The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In 1990, the yearhepublishedRussian Beauty, Erofeyev announced the death of socialist realism and the liberationofthe Russian author from all socio-moral strictures, in a landmark essay titled “A Wake for Russian Literature.” Five years later, in his “Russia’s Fleurs du mal,” he called for a new, unsentimental literature of evil to re-complicate the simplistic psychology of the Soviet period. Post-communist freedom had arrived, and postmodernism could not be far behind. Or perhaps the sequence should be reversed? Mikhail Epstein has argued that postmodernism was born in Russia, in the Russia of the Brezhnev stagnation – post-Stalinist, but still within the rhetorical force field of socialist realism.22 In that unfree, unreal place, fullofruins and scrap-heaps ofanofficial faith system, postmodernism possessed a vigor beyond the wildest dreams of academic theorists in the West.

We are only several decades into this unraveling process and cannot yet know which of the recent generations of writers and works will endure. Soviet communism’s twilight years yielded several precocious candidates. One is Pushkin House (completed 1971, published in Russia 1989) by Andrei Bitov (b. 1937), a piece of “delayed literature” and a carnivalesque “post-mortem on the tradition” that ends up – very much in the Russian manner – confirming the tradition. Pushkin House has been read in a wide variety of ways, from a

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liberal-humanist condemnation of Stalinist oppression (and thus in the Solzhenitsyn line of self-critique, a confession from educated society forced to face up to the camps) through a more absurdist and blankly postmodernist

fantasy.23

Bitov explores a theme much beloved in Russian literature, that of warring “Fathers and Sons,” in the context of an “evil Stalin” plot. A young literary scholar discovers that his father (a famous academic) had denounced his own father (an even more famous academic) during the height of the Stalinist purges, building a career on those paternal ashes. The grandson’s attempt to get to know his grandfather – who, it so happens, is not dead as assumed but unexpectedly rehabilitated – is a disaster. The old man, turned cynical and alcoholic in the camps, resents his rehabilitation, because it made a mess of his attempt to give shape and meaning to his fate: “The regime is the regime. Had I been in their place, I would have put myself away.”24 Not only was his life ruined; his martyrdom too had been interrupted. The old man disdains his grandson as a fop whose knowledge of life is nil, who doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know, who thinks he can work with life the way he works with his favorite books.

Indeed, that is the fantasy fueling Pushkin House the Book. Bitov labels his sections, chapters, and episodes with famous titles (or garbled parodies) from the Russian classics: Fathers and Sons, A Hero of our Time, The Fatalist, The Duel, The Shot, “The Humble [or Poor] Horseman” [Bednyi vsadnik instead of Mednyi vsadnik, Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”] and “Bronze People” [Mednye lyudi instead of Bednye lyudi, the “Poor Folk” of Dostoevsky fame]. No literary parallel quite works, of course, so the hero has a chance to gloss each of them with scholarly commentary, partly for real and partly farce. The Pushkin House is an authentic research institute in Petersburg. It is also the site of the novel’s final caper, in which the hero generates his own rival and double. On the eve of thefiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, these two rivals get into afistfight that degenerates into a duel in which the hero is killed – but not before the two of themtrash pricelessdocuments in the Museum of the Pushkin House. Cursorily brought back to life, the anxious scholar hurries to replace the destroyed items with forgeries. But no one notices the difference.

Confusion between the real and the fake ends up as indifference to the distinction: the perfect postmodernist scenario of a simulacrum without an original. Bitov’s Pushkin House is an early statement of this condition, written for insiders, contained within research libraries and museums. The next generation of genuinely post-communist writers breaks out of that House. Of our three exemplary prose writers, Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962), and Boris Akunin (b. 1956), the last two especially have managed

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to accomplish that difficult and necessary deed: bridging the distance between high and low readerships.