Context

In the late 1980s, as his temporal empire slipped away, the late Soviet reader woke up to find himself the owner, by delayed inheritance, of a fully formed major literature. As during the Renaissance, when a host of ancestors emerged from nowhere to assume their places, like so many ghosts of Banquo at the feast, the works repressed by the Soviets returned during perestroika newer and fresher than their distant progeny. The shock was felt for the better part of a decade—an empire collapsed, putsch followed upon putsch, but people continued to read Nabokov, with occasional breaks for the latest attack on Stalinism in the pages of the Moscow News.

Almost from the start, Soviet literature had been no different from other stable literary systems. It had its Great Books—the novels of the Soviet classics (Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov), not all of which, incidentally, were ideologically tainted, and its books for intellectuals (parts of Mikhail Bulgakov, fifties writers like Yuri Trifonov and Felix Iskander, "village" literature). Even samizdat, much of which was politically neutral (Vladimir Nabokov, Daniil Kharms, Venedikt Yerofeev), was a necessary part of the system, constituting as it did a sort of reading for the elite. And then there were the marginal genres, represented by underground and avant-garde writers who had never sought a major audience.

With perestroika, of course, this system collapsed. Literature began to resemble the enormous book piles then appearing all over the major cities of the empire. The suppressed classics, which had already proved their staying power, gained relevance in a triumph of publicity (they were new!) and became the contemporaries of their descendants.

As the most important novelist to have been excluded from official Soviet literary life, Vladimir Nabokov became the major figure of this renaissance. His novels were published in almost chronological order, with a translation of the late-career Ada appearing just a few years ago. In the early 1990s, Lolita caused the same sort of shock and sensation as it had in the West in the mid-1950s: its various editions filled the bookstalls and stores, while the literary journals wrestled with the quandary of applying moral and ethical values to Nabokov’s work. Other first-wave (1917) emigres, such as Boris Zaitsev and Mark Aldanov, caused less of a stir, but still vastly outsold even the most popular of contemporary writers like Viktor Erofeev, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. The internal characteristics of a work were erased; all that mattered was the judgment of the years.

In poetry, Joseph Brodsky became the best expression of this ahistorical zeitgeist. Having consciously forged a career as the last classical poet, he seemed a living, walking Osip Mandelstam. The 1987 Nobel Prize, rather than establishing him as a great working writer, only confirmed his timelessness. In the early 1990s, the only venues in Russia where critical views of Brodsky could be glimpsed were nationalist-patriotic publications like the journal Nash Sovremennik and the fascist news-paper Den’, and these were not exactly forward-thinking literary ventures.

In prose, after the bulk of the literature of the first half-century had been processed, works of later emigre authors came to the fore. Sergei Dovlatov and Sasha Sokolov—the major Russian-language novelists of the third (1970s) emigration—had been published at the end of the 1980s, but didn’t really receive due attention until the early 1990s. And even then it was important that they garnered approval from that most vaunted authority—much was made of the fact that Nabokov had endorsed Sokolov, and an interview Dovlatov had invented with the dead master was widely reprinted.

The introduction in 1992 of a Russian Booker Prize did little to improve the situation. Ostensibly created to recognize the most important work on the contemporary scene, the Booker, like your average deputy prime minister, quickly compromised its integrity. If the first laureate, Mark Haritonov, was a fresh enough face, the winners in succeeding years were familiar favorites essentially receiving lifetime achievement awards—Vladimir Makanin (1993), Bulat Okudzhava (1994), Georgy Vladimov (1995).

All this produced an odd situation—actual, contemporary literature became marginal, forming a new underground. Unlike Russia’s adventurous bankers, publishers were interested in books whose success was guaranteed, which meant Western bestsellers and the newly discovered Russian classics. The few works to make it out of the study were treated at best as tentative experiments. Vladimir Sorokin, for example, was first published in 1989 by the elite Riga journal Rodnik, but hardly anyone noticed. On the other hand, the Nabokov-like Novel with Cocaine, by the unremarkable 1930s emigre writer Mark Levi (writing pseudonymously as M. Ageev, so that it was at first supposed that the actual author was Nabokov), published that year in the same magazine, became an immediate hit.

The situation began to change, as so often happens, with pressure from below in the form of popular literature—contemporary reality entered the Russian novel in the 1990s via the mystery and science fiction genres.

In the mid-1990s, as Russia suffered one foreign humiliation after another, a strange metamorphosis could be noted at the bookstalls: imported bestsellers began to give way to Russian ones. James Hadley Chase and Rex Stout were replaced by names like Bushkov, Shitov, and Aleksandra Marinina. Science fiction and fantasy soon repeated the pattern with such authors as Tolkien-derivative Nik Perumov and middling cyberpunk imitator Sergei Lukyanenko deposing Robert Zilazny, Harry Harrison, and Terry Brooks. The situation was unprecedented because it did not represent the revival of a homegrown tradition—as genres during the Soviet years, neither mystery nor science fiction (with the exception of the Brothers Strugatsky) was ever particularly popular.

