(cherny), chernukha began as a perestroika phenomenon, a rejection of the enforced optimism of official Soviet culture. It arose simultaneously in three particular areas: “serious” fiction (published in “thick” journals such as Novy mir), film, and investigative reporting. One of the hallmarks of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost was the open discussion of the misery and violence that was a part of everyday Soviet life, transforming the form and content of the nation’s news coverage. In journalism, chernukha was most clearly incarnated in Alexander Nevzorov’s evening television program “600 Seconds,” which exposed the Soviet viewing audience to some of its first glimpses into the lives of prostitutes and gangsters, never shying away from images of graphic violence.
In literature and film, chernukha refers to the naturalistic depiction of and obsession with bodily functions, sexuality, and often sadistic violence, usually at the expense of more traditional Russian themes, such as emotion and compassion. The most famous examples of artistic chernukha include Sergei Kaledin’s 1987 novel The Humble Cemetery, which tells a story about gravediggers in Moscow, and Vasilii Pichul’s 1988 Little Vera, a film about a dysfunctional family, complete with alcoholics, knife fights, arrests, and virtually nonstop shouting. Also emblematic was Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1990 documentary This Is No Way to Live, whose very title sums up the general critical thrust of chernukha in the glasnost era.
Often condemned by critics across the ideological spectrum as “immoral,” chernukha actually played an important part in the shift in values and in the ideological struggles concerning the country’s legacy and future course. Intentionally or not,
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artists, writers, and journalists responded to Gorbachev’s call for “openness” with works that exposed the long-repressed underside of Soviet life: the misery of the communal apartment, the daily lives of homeless alcoholics, and the hypocrisy of established authority figures. One of the most prominent themes in the chernukha of the 1980s was Soviet youth, particularly in film and on stage: the new generation was repeatedly depicted as mercantile, hedonistic, and bereft of any moral compass. Yet even if these young people were presented in a fashion calculated to provoke the audience’s outrage, blame was almost always attributed to the older generations: to the parents who failed to provide a model worth emulating, and to the system itself, which reduced all human relations to a question of survival and dominance.
Though chernukha was initially a breath of fresh air after decades of sanitized news and entertainment, by the post-Soviet era the majority of the purveyors of “highbrow” culture began to reject it in favor of postmodern playfulness or a return to sentimentality. By contrast, variations on cher-nukha are still a crucial part of Russian popular culture, from the daily news magazines devoted to violent crime and horrible accidents, to the action films and novels where sadistic violence and rape are taken for granted. Though these forms of entertainment are distant from the ideological struggles that helped spawn the phenomenon in the 1980s, they show that the aesthetic of chernukha is still very much a part of the post-Soviet landscape. See also: GLASNOST; MOTION PICTURES; PERESTROIKA; TELEVISION AND RADIOS; THICK JOURNALS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Genis, Alexander. (1999). “Perestroika as a Shift in Literary Paradigm.” In Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, eds. Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. New York: Berghan.
the age of fifteen, and advanced rapidly through the ranks, participating in all of Russia’s campaigns against Napoleon. During the Tilsit Period (1807-1812) Alexander I sent Chernyshev to Napoleon to serve as a channel of communications. Napoleon took a liking to Chernyshev and undertook to lecture him in the finer points of war, information that Chernyshev duly brought back to Alexander before the outbreak of hostilities. In November 1812, Chernyshev became an adjutant-general, and commanded various Cossack detachments in the campaigns of 1812 to 1815. In 1819, Chernyshev became a member of the committee Alexander established to reform the organization and legal structures of the Don Cossack host.
Nicholas I promoted Chernyshev to the rank of general-of-cavalry and appointed him minister of war in 1826. From that position, Chernyshev played the leading role in devising and implementing a major reform of the Russian military administration between 1831 and 1836. This reform abolished the position of chief of the main staff and unified control over the entire military administration in the person of the war minister. Chernyshev also presided over the first successful codification of Russian military law, completed in 1838 with the assistance of Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky. In 1841, Chernyshev was created a prince.
The bases of the enormous mobilization that supported Russia’s efforts in the Crimean War, as well as the support of those troops, were largely established by Chernyshev’s reforms. The fundamental military structure developed by those reforms, furthermore, especially the predominance of the War Ministry as opposed to a General Staff, remained the basic organization of the Russian Imperial Army down to the collapse of the empire, and continues to serve as the basic structure of the Russian Federation’s armed forces. Chernyshev died on June 20, 1857. See also: ALEXANDER I; COSSACKS; MILITARY REFORMS; NICHOLAS I
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(1786-1857), minister of war for Nicholas I, 1826-1852.
Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev was born on January 10, 1786, entered the Russian army at
Kagan, Frederick W. (1999). The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian Army. New York: St. Martin’s. Menning, Bruce. (1988). “A.I. Chernyshev: A Russian Ly-curgus.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 30(2):192-219.
(1828-1889), Russian radical journalist, writer, literary critic, and thinker.
Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was the son of an Orthodox priest. From 1842 to 1845 he attended the theological seminary in Saratov, and in 1850 he graduated from the Department of History and Philology of the University of St. Petersburg. Chernyshevsky was a polyglot; he knew eight foreign languages. As a student Chernyshev-sky impressed his professors with his distinguished knowledge in literature and linguistics, and they predicted that he would have a bright academic career.
After two years of teaching in Saratov from 1851 to 1853, Chernyshevsky returned to St. Petersburg. There Chernyshevsky began to write for the popular journals Otechestvennye Zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland) and Sovremennik (Contemporary). In 1859 he became editor in chief of Sovremennik. There he published his Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury (Essays on the Gogolian Period in Russian Literature), “his first and most important contribution to literary criticism” according to Eugene Lampert (1965, p. 110). Soon Chernyshevsky became very popular among radical youth and was called a “prophet of the young generation” (Irina Paperno, 1988).
However, Chernyshevsky was not satisfied with only doing journalist work; he attempted to continue his academic career and prepared his dissertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality” (1855). This dissertation presented a doctrine about the superiority of reality over art. He believed that nothing could be more beautiful than that which exists in reality; as he wrote, “Beauty is life.” According to Chernyshevsky, art should be a “textbook of life.” He rejected “art for art’s sake.” However, the Academic Board of the University of St. Petersburg did not share Chernyshevsky’s views on art and did not approve his dissertation. According to T. Pecherskaya, Chernyshevsky said that his dissertation was his interpretation of the ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, but the conservative Academic Board could not understand him.
After his unsuccessful attempt to pursue an academic career, Chernyshevsky continued his journalistic work and published many essays on art, literature, philosophy, and radical socialist thought. He was a materialist and followed the ideas of German philosophers of the early and mid-nineteenth century. Chernyshevsky propounded radical ideas in his essays and criticized the emancipation of serfs by the government from the radical point of view. He believed that the liberation of the serfs without land was inadequate and mockingly cruel to the peasants. Francis B. Randall (N. G. Chernyshevskii, 1967, preface) wrote that Chernyshevsky called himself a “socialist” but took his doctrine “not from Marx but from the French radicals of the decades before the revolution of 1848.”
