosexuality as a lack in masculinity or as a refusal of the latter, when masculinity is understood as almost a synonym for vitality”).114 In a similar vein, Jean-Claude Marcadé places Mogutin in the Nietzschean paradigm of morality of the strong.115 Mogutin’s identity project has included a strategic appropriation of several antecedents. Both in Russian and in Western culture, he is drawn to controversial “outlaw” figures. Among the Russian authors, the names that crop up most frequently on the pages of Mogutin’s writings are those of Vasily Rozanov, Abram Tertz/Andrei Sinyavsky, Eduard Limonov, and the major gay author of the late-Soviet era, Evgeny Kharitonov. Embracing the Sinyavskian paradigm of the “poetics of crime,”116 Mogutin sexualizes it by invoking the legacy of Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet and of several other causes célèbres of the struggle for freedom of expression, such as the American Beat writers. He borrows from the self-fashioning practices, in both the literary and literal sense, of the Futurists and Dadaists, on the one hand, and of Andy Warhol117 as well as the punk tradition in styling and design, on the other. His cultivation of personal style stretches in a fully integrated fashion from the literary (with an almost Flaubertian obsessiveness) all the way to the sartorial. In his identification with the subversive tradition of queer counter-culture, he fully rejects the Russian tradition of male homosexual self-stylization, with its emphasis on feminization and camp.118 The linguistic makeup and imagery found in Mogutin’s texts are unprecedented in Russian writing in their assertive, energetic polymorphous queerness. His writing, in my opinion, may serve as one of the

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clearest instances of what Hal Foster has dubbed “postmodernism of resistance.”119 Mogutin continuously engages in anarchist subversion of all established social constructs and identities; his own self-identity is always “permanently partial,” nonconformist, and rebellious. Even genre distinctions in Mogutin’s writing are frequently blurred, with categories as disparate as journalism and lyric poetry collapsing into an idiosyncratic amalgam. One of the clearest instances of this kind is his early “signature text,” an “essay” entitled “Kak ia voroval v Parizhe” (How I was a thief in Paris, 1992),120 an homage to Jean Genet. His texts designated as “poetry” and “fiction,” however, are suffused with documentary minutiae. Mogutin’s early poetry – much of it collected in his first book, Uprazhneniia dlia iazyka (Exercises for the tongue, 1997) – often adopts a seemingly naive, frank tone, and, like other contemporary Russian poets, he creatively explores the legacy of oberiu and Russian Futurism in his subversive word play. However, as one might expect, these strategies are put to unexpected new uses. Thus in one of his poems Mogutin asks, a vot chem obiasniaetsia obiasnite mne boga radi printsipial’naia raznitsa mezhdu lakom dlia volos i lakom dlia nogtei i esli pokryt’ poly i tem i drugim to chem obiasniaetsia interesno mne znat’ prinstipial’naia raznitsa mezhdu polami? dlia tseli neponiatnyia govoriu issledovan’ia radi: a vot chem obiasniaetsia dokazhite mne pokazhite otsutstvie etikh nenuzhnostei i tekh nekrasivostei na moem tele chego eto ono takoe rovnoe-stroinoe i na oshchup’ priiatnoe? and how is it explained explain it to me in the name of God the principal difference between hairspray and nail polish and if you cover the floors/sexes with both the one and the other then how does one explain I wonder the principal difference between the floors/sexes? for an unintelligible goal I say for the sake of research, and how does one explain prove it to me show me

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the absence of these unnecessary things and those not beautiful things on my body why is it so flat and slender and pleasant to the touch?121

Mogutin’s most ambitious poetic text of the early period (that is, prior to his departure for the US), “Poema ekstaza” (The poem of ecstasy), likewise abounds in autobiographical explorations. Thus in one of its sections we find the following passage: Ia zariazhaiu pulemiot ia otkryvaiu glupyi rot mne del mne del nevprovorot menia manit manit poliot

I load the machine gun I open the foolish mouth my being busy overwhelms me flight beckons beckons me

ia sobiraiu ptits pomiot ia nabivaiu glupyi rot chuzhoi muzhchina spinu gniot menia manit ego magnit

I gather bird excrement I stuff the foolish mouth an alien man arches his back his magnet beckons me

On ponimaet moi namiok ego manit moi glupyi rot on spit i vidit nash poliot no Mne nevdomiok mne nevdomiok ego miniot moi polemiot ego minet–kolovorot

He understands my hint my foolish mouth beckons him he sleeps and dreams of our flight but I’m unaware I’m unaware my machine gun will pass him by his blowjob is an upheaval

Zachem zachem sei drevnii rod v rodnoi sem’e ia byl urod narod nas iavno ne poimiot nas tochno ne poimiot narod

Why oh why this ancient family in my own family I was a freak clearly the people will not understand us the people will definitely not understand us

Narod poimaet i ub’iot slomaet spinu rot porviot nakazhet ptits i s’est pomiot narodu tel nevprovorot

The people will catch and kill break the back and tear the mouth punish the birds and eat the excrement the people are overwhelmed by bodies122

In this text, Mogutin suffuses recognizable avant-garde forms with forthright, outspoken depictions of same-sex desire, ironic intertextual references, and random absurdist pieces. While this longer poem, published

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at the end of the book, emerges as a kind of metacommentary, many of the shorter texts that precede it, while abounding in similar allusive punning, are first and foremost performative statements of assertive queer masculinity that attack and/or hook the audience with their very first lines: “I hear not a boy’s voice but that of his husband” (“Ia slyshu golos ne mal’chika no ego muzha”); “Seriozha said he could not bear it any more / for five days in a row he’s been suffering from sleepwithmenitis” (“Seriozha skazal cho on bol’she ne mozhet / ego uzhe piatyi den’ muzhelozhit”); “My dick looks good in your face” (“Moi khui tebe ochen’ k litsu”). Perhaps most famous of these is the opening line of Mogutin’s “Armeiskaia elegiia” (Army elegy): “The scent of a soldier’s cock is beyond comparison” (“Zapakh soldatskogo khuia ni s chem ne sravnitsia”).123 This poem became a signature piece that caused many a commotion at Russian-language poetry readings, both in Russia and in the US. While Mogutin put a considerable amount of effort into compiling and designing his first book of poetry, his years in the US marked an increasing attention on his behalf to his other projects: on the literary side, to prose (even if genre distinctions among his texts are often hard to draw), and on the visual side, to fashioning and investigating corporeality by using his body as a canvas/surface-for-inscription/tool-of-the-trade. His expressive face and chiselled muscular body, with a few piercings and a growing number of tattoos, became a sought after subject for a number of prominent photographers and painters. Soon his engagement with the visual genres also expanded to work as a stage and film actor in several noted independent productions. In the contemporary American art world, Mogutin became, to quote the cover of Index magazine featuring his portrait, “Russia’s biggest export.”124 By the time this issue of Index was out, however, Mogutin was actively working both sides of the camera. Given his creative nature, it was probably simply a matter of time before he began experimenting with photography, thereby successfully reinventing himself yet again. At present, his international fame as a photographer has probably exceeded that as a writer (he has had five solo gallery shows in the US and Russia and has participated in nearly thirty group exhibitions in more than a half-dozen countries). His photographs have been acquired by several prominent collections, and like many contemporary art photographers, he has also been approached for commercial advertisement projects by such leading designer labels as Tom Ford for Gucci, which he has handled with his signature subversive touch. In the Russian context, however, it is Mogutin’s literary work that so far has had the greatest impact. In part, this may be because he continues to hold on to the Russian language as his literary raw material, even if he

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shifts his creative explorations to the heterogeneous global postmodern culture and its various alternative, subversive forms. He shifts the focus of his poetics by intensifying the features that have heretofore achieved greater development in American poetry (such as Frank O’Hara’s “personism” and Jerome Rothenberg’s “poetics of performance”). He is increasingly attracted by transgressive voices in modern Western literature and has translated into Russian some of the most radical texts by Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Dennis Cooper. His texts’ locales are as diverse as the Paris Jardin du Luxembourg, an S&M party in Berlin, California’s Death Valley, nightclubs in Toronto, the slums of South Bronx, and the beaches of Hawaii. His is now truly a nomadic subjectivity that is simultaneously endowed with liberatory potential but also can evidence traumas of alienation, as in the following emotionally intense and formally sparse poem: Ia zhivu v chuzhom dome Ia spliu v chuzhoi krovati Stranno chto menia ne sgoniat Stranno chto menia ne skhvatiat

I live in a foreign house I sleep in a foreign bed Strange how they don’t chase me Strange how they don’t trace me

Stranno chto menia zdes’ terpiat Stranno chto menia zdes’ khvaliat Stranno kak chasto i krepko Menia po nocham pialiat

Strange that they feed me Strange that they pay me Strange how often and hard at night they stuff me

Stranno chto menia kormiat Stranno chto mne platiat Stranno kak mnoiu vertiat V etoi chuzhoi krovati

Strange how they tolerate me Strange how they venerate me Strange how they rotate me on this foreign bed

Ia spliu v takom strannom dome Ia zhivu na takoi strannoi krovati Mne chasto byvaet bol’no Menia nadolgo ne khvatit

I sleep in such a strange house I live on such a strange bed I am often in pain There isn’t much more of me left

Ia imeiu v vidu chto Menia na mnogikh ne khvatit

I mean to say that I’m not left for much125

Part of the opening, more recent section of Uprazhneniia dlia iazyka (Exercises for the tongue), it serves as a foreboding of changes to come.

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Indeed, a simultaneous shift in intellectual perspective and aesthetic preferences appears to begin shortly after the publication of Uprazhneniia. Mogutin’s first major prose text, Amerika v moikh shtanakh (America in my pants), first published in its entirety in 1999, consists of two parts, subtitled respectively as diaries of his first and second years in America. Dating back to 1995–97, this text is not a diary in a traditional sense; its two parts are rather cycles of fragments and ministories that are reminiscent of fragment cycles by Kharitonov as well as, nearly a century earlier, of Rozanov’s Uedinennoe (Solitaria) and Opavshie list’ia (Fallen leaves). The author’s perspective here ranges from the ironically detached and sarcastic to warm and cheerfully curious; the self that is projected through them is indeed of a Russian newly arrived in America, finding himself in the midst of New York’s art scene and gay life while searching for a new understanding of his place in the world. Its final lines are telling: Ia chuvstvuiu sebia drugim chelovekom, s drugoi vneshnost’iu i vnutrennost’iu … neuzheli ia ispravilsia? – dumaiu ia. Net! Ia zatailsia. I feel like a different person, with a different appearance and essence. could it be that i reformed my behaviour? I ask myself, lost in thought. No! I’m just keeping it quiet for a time.12

In other words, the book documents the journey of Mogutin’s exploration of/adaptation to his newfound New York circumstances. Soon, however, he plunges into a frenetic odyssey of global travel and personal and professional (mis)adventures that are amply reflected in his writing that almost invariably bears a strong autobiographic charge; he appears to invest equal energy into “life writing” and writing in the more narrow sense. Mogutin’s parallel (and at times interweaving) literary projects – a series of longer prose pieces, including his longest sustained narrative text to date, “Roman s nemtsem” (A novel/romance with a German, dated 1996–98), the cornerstone of an eponymous prose collection published in 2000;127 and a new major poetry volume, Sverkhchelovecheskie superteksty (Superhuman supertexts, also 2000), which he signs as Supermogutin – are both characterized by an edgier and much darker tone. The latter book won him a major literary award, the Andrei Bely Prize, which ended up becoming the most controversial and commented upon jury decision in the prize’s quarter-century history. One of the recurring focuses in Mogutin’s texts of this period is on his conflicted feelings about his body as a project, a locus of pleasure, an object

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of discipline, and ultimately as a commodity. Thus “Roman s nemtsem,” his own personal On the Road, contains a lengthy dream sequence when the narrator is visited by all his past and future lovers: I felt uneasy. I felt absolutely naked, unprotected and vulnerable. It seemed to me that together, numbering so many, they could do anything with me, even kill me, without uttering a word or moving from their places – simply by looking at me all at once. My past and future lovers surrounded me on all sides like vampires and werewolves, all of them wanted something, unbearably demanded something from me, they had schemed to wipe me out, grind me into dust, turn me into outer space dandruff. They desired my sex. And only that. The most infuriating thing was that the majority of them didn’t give a shit about the fine features of my soul and my intellectual capabilities. They didn’t give a shit that I was a fucking poet and whether I was a good poet or a bad one. As they wrote in one of the reviews of my book of poems, does it really matter what the poet writes and what they write about him when the poet has such a big and beautiful member! Indeed, does it fucking matter, since everyone is interested only in my cock! Well, perhaps also in my tight and deep ass. Horrified, I realized that in the end my body was the only valuable commodity or product that i could offer to this fucking world. I felt a hostage and victim of my own sex.128

Mogutin readily acknowledges in interviews that the darkest pages of his writing are often a form of self-therapy, a product of exorcising his personal traumas and demons. All his major prose texts are, as it were, framed fragments of “life writing” whose composition was triggered by particular tragic events: the news of the death of an old acquaintance in the case of the story “Smert’ Mishy B’iutifula” (The death of Misha Beautiful); the murder of Mogutin’s friend Vitaly Poliakov in the case of “Roman s nemtsem”; the death of a major literary influence, William Burroughs, in the case of the story “Luchshaia grud’ pobeditelia” (The best chest of the winner). Interestingly, by far the darkest of his prose texts, “Krovavoe mesivo” (Bloody mess), recounts a chilling sexual encounter with a sadomasochistically inclined psychoanalyst. Over the course of his years as a nomad/exile, the tone of Mogutin’s writing has grown darker, and the emotionality has heightened. His texts evidence increasing debt to surrealist “automatic writing” and the spontaneous long periods of Ginsberg’s Howl. His second collection of poetry, Sverkhchelovecheskie superteksty, includes texts disturbing in the passion of their existential loneliness:

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ia perestupil porog otchaian’ia i boli poznal vse stradaniia zhizni i sdelalsia zhestokim tsinikom i mizantropom smotri ia odin absoliutno odin mne nekuda bol’she idti u menia nikogo i nichego net za pazukhoi u menia tol’ko kamni obid izmen i predatel’stv ia prokliat i p’ian svobodoi svoego izgoistva ia sam za sebia I crossed over the threshold of despair and pain learned all the sorrows of life and became a cruel cynic and misanthrope look I’m alone absolutely alone I have nowhere else to go I have no one and nothing in my bosom there are only the stones of offenses infidelities and betrayals I’m cursed by and drunk with the freedom of being a pariah I am for myself129

Yet Mogutin does not abandon his journeys of exploring the self and the world. His texts introduce ever-new themes and locales into Russian writing in a tireless project of cognitive mapping of sexuality and the postmodern subjectivity. While written in Russian, his poetry and fiction reference the world far beyond the established domain of Russian literature. Still, Mogutin returns to interrogations of Russianness as identity in both life and art, sometimes first and foremost to shock (as in the poem “Esenin,” which contains an image of Russia herself on her knees fellating the poet),130 but more often for a reckoning, a working through the traumas of identification. In a text set at a Russian party that he attended in Prague, Mogutin remarks, neuzheli mne vsegda nuzhno budet v toske ekhat’ siuda chtoby srazu zhe s uzhasom otsiuda uekhat’?! … my slushali russkuiu muzyku smotreli russkoe tv govorili russkie razgovory i vsio bylo tak shchemiashche-tosklivo chto khotelos’ udavit’sia iz-za togo chto ia sovershenno ne oshchushchaiu nichego obshchego ni s etim iazykom ni s etoi kul’turoi ni s etimi liud’mi ni s etim mestom ni s etim vremenem no po ch’ei-to zloi ironii ili naiobke prodolzhaiu nazyvat’sia russkim poetom would I always need to come here full of anguish and melancholy only to immediately leave in horror?!

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… we listened to russian music watched russian tv carried on russian conversations and everything was so painfully depressing that one wanted to go kill oneself because I absolutely do not feel that I have anything in common either with this language or this culture or these people or this place or this time but due to someone’s cruel irony or to someone’s fucking me up I continue to be called a russian poet131

Among the writers of Russian postmodernity, Mogutin has perhaps gone the furthest in his subversion of the national canon, explorations of previously taboo imagery and locales, and intensive assertiveness of a marginal speaking subject. His texts are persistent wake-up calls that do not allow Russian culture to slip into complacency or delusions of grandeur. His emphatically queer, persistently nonconformist textuality has been among the most effective weapons in the transformation of post-Soviet textual reality. Mogutin’s being awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for the year 2000 in the poetry category and the storm of controversy unleashed by the jury’s decision testify to the strength of the public impact of his work.132 With the publication of a volume of his selected poetry, Termoiadernyi muskul (Thermonuclear muscle, 2001), in the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize book series, this literary and sexual outlaw has successfully “muscled” his way into the canon of contemporary Russian literature. Since 2001 the volume of his literary output has decreased to a degree, as his attention has been focused to a greater extent on his visual arts projects – an arena where he has managed to establish a no-less-impressive international presence than in literature. Yaroslav Mogutin, the radical Russian writer, slowly gave way to Slava Mogutin, or simply Slava – an international arts celebrity; the self has been refashioned yet again. In late 2004, however, Mogutin returned to the public arena with a new volume of poetry, Deklaratsiia nezavisimosti (A declaration of independence), where the aggression of Sverkhchelovecheskie superteksty to a large extent gives way to an uncompromising selfanalysis that is passionate yet surprisingly sober, as, for example, in the short poem “Vykidysh statui svobody (i vot vo chto ia prevratilsia)” (Statue of Liberty’s miscarriage [and this is what I have become]).133 Taken as a whole, this book marks the transformation of a poet-rebel into a poetphilosopher. His philosophy mostly follows the subversive traditions of Sade and Bataille, with occasional notes of existential despair, as in the poem “Udovletvoreniia ne nastupit” (Satisfaction won’t come).134 Yet the

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title poem, along with several other texts in the book, brims with defiant assertiveness: Mogutin’s main message to the world remains that of a passionate, sexually exuberant, truly “self-made” man: “I am.” Having followed the paths of Mayakovsky and Rimbaud, Mogutin thus increasingly sounds like a younger colleague of Walt Whitman, his recent writing becoming a latter-day incarnation of Whitman’s “I heard it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions, / But really I am neither for nor against institutions / (What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?),” complete with the establishment of “the dear love of comrades.”135 His photographic work, with its many shockingly tender images of men (among them skinheads, Latino gang members, and representatives of other aggressive-looking male subcultures), serves as an equally eloquent testimony to this transformation. It remains quite possible that a new coil of Mogutin’s ongoing project of self-fashioning is just around the corner, and yet another reinvention of the self would be presented to the world. No matter its future form, however, it is bound to be a thought-provoking interrogation of the habitual clichés of selfhood, of Russianness, and of gender and sexuality. Yet even in his remarkably cutting-edge work, the vision of Russian culture as a dominant imperial entity within the Second World remains virtually unchallenged. To find such explorations that reevaluate and challenge the legacies of Russian political and cultural imperialism by textual means, we need to turn our attention to the national cultures that are shedding their subaltern status and learning to navigate the postmodern seas on the vessels of postcolonial subjectivity. The second part of this volume examines one such culture: that of contemporary Ukraine.

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part two Ukraine: Being Postcolonial in the Second World

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6 Allegorical Journeys, or The Metamorphoses of Magic Realism

At the end of this book’s opening chapter, having dwelled on the entanglements between the postmodern and the postcolonial in the cultural context of two neighbouring post-Soviet nations, Russia and Ukraine, I called for the reader to keep in mind those arguments as I discussed several key paradigms of new cultural practices that have emerged in Russia in recent decades. In the remaining part of this study, I address some of the ways in which contemporary Ukrainian culture, and literature in particular, has reacted both to the particular “Second World” version of the global postmodern condition and to the crisis of Russian colonial domination. Having focused in the preceding chapters on the strategies of challenging and critically subverting both the official Soviet discourse and the established canonical cultural tradition at work in Russian literature and culture, I now turn to an exploration of some of the similarities and differences manifested in the textual strategies employed in contemporary Ukrainian writing. In my attempt to map the postmodern/postcolonial Ukrainian literature, I have identified three major paradigms. While in discussions of contemporary Ukrainian writing it is more common to encounter divisions along generational or regional lines, I have found that aesthetico-ideological affinities often run across these “extraliterary” divides. The three paradigms that I focus on here do not, of course, exhaust the entire field of contemporary Ukrainian cultural production. In fact, it is possible to find in Ukraine cultural developments that run roughly along lines similar to those in Russia as discussed in the preceding chapters. For instance, the

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plays of Les’ Podervians’ky and the plays and fiction of Volodymyr Dibrova develop an indigenous sots-artian paradigm, heavily mixed with influences of Western theatre of the absurd.1 Together with another author, Bohdan Zholdak, Podervians’ky is also due credit for creatively exploring, in rendering the speech of late/post-Soviet Ukrainian “everymen,” the so-called surzhyk (the umbrella term for various forms of patois that mix elements from Ukrainian and Russian phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar). Similarly, Ukrainian authors have been no strangers to producing heterotopic texts. Among those who have developed this paradigm, I would mention first and foremost Yuri Izdryk and Taras Prokhas’ko as having received the greatest critical acclaim, along with some lesser-known authors like Pavlo Vol’vach and Oleksandr Zhovna, as well as Vasyl’ Kozhelianko, who balances on the verge of innovative writing and commercially driven historical fantasy fiction. While contemporary Ukraine has not yet produced a queer literary discourse of note, some of the elements of the paradigm that I discussed in the case of Russia – namely the focus on the testimonial and quasitestimonial narrative; the emphasis on the post-O’Haraesque attempts to seize the sensory and emotional makeup of a fleeting moment, to release its traumatic outcome by transforming it into a poetic text (here the Ukrainian authors have also been influenced by the Polish poetic school of “O’Haraists”); and, last but not least, counter-culturally inflected performativity – can be found in the work of several heterosexually identified Ukrainian writers (especially Andrii Bondar and Serhii Zhadan). Still, these paradigms have to a significant extent intertwined with the original Ukrainian ones described below, for which I have not been able to find Russian counterparts, and therefore are mentioned only in passing in the chapters that follow. The first paradigm on which I will focus is comprised by a large body of texts characterized by a spatio-temporal convolution of narrative combined with a view of the world that perceives the mundane and the magical as fused or intertwined. Many of the authors who have contributed texts of this kind also demonstrate a fondness for different types of stream-ofconsciousness narrative and a somewhat hermeticist worldview. Although one can find some truly remarkable instances of poetic writing that can be placed in this paradigm (most notably the work of Oleh Lysheha),2 it, understandably, achieves its fullest development in works of prose fiction, for which I suggest a designation that has more commonly surfaced in discussions of cultural products originating in other parts of the world, namely magic, or magical, realism.

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Among the genres of postcolonial writing, magic realism has achieved perhaps the greatest recognition and popularity. This term, while originating in 1920s German art criticism, has come to signify a corpus of writing produced predominantly in non-Western contexts, particularly in Latin America, but more recently in Africa and Asia as well. No matter its origins, the term has frequently cropped up in discussions of postmodernism and postcolonialism. Despite the term’s popularity, it has remained relatively undertheorized; the most thorough attempt to date of such theoretical discussion is the 1995 volume Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. In their introduction, editors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris state that “magical realism is especially alive and well in postcolonial contexts,” while later in the volume Faris asserts that it constitutes “a strong current in the stream of postmodernism”3; at the same time they stress that the volume’s contributors are “at pains not to monumentalize magical realism as the postmodern or the postcolonial mode or to propose marginality as some new (disguised) mainstream. [Rather, they suggest] that magical realist practice is currently requiring that we (re)negotiate the nature of marginality itself.”4 Among the major theorists of postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon discusses magic realist writing under the umbrella rubric of historiographic metafiction, as she designates what she believes to be the leading paradigm of postmodernist fiction writing.5 Fredric Jameson, conversely, initially expresses his belief that “‘magic realism’ … is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.”6 However, this statement is qualified by Jameson’s focus on the filmic version of magic realism, in contradistinction to the so-called “nostalgia film,” as well as his later assertion that “nonsynchronicity of the synchronous,” a term he borrows from Ernst Bloch, characterizes the contemporary global condition.7 Indeed, this aspect of postmodernity is stressed in particular by postcolonial theorists. “Postcolonial perspectives,” writes Homi Bhabha, “emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of east and west, north and south. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples.”8 The prominence of magic realism in the postmodern/postcolonial context can be accounted for by its being “suited to exploring – and transgressing – boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magic realism often facilitates the fusion, or

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coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction.” Thus it “may be considered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation, at the same time as it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism.”9 As Jameson notes, magic realism can be characterized as “not a realism to be transfigured by the ‘supplement’ of a magical perspective but [as a vision of] a reality which is in and of itself magical or fantastic,” which is the assumption underlying the notion of lo real maravilloso, advanced by one of the key magic realist authors, Alejo Carpentier.10 It has been frequently noted that magic realist writing is particularly preoccupied with the question of history. It is, however, “history with holes, perforated history” that forms the focus of its attention.11 As Zamora and Faris note, in magic realist writing “hallucinatory scenes and events, fantastic/phantasmagoric characters are used … to indict recent political and cultural perversions. History is inscribed, often in detail, but in such a way that actual events and existing situations are not always privileged and are certainly not limiting: historical narrative is no longer chronicle but clairvoyance.”12 All in all, a key topos in which we can observe a coming together of the concepts of postmodernism and postcolonialism, their ontological engagement with the world, and magic realism as a prominent form of such engagement is that of the Baroque. An affinity with the Baroque, both as a system of thought and as an aesthetic practice, and with allegory, which twentieth-century criticism recognized as “the dominant stylistic law” of the Baroque,13 constitutes an important strain in their makeup. Thus Alejo Carpentier in the context of Latin America, and Yuri Andrukhovych in the context of Ukraine assert Baroqueness as the essential trait of both the historical landscape and the psyche.14 It appears to be fundamentally linked with their liminal position within the context of Western civilization and, in the latter case, of the Russian/Soviet Empire and with the critical power that stems from such a position. Central for these projects is the propensity for the allegorical and the fascination with ruins that was characteristic of the Baroque. Thus a conscious engagement of the Baroque heritage in a literary context would suggest a necessity for adopting a magic realist approach to writing. It has been argued that among Slavic cultures, Ukraine is possibly the most Baroque-oriented, and, indeed, the Baroque era (more exactly, the seventeenth century) marked Ukraine’s greatest prominence in the Slavic, as well as the Eastern Christian, world. Hence it comes as no surprise that Ukrainian writers of later eras were frequently drawn to portraying and

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reevaluating this legacy, beginning with the founder of Ukrainian vernacular literature, Ivan Kotliarevs’ky, and the writer of Ukrainian origin whose work has enjoyed the greatest international renown, Mykola Hohol’, a.k.a. Nikolai Gogol’.15 The impact of Gogol’ makes for a strong tie between magic realism as a literary form and Ukrainian culture. His name is the one usually mentioned first among the antecedents of magic realism.16 Thus it comes as little surprise that the first distinct literary form to emerge in his homeland, Ukraine, as socialist realism began to loosen its grip on aesthetic production during the Thaw of the late 1950s, is a version of magic realist writing that came to be called khymerna proza (“chimeric,” or “whimsical,” prose), which arose virtually simultaneously with, but entirely independently from, the better-known Latin American tradition of magic realist writing.17 Initiated by Oleksandr Il’chenko’s 1958 novel, Kozats’komu rodu nema perevodu, abo zh Mamai i chuzha molodytsia (The Cossack kin never wanes, or Mamai and the stranger woman), subtitled ukraïns’kyi khymernyi roman z narodnykh ust (a Ukrainian chimeric novel derived from people’s word – literally, “from the people’s lips”), this subgenre gained considerable popularity in Soviet Ukraine; among its better-known practitioners one may name Yevhen Hutsalo, Volodymyr Yavorivs’ky, Ivan Senchenko, Pavlo Zahrebel’ny, and Vasyl’ Zemliak. “Chimeric prose” was grudgingly tolerated by the authorities and allowed to develop, as long as its aesthetic “deviation” did not spill into thematic transgression. When the latter possibility was suspected, tolerance evaporated quickly; for instance, excessive khymernist’ (“chimeric-ness”) was cited as the main reason for the ban of Sergei Paradzhanov’s unfinished early 1970s film, Kyïvs’ki fresky (Kyivan frescoes), followed by his arrest and imprisonment. In the context of Soviet literature, chimeric prose was regarded as an original Ukrainian form that came to be accepted, due to its profession of a Soviet form of narodnost’ (populist/national spirit). While noting the “extreme laxity of writing and imagination, which usually includes elements of fantasy and laughter and a free, yet goal-oriented deformation of spatiotemporal ties and relations,” the Soviet critic who devoted the most attention to this form, Anatoly Pohribny, stressed that the “general goal” of chimeric prose was “a striving to comprehend the national character and the people’s way of life and thinking.”18 The roots of Ukrainian chimeric prose were usually traced to Ivan Kotliarevs’ky’s Eneida, the 1798 mock epic that inaugurated modern Ukrainian literature, and to Gogol’’s Dikanka stories, as well as more indirectly to the European tradition of the comic novel. Yet in the context of trying

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to “grasp the national character,” and thus being, as it were, the Ukrainian equivalent of Russian “village prose,” its uses of folkloric and historical elements were frequently troubling:19 by insisting on a humorous, or sometimes sarcastic, tone, chimeric prose reinforced some of the worst colonial stereotypes about Ukraine and the Ukrainians. As Pavlyshyn stresses in his unsparing discussion of one of the more ambitious chimeric novels, Yevhen Hutsalo’s Pozychenyi cholovik (The borrowed husband, 1981), most of chimeric prose exhibited closer affinity not so much with Kotliarevs’ky as with so-called kotliarevshchyna, the nineteenth-century epigonist trend that through excessive identification of the ethnographic with the comical, lapsed into “vulgarity and provinciality.”20 Likewise, most chimeric novels, beginning with Il’chenko’s Kozats’komu rodu nema perevodu (The Cossack kin never wanes), toe the official line on Russian-Ukrainian friendship and “strike one by the crudeness of characterization, primitiveness of humour and forcedness of the ‘old-time’ style.”21 Against the background of such works, Pavlyshyn and other critics hailed the appearance in the 1980s of a series of prose works by Valery Shevchuk (b. 1939), a member of the generation of the 1960s who, after a decade of forced absence from print, came forth with an original form of magic realist writing that polemically reworked some of the aspects of chimeric prose, dispensed with the latter’s crude humour, and challenged its underlying cultural and political assumptions. An impressively prolific author who exhibits great attention to form, Shevchuk has emerged as the maître of contemporary Ukrainian letters and continues to publish to this day. Yet it would be fair to say that his major magic realist texts that came out in the 1980s and early 1990s achieved the greatest resonance. I consider here three of these works, the novels Dim na hori (The house on the hill, 1967–80, pub. 1983), Na poli smyrennomu (On the humble field, 1978, pub. 1982) and Try lystky za viknom (Three leaves outside the window, 1968–81, pub. 1986). Shevchuk’s fiction is usually divided into two large categories. The first is comprised of texts set in the present, most of which are characterized by subtle psychological realism and take place in the author’s native city of Zhytomyr (Shevchuk is regarded as the leader of the so-called Zhytomyr school of Ukrainian prose).22 The second group of texts is set in the past, most frequently in the Baroque era, and is marked by a perception of the world that syncretically combines the realistic and the magical. However, some of his best writing, as one might expect, defies this binary classification, including his best-known novel Dim na hori (The house on the hill). In

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addition to his impressive output of fiction, Shevchuk, who holds a university degree in Ukrainian history, has published a number of scholarly studies of Ukrainian history and literature of the Baroque era as well as translations of Baroque poetry and Cossack chronicles into modern Ukrainian. Throughout the 1960s Shevchuk contributed numerous realist works to literary periodicals; at the end of the decade, they were collected in three books: two volumes of short stories, Sered tyzhnia (Midweek, 1967) and Vechir sviatoï oseni (The evening of the holy autumn, 1969), and a volume comprised of the novel Naberezhna, 12 (12 Embankment Street, 1968) and the novella “Seredokhrestia” (The intersection, 1968). While occasionally reproached by official critics for a predilection for “psychological microanalysis,” he was nevertheless hailed as one of the major new figures in Soviet Ukrainian literature. However, the 1966 arrest of his elder brother Anatoly, also an aspiring writer, for dissident activity signalled that troubles were close by. Approximately at the same time, Shevchuk began to turn increasingly to writing allegorical historical fiction, which he was unable to see into print for more than a decade. To make matters worse, in 1970 a story of his, unpublished in the ussr, appeared in a West German anthology, which led to his “blacklisting.” Throughout the 1970s, Shevchuk’s life was that of an “internal émigré,” a self-professed resident of the ivory tower who, while basically living in abject poverty, nevertheless continued his quixotic pursuit both of historical scholarship and fiction writing. However, unlike his elder brother and a number of other shestydesiatnyky, he did not become an overt dissident. The reader would search in vain through Shevchuk’s texts for explicit denunciations of the regime. As he has noted in an autobiographical essay, his only altar was that of art, which, while precluding any ties to official literature, also complicated his relationship with the dissidents.23 However, Shevchuk’s rejection of shestydesiatnytstvo and his search for a new aesthetic paradigm ultimately led to his being able to deliver a critique of Ukrainian society both past and present more nuanced and potent than such straightforward attempts as Oles’ Honchar’s much discussed novel Sobor (The cathedral, 1968), a work that, while sharply critical of Soviet society, fully partook of the socialist-realist aesthetic and merely reversed the positive and negative designation of its characters. It is possible to single out several key critical strategies utilized by Shevchuk. On the one hand, in his œuvre, as in many classic texts of Latin American magic realism (and, which is crucial in Shevchuk’s case, as in many writings from the Baroque era), the chronotope of the text (invariably Ukrainian) emerges as a self-contained microcosm, thereby stressing

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the distinctness of Ukrainian culture. His approach to the critique of both totalitarianism and imperialism is not through direct invective but through scrupulous and nuanced portrayal of their pernicious impact on the human psyche. And, as I have already mentioned, his presentation of the magical is devoid of mocking overtones; rather, it is introduced as a syncretic, inseparable part of human existence. Last but not least, Shevchuk resolutely refuses to fetishize the village; indeed, he persistently avoids rural settings: the action in his works takes place in either urban or natural environments but most often in the borderline space of the outskirts of cities and towns. Similarly to the authors of “mainstream” chimeric prose, intertextual dialogue with Gogol’ is unavoidable for Shevchuk, yet it assumes entirely different dimensions. In the early 1970s, he set as his goal, as he writes, “to create an anti-Gogol’” (stvoryty anty-Hoholia), for in the writings of Gogol’ (and later authors influenced by him) he was disturbed by their malorosiistvo – that is, the presentation of Ukrainian mentality as something exotic and to be mocked – which was destined for consumption by the imperial centre, while Shevchuk strove to recreate, as unprejudicedly as possible, the psychology and ontology of pre-modern Ukrainian culture.24 As is the case with other Ukrainian writers, the overt engagement here is with Gogol’’s early Ukrainian-themed works, yet there is a less pronounced but fascinating intertextual tie between some of Shevchuk’s texts – particularly those set in the nineteenth century, such as part 3 of Try lystky za viknom (Three leaves outside the window) – and Gogol’ the psychologist, of his Petersburg tales and Dead Souls. The polemical intent expressed by Shevchuk is characteristic of much of postcolonial writing, which strives to create a counter-narrative to imperial discourse. To invoke the phrase by Salman Rushdie that provided the title of one of the most influential texts of postcolonial theory, “the Empire writes back to the Center.”25 His engagement, however, does not exclusively focus on the colonial legacy; indeed, one of the most striking instances of such subversive engagement is his novel Na poli smyrennomu (On the humble field), which constitutes a polemical rewriting of the renowned text of medieval Kyivan Rus’ literature, the Kyievo-pechers’kyi pateryk (Paterikon of the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves). Yet among the intertextual ties in Shevchuk’s work, none are more clearly pronounced as those to Hryhory Skovoroda, the late-Baroque poet and philosopher and Ukraine’s leading eighteenth-century intellectual.26 Skovoroda’s life, philosophy, and poetic imagery fascinate Shevchuk; indeed, he has edited a volume of translations of Skovoroda’s work into

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modern Ukrainian.27 While for most earlier champions of Skovoroda’s legacy (among them Tolstoy and the Russian Symbolists), he is a unique, exceptional character, an idiosyncratic “Ukrainian Socrates,” and for some others, he is first and foremost “an outstanding representative of the Ukrainian psyche,”28 Shevchuk sees Skovoroda as a product of Baroque culture. He stresses Skovoroda’s indebtedness to earlier Baroque authors, both in his choice of poetic forms and in his choice of themes. “Skovoroda, as it were, summed up the experience of his age’s reflections about the world, which had existed both before him and in his lifetime,” writes Shevchuk, “and applied this experience to his own self, that is, he brought it close to immediate human existence, and on this basis constructed his moralist teaching, his science of living in this difficult and complex world. In other words, the poet not only reflected about and strove to know the world, but also desired to maintain in it the purity of his own self and thus help others to do the same.”29 Shevchuk states the key message of Skovoroda’s writing in the form of a question: “where is the human being to go and how to purify oneself, how to gain not rank, riches, and material comfort but spiritual peace, joy, and light becomes one of the main ideas not only of Skovoroda’s poetry, but also of his fables and later of all his philosophical treatises.”30 He also dwells on the strategies that Skovoroda suggests for human development: “In order for the process of perfecting the self to take place, the human being must pass through one more stage: to learn to distinguish the visible and the invisible inside oneself. The visible is but the shadow of the true human being, the ‘tail,’ so to speak, while the invisible is one’s essence. This invisible is united with the idea of God; it is, one may say, the presence of the macrocosm in the microcosm, hence coming to know God inside oneself is the highest degree of self-perfection.”31 Fascinated by the fusion of Baroque aesthetics with the moral philosophy presented in Skovoroda’s writing, Shevchuk notes that Skovoroda the person was “independent, with plenty of self-respect, proud, odd, poor (ubohyi), but wise,” with “eyes that would shine sometimes with the pride of an intellectual, sometimes with the simplicity of a beggar, or the innocent goodness of a child.”32 This figure of a somewhat odd and lonely natural-born intellectual striving to know the mysteries of the world emerges as one of the key character types in Shevchuk’s own fiction. Much like Skovoroda himself, these characters are somehow not of this world, incapable of mundane settled existence. Theirs is a perpetually marginal, liminal subjectivity. This character type occupies a prominent place in Shevchuk’s mostdiscussed work, his novel Dim na hori (The house on the hill). Complex

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in its construction, this text brings together the concerns of many of Shevchuk’s novels; it was recognized as somehow paradigmatic of his aesthetic and moral concerns. This novel is shot through with several contrasting binary divisions, or rather, with separations of interrelated and mutually dependent parts. It consists of two parts, a framing narrative, spanning the pre-revolutionary years to the early 1960s, and a cycle of twelve short stories, set in the Baroque era, which are presented as written by one of the principal characters of the first part and published by his great nephew, the character that is given the greatest number of autobiographical features. The two parts also provide contrast in their presentation of time. As Pavlyshyn notes, the first part is characterized by “archaic, mythic, cyclical” time and the second by “linear, restless, horrifying, modern” time.33 The first part of the novel calmly builds a slow-paced epic narrative. Even its language, abounding in long compound sentences, “creates an impression of liturgical solemnity and archaic simplicity.”34 At first apparently realistic, it sutures in a mythic dimension and goes on to present the action as determined not by logical causality but by the cycle of eternal return determined by supernatural forces: the lives of the inhabitants of the house on the hill are governed by the myth of encounter with the personified mystic force visualized as a gray bird that can assume human form. If a female inhabitant of the house rejects the advances of this magical creature, she continues an orderly domestic existence; if she yields to it, she will give birth to a son who later becomes a paradigmatic Skovoroda-like character that yearns for the unknown and wanders restlessly through the world, only to find inner peace and a gift of clairvoyance late in life (such are Ivan and the Boy [Khlopets’], the two central male characters of this part of the novel). The realistic twentieth-century setting, much of it localized immediately after the Second World War, thus comes to appear incidental and marginal to the development of the plot, which, as Pavlyshyn notes, is comparable to The Odyssey in that the narrative presents not the discovery of the new but the confirmation of the already known, a ritual retelling of the myth.35 The second part, conversely, is diverse and fragmented, and indeed Baroque not only in its temporal setting but also in its structural organization. “That which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in baroque creation,” notes Walter Benjamin. “For it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal.”36 The stories in the cycle are also united by presentations of encounters with the

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supernatural; however, it is presented as a series of allegorical riddles or parables speculating about the relativity and the interpenetration of good and evil and the impossibility of clearly separating the two. For example, the story “Holos travy” (The voice of grass) narrates the struggle between the old “good” witch Ivanykha Halaidykha and the young “bad” witch Varka Morozivna, who masquerades as a boy and becomes Ivanykha’s apprentice; the categories of the “good” and “bad,” however, are soon called into question. The resolution of the conflict, in this and other stories of the cycle, is never presented in an unambiguous form. The serene calm of the first part is thus emphatically contrasted with the ambiguity and restlessness of the second part. This contrast forms a crucial part of the novel’s intellectual message. The binary indivisibility and interdependence of the two are akin to the structure of the fold, which Gilles Deleuze focuses on in his study The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The fold, which Deleuze asserts to be Baroque’s central “operative function” – indeed, its criterion37 – is a key concept in the thought of Leibniz, the Baroque philosopher par excellence for Deleuze: “The division of the continuous must not be taken as of sand dividing into grains, but as that of a sheet of paper or of a tunic in folds, in such a way that an infinite number of folds can be produced.”38 The fold, as it is presented by Deleuze, somewhat corresponds to Derrida’s notion of the hymen,39 in that it simultaneously unites and separates. It “moves between” matter and soul, the outside and the inside, the high and the low.40 This tension of simultaneous separation and unity, in my view, characterizes the relationship between the two parts of Dim na hori; similar folds arise between the generations, the sexes, the key loci, and other elements of the text. Another characteristic Baroque element in Shevchuk’s text is its preoccupation with a pars pro toto relationship and representation of the universal through the particular. As Pavlyshyn argues, its tone and style are a polemical rejoinder to the colonial self-denigration that persisted in many of the works of chimeric prose, thus asserting the possibility of presenting an emphatically locally grounded, particularly Ukrainian spatio-temporal setting for discussing universal philosophical dilemmas. “In this way,” he writes, “The House on the Hill argues for the viability, natural strength, normality and equality of Ukrainian literature.”41 The spiritual worlds of its principal characters are presented as Leibnizian monads, subjectivities as metaphysical points, “each of which draws from its depths the entire world and handles its relations with the outside or with the others as an uncoiling of the mechanism of its own spring, of its

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own prearranged spontaneity.”42 A monad “conveys the entire world,” while “expressing more clearly a small region of the world.”43 Similarly a magic realist novel aspires to be, to use Gabriel García Márquez’s term, a “speaking mirror” held up to the experienced world, thus acquiring particular postcolonial momentum.44 This practice of reflecting the world in a peculiar “convex mirror” dominates another important magic realist text by Shevchuk, the novel Na poli smyrennomu (On the humble field). This novel is structured as a polemical rewriting (the book annotation describes it as a “psychological travesty”)45 of the Kyievo-pechers’kyi pateryk (Paterikon of the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves), a major work of medieval Kyivan Rus’ literature. As Shevchuk has noted, here, too, he was guided by one of the principles of Baroque poetics, creating a model of the world in a closed, sealed-off microcosm ruled by a totalitarian order, represented by the monastery and its restrictive rules.46 He remarked that writing the book was a form of self-therapy and a protest against the usurpation of the spiritual realm by the ruling power.47 The text’s central dilemma lies in an investigation of the inner spiritual freedom in confrontation with the dogmatic law and an organized institution that always strives to suppress the former. Far from advocating an atheist viewpoint, Shevchuk stresses the individual spiritual quest that combines an individual monad’s striving for God with the “moral necessity of having a body,”48 thereby entering a relationship of contiguous impression with other monads and opening up to the universe. The narrative presents the actual events that Polikarp, the author of the Pateryk, used for his morally edifying stories, here transcribed by a fellow monk. One by one, we are presented accounts that humanize the characters of the Pateryk, as they agonize over asceticism, withdrawal from the world (which the narrative rejects as a dark, murderous force), and loving one’s neighbour. Some of them are presented in the most unflattering way as duplicitous bigots. Even the numerous encounters with the miraculous portray the monks as being at a loss about how to deal with an all-too-powerful and terrifying element. As one may expect, when a fellow monk denounces the narrator, his record is condemned by the powers that be: “The only thing to be considered the holy truth is that which serves the glory of our monastery. If it is written not to glorify, it is nothing but evil inventions and slander.”49 A totalitarian order is terrified of a “speaking mirror.” The monastery in the novel, of course, allegorically represents a repressive social order, including Soviet imperial institutions. As Shevchuk has noted, some of his fellow writers saw it as an allegorical image of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Indeed, the straightforwardness of some of the polemic

