Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity

Boris Noordenbos

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137596727
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137593634
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines a wide range of contemporary Russian writers whose work, after the demise of Communism, became more authoritative in debates on Russia's character, destiny, and place in the world. Unique in his in-depth analysis of both playful postmodernist authors and fanatical nationalist writers, Noordenbos pays attention to not only the acute social and political implications of contemporary Russian literature but also literary form by documenting the decline of postmodern styles, analyzing shifting metaphors for a "Russian identity crisis," and tracing the emergence of new forms of authorial ethos. To achieve this end, the book builds on theories of postcoloniality, trauma, and conspiracy thinking, and makes these research fields productively available for post-Soviet studies.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Boris NoordenbosPost-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian IdentityStudies in European Culture and History10.1057/978-1-137-59363-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Boris Noordenbos¹

(1)

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

End Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 not only marked the beginning of an economically and politically uncertain period in Russian history but also unleashed a nationwide identity crisis. With the demise of communism, a series of vexed questions and concerns about Russia’s unique national character, its “historical mission,” and its cultural place in the world surged to the forefront of public and private life. Literary writers engaged with these concerns intensely from perestroika and the beginning of the post-Soviet era, but, as this study will show, a momentous shift occurred around the turn of the twenty-first century: in tandem with the decline of postmodernism and a groundswell of nostalgic and patriotic popular sentiment, prominent Russian writers claimed increasingly authoritative and politically committed positions in debates about Russian identity.

Even a recent, flag-waving patriotic novel like Alexander Prokhanov’s Crimea, published in September 2014, invokes a Russian identity crisis, or at least conjures its looming specter. Prokhanov, a journalist and novelist, is one of the main spokesmen of a “neo-imperialist” trend in Russian culture, for whom a large, autocratically ruled empire is Russia’s natural (and only genuine) form of existence. The novels of these neo-imperialists, and the works of Prokhanov, in particular, tend to mourn the recent loss of Russia’s “imperial identity” and lament how liberalism and capitalism have eroded deep-rooted Russian values. At first glance, Crimea strikes a different chord. It brims with confident enthusiasm for what Russian nationalists call the “Russian Spring”: the envisioned revival of Russia as a superpower kick-started with its annexation of Crimea in March 2014.

The novel’s protagonist, Evgenii Lemekhov, is Russia’s vice president and a confidant of Labazov, a thinly veiled portrait of president Putin. Lemekhov has special oversight over the country’s arms factories. In Prokhanov’s version of contemporary Russia, the arms industry can hardly keep up with the flood of orders for new submarines, laser weapons, and tanks, now that a “big armed conflict” with the West (Prokhanov, Krym 13) is imminent. Russia, under constant threat from American military might and a fifth column of devious “liberal agents [working for] the West” (15) keen to sabotage the revival of a strong Russia, meets these dangers with its “heroic factor[ies]” (120), where workers and engineers devotedly contribute to the “armada of technology” (215), the “holy Russian weaponry” (35) that will allow the country to fulfill its “historical mission” (15). Indeed, notwithstanding the book’s streak of religious esotericism and its topical themes, Crimea features scenes that might have been based on Soviet propaganda posters or lifted from socialist–realist prose.

Underlying the book’s hysterical fervor for the restoration of a Russian Empire, however, is a feeling of national humiliation and dislocation. The narrator and the sympathetic characters relentlessly underscore that Russians have, after 1991, tragically lost their messianic beliefs (83); that Russia’s development has repeatedly been thwarted by destructive forces from the West (298); that the country’s various historical self-definitions and shifting state ideologies do not add up to a coherent narrative of Russian identity (83); and, finally, that the collapse of the “red civilization” and the ensuing splintering of a sense of collective belonging have plunged Russians into a “a gloomy desert” (168), an “abyss” (136), or a “black hole” (207).

The plot of Crimea pivots around the attempts of Lemekhov to found a new nationalist party, named Victory. Its political program takes inspiration from (a particular interpretation of) the prose, poems, and plays of Alexander Pushkin, who appears as a key emblem of Russianness and a major source of national pride. According to the Party’s ideologue (a specialist on the poet), Pushkin’s texts encompass “all Russian codes, all the beliefs of Russians about nature, the state and divine providence” (294).

