The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Three ways for writers to treat matter: eating it, transcending it, cracking its codes (Sorokin, Pelevin, Akunin)

Under the old regime(s), state control of culture pursued a two-pronged ideal. The first was to subsidize high-minded, healthy, politically conformist literature; the second, to prevent the publication or circulation of literature that was low-minded or morally corrupt. Readers who rejected state guidance in these matters availed themselves of samizdat (“self-published,” illegally circulating manuscripts), tamizdat (works published “over there” in the West and smuggled in), magnitizdat (illicit popular music smuggled in, recorded on tape or X-ray plates), and radio wavelengths beyond the range of state monitoring. Guidance in this “illegal” or unsponsored side of culture was provided by cult artists, poets, guitar bards, filmmakers, and select dissidents admired as the conscience of the nation. Since “unsponsored” meant free of censorship and thus more honest, many writers and their readers came to assume that unofficial cultural products were necessarily of high artistic quality.

The post-1991 literary market broke down that assumption. It began with a glut of the new. Once censorship lifted, a mass of texts appeared all at once: native “delayed” works (written decades earlier, like Bitov’s Pushkin House or Petrushevskaya’s plays and stories), translations of ancient religious tracts, formerly forbidden or bowdlerized works from the world market (the Marquis de Sade, Nabokov, sex manuals), and warehouses of films never cleared for release. These cultural statements, some produced a thousand years ago and others yesterday, appeared in no special order and often without any frame or context. It was unclear to which “reality” – or which transitory strip of reality – they referred. Banned philosophical classics (Freud, Nietzsche) were brought back. And new explanatory systems devised by Western theorists (Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillad) rapidly received their translation into Russian, resulting in an overlay of enticing, provocative foreign categories transliterated but poorly integrated. The situation recalled the culture shocks of Peter the Great’s reign, when teams of official translators labored to find non-existent Russian “equivalents” for German, French, and English concepts – and later, the linguistic fervor of the 1790s, when Karamzin “injected” into written and spoken Russian currently fashionable French modes of expression. The initial phases of a new glasnost are often felt as abrupt, artificial, polluting, and violently

From the first Thaw to the end 239

imposed. Several emigre writers, including Solzhenitsyn before and after his return to Russia in 1994, made passionate pleas to restore the authority of the “thick journals” that had once carried high literary culture. But subscriptions plummeted. By the mid-1990s, with the legalization of multiple political parties, Dostoevsky was recruited and celebrated by Russian neo-fascists as an anti-Semite (replacing his earlier, “dissident” image as a Christian mystic). Tolstoy, sanitized and officially canonized since 1928, was declared anathema in 1994 by several reactionary chauvinistic parties for his criticism of Holy Russia, the Emperor, and the Orthodox Church. Calls even went out to young people to resist Tolstoy’s corrupting, unpatriotic teachings.25