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led the author to “cool toward this text,” for he felt that it was swayed too much by his personal moods and emotions.50 Nevertheless, Shevchuk continued working with allegorical forms, and his third major magic realist text, Try lystky za viknom (Three leaves outside the window), the most ambitious and politically charged of his works, presents a vision of three centuries of Ukrainian history. The novel is organized as three first-person narratives by members of one Ukrainian family. All three are traditional lonely intellectuals striving to know the world: in the seventeenth century, it is a search for an extratemporal, moral truth; in the eighteenth, for a documented, verifiable one; and in the nineteenth, the search is not for the truth but for more and more confirmations of the fallen state of the world. Yet the text is primarily preoccupied not so much with epistemology as with ontology, where the characters’ experiences emerge as an allegory for Ukrainians’ psychic and intellectual evolvement over these three centuries. The occupations, too, are indicative: in the seventeenth century, Illia Turchynovs’ky is a son of a Cossack who studies at what at the time was Ukraine’s leading institution of learning, the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, and eventually becomes a priest; in the eighteenth, Petro Turchynovs’ky, also a former student of the Academy, is a legal clerk; in the nineteenth, Kiriyak Avtonomovych Satanovs’ky, after graduating from Kyiv University, becomes a gimnaziia teacher. Their yearnings and aspirations diminish in scale, while their conformity to the ruling order increases. Thus Marko Pavlyshyn sees in this novel a vision of Spenglerian decline of the Ukrainian culture and spirit.51 Yet I would argue that the novel’s overall construction likewise is strongly influenced by the Baroque. “When, as is the case in Trauerspiel [the German Baroque drama], history becomes part of the setting,” writes Benjamin, it does so as script. The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the baroque cult of the ruin.52

Try lystky za viknom (Three leaves outside the window) represents, to some degree, “a play of mourning,” a Trauerspiel, in its persistent interest in the antinomies of the nature and history of good and evil, of the

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spiritual and material, and of their eternal interdependence. But rather than offering the reader an abstract symbolism, the argument develops allegorically. “Walter Benjamin made a decisive step forward in our understanding of the Baroque,” notes Deleuze, “when he showed that allegory was not a failed symbol, or an abstract personification, but a power of figuration entirely different from that of the symbol: the latter combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the center of the world, but allegory uncovers nature and history according to the order of time.”53 Shevchuk’s novel is at its most Baroque, of course, in its part set in the seventeenth century. In his wanderings, Illia Turchynovs’ky continuously confronts humanity’s propensity for evil and is haunted by the personified figure of Fear and other allegorical visions, yet he persistently strives for spiritual goodness. The realm of his experience is dominated by Baroque’s two “dominant vectors”: “as Wölfflin has shown,” remarks Deleuze, “the Baroque world is organized along two vectors, a deepening toward the bottom, and a thrust toward the upper regions.”54 Throughout, Illia Turchynovs’ky retains an optimistic outlook. His worldview displays affinities with that of Leibniz in that the “optimism is based on the infinity of the damned as the foundation of the best of all worlds: they liberate an infinite quantity of possible progress”55; while personal suffering is seen as a means of the soul’s expression of the world: “the monad expresses the world ‘according to’ its body, according to the organs of its body, according to the action of other bodies upon itself.”56 The wanderings, sufferings, and visions lead Illia Turchynovs’ky to an inner peace in almost a Skovoroda-like manner. For all its paradoxes and antinomies, his is still a coherent worldview. The second part of the novel, entitled “Petro uteklyi” (Petro the escapee), offers a vision of Ukraine in the eighteenth century as a conflict between the ideologies of the Baroque and the Enlightenment. The protagonist, a legal clerk, both by his choice of profession and by his initially professed views, demonstrates his affinity with the orderly rationality of Enlightenment. Yet the environment in which he finds himself, the mysterious case that he investigates, and, last but not least, his interaction with other characters, including his principal interlocutor, Deacon Stefan, fold the narrative back into the realm of the Baroque. The denouement of this part of the novel develops in an opposite direction from the first one: Petro’s Enlightenment outlook becomes increasingly destabilized by his investigation of the death of a mysterious man who shares his first name, notably by his conversations with the witnesses as well as with Deacon Stefan and the tavernkeeper V’iutska, whom he befriends. Even the natural

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environment appears to be Baroque: the small town or village Rudivka, where the framing part of the narrative takes place, is all covered by reddish-brownish-grayish dust, the colour that provides the backdrop for the action. Importantly, this is precisely the dominant background colour in Baroque painting: in place of white chalk and plaster used by Renaissance artists, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, and other Baroque painters use a dark red-brown background, which then forces the lighter figures to “jump out of the background.”57 The striking circumstances of the death under investigation, as well as the increasingly mysterious accounts of other “Petros the escapees” whom Petro Turchynovs’ky encounters, finally effect a metamorphosis in himself: he too suffers a personal crisis, proceeds to sever his ties to the routine circumstances of his life, and disappears into the unknown, becoming yet another Petro the escapee. He has a foreboding of many tribulations, and perhaps imminent death, but is prepared to struggle with controlling Fate. The novel is at its darkest in the final part, set in the mid-nineteenth century. Its protagonist, Kiriyak Satanovs’ky, is an indirect descendant of the Turchynovs’kys, yet beginning with his macabre-sounding surname (which his forefather changed from Sotanovs’ky to Satanovs’ky “to adapt it to the Great Russian pronunciation”), his character represents an allegory of psychic degradation effected by colonial servitude. Satanovs’ky faithfully serves the empire and considers it his duty as schoolteacher to produce uniform and perfectly functioning cogs and wheels for the great state machine; indeed, he compares himself in his role of teacher to an automaton, a “mechanical doll.”58 A horrifying caricature of Enlightenment rationalism, he is obsessed by systematization and classification, yet he directs them, with glee and gusto, to the aspect of human existence that tormented his predecessors: humanity’s capacity for evil, which haunted Illia Turchynovs’ky and puzzled Petro Turchynovs’ky, fascinates Satanovs’ky. His is a fundamentally misanthropic view of the world, and he pours his venom into recording and classifying various cases of human cruelty and corruption in his “Black Book.” He sees human beings as motivated by nothing else but the desire for material gain, and in a somewhat Romantic gesture, separates himself from the mass as a superman whose duty is to dispassionately record and judge their failings. A proud loner, he does not believe in the possibility of love and genuine goodness in this world. His relationship with his students is likewise guided by mutual hatred and has some sadistic overtones that echo Fedor Sologub’s Petty Demon. Even the magic aspect of this part of the novel is simultaneously pettier and more horrifying than in the previous ones: Satanovs’ky’s gift

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is the ability to divide himself in two, sending an invisible double to eavesdrop on the targets of his investigations for the “Black Book.” The reality of the Russian Empire of his time, of course, obliges Satanovs’ky with plenty of instances of humanity showing its dark side. The bleak picture presented to the reader, as Pavlyshyn has argued, sends the message that with its Satanovs’ky incarnation, the Ukrainian spirit arrived at a dead end: the Russian Empire that it inhabits, in accordance with the surname, is hell, “a place not only unpleasant but also eternal.”59 Satanovs’ky is a creature thoroughly alienated both from ulterior aspirations and from a national and cultural identity: he believes that “it is not my job to better the world or to feel compassion for it,” and he calls himself “a Little Russian, but not one of those who distinguishes them as a separate tribe.”60 However, his project of “a dispassionate chronicle of the evil world” ends up eventually subverting itself: he discovers feelings, both in himself and in others, that do not conform to his overarching scheme and experiences genuine pain when his two feeble attempts at developing a loving relationship with a fellow human being, directed first at a talented student and later at a young woman who becomes Satanovs’ky’s fiancée, result in death for both of them. Satanovs’ky’s seemingly unshakable worldview, like that of Petro Turchynovs’ky before him, suffers a crisis, and he becomes more human. At the end of the novel, he dies in a fire that sweeps his apartment – an element duly infernal but at the same time potentially purifying. The age of Satanovs’ky is also the beginning of national revival, and he mentions at one point Shevchenko, Kostomarov, and the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood. Perhaps the dark night of Satanovs’ky’s age corresponds to the dark night of the Brezhnev era when the novel was written, yet I believe that its world is not a final dead end, as Pavlyshyn argues, but does offer a small glimmer of hope – at least in the cracks of Satanovs’ky’s worldview, that dark shadow of the Enlightenment. A subversive potential is present even in his earlier intention to avoid close human contact and be a dispassionate observer of this world, for an aspiration for objectivity eventually calls into question the value system on which it is based. The subtlety of magic realism lies here “in the metamorphosis of perception and of things perceived.”61 Shevchuk’s carefully crafted, psychologically elaborate magic realist narratives that engage centuries of Ukraine’s cultural history ushered in what I would call the psychologically introspective version of Ukrainian magic realist writing. Its reverberations, along with the influences of different forms

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of postmodernist writing from other parts of the world, are visible in the work of several major younger authors, particularly Izdryk and Taras Prokhas’ko. Their texts stand in contrast to the daringly transgressive and more openly political form of magic realist writing, which received its earliest developed articulation in the work of another prominent contemporary Ukrainian author, Yuri Vynnychuk (b. 1952). Vynnychuk’s writing offers one of the most fascinating instances of allegorical writing, in the more conventional sense, in contemporary Ukrainian literature: he frequently constructs his texts as fairly transparent allegories of colonial and totalitarian oppression. In this project, he favours the genres of short story and novella with a fragmented, fast-paced plot. Often suffused with politically charged violence, his texts nonetheless develop “a strange and poetic visual reality,” which Jameson believes characterizes the violence-charged paradigm of magic realist literature and film.62 Thus, in the short story “Litopys vid ravlyka” (The snail chronicle), which opens his first published book, Spalakh,63 water snails endowed with extraordinary mental powers take control of a Ukrainian father and son, who eventually turn into snails themselves. The story of the snail invasion and the eventual imposition of an absurd parody of a totalitarian order overtly invites a reading of the text as an allegory for the imposition of alien Soviet power over the Ukrainian populace. This theme is further explored, reaching the dimension of gruesome grotesque, in Vynnychuk’s novella “Laskavo prosymo v Shchurohrad” (Welcome to Ratville, 1992). In this work, rats develop a superior consciousness and take over the minds and the souls of the human city dwellers. This novella, similarly to “Litopys vid ravlyka” forces the reader to “sharpen [his/her] consciousness of the shock of entry into the narrative, which so often resembles the body’s tentative immersion in an unfamiliar element, with all the subliminal anxieties of such immersion … a sense of our vulnerability along with an archaic horror of impure contact with the unclean,” which Jameson believes characterizes our encounter with transgressively violent forms of magic realism.64 “Laskavo prosymo v Shchurohrad” (Welcome to Ratville) recounts how rats successfully destroy family bonds first by turning human children into rats through indoctrination and then by making them inform on their own parents. They lock the dissenting humans into insane asylums, where they are subjected to horrific experimentation aimed at eventual interbreeding of rats and humans, creating a new race of rat people that aspires to conquer and colonize the whole world. The novella narrates the story of the last partially unbroken family’s desperate rebellion against the rats,

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aided by a chance visitor to town. But in a darkly ironic twist, the family dies in the battle, and the visitor is the only one who survives and escapes to warn the future generations of humans. Through such allegorical means, Vynnychuk mounts a powerful critique of the crushed, brainwashed, compromised condition in which Ukrainians have found themselves as a result of lengthy colonial rule. The official doctrine of the rats, as it is presented by a guide-rat to a visitor at Ratville, begs the reader to compare it to the condition of the colonized Ukraine: “Ratville?” I got surprised and added, pointing to the houses, “But people live here too.” “Of course. Just like in any city. But Ratville was founded by rats. We were the ones who discovered and populated this city. And humans came later. Such is the history of quite a few cities, but for some reason we were always overshadowed.” “And how are you doing, living together with humans?” “Wonderfully. Beyond all expectations. We even allowed them to give human names to some of the streets … We finally found a common language, and even common interests. Humans stopped doing us harm … We have made them happy … Figuratively speaking, they sit on our neck … We are doing a great deal for them. We write books for them, which they gladly read, we compose songs to which they gladly listen, we shoot films which they gladly watch. We nourish them spiritually. And they are extremely grateful. Their gratitude is manifested in, among other things, the fact that they feed us dinner. Note, only dinner. We have to procure breakfast and supper ourselves. You have to agree they are getting a very good deal. Even more so since all the spiritual nourishment is only nominally in our hands. The films, for example, feature human actors, even if they are concerned with the problems of a purely rat family. And the books? In the books as well the heroes, as a rule, are human, while the rats appear only episodically. Historical works, though, constitute an exceptional case … Since it is only we who represent and make history here, humans do not have any connection to it. And all of this just for a dinner! Can you imagine?”65

The level of sarcasm that characterizes this passage is seldom reached in Vynnychuk’s other works. However, a dark irony of a similar type prevails, at times metamorphosing into extremities of physical transgression comparable to those found in Vladimir Sorokin’s texts.66 On the whole, the dominant mode of Vynnychuk’s prose is a magic realism of a more macabre type. Like Sorokin, Vynnychuk frequently “overstuffs” his texts with physical (and, to a lesser degree, verbal) transgression, but in this case it serves not to demonstrate the alienating force of sign systems but

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to “exorcise” slavish colonial mentality (thus the deeper affinity would be with Sorokin’s Norma and its overall project of “exorcising” the repressive totalitarian economy of language and thought).67 The youngest representative of Ukrainian magic realism that I would like to mention here is Oles’ Ul’ianenko. Born in 1962, he belongs to the generation that came of age in the final years of the Soviet Empire. His writing is dominated by a bleak, somber mood. He was born in a small town in the Poltava area, and his colourful biography includes army service in Afghanistan, a stint as a patient of a mental hospital, and living homeless on the streets of Kyiv. Ul’ianenko’s breakthrough success came with the 1994 publication of his novel Stalinka, and he was still technically homeless when it was awarded the state’s highest honour, the Shevchenko Prize (so as part of the prize package, he received a studio apartment). His favourite mode of writing is stream of consciousness, and he is considered a leader of the school of Ukrainian writing associated with the notion of chornukha (literally, “dark stuff”). He is fairly hostile to Western culture, and perhaps unsurprisingly, despite his critical acclaim in Ukraine, is virtually unknown beyond the country’s borders. Stalinka, although fairly short (ninety-two pages in the book edition)68 is a slow, dense narrative tending toward Faulknerian page-long convoluted sentences. It is composed of two alternating, and gradually converging, narratives. One of them is the story of the character nicknamed Lord, who escapes from a small-town mental hospital, decides to take on a new name, Jonah, and makes his way to Kyiv where he lives as a strange, quasiholy-fool figure. The other is the life story of a certain Gorik Piskarev (a.k.a. Hryhory Piskurenko), nicknamed Wolf, the last of the PiskurPiskurenko-Piskarev clan. He is a leader of the street gang that fights the rival gangs for control of the Kyiv neighbourhood known as Stalinka – a mostly working-class enclave, southwest of the city centre, built during the Stalin era, hence the (unofficial) name. Shortly before Gorik’s death, he meets Jonah, and the latter briefly becomes his spiritual advisor and confessor. While the Lord/Jonah story is a somewhat bizarre combination of autobiographical elements and a retelling of the Bible’s Book of Jonah, the Piskur/Piskarev subplot, as I will argue below, emerges as a powerful, condensed allegorical representation of Stalinist civilization. This narrative, which begins with Gorik’s birth, assumes the larger dimensions of a family chronicle, a neo-naturalist account of one family’s progressive degeneration much in the tradition of someone like Zola, even if this naturalist account is complicated by the stream-of-consciousness

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presentation, the strange, pulsating temporality, and the colourful hallucinatory passages fully within the magic realism paradigm. Like other magic realist narratives, Stalinka takes place entirely in a closed microcosm, located on Ukrainian territory, which turns out to be no less “Stalinized” than the rest of the empire – and this is visible not only in the Stalin-era and Stalin-style urban spaces that the characters inhabit, but also in the determining features of their mentality. It is Gorik’s grandfather, the family patriarch, who in the text makes the fatal alliance with the Stalinist state machinery; he is a proud, unrepentant trigger-happy ex-nkvd operative whose career began in 1929, “the year of the great break,” and skyrocketed in 1933, the year of the great famine. Grandfather, who worships Stalin, is endowed with “insane pride” (“skazhenyi honor”) in his deeds and the blood of his many victims as well as with an obsessive hate for Khrushchev because of the latter’s de-Stalinizing policies. Naturally, he delights in recalling his participation in killings and torture back in the “glory days.” Gorik’s father is an alcoholic, a sad non-entity dominated by his father and his wife; his first offspring is a mentally handicapped boy nicknamed Sio-sio, who eventually strangles the family’s last living tie with “authentic” pre-Stalin culture, the grandmother, and sets the apartment on fire. Gorik himself is as much a child of the mean streets, mentored by an aging ex-con and hardened in gang violence, yet the family situation serves as a primary impulse that sets him on his doomed path; his death is gruesome and horrifying but seems “pre-programmed” by his biography and his heredity. The novel is generally shot through with apocalyptic overtones; the Lord/Jonah subplot likewise abounds in harrowing details, but it is the story of the Piskurs/Piskarevs in particular that emerges as a clear instance of Jamesonian national allegory. Stalinka’s Lord/Jonah is a disillusioned prophet; even the qualified optimism of other writers’ works is entirely absent in this text. Ul’ianenko and other writers whom he feels close to (Yevhen Pashkovs’ky, V’iacheslav Medvid’) envision their project as a “constructive mythologization,” consciously opposed to the postmodernist strategies of subversion utilized by Andrukhovych and a number of other contemporary Ukrainian authors.69 While I do not share the fairly reactionary vision of “constructiveness” espoused by these authors (who basically equate Soviet civilization to pagan Rome and preach the arrival of some sort of new Christianity),70 I believe that they have authored some truly powerful attempts at rethinking the governing principles of Stalinist civilization. By such allegorical means, Ukrainian magic realist narratives, both of the psychologically introspective strain and of the graphically transgressive

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one, engage in a project of representation and simultaneous subversion of the legacies of colonialism and totalitarianism in contemporary Ukraine, manifested both as a collective national psychic trauma and as an ontological crisis. In yet another link with the Baroque legacy, this paradigm of contemporary Ukrainian writing is frequently characterized by a melancholy outlook: allegory, writes Benjamin, is “the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself.”71 In the next chapter, I will move to discuss a corpus of postcolonial Ukrainian texts that, conversely, are characterized by the prodigious employment of the carnivalesque as a creative and critical strategy. Additionally, while the realms of most magic realist texts are structured as sealed-off microcosms, and relate to the world in the fashion of Leibnizian monads, the works of the authors engaging the carnivalesque are characterized by their openness as they set off on a precarious journey of exploration of the place of the postcolonial Ukrainian subject in the global postmodern condition. In other words, they engage in what Deleuze calls “an overtaking of monadology with a ‘nomadology.’”72

7 The (Post)colonial (Post)carnivalesque, or The Poetics and Politics of Bu-Ba-Bu

As I noted in the previous chapter, one of the crucial strategies taken up by postcolonial Ukrainian writing consists of rethinking Ukraine’s cultural history and reaffirming several features that contemporary authors believe have been neglected or distorted over the centuries of imperial rule. Yet, as Saree Makdisi notes in his influential essay “The Empire Renarrated,” this paradigm can be fraught with grave pitfalls. Postcolonial intellectuals, he argues, often tend to focus, in their engagement with imperialism, on a reaffirmation of the traditional cultures and ways of life that were disrupted by it. They are thus led in search of alternatives to the present dominant culture that exist only in isolated images and practices that are taken as reaffirmations of traditional, precolonial cultures. Opposition to imperialism can therefore be diverted into a futile search for traditions, through which the postcolonial intellectual attempts (if only symbolically) to reembrace his or her own people and “their” culture. Having adopted the vestiges (or outer trappings) of these traditions, these intellectuals soon discover their emptiness; having tried to grasp hold of “the people,” they are left clutching the now-barren symbols of the past.1

While it is by no means my intention here to belittle the projects that I have discussed in the preceding pages, I would like to point out that texts of this kind, which played such a pivotal role in Ukrainian culture in the 1980s, in recent years have receded in their prominence, giving way to a different type of writing that, in sharp contrast to the sealed-off worlds of

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neo-Baroque magic realist texts, is characterized by openness, fluidity of structure, heterogeneity of intertextual links, and an overall formal exuberance. These texts are characterized by the suspense or radical distortion of traditional narrative temporality and by a conscious investment in various modes of carnivalesque transgression. These texts artfully fuse the playful investigative momentum of postmodernist writing with an incisive critique of both the Russian/Soviet imperialist oppression and the fossilized traditional forms of colonial-era Ukrainian nationalist iconography. A truly revolutionary upheaval ushered texts of this kind onto the Ukrainian literary scene in the late 1980s, and it has been first and foremost associated with a trio of writers (then primarily known as poets) who called themselves Bu-Ba-Bu, which stands for burlesk, balahan, bufonada (burlesque, side-show, buffoonery): Yuri Andrukhovych (b. 1960), Oleksandr Irvanets’ (b. 1961), and Viktor Neborak (b. 1961). While this trend in Ukrainian letters manifested itself in the texts of a number of other authors – such as the poetry by the groups LuHoSad (Ivan Luchuk, Nazar Honchar, Roman Sadlovs’ky) and Propala Hramota (The Lost Letter, consisting of Yurko Pozaiak, Viktor Nedostup, and Semen Lybon’), the prose and plays of Volodymyr Dibrova, the short stories of Bohdan Zholdak, and so forth (not to mention the trend’s spilling over into other genres, such as theatre and the visual arts) – Bu-Ba-Bu has been recognized as the undisputed leader of this transformation.2 The history of Bu-Ba-Bu as a coherent group roughly spans a decade. Formed in 1985, the group gave its first major public reading in late 1987, while its activity peaked between 1988 and 1992. The poezoopera (poetryopera) Kraisler Imperial (Chrysler Imperial), staged in L’viv in October 1992, has been designated the “apotheosis” of the movement;3 the publication in 1995 of the anthology Bu-Ba-Bu: T.v.o./…/ry (Bu-Ba-Bu: W.o.r./ …/ks) and in 1996 of the Kraisler Imperial project as a special issue of the journal Chetver was seen as the summing up of its accomplishments. Although its members still constitute a major presence in contemporary Ukrainian letters, the heyday of the group already has become the stuff of legends and cultural mythmaking, while the current literary projects of its members have taken them on very different and diverging paths. Both Irvanets’ and Neborak seem to have largely put this stage of their lives and literary careers behind them,4 while for Andrukhovych it has become a major theme for reflection and reconsideration in his prose writing, to which I turn later in this chapter.5 One of the group’s major distinguishing features is its focus on public performance and community-creation, unprecedented in Ukrainian letters;

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to my knowledge, Bu-Ba-Bu is the only literary group or movement anywhere to acknowledge the writing of Mikhail Bakhtin as a major source of inspiration in its artistic practice (although the Bu-Ba-Bists insist that they had formulated the group’s central issues prior to reading Bakhtin).6 That such a development would occur in contemporary Ukrainian literature is probably not accidental. Bakhtin himself, in his essay on Rabelais and Gogol’, an offshoot of his larger Rabelais project, notes that the traditions of “grotesque realism” (a term that he introduces as a synonym for carnivalesque literature) in Ukraine “were very strong and persistent” and constituted a reverberation of the West European carnivalesque tradition. Bakhtin singles out in particular the so-called “recreations,” spring graduation festivals held at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and other institutions of learning in Ukraine between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, comparing them to the Western tradition of the so-called risus paschalis7 – a comparison that, as we shall see, will be of crucial importance to the Bu-Ba-Bists. The intriguing, even seductive promise of the carnivalesque and of its peculiar form of utopianism for postmodern writing was perhaps first recognized by Julia Kristeva. In her early essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (pub. 1969), she asserts that “[c]arnivalesque discourse breaks through the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics and, at the same time, is a social and political protest. There is no equivalence, but rather, identity between challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law.”8 Kristeva then goes on to link Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony and carnival with her influential neologism, “intertextuality,” and extends its relevance to twentieth-century writing; however, her main emphasis in this essay remains on the carnival’s subversive potential and the peculiar form of community that it creates. She sees in the carnival “a homology between the body, dream, linguistic structure, and structures of desire”; for Kristeva, the carnivalesque is “the residue of a cosmogony that ignored substance, or identity outside of its link to the whole, which exists only in or through relationship.” She asserts that as it is “composed of distances, relationships and analogies, and nonexclusive oppositions,” the carnival is “essentially dialogical.” Kristeva stresses that “[w]ithin the carnival, the subject is reduced to nothingness, while the structure of the author emerges as anonymity that creates and sees itself created as self and other, as man and mask.” She draws insistent attention to the carnival’s foregrounding of sexuality and death as the “underlying unconscious” of cultural production. “Out of the dialogue that is established between [sexuality and death],” argues Kristeva, “the structural dyads of carnival appear: high and low, birth

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and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laughter and tears.” Finally, she reiterates that “the carnival challenges God, authority, and social law; insofar as it is dialogical, it is rebellious.”9 Kristeva’s essay appeared in the context of late-1960s Paris – one of the key instances of communitarian upheaval in recent history and an instance that, in retrospect, was indeed seen as a manifestation of a peculiar form of community, a carnivalesque one. Thus Maurice Blanchot, in his book The Unavowable Community, stresses in particular the carnivalesque aspects of that phenomenon: May ’68 has shown that without project, without conjuration, in the suddenness of a happy meeting, like a feast that breached the admitted and expected social norms, explosive communication could affirm itself (affirm itself beyond the usual forms of affirmation) as the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar.10

Blanchot stresses both the utopianism and the ephemeral nature of the Paris 1968 community: “Without project”: that was the characteristic, all at once distressing and fortunate, of an incomparable form of society that remained elusive, that was not meant to survive, to set itself up … what mattered was to let a possibility manifest itself – beyond any utilitarian gain – of a being-together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone. Everybody had something to say, and, at times, to write (on the walls); what exactly, mattered little. Saying it was more important than what was said. Poetry was an everyday affair.11

Perhaps there is a touch of nostalgia in Blanchot’s retrospective description of those events. Indeed, this utopian strain of French poststructuralist thought has been criticized by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, in their influential study The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (itself strongly influenced by Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque), for being “a romantic politics” – “[o]nly a challenge to the hierarchy of sites of discourse,” they argue, “which usually comes from groups and classes ‘situated’ by the dominant in low or marginal positions, carries the promise of politically transforming power.”12 Yet there is a striking kinship between the events of Paris 1968 and the numerous unofficial festivals – the 1990 Zolotyi Homin (Golden Noise), the annual Chervona Ruta (Red Rue, which lasted for several years), the 1992 Vyvykh (Dislocation) – that served

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as the hallmarks of Ukraine’s cultural transformation as the Soviet Empire was crumbling. These were, if one may use such an expression, “aesthetic revolutions,” whose principal feature was the Kantian “purposiveness without purpose” (although in the Ukrainian case the affirmation of the national language and cultural heritage in a challenge to the ruling empire, no matter how vague and often conflicting the visions of Ukrainianness espoused by the participants of the “revolutions,” served as a leitmotif – thus potentially endowing them with the extra-challenging potential affirmed by Stallybrass and White). These events, in contrast to the “velvet” and not-so-velvet revolutions in other nations of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, did not directly seek the collapse of the ruling order, but by their very establishment as “instantly realized utopia[s] … in suspension as if to open time to a beyond of its usual determinations,”13 they instantiated existence outside that order. Thus, rather than sharing features with the “velvet revolutions” of East Central Europe, these Ukrainian upheavals had more in common with Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in May 1989; this latter, for the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, serves as a prototype of “[w]hat could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not only by any condition of belonging … nor by any simple absence of conditions … but by belonging itself.” Agamben emphasizes that “[w]hat was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands,” which “makes the violence of the State’s reaction seem even more inexplicable.” For Agamben, the conflict in Tiananmen was not about a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State … What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans cobelong without any representable condition of belonging … Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself … and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.14

I have attempted here, by way of analogizing with some of the events better known internationally, to sketch out the contradictory yet elated atmosphere of the ephemeral Ukrainian carnivalesque communities of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I suggest that these phenomena could be considered a constituent part of the paradigm of a certain “globalization of resistance” and could serve as preludes of more powerful events to

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come. These small-scale “aesthetic revolutions” attempted to affirm a very vague and unstructured vision of alternative, rebellious, subversive Ukrainian culture. They were brimming with youthful energy, and throughout, the spirit of Bu-Ba-Bu served as the defining presence. And when the new upheaval swept through Ukraine in November and December 2004, an upheaval that thrust Ukraine into the global spotlight to an unprecedented degree and came to be known as the Orange Revolution, it, too, was fundamentally structured as a carnivalesque “instantly realized utopia,” localized, as carnivals were in the past, in main town squares, first and foremost Kyiv’s Independence Square, which transformed overnight from a monster of ill-conceived post-Soviet urban reconstruction into a magical site of peaceful and joyful being together beyond the reach of ruling order. The carnivalesque energy that swept through the country ended up being too powerful for the state apparatus to contain: incredibly, carnival stopped the tanks from appearing. The relative letdown of the messy postrevolutionary political and economic problems only further underscored the profound differences between what came to be called “the spirit of the Maidan,” as Kyiv’s Independence Square is colloquially known, and the violent uprisings from other times and places. This new revolution proved so powerful – too powerful – that it largely knocked cultural production off its established tracks, giving privilege to the genre of emotional essay and, of course, to passionate public speeches.15 Throughout, however, cultural figures played a key role in these events: the writer Serhii Zhadan served as the manager (komendant) of the revolutionary tent city in Kharkiv; rock and pop musicians, such as Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, the leader of the group Okean El’zy, and Ruslana, winner of the 2004 Eurovision contest, gave almost daily public performances for the temporary residents of the Maidan; the writer Oksana Zabuzhko concentrated her efforts on addressing the global intellectual community through her widely published essays – the list can be continued ad infinitum. The event was in some ways too stunning to fully comprehend, yet one thing was clear: the spirit of carnivalesque cultural production that dominated earlier, smaller-scale, short-lived “instantly realized utopias” of recent Ukrainian history grew into an awesome force. While this event is still too recent to be subjected to dispassionate analysis, it may be helpful to take steps toward contextualizing it through looking back at the evolution of the cultural paradigm that was to a significant extent responsible for bringing this revolution into being. Without minimizing the crucial differences between the texts by the three members of Bu-Ba-Bu (indeed, their early and later writing took them in very different directions), one can affirm that the “signature texts” from the

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late 1980s and early 1990s do come across as an amalgamated whole. One of the best-known examples of this “signature mode” of Bu-Ba-Bu writing is Oleksandr Irvanets’’s “Turbatsiia mas: Himn-oda ‘Bu-Ba-Bu’” (The stirring of the masses: A hymn/ode to “Bu-Ba-Bu”), the very title of which incorporates a carnivalesque pun: turbatsiia mas (the stirring of the masses) versus masturbatsiia (masturbation). This parodic ode to the group, for all its cheerfully subversive tone, nevertheless contains a strong message of community, “we shall gather you into a group next to us” (“Vas navkolo Sebe / Budem hurtuvaty”), continuing that now it is “time neither to dance nor to beat up, but to stir the masses” (“Chas ne tantsiuvaty / I ne morduvaty – / masy turbuvaty”).16 Similarly, Viktor Neborak’s nearly trans-sense “Bubon” combines carnivalesque playfulness with a communitarian utopian gesture: Maliuite BABU holuBU huBAmy dyvyt’sia doBA BU dyfiramBAm BU taBU vam zuby vstavyt’ BUBABU roste poeziia v horBA v horbi z hroshyma borot’BA ta BUntom BUde BUBABU vid azBUk holova slaBA huBAmy vyBUkhaie BArd chym svit sychyt’—krychyt’ teatr zihraiesh virsh iakoho vart potrapysh v rai (chy na monmartr) BU smerti i bezsmertiu BU i BU i BA i BUBABU17

The project of Bu-Ba-Bu thus emerges in this poem as a mutiny that mocks both death and immortality, both dithyrambs and taboos; it equates the world and theatre, heaven and the epitome of Bohemianism, Montmartre. It also registers an explosive, overwhelming multiplicity of “ABC’s” (“vid azBUk holova slaBA”) – that is, narratives, discourses. Yet this project is not a return to the avant-garde utopianism of the early twentieth century. As Tamara Hundorova notes in her theoretical discussion of the group and its legacies, the Bu-Ba-Bu phenomenon was first and foremost grounded in public action, a performance read aloud and bursting with voices (both authorial and of the masquerade) … Devoid of the avant-gardist claim to complete or turn upside down the Ukrainian literary tradition, Bu-Ba-Bism did not become a

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retrospective apocalypse. The sphere of Bu-Ba-Bists’ interests was the play with the “gaps” and taboos of national culture … Both repentance and insult were ground up in the ritual carnivalesque laughter, which was taken by the Bu-Ba-Bists to be the only possibility of avoiding the fully prostituted official Soviet (and more broadly speaking, any totalitarian) culture.18

These Bu-Ba-Bu practices, for Hundorova, provide sufficient evidence for designating the group’s project “a version of post-Soviet postmodernism bearing a form of a sociocultural critique.” She strongly disagrees with the comparison of Bu-Ba-Bu, proposed by some critics, to oberiu, seen as a paradigmatic instance of an experimental avant-garde group. “The Bu-BaBists,” she emphasizes, “yearned for mass action and resonance,” which once again suggests their greater kinship with the Bakhtinian carnivalesque.19 Exuberance and transgression of taboos are the key features of Bu-BaBu poetic performance, which often generated considerable controversy. Thus Irvanets’ authored a series of poems, dated 1992, which mock the kitsch incarnation of the national narrative as it was emerging in the first months of independence. For instance, “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” a “lullaby ode” to the mother-nation, opens with the lines: “From the Don to the Sian you lie, oh the radiant one, from the Tigris and the Euphrates all the way to Oslo and Baranovychi” (“Vid Donu do Sianu / Lezhysh, osiianna. / Vid Tihra z Efratom lezhysh azh do Oslo i Baranovych”), mocking the nationalist euphoria that resurrected claims to a larger Ukrainian territory (both rivers, the Don and the Sian [San], are now outside Ukraine’s borders) by stretching the nation’s boundaries all the way to Mesopotamia and Norway. In the same vein, the poem “Liubit’! …” (Love! …), more widely known as “Liubit’ Oklahomu” (Love Oklahoma), parodies the patriotic 1940s poem by the Soviet Ukrainian author Volodymyr Sosiura, “Liubit’ Ukraïnu” (Love Ukraine).20 Similarly, Neborak in his “Pisen’ka pro LialiuBo” (A ditty about Lialia-Bo) continues his near trans-sense alliterative experimentation, which is parodically presented as the glorious affirmation of nationalist sentiment, as exemplified in the following stanza: V Liali-Bo ie prava i obo i velyki tsabe i malen’ki bobo tsob-tsabe tsiatsia-kytsia-mytsia-be bo meta v Liali-Bo – ukraïns’ka

Lialia-Bo has rights and du and the big tsabeh and the little bobo tsob-tsabeh kootchie-kitty-mitty-beh for Lialia-Bo’s goal is – Ukrainian21

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In this poem, withered fragments of official discourse – on the rights and duties of a citizen in this particular stanza – are mixed with quasi-childish babble only to lead, seemingly out of nowhere, to the patriotic slogans of the final lines of each stanza (the head, trumpet, goal, and soul of the mysterious Lialia-Bo are proclaimed to be Ukrainian). The Bu-Ba-Bists’ texts continuously affirm Ukrainian culture, infusing it with a new vitality, but do so by breaking all the taboos of its ossified official incarnations (whether Soviet or anticolonial/nationalist). Yet the writings of Andrukhovych from the outset embark on a more reflexive, exploratory course that charts its way through the hybrid space of Ukraine, a nation shedding its colonial and totalitarian legacy and facing the numerous dilemmas of newly independent nations about which Frantz Fanon wrote so eloquently in the context of Africa in the late 1950s.22 Of all the BuBa-Bists, Andrukhovych seems to have taken Bakhtin’s writing closest to heart and consciously constructs his texts as explorations of the carnivalesque and the grotesque – but with a postmodern/postcolonial subversiveness and a stress on hybridity. Perhaps the clearest example of this technique can be found in his story “Samiilo z Nemyrova, prekrasnyi rozbyshaka” (Samiilo of Nemyriv, a handsome robber), which is thematically linked to the poems from the most overtly Bu-Ba-Bist of his books of poetry, the 1991 collection Ekzotychni ptakhy i roslyny (Exotic birds and plants). Structurally, this text seems to continue and elaborate the paradigm made famous by Borges in his 1935 short-story collection, Historia universal de la infamia (A universal history of iniquity). In this book, Borges presents quasi-documentary biographic essays that narrate the lives not of tyrants and oppressors but of exotic and obscure characters, such as the widow Chang, a pirate. Yet Andrukhovych’s “exercise” in this paradigm turns out to be fraught both with carnivalesque subversion and with postcolonial concerns. Not surprisingly, the chronotope that Andrukhovych chooses for his story is the “golden age” of the early seventeenth century, when Ukraine enjoyed considerable autonomy under Polish rule and Ukrainian culture experienced its Baroque flowering. His take on the era, however, is strikingly different from the best-known champion of the Baroque legacy in contemporary Ukrainian culture, Valery Shevchuk. Unlike Shevchuk’s sealed-off narrative microcosms and the serious, at times even terrifying, mood of his texts, Andrukhovych presents an exuberant carnivalesque adventure. The reader is offered the biography of a certain Samiilo Nemyrych and several poems by and about him.23 Nemyrych is an adventurer and a heroic robber who, we are told, settled in L’viv in 1610 and terrorized the city for nine

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years, later becoming a monk at the Pochaïv Lavra monastery. A hedonist with a taste for fancy clothing, fine wine, and life’s other pleasures, he made his house in L’viv the home for all sorts of “original exiles” from all corners of the world; together, they commit a series of extravagant and outrageous crimes, such as setting loose the starving exotic animals from a travelling circus, wreaking havoc across town, then peacefully returning them to their cages, and finally catching up with the circus and taking revenge on its owner for paying his ransom in counterfeit money. However, the reader soon notices obvious historical incongruities: Nemyrych and his friends call one of their victims on the telephone; they use tear gas in their attack on the Italian diplomatic mission; when set loose, the circus animals stream into the city down Lenin Street; and so forth. The story of Nemyrych thus emerges as a manifestly postmodernist narrative with its fusions of temporal locales and playful subversion of both the nostalgia for a mythical unspoiled past prior to the Russian colonization and the propensity for the hagiographic rewriting of the lives of historical figures (upon the death of the monk Nemyrych, the reader is told, his body did not decay and exuded the sweet smell of hibiscus; however, he was not canonized as a saint for the absurd reason that his birth certificate was not available). However, there is yet another important side to the text: Andrukhovych openly invites us to read the colourful and complex life story of Nemyrych as an allegory for “the Ukrainian experience”: [Nemyrych] had to drink to the bottom the bitter cup of tragedy of all great people: the incongruity with the time into which they were thrown by Providence. But the bitterness of Nemyrych’s cup is of a double nature: not only the time, but also the place. For he had the misfortune of being a Ukrainian and living in Ukraine, devoid of its own statehood, jurisprudence, its own history, finally, of its own criminal world. In America he could have become a president, in Rome a pope or at least a cardinal, in England he could have been Robin Hood, in Germany, Bismarck. But in Ukraine he could only be a bandit and a pogromist.24

Thus, what otherwise could be read as merely a playful and amusing exercise in postmodern pastiche, emerges as a politically charged postcolonial text developing an allegorical vision of colonial Ukrainian identity. This allegorical focus on hybridity and displacement, which has been recognized as the defining feature of postcolonial writing, is consistently pursued in Andrukhovych’s texts. Homi Bhabha’s comment on modern African-American writing – which he believes is characterized by its “transgressive, invasive structure … developed through an extended analogy

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with the guerilla warfare that became a way of life for the … communities of runaway slaves and fugitives who lived dangerously, and insubordinately, ‘on the frontiers and margins …’” and which “thrive[s] on rhetorical strategies of hybridity, deformation, masking, and inversion”25 – strikes a powerful chord for Ukrainian culture, among whose central figures is the Zaporozhian Cossack, likewise a fugitive to the frontiers and margins. Perhaps one of the clearest manifestations of this kinship is Andrukhovych’s poem that has become Ukraine’s “signature” postcolonial text, “Kozak Iamaika” (Jamaica the Cossack).26 The poem takes perhaps the most widespread subject of Ukrainian folk painting (and hence a prominent part of national iconography), Kozak Mamai (Mamai the Cossack), who is usually depicted sitting by a shady oak, dressed in an embroidered white shirt and sharovary (traditional baggy trousers), playing a bandura (a lute-like string instrument), with a bottle of liquor next to him and his trusted stallion nearby, tied to the tree, peacefully grazing. This image, which in and of itself already presents a curious amalgam or slippage of paradigms (a warrior not in the glory of a battle but at rest, enjoying earthly pleasures) by transporting the scene to the Caribbean – “on this side is bahama mama on the other the palms of haiti / at night stepping out of the bungalow I see the towers of freetown (“po sei bik bahama-mama po toi bik pal’my haiti / i vezhi fritauna bachu iak vyidu vnochi z bungalo”). On the one hand, the poem alludes to the founding text of Ukrainian vernacular literature, Ivan Kotliarevs’ky’s 1798 Eneida (The Aeneid), in which Olympic gods and ancient heroes are travestied into Ukrainian Cossack garb, and the heroic epic is turned upside down into a burlesque comic odyssey. But on the other hand, it offers a masterful hybridization of this quintessential Ukrainian icon, thus revealing its profound kinship with postcolonial Caribbean culture. Freetown, literally the city of freedom, in the poem becomes the ever-receding utopian goal; the protagonist overflows with longing but in the end seems to find inner peace, playing a sugar cane flute on the ocean shore and dissolving into the sunset.27 The Nemyrych cycle and “Kozak Iamaika” were written immediately prior to Andrukhovych’s first major prose work, which propelled him to national fame and considerable controversy. Written in the fall of 1990, the novel Rekreatsiï (Recreations) was published in January 1992, in the first issue of Suchasnist’, the leading Ukrainian literary journal, which appeared after the journal’s editorial offices were transferred to Kyiv from the US. Its publication thus carried high symbolic value, showcasing the promise of new literature of the now independent Ukraine. However, the work’s harsh and uncompromising portrayal of contemporary Ukrainian

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society provoked unease among the cultural establishment and a stream of angry letters from readers, particularly of the older generation, and a veritable scandal erupted: Andrukhovych was accused of slandering Ukraine and the Ukrainian idea, prompting several writers and critics to come to his defence. In this novel, as elsewhere in his writing, Andrukhovych does not simply bear witness to the decline and fall of the empire but daringly explores the hybrid and contradictory nature of the present-day Ukrainian intellectual subject and irreverently mocks the many sacred cows of the frozen populist vision of Ukrainian culture commonly held during the era of anticolonial resistance. The controversy that followed the publication of Rekreatsiï foregrounded precisely this critical aspect of his writing. Without reaching the dimensions of the controversy surrounding the writings of Salman Rushdie, the case of Rekreatsiï nevertheless proved Andrukhovych’s effectiveness in disturbing the complacent. That by the time his later novels, in many ways more radical than the first one, were published, the scandal had abated, testifies to the radical paradigm shift that Andrukhovych’s writing had triggered, ushering Ukrainian writing into the postcolonial condition. In his prose work of the 1990s, Andrukhovych used the experiences of displacement as the core trope, delivering in Rekreatsiï a critique of the condition of Ukrainian colonial intellectuals and the society at large on the eve of independence, a harsh indictment of Soviet colonialism in Moskoviada (The Moscoviad), and an exploration of the place of a Ukrainian postcolonial intellectual in the global cultural condition in Perverziia (Perverzion). Finally, his latest novel, Dvanadtsiat’ obruchiv (Twelve rings, 2003), serves as a kind of epilogue to the earlier quasi-trilogy, instantiating a revision of earlier topoi, this time anchored through the figure of a Westerner displaced into Ukraine and dying an absurd and tragic death. The notion of displacement occupies a peculiar position in the discourse on postcoloniality. While there exists a widespread consensus about its crucial importance for analysis of postcolonial subjectivity, the term itself remains largely undertheorized. Of course, there exists a voluminous literature on the themes of travel and exile, from such classic figures of exiles as Ovid and Dante to analyses of the postmodern heterogeneous mass mobility. East European authors, for example, have penned remarkable explorations of the experience of displacement that has characterized this region for much of the twentieth century, especially in the form of imprisonment and deportation. (Among the most remarkable works of

