fundamentally indifferent to the turmoil or suffering he causes in others. Their private lives are often shrouded from view; their public persona is invariably enigmatic and compelling. Each novel in the Fandorin series is dedicated “to the Nineteenth Century, when literature was great, the belief in progress boundless, and crimes were committed and solved with elegance and taste.”43 If only as the post-socialist ego ideal for a readership still uncertain how to come to terms with the twentieth century, Erast Fandorin is worth watching: a resplendent new Russian Hero for our Time.
Solzhenitsyn was not correct about postmodernism, of course: by no means is it always nihilistic or pessimistic. But he is certainly correct that Russian experiments in this realm are not to be reduced to a single moral standard. Nor will postmodernist authors, or their successors, relinquish their right to laugh at horror and annihilate it with their own playful devices. One efficient example of such postmodernist resistance is a poem by the recently deceased (d. 2007) Moscow Conceptualist Dmitry Prigov, “Dialogue No. 5.” This piece of quasi-doggerel short verse, Prigov’s favorite subversive form, is a contribution to the “Poet versus Tsar” theme in Russian literature, here cast as a conversation between Prigov and Stalin.44
To prepare for Prigov’s 46-line composition, let us recall the conversation between the fifteenth-century holy fool, Michael of Klopsko, and the monastery superior, discussed in Chapter 3. The Blessed Michael turns up at the monastery gate. Thesuperiorquestionshim; but insteadof answering, this
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Stalin retorts. “And how would it be if we left one letter off?” asks Prigov. “How would it be?” repeats Stalin, drawn inexorably into the mirror-imaging poetic logic of the exchange. “It would be Talin!” Prigov shouts back. Now his interlocutor is labeled Talin. “Talin!” Stalin shouts. And from then on down to nothing, the dictator is undone by the poet:
Prigov
And if we left another off?
Talin
Another?
Prigov
It would be Alin.
Alin
It would be Alin!
Prigov
And if we left another off?
Alin
Another?
Prigov
It would be Lin.
Lin
It would be Lin!
Finally Stalin ispromptedtoremove the singleremaining letter N – and there the poem stops. There is no one left to answer; the tyrant has literally, letter by letter, dissolved. In Prigov’s postmodernist exercise, power is tricked into dismantling itself by very traditional means. The Poet, feigning foolishness, sets up the framework, poses the enticing question, and controls the final creative – or annihilating – Word.
There are many ways for “one word of truth to outweigh the whole world.” True to the Tolstoy line, Solzhenitsyn prefers this truth to be uttered righteously, single-voicedly, with the intonations of a preacher or prophet. Prigov, who belonged to the Gogol–Dostoevsky line, relies on double-voiced cunning and carnival dismemberment to reveal that truthful word. Both approaches are dependent on a vast reservoir of inherited literary images and values – especially, one could argue, from the Sentimentalist tradition, more durable on Russian soil than either the analytical or the cynical. From Karamzin through Dostoevsky’s redeemed sinners, Tolstoy’s idea of art, socialist realism, Solzhen-itsyn, even Pelevin’s quasi-parodic mystic fusion of East and West, painful or isolating complexity resolves itself through emotion and communion. The contemporary Russian avant-garde does not campaign for a “blank slate” or “fresh start” – one of the more intoxicating fantasies from the revolutionary 1910s and 1920s. That fantasy is over. The critic Vladimir Kataev concludes his book
also predicted the demise of literature, the poverty of present-day writers. But these are cyclical complaints, Kataev assures his readers (p. 228), and never come true:
In their campaign against petrified language cliche?s, the postmodernists can be compared with wolves, the sanitary workers of the forest, who fulfill the honorable and necessary task of eating refuse and eliminating the weak so that the fittest remain, ensuring that life continues. But to consider – as the admirers of Sorokin do – that from now on one must write only the way he writes or not write at all, this would be like insisting that out of all the animals of the forest, only wolves should remain. Fortunately, nature permits nothing of the sort.
“Postmodernism today should be understood as a sort of pause, an intermission in the development of literature and culture,” Kataev advises (p. 231). “In general it might seem that literature has been completely crushed by the aggressiveness of other forms of information transfer. But as long as literature is alive, any development taking place in it – however endlessly distant from traditions it might appear – one way or another, ultimately returns to the classics.” This sentiment was given lapidary formulation by Mikhail Bakhtin, in the 1940s, during twentieth-century Russia’s darkest years. In a fragment devoted to Gogol’s laughter that has lost none of its relevance to the present century, Bakhtin wrote, “Only memory, not forgetfulness, can go forward.”46
Introduction
Michael Wachtel,
Prince D. S. Mirsky,
This understanding of literary tradition is eloquently argued in Michael Wachtel,
Milan Kundera, “Die Weltliteratur”,
This observation was made by the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) while editing some Czech versions of Pushkin in the late 1930s. See Jakobson, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry” [1960], in
“Some Words about War and Peace” [1868], in Leo Tolstoy,