The sudden triumph of Russian over foreign pulp can at least partially be attributed to the fact that readers would rather their vicious murders and alien invasions take place in a recognizable topography, not some faraway Los Angeles. But this is just part of it. The truth is that mass literature, which met the reader without the mediation of the Classics, was able to express the unconscious ideas and inner fears and hopes of average Russians. While mainstream literature was greedily counting its new treasures, minor literary genres began, in their perhaps semi-parodic way, to recreate the literary process. Former special forces troops were called out of retirement to battle nasty Arab terrorists, Jewish oligarchs, and evil Americans trying to break up Russia. Brave detectives/intellectuals brought to light the dirty truths of foul politicians, and aged KGB officers came back to make Russia a superpower again. The popularity of these books was soon a mass phenomenon.

Which is not insignificant. Paradoxical as it sounds to elite ears, mass sales have aesthetic import, and can have effects beyond the publisher’s bottom line. This was the case in contemporary Russian literature with Viktor Pelevin. He emerged, importantly enough, from the underworld of science fiction. He began writing only in 1987 and by the early 1990s had already gained a large following among sci-fi enthusiasts. His first appearance before a literary readership was the publication in 1993 by the thick journal Znamya of his Omon-Ra. This event passed without much notice, as Znamya and its cousin Novy Mir had by then lost the public influence that they’d enjoyed, along with massive (several million!) circulations, during perestroika. Pelevin had to wait until 1997, when the publisher Vagrius, which had been highly successful in putting out quality editions of Western bestsellers, decided finally to try a Russian author.

The attempt more than paid off. Buddha’s Little Finger immediately became a bestseller, gracing the hands of every other patron of Moscow’s extensive metro system. Science fiction had taught Pelevin how to package his esotericism, simplify his Buddhism, and compose elaborate fabulae. He married this to the basic myths that he uncannily dug out of the post-Soviet mind—he found culture heroes in old Soviet anecdotes, Jonathan Livingston Seagull-type allegories in Pioneer camp songs, and a Babylonian epic in the modern P.R. apparatus. As a result, 1997 was the first time in a long while that a book became a genuine event shortly after it was actually written.

Pelevin forged the way. With him, contemporary prose came back to the fore after languishing for ten years of cultural freedom in the exile of the underground. Pelevin himself, like many pioneers, quickly became passe. His next novel, Generation P, was just one of the many fashionable books to appear in 2000.

In the wake of Pelevin, it became clear that while the country was studying Nabokov and Dovlatov, a new generation of writers had come to maturity. The first to emerge was Vladimir Sorokin—already popular in Europe, in Russia he could be found mostly on the newly created Internet. Though he immediately came to be seen as a sort of alter ego to Pelevin, his experimentation is of a more serious, textual kind. In his Last Love of Marina, for example, the text seems, until the end, a standard realist account of a semi-dissident family during the Soviet years—until it suddenly falls apart into a flurry of affectless Soviet speech. Sorokin disassembles his own texts, finding in them an occult mechanism—speech becomes a word game, a literal reading of an idiom changes the world. The latter concept is the basis of one of his best novels, Norma, where the customary Russian expression, "to eat one’s fill of shit," taken literally, becomes the founding ritual for an entire society. Everyone has to have their daily "ration," and anyone who refuses, whether for political reasons or physiological ones, is considered a dissident.

The typical Sorokin story is the same sort of glossolalia—even when it appears to have obvious meanings, it is in fact totally discrete. In his latest novel, Goluboe Salo ("Blue Bacon Fat"), Sorokin for the first time constructs a fairly mysterious but more or less comprehensible plot. The protagonists (Hitler, Stalin, and a sort of representative bohemian from a future in which people speak in a mixture of Chinese, Russian, and English) are hunting for a blue slice of bacon that has, it is said, magical powers. This substance is created within the cloned bodies of great Russian writers (Nabokov, Akhmatova, Pasternak) while they write parodic-imitative texts. Sorokin’s attempt to create an accessible narrative does not quite come off—though the individual pieces are remarkable (especially the part about the Siberian earthfuckers, who practice an annual earth-fucking ritual), the whole does not coalesce. Sorokin seems to have fallen victim to the current literary fashion, again under the pressure of popular genres, for satisfactory plots.

Nonetheless, Sorokin may be the only current descendent of the Russian school of the quasi-grotesque (Gogol-Dostoevsky-Bely-Platonov-Mamleev). For the most part, the new generation of Russian litterateurs has in some sense accepted the preeminence of popular literature. B. Akunin (the pseudonym of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a well-known philologist specializing in Japan) has achieved a popularity beyond even Pelevin’s dreams by his reconstruction of the detective genre. His retro-mysteries from the world of Tsarist Russia are lightly written, with complex mystery plots and a consistent protagonist, but are currently the very ideal of important literature—a fact confirmed by his receipt in 2000 of the Anti-Booker Prize for his novel, Coronation. (Despite the anarchic name, the Anti-Booker has for some time been as serious and prestigious a prize as the Booker it sought to undermine.)