However, Lemekhov’s political ambitions, as one might have suspected, offend the acting president of the Russian Federation. Lemekhov falls into disgrace, losing his job, his privileges, his possessions, and the support of his loved ones. Dispossessed, he wanders Russia’s vast landscapes until the novel’s final pages, when he is rehabilitated and summoned back to Moscow. His assistance is needed in actions that will, according to the president, change Russia’s role in the world. In one of Prokhanov’s trademark epiphany scenes, Lemekhov feels a premonition of his country’s radiant future, a vision tagged with the “wonderful word ‘Crimea’” (382). The employment in the book of “Crimea” as a transcendental marker for the end of post-Soviet drift and for personal and national revival fits neatly with Prokhanov’s view, which he has repeated publically, that the annexation of Crimea inaugurated the long-awaited miracle of Russia’s restoration as an empire.

Crimea is an (extreme) example of a wider recent trend where prominent and, as in Prokhanov’s case, highly controversial Russian writers adopt politically engaged stances and insert themselves into debates about national destiny. More specifically, Crimea embodies a cultural mood and a literary tendency already ascendant during the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. This neo-imperialist literary fashion combines an emphasis on post-Soviet national humiliation and the tragic dissolution of former frameworks of collective belonging with a quixotic commitment to the prospect of a restored, triumphant, and autocratically ruled Russian Empire.

This recent upsurge of nationalist engagement by Russian literary figures, of course, taps into a Russian tradition of exalting writers as intellectuals uniquely equipped to speak out on weighty social issues. Imaginative fiction, indeed, served as a privileged medium for social and political debate in nineteenth-century Russia, when the lack of democratic institutions such as a parliament and a free press helped push intellectual exchange into the realm of culture and above all literature. The multilayered qualities of literary language could articulate ideas that had no forum within official culture. Aesopian language allowed authors to communicate, innocently it seemed, dissenting or forbidden ideas to a select, well-educated intellectual public, who were often sensitive to not only aesthetic quality but also subversive undertones.

Writers’ involvement in almost everything of national concern went hand in hand with a popular veneration of authors and their works that may seem inflated to the Western observer. It also shouldered the writer with a sense of responsibility. Alexander Pushkin in the 1820s and 1830s could still vigorously defend the autonomy of art, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, it was widely deemed irresponsible to insist that literature should concern itself with merely aesthetic matters. Democratic-revolutionary writers and critics such as Dmitrii Pisarev and Nikolai Chernyshevskii put forth the influential and increasingly accepted notion that the author was someone morally obliged—if not bound by sacred duty—to work for democratic reforms and social justice (Pipes 249–80).

Literature’s traditional prestige was perpetuated and exploited when writers—“engineers of the human soul,” in Stalin’s famous dictum—were given a firmly established, and highly controlled, role in the Soviet project. The status of socialist realism as the only authorized literary style, the persecution of (political and aesthetic) dissidents, the social and financial privileges enjoyed by members of the Writers’ Union: these developments testify to the authorities’ deep-rooted intuition about the life-guiding and subversive potentials of poetry and imaginative prose.

But the demise of communism seemed to put a decisive end to Russia’s “literaturocentricism” (Berg 23). In the 1990s, critics and writers, even those who had enthusiastically welcomed the end of the regime, routinely lamented the corrosive effects of political and economic reforms on Russian letters. The writer’s Soviet-era pedestal had been shattered by liberalization and commercialization, and without vast ideological projects to support—or an oppressive state to dissent against—literature could now seem socially unnecessary (Wachtel 168). Notwithstanding these developments and the growing prominence of film, digital media, and other modes of expression, literature has managed to retain some of its traditional prestige. Today, it remains a strikingly important forum for discussions of vexed social and political issues, including concerns about Russia’s identity and destiny. Also, classic writers still serve as important compass points in social debate. That Prokhanov can present Pushkin’s texts as expressions of primordial Russian values, and even as inspiration for twenty-first-century political agendas, suggests that elements of literaturocentrism are currently alive and well.

Literary critics, for their part, were often amazed at the turn of the century to discover this new, politically committed literature, of which Prokhanov’s novels are a vivid example. In 2001, one commentator observed that writers increasingly aligned themselves with the confident and authoritative tone of the freshly installed Putin government. “A frigid breeze, blowing from the Kremlin towers,” he wrote, “has reddened the noses of tireless pen-pushers and covered their moustaches in frost” (Prigodich, “Pervyi roman”). Others detected a fascination with Russian might and empire. The journalist Sergei Kniazev noted that “the last year of the previous millennium and the first months of the new one have been marked by the publication of quite a few outstanding literary works at once […]. And what’s interesting is that almost every one of them turned out to be about the Empire—they were all, to a certain extent, imperial novels” (“Toska”).

