Professional Documents
Culture Documents
E xil es at H o m e
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of
the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,
of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
PG3515.W35 2010
891.709'9206914—dc22 2009024121
Acknowledgments vii
2 Russian Cosmopolitan 27
Notes 155
Index 201
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
Introduction
S ituating Retur n
“Exile,” as I have used it in this introduction, refers to lived
experiences and modalities of writing and is not intended
to conflate individualized personal circumstances or creative
agendas under a single category. Similarly, “return” refers to
a complex of practices, including the dissolution of exilic rhe-
torical structures and the dynamics of reception, that do not
always correspond to a single moment of physical repatriation,
although it is accompanied by a realized journey of repatria-
tion in the case of each writer I study. Focusing on individual
histories in separate chapters allows for discussion of the spe-
cific conditions and rhetorical refractions of each writer’s exile
and return. Aksyonov has referred to himself at different times
as a voluntary émigré and a forced exile. Solzhenitsyn depicts
the moment of his forced departure in 1974 in unambiguous
terms: hustled to Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport from a cell
in Lefortovo prison, he was placed on a flight to Germany
under official escort, a coarse piece of prison-issue bread still
in his pocket as “a lump of something solid to show that it did
really happen.”25 Limonov maintains his separation from other
exiles and the “literary ghetto” of Russian literature abroad by
asserting that he left Russia of his own accord. While I treat
these individual stories and their implications for writing in
the chapters devoted to each author, I use the term “exile” to
refer to the narrative constructs that accompany physical exile
20 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature
Russian Cosmopolitan
a billy goat playing with its son. The father points out his
son’s mistake and tries to explain the conventions of story-
telling to him, but soon accepts his son’s version of events.
The child’s view of the world provides an escape from the
difficult social conditions the protagonist confronts each
day, as well as an approach to rewriting circumstances that
seem predetermined and out of his control. The rules of
storytelling, which the protagonist treated as rigid system
unto itself, are revealed to be mutable. This shift in reading
habits allows the protagonist to change his view of the nar-
rative of his life.13
Aksyonov incorporated similar constructions into the trav-
elogues he began to write in the mid-1960s. Here Aksyonov
also introduces tropes that are further explored in the later
works he had no hope of publishing in the Soviet Union,
such as his novel The Burn (completed in 1975), as well as
the works he would write in the West following his exile.
Like many of the works written “for the drawer,” his exilic
writings and narratives of return, the travelogues explore the
predicament of narrating on the interstices of the national and
the cosmopolitan. As the travelogues were intended for publi-
cation in the Soviet Union, however, Aksyonov does not posit
a cosmopolitan identity as an alternative to an ideologically
defined, internationalist Soviet one, but incorporates brief,
subjective meditations into the travelogues as a means of
considering the role of the artist and reader between the
social and aesthetic imperatives of the Russian and Euro-
pean modernist traditions and political realities in the Soviet
Union.14 It is these meditations, largely centered around
the modernist trope of alienation, that find echoes in his
unpublishable novels and stories that eventually find their
way into print abroad.
Following Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion in 1963 that
writers needed to travel abroad to inform Soviet readers
of how people of other nations lived, the number of works
devoted to travel grew dramatically.15 Permission to travel
was a privilege granted only to those writers who were con-
sidered ideologically trustworthy, but by most accounts,
Russian Cosmopolitan 35
Wr iting Retur n
Return becomes the subject, and very structure, of Aksyonov’s
works written following the restoration of his citizenship and
an apartment in Moscow. If in the essay “Not Quite a Senti-
mental Journey” he would “too tidily” formulate the condi-
tions of his homecoming, the narratives of return he writes in
the late 1990s and later reveal an unwieldy quality that stands
in contrast to themes of rootedness and closure. It is perhaps
52 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature
,
.
.
.....
,
, .