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this kind is A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by the late Yugoslav novelist Danilo Kisˇ.) Contemporary critical theory likewise has presented some fascinating reflections on themes connected with the idea of displacement, for instance Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of the notions of deterritorialization and nomadology and Foucault’s concept of heterotopia.28 However, postcolonial theorists have made few attempts to theorize the implications of displacement beyond one frequently quoted passage from Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back. “A major feature of post-colonial literatures,” they write, “is the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place.”29 By contrast, the concepts of hybridity and otherness and of subalternity and nationhood have been at the forefront of the debate. While more recently, the concept of diaspora as a displaced group identity has undergone a resurgence of interest (particularly in the context of Third World diasporas),30 it does not provide an adequate conceptual framework for discussing the more fragmented, individualized displacement that has characterized the situation in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Empire.31 Nor does it address the question of the more flexible, nonpermanent migration that has become possible with the contemporary permeability of borders (among the few critics to devote considerable attention to this issue is Rosi Braidotti, particularly in her influential study Nomadic Subjects). I would argue, therefore, that in Andrukhovych we find a major instance not only of an aesthetic depiction but also of a theoretical reflection on the concept of displacement with relevance far beyond Ukraine’s borders. The structure of Andrukhovych’s cycle of novels is in itself indicative of the trajectories of a postcolonial intellectual’s process of identity-construction. The first of them, Rekreatsiï, is an ambitious attempt to realize some of BuBa-Bu’s (and Bakhtin’s) key postulates on the carnivalesque, both thematically and as a structural organizing principle. The novel’s action takes place roughly during the course of twenty-four hours, at a carnivalesque festival much like the ones that were taking place in Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s; significantly, the festival’s organizers specifically invoke the legacy of the Baroque-era “recreations” (hence the novel’s title): The veritable essence of our masque is triumph over Death. This was well understood by our ancestors, the glorious Zaporozhian Cossacks, studiosi, clerics, and burghers, when each year at the end of May … they conducted their recreations – carnivalesque folk masquerades with singing, dancing, poetry recitations, and theatrical performances …

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On 27–28 May such recreations will be held in Chortopil’ for the first time in two hundred years and thereby returned to the people under the general title of a “Festival of the Resurrecting Spirit.”32

However, the program itself evidences the problems inherent in such attempts to recreate in contemporary contexts such cultural events characteristic of the pre-modern era (the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Western Europe for Bakhtin, and the Renaissance and Baroque eras for Ukraine).33 The clash of the names of the town (Chortopil’; i.e., Devilville) and the festival is just one of the apparent incongruities in this event: the program is replete with patriotic Ukrainian events scheduled to take place at the “Russia” movie theatre and at the auditorium of the city’s Communist Party Committee, the procession of the cross is scheduled to go down Dzerzhinsky Street, and so on. Andrukhovych purposefully inserts this destabilizing, hybridizing strain into the narrative and continues the simultaneous affirmation and subversion of the carnivalesque vision by blending the two radically different paradigms of the carnival/grotesque that Bakhtin singles out in his study, Medieval/Renaissance versus Romantic. Noting the “complex nature of carnivalesque laughter,” Bakhtin stresses its festiveness. Therefore, he argues, this is not an individual reaction to this or that singular (discrete) “laughable” phenomenon. Carnivalesque laughter, first of all, embraces all the people (vsenaroden) … everybody laughs, this is laughter “in public”; second of all, it is universal, it is directed at everything and everybody (including the carnival participants themselves), the entire world appears laughable, is perceived and comprehended in its laughter-related aspect, in its joyful relativity; finally, this laughter is ambivalent: it is joyful, celebratory and, simultaneously, mocking and ridiculing, it both negates and affirms, buries and recreates.34

Likewise, the grotesque, for the people of the Renaissance era, following the rediscovery of archaic ornaments, was understood in a similarly fluid and joyful way. In it, notes Bakhtin, “there is no familiar stasis in the depiction of reality”; instead of depicting ready-made forms, animal or plant-like, grotesque represents “the internal movement of being itself, expressed in the transition of one type of forms into the other, in the eternal non-readiness (negotovost’) of being.” As a result, the artistic form generates “exceptional freedom and lightness of artistic fantasy, and this freedom is perceived as joyful, almost laughing liberty.”35 In contrast, the Romantic grotesque, argues Bakhtin, is subjective, individualized, and macabre. A “rebirth of grotesque” that he believes

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characterizes that era is accompanied by “a fundamental rethinking.” Grotesque becomes “a form for the expression of the subjective, individual perception of the world, very far removed from the popular carnivalesque perception of the world during the preceding centuries.” This observation leads Bakhtin to a thesis crucial for understanding the complex interplay of different paradigms of the grotesque in Andrukhovych’s writing: “In contrast to the Medieval and Renaissance grotesque, directly tied to popular culture and bearing the features of a public forum and embracing all the people (ploshchadnoi i vsenarodnyi), romantic grotesque becomes intimate, small-scale (kamernyi): this is, as it were, carnival that is lived through in solitude, with a sharp perception of this isolation of the self.”36 I would argue that in the writing of Andrukhovych, in Rekreatsiï as well as in later novels, the reader is presented with a paradoxical blend of the traditional carnivalesque paradigm and of the Romantic grotesque (among whose practitioners Bakhtin particularly singles out Hoffmann, an author to whom Andrukhovych has acknowledged his indebtedness).37 This strategy allows the author to use Rekreatsiï to draw a picture of a contemporary Ukraine that both carries a passion for change and evidences the corruption of old ideals and a lack of a unifying moment. The novel recounts the schizophrenic hybridity of postcolonial society. This hybridity is particularly evident in the carnivalesque procession at the centre of the festival – a procession that, paradoxically, takes place at midnight (as Bakhtin notes, it is the Romantic grotesque that is dark and nocturnal, while “popular grotesque” for him is associated with light and the sunrise):38 And then, when the Chortopil’ town-hall clock struck twelve, it began. From the former Street of the Sisters of the Sacrament there emerged a grand procession of maskers, headed by several functionaries with organizing committee armbands and megaphones in their hands. Upon entering Market Square, the procession broke up into a number of streams, and here they are coming past you … in masks and with painted faces, they are innumerable! There were Angels of God, Gypsies, Moors, Cossacks, Bears, Studiosi, Devils, Witches, Naiads, Prophets, the Basilian Fathers in black cassocks … and it is impossible to enumerate all the others, for there also were Gorillas, Generals, Gavials, Baboons, Paulicians, Danaids, the Nanai, Nymphs, the Nivkh, Assyrians, Albanians, Pickpockets, Lyre Players, Cheesecakes, Tavernkeepers, Macedonians, Brewers, Anachorites, Midwives, Ukrainians, Lesbians, Gnomes, Dryads, Monkeys, Bats, Black Cats, Chest Toads, Alchemists, Tarts, Exiles, Tatars, Bu-Ba-Bists …39

The very purpose of this page-long list is to both amuse and overwhelm the reader: the excess and paradoxical incongruity of the carnival participants

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result in clashing unlikely juxtapositions of generals and gavials (a species of crocodiles), cretins and Zaporozhian Cossacks, and so forth. We find generic monks and Basilian fathers, plain Cossacks, Zaporozhians and Sich Riflemen, Etruscans next to hippies, Ukrainians in between midwives and lesbians – designations in the list intertwine into a tangled web, a veritable rhizome of continuous ephemeral couplings and breakdowns. There is no identifiable condition of belonging that unites them all; they are truly “whatever singularities,” in Agamben’s terminology, united by nothing but belonging itself. Their community is both expansive and incomprehensible – yet that this procession takes place after midnight, following the symbolic logic outlined by Bakhtin, adds a disturbing note to this otherwise utopian union, as does the presence of the persons with megaphones and armbands at the head of the procession. The sense of overwhelming confusion, as exemplified by this list, operates on many levels in the text, perhaps most importantly in the novel’s complex polyphonic construction. Switching between first, second, and third person, the narrative follows the perspective of six different characters: four poets invited to take part in the festival, the wife of one of them, and a local prostitute. The narrative begins with the characters approaching Chortopil’ (by train, bus, and hitching a ride – in other words, we have here a displacement within Ukraine’s borders from the mundane to the carnival site) and continuously cuts back and forth between the six characters. The supposedly joyful carnivalesque event leaves a bitter and alienating impression: nearly all the characters, as Michael Naydan has noted, “talk at each other with very little communication, and most often through a drunken haze in bars.”40 Their inebriated misadventures culminate in a series of visions and encounters experienced by each of the main characters: one of them has a Hoffmannesque brush with a devilish feast of the underworld, another’s search for the lost place of origin (his forefathers’ destroyed village) leads to the discovery of the still-warm corpse of a slain local racketeer, and so forth. These frustrating and telling accounts of “things having gone wrong” create an emotional buildup that leads to an overall sensation of crisis. The novel, however, ends on a note of unexpected catharsis, which gives a double meaning to its title: the festival comes to an abrupt end in a putsch and mass arrest of the festival participants, which, however, turns out to be a mock, staged event and the festival’s culmination. This jolting experience apparently reawakens in the characters the nobler personal emotions, and the text ends with a revived carnivalesque camaraderie of the fellow poets. Rekreatsiï invites several possible readings: many, including the author himself, were amazed at how its sobering portrayal of a putsch turned

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chillingly prophetic.41 Ultimately, however, it is the private, personal experiences of the principal characters that crystallize into an allegorical reflection of the troubled state of the country itself. It is thus more than fitting that the novel was published immediately after Ukraine gained independence: for all its ambivalence in portraying contemporary Ukrainian society, its ending contains a qualified optimism. It is Andrukhovych’s next major prose work, however, that in my opinion has become the paradigmatic postcolonial narrative in contemporary Ukrainian literature: Moskoviada (The Moscoviad, 1992, pub. 1993). The reader is presented here with an instance of “writing back to the center of the empire,” which Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin highlight in their earlier-mentioned book as the predominant feature of postcolonial writing; the ontological perspective of a displaced postcolonial intellectual in the (former) imperial centre serves here as the foundation of an antiimperialist counter-narrative. Even more ambitious in scope than Rekreatsiï, this novel, set in the year 1991, builds upon Andrukhovych’s autobiographic experiences: in 1990–91 he was a student at the Vysshie literaturnye kursy in Moscow. In its narrative construction, Moskoviada alludes to or parallels several key modernist and postmodernist texts. Organized as the protagonist’s second-person inner monologue, the narrative follows his day-long odyssey through Moscow on the eve of the August 1991 putsch. The protagonist is a Ukrainian poet paradoxically named Otto von F. The novel opens with a sometimes sadly ironic, sometimes openly sarcastic description of the “literary” dorm where he temporarily resides and of its various inhabitants, gathered from all over the empire. The highest dose of sarcasm is reserved for two Russian chauvinist poets of the brand associated with the journals Nash sovremennik and Molodaia gvardiia, Yezhevikin and Nikolai Palkin; the narrator quotes from the latters rabid doggerel, which displays a kernel of imperialist fervour stripped of cliché adornments: Za chto, Pribaltika, skazhi, Sviatuiu Rus’ tak nenavidish’? Zamri, Eston’! Litva, drozhi! Ty russkii khui eshche uvidish’!

Why is it, tell me, oh the Baltic, That you hate Holy Rus’ so much? Freeze, Estonia! Tremble, Lithuania! You are about to see the Russian prick!42

“But for some reason,” notes the narrator, “the word khui (prick) is crossed out, replaced with mech (sword), which is crossed out as well, substituted by tank.” Although Palkin and similar characters in the novel are obviously a grotesque caricature (Yezhevikin claims that the mere word “imperiia”

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brings him to orgasm),43 they form an integral part of a continuum with much more sinister forces. Not surprisingly, these forces turn out to be the empire’s repressive state apparatus (i.e., the kgb et al.), but the most frightening of all turns out to be the complicity of fellow Ukrainians in these atrocities, symbolized by the figure of Sashko, a kgb officer who emerges as a doppelgänger who torments the protagonist throughout the novel. The narrative irony is completely suspended in a passage that laments the degeneration of Ukrainians under colonial and totalitarian rule, making them indistinguishable from the rest of the gray Soviet mass.44 Otto’s carnivalesque adventures, at the beginning bearing greater resemblance to such texts as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Venedikt Erofeyev’s Moskva-Petushki, increasingly draw close to the allegorical surreal space of Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra. The places that Otto passes through, like the circles of Dante’s hell, grow more and more shocking. First, the filthy and dreary “literary” dorm and its pathetic inhabitants aspiring to the title of intellectual elite; then the beer hall on Fonvizin Street where Otto follows several of his acquaintances, which appears to have been lifted straight from Orwell’s 1984; then a frustrated visit to his beloved, Galia, which, like the misadventures of the characters of Rekreatsiï, evidences the erosion of human communication. After the trauma of this visit, Otto attempts to recollect his thoughts at the cafeteria of the Prague restaurant on the Arbat, but instead he finds there a gathering of grotesque and deranged vagabonds, one of whom sets off a grenade, with Otto barely escaping the explosion. Finally, Otto makes an equally frustrated visit to the Detskii mir (Children’s World) department store, which symbolically has no goods inside except for paper peace doves and where, ironically, he is mugged by a man whom he mistakenly assumed to be making a pass at him (and who turns out to be a fellow countryman). Chasing after the mugger, Otto suddenly finds himself in the otherworldly realm of Moscow’s secret underground, populated by the kgb and by giant mutant rats, the notorious subject of tall tales about the Moscow subway, which we are told were genetically engineered for the state’s needs. Otto is arrested for trespassing and locked in a cage next to these monsters. In this secret underworld, Otto learns how completely the threads of surveillance pervade the empire, when even his beloved, Galia, appears there with orders to kill him. However, Galia helps him flee the rat cage, and in his escape Otto stumbles upon the bunker where the ruling elite have gathered to wait out the putsch; finding Yezhevikin and Palkin at this grotesque gathering merely amuses him. Next to this bunker, Otto finds an even more surreal one: the guard informs him that there the dead are holding a symposium on the empire’s critical situation. It is at this macabre masquerade (all the

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participants in the symposium, Otto is told, have to wear masks) that Sashko again catches up with the protagonist, with orders to kill him. Otto receives a bullet in the head but survives and manages to escape and catch the last train leaving for Kyiv, just a couple of minutes before midnight. Moskoviada thus emerges as an instance of the archetypal “journey home,” a modern-age odyssey. More important for us, it also represents a case of postcolonial “writing back to the center of the empire.” While parallels can be drawn between the critique of totalitarianism mounted in this work and that in such texts as Venedikt Erofeyev’s Moskva-Petushki and Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Minor Apocalypse45 (Andrukhovych’s novel even shares with these works the structural organization of a one-day odyssey of a quasi-autobiographical protagonist – perhaps the common debt of all these texts to Ulysses), I would like to suggest discussing Moskoviada in the light of one of the now classic postcolonial novels, the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. What brings Andrukhovych’s and Salih’s novels together (and what distinguishes them both from those of Erofeyev and Konwicki) is their focus on the experience of a displaced (post)colonial intellectual in confrontation with the imperial centre (while in Erofeyev we have a Russian in Moscow and in Konwicki a Pole in Warsaw); in both we experience the empire in its splendour and misery through the defamiliarizing gaze of a colonial outsider, and in both the ambivalent ending testifies to the complexity of imperial relations: there is a possibility of escape, but the reader is not completely certain whether the escape is in fact successful. Notably, many Arab critics in the case of Salih and Ukrainian critics in the case of Andrukhovych reduce their works to the matters of retribution and self-affirmation and of the representation of the final closure of imperialism.46 A comment on such readings in Salih’s case by Saree Makdisi could well be applied to the critics of Andrukhovych. Makdisi writes, While [the novel] continually moves between different registers and frameworks, [such critics] try to reduce it to a one-dimensional narrative … Its power as an ideological form is, ironically, demonstrated by these critics who try to supply it with a narrative closure that will “make sense” within a certain ideological framework marked and governed by the existence of fundamental categories and rigid absolutes. But Season of Migration defies and deconstructs such categories as it undermines many of the traditional dualisms that are associated with postcolonial discourse. What appears at first to be neatly divisible into black and white is … broken down and synthesized into an endless variety of shades of gray.47

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The trajectory that Andrukhovych’s interests have taken since Moskoviada also points to a fundamental affinity of his writing with the postcolonial problematic. His third novel, Perverziia, explores the place of the Ukrainian intellectual in the larger, global cultural order through an encounter with the Western (and not Russian) Other. Like the previous novels, Perverziia follows its protagonist (once again a Ukrainian writer) through a journey, this time from Ukraine to Venice, where he is invited to take part in a symposium entitled “The Post-Carnival Madness of the World: What’s on the Horizon?” scheduled to take place during the week following the celebrated Venetian carnival. His wanderings all over the city lead to his eventual (mysterious and unresolved) disappearance. In this novel, Andrukhovych continues his analysis of the transformations of the Ukrainian postcolonial subject and of the national culture through these encounters, although a large dose of sarcasm is reserved for the West, which persists in its ignorance of and disinterest in Ukraine and its culture. (The letter of invitation, as well as the program of the symposium, consistently misspell Ukraine as “Ukrania” or “Ukraia”; the invitation contains a list of suggested topics for presentation that may be of interest to a Western audience – for example, Ukrainian nuclear arms, cholera epidemics, or “your writers,” such as “Dostoevsky, Gorky, Bulgakov, Sakharov and others”; and so forth.)48 This text is organized as a veritable encyclopedia of styles and literary forms (containing numerous simulations of “found objects,” such as transcripts of spy reports, playbills, newspaper articles, or passages in the form of a catechism, to name just a few). Some themes familiar from previous works, such as the carnival itself, as well as a Hoffmannesque encounter with the underworld, reappear in the novel. The levels of the plot are almost innumerable, and include a spy thriller, a love story, a social satire, a picaresque narrative, as well as parodies and subversions of these and many other forms. Intertextual references, hidden or laid bare, abound in the text. Yet Perverziia also signals that in the evolving postcolonial context, Andrukhovych is considering putting the carnivalesque behind him (after all, the events of the novel take place after the carnival). The utopian exuberance of the carnival gives way to the cacophony of the contemporary heterogeneous world, contrasted with an unexpected postmodern reincarnation of the Orphic myth (which, similarly to other cultural topoi in the text, is simultaneously asserted and subverted). However, the message of qualified optimism remains: the reader knows for sure that Perfets’ky, the protagonist, has disappeared – indeed, the novel contains a transcript of his taped suicide note – yet we are led to believe that his

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suicide could very well have been staged and that he may have fooled his pursuers and managed to sneak out of his established identity and reinvent himself. This note of qualified optimism is also present in Dvanadtsiat’ obruchiv (Twelve rings), Andrukhovych’s most melancholy text to date. With each new work, the scope of the characters’ displacement increases to new levels, as does the disorientation and the ambiguity of the endings. The novels consecutively lead their protagonists to attempt to work through identity-forming relationships with the nation, the imperial Other, and the “New World Order.” The private, personal experiences of displacement emerge here as an allegory of the collective experience of the Ukrainian people during this time of paradigmatic change, thereby evidencing a profound affinity of Andrukhovych’s writing with Jameson’s model of “national allegory,” one of the influential, if frequently criticized, attempts at constructing a theoretical model of postcolonial writing. In denouncing Russian and Soviet imperialism, however, Andrukhovych does not posit precolonial Ukraine as the utopian ideal. He does not want to have anything to do with the fossilized nationalist vision criticized by Makdisi.49 Although he emphatically asserts, in his novels and even more strongly in the cycle of poems “Lysty v Ukraïnu” (Letters to Ukraine), which serves as a companion text to Moskoviada, his faith in the Ukrainian spirit – described in one of the poems in the cycle as “an underground Baroque that organizes resistance and blooms wildly even in its ruins” (“pidpil’ne baroko vlashtovuie opir /i tsvite shaleno navit’ v ulamkakh”)50 – Andrukhovych continually stresses the impurity, heterogeneity, and ambivalence of all cultural loci. Throughout his œuvre, he eschews the rigid black-and-white dichotomy frequently encountered in traditional colonial discourse. In texts like his, “the existence of pure and unaffected traditional cultures to which postcolonial intellectuals can ‘escape’ is exposed as an illusion. Indeed, the very existence of any culture in some sort of absolute isolation from others is shown to be impossible in the postcolonial world.”51 The personal experiences of Moskoviada’s Otto von F., Perverziia’s Stanislav Perfets’ky, and other of Andrukhovych’s characters thus read as an allegory for Ukraine’s complex condition at the dawn of decolonization. However, despite the frequently dark and bitter tone of much of his writing, there is an element of optimism always to be found in the ruins that still manages to blossom. His work not only rewrites the past and the present as a “counternarration of the histories of imperialism and modernization,” but also looks toward “some alternative future it is in the process of inventing.”52 This grain of optimism in postcolonial writing is what brings it together with other discourses that can be

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described by the umbrella term “postmodernism of resistance.”53 Their critical deconstruction and subversion of the modern Western canon clearly show that the rumours about the death of the author have been somewhat exaggerated – for that particular author happened to be white, male, imperialist, heterosexual, and so forth. While much postmodernist writing works through the exhaustion of the project of modernity, texts produced from a formerly subaltern subject position in many respects look from these ruins to the future that is to replace the old order. These themes resurface with consistent frequency in texts of the genre that Andrukhovych has favoured in recent years, a kind of lyrical and often partly autobiographical essay, which at times mutates into a fictional story. The titles of the volume into which many of them were collected, Dezorientatsiia na mistsevosti (Disorientation on location), as well as of two major texts written after that book, “Tsentral’no-skhidna reviziia” (The east central revision) and “Roman z universumom” (Romancing the universal), signal his preoccupation with Jamesonian cognitive mapping, with a persistent quest for a place for the Ukrainian postcolonial intellectual at the table of the global postmodern condition. With humour, resolve, passion, and determination, he continues his project – as do several other contemporary Ukrainian authors who share his postmodern sensibilities and postcolonial concerns. For some of them, however, this search is inextricably bound with raising the questions of gender and corporeality and with foregrounding the experiences of an embodied, gendered, and nationed subject in the postmodern/postcolonial context. I turn to works of this kind in the next chapter of this study.

8 Confronting Traumas The Gendered/Nationed Body as Narrative and Spectacle

In the discourse on postcolonialism, the place of an embodied and gendered subject in one’s relations to the networks of power and cultural processes has been a continuous magnet for attention. As evidenced by the now classic essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” the postcolonial question of agency and anti-imperialist resistance is inextricably bound with an interrogation of the workings of patriarchy, as embodied in the figure of the mute subaltern woman. “The possibility of collectivity,” she suggests, “is persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female agency.” Spivak warns against facile, if at times wellintentioned, external imposition or construction of consciousness for subaltern subjects, suggesting instead the path of investigative semiosis (i.e., asking the question, “what does it mean?”) of subaltern resistance practices, using the example of sati (widow sacrifice) in India under British colonial rule. Spivak poses the question, “If the oppressed under socialized capital have no necessarily unmediated access to ‘correct’ resistance, can the ideology of sati, coming from the history of the periphery, be sublated into any model of interventionist practice?” Yet she asserts that “all such clear-cut nostalgias for lost origins are suspect, especially as grounds for counterhegemonic ideological production.” Thus, pace all temptations, Spivak concludes that “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read”; however, as “representation has not withered away,” an intellectual still faces a daunting, if circumscribed task that must not be disowned.1

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The complexity of the conjunction of articulations of gender-based and postcolonial concerns has prompted a number of calls for caution and concern. That the all-too-easy generalizations grant the doubly marginal position of (post)colonial woman “an iconicity that is altogether too good to be true,” is one of the key points of Sara Suleri’s “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” Still, a number of articulations of a positive project of resistance against “double colonization” by imperialism and patriarchy have been offered – for instance, Ketu H. Katrak’s “Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Post-Colonial Women’s Texts.” In her powerful theorization of a project of resistance primarily grounded in feminism, but focusing on the plurality of noncentral and noncentred subjectivities, Nomadic Subjects, Rosi Braidotti calls attention to the conjunctions between the mode of postcolonial literature and her vision of “postmodern nomadic feminism.” In postcolonial literature, she argues, “the sense of the home country or culture of origin is activated by political and other forms of resistance to the conditions offered by the [imperial] culture. As a consequence time is not frozen for the postcolonial subject, as the memory of the past is not a stumbling block that hinders access to a changing present. Quite the contrary, the ethical impulse that sustains the postcolonial mode makes the original culture into a living experience, one that functions as a standard of reference.” Feminism, too, is seen by Braidotti as “a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self … a rebellion of subjugated knowledges.”2 As noted earlier in this study, postcolonialism, both as resistance and as critique, has been entwined with questions of nationalism. Consideration of the interaction of gender concerns with these questions within the postcolonial context of contemporary Ukrainian culture forms the focus of this chapter. However, before proceeding to discuss the Ukrainian situation, I would like to offer a comparative/theoretical excursus by way of a reading of what I consider one of the most productive attempts at engaging nationalism, especially (post)colonial nationalism, with genderfocused concerns, an essay by Anne McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Nationalism, Gender and Race.” McClintock’s text begins with a forceful assertion that “[a]ll nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous – dangerous not in [the] sense of having to be opposed, but in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence.” Nations, in her view, are “not simply phantasmagoria of the mind but are historical

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practices through which social difference is both invented and performed.” Thus nationalism is viewed as “radically constitutive of people’s identities through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered.” Nonetheless, explorations of the cultural encounter of gender and nation have been, as McClintock puts it, “conspicuously paltry.” Notably, only Frantz Fanon, whose vision of nationalism is part and parcel of his theory of anticolonial resistance, can be considered an exception among the classic theorists of nationalism to this general ignoring of gender concerns, although he, too, as McClintock demonstrates, at times lapses into the elision of gender categories. Nationalisms have been couched in masculinist imagery: “[w]omen are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency,” while men’s relationship to the nation is “metonymic” – they are “contiguous with each other and with the national whole.”3 In view of this situation, McClintock finds it startling that theoretical discourse on nationalism reveals “a double disavowal”: while the (usually male) thinkers focusing on nationalism are by and large “indifferent to the gendering of nations,” feminist analyses of nationalism “have been lamentably few and far between.” In particular, white Western feminists “have been slow to recognize nationalism as a feminist issue.”4 Even within the progressive strands of feminism, as Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias point out in the preface to their pioneering collection Woman—Nation— State, “[i]ssues of ethnicity and nationality have tended to be ignored.”5 In the face of such a state of the field, McClintock proposes that a possible feminist theory of nationalism should be “strategically four-fold: (1) investigating the gendered formation of sanctioned male theories; (2) bringing into historic visibility women’s active cultural and political participation in national formations; (3) bringing nationalist institutions into critical relation with other social structures and institutions; and (4) at the same time paying scrupulous attention to the structures of racial, ethnic and class power that continue to bedevil privileged forms of feminism.”6 In the course of her analysis, McClintock notes that gender underpinnings pervade many characteristic features of nationalism. Among her most insightful observations is that nationalism’s central “temporal anomaly” – a tension between the nostalgia for the imagined traditional cultural mode and an impulse of modernization, of discarding certain elements of the inherited cultural condition – is typically resolved by figuring the contradiction in the representation of time as a natural division of gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic

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body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent and historic), embodying nationalism’s progressive, or revolutionary principle of discontinuity. Nationalism’s anomalous relation to time is thus managed as a natural relation to gender.7

McClintock repeatedly stresses that “there is no single narrative of the nation. Different groups (genders, classes, ethnicities, generations and so on) do not experience the myriad national formations in the same way. Nationalisms are invented, performed and consumed in ways that do not follow a universal blueprint.” She criticizes Eric Hobsbawm for his “breathtaking Eurocentrism” and “sweeping condescension” in asserting that all nationalisms originate in Western Europe and that “all anti-imperial movements of any significance” fall into categories of mimicry of Europe, antiWestern xenophobia, and “natural high spirits of martial tribes.”8 McClintock contrasts such prejudicial categorization with the intellectual legacy of Fanon, the leading theorist of anti-imperialist, liberational nationalism. In her study, McClintock traces the articulation of the gender problematic in some of Fanon’s most influential texts, the books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth and the essay “Algeria Unveiled.”9 She finds Fanon “exemplary” not only for “recognizing gender as a formative dimension of nationalism,” but also for “recognizing – and immediately rejecting – the Western metaphor of the nation as family.” McClintock draws attention to Fanon’s refusal to “collude with the notion of the familial metaphor as natural and normative”; instead, she argues, Fanon understands the latter as “a cultural projection … that has very different consequences for families placed discrepantly within the colonial hierarchy.” Indeed, Fanon “throws radically into question the naturalness of nationalism as a domestic genealogy.” Rather, familial normativity is for him “a product of social power – indeed, of social violence.”10 As a result, Fanon finds metaphoric projections from family life, such as the Lacanian “Law of the Father,” inadequate in and of themselves for understanding colonial or anti-colonial power. Instead, the figure of “racial alienation” that he deems the crucial element of the colonial power dynamic is a product of the combined impact of individual questions and societal forces calling for a “sociodiagnostic.”11 The combination of psychoanalytic, structuralist, and Marxist elements in Fanon’s theory, asserts McClintock, “animate[s] … the most subversive elements of his work,” most importantly in his tackling of “the gendering of national agency.”12

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Indeed, McClintock argues, “[g]ender runs like a multiple fissure through Fanon’s work, splitting and displacing the ‘Manichean delirium’ to which he repeatedly returns,” radically disrupting its binary dialectic. This disruption is manifested, notably, in the differing strategies of the réssentiment of the colonized man. In relation to the male colonizer, it is a fantasy of territorial displacement that McClintock terms a “politics of substitution.” However, the relation to the woman colonizer is articulated differently: “‘When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.’ The white woman is seized, possessed and taken hold of, not as an act of substitution, but as an act of appropriation.”13 Still, even in this paradigm the colonized women are, as it were, deferred outside theoretical analysis. Gender plays an important role in the tension between the two concepts of national agency articulated in Fanon’s work. On the one hand, there is the Hegelian-based view, following which anticolonial nationalism “irrupts violently and irrevocably into history as the logical counterpart to colonial power.”14 This nationalism is, as Edward Said put it, “marked throughout with the accents and inflections of liberation.”15 Moreover, it is a liberation, remarks McClintock, that is “structurally guaranteed, immanent in the binary logic of the Manichean dialectic,” ushering “the people” as a unitary subject into history. Ironically, this kind of nationalism “often claims legitimacy by appealing precisely to the august future of inevitable progress inherited from the Western societies it seeks to dismantle.”16 However, the history of anticolonial struggles and postcolonial development has demonstrated that alongside this Manichean, “mechanical” nationalism, there appears another, more open-ended, and, as McClintock puts it, “strategically difficult” view of national agency. This paradigm of nationalism stems … from the messy and disobliging circumstances of Fanon’s own activism, as well as from the often dispiriting lessons of the anticolonial revolutions that preceded him. In this view, agency is multiple rather than unitary, unpredictable rather than immanent, bereft of dialectical guarantees and animated by an unsteady and nonlinear relation to time. There is no preordained rendezvous with victory; no single, undivided national subject; no immanent historical logic. The national project must be laboriously and sometimes catastrophically invented, with unforeseen results. Time is dispersed and agency is heterogeneous.17

I share McClintock’s sympathy with this understanding of liberational nationalism advanced by Fanon. This paradigm is of particular importance

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since it is also the one that heralds the (precarious) appearance of women’s national agency within his argument. In “Algeria Unveiled,” Fanon discusses the Western dream of colonial conquest articulated as “an erotics of ravishment,” where the colonized woman “is seen as the living flesh of the national body, unveiled and laid bare for the colonials’ lascivious grip.” In this essay, asserts McClintock, “Fanon recognized the colonial gendering of women as symbolic mediators, the boundary markers of an agon that is fundamentally male.” Colonialism is seen as inflicting itself “as a domestication of the colony, a reordering of labor and sexual economy of the people, so as to divert female power into colonial hands and disrupt the patriarchal power of colonized men.” Yet the anticolonial nationalist response to this can, in turn, itself become oppressive: “Because, for male nationalists, women serve as the visible markers of national homogeneity, they become subjected to especially vigilant and violent discipline.”18 How, then, is women’s agency in national liberation to be accounted for? Even in Fanon, McClintock finds, “Women’s agency is … agency by designation. It makes its appearance not as a direct political relation to the revolution but as a mediated, domestic relation to a man … Fanon does not consider the possibility of women committing themselves to action. He thus manages women’s agency by resorting to contradictory frames: the authentic, instinctive birth of nationalist fervor; the mechanical logic of revolutionary necessity; male designation. In this way, the possibility of a distinctive feminist agency is never broached.”19 In other words, feminist agency is “contained by and subordinated to national agency, and the heterosexual family is preserved as the ‘truth’ of society – its organic, authentic form.” Sadly, as the history of the Algerian revolution has demonstrated, efforts to tackle women’s concerns after independence are not at all guaranteed.20 McClintock’s exploration of the gender dynamic in the writings of the leading theorist of liberational nationalism serves as the basis for a project of feminist investigation of national difference. McClintock’s discussion of the gender aspect in the history of the two major nationalist movements in South Africa, the Afrikaner and the black African ones, offers a number of observations that could be illuminating in a consideration of the Ukrainian context. While both South African nationalisms have had anticolonial underpinnings (the Afrikaner one being an ideology of resistance following defeat in the Anglo-Boer war), their development took them along very different paths, famously bringing about the reactionary apartheid regime in the case of the former and one of the most gender- and multi-

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culturally sensitive forms of government (as enshrined in the postapartheid South African constitution) in the case of the latter. Following defeat in the Anglo-Boer war and establishment of British domination, McClintock notes, “[l]acking control of the institutions of modernity, Afrikaners mobilized through the one institution with which they were intimate and over which they still held precarious control: the family.” Recourse to the traditional construction of the oppressive gender dynamic of the patriarchal family is given startling visibility in the public spectacles of Afrikaner nationhood in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in the icon of the “mother of the nation” (volksmoeder) as enshrined in the 1913 Vrouemonument, the monument to the Afrikaner women who died in the Anglo-Boer war. In it, McClintock argues, [w]omen’s martial role as fighters and farmers was purged of its indecorously militant potential and replaced by the figure of the lamenting mother with babe in arms. The monument enshrined Afrikaner womanhood as neither militant nor political, but as suffering, stoical and self-sacrificing. Women’s disempowerment was figured not as expressive of the politics of gender difference, stemming from colonial women’s ambiguous relation to imperial domination, but emblematic of national (that is, male) disempowerment. By portraying the Afrikaner nation symbolically as a weeping woman, the mighty male embarrassment of military defeat could be overlooked and the memory of women’s vital efforts during the war washed away in images of feminine tears and maternal loss.21

This icon, McClintock stresses, is paradoxical: while “recogniz[ing] the power of … motherhood,” it “contain[s] women’s mutinous power within an iconography of domestic service. Defined as weeping victims, [Afrikaner] women’s activism is overlooked and their disempowerment thereby ratified.”22 However, as historical scholarship has demonstrated, women played a crucial role in the “invention of Afrikanerdom.” The family household, notes McClintock, was seen as “the last bastion beyond British control and the cultural power of Afrikaner motherhood was mobilized in the service of white nation-building.” Thus, she asserts, in the discourse and practice of Afrikaner nationalism “motherhood is a political concept under constant contest.” Therefore, by obscuring the historical agency of Afrikaner women, one erases their historic complicity in the annals of apartheid. White women were not the weeping bystanders of apartheid history but active, if decidedly disempowered, participants in the invention of Afrikaner identity. As such they were complicit in

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deploying the power of motherhood in the exercise and legitimation of white domination. Certainly, white women were jealously and brutally denied any formal political power but were compensated by their limited authority in the household. Clutching this small power, they became implicated in the racism that suffuses Afrikaner nationalism. For this reason, black South African women have been justly suspicious of any easy assumption of a universal, essential sisterhood in suffering. White women are both colonized and colonizers, ambiguously complicit in the history of African dispossession.23

Having cautioned us about the dangers of a too facile gender-based alliance, McClintock looks at the history of the treatment of gender issues within black African nationalism. In its early stages, one finds a similar reductionist containment of women within the domestic space and the patriarchal family paradigm: the 1912 draft constitution of the organization that eventually became known as the African National Congress (anc) stated, “All the wives of the members … shall ipso facto become auxiliary members.” It went on to declare that the role and duty of “all auxiliary members” was “to provide suitable shelter and entertainment for delegates to the Congress.” Women were granted full membership and voting rights within the anc only in 1943. And while, as McClintock notes, “[w]ithin African nationalism, as in its Afrikaans counterpart, women’s political agency has been couched in the presiding ideology of motherhood,” over the course of the twentieth century “African women nationalists, unlike their Afrikaner counterparts … transformed and infused the ideology of motherhood with an increasingly insurrectionary cast,” manifested in “women’s local rites of defiance.”24 The long and complex path of evolvement of gender politics within black nationalism in South Africa eventually brought it to the cutting edge of feminist consciousness, as demonstrated in the anc’s “Statement on the Emancipation of Women” (released 2 May 1990): “The experience of other societies has shown that the emancipation of women is not a by-product of a struggle for democracy, national liberation or socialism. It has to be addressed within our own organization, the mass democratic movement and in the society as a whole.” McClintock emphasizes that this document “is unprecedented in placing South African women’s resistance in an international context; in granting feminism independent historic agency; and in declaring … that all ‘laws, customs, traditions and practices which discriminate against women shall be held to be unconstitutional.’”25 The anc’s drawing attention to women’s struggle for emancipation as a vital task in and of itself was followed within weeks by a statement by the anc’s Women’s Section that specifically addressed the strategies of

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interaction in feminism and nationalism that deemed the general mistrust of feminism in Third World countries erroneous: “there is nothing wrong with feminism,” they asserted. “It is as progressive or reactionary as nationalism. Nationalism can be reactionary or progressive. We have not got rid of the term nationalism. And with feminism it is the same.”26 Policy statements and day-to-day practice, of course, are not exact mirror reflections of each other, but still the evolvement of the black South African national liberation movement demonstrates possibly the most thorough integration of nationalist and feminist concerns in social and cultural politics. The excursus into the theoretical writings of Fanon and the history of nationalisms in South Africa allows us to concur with McClintock’s conclusions. She reiterates the need for us to be aware that “[t]here is not only one feminism, nor is there only one patriarchy. Feminism is imperialist when it puts the interests and needs of privileged women in imperialist countries above the local needs of disempowered women and men, borrowing from patriarchal privilege.” In the course of the past two decades women of (post)colonial background have offered an emphatic challenge to “privileged feminists who don’t recognize their own racial and class power.”27 Yet one must remain strategically aware of the reverse side of the coin, as “[d]enouncing all feminisms as imperialist … erases from memory the long histories of women’s resistance to local and imperialist patriarchies.” After all, as McClintock justly notes, “many women’s mutinies around the world predated Western feminism or occurred without any contact with Western feminists. Moreover, if all feminisms are derided as a pathology of the West, there is a very real danger that Western, white feminists will remain hegemonic, for the simple reason that such women have comparatively privileged access to publishing, the international media, education and money. A good deal of this kind of feminism may well be inappropriate to women living under very different situations.” Rather than acquiesce to this situation, (post)colonial feminists “are calling for the right to fashion feminism to suit their own worlds.” McClintock sees “[t]he singular contribution of nationalist feminism” in its “insistence on relating feminist struggles to other liberation movements.”28 The need to “transform nationalism by an analysis of gender power,” however, remains paramount. Otherwise, McClintock stresses, “the nationstate will remain a repository of male hopes, male aspirations and male privilege.” In this project of transformation, there is an urgent necessity to overcome the persistent denial to the female body of a place in politics. For, as McClintock observes in her reading of a major recent South African

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novel, Loretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, “some of the bleakest and bravest moments” in the cultural analysis of the postcolonial condition are often connected to “the politics of female sexuality.”29 The latter observation very much holds true in the context of Ukraine, which has stood out among Second World cultures in recent decades due to the extent of integration of attention to gender, sexuality, and corporeality in the debates over the paths of national culture’s transformation in the postmodern/post-Soviet context. Similarly to the discourse on postcoloniality, and perhaps to an even greater degree, articulations of gender concerns and feminist interventions came to occupy in Ukrainian culture a position of prominence unmatched in most neighbouring countries, Russia among them. In Russia and other post-Soviet states, feminist scholarship has been able to make the biggest inroads in sociology and anthropology (new disciplines that largely came into their own in the institutional framework during the waning years of the ussr) and also in history and, to some extent, philosophy. The feminist and gender-focused scholarship on literature, popular culture, and the arts, however, is still largely pursued by foreign-based scholars. The situation is drastically different in Ukraine, where feminist scholarship has emerged as the most vibrant and productive strain of literary studies in the postindependence era. Through the efforts of Solomiya (a.k.a. Salomea) Pavlychko, Vira Aheyeva, Tamara Hundorova, Nila Zborovs’ka, and a number of other scholars, gender-focused and feminist studies have come to occupy a place of distinct prominence in the pages of the leading scholarly journals and among book-length publications.30 Several generations of Ukrainian women writers are active today, and they too have exhibited much less hesitation in identifying themselves as feminist, compared with their Russian counterparts.31 At the forefront of this change has been Oksana Zabuzhko, whose Renaissance-scope talents as a poet, prose writer, essayist, and scholar put her among the leaders of contemporary Ukrainian cultural activity. These contributions to the feminist angle of Ukraine’s postcolonial transformation form the main focus of the remaining part of this chapter. The strength of gender concerns, as well as of some forms of feminist consciousness in contemporary Ukraine, is not a phenomenon that appeared overnight. Historians, ethnographers, and anthropologists have noted that in comparison with neighbouring Russia, for example, traditional Ukrainian society demonstrated elements of egalitarian and even matriarchal family structure, and only the increasing Russian influence following the incorporation of eastern Ukraine into the Russian state in

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the second half of the seventeenth century led to the acceleration of patriarchalizing tendencies.32 Gender concerns, along with solidarity in anti-imperialist resistance, form a crucial element of the literary legacy of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814–61); his works abound with authorial empathy and lyrical identification with the female protagonists. The archetypal image in Shevchenko’s writing is that of pokrytka, a seduced and abandoned young woman (with the seducer often being a representative of the colonizing force); yet he also portrays in his work, with similar empathy, victims of rape, incest, and other forms of abuse. Finally, the feminist movement in Ukraine has a rather long and venerable history, beginning with pioneering efforts of such nineteenth-century writers and activists as Natalia Kobryns’ka. Their legacy was continued in turnof-the-century Ukrainian literature, where at the centre of modernist transformation stood two women authors with strong feminist consciousness, Lesia Ukraïnka and Ol’ha Kobylians’ka. In fact, it was a project of feminist reevaluation and reappropriation of these two authors, who have long been part of the national canon but found their legacy distorted as a result of this process of canonization, that put feminist literary scholarship at the forefront of the national cultural debate in the mid-1990s. The publication of Pavlychko’s reading of the lives and works of these two remarkable women, later incorporated in her book Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns’kii literaturi (The discourse on modernism in Ukrainian literature), produced a commotion in the national media, as Pavlychko emphasized the gynocentric worldview informing the writing of the two authors and their explorations of female bodily experiences, sexuality among them. The more conservative camp of cultural commentators was shocked that she also drew attention to homoerotic elements in Ukraïnka and Kobylians’ka’s friendship, as demonstrated by the surviving correspondence between them.33 Pavlychko’s “outing” of Ukraine’s two greatest women writers, as the publication of her study was interpreted in the Ukrainian mass media, to a degree detracted public attention from the overall concerns of her excellent and influential study. In the course of her discussion of the evolving Ukrainian discourse on modernism, Pavlychko consistently draws attention to the role that the politics of gender and sexuality played in the work of major Ukrainian authors, both women and men. Her next book, the posthumously published critical biography of Ahatanhel Kryms’ky, an important early modernist writer and Ukraine’s leading Orientalist scholar, places the construction of gender and sexuality at the centre of her argument by insisting that the impact of Kryms’ky’s psycho-sexual

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traumas, stemming to a large extent from his repressed homosexuality, played a key role in determining his literary and scholarly career, as well as his nationalist politics.34 Pavlychko emerged as an extremely influential voice in contemporary Ukrainian culture that combined concerns with the politics of national cultural identity with an emphatic attention to the cultural construction and reception of gender and sexuality; however, she was by no means the only such voice. Side by side with her have been other scholars whom I mentioned earlier; both Vira Aheyeva and Tamara Hundorova, like Pavlychko, engaged in projects that could best be described, to borrow the title of Patricia Waugh’s influential study, as instances of “practicing postmodernism, reading modernism,” and like Waugh, they approached such practice from a feminist angle.35 Both Aheyeva’s programmatically feminist study of Lesia Ukraïnka, Poetesa zlamu stolit’, and Hundorova’s influential ProIavlennia slova, which grants attention to questions of gender and sexuality in the work of several major Ukrainian authors, Kobylians’ka among them, contain the term “postmodern” in their subtitles.36 Another scholar, Nila Zborovs’ka, brought a similar angle of approach to contemporary culture in her book Feministychni rozdumy: Na karnavali mertvykh potsilunkiv (Feminist reflections: At the carnival of dead kisses, 1999). Of considerable importance have also been the contributions of Oksana Zabuzhko in her scholarly incarnation, discussed in greater detail below. The work of these and other scholars has transformed the contemporary Ukrainian cultural landscape and has received institutional recognition through the establishment of the Kyiv Centre for Gender Studies. Yet simultaneously with this development, another and distinctly different school of feminist scholarship arose in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest urban centre, which served as the first capital of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and early 1930s. While the Kyiv school primarily grew out of literary scholarship and has been characterized by an attempt to integrate feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial approaches with an overall sympathy to the project of Ukrainian national cultural revival (a sympathy that did not blind the scholars to instances of male chauvinism, abuse, and gender oppression in Ukraine past and present), the Kharkiv school grew out of the disciplinary discourses of philosophy (institutionally, the Kharkiv Centre for Gender Studies is based in the Philosophy Department of Kharkiv University) and the social sciences and has espoused the view of feminism and nationalism as competing, mutually hostile discourses. This approach, combined with the school’s russocentric linguistic and

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cultural policy, has undermined many of its important accomplishments in familiarizing the scholarly reading public with Western feminist theory37 by tainting the school’s own original scholarship with distinctly culturally imperialist, chauvinist overtones. In the work of the Kharkiv school, one finds a curious slippage between a sustained feminist analytical project and the strategic use of feminist terminology for invectives against the Ukrainian state and the national culture, which the school apparently views as coextensive (even though through most of the postindependence era the Ukrainian government has shown little interest in promoting or supporting Ukrainian culture). Similarly to many other ex-Soviet russophones, the Kharkiv authors of the gender-studies school seem not to have done the work of mourning for the disintegrated Russian Empire and find themselves arrested in melancholic longing for the unified russophone cultural space. They refuse to approach the Ukrainian language as a means of communication and regard its use as an aggressive imposition of external power38 (displaying zero sympathy with the often tentative and cautious attempts at affirming their cultural identity by the millions of ukrainophones who for centuries were derided for speaking a “second-rate,” “coarse,” “peasant” language, a language whose very existence was denied and which was officially doomed for extinction by both the Tsarist and the Soviet regimes). Indeed, by way of refusing to subscribe to a Ukrainian identity, apparently not only linguistically but of any kind, members of the Kharkiv school offer a bizarre latter-day confirmation of Fanon’s insight: a colonial subject comes to experience the metropoly as the norm and him/herself as the Other. Much of the school’s activity proceeds as if the empire’s cultural space continued unchanged in the post-1991 era: Russian is the school’s lingua franca, and foreign influences do not arrive directly but are mediated through the former metropoly. The development of Ukrainian national literature and culture, both past and present, when it receives attention from the Kharkiv school – which seems to be generally biased against literary scholarship and in favour of “harder” social sciences, somewhat surprising given that in Western feminist scholarship, which they supposedly strive to emulate, literary and cultural studies have been at the forefront of innovation – is portrayed in hostile terms, unexpectedly revealing the authors’ “siege mentality” and pointing to their (perhaps unreflected) adherence to a negatively articulated, and deeply internalized, residual Russian imperialist nationalism.39 These tendencies are manifested with greatest clarity in the writings of the school’s leaders, the husband and wife team of Irina and Sergei Zherebkin.