Indeed, the works of the early Putin era to draw the most frantic public responses were those offering a Russian state of glory and unity, untainted by the humiliation of the postcommunist crisis and embodying a victorious Russian Empire of either the idealized past or the breathlessly anticipated future. The empire—often ruled by a modern tsar or a revived or rehabilitated ruler from the past—typically functioned as a shorthand for fantasies about the coherence of Russian space and history, and for ideas about Russian culture’s fundamental deviations from the liberal traditions of “the West.” This diverse and multifaceted trend—soon labeled “neo-imperialist” literature by reviewers—was closely tied up with similar tendencies in visual art and with the rising popularity of the “neo-Eurasianist” philosophies of, among others, Alexander Dugin.

Growing public enthusiasm for Russia’s supposed imperial greatness, and the concomitant elevation of the Soviet experience to “an organic part of the historical past of Russian statehood and national tradition” (Kalinin 158), have prompted some scholars to dismiss the label “post-Soviet” as a proper characterization of Russia under Putin. Kevin Platt reminds us that over the past several years, popular opinion has increasingly been drawn to “figures of political authority and national greatness” (“The Post-Soviet” 8); “visions of political and institutional continuity” are ubiquitous (“The Post-Soviet” 6); and, in contrast to the rampant anti-Soviet sentiments of the (early) 1990s, “[i]n dominant public discourse and common parlance in Russia today, the Russian Federation is typically conceived as heir to the greatness and cultural riches of the Soviet era” (“Russian Empire” 463). In light of these shifting orientations, but also in the context of the country’s reemergence as a confident player in the global political arena, Platt submits that “the post-Soviet era, such as it was, is now emphatically over” (“The Post-Soviet” 2). My study sets out to investigate the intricate refractions of the developments flagged by Platt in recent Russian imaginative prose. I retain, however, the label “post-Soviet,” partly because of the lack of a better term, partly because of this book’s contention that even the early twenty-first-century rejection of post-Soviet self-doubt and its feelings of humiliation are infused with a sense of loss and disorientation wrought by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Recent neo-imperialist tendencies in Russian literature constitute a particular cultural response to this event and its understanding benefits from their being considered as a “post-Soviet” phenomenon.

In literature, neo-imperialist approaches have begun to outshine the relativist and postmodernist engagements with national identity that had dominated the literary field immediately after perestroika. In many best-selling prose works from the late 1980s and early 1990s, a markedly postmodernist proclivity had supplanted the traditional role of the Russian writer as a primary “nation builder,” or as a spiritual guide who teaches readers who they are and how they should live. Here, the confusion wrought by the rapid dissolution of old modes of collective existence typically dovetailed with games and experimentation. Some of the most celebrated stories and novels from this period presented Russia as nothing more than a cultural void between East and West; as a purely linguistic or discursive phenomenon without an ontological foundation; as a computer-generated simulacrum of a modern Western society; or as a culture undermined by the “black holes” of an atrocious, but hardly known past. These writers championed ironic attitudes toward the moralizing and life-guiding aura of Russian literature. But they also routinely deconstructed the clichéd literary tropes of national identity, along with the grand narratives of communist and liberal–capitalist ideology. Rather than contemplating surrogate ideologies and new identitarian frames, popular postmodernist writers in the 1990s brought into the limelight the disillusioned and fragmentized worldview of post-Soviet Russians, who no longer could, nor should, conceive of their collective identity in serious and unequivocal terms.

These postmodernist approaches eventually burned themselves out, as can be seen in the controversy around another of Prokhanov’s works, the novel Mister Hexogen [Gospodin geksogen] (2002). In the 1990s, Prokhanov had been better known for his newspaper The Day (later Tomorrow) than for his books. This weekly paper, with Prokhanov as editor-in-chief (a post he still holds), professed a brand of patriotism whose admixture of Orthodox-inspired spirituality, antiliberal and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and Stalinist nostalgia was particularly welcome among an elderly audience who felt betrayed by the reforms of the 1990s. Prokhanov’s reading public, however, grew exponentially in 2002, when Mister Hexogen was published by Ad Marginem. This publisher was known for its postmodernist taste and of its publication of Vladimir Sorokin’s pastiches of naïve patriotic and socialist–realist prose.

