Viktor Erofeyev, “Anna’s Body,” trans. Leonard J. Stanton from author’s manuscript, in Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature under Gorbachev, ed. Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1990), pp. 379-82.
Mikhail N. Epstein, “Postmodernism, Communism, and Sots-Art,” in Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, trans. John Meredig, ed. Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), pp. 3-31.
A good reading from each tradition exists in English: for the liberal-humanist critique, see Ellen B. Chances, “Pushkin House: The Riddles of Life and Literature,” ch. 11, Andrei Bitov: The Ecology of Inspiration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 202-24; for the postmodernist interpretation, Mark Lipovetsky, “Sacking the Museum: Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House, ch. 2 in Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, ed. Lipovetsky with Eliot Borenstein (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 39-65.
Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House, trans. Susan Brownsberger (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1987), p. 71.
See Henrietta Mondry, “The Russian Literary Press, 1993-98: Critics Reach Reconciliation with Their Audience,” in Russian Literature in Transition, ed. Ian K. Lilly and Henrietta Mondry (Nottingham: Astra Press, 1999), pp. 105-26, especially 112-14.
See Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, pp. 197-219; also the discussion by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “Heterogeneity and the Russian Post-Avant-Garde: The Excremental Poetics of Vladimir Sorokin,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn, 1999), pp. 269-98.
Sally Laird, “Introduction” to Vladimir Sorokin, The Queue (New York and London: Readers International, 1988), p. i.
Konstantin V Kustanovich, “Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin,” in Russian Writers since 1980, ed. Marina Balina and Mark Lipovetsky (Detroit: Gale, 2004), p. 305.
A portion of the first part of The Norm (plus summary of remaining episodes) was translated by Keith Gessen in the journal n +1, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 75-95; the “Nose” / norm episode is on pp. 83-86.
Interview with Vladimir Sorokin by Anna Narinskaya, “Ya vypolnil rol' kul'turologicheskogobul'dozera,” Kommersant- Weekend, June 1, 2007.
Alexander Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of Post-Soviet Literature,” in Russian Postmodernism, ed. Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover, pp. 212-24, esp. 207.
For this discussion of Pelevin as a second-generation postmodernist (or perhaps not one at all but some transitional, more “sincere” third category), see Ellen Rutten, Unattainable Bride Russia: Engendering Nation, State and Intelligentsia in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Groningen, 2005), pp. 202- 09, esp. 202.
268 Notes to pages 241–49
For good English-language discussions of Pelevin, see two by Gerald McCausland: his entry “Viktor Olegovich Pelevin” in Russian Writers since 1980, ed. Balina and Lipovetsky, pp. 208-19, and “Viktor Pelevin and the End of Sots-Art,” in Endquote, ed. Balina, Condee, and Dobrenko, pp. 225-37.
Vitaly Chernetsky, MappingPostcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 107.
Victor Pelevin, Oman Ra, trans. Andrew Bromfield (London: Harboard Publishing, 1994), pp. 26-27.
Victor Pelevin, Buddha’s LittleFinger, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 23.
Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, p. 196.
Boris Akunin, The Winter Queen, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 9-10. All further references in the text are to this translation.
For the parameters of sex crimes and for Russian bias against materialist acquisition, see Anthony Olcott, “Crime, Sex and Sex Crimes,” ch. 2, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001), pp. 50-63.
A. Chekhov / B. Akunin, Chaika. Komediia i ee prodolzhenie (Moscow: Mosty Kul'tury, 2000). For a discussion in English, see Volha Isakava, “Postmodernism Revisited: The Seagull by Boris Akunin,” in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: Poetics -Hermeneutics - Thematics, ed. J. Douglas Clayton (Ottawa: Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa, 2006), pp. 267- 85.
See Leon Aron, “A Champion for the Bourgeoisie: Reinventing Virtue and Citizenship in Boris Akunin’s Novels,” The National Interest (Spring 2004): 149-57. Aron, Director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, considers the Akunin boom a moral and sociopolitical triumph, a continuation of the anti-intelligentsia campaign launched by the Idealist authors of the Landmarks essays of 1909.
“Jasper Rees meets Boris Akunin,” Electronic Telegraph (UK), April 17, 2004.
This point is made by Aron, “A Champion for the Bourgeoisie,” p. 149. Akunin’s English-language translator (or perhaps publisher) does not include this dedication in its Fandorin Series paperback.
Dmitry Prigov, “Dialogue No. 5,” from the bilingual anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era, selected and edited by J. Kates (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 1999), pp. 260-63.
V B. Kataev, Igra v oskolki: sud 'by russkoi klassiki v epokhupostmodernizma (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo moskovskogo universiteta, 2002), p. 230.
M. M. Bakhtin, “The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol'),” in Semiotics and Structuralism, ed. Henryk Baran (White Plains, NY: IASP, 1976), p. 293.
Glossary
Pronunciations and definitions of Russian words, names, places, and texts
Page reference is made to the first appearance of the word. Monarchs appear in the list alphabetized according to their first names, and the dates listed indicate the time span of their reign. Most Russian words have a strong primary stress. This is marked by an acute accent over the stressed syllable.
Words
bashmak shoe; boot, p. 116.
Bednye lyudi Poor Folk, title of Dostoevsky’s 1846 epistolary novel, p. 237.
Bednyi vsadnik “The Poor Horseman,” title of a chapter from Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House that parodies the title of Pushkin’s narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman [Mednyi vsadnik], p. 237.
blazhenny blessed one; alternate name for a holy fool, p. 39.
bogatyr a hero from Russian folk myth, similar to a warrior saint, p. 60.
bolshev??k lit. “majority person,” as opposed to “menshevik” (“minority person”); the Leninist wing of the Marxist Socialist-Democratic Party, victorious in 1917, p. 31.
byl??na Russian folk epic, the hero of which is usually a bogatyr, p. 60.
chort devil, imp, p. 35.
chronotope Bakhtin’s neologism for the time-space relationship in narrative,