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An early incarnation of their intellectual program can be found in Irina Zherebkina’s 1997 monograph, provocatively titled Zhenskoe politicheskoe bessoznatel’noe: Problema gendera i zhenskoe dvizhenie v Ukraine (Women’s political unconscious: The problem of gender and the women’s movement in Ukraine),40 and is continued in the collective monograph Femina Postsovietica: Ukrainskaia zhenshchina v perekhodnyi period: Ot sotsial’nykh dvizhenii k politike (Femina Postsovietica: The Ukrainian woman in the period of transition: From social movements to politics), edited by Irina Zherebkina, which opens with an extensive essay by her and closes with an equally lengthy piece by Sergei Zherebkin. These studies appear to consider the women’s movement in Ukraine and the gender dynamic in general in a number of social contexts (although apparently insulated from some of the cultural processes) but are overshadowed by the overarching binarizing vision of feminism and nationalism as each other’s antipodes. The Zherebkins take on face value the purely rhetorical pronouncements of the postindependence Ukrainian bureaucrats about the promotion of Ukrainian language and national culture (pronouncements that have not been even remotely supported by a consistent policy – if anything, the sphere of use of the Ukrainian language has struggled to maintain its preindependence limits) and use them to fan anti-Ukrainian paranoia, insinuating that there is a “secret war against the russophone population” going on in today’s Ukraine.41 Their underlying thesis is spelled out in the most consistent form in the introduction to the second volume: Zherebkina asserts that the recent years witnessed two main “types of power functioning in the post-Soviet space realiz[ing] power strategies.” One of them, which she names “masculinist nationalism,” “constitutes itself in accordance to the principle of reproduction/’rebirth’ of national identity, a symbolic substitution of the destroyed Soviet identity.” This paradigm, she asserts, pervades the new nation-states of the ex-ussr and the former Eastern bloc, but Ukraine is the only instance that is given any treatment. The second, which she terms simply “masculinism,” is realized by the political regimes where the constructiveness of the symbolic reproduction of the new (national) subjectivity finds itself suppressed/obscured (perekryvaetsia) by the destructivity of the real provided by the direct and obscene character of power. In other words, the Real prevails over the Symbolic. This type of power strategy is first and foremost characteristic of former totalitarian empires – in particular, Russia, where no discursive symbolic constructions that find themselves in the state of permanent destruction can or have the time to suppress/ obscure (perekryt’) the intensity of the real.42

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No examples where this paradigm allegedly realizes itself, other than Russia, are given. Zherebkina asserts that even the chauvinist ideologies of anti-Semitism or “the creation of a new indivisible Russia” cannot “establish themselves as a symbolic construct, self-destructing in the reality of the desperate survival of the masses.”43 In other words, the difficulties of day-to-day life in contemporary Russia somehow immunize the local population from racism and xenophobia (unless you happen to look like you are from the Caucasus, naturally), while the same hardships supposedly fail to do so in Ukraine and elsewhere. The heavily jargonized, pseudo-Foucaldian/Lacanian/Bourdieuesque language of the above passage, as well as the propensity for the construction of crude binary oppositions and for assertions with little, if any, substantiation are characteristic of the Zherebkins’ scholarly style. The blind subscription here to the insidious propagation of the empire’s self-presentation as the carrier of the supposedly nationless universal and the construction of the (formerly) colonial as the Other, persuasively analyzed and criticized by Fanon, is striking. The binary leads Zherebkina to the assertion that in Russia the violence against women is “real” and “direct”; in Ukraine, by contrast, it is “symbolic,” manifested in the double standard of the women’s high symbolic status “in the mythological national historiography,” while “the real situation of Ukrainian women in many negative aspects exceeds the contemporaneous situation of Russian women” (which only a few lines ago was portrayed as the bleak circle of uninterrupted violence and oppression).44 As Ukraine is her main topic in this essay, Zherebkina proceeds to focus on the situation in that country and goes on to assert that for contemporary Ukrainian women, “the post-Soviet power allows only two types of possible ‘politics of identification,’ (1) national/nationalist and (2) communist.” Although the postindependence years evidenced the continuing emphasis of the Ukrainian government, whatever its many faults, on its vision of Ukraine as not a fully ethnically homogeneous nation-state and the government’s inconsistent and indecisive stance toward nationalism as policy and as a cultural phenomenon, Zherebkina here collapses “national” and “nationalist” with an easy slash, and goes on in a few lines to conflate nationalism with language policy, faulting Ukraine for failing “to teach the national language systematically and on an economic basis, the way immigrants are taught in developed countries.”45 In other words, the young struggling nation-state, whose economy was in free fall for the first eight years after independence (primarily as a consequence of the cunning “divide and rule” economic policies of the Soviet Empire), is faulted for not providing economic incentives to the non-Ukrainian-speaking population (that is, first

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and foremost, the Russian-speaking one; i.e., the one speaking the language of the imperialist metropoly) to learn the language of what for centuries was the symbolically lower colonial Other.46 Zherebkina utterly fails to consider the confluence between imperialist and patriarchal oppression and, both in her argument and in her use of the heavily symbolically marked language of the former colonial power, constructs a position of privilege for herself and also perpetuates the very structures of imperialist oppression, which, as McClintock noted, borrow from patriarchal privilege. “Feminism” becomes a tool for the assertion of symbolic and/or political power and for a construction, as it were, of a reversed-paranoiac discourse: to the rhetorical question “Who’s afraid of feminism in the former ussr?” she answers that in Ukraine [sic!] these are, first of all, the women themselves as a “silent majority,” then, all political parties, all mass media, all academic scholarship, all private enterpreneurship, the state as such. And most paradoxically she asserts that feminism (as she understands it) is alien to the Ukrainian women’s movement in all its history since the latter has “inscribed women into the traditional images of the feminine.”47 Only from a position of arrogant hostility can one make pronouncements of this type, which smack more of a desire to symbolically humiliate Ukrainian women and the Ukrainian women’s movement, the scholarly jargon serving here the role of obscene speech. There appears to be little love lost between Zherebkina and Ukrainian culture,48 and the situation seems to call more for a therapeutic than a scholarly approach. In her discussion of contemporary Ukraine, however, Zherebkina focuses on elements of the social sphere other than literature and the arts (e.g., the government, the NGOs, the opinion polls, and so forth). Zhenskoe politicheskoe bessoznatel’noe (Women’s political unconscious) is her only foray into the history of Ukrainian culture, and even there discussions of literature are largely limited, except for in the section on Shevchenko, to a paraphrase – often with reversed value judgments – of the writing of Western historians of the Ukrainian women’s movement, particularly Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak.49 Zherebkina’s tendentious and reductively cursory reading of Shevchenko as an “enemy of feminism” in that volume received an impassioned rebuttal from Nila Zborovs’ka, who noted that Zherebkina’s text abounds in phobic inventions and glaring (and perhaps intentional) misreadings and that the supposedly cosmopolitan Truth that Zherebkina advocates is nothing more than an ideological discourse of power directed to fight nationalism as a political phenomenon.50 It is Sergei Zherebkin, however, who has carried on writing about Ukrainian literature and culture, evidently guided by the same tendentious imperatives.

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Sergei Zherebkin’s most notable engagement with the Ukrainian past is his essay “Seksual’nost’ v Ukraine: Gendernye ‘politiki identifikatsii’ v epokhu kozachestva” [sic] (Sexuality in Ukraine: The gender ‘policies of identification’ in the Cossack era”), which begins with a startling combination of false etymology and historical distortion: “Up to the end of the eighteenth century the vast steppes of southeast Russia that comprise a major part of the territory of the present-day Ukraine (derived from ‘u kraia,’ ‘by the border’), were practically empty of settled population and were rather a region covered by the movement of nomadic tribes: the Crimean and Nogai Tatars, the Kalmyks, and so forth.”51 In other words, Zherebkin asserts that Ukraine is nothing more than an “empty” frontier that has perversely claimed a history, an indigenous population, and an independent identity (a pseudo-historical argument familiar to scholars of other colonial empires around the world). Never mind that the Kalmyks and the Nogai never made it to Ukraine, only to the Northern Caucasus; never mind that the territory in question was one of the main centres of the major flowering of Ukrainian Baroque culture from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries onward, as affirmed not only by written sources, but also by the still standing architectural monuments, including some that are located in the city that the author of the article calls home. The facts do not fit the myth that Zherebkin tries to sell as scholarship to the gullible audience; and as the journal Gendernye issledovaniia, although edited in Ukraine, is distributed more widely in Russia, his essay provides a comforting reassurance to the circles in Russia whose members, like the tsarist minister Valuev, believe Ukraine to be a temporary, and late-coming, aberration that arose on Russian territory. In other words, the empire keeps on living, even if only as a phantasmic projection. The Cossacks, the subject of Zherebkin’s essay and the key part of Ukrainian national heritage, are here presented as nomads without a clear identity, a heterogeneous gang of runaways, or as he says, borrowing from Deleuze, a “nomadic war machine.”52 But far from Rosi Braidotti’s attempt to develop nomadism into a productive intellectual paradigm for our time, Zherebkin infuses his text with negative stereotypes. He happily quotes from Western as well as Russian sources if they happen to fit his argument – for instance, from the account by the Croatian Jesuit Juraj Krizˇanic´ (whom he misidentifies as a Serb) of his 1659 journey, in which he says that “the Cossack mores and customs are those of wild beasts.”53 Zherebkin goes on to dwell on the sexual aspects of the violence that pervaded the life of the Cossack homosocial warrior republic and with remarkable ease conflates homosociality with homosexuality and the latter with the ethos

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of Russian prisons, where same-sex rape is a form of symbolic humiliation (that other forms of homoeroticism are possible is apparently unthinkable for him). Thus Zherebkin’s phantasmic construct of the Cossack society acquires distinctly homophobic overtones. Once the damage is done, he softens his tone in the final section of the essay, where the sexual mores of the Cossacks are compared with those of the occupying Russian army in the nineteenth century. He states his intention to problematize the representation of the Cossacks as an idealized exotic Other in the discourse of Sentimentalism and Romanticism (which he does not distinguish from the Enlightenment) and as the idealized image of national masculinity in the Ukrainian folk tradition. While a problematization of the latter two could certainly be illuminating, the approach taken by Zherebkin can hardly be seen as productive. Both Zherebkin and Zherebkina seem to practise unabashed destruction rather than deconstruction. This tendency continues in Zherebkin’s engagement with contemporary Ukrainian literature, a key instance of which is his essay “Femina Postsovietica: Gendernye stereotipy v ukrainskoi politike i literature” (Femina Postsovietica: Gender stereotypes in Ukrainian politics and literature).54 He begins with an innocuous enough discussion of stereotypes of gender identity and their play in the day-to-day functioning of the society and goes on to consider briefly the official platforms of several Ukrainian political parties (social institutions that are still quite weak and fledgling), concluding that they exhibit “neopatriarchal gender stereotypes,” which is what he sought to assert from the outset. But the full force of assault is reserved for the remaining lengthy part of the essay, dealing with literature. He divides it into sections that focus, respectively, on the Ukrainian “male” and “female fantasies” (this allusion to the title of Klaus Theweleit’s influential study Male Fantasies seems to be purely decorative, not carrying any structural weight in the essay). The first section is titled, provocatively and tellingly, “Trakhat’ zhenshchin i stroit’ natsiiu” (Screw women and build the nation) and the second, “Svecha v khrame fallosa” (A candle in the temple of phallus). His thesis, repeated as a “working hypothesis” at the beginning and as a conclusion at the end, is that “the new patriarchal gender stereotypes and the new forms of misogyny” manifest themselves in literature more overtly than in political discourse. “In post-Soviet literature,” he asserts, “the new discriminatory construction of gender based on the naturalization of gender differences (‘new national masculine and feminine characters’)” is paramount.55 The bulk of the first section is devoted to a reading of the work of Yuri Andrukhovych (discussed in detail in the previous chapter of the present

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study), which is labelled at the outset as “a characteristic example of new masculinist and sexist politics in post-Soviet Ukrainian literature.” Zherebkin’s attempts to prove this assertion, however, are spurious from the outset. The notion that the views of the author of a literary work are not necessarily those of his characters is apparently unknown to him. In combination with his willful ignorance of the discourse on colonialism and postcolonial theory, this leads to startling misreadings. Zherebkin discusses at length only Andrukhovych’s second novel, Moskoviada (indicating indirectly that he finds no appreciable differences in gender politics between this and Andrukhovych’s other texts). That the protagonist, an aspiring young Ukrainian poet, depicted through a lens that combines a degree of sympathy with all-pervading irony, along with hefty doses of the parodic and the surreal, experiences a profound identity crisis, both ethno-linguistically (as a colonial subject displaced to the imperial metropoly) and in terms of gender (experiencing his colonial masculinity as compromised), in full accordance with the observations of Fanon or Salih, is lost on Zherebkin. He is completely deaf to the novel’s irony and goes as far as accusing Andrukhovych of a combination of racism and sexism in his portrayal of the protagonist’s interaction with other characters; he claims that “the hero literally fights with Moscow women, beating and raping them.” Continuing a motif from his earlier essay, Zherebkin claims that for the protagonist of Moskoviada, sex serves the similar symbolic function of humiliation of the partner as in the Russian male prison world. Instead of an admittedly provocative but ironic text, which indeed depicts the decaying empire in a far from flattering light but is equally critical of all of the characters and groups (the protagonist is hardly a hero), Zherebkin constructs a distorted and disturbing vision of the novel as a humourless, spiteful, and bilious text.56 Most paradoxically, Zherebkin goes on to offer the writing of Eduard Limonov, a self-proclaimed Russian literary rebel who over the years has passed from controversy to odiousness, as a supposedly more positive, tolerant form of literary construction of gender (which in turn, improbably enough, is claimed to typify contemporary Russian constructs of gender relations in male writing: Limonov’s super-alienated individualist rebel protagonists are said to draw from “the Christian tradition of collective salvation”).57 In his discussion of Ukrainian “female fantasies,” Zherebkin moves from the aesthetically conservative elder stateswoman of Ukrainian letters, Lina Kostenko, whose literary debut dates back to the 1950s, to its leading contemporary feminist author, Oksana Zabuzhko, and from her to an obscure grapho-maniac who publishes “erotic” poetry in the vanity press.58 His reading of Kostenko is fairly unproblematic, but trouble soon arises when he

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turns to contemporary writing. Of Zabuzhko’s writing, he discusses only her novel Pol’ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns’koho seksu (Field work in Ukrainian sex, 1996), once again tacitly asserting that there is no difference between the construction of gender identities in this and her other texts (which is even more problematic in the case of Zabuzhko than in that of Andrukhovych, whose first three novels are indeed sometimes viewed as a quasi-trilogy). Conceding that this novel brings female corporeality and sexuality to a position of unprecedented prominence, Zherebkin nevertheless believes that in the end the process of radical transformation of feminine speech in Zabuzhko’s novel cannot succeed, for the revolutionary language of female desire conflicts in her work with the logic of “female as other,” expressed in the impossible-to-fulfill desire of the Ukrainian woman to be “by someone’s side” (pri kom-to): to be a daughter or a wife, by the side of a father or a husband. As a result of this literary strategy in Zabuzhko, as in Kostenko, it is male, not female, subjectivity that is problematized.59

Problematization of male subjectivity by women writers can hardly be viewed as somehow objectionable; it is a rhetorically powerful and subversive enough gesture for a writing woman to do so. But Zherebkin goes on to claim that “in the end” for the protagonist of Zabuzhko’s novel, her main problems as a woman in the novel are determined by the repression of the masculine element in Ukrainian history. As a result, the problems of female subjectivity for her start to appear as secondary and accidental as compared to the problem of the Ukrainian male castration complex … Her tragic experience cannot realize itself since she views Ukrainian male castration – that is, something that in reality is not her own personal experience – as the main reason for her female existential crisis.

The above assertion leads Zherebkin to conclude that “in contemporary Ukrainian women’s writing, the situation of substitution of the problems of female subjectivity by the problems of male subjectivity continues to perpetuate itself.”60 Zherebkin criticizes Zabuzhko’s novel for failing to represent “female subjectivity as autonomous and independent,” as though that strategy is the only existing litmus test for a “good” feminist literary text (this novel, after all, is a text that recounts the traumas experienced by the protagonist in her personal interactions with others). I would counter that the novel presents a number of instances of problematizing female subjectivity; that

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it is not presented in a vacuum but in interaction with other characters, both female and male, can hardly be thought of as a drawback. Overall, one of the main structural flaws of Zherebkin’s argument is the crudeness of his attempt at “symptomatic” reading and the absurdity of his making his tendentiously chosen examples to stand synecdochically for the entire spectrum of literary production. His reprimanding of Ukrainian feminist authors for being bad feminists, or not feminist enough, is in exceptionally bad taste; its arrogance, however, is symptomatic of the Zherebkins’ desire to establish authority through rhetorical manipulation. Their writing, at times strikingly sophomoric in its crude attempts to incorporate Western theoretical discourse, might not have warranted detailed attention were it not for the fact that the rhetorical power they have amassed over recent years is rather impressive. In fact, many consider them to be among the leaders, at least in institutional terms, of feminist and gender scholarship in the former Soviet Union, making it all the more important that the gender dynamic in Ukrainian culture, both past and present, be given critical consideration independent of the interpretation that the Zherebkins have been trying to impose upon it. One of the paradoxical gestures of the Zherebkins and other members of the Kharkiv school is their rhetorical positioning of themselves outside the lengthy and rich Ukrainian feminist tradition (a consequence of their thoroughgoing refusal of identification with anything Ukrainian). By contrast, the feminists of the Kyiv school and those in other regions of the country, in a gesture familiar to historians of women’s social and cultural struggles, have gone back to reconstruct and reevaluate this tradition that has been long suppressed in the dominant discourse. In this reevaluation, however, similarly to the women of the African National Congress as discussed by McClintock, they have striven for a constructive synthesis of the project of building national culture and that of women’s liberation, seen as a project that, although not subordinate to the former, allows for recognition of the commonality of many of the goals. This does not mean, however, that the take on gender roles in society by nationally conscious Ukrainian writers, especially men, has been unproblematic. The critical writing by Pavlychko, Aheyeva, Hundorova, Zborovs’ka, and others has demonstrated that this has hardly been the case. In her book Feministychni rozdumy (Feminist reflections), Zborovs’ka states at the outset that although Ukraine has a venerable and rich feminist tradition, the general attitude to feminism in Ukrainian society is cautious if not hostile. Many of the rebuilders of the Ukrainian national culture espouse

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neoconservative views, fully approving of patriarchal gender stereotypes, and are deaf to feminist challenges; some of the leading representatives of this trend – for instance, the novelist V’iacheslav Medvid’ – openly declare feminism to be the root of the nation’s social peril. In this, as Zborovs’ka justly observes, today’s conservative Ukrainian nationalists replicate the fascist concepts of gender identity that penetrated Ukrainian nationalist thought in the 1930s and were resolutely decried by Milena Rudnyts’ka, Ukraine’s leading feminist thinker and activist of the interwar era, in her 1934 essay “Neporozuminnia z feminizmom” (Misunderstandings around feminism).61 While comparisons to situations elsewhere in the world may explain the hostility of conservative nationalists to gender equality, it is nevertheless puzzling given the relative lateness of the arrival in Ukraine of modes of patriarchal oppression typical of other European cultures. An unusual but telling testimony to the difference of the Ukrainian gender dynamic from its neighbours can be found in a late-nineteenth-century piece by the perhaps most internationally notorious writer born in Ukraine, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, namely his nonfictional sketch entitled “Women’s Images from Galicia”: If the Polish woman is sometimes called a Frenchwoman of the East, then the Russian is the Englishwoman, and the Ukrainian one is the Spanish woman of the East. The Polish woman wants to give orders, while the Ukrainian one wants to be free. While the Polish woman rules over her husband, the Russian one wants to submit to him, just like the German one, and the Ukrainian woman demands equality with him. At any opportunity her unrestrainable Cossack spirit goes ablaze, recognizing no master and no servant. Between the Don and the Carpathians live the natural born democrats; neither the Byzantine emperor, nor the Vikings, nor any Polish king or Russian tsar have broken their spirit, have suppressed their consciousness. They are always ready to trade the plow for a spear, they live in small republican communities as equals amongst equals; for the Eastern Slavs, they are the sprouts of the future, the sprouts of freedom.62

It is certainly flattering for contemporary Ukrainians to read this romanticized description as they recover from the combined legacy of totalitarian and colonial oppression. Indeed, Sacher-Masoch’s biographers emphasize that while he wrote exclusively in German, and came from a mixed heritage where Germanic roots predominated, he considered himself a Galician Ukrainian in terms of identity, even if his allegiances were overwhelmingly regional, not ethnic. Thus some contemporary critics view him as a pioneer sui generis of multiculturalism.63

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However, while the more avant-garde wing of the Ukrainian intellectual and artistic community appears to be ready to champion the West-leaning multicultural legacy of someone like Sacher-Masoch, it is anathema to many, not necessarily just those in the conservative camp. Witness the gender politics in the recent writings of Yuri Vynnychuk, on whom I dwelt earlier in this study in my discussion of Ukrainian magic realism. Next to the focus on the magical, the other most persistent feature of Vynnychuk’s writing is his attempt to nurture a discourse on sexuality à l’Ukrainien. In texts of this type, the transgressive impulse is manifested through shattering the stereotype of “chaste Ukrainian culture” (“tsnotlyva ukraïns’ka kul’tura”). The Ukrainians that populate these texts, both our contemporaries and those from Vynnychuk’s works set in the past (the period that he favours in particular is the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries), tend to be endowed with vigorous sexual appetite and are anything but chaste. Perhaps the most in-your-face piece of his is an early story entitled “Hy-hy-y” (written 1979), where various forms of sexual activity are combined with murder, cannibalism, and the descriptions of consumption of other substances obviously intended to repel the reader (for example, whipped cat testicles). All of this, however, is presented through the eyes of an apparently mentally handicapped or insane teenage boy and could be merely the transcription of his delirium. Throughout the story, Vynnychuk balances precariously between titillating and purposefully grossing out the reader. The reader, it seems, is invited to share in the author’s almost childish joy at saturating his text with transgressions of the taboos of philistine taste and Soviet censorship and at transgressing yet again by situating the story in the present-day countryside of Halychyna (of course, the year when the story was written, 1979, is telling in this respect). Such absurdist exercises in transgression can be found in Vynnychuk’s later works as well: see, for instance, his story “Liubov Anny-Mariï” (AnnaMaria’s love),64 in which the protagonist, unable to satisfy herself, literally has sex with all the household objects in her home – from the armchair to the dishes to the vacuum cleaner, and so forth, until she dies after copulating with the kitchen knife. But in several of his more recent texts, Vynnychuk seems to be preoccupied with something other than transgressive absurdist fables or tales of macabre magic realism. His new “project,” it appears, has been “to make the word ‘Ukrainian’ sound sexy.” The two best-known examples of this kind are his short novels Divy nochi (Maids of the night, 1992)65 and Zhytiie haremnoie (A harem life, 1996). The latter is a parodic retelling, in imitation

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sixteenth-century Ukrainian, of the story of Roxolana, the famous Ukrainian wife of the greatest of the Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent. The choice of Roxolana as the heroine is in itself significant: she is, after all, another incarnation of the Ukrainian nation metaphorically represented through a deflowered female body – but here the story of her defloration is offered for consumption to the prurient reader.66 But most remarkable in this respect is Divy nochi, which he proudly described as “the first dissolute tale in Ukrainian literature” (“persha rozpusna povist’ v ukraïns’kii literaturi”).67 In this text Vynnychuk sheds all his magic realism paraphernalia and unravels a first-person narrative of a pseudo-autobiographical protagonist’s accidental, but protracted, encounter with the underworld of prostitution, smuggling, robbery, and so forth. Masquerading as a specimen of mass culture, this text represents an attempt (not entirely successful, but nonetheless fascinating) to portray a somehow genuinely Ukrainian underworld and especially to promote the image of a nationally conscious prostitute. There is, of course, a dark aspect to this work’s theme, not intended by the author – the problem of tens of thousands of young Ukrainian women who in recent years turned up as sexual slaves in the brothels of Western Europe and the Middle East has attracted considerable public attention internationally. But at the time of its writing (late 1980s to early 1990s), these problems were far from the author’s mind. The novel is built around several of the protagonist’s “adventures.” The first of them begins when, in the street, he meets two young women from Odessa, Ukraine’s cosmopolitan port city, and for a short while becomes, through an unexpected turn of circumstances, their pimp. This part of the novel is most explicitly low and also the weakest. Vynnychuk plays up all the possible stereotypes about Odessa’s Jewish gangsters and hard-currency prostitutes; none of it is original, and this particular reader found himself longing for the inventiveness of Vynnychuk’s early stories. But the central part of the text redeems the inauspicious beginning: we are offered a hilarious description of the prostitute school of “Ms. Alina Korchovs’ka, an extra-class prostitute, the sex bomb of the year 1938” (“pani Alina Korchovs’ka, poviia ekstraklasu, seks-bomba 1938 roku”).68 Pani Alina, of course, is the materialized dream of Ukraine as a sophisticated European state, complete with its own courtesans, who, naturally, are well versed in national culture (Pani Alina, we are told, knows by heart the Ukrainian modernist poets Lepky, Oles’, Chuprynka, and Filians’ky) and despises all the features of the totalitarian state (her dogs are named Adol’fyk and Yos’ko, after Hitler and Stalin, and her cats, Beria and Kaganovich). Here, in contrast to the first part of

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the book, Vynnychuk let his imagination run wild. Not only is the reader treated to a detailed description of a lesson at pani Alina’s school, but we also learn that she had authored a book manuscript entitled – as the reader may guess – Istoriia ukraïns’koho seksu (The history of Ukrainian sex). In Pani Alina and her pupils, we see Vynnychuk’s answer to the famous question put in the 1930s by the leading Ukrainian woman poet of the time, Olena Teliha: “Iakymy nas prahnete?” (literally, “how do you want us?” but meaning rather “what do you want us to be like?”). This male Ukrainian intellectual dreams of educated patriotic courtesans. Vynnychuk is not alone in articulating his desires in such a way. Another prominent contemporary Ukrainian author, Yuri Pokal’chuk, likewise has been on a quest for a new supposedly uninhibited and prejudice-free Ukrainian discourse on sexuality. However, as Taras Koznarsky has convincingly demonstrated, Pokal’chuk’s work utterly fails in its aspirations, “doping the reader with a mixture of romantic nationalist populism and pornography.” His attempts to combine “organically” the two drown in paroxysms of socialist-realist narrative stereotypes, and the result is kitsch of the worst kind.69 Similarly troubling aspects can be found in the works of other prominent Ukrainian male authors. Thus the 1990s writings of Valery Shevchuk, whose accomplishments in magic realist prose, discussed earlier in this study, led him to be considered by many the maître of contemporary Ukrainian letters, persistently demonize their female characters, who appear to bring nothing but peril to their male counterparts.70 In this tendency Shevchuk and a number of other male Ukrainian writers uncomfortable with the crisis of traditional gender identities find themselves strange bedfellows with the Russian chauvinist authors as typified by Vasily Belov, discussed in chapter 5 of the present study. Even the carnivalesque writing of the Bu-Ba-Bists is sometimes criticized for the circumscribed and, for some, subaltern position of women in their texts.71 However, overall Ukrainian culture in the 1990s saw a massive overhaul of the traditional construction and representation of gender. And at the forefront of this overhaul, in the broadest spectrum of genres, has been Oksana Zabuzhko (b. 1960). Zabuzhko is a writer in whose work one can find a combination of powerful explorations of Ukraine’s colonial legacy with a challenge to the familiar paradigms of patriarchy that often reemerge in the openings created by the breakdown of the empire. A poet, prose writer, essayist, and scholar, she has emerged as one of the most impressive presences on the

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contemporary Ukrainian literary and cultural scene. Appearing at a number of international writers’ fora, Zabuzhko persistently addressed the peculiar condition of the contemporary Ukrainian writer who has to live with an acute feeling of “writing in an endangered language” since for much of the past two centuries the use of the language was discouraged and persecuted by both the Russian and the Soviet authorities. Yet her writing is marked by a keen awareness of the dangers of exclusive focus on resistance and “safeguarding” for a postcolonial writer’s project. Passionate and intellectually sophisticated, Zabuzhko’s texts testify to the power and the urgency of a critique shaped by the standpoint of a postcolonial feminist subject. Her œuvre demonstrates the remarkable potential generated by a conjunction of feminism and postcolonialism, two strains of postmodernism of resistance, in the post-Soviet context. If one looks into the recent history of the ways that gender and sexuality were perceived in Ukrainian culture, several predominant paradigms can be distinguished. In terms of the gender dynamic, they were perhaps best summarized by Zabuzhko in her lecture “Contemporary Ukraine: Perspectives of a Woman Writer in a Post-Colonial Culture.”72 The key tensions that emerge, she argues, are unambiguously of the Oedipal kind. First, there is the tension between, on the one hand, the nation and the national culture allegorized as a female body – something that reaches with its roots into the Slavic pagan cult of Mother Moist Earth – but in the case of modern Ukraine, it manifests itself as a violated female body, a victim of rape and abuse, and, on the other, the Ukrainian man, the loyal son forever tormented by his mother’s/nation’s humiliation who cannot but love her in all her shame and depravity (Zabuzhko traces this “archetype of the bastard” from Shevchenko through Evhen Malaniuk, a major émigré modernist poet). The second paradigm is the no-less-torturous striving to win favours of the cold, abusing force that has conquered the mother/nation, the symbolic Father/empire, a path that frequently leads to self-alienation and self-destruction (here, Zabuzhko places figures as diverse as Gogol’/Hohol’ and the Ukrainian sergeants in the Soviet army as depicted in the 1960s stories of Hryhir Tiutiunnyk). In other words, the construction of Ukrainian masculinities in the colonial era can be seen as a classic manifestation of the condition “Manichean delirium,” as Fanon describes the colonial consciousness in his Black Skin, White Masks.73 “Should we wonder, now, that there has been no room for a direct woman’s voice in the literature dominated by the above-described stereotypes?” asks Zabuzhko. And in a gesture similar to that performed by feminist critics in many other national literatures, she proceeds to offer a

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revisionist archeological reconstruction of women’s voices in Ukrainian culture, from folk poetry to the early modernist masterpieces of Ol’ha Kobylians’ka and Lesia Ukraïnka and the later twentieth-century women poets – all of them forced to deal with the “gender cleansing” that went along with their inclusion in the national canon. In the meantime, the portrayal of women in the works of most male Ukrainian writers to this day has tended to follow the paradigm of allegorization and/or objectification of the characters. However, we do find a few notable exceptions to this tendency in some texts from the 1920s – Mykola Khvyl’ovy’s “Sentymental’na istoriia” (A sentimental story), Valerian Pidmohyl’ny’s Nevelychka drama (A little touch of drama) – that offer fascinating, and relatively successful, experiments in narrative crossdressing – that is, organizing the narrative around the point of view of a female protagonist. Here, we see the germs of the type of narrative that we would encounter later in contemporary Slavic texts, especially in women’s writing: a combination of a foregrounding of the corporeal experiences with a more nuanced version of an allegorization of the individual experience as a metaphor for the national condition. Still, these fascinating but isolated exceptions only confirm the strength of the general trend. The reader will remember from this study’s opening chapter that in one of Jameson’s two examples of national allegory, Ousmane Sembène’s Xala, the metaphor for the troubled condition of the postcolonial society is that of sexual dysfunction. This may provide insight into why the attempt, undertaken in all seriousness by a number of “high culture” authors, to (re?)generate a discourse of “national eroticism” in post-Soviet Ukraine in the wake of the lifting of totalitarian rules of censorship (and following the trend virtually omnipresent in the postcommunist world)74 has failed miserably (as demonstrated by the earlier discussed examples of Vynnychuk and Pokal’chuk), tending to be pitiful from the aesthetic point of view and reprehensibly reactionary in its vision of the gender dynamic. The title of Zabuzhko’s most famous book, Pol’ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns’koho seksu (Field work in Ukrainian sex), might suggest to those unfamiliar with the actual text that it too belongs to the discourse of “nationalist erotica.” However, they are in for a disappointment. Instead, we are presented with a work of an entirely different type, a radical feminist text that is guided by what Helena Goscilo terms “a strategy of … maximal palpability, whereby not tearful lamentations but the female body – as the text’s physical and tropological center – testifies to women’s experience.”75 Zabuzhko, often provocatively described as simultaneously the enfant terrible and the femme fatale of contemporary Ukrainian letters, has offered

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in her poetry, fiction, and nonfictional writing both an autobiographical testimony of survival and resistance as a writing woman in a postcolonial cultural dynamic and a critique of the intellectual and cultural legacies of conceptualizing the oppressed nation.76 Her early poetry is predominantly introspective or made of “painterly” visual vignettes;77 however, already in the second collection of her poems, Dyryhent ostann’oï svichky (The conductor of the last candle, 1990), the intense emotionality of the lyrical monologues that was already present in some of the early works reaches new dimensions when coupled with existential and historical exploratory forays. The shock of the Chornobyl’ catastrophe permeating the first section of the book, the horrors of the totalitarian past78 are tackled next to philosophical reflections and a number of provocative rewritings of historical heroes and traditional plots;79 a central presence is accorded to love lyrics that are simultaneously unbridled comments on gender relations – a topic of continued concern for Zabuzhko. A similar combination of concerns governs her novella “Inoplanetianka” (The extraterrestrial woman, 1989, pub. 1992), an existential introspective/autobiographical piece whose principal topic, ultimately, is inner personal and creative freedom. It is, however, her third collection of poetry, Avtostop (Hitchhiking, 1994), as well as her novel Pol’ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns’koho seksu (Field work in Ukrainian sex),80 which has enjoyed considerable succès de scandale, that constituted, in my opinion, an epistemological breakthrough, precisely due to the prominent function of the allegoric paradigm in their construction, on both the national and the global plane. In a number of Zabuzhko’s poems, this allegorical impulse is combined with the strategy of figuration similar to the one that I traced through several of Nina Iskrenko’s texts in chapter 4. Zabuzhko turns to figures from other times or spaces, or even pages of past literary texts, and reinterprets, reimagines, reevaluates them. One of the most powerful instances of this kind is the poem that envisions a possible alternative life path for Lesia Ukraïnka. Zabuzhko tries to imagine what might have happened if Ukraïnka’s fiancé, instead of dying from tuberculosis in 1901, had recovered and the couple had settled into a conventional marriage. Instead of a writer embarking on a challenging, precarious path of modernist literary experimentation combined with a virtually unprecedented feminist challenge to the canon – most notable in her plays and dramatic poems, beginning with “Oderzhyma” (A woman obsessed), her version of the story of Mary Magdalene, which she wrote at her fiancé’s bedside while nursing him in his final days – we are offered a portrayal of a seemingly happy housewife and young mother who, however, is disturbed by an unarticulated but irrepressible longing. At the

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end of the poem, she is staring into emptiness, unable to sleep, while the “fiery angel” of inspiration waits in vain at a downtown Kyiv coffeehouse.81 Instead of Ukraine’s greatest woman of letters and its greatest playwright, in this alternative reality Ukraïnka becomes an unrealized, unfulfilled “Shakespeare’s sister.” Among Zabuzhko’s poems that reinterpret classic literary characters there are several that, indeed, turn to Shakespeare. For instance, “Ofeliia— Gertrudi” (Ophelia to Gertrude) presents to the reader, in disturbing, scornful detail, an alternative vision of the queen’s future, third marriage and all, where her role is reduced to that of an entity intended solely for production and reproduction, of heirs and of lies, a “regina-vagina” in service of tyranny.82 Notably, the poem’s structure is that of a woman addressing another woman, and while in the text Ophelia does not make any references to her own destiny, her speaking as a “madwoman” allows her to forgo diplomacy and decorum. This poem is followed in Avtostop by an equally subversive portrayal of Clytemnestra, likewise presented as a woman’s rejoinder to another woman (in this case, to a remark uttered by the protagonist in the epilogue of Lesia Ukraïnka’s play Cassandra – itself a polemical feminist rewriting of the classic Homeric figure – at the moment when Agamemnon introduces Cassandra, his captive, to Clytemnestra upon his return to Mycenae from Troy). This time, however, it is an inner monologue of Clytemnestra getting ready to slay her husband, in which her motivation for what she is about to commit is radically altered in comparison with the classic version: the poem’s theme is that of physical revulsion felt by Clytemnestra at the mere contact with the callous and brutal militaristic, imperialist masculinity that does not distinguish violence in battle from violence against women. His hands, she feels, “rip off my clothes as if I were some corpse on a battlefield” (“tsi ruky zryvaiut’ odezhu iz mene, iak z mertvoho tila na poli boiu”). Clytemnestra’s daring desire is to “outdo what you [Agamemnon] have accomplished, / I’ll establish a new kingdom, / a world without Agamemnon” (“vse perevershu, na shcho ty dosi spromihsia: / ia zasnuiu nove tsarstvo – / svit bez Agamemnona”).83 Thus she rises in this text as a desperate rebel against the tyranny of patriarchy and imperialism. Next to these “figurational” texts, one finds in the pages of Avtostop texts apparently anchored in contemporary lived experiences, which undergo, however, a transformation into a vision that ranges from the hyperreal to the surreal. These texts, like Zabuzhko’s novel, are characterized by an intense focus on the corporeal. One of them, tellingly titled “Dorohoiu do pekla” (On the way to hell), is set in a packed rush hour bus. This

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topos, frequent in late Soviet women’s writing, particularly in the stories of Petrushevskaya, who gives it more of a naturalist colouring, is transformed in this text into a kind of latter-day Bosch painting. The heroine’s corporeal discomfort (she discovers with disgust that a male passenger next to her is rubbing his crotch against her; another passenger’s wig gets into her mouth) gives way to her experiencing her own body and mind as fragmented and blending with her surroundings, as she is no longer sure whether she is thinking her own thoughts or is turning into “a public toilet of spite and despair” (“hromads’ka vbyral’nia zloby ta bezsyllia”); there seems to be no escape. She wants but is unable to scream, as she feels her tongue metamorphosing into a ticket about to be punched.84 In another text, “Lyst iz dachi” (Letter from a summer house), the outwardly cheerful tone is subverted almost immediately by the mention of acid rain, leading to an escalation of odd imagery; the world around seems to be going mad, and the heroine wonders how, for instance, mad trees might behave, as she relates that the neighbour woman has given birth to a mutant child and casually remarks that she now goes to bed with an axe and that she finds all the languages she knows worn out.85 The poem renders powerfully the disturbing feeling of the post-Chornobyl’ environment that deceives the senses while turning the mind obstinately toward the apocalyptic. The title poem in Avtostop offers an idiosyncratic fusion of these two textual modes and, in its focus on displacement, is linked to Zabuzhko’s novel. The poem, subtitled “molytva kintsia chasiv” (a prayer at the end of time), takes us to the US, more specifically to a Greyhound bus in the fields of the Midwest. The autobiographical heroine is a passenger looking out the bus window at a working-class Hispanic woman, her skin “the colour of buckwheat honey,” who has just gotten off the bus, while the passenger next to her, a thin white man who looks like a drug addict, dozes off, his head falling onto her shoulder. The context of her displacement, of her surroundings, of her fellow passengers (most of them nonwhite), inspires a stream-of-consciousness text much of which is a meditation on the violence that pervades this world and on the social and ecological devastation that has befallen much of our planet – the result, she feels, of the vain and misguided pursuits of the white race. The meditation fuses with a prayer: the woman she is looking at is transformed into a latter-day incarnation of Virgin Mary, while the neighbour on the bus looks more and more like her son. Apocalyptic reflections on the end of the millennium elicit a message of peace and seem to yield to a cathartic experience – when the bus makes a sudden turn and heads into a tunnel.86

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In the poems of Avtostop, as well as in the novel, the preoccupation with place and displacement, with the vestiges of the empire and the fragments of national past, shapes the identity-always-in-the-making of a nomadic postmodern intellectual, where both the nation-based and the genderbased aspects are objects of continuous negotiation grounded in a survivalthrough-text. If for Andrukhovych, as I have argued in the previous chapter, it was the displacement into the centre of the collapsing empire, depicted in his novel Moskoviada, that provided the impulse for articulating the Ukrainian postcolonial condition, for Zabuzhko it was the more heterogeneous and “rhizomatic” displacement of an almost dispersive kind that prompted the negotiations of personal – and collective – identities in her texts.87 In the novel in particular, a “writing one’s way out” of a personal crisis, a textual healing after an abusive relationship,88 metamorphoses into a paradigmatic instance of Jamesonian national allegory, a “private narrative invested with a properly libidinal dynamic” that emerges as “an allegory of the embattled situation of the public culture and society.” In Zabuzhko’s novel we are also confronted by the very graphically portrayed human bodies, and overwhelmingly those of women, experiencing sexual pleasure, but also being violated, scarred, and bruised. However, the experiences, both traumatic and pleasurable, of the protagonist and other characters are not presented in terms of an abstract gender confrontation. Zabuzhko herself appears to be in full agreement with Jameson: in the novel, she repeatedly remarks that the Ukrainian sorrow is not of a private psychoanalytic kind, but the imprint of the nightmare of colonialism and totalitarianism, and the novel’s protagonist half-jokingly, halfseriously refers to herself as “a sexual victim of the national idea” (“seksual’na zhertva natsional’noï ideï”).89 One of the most striking aspects of the novel – the one that probably brought the greatest number of critics’ objections – is its bitter critique of colonial masculinities, an issue that has been gaining prominence in the current postcolonial discourse. As Leela Gandhi notes in her study Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, a number of critics have “attempted to reread the colonial encounter in these terms as a struggle between competing masculinities [in which] colonial and postcolonial women are postulated as the symbolic mediators of this (male) contestation.” On the other hand, the colonial era led to the rise of the discourse of colonial masculinity as “compromised” – a discourse “thoroughly internalized by wide sections of nationalist movement [in the colonies]. Some nationalists responded by lamenting their own emasculation, others by protesting it.”90 In Pol’ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns’koho seksu the reader is offered a version of this encounter: a