The publication of Prokhanov’s novel by Ad Marginem led to conflicting interpretations. Several critics proposed that the book be read as an entertaining “deconstruction” of nationalist pulp writing. Such a reading outraged others, who warned that Prokhanov’s poor writing style and unconventional imagery should not be mistaken for postmodernist experimentation, and that his rabid chauvinism was worlds away from postmodern relativism. The director of Ad Marginem, Alexander Ivanov, fanned the flames higher when he declared in an interview that Prokhanov’s neo-Stalinist sympathies presented a welcome change to the excessive anticommunist impulse in post-Soviet literature (Aleksandrov, “Prokhanov”).

The debate reached a boiling point when Prokhanov’s novel received the prestigious National Bestseller Prize. As often with literary controversies, the affair itself guaranteed the success of the book and its author, who today is a well-known public figure and a frequent political commentator and presenter on various talk shows, on both radio and television. When I interviewed him in 2009, Prokhanov proclaimed that he did not see any contradiction between the profile of Ad Marginem and his own aesthetic orientation. His political views were ultraconservative, but his aesthetics, he emphasized, had always had an avant-garde impetus. Furthermore, he was a great admirer of Sorokin’s prose, and while he felt that Sorokin belonged to a different strand in Russian literature, he admitted that he might have been, unconsciously, influenced by his postmodernist style (personal communication, November 3, 2009).

The affair points up important changes in Russian literature, and its relation to both the postmodern paradigm and the post-Soviet condition. It is a key contention of this book that the study of Russian nationalist discourses (in literature and elsewhere) should include a careful analysis of how postmodern tropes and styles have recently been discarded and recycled in favor of sweeping doctrines of collective belonging. The militant fascination in recent Russian literature with Russia as an empire has been stirred not only by political developments. Neo-imperialist authors do not simply sing the praises of the Putin government; “a frigid wind blowing from the Kremlin Towers” does not suffice to explain their stances. The fanatical recent obsession with Russian identity and mission stems, at least in part, from a profound fatigue with the postmodern relativism and political aloofness of the most prominent novels and stories of the 1990s.

To grasp the full import of this tectonic shift in the way Russian writers engage with Russian identity, I have adopted a two-pronged approach. Part I demonstrates how, in the 1990s, writers such as Vladimir Sorokin and the immensely popular Viktor Pelevin fashionably depicted post-Soviet chaos and disorientation in a markedly postmodernist style. The second part contrasts the approach of these and other postmodernists with successful authors from the Putin era. Though familiar with postmodern thought and aesthetics, and sometimes openly referring to the work of Pelevin and Sorokin, these writers—among them Alexander Prokhanov, Pavel Krusanov, Dmitrii Bykov, and Eduard Limonov—moved beyond post-Soviet and postmodern skepticism. Aesthetically and politically, they may belong to different movements and camps, but these authors have all fervently committed themselves to the idea that the Russian community finds its natural home in a vast continental empire, and that the traditions of Russian culture are fundamentally incompatible with the democratic and capitalist values of “the West.”

The reader will notice that most of the authors discussed in this study are men. An exception is Tat’iana Tolstaia, whose intricate reflections in The Slynx [Kys’] (2001) on the distorted rhythms of Russian history are addressed in Chap. 2. While the proportion of women among Russia’s most prestigious literary figures is relatively small, literature in Russia today is by no means exclusively a male affair. Since the 1980s, various female writers have taken center stage in the literary field, and today, celebrated Russian authors such as Tolstaia, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and, more recently, Ol’ga Slavnikova have won major literary prizes at home and gained considerable recognition abroad. If the selection of writers analyzed here is not a representative cross section of the entire contemporary Russian literary field, this is because the books that have left the deepest imprints on recent debates about Russian identity have been written by men. This lopsided gender division among writers engaged with “the Russian question” testifies, at least in part, to the persistence of a (Soviet) Russian cultural tradition that attributes the authoritative roles of “nation builder” and enunciator of “big ideas” almost exclusively to male writers, while leaving more mundane (and politically less significant) topics to be taken up by their female counterparts (Wachtel 5; Goscilo and Lanoux 19). Scholars have pointed out that the overrepresentation of male authors in literary ref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 1. Part I
• 2. Part II
• Backmatter