* * *
E x il ic H isto r io gr aphy
Although he formulated his ideas about The Red Wheel as
early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn would continually revise the
shape and method of his narrative over the decades of its
production. Throughout the 1960s he would refer to The
Red Wheel as a “novel.” Later, he would primarily identify
it by its working title, R-17, or according to its component
parts, that is, its four “knots,” the critical moments of activity
from eleven to twenty-three days long composed of disparate
narrative strands. More tellingly, in 1976 he would state, “I
am the historian of the revolution; this is my main genre.”27
Solzhenitsyn noted that the “form of the novel will change
as it goes,” and over time it appears to have moved from
“novel” to “narrative,” and its author from novelist to “his-
torian.”28 These shifts foreground Solzhenitsyn’s interest in
interrogating the tradition of historical fiction while simulta-
neously acknowledging that the fictional modes of novelistic
writing would risk greater estrangement between his subject
matter and his textual representation of it.
Unlike postmodern works of historiographical metafiction,
The Red Wheel does not set out to problematize the question
of historical knowledge as a whole.29 Rather, as Solzhenit-
syn’s working through the examples of Leo Tolstoy, John
Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway illustrates, he acknowl-
edges, then puts aside, previous literary models to demon-
strate how the form and method of The Red Wheel frame
the material that makes up the work.30 The “material,” as
Solzhenitsyn refers to his sources, and his need to “process”
(prorabotat’) it, is the crux of the project. Archival materials
are not only incorporated into the varied types of chapters
that comprise the work, but determine the very shape and
structure of those chapters. Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the
dominant role the archival material exerted over the compo-
sition of The Red Wheel: “It is so interesting that everything
becomes clear as it goes. Having set up for myself three types
of exposition (narrative, political, cinematic), I was abso-
lutely unable to incorporate the latter two types . . . into the
first two parts of the novel. It turned out as traditional, slow
Agency Abroad and at Home 81
Narrative Retur ns
It has become commonplace to describe Solzhenitsyn return-
ing to Russia on May 27, 1994, to a hero’s welcome, only
to reveal himself increasingly in conflict with the zeitgeist
and out of touch with the interests of Russian audiences.57
Commentators described Solzhenitsyn’s act of return as a
performance, as “the grandest author tour in history,” or
more cynically, as the arrival of the master-landowner to
his provincial home.58 While journalists sought entry onto
the private train that carried the newly arrived Solzhenitsyn
from Vladivostok to Moscow in hopes of finding indiscre-
tions to sensationalize for their own “narratives of return,”
it was Solzhenitsyn the traveler, collecting experiences and
voices from across the country, whose transitory status led
Agency Abroad and at Home 89
existence like the rooster, that is, as if the nation were not in
crisis, a condition that both texts indicate is nearly impos-
sible in Russia’s present state.
Similarly, the prose poem “The Larch” can be read
together with the binary tale “It Makes No Difference.” In
“It Makes No Difference,” the captain of a ship carrying a
visiting official from Moscow notes that larch logs do not
stay afloat, and ten years after the trees were felled in the per-
estroika era with no barges to carry the logs downstream, the
logs remain in the river. “You try lying around like that,” the
captain says, as the ship passes a barren slope once thick with
growth.95 “The Larch” recalls this motif (the wood is “too
dense to drag and float downstream”), but also notes the
tenacity of the tree, which “abandoned in water does not rot,
but hardens ever closer to the eternal quality of stone.” Not-
ing that in spring the tree returns to life with silky new foli-
age, the poet observes that “there are people like this too,”
illustrating the hope that a dormant source of strength might
be regenerated after the current crisis has passed.96
Elsewhere in the 1996–1999 “Miniatures,” culturally
privileged sites are in ruins and disappearing along with the
nation’s conscience. “Pernicious weeds” threaten to domi-
nate “good plants” (“Pernicious Weed”), women launder
clothes in the Volga River along a “false embankment” in a
nearly submerged city (“The Belltower”), even the “nervous,
fleeting whirlwind of contemporary life” threatens to take
over the calm just before sleep (“Nocturnal Thoughts”).97
As in “The Rooster’s Crow” and “The Larch,” the poems
alternate between hope—emblematized in the persistence of
these privileged sites or human will to preserve them—and
the retribution of conscience for those responsible for Russia’s
collapse. The latter impulse is especially evident in “Pernicious
Weed,” and “Lightning,” in which a tree split in two by light-
ning reveals a mind divided, and destroyed, by conscience.