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Ukrainian man traumatized by the legacies of Soviet oppression replicated the trauma by abusing his lover, a Ukrainian woman who is equally a survivor of totalitarianism. This palimpsest of traumas is highlighted by the fact that much of the plot takes place in the US, where the protagonist, a poet, has come as a Fulbright fellow and where she is later joined by the man she loved, who also is an artist – a painter. The defamirializing American setting serves here as a “sense-generating context” that enables an analytic approach to the trauma that the novel portrays. The novel, as Serhii Datsiuk has noted in his perceptive reading of it, became “scandalous” precisely due to its honest and passionate portrayal of the psychological and physical trauma of the Ukrainian anticolonial intelligentsia.91 It is its gendered aspect that endows this portrayal with particular strength, providing a modern-day rewriting of one of the central icons of the Ukrainian canon, Shevchenko’s archetypal image of the Ukrainian nation as a pokrytka, a seduced, violated, and abandoned woman, which runs through his entire œuvre. The contradictions of gender relations, the entangled web of desire and abuse are conjoined in their traumatic force with the effects of the imperial machine (the novel includes numerous vivid flashbacks to the totalitarian past). Thus a momentum toward “double decolonization,” a working through a virtual palimpsest of traumas, becomes a step toward postcolonial healing as well. Zabuzhko hopes that the new Ukrainian literature will become “a form of national therapy,”92 which is precisely what a number of postcolonial critics have been calling for. Leela Gandhi, for instance, believes that “the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past.” Gandhi compares the postcolonial project to the psychoanalytic procedure of anamnesis, where patients are asked to “elaborate their current problems by freely associating apparently inconsequential details with past situations – allowing them to uncover hidden meanings in their lives and their behavior.”93 The postcolonial writer’s task, one may say, lies in “a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present,”94 and gender critique constitutes a particularly effective path for such a project. After Pol’ovi doslidzhennia, Zabuzhko published several emphatically gynocentric shorter pieces of fiction, envisioned as installments in a roman u novelakh (a novel that is structured as a series of self-contained novellas) that presents a project sui generis of cognitive mapping of the forms that Ukrainian femininity can take.95 The first of them, “Ia, Milena” (I, Milena), continues to a degree the paradigm of her first novel: the protagonist, a

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successful television journalist, a host of a women’s talk show, undergoes an existential crisis, an unraveling of her identity.96 The narrative is presented in a hybrid of third and first person, creating a shimmering, or perhaps slightly schizophrenic, effect of the protagonist thinking about herself and observing her own actions “from the outside.” At one point in the text, the separation becomes irreversible, and the character “divides,” or rather, redoubles, as the “internal” Milena watches with increased horror the crude and degrading public performance into which degenerates the experience of the public Milena, all the outward signs of success notwithstanding. The desperate attempts of the “authentic” Milena to convince the people around her, including her husband, that the “public” Milena is a false simulacrum fail; it is she who becomes invisible and ignored. The story’s overtones of Romantic and Gothic tales (a manufactured, “false” creature – a former shadow, a golem or Frankenstein’s monster that destroys its human “master”) work powerfully on the reader through the insightful use of the medium of television as a setting. The focus of the text is on a woman’s intellectual and emotional quest, which, as in the novel, is subverted, but this time not by the gendered inheritance of totalitarian trauma but by the pressures of public performance in contemporary context. As in the novel, the experiences of the protagonist allow for a possibility of interpreting them as an experience of defeat suffered by this particular woman, yet the narrativization of this experience turns into a woman’s survival-through-text. The next novella, “Divchatka” (Girls), is a fin-de-siècle text – published in an anthology entitled Na dobranok, milenium! (Good-bye, millennium!)97 – that returns the reader to a theme first articulated in Ukrainian letters during the previous turn of the century in the 1890s texts of Ol’ha Kobylians’ka:98 a strong-willed young woman’s awakening to the world, a discovery of sisterhood with other women, and the realization that such sisterhood may carry homoerotic overtones. The twentieth century, however, transformed this narrative paradigm from a utopian discourse with Nietzschean undercurrents into a corporeally grounded existential journey of discovery: the narrative recounts a crisis-generating infatuation and longing that propels a thirteen-year-old girl into the arms of her classmate and the clash of the naive idealism of the former with the budding yet already voracious sexual appetite of the other girl, which is but a facet of her thoroughgoing rebellion against all social norms. This second, “darker” character is ostracized and expelled from the school and thus disappears from her girlfriend’s life, while the first, although scared into conventionality, goes on to treasure

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the memory of this experience into adulthood. This story of teenage sexual transgression is set in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s “stagnation era” and acquires an allegorical dimension of personal as political, where sexual nonconformity is a window into freedom that allows for a different envisioning of a woman’s fate. Zabuzhko’s 2000 novella Kazka pro kalynovu sopilku (The tale of the guelder-rose flute) continues both the gynocentrism and the doppelgänger motif of the previous two texts (one may argue that the two main characters of “Divchatka,” Darka and Olena, are to an extent a continuation of the split of the two Milenas). This time Zabuzhko takes on the plot of a traditional Ukrainian folktale that can be read as a female version of the story of Cain and Abel and fleshes it out, so to speak, into a magic realism narrative. An extensive exercise in this mode represents a stylistic departure from the types of prose texts that Zabuzhko has tended to favour, but one may argue that this shift has been prepared for by the surrealist vein of her verse. It also further builds up the intertextual dialogue in her work, as it can be viewed as a powerful gynocentric rejoinder, with its multidimensional, captivating female characters, to the textual universe of Valery Shevchuk, which, as noted earlier, has turned increasingly misogynist over the past decade.99 In the writing of Oksana Zabuzhko, we are offered a welcome and much needed counterpoint to the “male heterosexual triumphalism” that, as Marko Pavlyshyn remarked in his essay “Ukrainian Literature and the Erotics of Postcolonialism,” has unfortunately been exercising a rather strong influence in recent Ukrainian letters. Pavlyshyn went on to claim, in a somewhat exaggerated manner, that “counterexamples illustrating any form of resistance to this phallic frenzy … are extremely difficult to find, even in writing by women.”100 The impulse that has guided this chapter has been the need to demonstrate that examples of such ameliorative critique of the gender dynamic in current Ukrainian culture do exist and that they have already generated considerable attention. One hopes that future instances of this kind will be plentiful, as well as influential. However, as already noted, Zabuzhko does not pursue gender critique Zherebkin-style, at the expense of the constructive postcolonial “national therapy.” While always palpable in her writing, the gender axis sometimes yields its priority to other aspects of postcolonial critique, as, for instance, in her book that followed on the heels of Pol’ovi doslidzhennia, a critical study entitled Shevchenkiv mif Ukraïny: Sproba filosofs’koho analizu (Shevchenko’s myth of Ukraine: An attempt at a philosophical analysis,

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1997). In this work, she offers a revisionist polemical reading of the national poet, who is frequently reduced in Ukrainian culture to an object of cult worship or to the obligatory national signifier, as a “native intellectual” in the sense that this term has been used in Western postcolonial discourse. As Edward Said has commented, [a]ccording to Fanon, the goal of the native intellectual cannot simply be to replace [an imperial] policeman with his native counterpart, but rather what he called, borrowing from Aimé Césaire, the invention of new souls. In other words, although there is inestimable value to what an intellectual does to ensure the community’s survival during periods of extreme national emergency, loyalty to the group’s fight for survival cannot draw the intellectual so far as to narcotize the critical sense, or reduce its imperatives, which are always to go beyond survival to questions of political liberation, to critiques of the leadership, to presenting alternatives that are too often marginalized or pushed aside as irrelevant to the main battle at hand … the intellectual’s loyalty must not be restricted only to joining the collective march: great intellectuals like Tagore of India or Jose Martí of Cuba were exemplary in this regard, never abating their criticism because of nationalism, even though they remained nationalists themselves.101

This is precisely the vision of Shevchenko that Zabuzhko advocates in her book. She posits Shevchenko as the first Ukrainian “national intellectual,” whose understanding of Ukraine replaces the early Romantic, still aristocratically rooted version of Ukrainian nationalism dominant in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. He was, Zabuzhko tells us, the first to see the Ukrainians as a modern nation in the making, an “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s sense, held together by horizontal ties, not by dynastic or religious identification. He was, however, also a poet-mythmaker, and the tracing of his idiosyncratic project is what preoccupies Zabuzhko. One of the central aspects of Shevchenko’s new mythology is his radical revision of the by-then-solidified myth of St Petersburg, the imperial capital that is either glorified (Pushkin) or demonized (Gogol’, Mickiewicz) yet always experienced as sublime in the Kantian sense. Shevchenko was the first to read St Petersburg through a defamiliarized gaze of a colonial Other, to lower emphatically and “decrown” this city. He consistently reads through and subverts all the iconic images of the city, while endowing with voice the silent masses of imperial subjects (many Ukrainians among them) who perished in the city’s construction. Petersburg is, for Shevchenko, a sinful, vampiric city that epitomizes the “big lie” of the Russian-Ukrainian

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brotherhood. “We are, you see, very close relatives,” notes Shevchenko sarcastically, continuing with a proverb, “when our father’s house was on fire, their father came to warm his hands.” The “Ukraine-empire” binary, as Zabuzhko notes, runs through all of Shevchenko’s œuvre, and the two are opposed as the daytime and nighttime landscapes; the terrifying imperial chaos is contraposed to the national cosmos. In Shevchenko’s life and work, writes Zabuzhko, we see the classic … problem of Ukrainian dualism, the incongruity, forced and inescapable for any nonindependent nation, of its factual historical being, dominated by the colonizer, and the self-sustained being, an “infra-historic” one, so to speak (which usually produces an “alternative” history of the nation, a spiritual one, which becomes a subjective analog of its identity). On the individual level, such split, which manifests itself immediately as soon the individual leaves the closed ethno-cultural microcosm of the patriarchal village … and integrates into social structures of … the “outside” world (through education, army service, etc.) emerges as a drama of existential choice (not only between the empowered “other” and the disempowered “self,” but between two cultures inside the self, one of which devours the other). It was in the forge of this drama that the [Ukrainian] intelligentsia came into being … following the model first posited (and fulfilled!) by Shevchenko: he alone can be considered the first national intellectual … conscious of his activity as representative of a separate and self-sufficient national community.102

Both Shevchenko’s life and work, notes Zabuzhko, are the embodiment of “the curse of the Ukrainian man under the empire.” In relentlessly constructing his individual mythology, Shevchenko both dismantles the imperial Russian one and critiques the frozen nostalgic vision of Ukraine’s past glory. Zabuzhko identifies as one of Shevchenko’s key – and intentionally disturbing – images of Ukrainian freedom the ancient burial mounds, filled with “free corpses” (“vil’ni trupy”).103 Construction of revisionist mythologies as a project of postcolonial critique is the topic that continues to preoccupy Zabuzhko. In one of her essays, “Proshchannia z imperiieiu” (A farewell to empire),104 she offers an instance of this project in a reading together of the work of Shevchenko, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott, analyzing Brodsky’s deafness and/or hostility to anti-imperial resistance in the life and work of the other two poets, even if he found much to admire in Walcott’s writing. Walcott and Shevchenko, on the other hand, emerge for Zabuzhko as the quintessential

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“native intellectuals” with similar aspirations of endowing silent nations with a voice, no matter how frustrated, lonely, or alienated they may feel in this endeavour. It is the undying energy, this persistence of the utopian project of “invention of new souls,” that I see in the work of Ukraine’s best contemporary intellectuals, Oksana Zabuzhko among them. It amazes me that they do not abandon this project even in these, the most trying of times: Ukrainian independence arrived, as Yuri Andrukhovych noted in his speech at the 1999 pen congress, “with the bitter taste of the apocalyptic,” as it was precipitated by the Chornobyl’ catastrophe and followed by years of economic and cultural chaos, when, to quote Andrukhovych again, “the former prison” became “a flea market by the train station.”105 The intellectual must continue her or his project, even though with an awareness that she or he might not be heard. But sometimes – as in the case of the Orange Revolution, to the cause of which Zabuzhko contributed a series of passionate essays – the breakthrough is sudden and awesome in its magnitude. A new era has begun; we will soon know what new souls have sprung up on postcolonial Ukrainian soil.

Conclusion

It has been my intention in this study to instantiate an intervention into the rapidly expanding discourse on cultural globalization by turning it toward the Second World cultural processes to which it has paid relatively little attention so far (with the exception of reflections on the impact of the collapse of the ussr and the Eastern bloc on the internal politics of the West and the South). I have argued that postmodernism, postcolonialism, and postcommunism have not been the exclusive property of the First, the Third, and the Second Worlds respectively, but have overlapped and diffused into each other on a great number of levels. Fostering dialogue between the critical discourses that address these phenomena remains an urgent imperative. This study has approached this imperative through an attempt to navigate the cultural processes in the Slavic world’s two largest nations, Russia and Ukraine, aiming to map the key forms in which these national cultures responded to the changing global cultural condition. I have been drawn in particular to a possibility of singling out those trends prominent within these cultures that seem to offer the greatest potential for what, following Hal Foster and Fredric Jameson, I consider to be instances of constructive and critical engagement with this new cultural condition: Foster’s “postmodernism of resistance” and Jameson’s “cognitive mapping.” My primary focus has been on literature, which I believe to be a particularly relevant and telling field of cultural engagement with these global processes due to the lengthy history of literaturo-centrism in Second World cultures. And

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although this literaturo-centrism has been challenged in recent years, it has by no means capitulated to other cultural forms, contrary to what many had expected.1 It would be an oversimplification, however, to assert that within this new cultural condition, there exist aesthetic paradigms that are purely “progressive” or purely reactionary. As numerous critics have noted, the cultures of the three “posts” continuously negotiate between “complicity” and resistance, and it is this negotiation that often endows them with particular power. The paradigms that I have singled out and to which I have devoted individual chapters do not exhaust the full spectrum of postmodern/ postcolonial/postcommunist cultural practices in the Second World in general and in the two particular national literary cultures on which I have focused. The largest and liveliest of the paradigms that fall outside the limits of this study is the new mass literature that in Russia in particular has been viewed by some as the most significant cultural development of the post-Soviet era. While I cannot claim that I have studied this paradigm exhaustively, my engagements with it have been largely disappointing in a search for some embedded messages of cognitive exploration or critical resistance. I encourage the reader to consult the work of other critics who have tackled this phenomenon.2 Another paradigm of post-Soviet writing that has not received detailed attention in the preceding pages is one that, although of utmost importance, is still in its infancy; hopefully it will undergo a prodigious development in the near future. I have in mind postcolonial russophone writing that, in a way structurally analogous to similar developments in anglophone and francophone literature, develops the language medium in ways radically different from the metropolies’ national literary traditions. Rather than focus on the reactionary nostalgia of the texts by Volos and Mamedov promoted in Madina Tlostanova’s book discussed in the first chapter, I would draw attention to the fascinating pioneering instance of this paradigm in the writing of the Ferghana school in Uzbekistan, particularly of the school’s leader, Shamshad Abdullaev.3 The paradigms that I have discerned, however, for all their local peculiarities, display profound affinities to similar processes around the world. One can find, to a varying degree and in various combinations, in most contemporary cultures, instances of subversion of the culture’s dominant linguistic economies; heterotopic explorations of memory, identity and narrative, often in coupling with a focus on the experiences of displacement; magic realist probings of sealed-off neo-Baroque microcosms; celebrations of the carnivalesque momentum; and unprecedentedly vigorous explorations

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of gender concerns and sexual identities within a general cultural “turn toward the corporeal.” Naturally, each culture responds to these in its own unique way that nevertheless partakes of these globally present forms. The inquiry into the cases of Russia and Ukraine demonstrates how distinctly different from each other these national responses can be, even if it is possible to detect similarities between some of the Russian sots-art poetry and the carnivalesque poetry of the Ukrainian Bu-Ba-Bists, or between the Russian heterotopic prose and some of the Ukrainian magic realist writing, as well as the novels of Yuri Andrukhovych for that matter. However, the priorities, the logical accents are different. For instance, in Russia we see a much greater propensity for engagement with the immediate textual legacy of totalitarian writing by way of simulation and defamiliarizing subversion from within, compared with the strategy of carnivalesque inversion prominent in Ukrainian letters, as demonstrated by such recent novels as Vladimir Sorokin’s Goluboe salo (Blue lard) and Tat’iana Tolstaya’s Kys’ in Russia and Vasyl’ Kozhelianko’s Defiliada v Moskvi (A défilé in Moscow) and the Kapranov brothers’ Kobzar 2000 in Ukraine. The two also produce radically different discourses on the national, a postimperial melancholy, and an enduring legacy of Dostoevsky’s theory of “universal responsiveness” versus a reconstruction and reevaluation of the colonial and precolonial past. Both, however, are engaged in a search for a newly constituted “place at the table” of an increasingly tightly integrated global culture. In both national literatures we are also witnessing, following a period of Foucauldian “erosion of the author function,” a new “autobiographical turn,” particularly in the cases when an author speaks from a marginalized or underprivileged subject position, thus continuing, in the case of Russia, the testimonial vein developed by Evgeny Kharitonov (not surprisingly this mode is particularly prominent in the “new queer writing” of Yaroslav Mogutin and Dmitry Vodennikov).4 It is also receiving a boost through the development of new technologies – for example, with the blossoming of the genre of an Internet diary. In Ukraine this “personal” mode seems to be even more widespread and can be said to follow more along the lines of the “politics of location” as articulated by Adrienne Rich and further developed by Rosi Braidotti: we see it both in the recent essays of Andrukhovych and in the work of the women writers of the younger generation – for instance, Svitlana Pyrkalo. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Second World’s momentous transformation and further integration into global processes goes on unabated. “New souls” are indeed being invented, the enduring grim legacy of the totalitarian/colonial past and the current social and political

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problems notwithstanding. A key task for cultural criticism in this dramatic time remains to be attuned to the dynamics of their evolvement and to go on with a project of cognitive mapping of this development. Without it, any attempt to construct a global cultural model is bound to remain fatally flawed.

Notes

preface 1 Jameson, Postmodernism, 5. This statement, of course, does not offer a full or adequate representation of Jameson’s theoretical models of either postmodernism or globalization, addressed below. 2 For an argument concerning the case of Russia, stemming in part from the repressive nature of the imperial state apparatus (thwarting other forums for public discourse) and in part from the public word’s privileged – indeed, sacred – place in the nation’s cultural hierarchy, see Freidin, “By the Walls of Church and State.” In other Slavic and East European national traditions, literature-centrism is more of a consequence of absence of national statehood in the “long” nineteenth century and of the colonial status of such statehood through much of the twentieth. 3 For an informative attempt to trace a history of the Russian Internet, see Kuznetsov, Oshchupuvaia slona. See also Ellis, From Glasnost to the Internet. 4 Foster, “Postmodernism in Parallax,” 3. 5 Ibid., 4–5. 6 For a discussion of this move, see Wollen, “Scenes from the Future,” 115–18. 7 See, for example, Hutcheon, A Poetics, 31–2. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 93–7, quotes a laudatory description of the Piazza from an exhibition catalogue, but his own assessment of it is far more cautious.

chapter one 1 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 17, emphasis in the original.

270 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18 19

Notes to pages 4–8

Ibid., 29–30. Jameson, Postmodernism, 54. Jameson, “The Politics of Theory,” in ibid., 55–66. Jameson, “Notes on Globalization,” 56–7. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 57–8. García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens, offers an example of an exploration of these processes. Jameson, “Notes on Globalization,” 73. The term was introduced by the architect and theorist Kenneth Frampton in his “Towards a Critical Regionalism.” Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 178. See Pletsch, “The Three Worlds.” The “three-worlds” division was apparently first formulated by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952 in his “Trois mondes, une planete”; see Scribner, Requiem for Communism, 167–8 n. 2. See Mignolo, “Globalization,” 47. For instance, Mignolo closes his contribution to Jameson and Miyoshi, eds, The Cultures of Globalization, with an assertion that “globalization is creating the conditions for spatializing the civilization process and, by so doing, of denying the denial of coevalness as one of the main epistemological strategies of colonial/imperial expansion and creating the conditions for ‘barbarian theorizing’ from/of the third world … for the (first/third) entire planet” (ibid., 53, emphasis added). Within the discourse of postmodernism, one such example is Jameson’s consideration of the 1960s as the period of the last surge of the utopian impulse that preceded the onset of postmodernity. In his 1991 Postmodernism, Jameson does agree that the absence of the Soviet Union from his global model of the 1960s was a “deplorable lapse”; however, in his attempt to correct it, he does not go beyond considering the political-historical implications of the failure of Khrushchev’s thaw outside the ussr; see Postmodernism, 274 (the reference is to Jameson’s 1984 essay “Periodizing the Sixties”). Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” 100, 111. Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial?,” 116–17, emphasis in the original. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 32, emphasis in the original. National and/or regional models of postmodernism have been proposed, inter alia, for Latin America and the Caribbean, China, Japan, and even the Islamic world; see, for example, Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds, Postmodernism and Japan; Colás, Postmodernity in Latin America; Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island; Dirlik and Zhang, eds, Postmodernism and China; and Ahmed and Donnan, eds, Islam, Globalization, and Postmodernity. A comprehensive international encyclopedia of

Notes to pages 8–11

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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various indigenized postmodernisms around the planet has even appeared – Bertens and Fokkema, eds, International Postmodernism – that includes good chapters on, among others, Eastern Europe and China, although the representation of the ex-ussr is disappointing. Buck-Morss, “Is There a Common Post-Modernism Culture?” Perloff, “Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?” Clark, “Changing Historical Paradigms,” 304. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 87. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 111. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, xii–xiii. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., 73–4. Ibid., 79–80. Without succumbing to the temptation to dwell at length on the strategies of inclusion and exclusion at work in this “we,” I would like to note here that it does not seem feasible to pinpoint a “pure” postmodernist culture without modernist residual elements anywhere in the world. That modernist energies are still at work within postmodernity can be demonstrated even on the basis of the fact that a coherent understanding and “solidification” of the concepts of modernism and modernity has become ultimately possible only in the postmodern era: see, for example, Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, especially chapter 3, “Reading Modernism through Postmodernism”; Waugh, Practicing Postmodernism/Reading Modernism; Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity; and ultimately the sections “Prolegomena to Future Contradictions between the Modern and the Postmodern” and “Notes Toward a Theory of the Modern” in Jameson, Postmodernism, 297–302 and 302–13 respectively, as well as his numerous remarks on the subject scattered throughout The Seeds of Time and elsewhere. See Jameson, Postmodernism, xvi. On Tertz, see Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz. For histories of Russian postmodernist writing, see Epshtein, Genis, and VladivGlover, Russian Postmodernism; and Lipovetskii, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, an English translation of his Russkii postmodernizm. For the case of the visual arts, see Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art. They are not represented at all in Jameson and Miyoshi, eds, The Cultures of Globalization; Jameson’s own essay in the book, “Notes on Globalization,” 67, contains a passing remark that, in his opinion, “the former socialist countries have seemed largely unable to generate an original culture and a distinctive way of life capable of standing as an alternative” to “Americanization.” Jameson’s 2002 volume, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, is fairly

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Notes to pages 11–13

generously sprinkled with references to Slavic literary, artistic, and political legacy (mostly Russian and Polish and dating from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century), although the argument’s primary focus is (understandably in this case) the intellectual legacy of the West. Similarly, his latest book, Archaeologies of the Future, which rethinks the history of Utopian discourse, also primarily focuses on the earlier era and Western authors, although it does contain a cursory reference to Viktor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens. I consider the complex story of the frustrated attempts at dialogue between Jameson and Second World (especially Russian) intellectuals in Chernetsky, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Postcommunism?” Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, x, 68. Ibid., 276–7. Habermas, “Modernity.” Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” xi–xii. Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic, also includes a case study in “postmodernism of resistance.” Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others,” 59, explores the implications of the “apparent crossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation.” Owens’s pioneering effort inspired a prolific following; see Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism; Waugh, Feminine Fictions; and Ferguson and Wicke, eds, Feminism and Postmodernism. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, 277–8. Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial?,” 124. The inclusion of the collapse of the Russian/Soviet Empire as an equal of the West European ones in the global discourse on decolonization is marked in the second, revised edition of Muriel Chamberlain’s popular textbook Decolonization, which even features a photo of Estonian children celebrating their nation’s independence on its cover. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, viii. Margaret Rose, in her Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern, 198–205, offers a chronological table of the major statements in this debate, which takes over seven pages of small print; like any diagram, it is a simplification, but it is useful as a reference. For a concise and inspired survey of the development of postmodernism as a concept and as a phenomenon, see Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity. Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” ix. Or “postmodernity,” or the “postmodern”: these three terms, like “modernism,” “modernity,” and “the modern” (and probably even to a greater degree), entertain a complex semantic interrelationship. As Harvey, The Condition, 99, succinctly formulates it, “modernism is a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to conditions of modernity”; on the other hand, “the modern” (from the German die Moderne) disrupts this opposition as it can refer both to the aesthetic experience and to the general social condition. It is beyond my scope

Notes to pages 13–14

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here to provide a definition of these two terminological clusters that clearly distinguishes each of the terms (the overview of the genealogy and the use of the terms “modern,” “modernity,” and “modernism” can be found in Bradbury and McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” and in the section “The Idea of Modernity” in Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 11–92). Of the “posts,” “postmodernism” will be used in this study in reference to products of culture, while the other two will be used in reference to the general aspects of the cultural condition. The succinct formulation of Jencks’s views and his contrastive diagram can be found in his “Postmodern vs. Late Modern.” Jameson, Postmodernism, 2: “It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated … it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism … initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism …, where formal criticism and analysis … are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of aesthetic institution.” That the first book-length Ukrainian study on postmodernism, Svitlana Shlipchenko’s Arkhitekturni pryntsypy postmodernizmu (Architectural principles of postmodernism), focuses precisely on architecture testifies to its retaining a place of privilege within the discourse on postmodernism to this day. Harvey, The Condition, 78. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” 20–1. I have to note, parenthetically, that much as one would wish to discern examples of postmodernist architecture, particularly “architecture of resistance,” in the former Soviet Union, the mere economic disarray severely restricted new major construction from the late 1980s through the 1990s, only to lead to a rather faceless construction boom in the 2000s. This is why my attention in subsequent chapters will be devoted to other arts, although the few such projects that were realized – for instance, the restoration of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Poklonnaia Gora monument in Moscow – indeed constitute classic instances of postmodernist proliferation of simulacra, as do the monstrous semiunderground shopping mall constructed in Moscow’s Manezh Square and the “reconstruction” of Kyiv’s Independence Square. Genuinely innovative examples of public postmodernist buildings within Second World spaces, such as the Nautilus shopping center in Moscow’s Lubianka Square, are few and far between. An altogether different paradigm is constituted by the construction within (former) Second World spaces of buildings designed by Western architects, visible in the reconstruction of the now united Berlin or in Frank Gehry’s

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51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Notes to pages 14–16

“Ginger and Fred” building in Prague: this is a manifestation of latter-day globalization in the economic sense rather than of indigenized postmodernist cultural forms. Still, the role that architecture has played in shaping the concept of postmodern culture necessitates bringing it within the theoretical horizon of this study. See, for example, Jameson, Postmodernism, 14. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. Lyotard’s proposition does not evoke Robert Musil’s high modernist concept of essayism, as in the famous chapter 62 of his The Man without Qualities. For an elaboration of the pairing of modernity and fragmentation, see Frisby, Fragments of Modernity. A productive resolution of Lyotard’s paradox is offered by Harvey, The Condition, 44, who sees postmodernism as taking up and pushing to an extreme the penchant for the fragmentary present in modernism since its inception. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” Ibid., 8: “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.” Ibid. 9: “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines … Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.” Ibid., 12–13. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiii–xxiv. Ibid., 66–7. Ibid., 78–81. See McHale, “Postmodernism,” 17. See Hutcheon, A Poetics, xiii, 20. Jameson, “Foreword,” xix–xx. Jameson’s later, more skeptical view of Lyotard’s model will be addressed below. Jameson, Postmodernism, 18. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 253. Ibid., 257, 273. However influential Baudrillard’s statements may be, it would be helpful to bear in mind the term’s origins in Plato and the discussion of the simulacrum’s peculiar position vis-à-vis the model-copy opposition in contemporary critical theory, most notably by Deleuze in his The Logic of Sense. In Platonic philosophy, simulacra “are like false pretenders, implying an essential perversion or deviation,” writes Deleuze; “[p]ure becoming, the unlimited, is the matter of simulacrum insofar as it eludes the action of the Idea and insofar as it contests both model and copy at once” (2, 256, emphasis in the original).

Notes to pages 16–20 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

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Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” 183. Ibid., 183, emphasis in the original. Ibid., 196. See Foucault, “What Is an Author?” and “The Discourse on Language.” Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” 198. In this respect, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in a bizarre 1993 essay where postmodernism functions as a handy bugaboo on which all of Russia’s current misfortunes can be blamed, repeats almost word for word Hilton Kramer’s pronouncements of 1982; see Solzhenitsyn, “Otvetnoe slovo”; and Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” 204–5 (which includes a summary of Kramer’s argument). Similarly, in the case of Ukraine there also has been a widely articulated discourse of blaming postmodernism for the nation’s cultural problems; for an insightful analysis of this discourse, see Shved, “Pobyttia postmodernoho nemovliaty.” Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” 210, 213, 220. Hutcheon, A Poetics, ix. McHale, “Postmodernism,” 23, 56. Hutcheon, A Poetics, 23. Ibid., 22. As I noted before, this model of architectural postmodernism is a normalized and idealized one. As noted by McHale, “Postmodernism,” 20, “it seems astonishing that anyone would assume the architectural field to be otherwise than agonistic, and of course no one would who did not need to postulate a serene, untroubled alternative to the agonistic discourse of her own field.” Hutcheon, A Poetics, ix. Ibid., 40, 52. McHale, “Postmodernism,” 26. Hutcheon, A Poetics, 5. Ibid., 7–8, 16. Ibid., 20, emphasis in the original. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 26. This understanding of parody, however, is insufficient for seeing it as a peculiarly postmodern feature, for by the same token we can then label Don Quixote or Eugene Onegin “postmodern” as well. Ibid., 110. See Deleuze’s remarks on the simulacrum, quoted above. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9. Jameson, Postmodernism, 418. McHale, “Postmodernism,” 23, 17. Jameson, Postmodernism, xi-xii, emphasis in the original. Ibid., ix. Ibid., 45–6.

276 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116

117 118

Notes to pages 20–4

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 48. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., xx–xxi. Ibid., 5. Nevertheless, focus on late capitalism should not be abandoned completely; it should remain, if not the determining factor, then a crucial part of postmodernism’s “sense-generating context,” as a representative of the Tartu school of structuralism would say. Jameson, Postmodernism, 297–8. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 46. Ibid., xvii. Ibid., 10, 9. Of these models, Jameson, ibid., 12, identifies the hermeneutic one of the inside and the outside, the dialectical one of essence and appearance, the Freudian one of the latent and the manifest, the existential ones of authenticity and inauthenticity and of alienation and disalienation, and the semiotic one of the signifier and the signified. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Hutcheon, A Poetics, 49, emphasis in the original. Ibid., 60–1. Jameson, Postmodernism, 22. Ibid., 22–3. Ibid., 26–7, 96. Stephanson, “Regarding Postmodernism,” 59. Jameson, Postmodernism, 8–10 on Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes; 28–30 on Bob Perelman’s poem “China”; 132–46 on the prose of Claude Simon; 148–9 on the prose of Georges Perec; and 79 and 89–90 on the video “AlienNATION.” McHale, “Postmodernism,” 28–9. Jameson, Postmodernism, 419 n. 1. Ibid., 321. McHale, “Postmodernism,” 30. McHale develops his critical model of cyberpunk in his Constructing Postmodernism, especially in chapters 10, “POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM,” and 11, “Towards a Poetics of Cyberpunk.” Bataille, L’Expérience interieure, quoted in Plotnitsky, Reconfigurations, 20. Plotnitsky, Reconfigurations, 4, emphasis added.

Notes to pages 24–27

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119 Ibid., 4–5. 120 Ibid., 257. 121 Dirlik and Zhang, “Introduction,” in Dirlik and Zhang, eds, Postmodernism and China, 3. 122 Xiaobing Tang, “The Function of New Theory,” 295–6. 123 Groys’s Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin has been translated into English as The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. 124 Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” 217. 125 An analogous idea is advanced by Margarita Tupitsyn in “Socialist Realism: The State As the Author,” the opening chapter of her Margins of Soviet Art, although she sees the state, rather than Stalin himself, functioning as the author. The difference between Tupitsyn’s and Groys’s models is minimal, for the figure of the totalitarian leader comes more or less to signify the state (and vice versa). 126 Groys, The Total Art, 48–9. 127 Ibid., 63. 128 Riese, “Postmodern Culture,” 162, pinpoints the postmodern features of the “high Stalinist” system, which “had become a postmodern symptom without being its critique” and which is characterized by the “double aspect of being a producer of frozen time, of posthistoire, of historical spatialization, of an unrestricted will to power, and of claiming historical truth, plenitude, and emancipation.” 129 Groys, The Total Art, 105. 130 The celebrated Moscow “bulldozer art show” of 15 September 1974 is usually singled out as the symbolic moment of transition. 131 Viktor Tupitsyn, “East-West Exchange,” 83–4, 104–5. Tupitsyn’s model of Russian postmodernism grounded in the visual arts is articulted in greater detail in his Kommunal’nyi (post)modernizm: Russkoe iskusstvo vtoroi poloviny XX veka (Communal apartment [post]modernism: Russian art of the second half of the twentieth century). 132 Margarita Tupitsyn, “Sots Art,” 150. Her essays on postmodernism and Russian art were later collected in her Kriticheskoe opticheskoe: Stat’i o sovremennom russkom iskusstve (The critical optical: Essays on contemporary Russian art). 133 First published in the January 1991 issue of the literary journal Znamia, Epstein’s “Posle budushchego” was almost immediately published in an English translation, “After the Future,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly. This text was later reprinted in Lahusen and Kuperman, eds, Late Soviet Culture, and then incorporated into the collection of Epstein’s essays on postmodernism and Soviet culture, After the Future: Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. 134 Epstein, “After the Future,” in Lahusen and Kuperman, eds, Late Soviet Culture, 257.

278 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

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Notes to pages 27–32

Ibid., 259. Ibid., 258. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 268. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 268. The table itself is on 276–7; it is reprinted in Epstein, After the Future, 86–7. Epstein, “After the Future,” in Lahusen and Kuperman, eds, Late Soviet Culture, 275. Ibid., 278. This image clearly invites a comparison with the Deleuzian model of the rhizome. Ibid., 284–5. Epstein, “Posle budushchego,” 230; Epstein, “After the Future,” in Lahusen and Kuperman, eds, Late Soviet Culture, 286–7, translation slightly modified. Epstein, “After the Future,” in Lahusen and Kuperman, eds, Late Soviet Culture, 287. Zˇizˇek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 40, emphasis in the original. In addition to “Posle budushchego” (After the future), Epstein’s essays on the topic were also collected in his Postmodern v Rossii: Literatura i teoriia (Postmodernity in Russia: Literature and theory), later reissued in a slightly expanded version as Postmodern v russkoi literature (Postmodernity in Russian literature) as well as in the collective tome Russian Postmodernism, coauthored with Aleksandr Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. Groys, “A Style and a Half,” 79. Potemkin villages are the fake villages (in essence, stage decorations) erected by Prince Potemkin along the way of Catherine II’s journey to southern Ukrainian lands newly conquered from Turkey. See “Potemkin village” in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village. Epstein, After the Future, 210. The entire essay is on pages 188–210 of this book; this English version precedes and differs slightly from the Russian version published in 1996. Berg, Literaturokratiia, 290–1, emphasis in the original. Berg’s approach to postmodernism is not without its own problems. I discuss Berg’s book in greater detail in Chernetsky, “Postmodernism?” See Epstein’s essay “Culture—Culturology—Transculture,” in After the Future, 280–306. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. Jameson, “Foreword,” in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xvi; quoted in Epstein, After the Future, 333.

Notes to pages 32–6 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164

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Jameson, Postmodernism, 17–18, quoted in Epstein, After the Future, 333. Epstein, After the Future, 334. Ibid., 338. Il’in, Postmodernizm ot istokov do kontsa stoletiia, 5–6. Man’kovskaia, Estetika postmodernizma, 195–6, 199. For a detailed critique of both Il’in’s and Man’kovskaia’s models, see Chernetsky, “Postmodernism?” Some of the most insightful and productive of these readings can be found in Lipovetskii, “PMS (postmodernizm segodnia).” Lipovetskii, “Mapping New Russian Poetry,” 147. See, for example, Avtonomova, “Vozvrashchaias’ k azam”; and Khalipov, “Postmodernizm v sisteme mirovoi kul’tury.” A notable, if not quite internally consistent, exception in this respect is Kuritsyn, “Postmodernizm.” Clark, “Changing Historical Paradigms,” 304, emphasis in the original. Lipovetskii repeatedly speaks of “the deep crisis of postmodernist aesthetics” (“Zakon krutizny,” 35), insisting that “the history of Russian literary postmodernism seems to be already reaching its end” (“Apofeoz chastits,” 220) and so forth. Lipovetskii, “Zakon krutizny,” 4. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, is the most quoted theoretical text in Lipovetskii, “Zakon krutizny.” Lipovetskii, “Patogenez i lechenie glukhonemoty,” 223. Lipovetskii, “Zakon krutizny,” 4. Lipovetskii, “Apofeoz chastits,” 224. Lipovetskii, “Soznan’e smerti ili smert’ soznan’ia” (the Russian-language version of “Mapping New Russian Poetry”), in Foster and Mesiats, eds, The New Freedoms, 133. This volume contains both the Russian and English versions. Lipovetskii makes this assertion most notably in “Patogenez i lechenie glukhonemoty,” 215. Lipovetskii, “Mapping New Russian Poetry,” 147. See Lipovetskii, “Zakon krutizny,” 35–6. In this, he is not alone; see, for example, Stepanian, “Realizm kak zakliuchitel’naia stadiia postmodernizma” (Realism as the final stage of postmodernism). In Viktor Khalipov’s own pendulum scheme, postmodernism appears as a new realism, and he also forecasts an increase of the realist momentum within it; see Khalipov, “Postmodernizm v sisteme mirovoi kul’tury,” 239–40. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 2. Lipovetskii’s later book Russkii postmodernizm (1997), translated into English as Russian Postmodernist Fiction (1999), while offering a wealth of information, is methodologically flawed, which is evident already in the subtitle of its Russian-

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Notes to pages 36–40

language version: “Ocherki istoricheskoi poetiki” (Sketches of a historical poetics). Indeed, the book constitutes a positivist normative history of Russian postmodernist fiction (narrowly understood à la Hutcheon). However, his 2002 essay “PMS” signals a welcome departure from this model, particularly in its remarks on the persistence of logocentrism and on the attacks on “political correctness” in contemporary Russia. In this respect, the comment made by Caryl Emerson in her study The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, 18, which, among other things, constitutes a meta-discursive account of twentieth-century Russian literary and cultural theory, is telling: “most Russian academics of my acquaintance,” writes Emerson, “continue to find remarkable the existence of, say, a Fredric Jameson or Terry Eagleton, productive scholars who have demonstrated considerable skills in building careers within their respective bourgeois establishments, who nevertheless in good conscience appear to take Marx and Engels seriously,” something that results in a general “credibility gap” that has, in Emerson’s opinion, characterized post-Soviet encounters between Russian and Western academics working in the humanities. Il’in, Postmodernizm, 107–8, 125. For an insightful, if pessimistic, overview of the state of postcolonial theorizing in Ukraine, see Shved, “Paradoksy postkoloniial’noho vymiru.” “Postkolonial’na krytyka i teoriia,” in Zubryts’ka, ed., Slovo, znak, dyskurs, 531–66; introductory essay by Marko Pavlyshyn, translation and comments by Mariia Zubryts’ka and Dariia Horodys’ka. Ibid., 567–79. See Ieshkiliev, “Povernennia demiurhiv,” in Andrukhovych and Ieshkiliev, eds, Povernennia demiurhiv, 5–13. See Andrukhovych, “Povernennia literatury?,” in Andrukhovych and Ieshkiliev, eds, Povernennia demiurhiv, 14–21. Andrukhovych, “Chas i mistse, abo moia ostannia terytoriia,” in Dezorientatsiia na mistevosti, 115–17. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 120–1. Note the parallels with Foster’s focus on ruins in “Postmodernism in Parallax.” Ibid., 121–2. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 278. For an overview of the development of the field, see Young, Postcolonialism. The mentions of the Russian and Soviet Empires in both Said’s Orientalism and his Culture and Imperialism are scarce and far between, usually as cursory references to “other empires” that are “no less imperialist” than the primarily discussed British and French. While it is understandable that these studies could

Notes to pages 40–3

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not possibly have been all-encompassing, the addition of the Russian Empire and of Eastern and Southeastern Europe to Said’s overall scheme challenges the otherwise dangerously looming binarization in a profound way. For a pioneering theorization of “orientalism in parallax,” see Bakic´-Hayden and Hayden, “Orientalist Variations.” Quayson, Postcolonialism, 1–2, emphasis added. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 146–7, emphasis in the original. There has been a virtual miniboom of historical scholarship on Russia as empire in recent years, both abroad and in Russia itself. For a representative sampling in English, see Brower and Lazzerini, eds, Russia’s Orient; Burbank and Ransel, eds, Imperial Russia; and Suny and Martin, eds, A State of Nations. See also the recently launched international and multilingual journal Ab Imperio, which in addition to history deals with contemporary issues in the post-Soviet space from a political-science perspective. This discussion has also expanded into literarycultural studies, but once again with a historical inflection; see Greenleaf and Moeller-Sally, eds, Russian Subjects; and Ram, The Imperial Sublime. See Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture; Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors and “The ussr as a Communal Apartment”; and Layton, Russian Literature and Empire and “Eros and Empire in Russian Literature about Georgia.” See Thompson, Imperial Knowledge. For an insightful and constructive critique of Thompson’s study, see Stephen Lovell’s review of her book in The Slavonic and East European Review. The earliest significant statement marking an encounter with postcolonial theory in Russia was the call for papers circulated in December 1999 for a conference in Moscow titled “Law, Knowledge and Power in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Anthropology,” to be held at the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences; yet, as is clear from the conference title, postcoloniality is seen here as something that does not pertain to Russia itself. A major breakthrough in this situation was marked by the first summer school in postcolonial theory on postSoviet territory, which took place in 2001 in Minsk. For a description and analysis of this ground-breaking event, see von Hagen, “Teaching and Confronting.” Lovell, review of Imperial Knowledge, 516. Groys, “Imena goroda,” 358. An instance of a similar project undertaken in the West can be found in an essay by Dragan Kujundzˇic´, “‘After’: Russian Post-Colonial Identity.” Etkind, “Fuko i tezis,” 64–5. Etkind’s source for the dominant Russian views of colonization are studies by two prominent early-twentieth-century Russian

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historians: Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii s drevneishikh vremen i do XX veka (An overview of the history of Russian colonization from the ancient times to the twentieth century) by M.K. Liubavskii (1860–1936); and Ocherki istorii kolonial’noi politiki zapadnoevropeiskikh gosudarstv: Konets XV–nachalo XIX v. (Sketches of the history of the colonial policy of the West European states: Late fifteenth through early nineteenth centuries) by E.V. Tarle (1874–1955). It is unclear what makes Etkind believe that Russia’s conquests of Poland, Finland, and Central Asia could be considered more “moral” than the shortlived attempts to colonize Malta, Hawaii, or Ethiopia turned down by the emperors. Etkind, “Fuko i tezis,” 63. This statement might give us an insight into the tortured take on the ongoing conflict in Chechnya by Russian cultural practitioners (and the complete avoidance of this topic by many of them). In literature, it has given rise mostly to abstract parables, such as the stories by Vladimir Makanin (“Kavkazskii plennyi” [Prisoner of the Caucasus], which actually predates the war) and Viktor Pelevin (“Papakhi na bashniakh” [Fur caps on towers]); in film, it has engendered a more prolific, but rather controversial, treatment. Thus Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains updates and “grows up” a Tolstoy children’s story (also a parable about humanity), while Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother and War use the theme for politically reactionary pseudo-Tarantinoesque thrillers. The latest major installment in the treatment of this topic, Andrei Konchalovsky’s attempt at humanization of the conflict in House of Fools, is a blatant imitation of Kusturica-style magic realism applied to the Russian context with rather unimpressive results. This context included Samuel Bentham’s employment in the service of Potemkin in conjunction with the European colonists brought to settle in southern and eastern Ukraine and in the so-called military settlements instituted by Arakcheev, also primarily on Ukrainian territory – the “capital” of military settlements was Ielyzavethrad (Elizavetgrad), present-day Kirovohrad. In Chernetsky, “Ukraïntsi, rosiiany ta Mazokhiv spadok” (Ukrainians, Russians, and the legacy of Sacher-Masoch), I discuss a similar instance of colonialist erasure of Ukraine and phantasmatic projection of Russian identity onto its territory (even as far as the Carpathians) in Etkind’s study of Leopold von SacherMasoch’s east Slavic ties, which comprises chapter 1, “Led, mekha, forel’: Ot Mazokha k Kuzminu, ili kontekstualizatsiia zhelaniia” (Ice, fur, trout: From Masoch to Kuzmin, or The contextualization of desire), of Etkind, Sodom i Psikheia: Ocherki itellektual’noi istorii Serebrianogo veka (Sodom and Psyche: Sketches of the intellectual history of the Silver Age), 11–58. See Tlostanova, Postsovetskaia literatura, 28–9. Parry, “Problems,” 37–8. See also Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura.”