And, as far as it goes, the Anti-Booker committee is right. Akunin is extremely symptomatic—as if trying to make up for the lost years of the early 1990s, Russian literature is scrambling to win a mass audience. Certain "serious" authors are so adept at this mimicry that their work is hardly distinguishable from the average bestseller. If one did not know, for example, that Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, author of The Matador and the Watercolor, was also a literary critic who had written extensively on postmodernism, one would never have guessed it from reading his book.

Most serious practitioners are, in fact, in the process of creating a synthesis of sorts, working with images that exist in only a formulaic way in the work of their less ambitious colleagues. Thus, Pavel Krusanov in his Ukus Angela ("Bite of the Angel") combines the style of the modish Serbian writer Milorad Pavic« with the zeitgeist-y notion of a Russian Empire. Krusanov, who lives in Saint Petersburg, has been around for some time—he began publishing during perestroika, but (like so many of his contemporaries) without much notice. In 1999, though, he hit the literary situation right on the nose. "Bite" describes an alternative history in which, at the end of the twentieth century, Russia, instead of shrinking to its smallest size in two hundred years, encompasses China and the Balkans. The novel is about the rise to supreme power, in this empire, of one Ivan Nekitaev (literally: "Ivan not-Chinese"), an obvious Antichrist figure. Nekitaev sleeps with his sister, tosses an inconvenient mistress from an airplane, and otherwise kills people left and right; after he begins losing a world war that he’d initiated, he releases his mysterious Hounds of Hecate to commence the apocalypse. Krusanov is less interested, however, in the moral or religious aspects of the myth than in the world-view of what is for him a very attractive personality, capable of annihilating all natural and human laws. With Nekitaev, Krusanov ably arranges certain fashionable literary tendencies—the stylistics of Pavic«, the resurgence of "magical realism," and a mutant strain of the sociopolitical novel. But the real root of Kursanov’s success is the journalistic ease with which he manages to reflect the cultural moment. "Bite" plays on the subconscious hopes and fears of the post-Soviet reader, oppressed by the transformation of his country from a world superpower to a slightly embarrassing European country with poor municipal services.

Dmitry Bykov is following a different course. A well-known poet and journalist, the 35-year-old Bykov last year published a novel, Opravdanie ("Vindication"), which refused both sci-fi plot devices and conspiracy theories—elements without which a Russian novel could hardly be imagined over the past few years. The hero of Bykov’s novel is a young man attempting to make sense of the Stalinist terror, during which his own grandfather disappeared. A number of strange events eventually lead him to the conclusion that Stalin was attempting not extermination but natural selection. Those who survived were to become the new elite, the basis for an Empire. Only at the end of the novel does this painstaking logical edifice come crashing down—Stalin, it turns out, had no such profound plans, and the world is as we see it, irrational, frightening, and beyond our understanding.

A refusal of conspiracies also lies at the core of the work of Leonid Yuzefovich, the new star of Russian letters. Like Akunin, Yuzefovich works in the retro-detective style, but in a far more subtle way. A well-known historian, he composed his trilogy about the detective Ivan Putilin about ten years ago, but the books have only become popular within the new literary dispensation. His first novel, Kostyum Arlekina ("The Harlequin’s Costume"), is a play on P. G. Wodehouse, with much of the same situational humor foreign to Russians. The second novel in the trilogy, Dom Svidaniy ("The Meeting House"), is a parody of conspiracy fiction. In it, a Masonic plot turns out to be fake, while a phrase that haunts the protagonist throughout the novel is actually, in the end, nothing other than a description of a murdered man’s privates. The final novel in the series, Kniaz’ Vetra ("Prince of the Wind"), for which Yuzefovich received the "National Bestseller Prize" for 2001, may be the best Russian novel of the past ten years. The detective plot is wholly conditional; the real subject is the relationship of the text to life. Putilin must investigate the murder of the author of popular books about the adventures of . . . Putilin. As Putilin digs into the case, it appears that the phantoms of pulp fiction have finally come to life, with a vengeance.

Whether these same phantoms have murdered the Russian novel is more difficult to tell. What’s clear is that, in its scramble for relevance, Russian literature at the end of the twentieth century became entertainment. If this process is, at its core, a populist one, our literature may yet return to the heights it once held; if, on the other hand, the process is essentially commercial, then the Russian is destined to become yet another European literature, only with smaller royalties. The situation will become clearer, no doubt, if the contemporary Russian writer stops boiling in his own juices and makes his appearance in the world with the help of translation—which would also let others in on a unique cultural experiment and a literature attempting by any means necessary to write its way out of a hopeless dead end.

—Translated from Russian by Keith Gessen

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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