The national allegory is put forward most explicitly in the
prose poem “Shame” (“Pozor”), in which the “Mother-
land” is overrun by corruption and the population reduced to
unbearable economic and spiritual poverty. The question of
Agency Abroad and at Home 103
* * *
(%
. %
/ ? 0 ?
1
— —?)13
his second wife, Elena Shchapova, in the West and their hyper-
bolic history-making accomplishments, Limonov includes a
reference to his “Coat of the National Hero”: “The national
hero loves form-fitting suits. Famed is Limonov’s remark-
able coat, sewn together by the poet from pieces of cloth.
The outer surface of the coat consists of 114 pieces of cloth.
The coat is equipped with the initials of the national hero ‘L’
and ‘E.’”15 “We Are the National Hero,” although written in
Moscow before Limonov’s emigration, first appeared in print
in the West in the large-format album Apollon-77 edited by
the émigré artist Mikhail Shemiakin. The young poet with an
interest in the self-promoting potential of extraliterary materi-
als found a compatible forum for his image and poetry in the
collection, presenting himself and several other poets featured
in the album as members of the poetry group “Konkret.”
In fact, the photograph of the poets included in the album
served as the very pretext for Limonov to fabricate the group’s
existence and write a statement of its putative creative prin-
ciples.16 This early attempt on Limonov’s part to manipulate
his photographic iconography and augment his literary status
through fabrication of the “Concrete movement” was easily
unmasked.17 Unlike “Konkret,” which in Limonov’s words,
“came together in order to come apart,”18 the National Hero
would reappear in later works Limonov wrote abroad. A 1974
photograph taken in Moscow of Limonov wearing the hand-
tailored Coat of the National Hero, standing with his hands in
his pockets behind a nude Shchapova who sits on a silver tray
on the floor, allows us to follow the trajectory of Limonov’s
methods of personal mythmaking, in particular, his acknowl-
edgement that when the signifying potential of the National
Hero has been exhausted, an exilic authorial identity must be
constructed in its place.19
In It’s Me, Eddie (1979), Limonov’s explosive novel-
memoir written after his arrival in New York, a photographic
self-portrait adorns the wall of the narrator’s cubicle in the
Hotel Winslow: “On the walls . . . my own photograph
against a background of icons and a brick wall, with me
holding a thick volume, perhaps a dictionary or a Bible and
Authenticity, Camera, Action 117
* * *
Conventions of Opposition
Limonov is aware that by integrating himself into his chosen
social and discursive hierarchies, he is literally and figuratively
putting his life at risk. He has predicted that a bullet, not a
pen, will write the “epilogue of [his] life.”99 At public events
he surrounds himself with tracksuit-clad young men from
his National Bolshevik party who serve as his bodyguards.
Along with Limonov, these men felt the ire of a hostile audi-
ence during Limonov’s 2006 lecture “Russian Literature and
Russian History,” and together with the special police forces
patrolling the lecture venue, they acted to scatter the crowd
and hurriedly push Limonov into a waiting car when a sudden
series of explosive sounds erupted on the street as Limonov
left the building. Limonov now sees himself as Jenkins, the
eliminated leader, not Luk’ianov, his fortunate émigré looka-
like.100 In his conversation with “Brodsky,” Limonov’s body
is in the process of being transmuted into bronze, simulta-
neously killing him and rendering him immortal.101 He par-
ticipates in the construction of his own monuments: he has
penned the introduction to his three-volume collected works
(in which he envisioned his life’s “epilogue”), collected and
published his albums of photographs, and concluded My
Political Biography—his 2002 account of his political awak-
ening—with a conventional “scene from a classic novel” con-
sisting of his first steps into his prison cell.