Notes to pages 45–9 212 213 214 215

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Tlostanova, Postsovetskaia literatura, 3. Ibid., 270–81 and 173–82 respectively. Ibid., 175: “romany, riadiashchiesia pod antikolonial’nye.” This is another false claim by Tlostanova; highlighting the continuity between the Russian and Soviet Empires does not negate important differences between them. Ibid., 176. See Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” and responses to this essay by George Grabowicz (“Ukrainian Studies”), Andreas Kappeler (“Ukrainian History”), Iaroslav Isaievych (“Ukrainian Studies”), Serhii Plokhy (“The History of a ‘Non-Historical’ Nation”), and Yuri Slezkine (“Can We Have Our Nation State?”). Grabowicz, “Ukrainian Studies,” 675. See, for example, Watson Kirkconnell’s “Foreword” in the first English-language history of Ukrainian literature, Clarence Manning’s 1944 Ukrainian Literature: Studies of the Leading Authors, 4. Another comparison that is sometimes advanced is to Korea, comparing Ukraine’s situation vis-à-vis Poland and Russia to that of Korea vis-à-vis China and Japan (an earlier cultural and political domination by one neighbouring state versus a brutal and exploitative modern colonization by the other one). Naydan, “Ukrainian Prose,” 45; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 191. For an extensive account of the Shevchenko-Belinsky controversy, see Swoboda, “Shevchenko and Belinsky.” A Russian ethnic slur for Ukrainians. A Russian ethnic slur for Central Asians. Grabowicz, “Ukrainian Studies,” 678. Ibid., 678–9. As George Luckyj has noted, his research prior to the opening of ex-Soviet archives brought him to an estimate of 254 Ukrainian writers killed in the purges; however, a more recent study by a Russian researcher, Eduard Bel’tov, put the total at about 500, half the total of Soviet writers who perished at the time; see Luckyj, Ukrainian Literature, 55, 116 n. 3. For accounts of the 1970s crackdown, see, for example, Korohods’kyi and Shcherbatiuk, eds, Serhii Paradzhanov; and Mudrak, “Lost in the Widening Cracks.” This condition is vividly described by a leading contemporary Ukrainian writer, Oksana Zabuzhko, in her essays “Ukrainian Literature as a Dramatis Persona in History” and “Reinventing the Poet in Modern Ukrainian Culture.” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, quoted in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 43. Pavlyshyn, “Ukraïns’ka kul’tura z pohliadu postmodernizmu” (1992) and “PostColonial Features in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture” (1992), revised as “Kozaky v Iamaitsi: Postkoloniial’ni rysy v suchasnii ukraïns’kii kul’turi” (1994).

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These and other essays by Pavlyshyn are collected in his Kanon ta ikonostas, 213–22 and 222–36 respectively. There have been some discussions of both concepts’ applicability to contemporary Ukrainian literature and visual arts in Ukrainian periodicals, but they have been conducted largely in a journalistic or ad hominem vein – as Marko Pavlyshyn, “Literary Politics,” 149, has noted, “the rhetorical level of the exchanges [in these discussions] is sometimes such that it would justify the term ‘brawl’” – and these discussions proceeded from an uncritical assumption of a stable and well-defined meaning of the two concepts. The call for a revitalization of Ukrainian discourse on postmodernism and postcolonialism sounded by Pavlo Shved in his 2005 essays, “Paradoksy” and “Pobyttia,” is yet to meet with an effective response. Anonymous editorial, Zoil 2 (1997): 122–3. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 79. Pavlyshyn, “Ukraïns’ka kul’tura,” in Kanon ta ikonostas, 221. Nicholson and Seidman, eds, Social Postmodernism, i. Pavlyshyn, “Kozaky v Iamaitsi,” in Kanon ta ikonostas, 227. Ibid. Pavlyshyn, “Ukrainian Literature,” 111. Quayson, Postcolonialism, 9. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 4, 7–8, emphasis in the original. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 12. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 81. See the discussion of this distinction in Lazarus, “National Consciousness,” 198–200. Ibid., 200–5. Pavlyshyn, “Kozaky v Iamaitsi,” 226, 229–32. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 69, emphasis in the original. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 73. See Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse.” See in particular Radov’s novels Zmeesos (Serpent-sucker) and Iakutiia (Yakutia). See in particular Klekh, “Pominki po Kallimakhu.” See Andrukhovych, “Ave, ‘Kraisler’!,” in Dezoriientatsiia na mistsevosti, 81–97; and Hrycak, “The Coming of ‘Chrysler Imperial.’”

chapter two 1 Groys, The Total Art, 11.

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2 Margarita Tupitsyn, “Sots Art,” 150. 3 Both trends originated in the work of artists who at the time were based in Moscow (although not necessarily born there: for instance, Ilya Kabakov, the leading conceptualist artist, is a native of Dnipropetrovs’k), and later on spread to Leningrad and, in the case of conceptualist visual art, also to Odessa. 4 These two trends, sots-art and conceptualism, arose virtually simultaneously in the Russian visual arts: both the first sots-art works of Komar and Melamid and of Erik Bulatov and the first conceptualist albums of Ilya Kabakov date back to circa 1971–72; for an introduction to the unofficial Russian art of the late Soviet era, especially sots-art and conceptualism, see Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art. However, confusions and conflation of the two terms have been frequent, largely due to the fact that both emerged as “buzzwords” standing for nonconformist art from the Soviet Union. For example, the (otherwise quite useful) volume Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptualist Art in the Era of Late Communism, edited by David A. Ross, actually discussed both conceptualism and sots-art without making a clear distinction between the two. A similar conflation can be observed in Lipovetskii, Russkii postmodernizm, especially 252–4. 5 Rubinshtein, “Chto tut mozhno skazat’ …,” 233. A somewhat different and more elaborate vision is offered by the fellow conceptualist poet Dmitry Prigov, “Chto nado znat’,” 417: The term “conceptualism” came to us from the West, and from the sphere of the visual arts … Having been born as a reaction to pop art and its fetishization of the object and of the mass media, conceptualism declared the principal content and pathos of its activity to be the drama of the relationship between an object and the descriptive language, the coming together of different languages behind the back of objects, the substitution and absorption by language of the object and of the entire sum of problems and effects that appear within the limits of this drama. 6 Rubinshtein, Reguliarnoe pis’mo, 104–13. 7 Rubinshtein, “S chetverga na piatnitsu” (From Thursday to Friday, 1985), in ibid., 38–45. 8 Rubinshtein, “Mama myla ramu” (Mommy washed the window frame, 1987), in ibid., 67–74. The title of this text alludes to one of the first phrases Russian children learn to read in elementary school; however, Rubinstein defamiliarizes and “detextualizes” it: the childhood memories described here have nothing to do with learning how to read. 9 Rubinshtein, “Ia zdes’” (I am here, 1994) and “Eto ia” (It’s me, 1995), in ibid., 121–9, 140–50. For a selection of Rubinshtein’s texts in English, see Johnson

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and Ashby, eds, Third Wave, 137–50; Erofeev, ed., The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing, 300–8; and High et al., eds, Crossing Centuries, 51–7. For more on Kabakov, see Wallach, Ilya Kabakov; and Boym, “On Diasporic Intimacy.” For an insightful discussion of Prigov’s poetry and its theoretical underpinnings, see Nicholas, “Dmitrij Prigov,” and Prigov’s own theoretical manifesto “Chto nado znat’.” Most of Prigov’s texts mentioned here can be found in his collections Napisannoe s 1975 po 1989 and Napisannoe s 1990 po 1994. For a selection of Prigov’s writings in English translation, see the bilingual collections Texts of Our Life/Teksty nashei zhizni and Fifty Drops of Blood, the portfolio “The Image of Reagan in Soviet Literature,” and the selections in Johnson and Ashby, eds, Third Wave, 101–15, and High et al., eds, Crossing Centuries, 37–47. While Sorokin’s texts, as I argue below, largely operate within this mode of semiotic investigation/subversion, due to his personal association with the writers and visual artists who are often referred to by the umbrella term “Moscow Conceptualists,” he is frequently identified as a conceptualist as well. However, in the interview accompanying the 1998 edition of his collected writings, Sorokin denied ever considering himself a conceptualist; see “‘V kul’ture dlia menia net tabu …’: Vladimir Sorokin otvechaet na voprosy Viktora Shapovalova,” in Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 12. A comprehensive edition of Irten’ev’s selected poems, Riad dopushchenii, was published in 2000 by Nezavisimaia gazeta. For a selection of his poems in English translation, see Evtushenko, Todd, and Hayward, eds, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, 998–1001, and High et al., eds, Crossing Centuries, 188–92. Irten’ev, Riad dopushchenii, 151–2. This absurdity thus also involves in the poem’s vortex of parodic transgression Pushkin’s classic “The Monument,” where the poet, following Horace, prophecies that his fame will be spread through every language spoken in the Russian Empire, even the “barbaric” ones of the colonized peoples. “Pro Petra,” for instance, is written in iambic tetrameter, with an a/b/b/a rhyming scheme. Irten’ev, Riad dopushchenii, 194. Ibid., 25–6. See Zabolotskii, Stolbtsy i poemy, 15–17, 22–3, 25–7. See, for example, “Peremena familii” (Change of the surname) and “Tarakan” (Cockroach), in Oleinikov, Puchina strastei, 151–3, 156–9. This is the principle stressed in the oberiu manifesto; see Zabolotskii, “Iz deklaratsii oberiutov,” in Ogon’, mertsaiushchii v sosude, 184: “In our work we widen and deepen the meaning of objects as words, and not at all destroy it.

Notes to pages 64–73

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A concrete object, cleared from the rubbish both literary and mundane, becomes a property of art. In poetry the collision of meanings expresses this object with the precision of mechanics.” For more on oberiu poetics, see Goldstein, Nikolai Zabolotsky; and Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde. Zabolotskii, Ogon’, mertsaiushchii v sosude, 185. Reprinted in Irten’ev, Riad dopushchenii, 234. See Chernyi, “Lamentatsii” (Lamentations), “Probuzhdenie vesny” (The awakening of spring), “Vse v shtanakh, skroennykh odinakovo …” (Everyone is in pants tailored the same way …), “Obstanovochka” (A pretty little situation), and so forth, in Stikhotvoreniia, 56–8, 59–60, 75–6, 103. The same year, Druk also published a volume of poetry for children, Narisovannoe iabloko (A drawn apple); another collection, Vtoroe iabloko (Second apple), came out in 1999. For a selection in English, see Johnson and Ashby, eds, Third Wave, 37–51; Evtushenko, Todd, and Hayward, eds, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, 1050–1; and High et al., eds, Crossing Centuries, 193–201. Druk, Kommutator, 13, 15. Zabolotskii, Stolbtsy i poemy, 5, singled out Chagall, along with Filonov, as the visual artist who particularly influenced his work. Druk, Kommutator, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96. Ibid., 76, 78. Ibid., 83, 85. See Kharms’s short prose texts, particularly the cycle “Sluchai” (Incidents), in Polet v nebesa, 353–97. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 89, 91. For more on the history and function of the Pushkin myth, see Debreczeny, “‘Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo’”; Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin; and Slater, “The Patriots’ Pushkin.” Druk, Kommutator, 87, 89. Ibid., 101–11. See Jameson, “Reading without Interpretation.” Although this rhythmical pattern has not been used in the Russian tradition as extensively as, say, iambic tetrameter, it assists in uncovering the poem’s deliberate drawing on the Russian cultural canon – this is the metrical pattern, for example, of Lermontov’s “Nochevala tuchka zolotaia …” (A golden cloud spent the night …), a classic poem that many a Russian knows by heart. While all of the left column of Druk’s “Teletsentr” (tv station) is written in trochaic pentameter, the rhythmical structure of the right column, abounding in reproduced scraps of actual tv speech, is more variegated. There is no connection, as far as I understand, between Levin’s use of the term “biomechanics” and its prior use in Vsevolod Meyerkhold’s theoretical writings.

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Notes to pages 73–5

For a much more comprehensive collection of Levin’s writings, see his personal homepage: http://www.levin.rinet.ru. For a selection in English, see High et al., eds, Crossing Centuries, 234–6. See Guro, Nebesnye verbliuzhata, Bednyi rytsar’. See Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti. Levin, Biomekhanika, 184, emphasis in the original. An extra degree of subversive irony here and in other Levin texts is provided by a metric organization that invokes both Russian folklore and the populist nineteenth-century poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov. Ibid., 79–80. “Suchil’shchitsa” is derived from the verb “suchit’” (to twist or spin, as in spinning yarn), with a pun on the Russian for “bitch” (suka); “volochil’shchik” is derived from “volochit’ (provoloku),” meaning “to make wire,” with a pun on “volochit’sia (za kem-to)” meaning “to be after someone (with sexual intensions).” “Red Sawyers Street” (“ulitsa Krasnykh Pilil’shchikov”) plays on the verb “to saw” (pilit’), which is a euphemism for “to copulate.” Other examples of poems of this kind in Levin, Biomekhanika, include “Geroi tuda” (The hero of there), 84, a travesty of “Geroi truda” (Hero of labour); “Razgovor s narodnym akademikom” (A conversation with a people’s academician), 77–8); the cycle “Ostrye basni” (Sharp fables), 158–62, a subversion of the genre of “official satire”; and so forth. One of Sorokin’s novels, Serdtsa chetyrekh (Four stout hearts), while still unpublished at the time, was shortlisted for the first Russian Booker Prize in 1992. Viacheslav Kuritsyn, one of the leading critics of contemporary Russian literature, claims that “perhaps [Sorokin] is the last man that can be called a Great Russian Writer”; see Kuritsyn’s website, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura s Viacheslavom Kuritsynym, http://www.guelman.ru/slava/writers/sorokin.htm. In his interviews, Sorokin often asserts that he writes for himself only and that he does not actively pursue publishing his work. Even if one agrees with his vision of writing as a form of self-therapy, Sorokin’s claims of total absence of interest in publication strike one as rather tongue-in-cheek, particularly considering his remarkable publishing success since 1998. Sorokin’s novel Ochered’ (The line) was published abroad in Paris in 1985 (it was translated into English in 1988 by Sally Laird as The Queue). Then, a slim collection of short stories entitled simply Sbornik rasskazov (A collection of stories) appeared in 1992. A book of prose of undefinable genre, Norma, was published in 1994; another text, “Mesiats v Dakhau” (A month in Dachau) was published the same year virtually simultaneously in Russian and in English; then two novels, Roman and Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s thirtieth love), appeared in 1994 and 1995, respectively, followed by the play Dostoevsky-Trip in 1997. Finally,

Notes to pages 75–8

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two mammoth tomes of Sorokin’s collected writings, Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh, were published in 1998 by Ad Marginem; they include many texts written as far back as the late 1970s but published in Russia for the first time. This edition began a longstanding association between Ad Marginem and Sorokin: the press brought out his three later books – the novels Goluboe salo (Blue lard, 1999) and Led (Ice, 2002) and a collection of short stories, Pir (Feast, 2001) – as well as separate reissues of his earlier works and a new, three-volume edition of his collected writings in 2003. Sorokin’s two latest books – the novel Put’ Bro (2004), a “prequel” to Led; and a collection of heterogeneous texts titled 4 (2005) – were brought out by a different publisher, Zakharov. The latter book includes the libretto for the opera Deti Rozentalia (Rosenthal’s children), staged at the Bolshoi Theater in 2005 to considerable controversy. Sorokin, “Tekst kak narkotik” (Text as a narcotic), in Sbornik rasskazov, 126. Vladiv-Glover, “Heterogeneity,” 275. A similar point of view is expressed by Kuritsyn on his website, Sovremennaia: “Sorokin’s text is literariness as such, the ‘meat’ of writing that is quite indifferent to its own semantics, the infinitive of discursivity.” Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 4–5. Ibid., 82. Sorokin, “Tekst kak narkotik,” in Sbornik rasskazov, 121. Ryklin, “Medium i avtor” (The medium and the author), 737. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 82. Ibid., 88. Ryklin, “Medium i avtor,” 737. Sorokin’s Pervyi subbotnik (The first subbotnik) was partially published as Sbornik rasskazov (1992) and in its entirety in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 407–594 (1998). Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, 65. Sorokin’s rather ambivalent use of homosexuality as part and parcel of this series, which ultimately reinforces, rather than challenges, the homophobic prejudices still widespread in Russia, is discussed in greater detail in chapter 5 of this study. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 309. Groys, The Total Art, 100. For a detailed exploration of the emergence of this paradigm of differentiation and its key signifiers (“dirt,” “slum,” “sewer,” “rats,” “prostitute”), see the chapter “The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch,” in Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 125–48; Freud’s classic texts on the subject are “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908) and “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (the ‘Rat Man’)” (1909). Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 560–1.

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Ibid., 419–22. Ibid., 411–18. Ibid., 538–44. As, for instance, in the story “Delovoe predlozhenie” (A businesslike proposal), where the account of a meeting of the editorial board of a student newspaper is followed by the appearance of a box, the contents of which are described as follows: “A part of a man’s face, crudely chopped off, was squeezed into the box. The edges of the parched skin were covered by clotted blood, the only cheek, unshaved, fell in between the shiny cheekbone that had turned blue and the dislocated jaw; the teeth, yellow from smoking, were visible from underneath the cut-up lips; two of them were golden; the whitish eye, squeezed out of its socket that had turned black, was lying in the corner of the box” (ibid., 492). Sorokin, “Tekst kak narkotik,” in Sbornik rasskazov, 120. Epstein, “After the Future,” in Lahusen and Kuperman, eds, Late Soviet Culture, 265. For more on heterotopic writing, see chapter 3 of this book. This theme is continued in Sorokin’s play “Hochzeitreise,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2, 599–629, and in his novel Goluboe salo. Sorokin, “Mesiats v Dakhau,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 806. Sorokin himself describes Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny as a travesty of the classic Russian narrative of the protagonist’s salvation, offering, as it were, the reversal of the plot of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, in which the protagonist is saved from her own individuality; see Sorokin, “Tekst kak narkotik,” in Sbornik rasskazov, 124–5. Groys, The Total Art, 100, translation slightly modified. For example, in Sorokin’s Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 249: Chto zh, Shvartsman protsotag zhdloshg nas v eto uvlekatel’noe roi noarpvepk, kuda i noaglyoego rpen el oitprt aproso. V etom, tovarishchi, na moi vzgliad i nopnrenr vkaud oli. Kazalos’ by—goproa, shoraipimm vav! No Goproaer Logapro ne mozhet prytsu zyku bobvl’e. I po-moemu, eto rnvru khyva, nesomnenno. Doloarenr rmiapi zhivut eshche mogoy prostov shcharonkr ek, ek i eshche raz ek. Eto zhe ochevidno, tovarishchi, my zhe ne mozhem aogovnrk dochlovtrt zhyava, chto zhe ne nashei zhdialovnak geogo ytsu. Esli est’ shnogoagon, nado zlchovrp i vse! My ob etom ovorknrps Aleksandr Palych. Well, Shvartsman protsotag zhdloshg us into this fascinating roi noarpvepk, where also noaglyoego rpen el oitprt aproso. In this, comrades, I see nopnrenr vkaud oli. It may seem that goproa, shoraipimm vav! But Goproaer Logapro cannot prytsu zyku bobvl’e. And in my opinion, this is undoubtedly

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rnvru khyva. Doloarenr rmiapi also live mogoy prostov shcharonkr ek, ek, and ek again. It’s obvious, comrades, that we cannot aogovnrk dochlovtrt zhyava, that it’s not for our zhdialovnak geogo ytsu. If there’s shnogoagon, then one must zlchorvp, and that’s it! We ovorknrps about this Aleksandr Palych. 78 For example, in Sorokin’s play “Doverie” (Trust), in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2, 553, a simulation of the genre of industrial drama. The following excerpt can serve as an example of this work’s textual strategy: tamara sergeevna. A ty chuvstvuesh’ eto doverie? pavlenko. Chuvstvuiu. Chuvstvuiu, kak rodovye prut’ia, kak sernuiu zhest’. Mne eto doverie – kak rebristost’. Ia, mozhet, i svishchu v ugol tol’ko potomu, chto doveriaiut. Znaesh’, Tomka, kogda tebe doveriaiut po-nastoiashchemu – eto … eto kak sliunnoe bol’shinstvo. Kogda za spinoi sirenevye nasechki – togda i linii drug na druzhke. Vot radi etogo ia i rabotaiu. tamara sergeevna. And do you feel this trust? pavlenko. I do. I feel it like birth rods, I feel it like sulphurous tin. For me this trust is like being ribbed. I may be whistling into a corner only because they trust me. You know, Tamara, when someone truly trusts you, it’s … it’s like a salivant majority. When purple notches are behind your back, then the lines are on each other. This is what I work for. 79 Genis, “Postmodernism and Sots-Realism,” 209. 80 Vladiv-Glover, “Heterogeneity,” 286, traces the roots of the novel’s surrogate family to the Dostoevskian sluchainoe semeistvo (accidental family), while Lipovetskii, Russkii postmodernizm, 266–7, sees in the novel’s surrogate family a reincarnation of socialist realist bol’shaia sem’ia (the great family); for more on the Stalinist myth of bol’shaia sem’ia, see Clark, The Soviet Novel, 114–35. 81 For a discussion of adventure plots in early socialist-realist texts – such as, for instance, Veniamin Kaverin’s Dva kapitana (The two captains) – see Clark, The Soviet Novel, 100–6; for a concise and informative discussion of Soviet detective fiction as a later incarnation of the genre, see Nepomnyashchy, “Markets, Mirrors and Mayhem,” especially 163–5. The novel’s title, Serdtsa chetyrekh (Four stout hearts), alludes to the eponymous 1941 Soviet film and beyond that to Jack London’s 1916 novel Hearts of Three (Serdtsa trekh in the Russian translation), a popular model for emulation, in terms of narrative organization, in Soviet socialist-realist adventure writing. 82 Some critics even went so far as to deny any clear purpose to this quest. For instance, Petr Vail’, “Pokhval’noe slovo shtampu,” compares Serdtsa chetyrekh to

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Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, arguing that both are “put together out of borrowings and clichés, constructed according to a strict internal logic, but outwardly following the examples of dramatic anti-structure. In other words, it is a rather chaotic collection of recycled episodes.” Vladiv-Glover, “Heterogeneity,” 277, 285. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 288. In an interview in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 17, Sorokin argues that with Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny, he shifted from “pure sots-art” to investigating the “problem of corporeality in Russian literature” (“V literature dlia menia net tabu”). Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 2–3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 8. Vladiv-Glover, “Heterogeneity,” 287, 298 n. 57. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8. Thus Sorokin’s Serdtsa chetyrekh can be viewed as an instance of the “literature of exhaustion” as defined by Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Consider Klossowski’s description of Sade’s literary project in Sade My Neighbor, 68: “Sade had at his disposal no other terminology and dialectics than those of the philosophy of the Enlightenment … But Sade, with his habitual violence, will make this language convey all it is capable of conveying; he will push the mechanist explanation of man to the point of delirium, and he will show its practical application in the hands of precisely those whom common sense disowns.”

chapter three 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. Foucault, The Order of Things, xv–xx. Ibid., xviii. Greimas, Narrative Semiotics, 139–40. See also Greimas, On Meaning, 78; and Greimas and Courtés, Semiotics and Language, 142. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 62. Ibid., 68–9. As Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 9, remarks in his critical survey of the theories of the postmodern, heterotopia, designating a “structure of radical incommensurability,” becomes “a name for the whole centerless universe of the postmodern.” More recently, Cesare Casarino has developed in his critical writing a comprehensive and thought-provoking critical model of heterotopia. However, he links heterotopia not with postmodernity, but with an earlier, modernist

Notes to pages 89–93

9 10 11

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paradigm, selecting as his model the sea novels of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, as well as the theoretical texts of Marx; see Casarino, Modernity at Sea and “Gomorrahs of the Deep.” McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 43. Ibid., 45. McHale, ibid., considers such a possibility once, discussing Donald Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising,” where he notes that the condition of “discursive orders mingle promiscuously without gelling into any sort of overarching ‘super-order’” as a heterotopia (163); he thus arrives at a dichotomy between ontological and discursive heterotopias (164), the latter immediately subsumed under the Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia and polyphony. There is, perhaps, just one step from a heterotopia to a heteroglossia, but I do not believe that the two terms are coextensive. Heise, Chronoschisms, 55. Heise, ibid., 1, herself agrees that the transformation of textuality in postmodern writing has primarily proceeded along the spatial axis, visible in “the postmodernist predilection for spatial metaphors”; it goes without saying, however, that such “fundamental reconceptualization of space could [not] occur without corresponding changes in the notion of time.” See Hutcheon, A Poetics. See the discussion of a postmodernism of resistance in the opening chapter. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 26–7. Ibid., 18–19; Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 4–5. Hutcheon, A Poetics, 73. Goscilo, “Introduction: A Nation in Search of Its Authors,” in Goscilo and Lindsey, eds, Glasnost, xxxv. Lindsey, biographical note on Kuraev, in ibid., 460. Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 36–7. Brown, The Last Years, 125. The intertextual echoes in Kapitan Dikshtein and “Nochnoi dozor” are discussed in detail in Dowsett, “Rewriting History,” 117–20; in addition to Gogol’, Dostoevsky, and Bely, Dowsett also draws parallels with Yuri Tynianov’s “Podporuchik Kizhe” and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s skaz narratives. Consider, for instance, the following passage – from Kuraev, “Kapitan Dikshtein,” in Malen’kaia, 19–20; “Captain Dikshtein,” in Night Patrol, 23 – which displays such classic Gogolian features as the “intrusive narrator” device and the mocking use of high verbiage, complete with scholastic terminology and occasional archaic forms (such as koemu) to describe an emphatically mundane event: It’s easy to imagine how moralists of various orientations will pounce on Igor’ Ivanovich to expose the moral vulnerability of his attempts to locate precisely

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the yellow net bag. Let him look, let him look! Only blind pride could prevent one from seeing in his searching a search for and an affirmation of order, this highest good, the highest master of the world to which (koemu) formerly even gods were subordinated. And since I know that the net bag is lying in the pocket of the kerosene jacket (he himself put it there) I’m not going to interrupt his search, for the philosophical and ontological meaning of his action is much higher than its everyday meaning. 25 For an in-depth study of spatial concerns in Gogol’’s prose, see part 1 of Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 3–93. 26 The incorporation of historical material signals another of Kuraev’s indebtednesses to the Russian literary tradition, this time first and foremost to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. 27 Kuraev, “Kapitan Dikshtein,” in Malen’kaia, 46; “Captain Dikshtein,” in Night Patrol, 48. 28 Ibid., 38; 40, translation substantially modified: “Prekrasnaia dekoratsiia bessmyslennogo spektaklia, sygrannogo nevedomo dlia kogo i nevedomo zachem.” 29 Ibid., 44; 46. 30 We are never told the “real” name of Dikshtein the second; in the account of the sailors’ uprising throughout the text, he is referred to as “the one with a forelock” (chubatyi); see ibid. 31 However, an extensive English-language study of the uprising has been available since 1970; see Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921. 32 Kuraev, “Kapitan Dikshtein,” in Malen’kaia, 11; “Captain Dikshtein,” in Night Patrol, 14, translation modified. 33 See ibid., 132; 130. 34 Brown, The Last Years, 125–6. 35 Kuraev, “Nochnoi dozor,” in Malen’kaia, 180–3; “Night patrol,” in Night Patrol, 176–9. 36 Kuraev, “Kuranty b’iut,” 29: “The observations that I have been conducting in this experimental city [i.e., St Petersburg/Leningrad] over the course of thirtyone years provide serious grounds for hypothesizing that TIME, which, until now, was considered an abstract notion, possesses a material force and is capable of meaningful actions. So far there have not been too many of those, but quantity, sorry, is only a question of time.” 37 John 18:10: “Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus.” 38 Kuraev, “Druzhby nezhnoe volnen’e: Zapiski provintsiala,” in Zhrebii No. 241, 228.

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39 Kuraev, “Malen’kaia semeinaia taina,” in Malen’kaia, 299. 40 Ibid., 334. 41 Kuraev, “Kapitan Dikshtein,” in Malen’kaia, 140; this phrase is changed beyond recognition in Thompson’s translation. 42 The search for, combined with the interrogation of, identity in its many forms (familial, national, historic, and so forth) continues to preoccupy Kuraev in his more recent writings. Stylistically, however, he is shifting toward somewhat more straightforward types of narrative, which nevertheless continue to actively use the device of montage of historic documents, from the grand and well-known to the hidden, personal, accidental – and often “invented”; see, for instance, his novellas “Zhrebii No. 241” (Lot no. 241) and “Vstrechaite Lenina!” (Meet Lenin!), in Zhrebii No. 241. Elsewhere, I have compared the narrative organization of Kapitan Dikshtein to the work of a contemporary French author, Patrick Modiano, in particular the latter’s novel Rue des Boutiques Obscures; see Chernetsky, “Travels through Heterotopia.” Kuraev’s more recent choices, however, seem to have more in common with the “faction” (fact-based fiction) of Yugoslavia’s leading postmodernist author, Danilo Kisˇ; for more on Kisˇ’s writing, see Vuletic´, The Prose Fiction. 43 I have not been able to locate any critical texts that focus on Laputin’s work. Skoropanova, Russkaia postmodernistskaia literatura, mentions him three times in lists of Russian postmodernist prose writers (349, 350, 351) and includes his texts in the bibliography of postmodernist texts (589). Also, the dust jacket of the book edition of his novel Moi vstrechi s Ogastesom K’iunitsem: Kniga pervaia (My meetings with Augustus Kunitz: Book one) carries several laudatory quotes from newspaper reviews. 44 In addition to his own writing, Laputin played an important role in contemporary Russian letters as the editor-in-chief of a prominent literary journal, Novaia iunost’. 45 Laputin, “Retsepty bezumiia,” in Retsepty bezumiia, 3; “Recipes of Madness,” 117. 46 Laputin’s next major work, the novel Moi vstrechi s Ogastesom K’iunitsem (My meetings with Augustus Kunitz), which he began serializing in 1994 in the journal Novaia iunost’ (a book edition came out in 1999), continues this paradigm. 47 I thank John Zilcosky for attracting my attention to Kafka’s early writings and especially Kafka’s interest in travels both real and literary. 48 Laputin, “Priruchenie arlekinov,” 52. 49 Jameson, Marxism and Form, 60. 50 In Laputin’s third novel, Moi vstrechi s Ogastesom K’iunitsem (My meetings with Augustus Kunitz), the strongest pronounced intertextual relationship is with Nabokov’s important (and often overlooked) “transitional” novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

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51 See Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment.” 52 With some cuts; for the full unexpurgated text, see Erofeev, Russkaia krasavitsa: Roman, rasskazy (1994), 5–274; for the English translation, see Russian Beauty (1993). 53 Goscilo, “Body Talk,” 160. 54 For more on the use of images of violence in Erofeev’s texts, see Roll, “Re-Surfacing.” 55 Erofeev, “Markiz de Sad, sadizm i XX vek,” first published in Voprosy literatury (1973), reprinted in his collection of essays, V labirinte prokliatykh voprosov, 225–55. 56 Goscilo, “Body Talk,” 163. 57 Ibid., 162. 58 For a more extended discussion of the sexual politics of Erofeev’s writing, see chapter 5 of this study. 59 Epstein, “Posle budushchego,” 222. 60 Erofeev, “Berdiaev,” written in 1981, first published in the almanac Zerkala 1989, 46–62, reprinted in Erofeev, Zhizn’ s idiotom, 63–86. 61 Jameson, Postmodernism, 20. 62 Erofeev, “Berdiaev,” in Zhizn’ s idiotom, 48, emphasis added. 63 And a parodic nod to Dostoevsky is particularly strongly manifested. 64 This scene offers one of the most successful and unbigoted depictions of “alternative sexualities” in Erofeev’s œuvre. 65 Erofeev, “Popugaichik,” first published in Russian in 1988, translated into English as “The Parakeet,” in Goscilo and Lindsey, eds, Glasnost. The English translation restores the cuts that were made in the original Soviet publication; however, it fails, in my view, to convey the story’s stylistic peculiarities and the play with cultural signifiers. I shall refer here to the original Russian text. The complete text of the story was published in Russian in Erofeev, Zhizn’ s idiotom, 163–74. 66 A striking instance of linguistic heterogeneity in “Popugaichik” is the monster hybrid chelobitnyi zapros: the adjective implies a petition to the tsar or a government official from the pre-Petrine era, while the noun is a modern bureaucratic term that means “judicial inquiry.” 67 Soviet Communist youth organization for children aged nine to fifteen. 68 Most notably, Erofeev, “Pis’mo k materi” (Letter to mother, 1987), in Zhizn’ s idiotom, 27–37, a detailed discussion of which can be found in Vanchu, “Escape from ‘Tukhliandiia.’” 69 Pelevin, Sinii fonar’, translated into English by Andrew Bromfield as The Blue Lantern and Other Stories and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories.

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70 The abbreviation stands for “Dialektika perekhodnogo perioda iz niotkuda v nikuda” (The dialectics of the period of transition from nowhere to nowhere). 71 Annotations in Pelevin, Sinii fonar’, 318, and Omon Ra (1992), 288. 72 See in particular Pelevin, “Prints Gosplana,” in Sinii fonar’, 72–108 (“Prince of Gosplan,” in A Werewolf Problem, 159–213) and “Sviatochnyi kiberpank, ili Rozhdestvenskaia noch’-117.DIR” (Christmas cyberpunk, or Christmas night117.DIR), reprinted in Relics: Rannee i neizdannoe, 217–36. 73 See Genis, “Viktor Pelevin.” 74 Dalton-Brown, “Ludic Nonchalance?” 216. However, Pelevin’s ludic engagement with the legacies of the Soviet era bears only superficial resemblance to the paradigm of sots-art discussed in the previous chapter. For an extended discussion of Pelevin’s poetics vis-à-vis sots-art, see McCausland, “Viktor Pelevin.” 75 Pelevin, “Zatvornik i Shestipalyi,” in Sinii fonar’, 16–45; “Hermit and Six Toes,” in The Blue Lantern, 21–62. 76 Pelevin, “Problema vervolka v Srednei polose,” in Sinii fonar’, 46–71; “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia,” in A Werewolf Problem, 1–35. 77 Pelevin, “Mittel’shpil’,” in Sinii fonar’, 218–40; “Mid-game,” in The Blue Lantern, 105–37. 78 Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, he himself has occasionally referred to his narrative method as “critical solipsism.” 79 Pelevin, “Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny,” in Sinii fonar’, 140–56; “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream,” in A Werewolf Problem, 36–58. 80 Pelevin, Omon Ra (1992), 146; Omon Ra (1998), 150, translation modified. 81 The train’s name alludes to Krasnaia strela (The red arrow), the name of the Moscow-Leningrad express train. 82 The title can be translated as Chapaev and the Void and Chapaev and Pustota (depending on whether we read the last word of the title as a regular word or a personal name). The novel was a considerable success among Russian readers and has since been widely reprinted and translated. However, in a controversial move, the jury of the Russian Booker Prize, angered by the text’s daring manipulation of landmark events of Russia’s past, removed it from competition, branding it “a computer virus designed to destroy Russian cultural memory.” 83 Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota, 7; Buddha’s Little Finger, vii. 84 This statement reemphasizes the pun on the last name of the narrator/ protagonist, Pustota, which in Russian means “void, emptiness.” 85 Mélat, “Entre passé soviétique”: “Dans [les textes de Pélévine] l’espace, comme le temps, est fermé … Les personnages n’ont pas de passé, ils vivent dans un éternel présent narratif, comme suspendus au milieu des mots.” 86 Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses,” 217.

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87 Mélat, “Entre passé soviétique,” makes a similar observation, writing that “Pelevin’s œuvre is entirely under the sign of the boundary” (“L’œuvre de Pélévine est entièrement sous le signe de la frontière”); central to his poetics, according to her, is “the instability of the border zones” (“l’instabilité propre aux zones frontalières”). 88 However, as noted earlier, they do not deny but transform the historicity of a text; theirs is not the monolithic History but a heterotopic history, thus identifying them as instances of a postmodernist resistant mode of writing, where the hesitations, lacunae, and subversions of the familiar signify what Timothy Sherman (“Translating from Memory,” 294–5) has described as a “fallout of historicity … descending over the postmodern world.” 89 Jameson, Postmodernism, 54.

chapter four 1 See Heise, Chronoschisms, 3. 2 It is important here to remember that not all post-Soviet women’s writing, as noted in the discussion below, displays postmodern features; conversely, a great many postmodernist texts (post-Soviet among them) can hardly be spoken of as contributing to the feminist project. Not all postmodernist texts are critical; in fact, many are either escapist or outright celebratory in their irresponsible play with cultural elements. But even when a text attempts a critique of certain aspects of a particular textual (and/or social) order, it might leave the others firmly in place, or even reinforce them (consider the misogynistic and homophobic attitudes displayed in the writings of Viktor Erofeev and, to a lesser degree, in those of Vladimir Sorokin, discussed elsewhere in this study). However, such texts are increasingly confronted, in the former Soviet Union just as elsewhere, by those articulating underrepresented, minoritized, subaltern subject positions to challenge the hierarchy of cultural privileges – as evidenced by the texts discussed in this and following chapters of the present book. 3 Ellen E. Berry, “Introduction,” in Berry, ed., Postcommunism, 2. 4 The possibly most unusual, and extremely productive, such instance is provided by the work of Egor Radov. His writing takes yet another step in exploration of gender and corporeality, a step that puts it beyond the traditional binary separation of genders and the fixed identification of gender with a particular sexed body as well as beyond the separation of human versus nonhuman corporeality. In Radov’s work we may observe a destabilization of these regulations and an emergence of a hybrid, subversive form of textuality that may be compared to Donna Haraway’s notion of “cyborg writing.” For a more detailed discussion of Radov’s writing, see Chernetsky, “Post-Soviet Cyborgs.”

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5 On the topic of Russian reception of feminist theory and activism, see Holmgren, “Bug Inspectors.” The critic who has written the most about women’s prose writing in contemporary Russia is Helena Goscilo; see in particular her Dehexing Sex. 6 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 89. 7 I am here speaking of “dirty realism” in the sense proposed by Bill Buford to describe a particular trend in contemporary US writing; see two special issues of Granta, “Dirty Realism” (Granta 8, 1983), in the introduction to which Buford develops this notion, and “More Dirt” (Granta 19, 1986). Although Buford does not develop the notion in gender-specific terms, it is notable that in Russia this type of writing has emerged specifically as part of “new women’s prose.” 8 Tarasova, “Ne pomniashchaia zla,” in Vaneeva, ed., Ne pomniashchaia zla, 187– 214; Tarasova, “Ty khorosho nauchilsia est’, Adam,” in Vasilenko, ed., Novye amazonki, 277–301. These two collections were enormously influential in establishing “new women’s writing” as a major component of the contemporary Russian literary process. 9 See Basinsky, “Pozabyvshie dobro?” Basinsky would repeat the same remark a few years later in connection with the posthumous publication of gay-themed texts by Evgeny Kharitonov (for more on the reception of Kharitonov’s work, see the next chapter). 10 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 104. 11 Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 636–7: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself a projection of the surface … the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body.” 12 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 100. 13 Tarasova, “Ne pomniashchaia zla,” 191; “She Who Bears No Ill,” 99–100, translation modified. 14 Vasilenko, “Shamara,” in Zvonkoe imia, 103–58. A comprehensive collection of Vasilenko’s prose in English, Shamara and Other Writings, edited by Helena Goscilo, was published in 2000. 15 Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, Vasilenko has published only one major new piece of fiction, a novel entitled Durochka (Little fool). 16 Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 91, 93, 94. 17 Ibid., 94. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 107, emphasis in the original. 20 As noted by Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 23, to be effective, “a feminist text must not only be critical of or a challenge to the patriarchal norms governing it;

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it must also help, in whatever way, to facilitate the production of new and perhaps unknown, unthought discursive spaces – new styles, modes of analysis and argument, new genres and forms – that contest the limits and constraints currently at work in the regulation of textual production and reception.” See Iskrenko, “The Metamorphosis Project.” For further explorations of her texts as representative of the strategies of Second World postmodernist writing, see Chernetsky, “Nina Iskrenko.” The other leading women poets of her generation, Elena Shvarts and Ol’ga Sedakova, have stayed within the limits of the more traditional modernist paradigms of either Tsvetaeva’s emotionality or the more hermetic poetry of allusions. Incidentally, this adherence to the more familiar paradigms resulted in the far greater volume of scholarship on these two poets in comparison with Iskrenko; for instance, both of them are given separate chapters, twelve and ten pages long respectively, in Catriona Kelly’s A History of Russian Women’s Writing, while Iskrenko is accorded only one sentence. “Pamiati Niny Iskrenko,” Novaia iunost’ 1, no. 2 (1995): 230. Ibid. For more on this dichotomy, see the writings of Mikhail Epstein, particularly “New Currents in Russian Poetry,” in Epstein, After the Future. Wachtel, “Introduction: Nina Iskrenko and the Russian Poetic Tradition,” in Iskrenko, The Right to Err, 5–9. Iskrenko, “Obrashchenie k predpolagaemomu sobesedniku,” in Referendum, 3–4, emphasis in the original; “From Referendum,” 147. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, 146. In the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Barthes was the most influential among contemporary Western literary theorists and the most translated. Iskrenko, “Obrashchenie k predpolagaemomu sobesedniku,” in Referendum, 4; “From Referendum,” 148. See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Gilbert and Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence,” 49. I borrow the notion of figurations from the work of Rosi Braidotti, who outlines her use of it in the introduction to her book Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. “A figuration,” she writes, “is a politically informed account of alternative subjectivity” that represents “a style of thought that evokes or expresses ways out of the phallocentric vision of the subject.” Figurations are “politically informed images that portray the complex interaction of levels of subjectivity” and have the potential to “open up inbetween spaces where new forms of political subjectivity can be explored” (1, 4, 7). While Braidotti explores several figurations of a more generic kind – nomad,

Notes to pages 125–32

34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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migrant, exile, or Donna Haraway’s cyborg – she also emphasizes several “genealogical” images, most notably Christa Wolf’s rewriting of Cassandra (15). Iskrenko, “Fivanskii tsikl,” in Referendum, 41–53; also in Vasilenko, ed., Novye amazonki, 149–59. Tat’iana Larina is the heroine of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia was a Soviet guerrilla fighter during the Second World War; executed by the Nazis, she was later turned into a Soviet icon. This designation is produced from the combination of akheitsy (the Achaians) with akhineia (nonsense, rubbish). Iskrenko, “Tiazhelaia tucha v vysokoi trave,” in Referendum, 14. Iskrenko, “P’ianye zhenshchiny,” in Neskol’ko slov, 76–7; The Right to Err, 72–3. That the story of Jezebel is the subtext of this poem was pointed out by Iskrenko during our personal conversation in Hoboken, NJ, in April 1994. For an illuminating analysis of Akhmatova’s poem, see Sandler, “The Canon,” 114–17. Sibelan Forrester discusses another instance of subversive use of figuration by a modernist woman poet, Marina Tsvetaeva’s cycle “Ioann” (1917), which reinterprets St John the Apostle as an androgynous figuration for a woman poet; see Forrester, “Not Quite,” 280–4. Iskrenko, O glavnom, 149–50. Another instance of ironic subversion of this pair, by Valeriia Narbikova, is discussed below. Iskrenko, “Dorogaia razden’sia do poiasa,” in Neskol’ko slov, 63. See Tsvetaeva’s use of this figuration, discussed by Forrester, “Not Quite,” 286–92. Iskrenko, “Sreda: Poema-rasskaz v dvukh chastiakh,” in Ili, 42, emphasis in the original. See Chernetsky, “Nina Iskrenko.” Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 28–36 on the postmodernist feminist project, 100–2 on rhizomatic figurations, 111–23 on the concept of “becoming-woman,” and passim. Ibid., 12. For an illuminating discussion of the place of the notion of fragmentation in modernist literature and social theory, see Frisby, Fragments of Modernity. Iskrenko, “Kolybel’naia rech’,” in Referendum, 6. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 22–4. Ibid., 31–4. Iskrenko, “Drugaia zhenshchina,” in Ili, 53–7; “Another Woman,” 61–4. A produce storage facility, where students and the employees of various research and educational institutions were sent to help with the sorting of the harvest during the Soviet years.

