working woman, doing her best, alone and lonely – in a word, Petrushevskaya (says the female author of the guide) gives us nothing at all like playful postmodernism, only “harsh realism.”20
One day Anna comes home to find that her daughter, unhinged by their last fight, has taken all her children away. The apartment is deserted. At last Anna is completely alone and needed by no one: the authentic enabling condition for the Underground has arrived. At this point the manuscript breaks off. Doubtless Anna Adrianovna, as she falls silent, recalls the second poem in Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” a tiny lyric of four couplets, the last two of which read: “This woman is sick, / This woman is alone, / Husband in the grave, son in prison, / Pray for me.” The Time: Night is submitted to a publishing house anonymously by the daughter Alyona, and appears to be posthumous. But if this Anna, following her Tolstoyan prototype, has committed suicide in order to punish those who have ceased to need her, that story is discreetly in the margins.
In the vastlyexpandedpoolof Russian literaryplotsbyandaboutwomen, The Time: Night stands out not only because it is written so graphically on the body, where a great deal of the drama of female life is focused. Equally important, women are allowed to be tested and to fail on what was traditionally male terrain (honor, creativity, supporting a family), making use of men’s excuses. Anna Adrianovna doesn’t have a man of her own in sight, to save or to ruin, and she does not perish out of disappointed (or jealous, or unrequited) love – that powerful but narrow and hopelessly cliche?d plot. Is she a tragic figure, a superfluous one, a duplicitous one, perhaps even a comedy villain? As with all first-person narration under the star of Dostoevsky, no single answer suffices. But we can speak to the games being played. The interminable Underground identity game – “Here I am. But don’t pin me down. The real me is over here” – is to a certain extent endorsed by Dostoevsky. He cares that human
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beings not be manipulated or denied their freedom of choice. “Anna” might even be the conventional nomination for this burden of the flesh. In 1990, Viktor Erofeyev’s three-page story, “Anna’s Body,” appeared in an anthology of glasnost-era writings.21 The plot takes place mostly in bed, alone, during one of her nightmares, amid cigarettes and cognac, lamenting her lost youth and the lovers who had jilted her. Various parts of that body had been going out of control for some time: “Sometimes Anna felt that she was Anna Karenina, sometimes – Anna Akhmatova, sometimes just an Anna on the neck.” At the end of her reverie she turned off the light, “passed her dry tongue over her lips, and, as in an old fairy tale, gobbled up the man she loved.”
Viktor Erofeyev (b. 1947, not to be confused with Venedikt Erofeyev, 1933– 88, author of the phantasmagoric Moscow to the End of the Line) is a skilled male practitioner of “women’s prose.” It is no accident that his Anna in Bed eats her men, like some latter-day Baba Yaga. In Erofeyev’s novel Russian Beauty (1990), the high-class prostitute Irina Tarakanova, in search of true love, moves to Moscow, compromises a wide circle of Russian dissidents, then forms a mystical union with an elderly man whose child she conceives after he is already deceased. Hailed as both a “Russian Molly Bloom” and a “Russian Moll Flanders,” Erofeyev’s sex-queen also recalls a more local prototype updated to psychedelic dimensions: Martona, the “debauched woman” of Chulkov’s 1770 Comely Cook.
In 1990, the yearhepublishedRussian Beauty, Erofeyev announced the death of socialist realism and the liberationofthe Russian author from all socio-moral strictures, in a landmark essay titled “A Wake for Russian Literature.” Five years later, in his “Russia’s Fleurs du mal,” he called for a new, unsentimental literature of evil to re-complicate the simplistic psychology of the Soviet period. Post- communist freedom had arrived, and postmodernism could not be far behind. Or perhaps the sequence should be reversed? Mikhail Epstein has argued that postmodernism was born in Russia, in the Russia of the Brezhnev stagnation – post-Stalinist, but still within the rhetorical force field of socialist realism.22 In that unfree, unreal place, fullofruins and scrap-heaps ofanofficial faith system, postmodernism possessed a vigor beyond the wildest dreams of academic theorists in the West.
We are only several decades into this unraveling process and cannot yet know which of the recent generations of writers and works will endure. Soviet communism’s twilight years yielded several precocious candidates. One is Pushkin House (completed 1971, published in Russia 1989) by Andrei Bitov (b. 1937), a piece of “delayed literature” and a carnivalesque “post-mortem on the tradition” that ends up – very much in the Russian manner – confirming the tradition. Pushkin House has been read in a wide variety of ways, from a
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liberal-humanist condemnation of Stalinist oppression (and thus in the Solzhenitsyn line of self-critique, a confession from educated society forced to face up to the camps) through a more absurdist and blankly postmodernist
fantasy.23
Bitov explores a theme much beloved in Russian literature, that of warring “Fathers and Sons,” in the context of an “evil Stalin” plot. A young literary scholar discovers that his father (a famous academic) had denounced his own father (an even more famous academic) during the height of the Stalinist purges, building a career on those paternal ashes. The grandson’s attempt to get to know his grandfather – who, it so happens, is not dead as assumed but unexpectedly rehabilitated – is a disaster. The old man, turned cynical and alcoholic in the camps, resents his rehabilitation, because it made a mess of his attempt to give shape and meaning to his fate: “The regime is the regime. Had I been in their place, I would have put myself away.”24 Not only was his life ruined; his martyrdom too had been interrupted. The old man disdains his grandson as a fop whose knowledge of life is nil, who doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know, who thinks he can work with life the way he works with his favorite books.
Indeed, that is the fantasy fueling Pushkin House the Book. Bitov labels his sections, chapters, and episodes with famous titles (or garbled parodies) from the Russian classics: Fathers and Sons, A Hero of our Time, The Fatalist, The Duel, The Shot, “The Humble [or Poor] Horseman” [Bednyi vsadnik instead of Mednyi vsadnik, Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”] and “Bronze People” [Mednye lyudi instead of Bednye lyudi, the “Poor Folk” of Dostoevsky fame]. No literary parallel quite works, of course, so the hero has a chance to gloss each of them with scholarly commentary, partly for real and partly farce. The Pushkin House is an authentic research institute in Petersburg. It is also the site of the novel’s final caper, in which the hero generates his own rival and double. On the eve of thefiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, these two rivals get into afistfight that degenerates into a duel in which the hero is killed – but not before the two of themtrash pricelessdocuments in the Museum of the Pushkin House. Cursorily brought back to life, the anxious scholar hurries to replace the destroyed items with forgeries. But no one notices the difference.
Confusion between the real and the fake ends up as indifference to the distinction: the perfect postmodernist scenario of a simulacrum without an original. Bitov’s Pushkin House is an early statement of this condition, written for insiders, contained within research libraries and museums. The next generation of genuinely post-communist writers breaks out of that House. Of our three exemplary prose writers, Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962), and Boris Akunin (b. 1956), the last two especially have managed
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to accomplish that difficult and necessary deed: bridging the distance between high and low readerships.
Three ways for writers to treat matter: eating it, transcending it, cracking its codes (Sorokin, Pelevin, Akunin)
Under the old regime(s), state control of culture pursued a two-pronged ideal. The first was to subsidize
