Count, your rating is too low! We’re going to put a page of police jokes in your slot.’”45
The unceremonious canning of Solzhenitsyn’s program, which pleased some, was seen as a sad symbol of the era by others. It signaled major changes in the country’s cultural situation. It was becoming ever clearer that the old Russian logocentrism, with its idolization of the word and its magical properties, was waning.
That great Russian tradition had had its high points. One was Solzhenitsyn’s heroic resistance to the Soviet political system in the 1960s–1970s. In 1978, Maximov, then editor of the leading emigre journal
Maximov’s statement seemed more indisputable then than it did some twenty years later. In 1991, a revolution took place in Russia, whether you consider it for better or worse. The emigre philosopher Georgy Fedotov, watching the tectonic shifts in Stalinist Russia from Paris in 1938, said with a sigh: “No nation comes out of a revolutionary catastrophe in the same shape that it went into it. An entire historic epoch, with its experience, tradition, and culture, is crossed out. A new page of life is turned over.”47 Among the causes for radical cultural changes in the 1930s, Fedotov listed the people’s loss of religious faith and the quick absorption by the masses “of civilization at its most superficial: Marxism, Darwinism, technology.”48
By the end of the twentieth century, a somewhat similar situation had developed in Russia: the hollow pyramid of Communist ideology had collapsed, and the country embarked on a new, dizzying spiral of Westernization, which in many ways turned out to be a mixed blessing. The Soviet censors had diligently sifted the cultural product coming from the West. Now, a huge flow of bad American movies, bland pop music, and pulp fiction rushed into the country. At the same time, the state made severe cuts in financing national theaters, serious films, opera, ballet, and symphony orchestras.
Literature in particular lost ground, after playing such a visible role in perestroika. The Soviet Union used to call itself “the most reading country in the world.” In contemporary Russia, as in the entire world, people read less and less, therefore print runs for books, the traditional “thick” journals, and highbrow periodicals were falling. The public idols were no longer writers and poets but pop musicians, film actors, and television celebrities, as it is everywhere else.
One of the last serious authors who made his way into the pantheon of cultural heroes was the eccentric Venedikt Erofeyev, who in his popular novella “Moscow-Petushki”(which had circulated in manuscript for years in the USSR and was at last published in 1988, only two years before his death at fifty-one) created an autobiographical image of an alcoholic and tramp traveling the commuter train from Moscow to the end of the line, Petushki, that resonated with pages from Dostoevsky and Rozanov. Erofeyev, an erudite and subtle stylist in the surrealistic vein, managed, as had Sergei Dovlatov who died the same year, to intrigue the reader, creating a memorable image of an ordinary guy, who with the help of a bottle of vodka turns into an existentialist philosopher commenting acidly on Soviet absurdity.
As Russian literature in the 1990s ceded its former central role, poetry in particular lost its former public significance, becoming, in the wry observation of critic Viktor Toporov, a marginal occupation within a marginal profession: “One poet has written several thousand poems but still is famous only for screaming like a banshee. Another reads from catalogue cards, cursing under his breath, which due to his profoundly intellectual appearance creates a comic impression. A third composes one mediocre poem a year—and is proud. A fourth tells boring stories in a booming voice, hoping they pass for poetry.”49
These lampoon portraits of prominent contemporary poets (respectively, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Sergei Gandlevsky, and Yevgeny Rein) were manifestly unfair, but they reflected the marginal status of the poets, which the writers themselves recognized, using it to justify their position as observers rather than participants and certainly not arbiters of public life.
Gandlevsky (a serious poet who in fact does write very little) admitted, “With the years, I came to terms with the notion that I do not belong to the same civilization as nine-tenths of my countrymen. This narrows my ambitions. You understand as a writer: you are not the spokesperson of those people.”50 Paradoxically, Gandlevsky connects his refusal to take a public stand to the same Soviet experience that produced the larger-than-life figures of Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, stressing “the danger of overestimating the importance of one’s message, a supergoal, becoming a missionary—pride always finds a loophole: we may have ended up in a puddle, but at least it’s the deepest one in the world.”51
The postmodernist Prigov also rejected the traditional great claims made by Russian writers: “The intelligentsia fought for the minds of the masses. I don’t do that. I only fight for my personal spot in the cultural marketplace.”52
With Russian culture atomized along the Western model, writers focused on finding comfortable genre or stylistic niches. Vladimir Sorokin brilliantly parodied the classic unhurried Russian novel and the placid socialist realist industrial fables (“boy meets girl and tractor”), exploding the traditional schemes with scenes of wild sex and sadism. (The pioneer in this field was Yuri Mamleyev, the grandfather of the contemporary Russian literary mysticism.)
The disturbing sex descriptions were particularly shocking when Sorokin read them aloud, being a quiet, pleasant-looking man with a stutter. Another prose writer, Viktor Pelevin, first cultivated an image as a homegrown eccentric (walking around Moscow in a gorilla mask), then became a recluse in the manner of Thomas Pynchon (refusing to give interviews or have his photograph taken, communicating only by email), while writing stylish science fiction in the manner of Philip K. Dick. He claimed, like Prigov, that he wrote not to lead his readers anywhere but rather to entertain himself.
Broader audiences were addressed by Edvard Radzinsky, the author of popular historical novels and plays, by Grigory Chkhartishvili, a Japan scholar, who under the pseudonym B. Akunin was the first to offer a cycle of “retro” detective novels, based on popular British models, but with a whiff of Dostoevsky, and by the much less pretentious (and therefore even more popular) authors of contemporary police procedurals and chick lit like Darya Dontsova, Alexandra Marinina, and Maria Arbatova.
The Soviet and even the post-Soviet value systems became irrelevant. When a group of influential critics was asked to name the most important works of the 1990s at the end of the decade, Sorokin got as many votes as Solzhenitsyn (two), and Gandlevsky was even with Brodsky (both got four votes). The leaders among poets were the slick parodist Timur Kibirov and the philosophical ironist Lev Losev, and among prose writers, Pelevin came right behind Makanin and Georgy Vladimov, whose historical novel about Nazi collaborator Andrei Vlasov, hanged in 1945 on Stalin’s orders, was the literary sensation of 1994.
On December 31, 1999, on the eve of the twenty-first century and the third millennium (a date to which many at the time attributed mystical significance), Yeltsin appeared with a televised address to announce to the stunned nation that he was retiring early and handing the presidency to Vladimir Putin, forty-seven, a previously little-known former KGB officer who became head of the Federal Security Service in 1998 and in August 1999 was named prime minister.
Yeltsin’s departure, which had been secretly prepared for a long time but came as a total surprise to the country, drew a line under an entire era. During his turbulent administration, Russia came dangerously close to an economic crash and political collapse. Yeltsin confessed: “I am tired and the country is tired of