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Notes to pages 132–4

56 Gilbert and Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence,” 53. 57 Iskrenko, “Bud’ zdorova Liusia Komarova,” in Neskol’ko slov, 49–50; The Right to Err, 60. 58 Iskrenko, “Nishchenka kudriavaia …,” in Neskol’ko slov, 53–4. 59 Iskrenko, “Kak perezhit’ etu noch’,” in the newspaper Blagonamerennyi kentavr (Moscow), issue no. 2, [1992–93?], 5; trans. in The Right to Err, 53–4; both original and translation reprinted in Kates, ed., In the Grip, 282–7. 60 On the Poeticheskii al’bom (Poetic album) television program in October 1994. 61 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 130. 62 Narbikova, Ravnovesie, first published in an abridged version in Iunost’ 8 (1988), full text published as a separate volume in 1990; translated into English by Seth Graham as Day Equals Night, or The Equilibrium of Diurnal and Nocturnal Starlight (1999). 63 Since then, Narbikova has also published a collection of essays entitled Vremia v puti (Travel time, 1997). More recently, she has been channelling her creative energies into visual arts. Her early novel Skvoz’ (Through), written in the early 1980s, was published in 2005; see “Skvoz’,” in Kedrov, Narbikova, and Katsiuba, Skovoz’ k …, 20–86. 64 See Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 102. 65 One should, however, be aware of some of the dangers and pitfalls of overessentializing “the feminine” in relation to literature and writing. A productive path for the use of this notion is sketched out by Annette Kuhn in her book Women’s Pictures. “How might a ‘feminine’ text be defined,” she asks, and if “the feminine” can be considered a principle of textual organization, an attribute of text itself, what is the connection between such a principle and “woman”: what possible link can there be between an attribute which informs the structure and organization of texts, and gender? Even to suggest the possibility of a relationship between feminine-as-text and “woman” is to pose some kind of connection between “woman” and representation … What is at stake here then is the possibility of a feminine text as opposed to a feminist one: that is, that representations can be considered as either “feminine” or “masculine.” (11) Kuhn appropriates Irigaray’s notion of Western “masculine” discourse shaped by an “Aristotelian type of logic,” which is seen as “possessing the ‘masculine’ attributes of visibility, goal-orientation, and so on.” Assuming this, one can then define a feminine language, or a feminine relation to language, as that which challenge[s] and subvert[s] this form of discourse by posing plurality over against [sic] unity, multitudes of meanings as against single, fixed meanings,

Notes to pages 134–7

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diffuseness as against instrumentality. That is to say, whereas Western discourse – the “masculine” – tends to limit meaning by operating a linear and instrumental syntax, a feminine language would be more open, would set up multiplicities of meanings. (11)

66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

This assertion allows one to escape biologism and equating the feminine with “woman as defined by bodily attributes.” The feminine becomes an “attribute of textual organization” and could be broadly viewed as a definitonal feature of a subversive text that challenges the representational logic of mainstream writing. Kuhn later goes on to attach the distincion between the feminine and the feminist to reading rather than to the text itself (15). Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 11, offers a useful, concise definition of the distinction between women’s, feminine, and feminist texts. “Women’s texts,” she writes, can be defined as “texts written by women, largely for women,” “feminine texts” as “those written from the point of view of feminine experience or in a style culturally designated as feminine,” and “feminist texts” as “those which self-consciously challenge the methods, objects, goals, or principles of mainstream patriarchal canons.” However, Grosz does insist that the relations between these three designations can be very complex and that the identification of a particular text as “feminist” is fraught with numerous complications; see Grosz, “Sexual Signatures: Feminism after the Death of the Author,” in Space, Time, and Perversion, 9–24, especially 22–3. Finally, an altogether daring interpretation of écriture feminine as “bisexual writing” is offered by Moi, Sexual/ Textual Politics, 108–11, in her discussion of the work of Cixous. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 28–9, emphasis in the original. Ruslan Marsovich, untitled manifesto, in Lopusov, ed., Krest-Nakrest, 24. Ruslan Marsovich (Nadreev), my classmate at Moscow State University in the 1980s and a promising young writer, died in a tragic accident in 1992. Narbikova, Ravnovesie, 8; Day Equals Night, 7. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 37. See the discussion of Lyotard in the first chapter of the present study. Narbikova, Okolo ekolo, 8–9; “In the Here and There,” 187, translation slightly modified. Mary Kelly, “Beyond the Purloined Image,” quoted in Suleiman, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” 119. Narbikova, Okolo ekolo, 82. Ibid., 34; “In the Here and There,” 211, translation slightly modified. Narbikova, Okolo ekolo, first published in book form in Okolo ekolo: Povesti (1992), shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize; this volume also includes Ravnovesie sveta dnevnykh i nochnykh zvezd (Equilibrium of diurnal and nocturnal starlight).

304 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95

96 97

Notes to pages 137–42

See, for example, Dark, “Zhenskie antinomii.” Narbikova, Okolo ekolo, 77. Ibid., 62. See Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” especially its “Epilogue,” 241–2. Jameson, Postmodernism, x. On this problematic, see Groys, The Total Art; and Papernyi, Architecture. Narbikova, Ravnovesie, 183; Day Equals Night, 134, rendered in Graham’s translation simply as “à la russe.” Jameson, Postmodernism, 4. Narbikova, Ravnovesie, 153; Day Equals Night, 112, translation slightly modified. The “quasi-erotic” aspect of Narbikova’s writing has attracted substantial attention in recent scholarship. The peculiarity of Narbikova’s “eroticism” is discussed in Peterson, “Games Women Play,” 23–5 and passim; and in Kustanovich, “Erotic Glasnost.” Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, in their “Introduction” to Costlow, Sandler, and Vowles, eds, Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, 33–4, draw attention to another aspect of Narbikova’s writing, her deconstruction of the Russian maternal myth. See, for example, in Narbikova, Ravnovesie, 9, 12, descriptions, respectively, of a masturbation scene and of a “sixty-nine.” Narbikova, Okolo ekolo, 88. Ibid., 93. Narbikova, Ravnovesie, 44; Day Equals Night, 33. Ibid., 133–4; 98–9, translation slightly modified. Ibid., 157; 115. Ibid., 172–4; 127–8, translation slightly modified. Otmatfeian, Avvakum, Sana, and Chiashchiazhyshyn appear in Ravnovesie; Boris, Gleb, Petrarka, Ezdandukta, and Lzhedmitrii appear in the trilogy Okolo ekolo, Angel in “Ad kak Da aD kak dA,” and Irra, Dodostoevsky, and Toest’lstoy in “Plan pervogo litsa. I vtorogo” (The plane of the first person. And of the second, 1989), reprinted in Narbikova, Izbrannoe, ili Shepot shuma, 7–64. Dark, “Zhenskie antinomii,” 267. Ibid. This motif in Narbikova’s writing, “a wish to have babies outside the norms of childbirth, to have sex outside the norms of gender,” is emphasized by Costlow, Sandler, and Vowles, eds, Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, 34, 294–5 n. 114. Narbikova, Okolo ekolo, 102. Narbikova, Ravnovesie, 39; Day Equals Night, 30, translation slightly modified.

Notes to pages 142–7

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98 Narbikova, Okolo ekolo, 28–9; “In the Here and There,” 206, translation slightly modified. 99 Ibid., 9; 187–8, translation slightly modified. 100 A few texts by Stein have finally appeared in Russian translation in recent years; however, even Russia’s leading interpreter of Stein, Elena Petrovskaia (see her “Stanovlenie po-amerikanski: Literaturnyi opyt Gertrudy Stain”), does not venture to look for analogies to Stein’s textual strategies in Russian literature. 101 Jameson, Postmodernism, 4. 102 Narbikova, Ravnovesie, 5; Day Equals Night, 5, translation slightly modified. 103 Iskrenko, interview in Al’manakh “Poeziia” 55 (1990): 62. 104 The title (as well as significant parts of the argument) of an important study of Gertrude Stein’s writing, Ellen E. Berry’s Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism, could to a great extent apply to Narbikova’s texts and to some degree to those of Iskrenko as well. 105 Brown, The Last Years, 176. 106 Iskrenko’s untitled poem, published in Slovo/Word, no. 10/11 (N.d.), 32, from which these words are taken, goes as follows: Uronila verstku na pol stoia za svininoi

Dropped the galleys on the floor standing in a line for pork

Ekaia ty Nina Pisatel’nitsa neakkuratnaia

What a sloppy woman writer you are Nina

chapter five 1 For accounts of the emergence of the modern-day Russian gay and lesbian movement and analysis of public attitudes toward homosexuality, see Gessen, The Rights; Robinson, “Molchanie – èto smert’”; Kon, The Sexual Revolution; Riordan, “Sexual Minorities”; and Healey, Homosexual Desire. In “Gomofobiia v Rossii: Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i politicheskii kontekst” (Homophobia in Russia: Social psychology and the political context), Igor’ Kon has argued that after a general trend toward greater tolerance in the 1990s, Russian society has, since 2000, increasingly exhibited signs of rising intolerance, including homophobia. At the same time, November 2005 also saw a major advance in the visibility of queer culture in Russia: the opening of the first gay and lesbian bookstore in the country, the Moscow-based Indigo. 2 An example of particularly insidious verbal gay bashing that appeared in one of the most liberal Russian newspapers, Nezavisimaia gazeta, is an article by Sergei

306

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Notes to pages 147–51

Tikhomirov, “Russkaia kul’tura v predchuvstvii sodomizatsii: Gomoseksualizm kak demokraticheskaia problema” (Russian culture in anticipation of sodomization: Homosexuality as a democratic problem, 1993). For a study of the construction of public queerness in contemporary Russia (through activism, mass media, legal and medical discourse, etc.), see Essig, Queer in Russia. For an instroduction to the life and work of these authors, see Malmstad and Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin; and Burgin, Sophia Parnok. Of gay literary journals, the Moscow-based RISK, launched in 1995, has been the strongest; in addition, the St Petersburg-based Mitin zhurnal, while not exclusively queer, has been publishing considerable amounts of literature concerned with the expression of nonnormative sexuality, including works by gay and lesbian authors, both Russian and foreign. Of the so-called “new glossy magazines” in Russia, two, Om and Ptiuch, have demonstrated the greatest degree of “gayfriendliness.” In recent years, the greatest gain in public access by Russian queers has been achieved on the Internet (see in particular the comprehensive website at http://www.gay.ru). Sorokin, “Delovoe predlozhenie” and “Pominal’noe slovo,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 489–93 and 519–26. Ibid., 559. These are the terms in which Sorokin’s work is discussed by Groys, The Total Art, in the section “A Cruel Talent,” 99–102. Sorokin, “Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 595–798. Erofeev, “Zhizn’ s idiotom,” in Zhizn’ s idiotom, 5–26. Konstantin Kustanovich discusses this story in his “Erotic Glasnost,” 143; he fails, however, to acknowledge the story’s homophobic colouring, and his own vocabulary displays homophobic tendencies as well. The story itself has had the greatest impact of Erofeev’s shorter texts, serving as the basis for an eponymous opera by Alfred Shnitke and an eponymous film by Aleksandr Rogozhkin. Erofeev, “Popugaichik,” in Zhizn’ s idiotom, 163–74. Erofeev, “Podrugi,” in ibid., 51–62. Ibid., 53. Vishevsky, “The Other among Us,” 725–7. Belov’s Vse vperedi has been translated into English as The Best Is Yet to Come (1989). Belov, “Vse vperedi,” 61. In the case of Viktor Erofeev, this affinity with Belov’s attitudes to homosexuality comes across most clearly in his condescending tone and numerous homophobic remarks in an interview with him tellingly titled “Gomoseksualist – ne geroi romana” (A homosexual is not a hero of a novel), published in Art-fonar’, the monthly literature and arts supplement to the newspaper Argumenty i fakty.

Notes to pages 151–4

307

18 Dark, “Tri lika russkoi erotiki,” 227. 19 Kharitonov’s first posthumous publication, an untitled portfolio of selected texts, appeared in Berman, ed., Katalog, 235–62. 20 Karlinsky, “Russia’s Gay Literature and Culture,” 363. 21 Literally, Central House of Writers, an auditorium specially designed for literature-related events, which had been operating under the auspices of the Soviet Writers’ Union. 22 Panov, “(Ne)esteticheskoe otnoshenie deistvitel’nosti k iskusstvu,” 7, emphasis in the original. 23 Basinskii “Chuzhoi sredi svoikh” (A stranger among his own kind), 5. 24 Such was, for example, the reaction to Kharitonov’s work of Vsevolod Nekrasov, the noted author of experimental poetry, reported by Vladimir Sorokin in an interview included in a cluster of materials on Kharitonov (Beliaeva et al., “O tvorchestve Evgeniia Kharitonova,” 157): “[Nekrasov] was visibly shocked – not by Kharitonov’s prose (he loved it) – but by the author’s confession of a certain personal feature which is presented in the theme that he was developing” (note the euphemistic vocabulary). 25 Discussed by Kevin Moss in his “What’s Cooking in Kharitonov’s ‘Dukhovka’?” 26 All of Kharitonov’s texts, except when noted otherwise, are cited from the twovolume edition of his collected writings, Slezy na tsvetakh (1993). The above mentioned texts are in vol. 1, 177–210, 211–28, 234–47, and 256–65. Their English translations, “Tears for One Strangled and Dead,” “A Russian Who Doesn’t Drink Vodka,” “Teardrops on the Flowers,” and “In the Cold Higher Sense,” appear in Kharitonov, Under House Arrest, 57–120, 121–48, 158–83, and 188– 205; while this latter volume’s title is the exact translation of the one compiled by Kharitonov himself, it does not offer the complete translation of the Russian text, and, unfortunately, Kharitonov’s text is frequently altered beyond recognition. The second volume of Slezy also contains a large portfolio of reminiscences and criticism on Kharitonov. 27 Mogutin, “Preface,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 276 n. 30. 28 Bocharov, “Conversations with Bakhtin,” 1019. 29 Erofeev, “Stranstvie stradaiushchei dushi,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 2, 147. 30 Klimontovich, “Uedinennoe slovo,” in ibid., 112. 31 Prigov, “Pamiati Evgeniia Vladimirovicha Kharitonova,” in ibid., 85. 32 Popov, “Kus ne po zubam,” in ibid., 105. 33 Iarkevich, “Posledniaia priamota,” in ibid., 171. 34 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 299–333. 35 Rozanov, Uedinennoe. Opavshie list’ia. Apokalipsis nashego vremeni, 194, 368. In a curious coincidence, the same idea is repeated a decade later (1921 to be

308

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

49 50 51 52 53

Notes to pages 155–8

exact) by Ezra Pound, in his “Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love.” The parallels that could be drawn between some of Rozanov’s and Pound’s ideas are indeed striking: their linkage of creativity and sex, their obsession with the Jews, their self-contradiction, their reactionary politics. The one peculiar difference between the two is that while both are obsessed with circumcision, they hold diametrically opposing views on the subject. Pound finds circumcision objectionable since it desensitizes the head of the penis, making the man as such, particularly the artist, less sensitive, whereas Rozanov believes that circumcision makes the head of the penis more sensitive; for him, the practice of circumcision accounts for the heightened sensuality that he perceives in the Jewish and Muslim cultures. Karlinsky, “Russia’s Gay Literature and History,” 92. Rozanov, Liudi lunnogo sveta, 209. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 82, emphasis in the original. Rozanov, Liudi lunnogo sveta, 145 n. 1. Ibid., 221, 225. Ibid., 189–90. Ibid., 30–1, 290 n. 1. Ibid., 223–5. Klimontovich, “Uedinennoe slovo,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 2, 114. Sadur, untitled preface to a portfolio of Kharitonov’s texts, Iskusstvo kino 11 (1991): 117–18. In Beliaeva et al., “O tvorchestve Evgeniia Kharitonova,” 161, Dmitry Prigov, usually a perceptive critic of Russian culture and the leading figure of the Conceptualist movement, calls Kharitonov “a rather traditional figure of a writer of the confessional type.” Dark, “Tri lika russkoi erotiki,” 225, believes that for Kharitonov his homosexuality was a “cross,” “hell,” and “damnation.” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18. Jean Genet, “Introduction,” in Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1971), 22, quoted in Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 99–100. “We must have a minor language inside our own language, we must create minor use of our own language,” reiterates Deleuze, in Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 4. Wittig, The Straight Mind, 61–2. Sorokin, interview in Beliaeva et al., “O tvorchestve Evgeniia Kharitonova,” 159. Wittig, The Straight Mind, 62–3. Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 266–7; Under House Arrest, 206–8. On the back cover of her collection of plays, Chudnaia baba (The miraculous peasant woman), Sadur calls Kharitonov her “literary teacher.” This collection includes a play, “Volosy” (Hair), that is “dedicated to the memory of Zhenia [Evgenii] Kharitonov and [is written] in his manner” (295). Kharitonov’s

Notes to pages 158–61

54 55 56

57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71 72

309

profound influence on the younger gay Russian authors is considered later in this chapter. Klimontovich, “Uedinennoe slovo,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 2, 109– 16. Ibid., 110. A portfolio of Kharitonov’s pre-1969 poetry was published in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1993): 274–83. None of the reminiscences or the critical pieces about Kharitonov offers an explanation of this rather puzzling title. It could perhaps be an allusion to the suffocating claustrophobia of an obsessive desire. Kharitonov, “Dukhovka,” first published in Berman, ed., Katalog, 238–56, reprinted in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 20–37. An English translation of this text by Arch Tait, “The Oven,” is published in Erofeev, ed., The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing, 207–36; another translation, by Kevin Moss, appears in Moss, ed., Out of the Blue, 197–215. Moss, “What’s Cooking in Kharitonov’s ‘Dukhovka’?” Klimontovich, “Uedinennoe slovo,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 2, 111. Erofeev, “Stranstvie stradaiushchei dushi,” in ibid., vol. 2, 146–7, emphasis in the original. Mogutin, “Katorzhnik na nive bukvy,” in ibid., vol. 1, 13. Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” xi-xii. I believe that Mogutin’s own writing, analyzed below, can also be viewed as an instance of this mode of postmodernism. Beverley, Against Literature, 113. Ibid., 70–1. Ibid., 73–4, emphasis in the original. Ibid., 76, 83. Ibid., 84, 92. The controversy that arose around this particular volume in recent years, in my opinion, only further highlighted the continuing relevance of the genre of testimonio and of the challenges involved in producing such a text. For more on this, see Arias, “Authoring Ethnicized Subjects”; and Arias, ed., The Rigoberta Menchú Contoversy. For additional theorizations of testimonio, see Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing. A testimonio that is not mentioned by Beverley but constitutes perhaps the most poignant account of the survival of a homosexual and a writer under Soviet-style totalitarian repression is Before Night Falls by the late Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. Literally, “dachnyi poselok” (“a cottage settlement”). Beaver, “Homosexual Signs,” 104–5. Kharitonov, “Dukhovka,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 30.

310 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97

Notes to pages 162–6

Ibid., 36; “The Oven,” in Moss, ed., Out of the Blue, 214–15. Ibid., 36; 215. Sorokin, interview in Beliaeva et al., “O tvorchestve Evgeniia Kharitonova,” 158. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 3. Moss, “What’s Cooking in Kharitonov’s ‘Dukhovka’?”; a revised version of this argument appears in Moss, “The Underground Closet” 241–2. Kharitonov, “Vil’boa i drugie veshchi,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 38–40. An English translation of this text by Sam Truitt and Vitaly Chernetsky, “Vilboa and Other Things,” appears in High, et al., eds, Crossing Centuries, 23–5. Kharitonov, “Sobytie: pokazali fenomena …,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 40–1. Kharitonov, “Odin takoi, drugoi drugoi,” in ibid., 68–71; “One Man’s Meat,” in Under House Arrest, 27–35. Kharitonov, “Odin takoi,” 71. Kharitonov, “Alesha Serezha,” in ibid., vol. 1, 76–7; “Alyosha—Seryozha,” in Moss, ed., Out of the Blue, 221. Kharitonov, “A., R., ia,” in ibid., vol. 1, 87–91; “A., R., and I,” in Under House Arrest, 41–51. See, for example, Hejinian, My Life; or Perelman, “Holes in the Argument,” in Face Value, 51–62. Kharitonov, “Roman,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 105. Ibid., 107. Actually, the word is a borrowing from Rozanov, Uedinennoe, 94, with altered capitalization. Klimontovich, “Uedinennoe slovo,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 2, 112. Ibid., 112. Kharitonov, “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 192; “Tears for the Killed and Strangled One,” Under House Arrest, 85. Gareev, ”Ego spasala literatura” (He was being saved by literature), 5. Sadur, untitled preface to a portfolio of Kharitonov’s texts, Iskusstvo kino 11 (1991): 117–18. Kharitonov, “Slezy ob ubitom i zadushennom,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 177 (Tait’s translation, in Under House Arrest, 57–8, alters this passage beyond recognition). Kharitonov, “Rasskaz odnogo mal’chika, ‘Kak ia stal takim,’” in ibid., 229–33; “One Boy’s Story, ‘How I Got Like That,’” in Moss, ed., Out of the Blue, 216–20. Kharitonov, “Listovka,” in ibid., 248–9; “A Leaflet,” in Moss, ed., Out of the Blue, 224–5. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 28. Prigov, “Kak mne predstavliaetsia Kharitonov,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 2, 90.

Notes to pages 167–72

311

98 Mogutin, “Etot? Da tak—eshche odin russkii.” Mogutin sheds some light on the possible origins of the anti-Semitic tone of some of these fragments (which is indeed disturbing) in his essay “‘Drugoi’ Kharitonov i ego ‘nepechatnoe’ tvorchestvo” (The “other” Kharitonov and his “unpublishable” writing). According to the recollections of Kharitonov’s friends, the anti-Semitic tones began appearing in his statements when Kharitonov returned from a trip undertaken in the summer of 1978 to his home city of Novosibirsk under the influence of his personal acquaintances there, many of whom apparently adhered to this “new” ideology, then somewhat fashionable in right-wing dissident circles that later gave rise to the infamous “Pamiat’” society. Mogutin believes that Kharitonov’s anti-Semitic statements should be confronted as a serious problem, not dismissed as mere “play-acting.” 99 Kharitonov, “Slezy na tsvetakh,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 235, 247; these sections of the text are unfortunately altered beyond recognition in Tait’s translation. A more accurate but abridged translation of this text by Kevin Moss, “Tears on Flowers,” appears in High et al., eds, Crossing Centuries, 340–8. 100 Kharitonov, “V kholodnom vysshem smysle,” in Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 1, 259. 101 Ibid., 257. 102 Ibid., 260. 103 Kharitonov, “Nep’iushchii russkii,” in ibid., 227. 104 Wittig, The Straight Mind, 64. 105 An elaboration of this thesis is presented in Harper Framing the Margins; see especially “Introduction: The Postmodern, the Marginal, and the Minor,” 3–29. 106 See Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 1092 n. 4. 107 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 58–9. 108 Sadur, “Zhivaia dliashchaiasia zhizn’,” in Kharitonov, Slezy na tsvetakh, vol. 2, 149. 109 Wittig, The Straight Mind, 73–4. 110 Ibid., 75. 111 For further discussion of this topic, see Chernetsky, “After the House Arrest.” 112 The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed an emergence of several Russian lesbian writers – among them Evgeniia Debrianskaia, Margarita Meklina, Natal’ia Sharandak, Margarita Sharapova, and Natal’ia Shul’ga. So far, however, their attention seems to be overwhelmingly focused on prose fiction, and both stylistically and thematically it can be placed into the paradigms of new women’s writing discussed in the previous chapter (either the “corporeal” or the “experimental”) rather that presented as an exploration of a distinct queer textuality. 113 For an account of his persecution, see Mogutin, “Invitation to a Beheading.” 114 Kuz’min, “Sluchai poeta Mogutina,” in Mogutin, Uprazhneniia dlia iazyka, 158. 115 Marcadé, “Die prachtvolle Animalicat: Orgiinoe isstuplenie poezii Iaroslava Mogutina,” in Mogutin, Termoiadernyi muskul, 5–13.

312

Notes to pages 172–86

116 See Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz. 117 For more on Warhol’s strategies relevant to Mogutin’s case (both in selffashioning and in his recent work as a visual artist), see Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face.” 118 For more on this tradition, see the writings of Dan Healey, particularly the Introduction and chapter 1 in his Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent and “Ischeznovenie russkoi ‘tetki,’ ili Kak rodilas’ sovetskaia gomofobiia.” 119 Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” xi-xii. 120 Mogutin, “Kak ia voroval v Parizhe,” reprinted in Roman s nemtsem, 163–83. 121 Mogutin, “Chto s togo chto ia vyros v derevne?” (So what that I grew up in the country?), in Uprazhneniia dlia iazyka, 81. The poem puns on the Russian word pol, which means both “floor” and “sex” (as a differentiating category, not as an activity). 122 Mogutin, “Poema ekstaza,” in ibid., 149–50. 123 Ibid., 71; English trans. by Vitaly Chernetsky, in Moss, ed., Out of the Blue, 400. 124 Cover of Index 6, no. 3 (2002). 125 Mogutin, “Ia zhivu v chuzom dome,” in Uprazhneniia dlia iazyka, 43, translated by Dmitry Gelfand and Mogutin. 126 Mogutin, Amerika v moikh shtanakh, 285. 127 Mogutin’s preferred English rendition of this title is “German Entanglement.” 128 Mogutin, “Roman s nemtsem,” in Roman s nemtsem, 56–7. 129 Mogutin, “Pravo na zhestokost’,” in Sverkhchelovecheskie superteksty, 209. 130 Mogutin, “Esenin,” in ibid., 29–30. 131 Mogutin, “Ia upustil Marki Marka,” in ibid., 139. 132 For a sample of reactions, see Mogutin’s Russian-language webpage, http://www.mitin.com/people/mogutin; through this page one can access most of Mogutin’s original writing in Russian. For a sampling of Mogutin’s work in the visual arts and of his writing in English translation, see http://www.slavamogutin.com. 133 Mogutin, “Vykidysh statui svobody,” in Deklaratsiia nezavisimosti, 20. 134 Mogutin, “Udovletvoreniia ne nastupit,” in ibid., 98–9. 135 Whitman, “I Hear It Was Charged against Me,” in Leaves of Grass, 123.

chapter six 1 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dibrova, in addition to his original writing, has published translations of Samuel Beckett. 2 See the comprehensive collection The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha.

Notes to pages 187–90

313

3 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” in Zamora and Faris, eds, Magical Realism, 2; Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in ibid., 165. 4 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 4. 5 See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 6 Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” in Signatures of the Visible, 129. 7 Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 79. 8 Bhabha, “Postcolonial Criticism,” 437, emphasis in the original. 9 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 5–6. 10 Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” 138. For Carpentier’s own formulations, see “On the Marvellous Real in America” and “The Baroque and the Marvellous Real.” 11 Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” 130. 12 Zamora and Faris, “Introduction,” 6. 13 See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 163. 14 See Carpentier’s “The Baroque and the Marvellous Real” and Andrukhovych’s poetic cycle “Lysty v Ukraïnu” (Letters to Ukraine), especially 65. 15 For a discussion of Gogol’’s ties to the intellectual and artistic legacy of the Baroque, see Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol. 16 See, for instance, Zamora and Faris, eds, Magical Realism, 2, 111, 167. 17 Latin American magic realist fiction reached Ukraine only in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A number of practitioners of chimeric prose acknowledged the affinity between some aspects of their writing and aspects of the writing of their Latin American colleagues (particularly Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar) but disclaimed any direct influence. 18 Pohribnyi, “Moda? Novatsiia? Zakonomernost’?” 25. 19 This is precisely the angle at which Ukrainian chimeric prose was approached by critics writing on the “multinational Soviet literature.” For instance, Nadya Peterson, in her study Subversive Imaginations: Fantastic Prose and the End of Soviet Literature, focuses on the uses of the fantastic and, more broadly, of circumventions of realism as the subversive strategy in the works of writers both from Russia and from other constituent republics of the ussr – Latvia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kirghizia, and so forth. The only Ukrainian text that she discusses is Yrii, a 1974 foray into chimeric prose by a prominent author from the 1960s generation, Volodymyr Drozd. The section on Drozd is oddly situated between those on Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matera and Vladimir Krupin’s Living Water, two well-known works by Russian-village prose writers. Next to the apocalyptic pathos of Rasputin and the Orthodox didacticism of Krupin, Drozd’s text creates quite a contrast by its “closeness … to fairy tales, folk legends, and the

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25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

Notes to pages 190–5

stylized ‘popular’ genre of Gogol’’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” and by the author’s “deliberately ironic touch” (94). Yet Peterson believes that situating Yrii in this context is justified since the novel demonstrates the author’s “belief in the superiority of patriarchal values of village life,” which is “viewed nostalgically as the mythic golden age” (95). Pavlyshyn, “‘Pozychenyi cholovik’ Ievhena Hutsala: Khymerne v suchasnomu ukraïns’komu romani” (1987), in Kanon ta ikonostas, 95. Pavlyshyn, “Dim na hori Valeriia Shevchuka” (1987), in ibid., 109. For a sampling of the Zhytomyr school, see Danylenko, ed., Vecheria na dvanadtsiat’ person. See Shevchuk, “Sad zhyteis’kykh dumok,” 72. Ibid., 69–70. The term malorosiistvo was coined, in an eponymous 1959 essay, by the émigré modernist poet Evhen Malaniuk to signify the deformation of the Ukrainian psyche under Russian colonial rule (and, more broadly, of any native psyche under colonial rule). See Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, ix. For an excellent analysis of one of Shevchuk’s novellas that is set in the present but develops a worldview shaped by the philosophy of Hryhorii Skovoroda, “Misiatseva zozul’ka z lastiv’iachoho hnizda” (The moon’s cuckoo from the swallow’s nest, 1992), see Parts, “‘The Sedulous Providence of Nature.’” Skovoroda, Tvory. See Bilaniuk, “An Introduction to the Theological Thought of Hryhorij Skovoroda,” 251. Shevchuk, “Velykyi myslytel’ ukraïns’koho narodu,” in Skovoroda, Tvory, 12. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 15. Pavlyshyn, Kanon ta ikonostas, 119. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 104. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178. Deleuze, The Fold, 3, 33. Louis Couturat, ed., Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz (Paris, 1903), 614–15, quoted in ibid., 6. See Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, 173–286. Derrida himself stresses the connection between the hymen and the fold but without reference to Leibniz. Deleuze, The Fold, 35. Pavlyshyn, Kanon ta ikonostas, 111.

Notes to pages 196–205 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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Deleuze, The Fold, 68. Ibid., 25. See Slemon, “Magic Realism,” 411. See Shevchuk, Ptakhy z nevydymoho ostrova, 4. The thematic (and occasionally even structural) parallels between this text (written in 1978) and one of the best-known postmodernist novels, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (pub. 1980), are remarkable. See Piwowarska, “Dim na hori,” 57. Deleuze, The Fold, 85. Shevchuk, “Na poli smyrennomu,” in Ptakhy z nevydymoho ostrova, 184. Piwowarska, “Dim na hori,” 57. Pavlyshyn, Kanon ta ikonostas, 151. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177–8. Deleuze, The Fold, 125. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 31. Shevchuk, Try lystky za viknom, 288, 400. Pavlyshyn, Kanon ta ikonostas, 129. Shevchuk, Try lystky za viknom, 348, 432. Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” 128. Ibid., 129. Vynnychuk, “Litopys vid ravlyka,” in Spalakh, 6–12. Prior to the publication of this volume, Vynnychuk’s writings formed a prominent part of Ukrainian samizdat of the 1970s and early 1980s. Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” 131. Vynnychuk, “Laskavo prosymo v Shchurohrad,” 21–2. See in partucular Vynnychuk’s story “Hy-hy-y” (1979, pub. 1992); “Max & Me.” See the discussion of Norma in chapter 2 of this study. Ul’ianenko, Stalinka, 5–96. See Zborovs’ka, “Mistychna bezodnia u prozi Olesia Ul’ianenka,” in Feministychni rozdumy, 160–78. Ul’ianenko comments: “The novel’s content is shot through by one symbol: the black sun of paganism is setting, breaking bones, tearing muscle, saturating the air with rays of cadaver stench, but the sun of Christianity is rising – it will rise” (quoted in ibid., 170). Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 185. Deleuze, The Fold, 137.

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Notes to pages 206–11

chapter seven 1 Makdisi, “The Empire Renarrated,” 537. 2 For a comprehensive mapping of this paradigm shift in Ukrainian letters, see Andrukhovych and Ieshkiliev, eds, Povernennia demiurhiv; the first part of this volume is structured as an encyclopedia and the second as an anthology of representative texts. A revised and expanded version of this volume is available at http://www.ji.lviv.ua/ji-library/pleroma/zmist.htm. 3 See the entry on Bu-Ba-Bu by Volodymyr Ieshkiliev, in Andrukhovych and Ieshkiliev, eds, Povernennia demiurhiv, 35; and Hrycak, “The Coming of ‘Chrysler Imperial.’” 4 Neborak in the 1990s continued publishing poetry but also launched several other projects, such as a rock music performance/recording, NEBOROCK, as well as journalism and literary criticism. For a sampling of his writing in different genres, see his book Povernennia v Leopolis as well as the volume of his collected poems, Litostroton (2001), and the bilingual The Flying Head (2005). Irvanets’ has been involved in teaching, journalism, and theatre, returning to the literary spotlight with the publication of a dystopian novel, Rivne/Rovno (2002). 5 Additionally, a new group project, Maskul’t, launched by Andrukhovych in January 2003 together with two younger poets, Andrii Bondar and Serhii Zhadan (both b. 1974), has emerged as a new coil sui generis in the Bu-Ba-Bist spiral. 6 See Riabchuk, “Zamist’ pisliamovy do ‘Rekreatsii,’” 117. 7 See Bakhtin, “Rable i Gogol’,” in Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable, 528. 8 Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” 65. 9 Ibid., 78–9, emphasis in the original. 10 Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 29–30, emphasis in the original. 11 Ibid., 30, emphasis in the original. 12 Stallybrass and White, The Poetics and Politics, 200–1, emphasis in the original. 13 Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 31. Such utopian quasi- or pseudorevolutions are part and parcel of Ukraine’s national history. This aspect marked the crucial difference between the February 1917 revolution in Russia and the Easter 1917 events in Kyiv, celebrated in one of the key texts of Ukrainian modernism, Pavlo Tychyna’s poem “Zolotyi homin” (The golden noise), whose title was appropriated by the 1990 festival mentioned earlier. 14 Agamben, The Coming Community, 85–7. 15 For representative retrospective examples, see Bondar, “The Best Color in the World” (April 2005); and Andrukhovych’s contributions to the round table

Notes to pages 212–16

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“Iskusstvo. Revolutsiia. Kontrrevoliutsiia” (Art, revolution, counter-revolution, January 2005) at http://www.scilla.ru/works/uprdem/krstukr.html. 16 Irvanets’, “Turbatsiia mas: Himn-oda ‘Bu-Ba-Bu,’” in Andrukhovych, Irvanets’, and Neborak, Bu-Ba-Bu: T.v.o./…/ry, 80. 17 Neborak, “Bubon,” in ibid., 143. The alliteration of the original, which continuously repeats the syllables of the group’s name, Bu-Ba-Bu, is impossible to render in English, but the literal translation would be approximately the following: Paint a blue broad the age looks with its lips boo to the dithyrambs boo to taboos bu-ba-bu will show you a thing or two a hump grows poetry inside a hump there’s a struggle with money but bu-ba-bu will come as a mutiny the head is weak from the ABC’s a bard explodes with his lips what the world hisses with – the theatre shouts you’ll play the poem you are worth you’ll get to heaven (or to montmartre) boo to death and boo to immortality and boo and bah and bu-ba-bu. 18 Hundorova, “‘Bu-Ba-Bu,’ karnaval i kich,” 14. 19 Ibid. 20 Irvanets’, “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” and “Liubit’! …,” in Andrukhovych, Irvanets’, and Neborak, Bu-Ba-Bu: T.v.o./…/ry, 82–3 and 87. 21 Neborak, “Pisen’ka pro Lialiu-Bo,” in ibid., 150. 22 See in particular Fanon, “On National Culture” (1959). 23 See the section by Andrukhovych “Samiilo Nemyrych ta inshi bandyty” (Samiilo Nemyrych and other bandits), in Andrukhovych, Irvanets’, and Neborak, Bu-ba-bu: T. v. o. /…/ ry, 29–54; the story itself, “Samiilo z Nemyrova, prekrasnyi rozbyshaka,” is on 29–38. 24 Andrukhovych, “Samiilo z Nemyrova, prekrasnyi rozbyshaka”, in ibid., 37. 25 Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 296. 26 Andrukhovych, “Kozak Iamaika,” in Andrukhovych, Irvanets’, and Neborak, Bu-ba-bu: T. v. o. /…/ ry, 53; my English translation of the poem appears in Luchuk and Naydan, eds, One Hundred Years, 625.

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Notes to pages 216–22

27 This Ukrainian Cossack/Jamaican hybridity reappears in Andrukhovych’s novel Perverziia (Perverzion), which features among its characters a Jamaican Ukrainian poet, John Paul Oshchyrko. 28 For the development of the concepts of deterritorialization and nomadology, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, and for the first concept, also their earlier volume, Anti-Oedipus. On the concept of heterotopia, see chapter 3 of the present study. 29 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 8–9. 30 See, for instance, Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora; and Lavie and Swedenburg, eds, Displacement, Diaspora. The focus of these valuable volumes is on the experiences of diasporas as displaced group identities, mostly within the sociological and anthropological framework. 31 Although the recent immigrants from Ukraine have sometimes been referred to in North America as “the fourth wave,” this is probably the least united or organized Ukrainian immigrant community ever. 32 Andrukhovych, “Rekreatsiï,” in Rekreatsiï: Romany, 48; Recreations, 37, emphasis in the original. 33 The Baroque, significantly, is absent from Bakhtin’s historical narrative of the evolution of the carnival/grotesque – from the Renaissance he moves directly to Neoclassicism, which for him constitutes a radical break in the evolution of the grotesque – thus one might infer that the Baroque grotesque for Bakhtin was a continuation of the Medieval/Renaissance paradigm; see Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable, 25, 41. 34 Ibid., 17, emphasis in the original. 35 Ibid., 40, emphasis in the original. 36 Ibid., 44–5, emphasis added. 37 Personal conversation between Andrukhovych and the author, in IvanoFrankivs’k, in October 1999. The indebtedness of Andrukhovych’s writing to Hoffmann, Gogol’, and also the “Reisebilder” cycle of poems by Heine is argued by Iurii Sherekh (George Y. Shevelov) in his essay “Ho-Hai-Ho: Pro prozu Iuriia Andrukhovycha i z pryvodu,” in Andrukhovych, Rekreatsiï: Romany, 257–68. 38 Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable, 49. 39 Andrukhovych, “Rekreatsiï,” in Rekreatsiï: Romany, 67–8; Recreations, 64–5, translation slightly modified; in his translation, Pavlyshyn followed the initial 1992 journal version of the text, while Andrukhovych later made some minor but significant changes to the text. 40 Naydan, “Ukrainian Prose of the 1990s,” 52. 41 As Andrukhovych notes (see Riabchuk, “Zamist’ pisliamovy do ‘Rekreatsii,’” 118), the August 1991 putsch in Moscow coincided with the Chervona Ruta Festival in Zaporizhzhia.

Notes to pages 222–32 42 43 44 45

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51 52 53

Andrukhovych, “Moskoviada,” in Rekreatsiï: Romany, 122. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 148. The parallels between Moskoviada and Konwicki’s novel are discussed in Zabuzhko, “Pol’s’ka ‘kul’tura’ i my, abo malyi apokalipsys moskoviady,” in Khroniky vid Fortinbrasa, 314–25, especially 322–5. See, for instance, Pavlychko’s reading of Moskoviada in her “Facing Freedom,” 17, a surprisingly reductive interpretation for Pavlychko, one of the most nuanced and sensitive critics of modern Ukrainian literature. Makdisi, “The Empire Renarrated,” 543–4. See Andrukhovych, Perverziia, 35–42; Perverzion, 35–41. See the quotation from Makdisi, “The Empire Renarrated,” 537, at the beginning of this chapter. An abbreviated version of Andrukhovych’s cycle of poems “Lysty v Ukraïnu” appears as an appendix in Andrukhovych, “Moskoviada,” in Rekreatsiï: Romany; the quotation is from poem X, lines 13–14. Makdisi, “The Empire Renarrated,” 543–4. Ibid., 546. See the discussion of a “postmodernism of resistance” in the opening chapter.

chapter eight 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 78, 90–104. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 25. McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 352–4. Ibid., 355–6. Yuval-Davis and Anthias, eds, Woman—Nation—State, 7. McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 357. Ibid., 359, emphasis in the original. See Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 151, discussed in McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 360. Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” is included in his A Dying Colonialism. McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 360. See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 13, 141–3. McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 361. Ibid., 361–2, emphasis in the original; see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 63. McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 363. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 234. McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 363–4. Ibid., 364.

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Notes to pages 233–9

18 See Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, 35, 37–8, 42, 53, discussed in McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 364–5, emphasis in the original. 19 McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 366, referencing Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, 49, 51. 20 McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 367–8. 21 Ibid., 378, emphasis in the original. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 378–9. 24 Ibid., 380–1. 25 Ibid., 383–4. 26 Women’s Section of the anc, quoted in ibid., 384. 27 McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 384. 28 Ibid., 384–5. 29 Ibid., 385, 387. 30 The beginning of this remarkable flowering can be dated back to Pavlychko’s essay “Chy potribna ukraïns’komu literaturoznavstvu feministychna shkola?” Western-based scholars, of course, have helped in the evolvement of this phenomenon. Among the leading representatives of feminism in Ukrainian studies in the West are Martha Bohachesky-Chomiak, Marian Rubchak, and Halyna Koscharsky. 31 See, for instance, the writing of Natalka Bilotserkivets’, Ievheniia Kononenko, Sofiia Maidans’ka, Mariia Matios, Halyna Pahutiak, and Svitlana Pyrkalo, to name just a few. 32 For an instructive overview, see Rubchak, “Mif zhenstvennosti.” 33 See Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns’kii literaturi, 2nd ed., 25–94 (the first edition of this book came out in 1997). A version of Pavlychko’s interpretation of the relationship between Kobylians’ka and Ukraïnka was published in English as “Modernism vs. Populism in Fin-de-Siècle Ukrainian Literature: A Case of Gender Conflict.” 34 See Pavlychko, Natsionalizm, seksual’nist’, oriientalizm: Skladnyi svit Ahatanhela Kryms’koho (Nationalism, sexuality, Orientalism: The complex world of Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi, 2000). Pavlychko died in a tragic accident on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Her untimely death dealt a major blow to Ukrainian intellectual life. In addition to her work as a scholar and literary translator, she was also the founder of Osnovy, a major scholarly publishing house. 35 See Waugh, Practicing Postmodernism, Reading Modernism and Feminine Fictions. 36 See Aheieva, Poetesa zlamu stolit’: Tvorchist’ Lesi Ukraïnky v postmodernii interpretatsii (A poetess of the turn of the century: Lesia Ukraïnka’s creative work in postmodern interpretation, 1999) and Hundorova, ProIavlennia slova: Dyskursiia

Notes to pages 240–1

37

38 39

40

321

rann’oho ukrains’koho modernizmu: Postmoderna interpretatsiia (The revelation/ “ego-fication” of the word: The discursive processes of early Ukrainian modernism: A postmodern interpretation, 1997). The main publication of the Kharkiv Centre for Gender Studies, Gendernye issledovaniia, edited by the centre’s director, Irina Zherebkina, has featured Russian translations of the work of numerous Western feminist and queer scholars, such as Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Julia Kristeva, bell hooks, Gayle Rubin, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Chantal Mouffe, Juliet Mitchell, Rosi Braidotti, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In addition, Zherebkina has published a book entitled Prochti moe zhelanie: Postmodernizm, psikhoanaliz, feminizm (Read my desire: Postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, 2000), which offers basically a concise paraphrase of volumes and volumes of Western, mostly English-language scholarship. However, all these publications are plagued by fairly frequent mistakes, mistranslations, and mistransliterations of personal names; additionally, the school unnecessarily jargonizes its own writing and seems to cultivate opacity for its own sake (apparently in imitation of some of the English-language writing that it has encountered and in aspiration for discursive authority). The Kharkiv school has also been running, since 1997, annual summer schools in gender studies in Foros, Crimea. While the schools have made an invaluable contribution by familiarizing younger scholars from the ex-ussr and Eastern Europe with gender and feminist scholarship, they too have shown a russocentric bias in the composition of both the faculty and the student body. At the 2000 school, which I visited, the linguistic/cultural problems were quite palpable. The summer school that the Kyiv Centre ran the same year offered, by contrast, a picture of multicultural and multilingual harmony and cooperation. See Zherebkina, “Kto boitsia feminizma v byvshem sssr?” in Zherebkina, ed., Femina Postsovietica, 54. Additional support for such a reading of the work of the Kharkiv school is provided by the fact that in their writing, Ukrainian culture is invariably objectified and described from a symbolic distance (as a foreign culture, in other words), while their discussions of Russian culture markedly lack this symbolic distance. The title’s allusion to Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious is misleading: in the process of appropriating the term, Zherebkina, Zhenskoe politicheskoe, misinterprets it as a “prioritizing of symbolic interpretive reality over what we are used to denote by the word ‘reality’” (12), a formulation that has little, if anything, to do with Jameson’s call for “priority of the political interpretation of literary texts” and which is a far cry from Jameson’s vision of the impact that the notion of “text” has made in recent scholarship “by extrapolating the notion of ‘discourse’ or ‘writing’ onto objects previously thought to be ‘realities’ or objects in the real world” and “by displacing our attention to its [an object’s] constitution as

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Notes to pages 241–4

an object and its relationship to the other objects thus constituted”; see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 17, 296–7, emphasis in the original. Zherebkina goes on to posit “the national imaginary” as her “book’s main concept” (13) and proceeds to operate mostly within the parameters of a vulgar “social Lacanianism.” For a comprehensive critique of Zherebkina’s book, see Bohachevsky-Chomiak, “Tender navkolo genderu.” This particular formulation (“tainaia voina protiv russkoiazychnogo naseleniia”) can be found in Zherebkina Zhenskoe politicheskoe, 65 (the entire volume is overwhelmed by a disturbing pervasive rhetoric of violence). And as for the statesanctioned language-specific violence, in post-Soviet independent Ukraine it rather befalls the ukrainophone population, such as police violence against the anti-presidential protesters in the spring of 2001, when being young and ukrainophone was often deemed sufficient criteria for beating and detention – a “language profiling,” as it were, of those who “rock the boat.” Zherebkina, “Kto boitsia,” in Zherebkina, ed., Femina Postsovietica, 43. Ibid., 43–4. Ibid., 44–6. Ibid., 53. I wonder what would be the reaction if an Afrikaner woman made a similar pronouncement concerning the Zulu or Xhosa language. Ibid., 59–62. A telling example may be found in Zhenskoe politicheskoe when Zherebkina interprets Taras Shevchenko’s poems empathizing with young women seduced and abandoned by the empire’s soldiers and then ostracized by their native peasant communities (an incident of this kind, witnessed by Shevchenko in his teenage years, deeply traumatized him for life) as an example of “nourishing the national fantasies of taking pleasure in the hatred of the Other and his customs” and of “sexualizing the myth of the Enemy” (76–8). If anything, these poems constitute a powerful critique of patriarchal power structures within both the empire and the Ukrainian peasant community, and Shevchenko throughout his career champions the pokrytka single mother as a heroic character (even reinterpreting the figure of Virgin Mary in these terms). For the original presentation, see Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Feminists despite Themselves. See Zborovs’ka, “Taras Shevchenko u ‘zhinochykh studiiakh’” (Taras Shevchenko in “women’s studies”), in Feministychni rozdumy, 39–53, especially 47–53. Zherebkin seems to have trouble with geography: Ukrainian Cossack lands are southwest of central Russia. Zherebkin, “Seksual’nost’ v Ukraine,” 231. Ibid., 232.