This infatuation with biography and self-monumental-
ization does not allow for the interpretive spaces of agency,
only genetic and generic inevitability. Such imperatives may
lead to the interpretation of his work exclusively within the
institutional boundaries of biography, as is the case with
142 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature
Chapter 1
1. On the discursive rupture that accompanied the Soviet collapse,
see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No
More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
2006).
2. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993).
3. Chow refers more specifically to “a deeply ingrained Oriental-
ism in the field of East Asian studies” when she defines “Orien-
talist melancholia,” that is, the sense of loss and anxiety some
scholars have associated with the emergence of contemporary
Chinese literature that, in their view, does not “rise to the gran-
deur of [its] cultural past.” Chow identifies this phenomenon
with the twofold marginalization of Asian studies—the evalua-
tion of classical Asian literature as an arcane “specialty” and the
concomitant disregard for contemporary Asian literature. See
Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993),
3–4, 124–27.
4. John Glad identifies Valery Tarsis as the first writer to be deprived
of his citizenship upon deportation to the West in 1966 and the
theatre director Iurii Liubimov among the last in 1984. See
John Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 21; and John Glad, Russia
Abroad: Writers, History, Politics (Washington, DC: Birchbark
Press and Hermitage Publishers, 1999), 394. This wave of emi-
gration is traditionally designated as the “Third Wave,” with the
First Wave coming in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917, and the Second Wave after the Second World War.
5. See Arnold McMillin, “The Effect of Exile on Modern Russian
Writers: A Survey,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 34 (1991),
20; and Glad, Russia Abroad 383–94.
156 Notes
Chapter 2
1. From the introduction to an interview with Aksyonov (Igor’
Shevelev, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” [2001]
http://ishevelev.narod.ru/int2001.htm). The interview was
reprinted without Shevelev’s introduction, “Normal’naia
zhizn’, delennaia na dva,” in Zenitsa oka (Moscow: Vagrius,
2005, 432–46).
2. These works include The Egg Yolk (Zheltok iaitsa, 1991), Gen-
erations of Winter and The Winter’s Hero (the trilogy Moskovs-
kaia saga, 1991–1994), The New Sweet Style (Novyi sladostnyi
stil’, 1997), Caesarean Illumination (Kesarevo svechenie, 2001),
Notes 159
Chapter 3
1. Nina Khrushcheva, “Solzhenitsyn’s History Lesson,” The
Nation, 3 May 1999, 33; D. M. Thomas, Alexander Solzhenit-
syn: A Century in His Life (New York: St. Martins, 1998),
484; Michael Nicholson, “Solzhenitsyn, Exile and the Genius
Loci,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 33:2–4 (1999), 327;
Aleksandr Sokurov, Uzel (Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn), (Russia,
1999). In response to suggestions that there was as yet no Rus-
sian reader for The Red Wheel (in Lev Pirogov, “Khozhdenie v
narod,” Literaturnaia gazeta 24 [14 June 2000], quoted in
Kathleen F. Parthé, Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics between
the Lines (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 202; Solzhenitsyn states
that “only time will tell, after my death, to what extent the pri-
mary work of my life—the epic work The Red Wheel—will have
been read” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Interv’iu s Peterom Kho-
lenshteinom,” Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami, 1998–2003 (Mos-
cow: Russkii put’, 2005), 55–56).
2. Zhorzh Niva, Solzhenitsyn, trans., Simon Markish (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1992), 143.
3. David Gary Shaw writes, “Coming at the end of a long and pow-
erful tradition of stressing the role of society over the individual,
postmodernism attempts to undermine the relevance of the tra-
ditional subject, the substratum of the historian’s conventional
individual agent. The relevance of historiography itself has been
put into question because of its close connection with such old
168 Notes
The First Circle, and The Red Wheel (317–19). Wanner describes
the early “Miniatures” as “a completely ‘monological’ genre . . .
not meant to question or challenge the notions of poetry and
narrative prose, but to mobilize their resources for his moral mes-
sage” (149).
