high-minded, healthy, politically conformist literature; the second, to prevent the publication or circulation of literature that was low-minded or morally corrupt. Readers who rejected state guidance in these matters availed themselves of samizdat (“self-published,” illegally circulating manuscripts), tamizdat (works published “over there” in the West and smuggled in), magnitizdat (illicit popular music smuggled in, recorded on tape or X-ray plates), and radio wavelengths beyond the range of state monitoring. Guidance in this “illegal” or unsponsored side of culture was provided by cult artists, poets, guitar bards, filmmakers, and select dissidents admired as the conscience of the nation. Since “unsponsored” meant free of censorship and thus more honest, many writers and their readers came to assume that unofficial cultural products were necessarily of high artistic quality.
The post-1991 literary market broke down that assumption. It began with a glut of the new. Once censorship lifted, a mass of texts appeared all at once: native “delayed” works (written decades earlier, like Bitov’s Pushkin House or Petrushevskaya’s plays and stories), translations of ancient religious tracts, formerly forbidden or bowdlerized works from the world market (the Marquis de Sade, Nabokov, sex manuals), and warehouses of films never cleared for release. These cultural statements, some produced a thousand years ago and others yesterday, appeared in no special order and often without any frame or context. It was unclear to which “reality” – or which transitory strip of reality – they referred. Banned philosophical classics (Freud, Nietzsche) were brought back. And new explanatory systems devised by Western theorists (Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillad) rapidly received their translation into Russian, resulting in an overlay of enticing, provocative foreign categories transliterated but poorly integrated. The situation recalled the culture shocks of Peter the Great’s reign, when teams of official translators labored to find non-existent Russian “equivalents” for German, French, and English concepts – and later, the linguistic fervor of the 1790s, when Karamzin “injected” into written and spoken Russian currently fashionable French modes of expression. The initial phases of a new glasnost are often felt as abrupt, artificial, polluting, and violently
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imposed. Several emigre writers, including Solzhenitsyn before and after his return to Russia in 1994, made passionate pleas to restore the authority of the “thick journals” that had once carried high literary culture. But subscriptions plummeted. By the mid-1990s, with the legalization of multiple political parties, Dostoevsky was recruited and celebrated by Russian neo-fascists as an anti-Semite (replacing his earlier, “dissident” image as a Christian mystic). Tolstoy, sanitized and officially canonized since 1928, was declared anathema in 1994 by several reactionary chauvinistic parties for his criticism of Holy Russia, the Emperor, and the Orthodox Church. Calls even went out to young people to resist Tolstoy’s corrupting, unpatriotic teachings.25
A large number of new heroes and plots emerged, created by writers for whom Stalin and World War II were fully historical events, over before they were born. If they were parodists, these writers addressed a tradition that they had absorbed as a “relic,” not experienced in their own lives. Among the most controversial of these “workers with relics” has been the visual and verbal Moscow conceptualist artist Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), master at the metaphysics of disgust.26 Trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, Sorokin worked throughout the 1980s as a graphic artist and book illustrator. His stories were banned. In 1985, the Paris publishing house Syntaxis brought out his comic romance The Queue [Ochered'], several hundred pages of random snatches of dialogue overheard in line (including an attendance roll call of 720 names), spun out of the socialist-economy shortage-of-everything cliche: if you see a line in the street, immediately join it, even if no one can tell you what isbeingsold up front. The English translator of The Queue aptly likens the narrative to “a musical score ... for some bizarre street symphony”27 We never find out what the line was for. But the hero befriends the saleswoman who had engineered the queue and ends up satisfied and happy - in the final chapters, several dozen “dialogic” pages are devoted to the monosyllabic sighs and moans of lovemaking. More scandalous than this mildly dissident, naughty spoof has been Sorokin’s mature work and its “bipartite style.”28 A trivially banal “model” text (household, landscape, routine conversation) is abruptly interrupted by a stretch of “killer” text from the mouths of the same speakers -shockingly violent, obscene, or incomprehensible images or words - only to have the banal model stereotype resume its course, unruffled. Unlike the classic “mad” or schizophrenic heroes in the Gogol-Dostoevsky line, who degenerate as their narrative proceeds inexorably to its denouement, Sorokin’s characters are sane and insane simultaneously. They can reclaim their surface conformity even after their monstrous subcutaneous life is revealed. According to this psychology, we do not develop or decay in any linear manner but simply display ourselves at different levels.
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Another key strategy for Sorokin is to peel back the clean, wholesome, and self-satisfied veneeroflate- Soviet-erasocialistrealism and, inthe deadpan spirit of Gogol, turn its ideas into food. Sorokin “realizes” metaphors. In one of his more startling stories, “Sergei Andreyevich” (1992), a star pupil listens dazzled to his high school teacher’s platitudes on a class field trip and then, coming across the teacher’s excrement lying in greasy coils in the grass, proceeds to eat it, greedily and reverently. But “eating it” can also be less ecstatic, a duty expected (or in the Soviet context, vaguely required) of each honest citizen. Early in his huge, eight-part novel The Norm (written during the bleakest years of the Stagnation, 1979–84, published 1994), we realize that the dark, moist, pre-packaged “ration” that everyone carries around, nibbles at, scrambles up into omelets or dissolves into cocoa is human feces. For some reason, people are not allowed to forgo eating their daily norm. In an episode recalling Gogol’s “The Nose” (the opening scene where the barber, who has just found a human nose in his breakfast roll, surreptitiously tries to drop it in a Petersburg canal but is prevented by a police inspector), one Kuperman tries to toss his norm into the Moscow River. It won’t sink. Two conscientious young people see it floating on the surface and alert the police.29
Sorokin won a National Booker award in 2001. In 2002, he achieved international visibility when the Putin- inspired youth movement “Moving Together” attempted to imprison him (unsuccessfully) on a pornography charge. Article 242 of the Russian criminal code was brought against the 1999 novel Blue Lard (which features, among other improprieties, sodomy between clones of Khrushchev and Stalin). But Sorokin insists he is not a political writer and that his interests are purely analytical and aesthetic. In an interview from June 2007, in response to a question about the current state of Russian literature, Sorokin remarked:
It’s complicated. But it’s been complicated for a long time – Russian literature, that is. It’s an international brand. Like Russian vodka or Kalashnikov. In front of us passed the Mesozoic or Paleozoic nineteenth or twentieth centuries, where such extravagant animals lived. Everything was trampled down and eaten up by them. And here we are, on this field trampled down by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, by Bulgakov, Shalamov and Platonov, and we’re trying to create something new . . . But in general, there shouldn’t be many good writers.30
Like Petrushevskaya from an earlier generation, in turning his lens on the body with its undignified products, Sorokin forces us to see how the spirit is trapped in matter. In his 2002 novel Ice [Lyod], about a millenarian sect in
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search of its secret members, the 23,000 “True People” are revealed only when struck on the chest with an ice hammer and forced to utter their real names. These awakened ones are carriers of the primeval Light, which will return to the Cosmos as soon as matter (death giving birth to death) is dissolved. Sorokin’s primary concern is everywhere to disentangle language from the body, to lay bare the workings of each, and to resist one being casually or thoughtlessly reproduced by the other.
Our second exemplary post-Soviet writer, Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962), also toys with Stalinist ruins and also denies any political intent. But he is not, in the brutal corporeal way we have just sampled, a “materialist.” Like the mystical Symbolists of the 1910s–20s, Pelevin builds his works “on the windowsill” between different worlds.31 His technique is one of constantly switching perspectives, back and forth across both sides of the sill. He resists writing