Notes to pages 245–51

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54 The second part of Zherebkin’s “Femina Postsovietica,” dealing with literature, was reprinted under the title “Muzhskie i zhenskie fantazii: Politiki seksual’nosti v postsovetskoi natsional’noi literature” (Masculine and feminine fantasies: The policies of sexuality in post-Soviet national literature), in Gendernye issledovaniia 3 (1999): 275–96, the only essay in that issue under the rubric “Gender i natsionalizm” (Gender and nationalism). Note the use of “national” in the title, which begs one to ask whether there is a literature that is not national to some extent? For Zherebkin, of course, the answer is affirmative, and the “non-national,” naturally, is metropolitan; the empire hijacks universality once again. 55 Zherebkin, “Femina Postsovietica,” 297, 329. It does not seem to occur to Zherebkin that embarking on an investigation armed with his “working hypothesis” makes for a very biased study (not a single case when reality – as he interprets it – contradicts or at least complicates his “working hypothesis” is mentioned in his text). 56 Fortunately, in 2001 a sensitive and nuanced Russian translation of Moskoviada was published by one of Russia’s leading presses, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (which surely would not touch the monster described by Zherebkin), so the Russian-speaking audience can now experience the text first-hand. 57 Zherebkin, “Femina Postsovietica,” 311. 58 Only a biological reductionist – and they supposedly are a target of Zherebkin’s criticism – would put these authors into one and the same series. 59 Ibid., 323. 60 Ibid., 325. 61 See Zborovs’ka, Feministychni rozdumy, 6, 8–10; and Rudnyts’ka, “Neporozuminnia z feminizmom.” This topic is also taken up by Vira Aheieva in her essay “Khto boït’sia pryvydu matriarkhatu?” (Who’s afraid of the ghost of matriarchate?) in the May 1999 issue of Krytyka, and in the discussion by Medvid’, Andrukhovych, and Aheieva herself occasioned by this article in the following issue. 62 von Sacher-Masoch, “Zhinochi obrazky z Halychyny,” in Vybrani tvory, 21, trans. Ivan Herasym. 63 See Larysa Tsybenko, “Pisliamova,” in ibid., 366. 64 Vynnychuk, “Liubov Anny-Mariï,” in Divy nochi, 120–4. 65 Vynnychuk, Divy nochi, 3–119. 66 Vynnychuk’s Roxolana is very different from the protagonist of Ukraine’s first national soap opera, which was based on her story and broadcast on national television in the summer of 1997. In it, one of the main intrigues revolved around the question of whether Roxolana would succeed in her plan to secretly baptize her son, the future sultan. 67 The inscription on the copy of the book that Vynnychuk presented to Prof. Michael Naydan.

324 68 69 70 71

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80

Notes to pages 251–5

Vynnychuk, Divy nochi, 51. See Koznarsky, “Mapping the West” and “A shcho pid spodom?” See Danylenko, “U poshukakh demonichnoï zhinky.” See, for instance, Zborovs’ka, Feministychni rozdumy, 108–9. This is far less the case in the mature writing of Andrukhovych than in that of his fellow Bu-BaBists. For his statement regarding feminist concerns in contemporary Ukrainian culture and in his own work, see Andrukhovych’s response to Vira Aheieva in the June 1999 issue of Krytyka. A revised and expanded Ukrainian-language version of Zabuzhko, “Contemporary Ukraine,” entitled “Zhinka-avtor u kolonial’nii kul’turi, abo znadoby do ukraïns’koï gendernoï mifolohiï” (A woman author in a colonial culture, or Tackling the Ukrainian gender mythology), appears in the volume of Zabuzhko’s essays Khroniky vid Fortinbrasa: Vybrana eseïstyka 90-kh (The Fortinbras chronicles: Selected essays of the 1990s), 152–93. On this, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 43ff. For an articulation of this imperative, see “Erotyka i ukraïns’kyi pobut” (Eroticism and Ukrainian daily life) by Ievheniia Kononenko, a prominent Ukrainian woman writer, who offers a somewhat tongue-in-cheek elaboration of the thesis that “rank-and-file Ukrainians protect their image as the world’s most chaste nation” (“peresichni ukraïntsi oberihaiut’ svii imidzh naitsnotlyvishoï v sviti natsiï”) and calls on us to nurture the discourse of “the Ukrainian Eros” (122). Goscilo, Dehexing Sex, 89. On the latter topic, see in particular Zabuzhko’s scholarly monograph Filosofiia ukraïns’koï ideï ta ievropeis’kyi kontekst: Frankivs’kyi period (The philosophy of the Ukrainian idea in the European context: The Franko period). See Zabuzhko’s first collection, Travnevyi inii (May hoarfrost, 1985). See in particular Zabuzhko’s poems “Ekskursiia na Solovky” (An excursion to the Solovki) and “Portret K.M. Hrushevs’koï v iunosti” (A portrait of K.M. Hrushevs’ka as a young woman), in Dyryhent ostann’oï svichky, 24, 106–7. The daughter of the great Ukrainian historian and the nation’s first president, Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866–1934), Kateryna Hrushevs’ka perished during the Stalinist purges. See, for instance, Zabuzhko, “Korabl’ durniv” (The ship of fools) and “Komentar do dii sv. apostoliv” (Commentary to the acts of the apostles), in ibid., 37, 96–7. An excerpt from the novel in the English translation by Halyna Hryn, accompanied by her interview with Zabuzhko, was published in AGNI 53 (2001): 3–16 and 17–22.

Notes to pages 256–9

325

81 Zabuzhko, “Zadzerkallia: Pani Merzhyns’ka,” in Avtostop, 73–5; “Through the Looking Glass: Mrs. Merzhynsky,” in A Kingdom of Fallen Statues, 14–16, trans. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps. 82 Zabuzhko, “Ofeliia—Gertrudi,” in Avtostop, 65–6; “Ophelia to Gertrude,” in A Kingdom of Fallen Statues, 11–13, trans. Marco Carynnyk. Ophelia seems to be one of Zabuzhko’s favourite figures; several earlier poems are also written from her point of view. 83 Zabuzhko, “Klitemnestra,” in Avtostop, 67–9; “Clytemnestra,” in A Kingdom of Fallen Statues, 3–5, trans. Lisa Sapinkopf. 84 Zabuzhko, “Dorohoiu do pekla,” in Avtostop, 33–4; “On the Way to Hell,” in A Kingdom of Fallen Statues, 47–8, trans. Lisa Sapinkopf. 85 Zabuzhko, “Lyst iz dachi,” in Avtostop, 53–4; “Letter from the Summer House,” in A Kingdom of Fallen Statues, 39–40, trans. Douglas Burnet Smith. 86 Zabuzhko, “Avtostop,” in Avtostop, 61–4; “Hitchhiking,” in A Kingdom of Fallen Statues, 49–51, trans. Askold Melnyczuk. 87 Nevertheless, the more recent works by Andrukhovych, beginning with the essay “Vstup do heohrafii” (Introduction to geography) and continued in the novel Perverziia and in later essays, also signal a movement in this direction. 88 Here Zabuzhko’s novel Pol’ovi doslidzhennia is in many respects homologous to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; one is not surprised, then, that Zabuzhko has acknowledged the influence of Plath on her own writing and has translated Plath’s poetry into Ukrainian. I wonder if the influence of Plath might explain the presence of the fairly traditional Freudian overtones that Zborovs’ka detected in the way female desire and identity are portrayed in Pol’ovi doslidzhennia; see Zborovs’ka, Feministychni rozdumy, 109–11. However, I would not go so far as to doubt, as Zborovs’ka does, whether with this markedly Freudian undercurrent in mind, one can still deem the novel a “properly” feminist text (although she never in fact questions the novel’s status as an instance of feminine writing and does believe it to be a major instance of such a mode). 89 Zabuzhko, Pol’ovi doslidzhennia, 99–100, 103. 90 Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 98, 100. 91 See Datsiuk, “Potiah do zhuby.” 92 Zabuzhko, Pol’ovi doslidzhennia, 140. 93 Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 7–8, quoting in the last instance Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 93. 94 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 63. 95 In 2005 Zabuzhko published several sections of an unfinished novel, Muzei pokynutykh sekretiv (Museum of abandoned secrets), continuing the paradigm of these prose pieces.

326

Notes to pages 260–7

96 Zabuzhko, “Ia, Milena”; “I, Milena,” in Kulyk Keefer and Pavlychko, eds, Two Lands, New Visions, 125–60, trans. Marco Carynnyk and Marta Horban. 97 Zabuzhko, “Divchatka,” in Na dobranok, milenium! Suchasna ukraïns’ka proza, a special triple issue of Kur’ier Kryvbasu (1999); translated into English as Girls: A Story (2005). 98 See especially Kobylians’ka’s story “Valse mélancolique” (1898), in Kobylians’ka, Povisti, opovidannia, novely, 523–56. 99 The titles alone of Shevchuk’s collections of novellas, Zhinka-zmiia (The snake woman, 1998) and Bis ploti (The demon of the flesh, 1999), provide ample indication of his tendency toward misogyny, further accentuated by the choice of artwork on their covers. 100 Pavlyshyn, “Ukrainian Literature,” 122. 101 Said, Representation of the Intellectual, 41, emphasis in the original. 102 Zabuzhko, Shevchenkiv mif Ukraïny, 42, emphasis in the original. 103 Ibid., 127, 131. 104 Zabuzhko, “Proshchannia z imperiieiu: Kil’ka shtrykhiv do odnoho portretu,” in Khroniky vid Fortinbrasa, 270–313. 105 See Andrukhovych, “Chornobyl, the Mafia and Me,” 3–5.

conclusion 1 The continuing privileged position occupied not merely by literature but by “high” literary paradigms is evidenced by the fact that in 1999 Russia’s public attention was significantly drawn to the nation’s two biggest literary bestsellers, Viktor Pelevin’s Generation P and Vladimir Sorokin’s Goluboe salo (Blue lard), both of them falling into the category of “high” postmodernist novels. In 2000 the contest was between Tat’iana Tolstaia’s openly experimental novel Kys’ (translated into English as The Slynx) and the series of detective novels by B. Akunin that pioneered a new incarnation of “middlebrow” literature by transforming the detective as a commercial genre through a masterful “cannibalization” of nineteenth-century Russian literary classics. 2 See in particular Barker, ed., Consuming Russia. On visual popular culture, see also Condee, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics. 3 See Abdullaev, Promezhutok (Interval, 1992), Medlennoe leto (Slow summer, 1997), Dvoinoi polden’ (A double noon, 2000), and Nepodvizhnaia poverkhnost’ (Immobile surface, 2003). A comprehensive anthology of the school’s writing appeared in 2001; see Abdullaev, ed., Poeziia i Fergana. A number of texts by the Ferghana school authors are available at http://library.ferghana.ru. 4 For a more detailed discussion of this mode of writing, see Chernetsky, “Queer Performance.”

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Index

Abdullaev, Shamshad, 266 Abuladze, Tengiz, 106 Acmeism, 81, 158 Agamben, Giorgio, 210, 221 Aheyeva, Vira, 237, 239, 248, 323n61, 324n71 Akhmatova, Anna, 127, 301n40 Aksyonov, Vasily, 147, 150 Akunin, B., 326n1 Anashevich, Aleksandr, 170 Anderson, Benedict, 262 Andriichenko, Natalia, 118 Andrukhovych, Yuri, xxi, 37–9, 45, 49, 55, 188, 204, 207, 214–27, 245–6, 258, 264, 316n5, 316– 17n15, 318n27, 318n37, 318n39, 318n41, 323n61, 324n71. See also Bu-Ba-Bu Andrukovich, Polina, 116 Anouilh, Jean, 125 Anthias, Floya, 230 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 122 Appadurai, Arjun, 3–4, 6 Appiah, K. Anthony, 40 Arabov, Yuri, 72, 123 architecture, postmodernist, 13–14, 18, 21, 273n44, 273n47, 275n74

Arenas, Reinaldo, 309n69 Aristotle, 145 Arnold, Matthew, 32 Ashcroft, Bill, 218, 222 Astradur Eysteinsson, 271n30 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 77–8, 105, 126, 153, 208–9, 213–14, 218–21, 318n33. See also carnivalization Balabanov, Aleksei, 282n207 Baldwin, James, 171 Barnes, Djuna, 169 Baroque, 49, 101, 188, 191–5, 197–9, 205, 207, 214, 218–19, 226, 244, 266, 313n15, 318n33 Barth, John, 101, 292n94 Barthelme, Donald, 293n11 Barthes, Roland, xviii, 75–6, 124, 300n29 Basinsky, Pavel, 117, 151–2, 154, 299n9 Bataille, Georges, 180; on general economy, notion of, xvii, 23–4, 30, 143 Baudelaire, Charles, 78 Baudrillard, Jean, 16, 26, 274n63 Beaver, Harold, 161

Beckett, Samuel, 91, 312n1 Belinsky, Vissarion, 46, 283n221 Belov, Vasily, xix, 150–1, 252, 306n17 Bel’tov, Eduard, 283n226 Bely, Andrei, 93, 95, 293n23 Bely, Andrei, Prize, 177, 180 Benjamin, Walter, 101, 137–8, 194, 197–8, 205 Bentham, Jeremy and Samuel, brothers, 43, 282n208 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 31, 105 Berg, Mikhail, 31–2, 278n152 Berry, Ellen E., 115 Beverley, John, 159–60, 309n69 Bhabha, Homi, 37, 51, 187, 215 Bilotserkivets’, Natalka, 320n31 Black Mountain, US poetry school, 170 Blanchot, Maurice, 209 Bloch, Ernst, 187 Blok, Aleksandr, 79, 128 Bloom, Harold, 125 Bocharov, Sergei, 153

356 Bodrov, Sergei, 282n207 Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Martha, 243, 320n30 Bohr, Niels, 24 Bondar, Andrii, 186, 316n5 Borges, Jorge Luis, 89, 214 Bosch, Hieronymus, 257 Braidotti, Rosi, 129, 132–3, 218, 229, 244, 267, 300– 1n33, 321n37 Brezhnev, Leonid, 76, 104, 200 Brodsky, Joseph, 102, 170, 263 Brown, Deming, 95, 144–5 Bu-Ba-Bu, xxi, 49, 53, 55, 207–8, 211–14, 218, 252, 267, 316n5, 317n17, 324n71. See also Andrukhovych, Yuri; Irvanets’, Oleksandr; Neborak, Viktor Büchner, Georg, 84 Buck-Morss, Susan, 8, 11–13 Buford, Bill, 299n7 Bukowski, Charles, 170 Bulatov, Erik, 64, 285n4 Bunin, Ivan, 81 Burroughs, William, 90, 103, 171, 176, 178 Butler, Judith, 321n37 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 111 Calvino, Italo, 90 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 199 Caribbean region, 216, 270n19 carnivalization, xxi, 38, 77–8, 86, 105, 207–13, 218–21, 223, 225, 252, 266. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Carpentier, Alejo, 188 Cartland, Barbara, 26 Casarino, Cesare, 292–3n8 Catherine II (the Great), empress of Russia, 43, 94, 278n150 Caucasus, 42–3, 62, 244 Central Asia, xiv, 43, 282n205 Césaire, Aimé, 262 Chaadaev, Petr, 28, 42

Index Chagall, Marc, 65, 287n28 Chamberlain, Muriel, 272n39 Chapaev, Vasily, 111 Chekhov, Anton, 61, 153 Chepelev, Vasily, 170 Cherny, Sasha, 65 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 109, 148 China, 24–5, 270n19 Chornobyl’, 1986 nuclear accident in, 255, 257, 264 Chuprynka, Hryhory, 251 Cixous, Hélène, xix, 134, 169, 303n65, 321n37 Clark, Katerina, 8, 34 cognitive mapping, xvi, 14, 16, 21, 33, 37–9, 55, 179, 227, 259, 268. See also Jameson, Fredric colonialism, 42–3, 45–7, 49, 51–2, 114, 185, 202, 205, 207, 214–15, 217, 223, 226, 231–3, 240, 244, 246, 249, 252, 258–9, 262, 267. See also imperialism; postcolonialism conceptualism, xiv, xviii, 26, 28, 60–1, 123, 285n4 Connor, Steven, 292n7 Conrad, Joseph, 293n8 Cooper, Dennis, 176 corporeality, representations of, xviii–xix, xxi, 82–6, 102–5, 114–20, 134, 138, 143, 175, 177–8, 227–8, 236–7, 251, 253–4, 256, 258, 260 Cortázar, Julio, 90, 99, 313n17 Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de, 104 cyberpunk writing, 23, 107, 276n276 Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood, 200 Dadaism, 172 Dalton-Brown, Sally, 107 Dante Alighieri, 217, 223 Dark, Oleg, 141 Datsiuk, Serhii, 259 Debrianskaya, Evgenia, 311n112

de Custine. See Custine de Lauretis, Teresa, 321n37 Deleuze, Gilles, xx, 14, 84– 5, 91, 128–9, 156, 195, 198, 205, 218, 244, 274n63, 275n83, 278n143, 308n48 Derrida, Jacques, 195, 314n39 de Sade. See Sade Dibrova, Volodymyr, 186, 207, 312n1 Dirlik, Arif, 24 displacement, theme of, 215–18, 222, 224, 226, 257–8, 266 Dobychin, Leonid, 166 Doctorow, E.L., 22, 104 Dolmatovsky, Evgeny, 81 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 93, 95, 102, 141, 267, 293n23, 296n63 Dowsett, Colin, 293n23 Drozd, Volodymyr, 313–14n19 Druk, Vladimir, xviii, 62, 65–73, 287n26, 287n38 During, Simon, 37 Eco, Umberto, 315n46; on open work, notion of, 38 Egunov, Andrei, 166 Einstein, Albert, 106 Eisenstein, Sergei, xiii Emerson, Caryl, 280n178 Engelstein, Laura, 154 Epshtein. See Epstein Epstein, Mikhail, 27–34, 41, 78, 103, 277n133, 278n148, 300n26 Erofeev. See Erofeyev Erofeyev, Venedikt, 10, 35, 223–4 Erofeyev, Viktor, xviii, xix, 102–6, 147, 149–50, 153, 159, 296n58, 298n2, 306n10, 306n17 Esenin, Sergei, 72, 179 Etkind, Aleksandr, 42–3, 281n204, 282n205, 282n209 Fanailova, Elena, 116 Fanon, Frantz, 45, 49, 53, 214, 230–3, 240, 242, 246, 253

Index Faris, Wendy B., 187 Faulkner, William, 99, 203 feminine writing, xix, 134, 169, 302–3n65, 325n88. See also women’s writing feminism, xix, xxi, 115, 129, 229–30, 233, 235–41, 243, 247–9, 253, 255, 298n2, 299–300n20, 325n88 Ferghana, Uzbekistan, Russian-language writing, school of, 266, 326n3 Filians’ky, Mykola, 251 Filonov, Pavel, 105, 287n28 Filosofov, Dmitry, 155 Flaubert, Gustave, 76, 172 Forrester, Sibelan, 301n40 Foster, Hal, xv–xvi, 11–13, 36; on postmodernism of resistance, notion of, xvi– xvii, 12, 41, 159, 173, 227, 253, 265 Foucault, Michel, 21, 42, 124, 267; on heterotopia, xviii, 88–9, 218 Frampton, Kenneth, 14, 270n10 Freidin, Gregory, 269n2 Freud, Sigmund, 78, 84, 117, 289n64, 325n88 Furmanov, Dmitry, 111 Futurism, 73, 82, 172–3

Genet, Jean, 103, 156, 169– 70, 172–3 Gilbert, Sandra M., 125, 132 Ginsberg, Allen, 176, 178 globalization, xiv, 3–6, 39, 43–6, 55, 176, 185, 210, 217, 227, 265, 267–8 Glushko, Tat’iana, 115 Godard, Jean-Luc, 91, 122 Goethe, J.-W., 32 Gogol’, Nikolai, 93, 95, 189, 192, 208, 253, 262, 293n23, 294n25, 313n15, 314n19, 318n37 Gol’dshtein, Aleksandr, 153 Gorenko, Anna, 116 Goscilo, Helena, 92, 102–3, 116–17, 119–21, 254, 299n5 Gounod, Charles, 65 Grabowicz, George, 46–7 Grant, Bruce, 41 Greimas, A.J., 89 Griffiths, Gareth, 218, 222 Grosz, Elizabeth, 299n20, 303n65 Groys, Boris, 25–6, 30–1, 42, 59, 78, 82, 277n123, 277n125 Guattari, Félix, 14, 84–5, 91, 128, 156, 218 Gubar, Susan, 125, 132 Guro, Elena, 73

Galicia. See Halychyna Gandhi, Leela, 52, 258–9 García Canclini, Nestor, 3–4, 270n8 García Lorca, Federico, 170 García Márquez, Gabriel, 160, 196, 313n17 Gareyev, Zufar, 166 gay writing, xix–xx, 151–81, 267, 306n4 Gehry, Frank, 273n47 gender, representations of, xviii, xxi, 114–15, 121–2, 126–8, 131–3, 141–2, 175, 181, 227–31, 233–8, 241, 244–9, 252–61, 267, 304n95 Genis, Aleksandr, 83, 112

Habermas, Jürgen, 12, 17, 159 Halychyna, 38–9, 250 Haraway, Donna, 298n4, 301n33 Harvey, David, 269n7, 272n42, 274n50 Hassan, Ihab, 13 Healey, Dan, 312n118 Hegel, G.W.F., 24, 34, 232 Heine, Heinrich, 318n37 Heise, Ursula, 90, 114, 293n13 heterotopia, xviii, 79, 87–91, 94, 102, 105–6, 110–11, 113, 266, 292–3n8. See also Foucault, Michel Hobsbawm, Eric, 231 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 220–1, 225, 318n37

357 Homer, 256 homosexuality, depictions of, xix–xx, 61, 79–80, 146–81, 238–9, 244–5, 260–1, 289n61, 296n64, 305n1, 309n69 Honchar, Nazar, 207 Honchar, Oles’, 191 hooks, bell, 321n37 Horace, 286n16 Hrushevs’ka, Kateryna, 324n78 Hrushevs’ky, Mykhailo, 324n78 Hryn, Halyna, 324n80 Hundorova, Tamara, 212–13, 237, 239, 248 Hutcheon, Linda, xviii, 18–19, 22, 90–1, 187 Hutsalo, Yevhen, 189–90 Huyssen, Andreas, 16–18, 25–6 hybridity, notion of, 31, 43–5, 214–16, 219–20, 318n27 Iarkevich. See Yarkevich Ieshkiliev. See Yeshkiliev Il’chenko, Oleksandr, 189–90 Il’ianen, Aleksandr, 171 Il’in, Il’ia, 33, 36 Ilnytzkyj, Oleh, 46 imperialism, xvii, xxi, 39, 41, 206–7, 222–4, 226, 238, 240, 243, 262–3 Internet, xiv, 11, 269n3, 281n197 intertextuality, 19, 22, 60, 99, 101, 103–4, 114, 116, 137, 174, 207–8, 225. See also palimpsest Ireland, as analogy to Ukraine’s colonial condition, 46–7 Irigaray, Luce, xix, 28, 134, 302n65, 321n37 Irten’ev, Igor’, xviii, 62–5, 73 Irvanets’, Oleksandr, xxi, 207, 212–13, 316n4 Isaev, Egor, 71 Iskander, Fazil’, 54 Iskrenko, Nina, xix, 116, 122–33, 138, 143–5, 255,

358 300n23, 301n39, 305n104, 305n106 Ivan IV (the Terrible), Tsar of Russia, 164 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 170 Izdryk, Yuri, 186, 201 Jackson, George, 156 James, Henry, 155 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 9–10, 13, 15, 24, 34, 36–7, 50, 72, 101, 104, 137–8, 143, 187–8, 201, 270n15, 271–2n32, 276n102, 321–2n40; on cognitive mapping, xvi, 4, 35, 113, 227, 265, 280n178; on globalization, 4–6, 269n1, 271n32; on national allegory, xx, 53–5, 226, 254, 258; on postmodernism, xvii, 4, 8, 19–23, 32–3, 113, 138, 143, 269n1 Jencks, Charles, 13–14, 18, 273n43 Joyce, James, 28, 168, 223–4 Kabakov, Ilya, 61, 285n3, 285n4 Kafka, Franz, 91, 156 Kant, Immanuel, 86, 210, 262 Kapranov, Dmytro and Vitaly, brothers, 267 Karlinsky, Simon, 151, 154 Katrak, Ketu H., 229 Kaverin, Veniamin, 291n81 Kelly, Catriona, 300n23 Khalipov, Viktor, 279n175 Kharitonov, Evgeny, xix–xx, 151–171, 177, 267, 299n9, 307n24, 307n26, 308n53, 309n56, 311n98 Kharms, Daniil, 66, 287n31 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 82, 164 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 71 Khrushchev, Nikita, 270n15 Khvyl’ovy, Mykola, 53, 254 khymerna proza, 189–90, 192 Kibirov, Timur, 35 Kiev. See Kyiv

Index Kirkconnell, Watson, 283n219 Ki˘s, Danilo, 218, 295n42 Klekh, Igor’, 55 Klimontovich, Nikolai, 153, 156, 158, 165 Klossowski, Pierre, 77, 292n95 Kobryns’ka, Natalia, 238 Kobylians’ka, Ol’ha, 238, 254, 260, 320n33 Komar, Vitaly, xvi, 59, 285n4 Kon, Igor’, 305n1 Konchalovsky, Andrei, 282n207 Kononenko, Yevhenia, 320n31, 324n74 Konwicki, Tadeusz, 224, 319n45 Korolenko, Vladimir, 104 Koscharsky, Halyna, 320n30 Kostenko, Lina, 246–7 Kostomarov, Mykola, 200 Kotliarevs’ky, Ivan, 189, 216 Kozhelianko, Vasyl’, 186, 267 Koznarsky, Taras, 252 Kramer, Hilton, 275n69 Kristeva, Julia, 33, 208–9, 321n37 Kri˘zani´c, Juraj, 244 Kronstadt, 1921 uprising in, 92, 94 Kruglov, Sergei, 170 Krupin, Vladimir, 313n19 Kryms’ky, Ahatanhel, 238 Kuhn, Annette, 302–3n65 Kuitca, Guillermo, xiii, 4 Kuniaev, Stanislav, 71 Kuraev, Mikhail, xviii, 91–7, 294n26 Kuritsyn, Viacheslav, 36, 288n48, 289n51 Kushner, Aleksandr, 71 Kustanovich, Konstantin, 306n10 Kusturica, Emir, 282n207 Kuz’min, Dmitry, 170, 172 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 147, 153, 170 Kyiv, 1,500th anniversary of the founding of, festival, 29–30

Lacan, Jacques, 23, 30, 83–4, 231 Language poetry, US, 23, 163 Laputin, Evgeny, xviii, 97–101, 295n43 Latin America, xx, 6, 26, 44, 159–60, 187–9, 191, 270n19, 313n17 Lavut, Evgeniya, 116 Layton, Susan, 41 Leibniz, G.W., 195, 198, 314n39 Lenin, Vladimir, 69, 79, 149 Lepky, Bohdan, 251 Lermontov, Mikhail, 104, 135, 287n38 Leskov, Nikolai, 74 Levin, Aleksandr, xviii, 62, 73–5, 287–8n39, 288n43 Limonov, Eduard, 172, 246 Lindsey, Byron, 92 Lipovetsky, Mark, 34–6, 279n166, 279–80n177 Liubavsky, M.K., 282n204 London, Jack, 291n81 Loomba, Ania, 52 Lovell, Stephen, 42 Lu Xun, 54 Luchuk, Ivan, 207 Luckyj, George, 283n226 Lybon’, Semen, 207 Lyotard, Jean-François, 14–16, 32, 40, 274n50 Lysheha, Oleh, 186 magic realism, xx, 186–91, 200–1, 203–4, 207, 250, 261, 313n17 Magritte, René, 112 Mahler, Gustav, 122 Maidans’ka, Sofia, 320 Makanin, Vladimir, 147, 150, 282n207 Makdisi, Saree, 206, 224, 226 Malaniuk, Evhen, 253, 314n24 Malevich, Kazimir, 126–7 Mamedov, Afanasy, 45, 266 Mamin, Yuri, 69 Mandelstam, Osip, 170 Man’kovskaia. See Man’kovskaya

Index Man’kovskaya, Nadezhda, 33–4 Marcadé, Jean-Claude, 172 Marinina, Aleksandra, 115 Marsovich, Ruslan, 303n67 Martí, Jose, 262 Marx, Karl, 20, 24, 280n178, 293n8 Marxism, 20–1, 36, 40, 231 mass culture, xiv, 6, 17, 38, 60, 115, 251, 266 Matios, Maria, 320n31 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 62, 71, 172, 181 McClintock, Anne, 229–36, 243, 248 McHale, Brian, 15, 18, 20, 23, 89, 275n74, 276n116, 293n11 Medvid’, V’iacheslav, 204, 249, 323n61 Meklina, Margarita, 116, 311n112 Melamid, Aleksandr, xvi, 59, 285n4 Mélat, Hélène, 112, 298n87 Melville, Herman, 293n8 Meyerkhold, Vsevolod, 287n39 Mickiewicz, Adam, 262 Mignolo, Walter, 270n14 Miller, Henry, 103, 149 Mitchell, Juliet, 321n37 Modiano, Patrick, 295n42 Modigliani, Amedeo, 132 Mogutin, Yaroslav, xx, 152, 159, 167, 171–81, 267, 311n98, 312n117, 312n132 Moi, Toril, 134, 303n65 Moore, Charles, xvi Moore, David Chioni, 7, 13 Morotskaya, Stella, 116 Moss, Kevin, 162 Mouffe, Chantal, 321n37 Musil, Robert, 274n50 Nabokov, Vladimir, 81, 99–101, 295n50 Narbikova, Valeria, xix, 28, 116, 122, 134–45, 301n42, 302n63, 304n84, 304n95, 305n104

nationalism, xxi, 44–5, 53, 81, 115, 167, 214, 226, 229–36, 239–43, 248, 253–4, 258–9, 261–4, 323n54 Naydan, Michael, 46, 221 Neborak, Viktor, xxi, 207, 213, 316n4 Nedostup, Viktor, 207 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 288n43 Nekrasov, Vsevolod, 307n24 Nepomnyashchy, Catharine T., 291n81 Ngcobo, Loretta, 237 Nicholas I, Emperor of Russia, 94 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 153, 172, 260 OBERIU, 63–6, 173, 213, 286–7n22. See also Kharms, Daniil; Zabolotsky, Nikolai O’Hara, Frank, 170, 176, 186 Oleinikov, Nikolai, 64 Oles’, Oleksandr, 251 Olesha, Yuri, 98 Orange Revolution, November–December 2004, in Ukraine, xv, 45–6, 211, 264 Ortiz, Fernando, 43 Orwell, George, 107–8, 223 Ovid, 217 Owens, Craig, 272n37 Pahutiak, Halyna, 320n31 Palei, Marina, 116 palimpsest, 39, 134–5, 259 Panov, Aleksandr, 152 Paradzhanov, Sergei, 48, 189 Paris, 1968 events in, xxi, 209 Parnok, Sophia, 147 Parry, Benita, 44 Pashkovs’ky, Yevhen, 204 Pasternak, Boris, 71, 79 pastiche, 22–3, 103. See also Jameson, Fredric Pavel (Paul) I, emperor of Russia, 94 Pavlychko, Solomiya (Salomea), 237–9, 248, 319n46, 320n30, 320n34

359 Pavlyshyn, Marko, 49–53, 190, 194–5, 197, 200, 261, 283–4n230, 284n231, 318n39 Pelevin, Viktor, xviii, 55, 107–12, 223, 272n32, 282n207, 297n74, 326n1 Perec, Georges, 23, 276n112 Perelman, Bob, 23, 276n112 Perloff, Marjorie, 8 Peter I (the Great), emperor of Russia, 31, 42, 62 Peterson, Nadya, 313–14n19 Petrarch (Petrarca, Francesco), 141 Petrushevskaya, Liudmila, 116, 141, 257 Pidmohyl’ny, Valerian, 254 Pirandello, Luigi, 112 Plath, Sylvia, 325n88 Plato, 32, 41, 122, 137, 140, 274n63 Platonov, Andrei, 10 Plotnitsky, Arkady, xvii, 23–4 Podervians’ky, Les’, 186 Pohribny, Anatoly, 189 Pokal’chuk, Yuri, 252 Polevoi, Boris, 110 pop art, 59 Popov, Evgeny, 154 postcolonialism, xiv–xv, xvii, xxi, 7–8, 12–13, 36–7, 39–53, 55, 185, 187, 196, 206, 216, 222, 224–9, 239, 246, 253, 258–9, 261, 265, 281n200. See also postcoloniality postcoloniality, xvi, 13, 181, 185, 217, 220, 232, 237, 254, 258–9, 264, 266. See also postcolonialism postcommunism, xvii, 12, 14, 24, 27, 37, 39, 265–6 postmodernism, xiv–xvii, 4, 7–8, 10, 12–41, 48–51, 54–5, 59–60, 87, 89–91, 98, 107, 111, 114, 134–6, 138, 140, 159, 176, 185, 187, 204, 215, 222, 225, 227, 229, 239, 253, 265, 273n42,

360 273n47, 275n69, 298n2. See also postmodernity postmodernity, xiv, xvi, xxi, 39, 87, 126, 136, 179–81, 185, 227, 266, 272n42, 292n8. See also postmodernism Potier, Eugène, 137 Pound, Ezra, 308n35 Pozayak, Yurko, 207 Prigov, Dmitry, 35, 61–2, 153, 166, 285n5, 286n11, 308n46 Prokhas’ko, Taras, 186, 201 Proust, Marcel, 157, 159, 169 Purin, Aleksei, 170 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 68–72, 128, 132, 137, 148, 286n16, 287n34 Pynchon, Thomas, 90 Pyrkalo, Svitlana, 267, 320n31 Quayson, Ato, 40–1, 52 Queneau, Raymond, 76 Rabelais, François, 77, 86, 208 Radov, Egor, 55, 284n251, 298n4 Rasputin, Valentin, 313n19 rhizome, notion of, 14, 16, 145, 221, 258, 274n52, 274n53, 278n143. See also Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix Rich, Adrienne, 267 Riese, Utz, 277n128 Rimbaud, Arthur, 172, 181 Rogozhkin, Aleksandr, 306n10 Rose, Margaret, 272n40 Rothenberg, Jerome, 176 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 94 Roxolana, 251, 323n66 Rozanov, Vasily, xx, 152, 154–6, 165–7, 172, 177, 307–8n35 Rubchak, Marian, 320n30 Rubin, Gayle, 321n37 Rubinshtein, Lev, 60–2, 285n8 Rudnyts’ka, Milena, 259 Rushdie, Salman, 217 Ruslana, 211 Rybakov, Anatoly, 92

Index Ryklin, Mikhail, 76 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, Ritter von, 249–50, 282n209 Sade, D.A.F., Marquis de, xviii, 77, 103, 164, 180, 292n95 Sadlovs’ky, Roman, 207 Sadur, Nina, 116, 141, 156, 158, 166, 308n53 Said, Edward, 36–7, 39–40, 46, 51, 262, 280–1n192 St John, Evangelist, 168 Salih, Tayeb, 224, 246 Sauvy, Alfred, 270n12 Second World, xiv–xvi, xxi– xxii, 3–4, 6–13, 16, 19, 25–6, 30, 39–41, 47, 55, 114–15, 185, 237, 265, 267, 272n32, 273n47. See also three-worlds theory Sedakova, Ol’ga, 16, 300n23 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, xx, 155, 162, 169, 321n37 Sei Shonagon, 168 Sembène, Ousmane, 54, 254 Senchenko, Ivan, 189 sexuality, representations of, xix, xxi, 75, 77, 82–4, 86, 103, 108, 115, 118, 120– 2, 131, 133–4, 138, 144, 148–50, 237–8, 244, 246, 250–2, 254, 258, 267, 296n58, 304n84, 324n74. See also gay writing; homosexuality, depictions of Shakespeare, William, 256 Sharandak, Natal’ia, 311n112 Sharapova, Margarita, 311n112 Shatalov, Aleksandr, 170 Shatunovsky, Mark, 123 Shcherbyts’ky, Volodymyr, 48 Sherekh. See Shevelov Sherman, Timothy, 298n88 Shevchenko, Taras, 46, 200, 238, 243, 253, 259, 261–3, 283n221, 322n48 Shevchenko Prize, 203

Shevchuk, Anatoly, 191 Shevchuk, Valery, xx, 53, 55, 190–200, 214, 252, 261, 314n26 Shevelov, George Y., 318n37 Shlipchenko, Svitlana, 273n44 Shnitke, Alfred, 306n10 Shohat, Ella, 7 Shul’ga, Natal’ia, 311n112 Shvarts, Elena, 116, 300n23 Shved, Pavlo, 280n180, 284n231 Simon, Claude, 23, 276n112 simulacrum, notion of, 16, 26, 28–31, 101, 112, 148, 260, 273n47, 274n63, 275n83 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 10, 153, 172, 271n31 Skoropanova, Irina, 295n43 Skovoroda, Hryhory, 95, 128, 192–4, 198, 314n26 Slezkine, Yuri, 41 Smeliakov, Yaroslav, 81 socialist realism, 26–8, 30–1, 60, 73, 75, 77, 79, 83, 149, 291n81 Sokurov, Aleksandr, 9, 72 Sologub, Fedor, 199 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 28, 92, 165, 275n69 Sophocles, 125 Sorokin, Vladimir, xviii, xix, 62, 65, 75–86, 147–50, 162–3, 202–3, 267, 286n13, 288n48, 288– 9n49, 289n51, 289n61, 290n75, 292n86, 298n2, 307n24, 326n1 Sosiura, Volodymyr, 213 sots-art, xiv, xvi, xviii, 59–60, 64, 71, 73, 75, 82, 87, 186, 285n4, 297n74 South Africa, xxi, 233–6, 248 Spengler, Oswald, 197 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 36–7, 51, 228 Stalin, Joseph, 25–6, 95, 119, 204, 251, 277n125

Index Stalinist culture, 25–6, 30–1, 45, 71–2, 74, 79, 81, 92, 94–5, 98, 106, 203–4 Stallybrass, Peter, 209–10 Stein, Gertrude, 143–4, 305n100, 305n104 Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, brothers, 9 Stus, Vasyl’, 48 Suleri, Sara, 229 Symbolism, Russian, 171, 193 Tagore, Rabindranath, 262 Tang, Xiaobing, 25 Tarantino, Quentin, 292n82 Tarle, E.V., 282n204 Tarasova, Elena, xix, 116–18 Tchaikovsky, Peter, 62 Teliha, Olena, 252 Tertz, Abram. See Sinyavsky, Andrei testimonio, notion of, 159–61, 309n68, 309n69 Theweleit, Klaus, 245 three-worlds theory, 6–7, 12, 265 Thompson, Ewa M., 42 Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989 events in, xxi, 210 Tiffin, Helen, 218, 222 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 199 Tiutiunnyk, Hryhir, 253 Tlostanova, Madina, 43–6, 266, 283n215 Tokareva, Viktoria, 115 Tolstaya, Tat’iana, 116, 141, 267, 326n1 Tolstoy, Aleksei N., 72 Tolstoy, Leo, 50, 79, 126–7, 141, 143, 193, 282n207, 290n75, 294n26 Trotsky, Leon, 94 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 300n23, 301n40

Tupitsyn, Margarita, 26–7, 60, 277n125 Tupitsyn, Victor, 26–7, 277n131 Turgenev, Ivan, 78–9, 168 Tychyna, Pavlo, 316n13 Tynianov, Yuri, 293n23 Ukraïnka, Lesia, 238–9, 254–6, 320n33 Ul’ianenko, Oles’, 203–4, 315n70 Ulitskaya, Liudmila, 116 Vail’, Petr, 291–2n82 Vakarchuk, Sviatoslav, 211 Vaneyeva, Larisa, 116, 141 Vasilenko, Svetlana, xix, 116, 118–22, 299n15 Vattimo, Gianni, 36, 89 Vishevsky, Anatoly, 150 Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka, 75, 83–4, 86 Vodennikov, Dmitry, 170, 267 Volchek, Dmitry, 170 Volos, Anrdei, 45, 266 Vol’vach, Pavlo, 186 von Hagen, Mark, 46, 281n200, 283n217 von Sacher-Masoch. See Sacher-Masoch von Wölfflin. See Wölfflin Vynnychuk, Yuri, xx, 55, 201–2, 250–2, 315n63, 323n67 Wachtel, Andrew, 123 Walcott, Derek, 263 Warhol, Andy, 23, 172, 276n112, 312n117 Waugh, Patricia, 239 White, Allon, 209–10 Whitman, Walt, 181 Wilde, Oscar, 168 Wittig, Monique, xx, 157, 169

361 Wolf, Christa, 301n33 Wölfflin, Eduard von, 198 women’s writing, xviii, 114– 45, 238, 247, 253, 256–7, 260, 298n2. See also feminine writing Yarkevich, Igor’, 154 Yavorivs’ky, Volodymyr, 189 Yeltsin, Boris, 73 Yeshkiliev, Volodymyr, 37–8 Yoshida, Hiroaki, 108 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 230 Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 64–5, 137, 287n28 Zabuzhko, Oksana, xxi, 45, 55, 211, 237, 239, 246–7, 252–64, 283n228, 319n45 Zahrebel’ny, Pavlo, 189 Zamiatin, Evgeny, 133 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 187 Zborovs’ka, Nila, 237, 239, 243, 248, 325n88 Zemliak, Vasyl’, 189 Zhadan, Serhii, 186, 211, 316n5 Zhang, Xudong, 24 Zhdanov, Ivan, 35 Zherebkin, Sergei, 240–8, 261, 322n51, 323n54 Zherebkina, Irina, 240–3, 245, 248, 261, 321n37, 321–2n40, 322n48 Zholdak, Bohdan, 186, 207 Zhovna, Oleksandr, 186 Zhytomyr, Ukrainian prose, school of, 190 ˇ iˇzek, Slavoj, 30 Z Zola, Émile, 203 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 61, 293n23 Zubryts’ka, Maria, 37