92. Wanner, Russian Minimalism, 149.
93. Nico Israel constructs a set of binaries (inside/outside, national/
extranational, center/periphery, West/East) to propose that
the displaced writers Conrad, Adorno, and Rushdie align them-
selves with the “weaker” term, which in effect allows them to
become “conceptual minus signs among a series of pluses or
emblems of power and location” (Outlandish: Writing between
Exile and Diaspora [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000], 11). Sol-
zhenitsyn’s overriding concerns with cultural degradation pro-
duce a different set of binaries, and more important, prevent
him from accepting the marginal status of his terms, and drive
him to argue for their dominance.
94. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Petush’e pen’e,” Rasskazy (St. Peters-
burg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 567.
95. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Vse ravno,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg:
Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 419.
96. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Listvennitsa,” Rasskazy (St. Peters-
burg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 555.
97. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Likhoe zel’e,” “Kolokol’nia,” “Noch-
nye mysli,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006),
563, 559, 568.
98. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Pozor,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg:
Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 562.
99. Steven Lee Meyers, “Toast of the TV in Russian Eyes: It’s Sol-
zhenitsyn,” New York Times 9 Feb. 2006.
100. James M. Decker approaches film adaptations of literary works
as editions as a means of avoiding conventional analyses that
present conflicting attitudes toward originality and fidelity to
the text (“Literary Text, Cinematic ‘Edition’: Adaptation, Tex-
tual Authority, and the Filming of Tropic of Cancer,” College
Literature 34.3 (2007).
101. Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna, “Solzhenitsyna: Vazhno uvidet’ svoiu
nedavniuiu istoriiu,” rec 26 Jan. 2006, BBC, Moscow, 2006.
102. Revekka Frumkina, “Naivnyi zritel’,” Novoe literaturnoe obozre-
nie 78 (2006).
103. These include Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The citation is from Elena
178 Notes
C hapter 4
1. John Glad, Literature in Exile (Durham: Duke UP, 1990), 49.
2. Brodsky’s 1978 preface to a selection of poems published in
the émigré journal Kontinent helped to establish Limonov’s
name (Andrei Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study
of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, Studies in Slavic Lan-
guages and Literature [Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press,
2003], 153). Brodsky also helped him get his first collection
of poems, Russkoe, published with Ardis Publishers in 1979
Notes 179
C hapter 5
1. Susan Sontag, “Joseph Brodsky,” Where the Stress Falls (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 332–33.
2. Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American
Diaspora (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 128.
3. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora, 128.
4. Aleksandr Shchuplov, “Borshch dolzhny varit’ slugi.” Rossiis-
kaia gazeta 3868 (8 Sept. 2005).
5. On Voltairians and Voltairiennes, see Vladimir Kirsanov’s
review at http://az.gay.ru/books/fiction/aksenov.html and
Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, “Nostalgic Imagining in Post-Soviet
Narratives,” Love-sickness, Melancholy and Nostalgia, (Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, forthcoming).
6. Serguei Oushakine discusses the purely formal character of
post-Soviet nostalgia for the imperial era in, “‘We’re nostalgic
but we’re not crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” The Rus-
sian Review: 66 (July 2007), 451–82.
7. Maria Sergeeva, a rising star in the Young Guard known for her
incendiary blog that identifies “enemies of the nation” (includ-
ing Limonov), holds ambitions of becoming “President, or at
least Prime Minister” (Will Stewart, “Putin’s Poster Girl: Pin-
Up Politician Who Hates the West, but Loves Thatcher,” Daily
Mail [15 March 2009]).
8. On the renaming, see Luke Harding, “Signs of Dispute on
Moscow’s Solzhenitsyn Street,” The Guardian (12 December
2008). On Dzerzhinskii’s statue, see Paul Goble, “Duma Dep-
uties Applaud Proposal to Restore Dzerzhinsky Statue to Luby-
anka Square,” Georgian Daily (22 September 2008). http://
georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task
=view&id=7701&Itemid=67.
9. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 4.
10. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 4.
11. Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of
the Modern Poet, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature
41 (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1991), and Lynne
Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics and
the Question of Difference (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
12. Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia
and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s UP, 2007), 267.
Works Cited